What I’m Reading, June 18, 2014

Posted on June 18, 2014 by wellsdc

Erik Adam Klausz [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/)], via Flickr The Truth About Pavlov’s Dogs Is Pretty Disturbing, Esther Inglis-Arkell, io9, June 17, 2014

When did Pavlov’s dogs start salivating? When they heard a bell, you say? Au contraire. Pavlov’s dogs started salivating when they saw lab coats. Workers at a lab that studied digestion noticed that the dogs used in the experiments were drooling for seemingly no reason at all.

It was only Ivan Pavlov, a scientist working at the lab, who made the connection between the lab coats and the drool. The dogs, Pavlov reasoned, knew that they were soon going to be fed whenever they saw a lab coat. What intrigued Pavlov was the fact that a physical response could be produced solely by way of a mental association. The dogs couldn’t drool on command consciously, but they could be trained to do so just the same.

Agriculture isn’t Natural, Keith Kloor, Collide-A-Scape, June 12, 2014 Continue reading →

What I’m Reading, June 17, 2014

Posted on June 17, 2014 by wellsdc

Law Enforcement Agencies Continue To Obtain Military Equipment, Claiming The United States Is A ‘War Zone’, Tim Cushing, TechDirt, June 12, 2014

That law enforcement agencies across the US are swiftly converting themselves into military outfits is hardly a surprise at this point. The problem is that nothing seems to be slowing them down, not even the dismayed reactions of citizens supposedly under their care.

The government’s desire to offload its unused military hardware at deeply discounted rates has turned a few outliers into the new normal. Towns as with populations well under the 10,000 mark have secured Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles, supposedly in order to keep up with a non-existent arms race between the good guys and the bad guys.

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The problems with this sort of ad hoc “mobilization” are numerous. The dangers of outfitting police with military gear can best be signaled with a combination of “if all you have is a hammer…” and Chekhov’s Gun. If you give police military gear, they’re going to want to use it. The very occasional shootout with heavily-armed criminals simply won’t satisfy the urge to deploy the new acquisitions. The slightly-more-occasional no-knock warrant served in the dead of night to known drug offenders won’t sufficiently scratch the itch.

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What I’m Reading, June 16, 2014

Posted on June 16, 2014 by wellsdc

Women Are Hard To Animate. Thoughts on Representation of Women in Movies, Television and Games, Echidne, Echidne of the Snakes, June 12, 2014

My point is that these stories are picked from a certain angle, an angle of traditionally male heroism, and even when that is not the case most of us are lulled into believing that a handful of women in a large list of participants is a mixed gender setting in a movie or television series. Just think of the Noah’s Ark (which also consisted of all white characters). Probably a fifty-fifty distribution of men and women in some movie reads as a chick flick to many viewers.

One reason for all this is that we tend to see women portray womanhood in their roles, not play roles of individuals who have different temperaments, characters and so on. That’s why having a handful of women in a movie looks like inclusion, even if they all play the role “women,” because that role might be subconsciously compared to the number of dentists or gamblers or whatever in the same movie, never mind that most of the rest of that list are played by men.

Who Owns Your Womb? Women Can Get Murder Charge for Refusing C-Sections, Michelle Goodwin, AlterNet, June 13, 2014

Continue reading →

Our F—ed Up Health Care System

Posted on June 4, 2014 by wellsdc

By ErgoSum88 (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons A now-former neurosurgeon at a Dallas hospital is accused of multiple botched surgeries, resulting in debilitating injuries, paralysis, and death.

Thanks to a provision of Texas law enacted in the name of “tort reform,” plaintiffs cannot recover damages from the hospital unless they can prove that it had “specific intent…to cause substantial injury or harm to the claimant”

In the fight to have that provision declared invalid under the “Open Courts” provision of the Texas Constitution, the state (by and through its attorney, Attorney General/gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott) has intervened on the side of the hospitals.

Texas: it’s like a whole other country. A shitty one.

Photo credit: By ErgoSum88 (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

What I’m Reading, May 21, 2014

Posted on May 21, 2014 by wellsdc

By Flickr user Romeo Reidl from Budapest, Hungary (Respect sexworkers statue) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons Invisible Sex Workers, Charlotte Shane, Jacobin, May 14, 2014

Journalists, policy-makers, and self-appointed experts repeatedly say that the Internet facilitated an explosion of activity for sex sellers of all stripes, yet that activity was somehow entirely covert. Similarly, the “end demand” crowd, who would like to see the sex trade eradicated but catch flack for explicitly supporting policies that criminalize those selling it, assert that sex work proliferates because of an endless male appetite for bought sex.

But very few sex workers use the “Dark Net,” and even that private corner of the web is now subject to busts. So some connecting of the dots is long overdue. If sex workers are so hard to find, how do clients responsible for making the sex industry the “fastest growing and second largest criminal industry in the world” find them? How do the cops who continue to arrest them?

The Feminist Version of American History You Never Hear About In School, Maureen Shaw, PolicyMic, May 13, 2014 Continue reading →

This News Surprises No One

Posted on May 20, 2014 by wellsdc

By Unknown. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons It turns out that admissions at the state’s top law school are influenced by politics. Who knew?

Some of the least-qualified graduates of the University of Texas School of Law in recent years have high-level connections in the Legislature, which may explain how they got into the prestigious law school in the first place.

A months-long Watchdog.org analysis of political influence on the admissions process at UT Law found there’s some truth, after all, to the old line about who you know mattering more than what you know. We found dozens of Longhorns who don’t know enough to be lawyers but know somebody important in the Legislature.

Two of those mediocre students are legislators themselves.

It’s not even exclusive to one party or the other.

Where I’m not sure they’re right is in their apparent correlation between qualifications to go to law school and bar exam passage rates. One could argue that those are two separate things, as least where UT Law School is concerned. Continue reading →

The Pocahontas Argument

Posted on May 20, 2014 by wellsdc

The following argument was actually made, out loud, during proceedings before the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Bostic v. Schaefer, a same-sex marriage case (the context is a comparison between anti-same-sex marriage laws and anti-interracial marriage laws struck down in Loving v. Virginia):

There is a history, prior to the Jim Crow era laws, the anti-miscegenation laws. The idea of interracial marriage was not prohibited. It still fit within the fundamental right of marriage, the idea of a man-woman marriage. Before Virginia passed those affirmative anti-miscegenation laws, it might not have been the social norm, but people certainly could have married, and indeed did marry, across racial lines. Pocahontas married John Rolfe in the early 1600s and their marriage wasn’t declared unconstitutional

David S. Cohen at Slate deconstructs some of the problems with this argument, although I suspect one could write a book detailing just the legal or historical problems with it. As Cohen notes: Continue reading →

What I’m Reading, May 19, 2014

Posted on May 19, 2014 by wellsdc

By Peter Mackinnon, Kerry Calder, and Stef Moir/First Photographics [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons Amazon’s ridiculous photography patent makes Mark Cuban happy, Andrew Leonard, Salon, May 9, 2014

If you are, like Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, a person who believes that the U.S. patent system is completely out-of-whack, then the news that Amazon was recently granted a patent for the process of shooting pictures against a white backdrop was simultaneously a cause for outrage and reason for jubilation.

The outrage part is easy. Studio photographers have been taking pictures against white backgrounds for ages. The notion that such a thing could be patented strikes many people as inexplicable and bizarre. But that’s also exactly why this particular tidbit exploded so quickly out of the amateur photography blogosphere and into the mainstream tech press and finally to the attention of Mr. Cuban. It’s the perfect example of why we need comprehensive patent reform.

The NFL Will Never Be ‘Ready’ for an Openly Gay Player, Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic, February 10, 2014

[Sam] will be challenging a deep and discrepant mythology of who is capable of inflicting violence and who isn’t. Last week, Jonathan Vilma speculated about how he might feel if a gay teammate saw him naked:

Imagine if he’s the guy next to me and, you know, I get dressed, naked, taking a shower, the whole nine, and it just so happens he looks at me. How am I supposed to respond?

What undergirds this logic is a fear of being made into a woman, which is to say a fear of being regarded sexually by someone who is as strong as, or stronger than, you. Implicit to the fear is the gay player’s ability to do violence. It exists right alongside a belief that the gay player is a “sissy.” (“Grown men should not have female tendencies. Period,” Vilma once tweeted.) The logic is kin to the old Confederate belief that Southern slaves were so loyal and cowardly yet they must never be given guns.

The mythology Jonathan Vilma endorses will not fade through vague endorsements of “tolerance,” lectures on “acceptance,” nor any other species of heartfelt magic. The question which we so often have been offered—is the NFL ready for a gay player?—is backwards. Powerful interests are rarely “ready” for change, so much as they are assaulted by it. We refer to barriers being “broken” for a reason. The reason is not because great powers generally like to unbar the gates and hold a picnic in the honor of the previously excluded. The NFL has no moral right to be “ready” for a gay player, which is to say it has no right to discriminate against gay men at its leisure which anyone is bound to respect.

Photo credit: By Peter Mackinnon, Kerry Calder, and Stef Moir/First Photographics [CC-BY-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

A Very Bad Defamation Claim

Posted on May 15, 2014 by wellsdc

William Morris Design of the Letter F converted from a font "Goudy Initialen" by Dieter Steffmann, uploaded by kuba [Public domain, CC0 1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)], via Openclipart I read about a lot of defamation claims, both threatened and actually filed as lawsuits, and most of them seem pretty bad. As a broad overview, in order to successfully sue for defamation, you have to prove that someone (1) published information about you (2) that is untrue, (3) that the person knew or should have known that it was not true, and (4) that this harmed you in a tangible (i.e. expressible in a dollar amount) way. This is not the precise definition of defamation in all U.S. jurisdictions, but it’s a start. The idea is to balance people’s rights of free speech with people’s rights against conduct that directly causes them harm.

Peter LaBarbera, a gentleman who apparently gets offended about gay people for a living, had an unpleasant experience on a college campus not too long ago. He was giving a speech to a rather large crowd on a campus in Ohio, when most of the crowd abruptly stood up and walked out in protest. It turns out that the protest was planned in advance, and quite frankly, it strikes me as a reasonably effective method of protest—certainly better than yelling or heckling.

According to some observers, or at least some writers who wrote about the event, LaBarbera allegedly said something to the effect of “You’re leaving? Are you effing kidding?” as people filed out of the room.

That’s the part he thinks is defamatory. That someone accused him of using the word “effing.” Last time I checked, “effing” is what you say to avoid saying a swear word. Continue reading →

What I’m Reading, May 9, 2014

Posted on May 9, 2014 by wellsdc

Philipp Clüver [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons Barbarians in Oklahoma, Charles Pierce, Esquire, April 30, 2014 (h/t PZ Myers)

I am saying this quite deliberately. The state of Oklahoma committed an act of fucking barbarism last night. It did so under the color of law, which makes every citizen of that benighted state complicit in the act of fucking barbarism. The governor of that state, a pink balloon named Mary Fallin, is a fucking barbarian. A state legislator named Mike Christian is a fucking barbarian, for reasons we will get to in a moment. Every politician in that benighted state belongs in a fucking cage this morning.

(Emphasis in original.)

Andrew Wakefield: Attracting antivaccine cranks like moths to a flame since 1998, Orac, Respectful Insolence, May 7, 2014

Andrew Wakefield, like many antivaccinationists, doesn’t like being called an “antivaccinationist” or “antivaccine.” This becomes evident in a part of the interview where Billy D [Billy DeMoss] asks Wakefield if there are any vaccines that are effective; i.e., if there are any vacines that “work.” It’s clear that Billy D wants Wakefield to say that vaccines don’t work. He doesn’t say that—exactly. He does, however, equivocate. Instead of saying whether vaccines work or not, he does say that vaccines result in the production of antibodies against the organisms for which they are designed, after which he questions whether antibodies actually lead to immunity and pulls out the antivaccine trope of questioning how long the immunity from vaccines lasts. He even goes so far as to claim that the mumps vaccine is not needed, that it doesn’t work, and that mumps is a “trivial disease,” which it is not. (If you develop deafness from mumps, to you it’s not a trivial disease.”

Rick Santorum: Georgia Law ‘Creates An Opportunity’ For Gun Owners To Police Airports, David, Crooks and Liars, April 27, 2014 Continue reading →

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