Month: March 2014

by Patrick Appel

Sydney Spiesel considers the choice that pediatricians like him face when dealing with anti-vaxxers:

What do we do about vaccine refusers? It’s a difficult question. If we don’t allow unimmunized kids in our practice, where will they get medical care? That’s the reason that many (though I’m not sure how many) pediatricians allow unimmunized kids in their practice. But others refuse to see any patients whose parents won’t vaccinate them.

Spiesel’s stance:

Personally, I draw the line at vaccines protecting against diseases that kids might catch from exposures in my office.

If parents want to withhold protection from hepatitis B or cervical and oral cancer, I think it’s not so smart, but I’ll still care for their children because not even the friskiest teen is likely to transmit these diseases in my office. Measles? Whooping cough? These are another matter. My sense of responsibility to the health of the vast majority of kids coming to see me says “no.”

I didn’t come to this decision easily. After all, it’s the parents, not the children, who make the choice to avoid vaccines—what is my responsibility to those kids? Maybe I’m deluding myself, but I sort of believe that my clear policy may be beneficial to them, too. It’s a statement of how important I think immunization is (and why I think so). It encourages families to think about responsibility to others in the community. And it sometimes provokes people to rethink the question. (I’ve had families who left my practice because of my policy, but later came back, perhaps in spite of it—or perhaps, finally, because of it.)

Recent Dish on anti-vaxxers here.

by Patrick Appel

Last week, the left pounced on Paul Ryan for saying that we “have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work.” TNC asks why only Ryan was called out:

What Ryan said here is not very far from what Bill Cosby, Michael Nutter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama said before him. The idea that poor people living in the inner city, and particularly black men, are “not holding up their end of the deal” as Cosby put it, is not terribly original or even, these days, right-wing. From the president on down there is an accepted belief in America—black and white—that African-American people, and African-American men, in particular, are lacking in the virtues in family, hard work, and citizenship … From what I can tell, the major substantive difference between Ryan and Obama is that Obama’s actual policy agenda regarding black America is serious, and Ryan’s isn’t. But Ryan’s point—that the a pathological culture has taken root among an alarming portion of black people—is basically accepted by many progressives today. And it’s been accepted for a long time.

Chait counters:

Coates treats the cultural explanation for African-American poverty and the structural explanation as mutually exclusive.

“I can’t think of a single credible historian of our 500-year tenure here,” he writes, “who has concluded that our problem was a lack of ‘personal responsibility.’” Not even Paul Ryan, whom Coates argued yesterday holds similar views to President Obama on this issue, believes personal responsibility is the singular, root cause of the African-American predicament. The argument is that structural conditions shape culture, and culture, in turn, can take on a life of its own independent of the forces that created it. It would be bizarre to imagine that centuries of slavery, followed by systematic terrorism, segregation, discrimination, a legacy wealth gap, and so on did not leave a cultural residue that itself became an impediment to success. ….

Coates is committing a fallacy by assuming that Obama’s exhortations to the black community amount to a belief that personal responsibility accounts for a major share of the blame. A person worries about the things that he can control. If I’m watching a basketball game in which the officials are systematically favoring one team over another (let’s call them Team A and Team Duke) as an analyst, the officiating bias may be my central concern. But if I’m coaching Team A, I’d tell my players to ignore the biased officiating. Indeed, I’d be concerned the bias would either discourage them or make them lash out, and would urge them to overcome it. That’s not the same as denying bias. It’s a sensible practice of encouraging people to concentrate on the things they can control.

by Patrick Appel

Leon Wieseltier attacks Nate Silver’s new site:

Many of the issues that we debate are not issues of fact but issues of value. There is no numerical answer to the question of whether men should be allowed to marry men, and the question of whether the government should help the weak, and the question of whether we should intervene against genocide. And so the intimidation by quantification practiced by Silver and the other data mullahs must be resisted. Up with the facts! Down with the cult of facts!

An opinion with a justification may be described as a belief. The justification that transforms an opinion into a belief may in some instances be empirical, but in many instances, in the morally and philosophically significant instances, it will not be empirical, it will be rational, achieved in the establishment of the truth of concepts or ideas by the methods of argument and the interpretation of experience. A certain kind of journalistic commentary, when it is done rightly, is a popular version of the same project, an application of thoughtfully (and sometimes wittily) held principles to public affairs, and is therefore an essential service to a free society. The intellectual predispositions that Silver ridicules as “priors” are nothing more than beliefs. What is so sinister about beliefs? He should be a little more wary of scorning them, even in degraded form: without beliefs we are nothing but data, himself included, and we deserve to be considered not only from the standpoint of our manipulability. I am sorry that he finds George Will and Paul Krugman repetitious, but should they revise their beliefs so as not to bore him? Repetition is one of the essential instruments of persuasion, and persuasion is one of the essential activities of a democracy.

Michael Brendan Dougherty sticks up for Silver:

Wieseltier’s form of critique has been paraphrased elsewhere: Numbers can’t tell us everything. They cannot tell us what kind of policies we should have. They cannot tell us what to love or hate or aim for in life. This is a truism pretending to contradict something.

When Silver writes, “We’re trying to just do analysis. We’re not trying to sway public opinion on anything except trying to make them more numerate,” he is obviously defining the limited scope of his website’s mission; he is not revising downward the entirety of worthy human knowledge, judgment, and endeavor. Silver writes, “Our methods are not meant to replace ‘traditional’ or conventional journalism. We have the utmost admiration for journalists who gather original information and report original stories.”

Somehow after reading this “aw-shucks” manifesto in which Silver rather self-deprecatingly defines a niche for his site, Wieseltier has in his mind a totalitarian threat. Shortly thereafter he commands his readers to resist the “intimidation by quantification” by Silver and other “data mullahs.”

When FiveThirtyEight authors start writing articles titled “Math Wants Us to Commit Genocide,” then I’ll worry about them exceeding their intellectual remit. Until then, it seems long overdue that in a media world overpopulated with fluff projects, ideological anvil-pounders, outrage porn, and a million and one precious niches, one little corner would dedicate itself to numerical investigation, train some of its journalists in statistical programming languages, and run some data visualizations.

Jon Fasman piles on:

The unspoken attitude underpinning Mr Silver’s project—I will lay the facts as I understand them before you, explain why I think the facts matter, show you where I think they lead, and leave you to your own conclusions—surely is preferable to the unspoken attitude underpinning much American political discourse, which is: My opponents are imbeciles or racists who hate freedom and decency, and if you agree with them surely you must also be mentally deficient and hate the same things.

Second, some things that present themselves as moral questions are not, and are (or should be) amenable to factual suasion. There is, in fact, a near-total consensus among scientists that climate change is happening and is “unpredictable” and “highly damaging”. Many people deny this. Best to lay the facts before them, over and over again.

Krugman fears that 538 will commit the error of “letting the data speak for itself — because it never does.” Matt Bruenig shares those concerns:

It is a bit early to say whether Silver’s project will actually be worthwhile. With that said, people should be skeptical of anyone who says they can cover politics in a just-the-facts, data-driven way (and I say this as someone who heavily relies upon data crunching, probably more so than 95% of political writers). There are political and economic topics for which pure data is interesting and illuminating, but not very many. The rest are deeply entangled with normative judgments that you cannot avoid.

Perusing the site as it currently exists, things don’t look very promising at this very early stage.

Not every 538 post has been up to snuff, but the site’s batting average is respectable for a blog that just increased its staff significantly. It takes months for an editorial team to gel. And Silver’s analysis has always capitalized on big events; a relatively slow political news week probably isn’t the best time to size up the new 538’s editorial chops. Note that Silver himself has focused mostly on March Madness this week, a big story that the political blogosphere is relatively uninterested in and therefore gives him no credit for covering well. The greatest danger to any data-driven site is being too dull. The 538 crew has avoided that thus far by having fun with the content – applying data analysis to subjects like toilet seat covers. And this post on Hugo Chavez’s economic legacy was excellent. Drum worries that Silver’s model won’t scale:

My basic take is that Silver’s data-driven approach to journalism works well with subjects that satisfy two criteria:

1. They lend themselves to analysis via number crunching.
2. They are currently underserved by serious number crunchers.

Both sports and poll aggregation fit this model, and Silver made a reputation with both of them. But they’re the exceptions, not the rule. Economics? It doesn’t satisfy #2. Science? Ditto. “Life”? That’s a pretty broad category, but I suspect it mostly fails #1.

Alyssa Rosenberg, writing at her new digs, disagrees about that last point:

While I am not persuaded that data analysis is a substitute for criticism, there are an enormous number of subjects that fall under “Life” where data-driven journalism would actually be a profound public service. The entertainment industry holds up as sacred any number of assumptions that deserve a rigorous, numbers-based fisking, among them that female leads cannot carry movies and that international audiences dislike black actors (Will Smith and Denzel Washington are treated like, dare I say it, magical exceptions to an otherwise hard rule). In television, as the Nielsen ratings increasingly fail to capture Americans’ actual viewing patterns, a deep dive into those practices and the TV ad sales business that returns to the surface with viable suggestions for a new measurement that advertisers would trust and outside analysts could deliver would be high-level service journalism.

by Katie Zavadski

About a decade ago, members of the Raëlian religion began raising funds for a so-called Pleasure Hospital in Burkina Faso, which would restore the clitorises of women who had undergone female genital mutilation. The hospital had been slated to open in early March, but it was blocked by the local government. Sue Lloyd-Roberts reports that the American surgeons, led by gender-confirmation surgery expert Marci Bowers, moved their operating room to a local doctor’s clinic:

Bebe, a 24-year-old, is among the first. Is she scared? “No, I am not scared,” she says. “I am just angry. They cut me when I was four and it still hurts. Whenever my husband approaches, I just don’t want him.”

Bebe is given a local anaesthetic for the procedure which is a surprisingly simple one. Bowers investigates to see how badly Bebe has been mutilated. “No matter how severe it is,” Bowers explains, “we can always find the clitoris.” Although the visible part of the clitoris is cut off during FGM, it remains below the surface. “Voilà,” Bowers says as she finds it and pulls it up. “The clitoris now looks amazingly normal, part of an unaltered female anatomy.”

By the end of the first day, the team have “restored” eight women. The word is getting out, beyond the borders of Burkina Faso. By day three, women from Senegal, Mali and even Kenya come to the clinic to ask for the operation.

But the government swiftly canceled the licenses of the foreign doctors:

An official at the Health Ministry tells me that the opening was cancelled because Clitoraid [the organization behind the Pleasure Hospital] had not provided essential documents. All of which sounds reasonable until the Health Minister tells another journalist that “medical organisations should be focused on saving lives and not advertising their religion in an attempt to convert vulnerable people.”

Wendy Syfret talks to Clitoraid spokeswoman Nadine Gary:

How central is orgasm to Raëlian philosophy?

Pleasure is the most important part of the Raëlian philosophy, but the central part is simply explaining that life on planet Earth was created scientifically by people like us. Ladies like us and men who were created in their image. When you enjoy your clitoris, you can think that women creators have a clitoris just like you and have created you in their image, so you can enjoy yourself like they enjoy themselves. So is orgasm central to the Raëlian philosophy? Yes. You know we don’t masturbate every second of the day, but we don’t shy from it.

Previous Dish coverage of FGM here.

by Tracy R. Walsh

Andrew Cohen applauds the coalition of animal rights groups, civil liberties organizations, and media groups challenging Idaho’s three-week-old “ag-gag” bill:

The statute creates the crime of “interference with agricultural production” by punishing anyone who makes an unauthorized “audio or video recordings” of what transpires inside food processing facilities in Idaho with up to one year in prison. It is designed, as its lengthy legislative record suggests, to help Big Ag prevent the public dissemination of images of animal abuse or unsafe conditions. Images like those posted in April 2011 as part of an award-winning investigation into the state’s dairy industry by the Boise Weekly. Or the video of farm workers in Idaho kicking and stomping on cows that the Boise Weekly posted in October 2012. It was this investigative work that caused one concerned lawmaker to lament recently not the cruelty, or unclean food, but the injustice of these farm operators being “tried and convicted in the press or on YouTube.”

Ken Paulson of the First Amendment Center weighs in:

There is a certain redundancy to all the ag-gag bills. They invariably try to limit investigative work by criminalizing things that already are criminal. …  You violate the law if you enter a farm by “force, threat, misrepresentation or trespass.” Each and every one of those is already prohibited by multiple statutes. If you were trying to eliminate coercion and fraud and trespass, you would not need to pass this bill. If you were trying to limit the scrutiny of the agriculture industry, you would need to pass this bill.

It is not only constitutionally suspect, it’s terrible public policy on the part of the legislature. Give me the very best argument for why this needs to be in place and then tell me why you wouldn’t then pass similar legislation for day-care centers. Would anyone suggest that you would send someone to prison for documenting child abuse? Is there anyone who is going to run on that platform?

Katie Valentine argues such laws have already had a chilling effect elsewhere:

In the six other states that have ag gag laws on the books, activists and journalists have said they’ve stopped attempting to document abuse on farm operations for fear of prosecution. This chilling effect means that the public in these states has little chance of seeing footage that can expose cruel and dangerous practices on agricultural operations and lead to major change in the agriculture industry. In 2008, for instance, an undercover video exposed “downer” cows, which can’t stand on their own and are sometimes diseased, being used for beef. The video led to the largest meat recall in US history and prompted the US to ban the use of downer cows for meat.