Following on the heels of David Frum’s excellent takedown of famous crank Charles Murray’s latest book, Andrew Gelman explains why the meme of the rich latte-sipping liberal elites vs. the Pabst-drinking conservative working class is, as with everything else Murray says, utter horseshit.
I would have thought previous takedowns would have ended his 15 minutes, but nobody apparently goes broke catering to the wealthy racist class in America.
Apropos of the 9th Circuit’s ruling on Proposition 8, rather than raise the same arguments again we can just turn to Ampersand’s analysis of why same-sex marriage won’t make incestuous marriage more likely, particularly his brilliant analysis of why there is a rational basis for prohibiting incestuous marriages between adults:
In my case, I’d first say that marriage is a kin-making institution, which by definition transforms two unrelated (or at least not closely related) people into close kin. It makes no more sense for marriage to turn close kin into close kin than it does for an alchemist to transform gold into gold. It’s already gold.
Second, I’d point out that limiting incestuous marriage to adults would not solve the problem of child abuse, and could conceivably make it worse. Legal recognition of incestuous marriage could give sexually abusive fathers (or mothers — but in most cases, sexually abusive parents are fathers) a strong incentive to sexually abuse their daughters, in hopes of crushing her will before she comes of age, so she’ll agree to marriage.
Finally, I’d argue that child health and child abuse are not the only harms of incest. Importantly, legalizing incestuous marriage between the infertile would transform currently existing families, by introducing the possibility of marriage into relationships that have never had that possibility. It fundamentally changes the relationship between father and son, or between sister and brother, if we add the possibility of marital union to those relationships.
Over here on Earth-Alpha, you may have heard of today’s big appellate court decision. No, not the one on regular Earth about same-sex marriage; we’ve had that on our parallel timeline pretty much forever. No, in our alternate reality, the Ninth Circuit struck down a law forbidding left-handed people from marrying each other. This law was passed through a popular initiative, to get around the meddling of the courts, and let me tell you, we are not happy about the damage this will cause to our traditional view of marriage.
First was the whole nonsense about “discrimination”, as if left-handers had any different treatment than their right-handed counterparts. A lefty could, if he or she wanted, marry a righty, just as a righty can marry a righty. Tell me, how is that discrimination? Nobody said they couldn’t marry at all; they just want special treatment. (Don’t ask about the “ambidextrous.” They don’t exist; that’s just a phase a lot of people go through until they make up their mind as to whether they’re righties or lefties.)
Then they ignored the fact that left-handedness is not only rare, but something we would like to discourage. Of course many left-handed people can’t help the way they are, but they may be more likely to have left-handed children. And those children will struggle to get along in a right-handed world geared towards right-handed people in everything from pens to circular saws. It’s also well-known that being left-handed increases the risk of everything from ADHD to schizophrenia. Don’t we want to protect our children from the negative effects of sinister marriage?
The court’s decision also spit in the face of millennia of tradition favoring right-handedness. The same word for the majority of people’s hand orientation even means “correct” and “proper” in English. Multiple languages recognize the left side, and left-handedness, as being unlucky or evil – “sinister” in English and “gauche” in French, to pick two easy examples. Many cultures also treat the left hand as unclean or disfavored, useful only for unpleasant tasks. Yet the activist judges in the majority saw fit to set aside a hallowed cultural tradition held by human cultures going back to the dawn of time.
Don’t ask me if the opinion makes any legal sense; we don’t like the result, and that’s all we right-minded folk need to know that the court got it wrong.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go make a donation to a religious charity that helps train left-handed people to hold a pencil in the correct hand; with time and effort, many can write their names legibly, and accept that they should marry a right-handed person, as all right-thinking people do.
I know, I know. When somebody online asks for relationship advice it’s often not worth the bother, because of the areas in which people really want an honest answer to their questions, “what should I do about my partner being a complete jackass” is right down there with “does this make me look fat?”
Nonetheless, in the interests of self-help: No, you’re not crazy and yes, s/he is a complete jackass.
Occasionally, in the course of my work, I find that a defense attorney has been lying or fighting tooth and nail to withhold information that actually would help their client. When I finally pry it out of them – sometimes at judgepoint. Sometimes they do this for billing purposes, but sometimes it’s just…well, stupid. “Why do they do this?!” I will snarl, stomping around my office. (I have very patient co-workers.) And somebody will inevitably remind me that, hey, dumbfuck, they’re defense attorneys. That’s what they do. Withholding information. dodging, never giving a straight answer: those are typical and often very useful strategies, and they do them reflexively, even when it does not serve them or their clients.
I sometimes think that these same people end up running socially conservative activist groups.
Witness the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s recent decision to end funding for Planned Parenthood’s breast-cancer screening program. Their claim, which they continue to maintain, is that this has nothing to do with abortion or contraception, but is simply pursuant to a (brand new) rule that they don’t give grants to groups “under government investigation”. By a startling coincidence, an anti-choice Congressman has (again) started an investigation as to whether Planned Parenthood spend public money on providing abortions. By an even more startling coincidence, the foundation recently hired as its VP an anti-choice politician who made defunding Planned Parenthood part of her unsuccessful campaign. And Ms. Handel quietly ended the foundation’s support of cancer research (you know, a thing that’s part of its mission) involving embryonic stem cells. Nor has there been any suggestion that the new guidelines have been, or will be, applied to any of the other thousands of organizations receiving grants.
So why is the Komen foundation lying about its reasons for defunding Planned Parenthood?
Because that’s what they do. They can’t help it.
I recall hearing an interview with an anti-choice leader of the movement to pass a “parental notification” initiative in my state, in which they added a little paragraph about life starting at conception. The woman being interviewed was shocked, shocked at the suggestion that said paragraph might be taken as anything other than a legally meaningless statement of purpose: “I’m a lawyer,” she said, and she therefore knew there was no possible way that could bleed out into any other legislation. Which, as anybody who got their JD from an actual law school instead of a cereal box knows, is not only horseshit but is the exact opposite of how laws work.
Or consider when Mark Leno introduced SB-906 in California, which explicitly stated the (existing) rule that religious groups would not be forced to solemnize same-sex marriage. You would think that anti-LGBT groups would embrace it, but unsurprisingly, they did not; because one of their anti-equality talking points is “Your church will be forced to marry gay couples!” and they didn’t want to lose it.
A principled stance would be for the Komen foundation to state that they believe funding Planned Parenthood detracts from their mission of ending breast cancer; or that they believe Planned Parenthood engaged in misconduct; or that they believe abortion and contraception are contrary to the mission of protecting women’s health. But these aren’t principles; they are socially conservative politicians. They can’t help themselves.
I know I probably should have posted these helpful tips before Thanksgiving, so you would have them before next year, but I have a horrible cold and didn’t make the pie the day before as I usually do. So. I’ll update later in the day with photos and details, but the basics:
1 1/2 to 2 cups cooked and cooled pumpkin (more or less depending on how firm and pumpkiny you want your pie), or a large can of canned pumpkin (sigh)
2 eggs
1 1/2 cups half and half
1/4 cup (packed) brown sugar, light or dark, your choice, but I use light
1/2 cup regular white sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspooon ground ginger
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon ground allspice
Preheat your oven to 400F.
Blend the pumpkin in a food processor or blender. If your machine can hold everything, put in a cup of the half-and-half and everything else and blend until smooth, then add the rest of the half-and-half. If you don’t, or if you have canned pumpkin, just beat everything together in a bowl. Pour into your prebaked pie crust and cook for 15 minutes (it’s probably a good idea to put pie strips or foil over the pie crust edge, by the way). Turn your oven down to 350F and bake for 25-35 minutes, until the center of the pie is just barely still jiggly. Take it out and cool it well away from little helpers:
Increasing the signal to whatever pitiful degree I can, because I am absolutely gobsmacked (or perhaps more accurately, godsmacked) that this project isn’t fully funded by now. It’s Sean Demory’s voudon noir novel, and it’s about ten times as awesome as that sounds, which is a pretty unmeasurably high level of awesome.
Kickstarter page has excerpts. A measly $5 gets a PDF copy for you crazy kids with your e-readers, and a published dead-tree version is only $20. I spent more than that for Halloween candy.
Desamours felt a hand around his ankle, heard a low, wet giggle.
“Like I say, focus on the future,” Kalfu said. “You’re back, you’re in the game. You need anything at all, let me know.”
Desamours woke up suddenly, a hand over his eyes. He smelled rum and rancid fat, heard Kalfu’s gunpowder hiss as the hand receded.
“Because, the way it’s looking now, baby,” Kalfu said, fading into the shadows of the room, “you could use some friends.”
(Shut up. For blog purposes this is still Sunday.)
I don’t have time or energy to do full reviews, as today was probably the least productive day ever recorded in human history, but here’s stuff you should look at:
The Sherlockian (Graham Moore) – a mysterious murder in the world of Sherlock Holmes nerds, intertwined with the story of a murder investigation conducted by Arthur Conan Doyle, who has just rid himself of Holmes in “The Final Problem”. Our nerd-hero is very likeable and the Doyle portrait is very believable. This is a breath of fresh air if you made the understandable error of trying to read The Arcanum.
Getting Off (Lawrence Block) – yes, okay, the cover will have people on BART looking at you funny. I was expecting it to be okay but not great, and it was actually quite good. Not Eight Million Ways to Die good, but well worth a read. Kit, our heroine, has sex with men and then kills them, for reasons that make perfect sense to her. I was expecting this to turn into a cat-and-mouse game with a brave detective investigating the killings, but Block knows better than to pull that nonsense. One finds oneself torn between rooting for Kit and being creeped out.
The Book of Cthulhu (edited by Ross E. Lockhart) – a compendium of stories “inspired by” Lovecraft, which means it’s a very mixed bag. Some of the stories are really well-done (like Caitlin Kiernan, surprise surprise) and others appear to have been phoned in, or missed the point entirely.
How Not to Write a Screenplay (Denny Martin Finn) – on the first page, the author lays out for us that he’s not a screenwriter; he’s the reader. Therefore, as the person who is going to help decide whether your screenplay is rejected or not, he has a great deal of advice on what works and what doesn’t, what used to be in screenplays that is left out, and he compares crappy screenplays (with the serial numbers filed off) with really good writing from actual moves. I found this very interesting from a non-screenwriter perspective because it has very useful information about what goes into a novel that doesn’t belong in a screenplay, and possibly vice versa. The Arcanum, I’m looking at you, damn it.
Art History: A Very Short Introduction (Dana Arnold) – good grid, I love the Very Short Introduction series. The books are small enough to be portable, Oxford gets actual experts to write them, and you can feel especially smart. Instead of reading a “Dummies” book you can pretend you’re reading “Dummies for Very Intelligent People with Little Spare TIme”. This is a good overview of the discipline of art history and approaches to the history and curation of art, and if a Philistine like me can understand it, it should be perfectly adequate for you.
Seanan McGuire, author of One Salt Sea, has an excellent post about the “print is dead” handwaving. (I was initially going to use a more accurate and less polite term than “handwaving” but had a rare burst of restraint. You’re welcome.)
This isn’t a unique problem. It’s just one more of the usual ooh-shiny geek reaction too many people have when a New Thing comes out: the old thing is dead! Onward, comrades, into the glorious future where we will leave behind all those uncool, outdated people with their buggywhips! Like brick-and-mortar stores. Remember ten years or so ago, when “e-” everything was going to totally replace brick-and-mortar stores, and you’d be able use the Web to do everything from ordering groceries to having people run errands for you?
Well. You still can order groceries online, and all kinds of other good things, and some of those stores have gone away. But Safeway and Target still have physical stores, and companies that promised to run around the city for you are out of business. Just as television didn’t kill radio, online availability didn’t kill brick-and-mortar stores or real-life grocery shopping. Turns out there are things it’s not always easy to do online, and that there are people who can’t just hop on their trusty computer to have organic grass-fed steaks shipped to their door, perhaps because the entire world is not upper-middle-class and residents of hip urban neighborhoods.
And so it is with books. E-readers and electronic books are a fabulous thing. They’re especially helpful for books that need updating frequently (textbooks) or to handle accessibility issues (larger type). They are encouraging publishers to re-issue out-of-print materials, and they allow authors to release older and shorter pieces quickly.
But: they require a reader, which costs money, and has to be kept charged, and stores the books in a format selected by a vendor. The books themselves can go into the memory hole. It’s not easy to lend e-books, because they have to be controlled with DRM. They’re not “green” (perhaps the stupidest argument made in their favor), and not just because they require electricity to use; they are not spun out of recycled pop bottles and repurposed copper wire, but are manufactured under pretty crappy (and sometimes deadly) working conditions, and let’s not even get into what happens after their life cycle is over. They also, as McGuire pointed out, are largely out of the reach of anyone other than the sort of person with a spare couple of hundred bucks to spend on a new reading medium.
The sales figures waved around to suggest that e-books are “overtaking” print books are also misleading. Amazon, whose motives are not exactly pure, reports figures for any kind of e-book sold at all, from badly-formatted copies of public-domain works to actual books that someone chose to buy instead of a print copy. Those figures don’t reflect sales from Wal-Mart, or independent bookstores, or second-hand bookstores; they tell us very little reliably that would suggest people hate paper books and are eager to entire the Glorious Kindle Future.
Print books are going nowhere except in the minds of people who have a progress fetish. And those people need to check their privilege.
I highly recommend Chuck Wendig’s “Penmonkey” books on writing. If you want to know why, here’s an excerpt.
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