Back In The GDR?
Scott Horton dismembers Chuck Lane’s moral relativism when it comes to surveillance. Lane’s view is that anything is legit as long as the US does it – because our good intentions trump the actual facts.
Why Is China Missing So Many Women?
The one-child policy (OCP) alone doesn’t account for the shortage of females in the country’s population:
[A]n NBER working paper by economists Douglas Almond, Hongbin Li, and Shuang Zhang makes the case that the roots of the gender imbalance go back farther than the OCP. Specifically, they argue that it was the pro-market land reform policies and breakup of collective farms following the death of Mao Zedong that drove the trend in rural areas — 86 percent of the country’s population at the time. For rural couples, who were allowed to have two children and generally preferred at least one of them to be a boy, the second child was 5.5 percent more likely to be a boy after land reform was introduced in a given area. The introduction of the OCP, which happened around the same time, had an effect as well, but the authors find that it’s almost entirely eliminated when you control for the effect of land reform.
Why exactly land reform had this effect is less clear. The authors consider a number of possibilities including gender bias in land distribution, increase in the demand for male labor, increase in demand for old age support, and the collapse of the rural medical system, but don’t find empirical support for any of them.
More Dish on the state of the one-child policy here.
Christianism Watch
“When you worship God, you are not just doing the right thing in terms of your relationship with God, you are doing your patriotic duty. It is your patriotic duty to worship God in order that we may have a prosperous and flourishing economy” – Bryan Fischer.
A brief reminder of what Christianity actually is (from Luke):
And he lifted up his eyes on his disciples, and said, Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God … But woe unto you that are rich! for ye have received your consolation.
The religious right is one of the major forces against Christianity right now in this country.
Gold, Silver, Bronze, Green
The International Olympic Committee has changed its drug-testing policies to disqualify marijuana smokers for “in-competition” use only. The new threshold for testing positive, 150 nanograms per milliliter of blood, is 10 times higher than the previous version, leading NORML’s executive director to remark that only a “pretty dedicated cannabis consumer” would reach that level on game day. Jess Remington comments:
The goal of the new rules is to catch marijuana users who are competing under the influence, rather than those who smoked days or weeks earlier. In other words, the [World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), which regulates the Olympics] is now treating marijuana like alcohol.
Following suit, the UFC changed their marijuana rules to match the WADA’s just three weeks later. In response to these changes, state athletic commissions have met to discuss raising the marijuana threshold for combat sports. “My personal feeling is that I would much rather focus on obvious performance-enhancing drug use like steroids and blood doping,” Nick Lembo of the Association of Boxing Commissions said. “If I was a trainer, I would much rather have my fighter fighting someone who took marijuana than someone who’s blood doping.”
Quote For The Day
“America no longer is a functioning democracy. The invasion of the private sphere has gone too far. The claims of secrecy have clearly been excessive. Snowden has done a great service in informing the public of this,” – former president Jimmy Carter, re-translated back from the German (and so paraphrased) because no US news outlet covered the actual remarks.
Mental Health Break
Communicating With Caveats
Jessica Love wonders if we will develop a system “to help us convey the particularities of our communication tools,” increasingly an imperative in an age when conversations take place across multiple devices:
Language is ripe with conventions, and though they can differ drastically from one situation or medium to the next, they are generally understood—or at the very least understood to be understood—by everyone involved. Thus, most of us take care to manage expectations when the unexpected arises. “Sorry, I’m losing my voice,” our waitress warns. (Don’t lowball your tip just because I don’t sound peppy.) “I’m taking a vacation from Facebook,” a friend cautions. (I won’t be “liking” everything you post.) “I will be out of the office through the end of the month,” a coworker auto-replies. (Unless you are really important, I’m not going to respond to your email until August.)
Increasingly, though, we must also manage expectations about the very devices we use to communicate. It is no longer obvious whether, say, an email was typed on a smart phone, a tablet, or a computer—or perhaps composed using a mobile dictation application, or something else altogether (something with a broken screen!). And yet, as they’ve always been, our messages are very much shaped by the method we use to communicate them.
An example:
Consider the “Sent from my iPhone” message that now accompanies so many emails. I actually welcome it as a caveat of sorts: I’m typing using the teeny keyboard on my phone, it says—my response may be abrupt and error-prone. (And the caveat works! Journalist Clive Thompson describes a 2012 study demonstrating that people who send emails with spelling and grammatical errors are deemed more credible when their sendoff is trailed by “Sent from my iPhone” than when it is not.)
Stories Of Permanent Flux
Science fiction writer Ted Chiang reflects on the genre:
I think science fiction is fundamentally a post-industrial revolution form of storytelling. Some literary critics have noted that the good-versus-evil story follows a pattern where the world starts out as a good place, evil intrudes, the heroes fight and eventually defeat evil, and the world goes back to being a good place. Those critics have said that this is fundamentally a conservative storyline because it’s about maintaining the status quo. This is a common story pattern in crime fiction, too—there’s some disruption to the order, but eventually order is restored.
Science fiction offers a different kind of story, a story where the world starts out as recognizable and familiar but is disrupted or changed by some new discovery or technology. At the end of the story, the world is changed permanently. The original condition is never restored. And so in this sense, this story pattern is progressive because its underlying message is not that you should maintain the status quo, but that change is inevitable. The consequences of this new discovery or technology—whether they’re positive or negative—are here to stay and we’ll have to deal with them.
(Video from L’uomo Meccanico [The Mechanical Man], 1921)
Face Of The Day
A man tosses green algae to friends at a beach on July 18, 2013 in Qingdao, China. A large quantity of non-poisonous green seaweed, enteromorpha prolifera, hit the Qingdao coast in recent days. Since June 8, more than 50,000 tons of such seaweed has been removed from the city’s beaches. By ChinaFotoPress via Getty Images.
