Linky Friday #141: God, Family, Terror
Terror:
Image by Lion Multimedia Production U.S.A. 
[T2] While we were watching Paris, a hero did this in Beirut.
[T3] You know what else saved lives (well, a life)? A Samsung smartphone. And not for the first time.
[T4] Michael Weiss interviews Abu Khaled, Daeshian spy.
[T5] One of the terrorists of the Paris attack got in to Paris using a fake Syrian passport, which are apparently pretty easy to get. That he wasn’t actually a Syrian is less comforting than that he apparently snuck in through the refugee system is discomforting. At least, for the European system. (Hopefully ours is a lot better.)
[T6] The National Front in France is allegedly gaining support among gays.
Immigration:
Image by The U.S. National Archives
[I2] Last week I linkied a liberal case against Birthright Citizenship. This week, the conservative case for Birthright Citizenship.
[I3] When the Obama Administration paused refugee entry.
[I4] Images from Ellis Island.
Politics:
Image by DonkeyHotey
[P2] Also, the whole bit about Jeb helping a National Review reporter with tips on how to clean her room is kinda cool.
[P3] Some black voters may disagree, but Kareem Abdul-Jabbar believes that Ben Carson is perpetuating black stereotypes by denying science. Not sure about that, but he does carry some black comic book character stereotypes (wherein black characters tend to fall into one of three categories, one of which is being incredibly successful and smart).
[P4] Orac looks Ben Carson and why intelligent people aren’t always skeptics. Somewhat related, from 2013, Tea Partiers know science.
[P5] Though I think there was a window of opportunity for him to run, Mitt Romney would not be wise to enter the fray now. He could possibly do his party a lot of good by endorsing Rubio, however.
[P6] Say what one will about the Tea Party, but no faction of the GOP has done more to recruit minority candidates.
Health:
Image by WisPolitics.com
[H2] … because Obama’s seemingly reasonable regulatory regime for ecigarettes is looking worse and worse with each passing month. It’s far enough in the future that the next president will have a lot of influence over what’s going to happen. The decision looks more like a punt.
[H3] Is institutional racism (against minorities, to be clear) responsible for substance abuse deaths among whites?
[H4] The biology of morning sickness. (This is not a hint that Clancy is pregnant. Elizabeth Stroker Bruenig is, though!)
[H5] Horrifying.
Religion:
Image by sabertasche2
[R2] Sergio types out participants in the Catholic Dating World. They ain’t no Amish, I fear.
[R3] Ardis E Parshall explains (sympathetically) the Mormon policy on children of gay parents.
[R4] Jerry Coyne wants the Quiet Atheists to lay off the New Atheists.
[R5] They may not be enthusiastic about getting Syrian refugees, but The Economist explains why Muslims are heading for Dixie.
Family:
Image by April L. Sanders
[F2] The combination of automatic birthright citizenship and the requirements of expatriates to pay taxes makes for a troubling combination for young Americans born abroad.
[F3] Harry Benson argues that giving cohabitating couples the same rights as married couples undermines men’s commitment. I hadn’t thought about it in quite that manner, but even setting aside some dubious incentives my view is that if you want the obligations and benefits of marriage, there is only one thing you need to do to make it happen. Including for…
[F4] It’s time for gays to get married or lose their benefits. Which is exactly as it should be. When I was living in Deseret, I had a couple of friends – both of which fervently supported SSM – who were irritated that gay couples could get work benefits without getting married, while they would have to get married.
H1,
No one’s bothered that Ryan is releasing known carcinogens into the Capital?
H4,
Ahh, the joys of being completely and utterly wrong!
Taking a population perspective on “who gets morning sickness” doesn’t give you nearly the insights that asking “which individuals don’t get morning sickness”…Report
A controversy in curling?
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/20/sports/facing-control-issues-curling-draws-line-at-high-tech-brooms.html?_r=1Report
Interesting piece. Well, actually the execution is pretty crappy, but the topic is interesting.
Every sport has to deal with this issue, once it becomes big enough for there to be money in it for manufacturers to market high tech equipment. It appears that curling has finally hit the big time.
The decision is whether to embrace high tech equipment completely, to adopt it partially, with defined limits, or to mandate low tech. The complete embrace often is the least desirable option, as it turns the sport into an arms race. Mandating low tech inevitably provokes cries of “Luddite!” but it often has a lot going for it. This is the route professional baseball took. The ball is essentially unchanged from a century ago. The bat even reverted. The rule has always required it be made of wood. There were in the 1870s and 80s experiments with composite construction, combining hard woods with springy woods. This is how cricket bats are constructed. Baseball pulled back from that, requiring not only that the bat be made of wood, but that it be a single piece.
My prediction is that curling will go low tech. The argument seems to be that high tech brooms materially affect game play in a way that the curling establishment would consider undesirable.Report
the curling establishment
I see. You’re just another tool of Big Curl.Report
I never pretended otherwise.Report
Isn’t Big Curl part of the fashion industry?Report
…making me, as its tool, a curling iron.Report
I wish tennis had stuck with low tech. The diversity of play style that the inferior wooden rackets allowed for made tennis far more interesting than the largely pure baseline play that you see today with the juiced up rackets of today.Report
Golf, too. I’m old enough to have started with woods made from real wood (a model named after Dr. Cary Middlecoff!). They had a sweet spot approximately the exact same size as the ball, so you had to be perfect to get best results. With the driver I have today, not only is the head half again as large as my first, it’s almost impossible to mishit badly enough to get any torque on impact. So now I get 250 yards from a flawed swing that my junior self would have sent on a 150-yd banana into the right rough.
But I’m admittedly a massive Luddite where golf is concerned. I still carry my own bag, and I think the professional sport would be better if the touring pros did as well.Report
P4: When you follow the second link back to the original data source, it might be relevant that the measure is “science and engineering indicators” (emphasis mine). Given that we know the Tea Party is older and whiter than the population overall, it would not be surprising to find that they are “engineerier” than the population average as well. Perhaps related, any number of sources (here’s a short one) have pointed out the prevalence of engineers and engineering students in terrorist organizations.Report
Agreed.
I mean, we should all be distrustful of “look at how dumb those people are” kinds of arguments, although to be honest I find liking the tea party to be kinda dumb. But still. I think this is (at least partly) an “older male STEM culture” thing.
Which is to say, an “engineering dude” can be one of the most stubbornly idiotic specimen you might encounter in an average week —
— while at the same time being totally brilliant. It’s kinda weird, right?
But to step back, and perhaps be less snide (as if!), I think this falls under the map-territory thing, combined with a sort of person who is completely allergic to any dialectic process. What I mean is, in their minds they have a model of the world, and what does not fit that model has to go, and they are smart enough to build a very elaborate (and completely bogus) model.
If you now imagine epicycles of social nonsense, then you’re on the right track.
Anyway, dialectic is the answer. It is to say, “My model works for me, but those other models work for those people, and there isn’t one social truth” — but as an aside, there is one scientific truth, in the sense the world exists, and “not believing in” the bus won’t stop it from running you over. But my point is, if someone thinks their opinions of family structure (to pick a not-actually-random example) is “scientific truth,” well then they are idiots.
Often highly intelligent idiots. But so it goes.
Anyway, there is a next step: then you say, “If no modes (of social stuff) are true, and if it is pretty useless to say ‘all models are true’ — cuz fuck that shit — then what do I do?”
At which point the philosopher grins knowingly.Report
Which is to say, an “engineering dude” can be one of the most stubbornly idiotic specimen you might encounter in an average week… while at the same time being totally brilliant. It’s kinda weird, right?
Perhaps my sister summed it up well when, speaking about me, she told one of her friends, “Yes, he probably has a mental illness. But it’s a socially useful mental illness, so we’re not trying to fix him.” Exaggerating for effect, but still…Report
Michael,
Much, much better than the time someone discovered that certain engineers produce much better work when they’re off their medication… [and here I’m not talking about antidepressants, which have known affects on creativity. I think the issue was paranoid schizophrenia]
A socially useful mental illness indeed!Report
I’ve occasionally wondered if the whole “mad engineer” meme that has been popular in fiction for the last 150 years is a recognition of that. And I say mad engineer instead of mad scientist because what made them dangerous was the engineering they did. Not, “I’ve discovered a new power source,” but rather, “I’ve used my new power source to build an army of giant robots to conquer the world.”Report
Another feature of the Mad Engineer is (generally) the lack of a spouse or significant other.
A lonely, angry engineer is a very dangerous thing.Report
Yes, but they’re generally like Dr. Horrible, tend to flip out and kill someone they know.Report
Yep.
It’s like, one of those big, unsolvable social problems. These dudes are lonely. This make them suffer. Suffering is bad, and we should care about them.
But they are such rotten, toxic people with completely broken views of women — who on Earth would date such a person? Gah!
Anyway, the whole “incel” space is a cesspool. The fact I find them so fascinating probably reflects poorly on me. Which, whatever. We each get to have a dark side.Report
Professional observation (me being an engineer).
Engineering, as a profession, has become so complex that it is almost impossible for it to be a solitary endeavour anymore. Modern engineers (since the 60’s or so, actually) can no longer be anti-social hermits & hope to be successful, so the profession has become much less attractive to that type of personality. It also helps that engineering has been making a long term effort to get more women into the field, even if academia is still struggling. That’s not to say such hermit engineers don’t exists, just that they don’t generally do well in any sector that would employ them, so their ability to gain the experience that would make them very dangerous is lacking.
Software development & IT seems to be the current holdout for the hermit, since they can be very anti-social & still be employed (although as software & IT infrastructure gets more complex, and more women get into the professions, I suspect these fields will also become unattractive).
Personally, as a former awkward science geek, high school is the greatest forge in which such personalities are generated. Finding some way to fix the damage high school can do to such kids would go a long way.Report
Exactly how many engineers do you know, LeeEsq?Report
@oscar-gordon — Right. Like, I work for a “bigtech” company, and indeed our engineers are on the whole socially well adapted. I mean, we’re nerds. But there are nerds and then there are nerds. So yeah. I’ve met that guy, but he’s usually working in a really small shop, where he can go full “basement geek” mode and churn out (unreadable) code.Report
We actually let a developer go for that. She liked to write very tight, condensed code that was unreadable, and would then refuse to comment it to explain what she was doing, and if you called her to ask about it, she’d get snippy and you’d hear a lot of, “We’ll, if you were a REAL developer, instead of a CFD engineer with some hack coding skills…”Report
Right. I mean, I used to be that person. But there is this thing in life, where you look at the big picture and decide, will I listen to other people or will I not? Which people? When?
Think carefully!
I decided to listen. It worked out pretty good.Report
Good to hear it. It was a shame really, because she was a very talented coder, but instead of taking the opportunity to raise up us hack engineers into a cadre of kick-ass developers churning out awesome tools, she opted to be an ass.Report
(At which point veronica storms through the message board shouting “Just use Haskell!” until she is mercifully put down with a clean shot to the heart.)Report
(Oh and some of my posts have been getting eaten, like three so far today. I don’t know who to contact about this.)Report
@veronica-d Huh. I don’t see any comments by you being held.
By any chance were you using colorful, not-oft used language? If so then, depending on what language it was, WP might have made an incorrect assumption that you were the sockpuppet.
If not, I’ll have CK look and see if there’s anything hinky behind the scenes.Report
I wasn’t swearing any more than I usually do — which is enthusiastically and often.Report
Weird.
I’ll ask CK to look into it.Report
Which reminds Oscar that he really has to look into Haskell, in his infinite spare time…Report
And you didn’t keep her on for her A+ interpersonal skills?Report
It was a close thing, but in the end, the fact that NO ONE wanted to work with her cinched it.Report
When the comments turn into a PHD dissertation, and you still can’t make heads or tails of the assembly, sometimes you simply say “your unit tests work?” and call it a day.Report
There has only been one guy I’ve worked with who produced code none of the rest of us could read. He was the only one in the shop who actually grokked Python. He was at the stage he could intuitively express things elegantly using proper Python metaphors – while the rest of us were perfectly functional but treated it as just another scripting language.
So his code was unreadable because it was too elegant for the rest of us to comprehend.Report
@el-muneco — I dunno, in this case I might take Python-guy’s side, not that I want to get in your face about it, but it is valid to know the idioms of a language and use them in the intended ways. That doesn’t seem too much to ask. And it seems a rather different sort of thing than asking folks to clean after Mel, a Real Programmer: https://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.htmlReport
The statement he’s pusing back against isn’t “Real Programmers write in FORTRAN”, it’s “Real Programmers can write FORTRAN programs in any language.”
If you’ve never read Real Programmers Don’t Use PASCAL, you should. It’s brilliant and hilarious, and gives you a feeling for what people used to be able to do with, roughly speaking, no tools whatsoever.Report
Oh dear Lord, I am old enough to have done all of those. OTOH, I can learn. When someone asked me once what I would possibly do with a billion ops per second, I told them, “Never, ever write casual code in a compiled language again.”Report
Real programmers read the “Barbie, I Can Be a Computer Engineer” book and figure out how to get cute boys to write their code for them. (I’m not yet a real programmer.)Report
(My previous post was brought to you by the postmodern condition.)Report
Or if they get really drunk, they design algorithms to write their code for them. And then they disappear for a while.Report
Thank you for that. My old boss always had stories like that from back in the bad old days of IT.Report
Oh, I know – I was just riffing on “unreadability”. He’s by far the best Python programmer I ever met, and his code was perfect – maximum expressiveness, minimum wasted space, far less to go wrong. Knowing what it had to be doing, I could work backwards and get a mental picture of the concept he was expressing so tightly, but creating it in the first place…
OTOH, in C++, which didn’t map so closely to his way of thinking, he was no better than the average bear. It was just a Man/Machine/Moment situation.Report
This. When I was learning Perl seriously, I used to go bug the local expert. “What,” I would ask, “is the best way to express this generic programming concept in Perl?” At times, the mental model used by a programmer and the notational structure of a programming language conform closely, and amazing things can happen.
When I went to work for the legislature, I found the similarities and differences between programming and legislating fascinating. The programmers (legislators) do their best, but work in an environment where the execution platform (executive) may change without warning and the compiler (courts) may decide that an expression means something different starting today.Report
‘Round my part of the world, when you talk about an engineer, you’re talking about somebody who builds aircraft.
Nevertheless, all of the observations about personality traits and trends in career arcs remain true, functionally unchanged.Report
I’ve known people who produce code that they can’t read. That it takes a self-modifying compiler to even compile…Report
You know my day job involved a half million lines of Common Lisp. Talk about “self modifying compiler” — we don’t even have a clear dependency graph between the macro expansions and the final build stages. It’s literally uncanny that this code even builds.
But we keep hacking away at it. It’s kinda fun, to tell the truth.Report
At least you still know where your code (and hopefully source control) is…
Do we really have wayward bits of self-modifying code wandering the internet? It’s the internet, of course we do.Report
True, but not super obvious, especially to high-school students and the people who help them choose their future path. Which means, we’re getting a lot of anti-social nerds pushed into engineering because people thought “he seems like an engineer”, and then dropping out or graduating without the interpersonal skills to land a job. I suspect a few of my friends would be in that boat were my alma mater not so highly regarded as an engineering school that they’re landing (often-mediocre) jobs anyways. And those are the ones with enough interpersonal skills to make friends with a humanities major.Report
@alan-scott
True, but it seems a trend that is falling. I have a friend who does a lot of outreach to high schoolers interested in engineering & she still occasionally hears things like, “What?! Engineers have to work in teams & do writing & give presentations (etc.)? I don’t want to do that kind of crap, that’s why I want to be an engineer!”
She then disabuses them of the notion.
Still, it’s something she hears less & less, so it is getting out there.Report
Most engineers do marry despite their lack of graces. My guess is that the part of their mind that makes them so good at doing that engineer thing makes the social interactions required for romance hard. It either seems not rational and stupid or the engineer has such a cultivated sense of eccentricity, he is off putting. Than you get to the sexism.Report
Most engineers do marry despite their lack of graces.
And most humanities types eventually find jobs despite their completely unfounded sense of superiority.Report
OuchReport
Only after we go to graduate school.Report
Oof!Report
Another issue is that many engineers kind of recognize their misogyny but don’t think that it should matter because Lothario types are misogynists are sexist to. The fact that the Lothario types are much more social and less weird in their behavior doesn’t seem to cross their minds.Report
Engineers are logic, parametric observant critters. Society and culture often define parameters about women and what relationships should be. When applied out in the field as given, those parameters really suck.
Playing the game of switching a parameter at a time per date really sucks, and switching multiple parameters per date and trying to figure out which one improved sucks.
Added to that each new individual encountered changes the goal post of the last parametric readings. Hence frustration often leading to toxicity is my guess.Report
Flag on the play, causal connection not established!
People who are dominated by logical, parametric observant personalities are attracted to fields like engineering & computer science, but those fields do not produce people who have such dominant personalities.
Ergo, those fields are populated by people who have more diverse personalities, where the logical, parametric aspect is but one of many personality aspect employed by the individual.Report
I see your objective framing and raise you a subjective framing, and furthermore, to the bigger issue, why is that flag on the ground paisley print?Report
Don’t be questioning my fashion choices, I’m a summer, yellow is just not my color!Report
As an aside, this: http://faerye.net/post/the-puzzle-boxReport
Ah, I was thinking differently. Not that a woman is a puzzle, but men without much individual self preference, may change parameters about themselves to be more appealing, example: should I part my hair to the right, left, or just spike it all up in a mess, or shave it all off.
I mean, if a guy isn’t overly self-defined, he won’t much care what he looks like. And if the desire is to look appealing to someone he might be interested in, it’s a parameter that can be adjusted to maximize appeal. Women kinda help each other out in this regard but guys usually are just wingin’ it.
Without input from other peeps, he is kinda trying to mix various parameters to meet some threshold of appealing just to get to the point of conversation.Report
“Just be yourself!”
“I tried that. That’s my control, actually.”Report
Ha!
My usual dating advice: “Fuck if I know. This shit is hard, yo.”Report
Way better than the troll’s advice:
Date fat chicks!Report
Way back, in The Psychology of Computer Programming, when people still believed that there was a personality type that made people good programmers, the author describes an exchange between the outside contractor administering personality tests and one of the programmers.
Programmer: Which personality should we use when we take this test?
Contractor: We want you to answer the questions honestly.
Programmer: What kind of a fool do you think I am?Report
LOL. They do have fine tests to figure out when you’re lying about your personality. (not in the Myers Briggs of course).Report
FTR:
1.Sam Elliot style beard
2.just got outta bed hair,not long but not short
3.little rough around the edges overall
4.not overly thick eyebrows, well tended to
5.little bit of white in the hair and beard
6.slight bit of indifference
Now, how to get that info back to 1985.Report
You should just be yourself. Absolutely.
But if you can’t be yourself, then be Inigo Montoya. Because, if you could be someone other than yourself, wouldn’t you want to get to say all of Inigo Montoya’s really awesome lines?Report
That’s good advice and I’d like to try it, but I have no gift for strategy….Report
Lol. Failing that, read some romance books. Figure out what people want to happen.Report
@veronica-d That post! I had FORGOTTEN ABOUT that excellent post.
Also that I wanted to read the blog archives and look into the writer.
Thank you so much for reminding me.Report
I’ve found that two engineers being married is only slightly better. Most of my friends say things like, “My wife says she’ll divorce me if I bring home another old broken oscilloscope. She doesn’t understand that I’m rescuing them.”
My wife does very little to check my weird tendencies. If I said, “Let’s build a robot that recognizes and chases the neighborhood children,” my wife might just say, “That sounds cool! I’ll pull the car out of the garage.”Report
@troublesome-frog — Is it fair to demand video? — I mean when this inevitably happens, now that the idea has been broached.Report
I think we can demand HD video, I’ve seen what those drone cameras can do.Report
I think we can rely on the ubiquity of cell phone cameras to get something like that onto YouTube without my help.
Something I’ve learned watching YouTube: If you’re doing a project in your yard and your neighbor is out with his cell phone taking a video of you, think long and hard about the wisdom of whatever it is you were about to do next.Report
Oooh… I’ve got to demand video of the last time some idiot made cat admin…
Cat types too fast and sets server farm on fire… Don’t make cat admin.Report
I understand about rescuing. In my last full-time technical gig, people would bring me old PCs, often with the question, “Can you find something useful for this to do?” If I said no, they looked at me like I’d just told them their puppy was going to die.
Re the robot: you’ll need software. I can shuffle my little projects around and create some free time to help you with that. Please? Pretty please with sugar on top?Report
A couple years ago I spend several hours getting a single core Athlon XP 1800 computer back up and running. Having done so, I determined it was useless and it became a Lainstop.
Now I’m having to do that with laptops, which just hurts. 1600×1200 resolution!Report
These days, if I were just looking for some cheap CPU cycles to put to work running something, I’d be inclined to pop the $35 for a Raspberry Pi 2. 900 Mhz quad core ARM processor, a gig of RAM, a real GPU, four USB ports. Runs Linux, the standard SD image includes GCC, Perl, and Python. For @veronica-d , it appears GHC is available, but not GHCi, with the proviso that a gig isn’t all that much memory.Report
Freecycle is my nemesis.
Freecycle – I have a powertool/computer/device that just needs a little TLC.
Me – Oh, I know how to fix that, let me just type out a response…
Wife – Oh HELL NO! We do not have any more room in the garage for junk you want to ‘Do something with’. Fix what you got first.
Me – sulking away…Report
@oscar-gordon On the upside, “Fix What You Got First” sounds like a self-help book that could sell about 300 million copies if there was any justice in publishing.
You should bug her to write that book.Report
Machine vision and object tracking are my favorite things, but I’d be happy to offload the control of the buzz saw and TASER subsystems to you.Report
‘Machine vision and object tracking are my favorite things’
Is there a way to run a low resource ascii cam in javascript?
Was kicking that idea around for a few years.Report
” “My wife says she’ll divorce me if I bring home another old broken oscilloscope. She doesn’t understand that I’m rescuing them.””
Hey! There is nothing wrong with have a dozen VTVMs!
(My wife actually offered to grab me a ’40’s Wedgewood to keep in the garage just for me to fettle with…)Report
My husband keeps the Aztec Tomb in a warehouse (that’s why Arrested Development used the “improved” version…).
We’re all thankful for that one.Report
“We would have brought him in sooner, but we needed the eggs”.Report
Nice.Report
I’m pretty sure this is how my wife thinks of me.Report
I think politics of engineers seems to depend on idustry but there were a huge amount of Goldwater Republicans who were engineers. Goes hand in hand with Orange County RepublicabReport
Deep in the heart of urban Cascadia, I haven’t met too many people who are out as young-earth creationists.
Almost every man Jack of them is an electrical engineer. Huge majority.Report
[H3] — Yeesh! It is pretty irresponsible to advocate racial disparity based on flimsy speculation. Which is to say, the null hypothesis should be that minorities deserve the same access to pain medications as white Americans, since pain is manifestly awful.
I cannot believe I had to type that.
The obvious theory for the rise of depression, drug use, and suicide among middle-class American men is indeed the economic downturn. The authors think they dismissed this theory, but they did not. In fact, I rather think they are idiots.
“Why doesn’t this show up in other countries?” they ask. I mean, let us try to answer that as if we had more than three working brain cells:
Because the US has a fucking shitty social safety net you morons!
We lag waaaaay behind the rest of the industrialized world. So Americans suffering economic shock will suddenly lack easy access to health care and housing, which is business as usually for many minorities, who thus have cultural tools to address these problems. White Americans do not have these tools, particularly men. And indeed, we have our particular flavor of patriarchy, with the independent household unit, the notion of the male “breadwinner,” the deemphasis on community and extended family, the general shame in seeking assistance. These things are not uniquely American, but they do cluster here.
My point is, these authors need to do more work before they advocate racism.Report
This is a good point, but it still can be both/and.
Meaning, having easy access to a gun presumably increases the risk of suicide, because it makes the decision quick to implement.
Having easy access to pain meds that will give you a relatively painless sendoff probably has a similar effect, right?Report
@glyph — I think the authors were arguing that drugs cause the social ills, not that they are the method of suicide.
On that, this seems to indicate that firearms remain the method of choice: http://lostallhope.com/suicide-statistics/us-methods-suicide
(I got that link from a quick Google search. I’m not sure if the data is any good.)Report
note to @veronica-d : I’m not sure what exactly tripped a false positive in the spam filter, but could be the mention of drugs, combined with a link, combined with firearms, possibly coming on top of the earlier version also spam-caught that mentioned pills and pain meds specifically… Anyway, I rescued the above comment. Next time you lose a comment like that you can contact the Editors or Support (me, mainly) via the Contact link in the site’s main Nav Bar.Report
@ck-macleod — Thanks 🙂Report
@glyph — I think they are saying that the drugs cause the social ills, not that they are the method of suicide. It less “I have pills, at last I can die” and more “I’ve been talking pills for years and now I’m an addict with no prospects so I’ll eat a gun.”Report
Hmmm…I read another article (I’ll try to find it) that I thought was laying out the theoretical causal model differently, maybe that’s coloring how I read this one (the model has little to do with addiction being the cause). It went like this:
1.) People of color have a harder time getting prescribed pain meds – part of this is due to fear of them abusing them, part of it is because it’s been shown that doctors have a weird belief that people of color are magically more impervious to pain than white people. Both of these are pretty clearly stereotypes/racism.
2.) Prescriptions for opioid pain meds have increased drastically in the US over recent decades, and per #1, the majority of scrips have been given to white people.
3.) Therefore, a lot of white people now have access to an easy suicide tool, that people of color do not have as much access to.Report
@glyph — Makes sense. To demonstrate this, you’d have to show that the increase in suicide is precisely an increase in suicide-by-prescription-drugs and not (for example) suicide-by-gun.
The latter of which remains the method of choice. So anyway. Let them do the work.
This still has nothing to do with the original article. I suspect this “prescription drugs” theory is rank nonsense. I’m quite certain that any hand-wavy dismissal of the economic explanation is literally stupid.Report
To be clear, completely dismissing the economic explanation seems…premature to me as well. Surely it must play some role.
But even in other countries, people don’t have the access to guns that we have either – and I can’t back this up, but somehow I suspect that, much like Oxy ‘scrips, white Americans ALSO have an easier time getting their hands on a gun than black ones do.
All of which is to say, I’d be surprised if it’s any one thing we can pin it on, rather than a confluence of several.Report
But wait! Do white people have an easier time getting their hands on a gun?
I mean, I sense that you’re kind of thinking out loud. But still, [citation needed].Report
Which is why I said, “I can’t back this up”, and “somehow I suspect”. 😉Report
@glyph — Ah. Fair enough. I fail at careful reading, it appears.Report
No worries. I probably should have left it out entirely if I didn’t intend to research it, but like I said, if I had to bet one way or another, I know which way I’d go.Report
No data at hand, but…
If certain minorities are more prone to getting unfair treatment in the criminal justice system, then they are also more prone to being denied 2nd amendment rights, which means that their legal options for getting a gun to commit suicide with are null, and they’ll have to deal with criminals to get one.
So the question is then, would a suicidal person be more or less willing to engage with the black market for weapons just to commit suicide?
It’s questions like this that make me wish the GOP would let the CDC do some damn research. This is right up their alley.Report
“So the question is then, would a suicidal person be more or less willing to engage with the black market for weapons just to commit suicide?”
Isn’t this the premise of Breaking Bad, recast to a different situation?Report
Gun merchants seem really agnostic about who they sell to.Report
Guns and ammo (and training/practice) cost money, and are non-necessities, so I’d expect wealthier people to have more guns on average, and white people are wealthier on average.
As Oscar points out, increased rates of felony convictions in the black community means more people barred from legal ownership.Report
I don’t know about how easily they can get them, but white people do in fact have significantly higher rates of gun ownership.Report
I certainly read the article the way Veronica did–that the authors were suggesting that increased drug abuse is a life factor that leads to increase suicide rates, rather than that increased access to drugs lead to an increase in their use as a suicide method.
I think it’s worth noting that chosen methods of suicide are incredibly gendered–If access to drugs leads to a direct rise in suicide, we’d probably see that in the population that was most likely to use that method–women. That the particular area of concern is the increase in suicide among men suggests that it’s not a factor, unless the increase in access is itself very gender-specific.Report
Note that since 1999, drug overdose deaths among middle-aged whites went from 8 per 100,000 to 30, whereas suicides went from 16 per 100,000 to 25. The increase in the death rate has been driven primarily by an increase in drug overdoses.Report
@brandon-berg
Isn’t there some subjectivity to determining whether a death by drug overdose was accidental or intentional?Report
Possibly, though I’m actually not sure which direction the error would go in.
I would guess that they can usually figure it out from the dose, though.Report
Or the presence of a note. But given the stigma against suicide, I’d guess it’s only ruled that if the evidence is pretty strong.Report
I heard that gun access ramps up suicide because it allows impulsive attempts to be successful. Some absurdly high percentage of people with failed attempts never try again, meaning their desire for suicide was temporary. But when these people have guns, their attempts are highly successful.Report
their desire for suicide was temporary
Supposedly, a large number of bridge jumpers who survive, report immediately thinking “oh s**t, I shouldn’t have done this” right after jumping. So yeah, the whole “a permanent solution to a temporary problem” cliche may have some validity.Report
Don’t know if it was based on any of that research, but Niven and Pournelle’s Oath of Fealty involves an enormous cube-shaped building with easy access to the roof (parks and such), which makes it desirable for jumpers. The edge is protected, of course, but structured in such a way to lead jumpers to a gap in the fencing, which ends at… a diving board. In a largely throw-away piece of dialog, the building managers note that most jumpers who start out the board, which does the usual diving board bouncing, panic and abandon the effort.Report
The obvious theory for the rise of depression, drug use, and suicide among middle-class American men is indeed the economic downturn.
It started in the late ’90s and has actually slowed down a bit since the downturn started. As I pointed out the last time this came up, a part of this is the fact that the Boomers simply used drugs much more than their parents did. So when the Silent Generation moved out of the late middle age bracket and the Boomers moved in, drug-related deaths were bound to go up.
Kevin Drum pointed out that the rates of these kinds of deaths were also going up for younger age brackets, which is more interesting, and I don’t really have a good explanation for that.
One thing worth noting is that prescriptions of opioid painkillers have increased dramatically during this time period. That alone probably explains a lot of it.
My point is, these authors need to do more work before they advocate racism.
They didn’t advocate racism.Report
Forgot to add that this isn’t true:
Because the US has a fucking shitty social safety net you morons! We lag waaaaay behind the rest of the industrialized world.
In PPP-adjusted per-capita terms, aggregate social spending in the US in 2011 was greater than in the UK, Japan, Australia, Canada, and Iceland; and not far behind Ireland, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. Even Sweden was only 20% higher.Report
I thought I linked to the PPP-adjusted chart, but it still defaults to %GDP. There’s a “Measure” drop-down box you can use to change it. Using %GDP makes US social spending look lower than it is, relative to other countries, because the US has a significantly higher per-capita GDP than most European countries (excepting only Norway, Luxembourg, and Switzerland), in part due to not strangling the economy with ridiculously high levels of government spending. PPP-adjusted spending is a better indicator of what the spending actually buys.Report
@brandon-berg She said it was shitty, not cheap.
Having moved from Canada to the US, one of my first culture shock experiences was “WE PAY HOW MUCH IN TAXES AND IT HELPS HOW LITTLE???”
Jaybird had to put up with an awful lot of ranting back at the turn of the century. I have since become jaded.Report
One thing worth noting is that prescriptions of opioid painkillers have increased dramatically during this time period. That alone probably explains a lot of it.
This was my thought as well when I came to learn about the causes detailed in the study.Report
F3 & F4 are interesting… I hadn’t thought about the unintended consequences in F4; for the companies I’ve worked for its been benefits for married folks, or +1 for everyone else (that couldn’t get married). I guess I assumed we’re more likely to move to just +1 for everyone; but, families are costly (in the grand scheme of benefits) and how does one administer +1 +family +other person’s family. Now there’s another $20k/year at stake for breaking-up (and who decides if the +1 keeps the insurance or not)? Hmmn, interesting.
The moral hazard of F3 I expect will *not* carry any weight influencing whatever happens in F4.Report
Well F4 is inevitable and probably a productive sign really. Private provision of partner benefits was a beachead in the SSM conflict. With SSM being predominantly secured now it’s a constructive sign that the beachead is beginning to be eyed as anachronistic.Report
For the sake of his staff, Speaker Ryan really needs to finally get an off campus apartment.Report
[R4] I’ll be happy to do so when they stop being anti-intellectual assholes.Report
Also, it’s quite clear from that piece that he doesn’t understand why people are criticizing New Atheists.Report
Yeah, atheists and agnostics are kind of quiet about it by natural. The entire new atheist shtick of trumpeting their nonbelief like some kind of evangelist mouth breather runs against the entire grain of the thing.Report
I don’t mind a loud atheist — I was one when I was young and new to atheism — and I don’t mind loud criticism of religion. I don’t think I know any atheists who do. What I dislike is loud atheists whose criticisms of religion sound less like considered critiques than ignorant bluster, whose atheism is little more than a dogmatic vulgar positivism combined with an endorsement of a facile conception of “free thought,” which usually just means being a sexist, sometimes racist ass and thinking “Reason” got them there. See, e.g., Richard Dawkins’ Twitter account, anything he or Coyne has ever said about theology, Ed Harris’ “debate” with Scott Atran about terrorists, etc., etc., etc.Report
Most of the loudest of the atheists are just really, really hurt people, who know that they’re never going to get any justice for the abuse they’ve suffered, and know that the kids today suffering similarly won’t get any either.Report
You can get a lot of mileage out of the “hurt people hurt people” theory.Report
I didn’t realize that you were a psychoanalyst.Report
Physician, heal etc. etc.Report
I’m not. But I’ve mentioned that I know trolls before…
It’s impossible to troll people properly without understanding them thoroughly.
And, in this case, I’m just repeating what people who have FAR more time on their hands to analyze folks have come up with.Report
She is also a master French Chef and Yatzee champion.Report
There is good money to be made in the illegal Yatzee dens in Lower Mamhattan. You have to be careful though. They play for keeps at Mulligsn’s Yatzee joint on Allan Street.Report
Many of the loudest of theists are similarly obnoxious but I wouldn’t advance a claim that their loud piety is a product of a wounded psyche. It seems equally wrong to suggest this of loud, obnoxious atheists.Report
To be fair to what Kim’s saying, it’s certainly become a cliche to find that some virulently anti-gay person has been suffering from a life in the closet, or that some extremely anti-social person had a very rough childhood.
It’s not a 1:1 relationship: plenty of people who didn’t suffer any real trauma are just plain a-holes, and plenty of people who have suffered severe trauma are just fine people; but “a fearful, beaten dog is more likely to bite” is pretty much folk wisdom for a reason.Report
@glyph Having spent a fair amount of time around both animals and people who suffered abuse, I would say that a dog who HAD been abused but is not now being – a different proposition entirely than a dog who is still receiving regular beatings – may be more dangerous, or it may be even more gentle and empathetic and in love with its housemates than your average dog. And I feel that the analogy still holds – human trauma may lead to their being both more monsters AND more saints in the world (and more people leaning in both of those directions without being that extreme), but it doesn’t lead to a net worsening of human behavior. A net increase in suffering, yes. But also a net increase in people who know what it’s like to suffer and have a special eye out for others who need their help. It’s almost like a self-correction, on the systematic scale. (But not actually a self-correction, because those latter, more helpful, people are also, usually, full of an extra helping of suffering. They just deal with it differently. Dogs have it easier than people sometimes.)Report
I would also say that the related misconception – that abused people should be a cause for wariness, because they are more likely to be dangerous than not – is one of the biggest reasons abused people suffer such a stigma. I know it was one of the biggest reasons it took me so long to be honest – even with myself – about how much I went through as a kid. Finding that almost every single one of the people I cared about reacted with “Wow, what a lot you’ve been through, we’re lucky you made it” and not “OMG stay away from my children” (or the much more ambiguous but equally painful Sudden Avoidance Syndrome) was a shock to me.Report
PS @glyph (to be clear, I don’t think you were saying all that! it just set me off on my own musings…)Report
Dogs who are abused have triggers, just the same as people.Report
Burt,
What if someone just shows you the scars?
You’re undoubtedly aware that corporal punishment is rather popular in certain religious circles.
You’re probably not aware of how popular exorcisms are…
[Not my circles, honestly! Someone had an idea for a prank… which turned rather ugly when the young lady’s parents thought she was possessed.]Report
No argument with “some.”
Larger point: even if assholery is caused by childhood abuse (a proposition I’m not signing off on), adults need to step up to the plate and take conscious control of their own behaviors at some point. Report
The Protestant Atheists I know are very much into the whole “Great Commission” thing. It is their job to go into the world and convert the heathen. Or whatever the equivalent is.
The Catholic Atheists I know are cafeteria atheists.Report
Many years ago a certain well-known and widely hated science blogger whose name I shall not mention to avoid that discussion did a podcast that, I believe, never saw nor will see the light of day, and this was one of the topics of conversation: so many of the New Atheists grew up Protestant, and have taken a Protestant attitude toward Atheism. What’s more, they tend to view religion itself through a very narrow Protestant Christian lens. Those of us atheists who were raised Catholic tend to find both of those elements distasteful.
There’s also a distinction between the path(s) people took to atheism. Mine was through philosophy and politics, while so many of the New Atheists came through science. In a way, philosophy and political philosophy became my religion, and science theirs’.Report
Relatedly, the most militant atheism I’ve ever seen was in Deseret. Some of it being lapsed Brethren. Some of it being Gentiles who have lived around Brethren their entire lives.Report
That’s unsurprising (by the way, you probably know who the widely-hated science blogger is).
When I was most militant, as an atheist, was when a substantial portion of my social circle was comprised of current and former Evangelicals and fundamentalists. Some of this is because I was young, with the zealotry of the (recent) convert, and stupid. Now that I’m older, no longer a recent convert, and stupid, I’m much more mellow.
It probably also helps that in my 20s and 30s I met and befriended a lot of atheists of all different stripes — positivists, new agey types, postmodernist types, atheists whose militancy was directed elsewhere (mostly politics and activism), etc. One of the reasons I became a pretty harsh critic of New Atheists from the moment they became a thing, I think, was that they tended to treat their atheism as the atheism (and tended to belittle all other types of atheism, e.g. “Chamberlain Atheists”), and I prefer Big Tent Atheism.Report
Who is the most widely hated science blogger?Report
Rhymes with “Freezie Choirs”.Report
That one took me a moment, and if I got it, not that one.Report
OH! Then I’m stumped too.Report
Rhymes with Ma Beeb, Mon.Report
You mean Tyson? Because if he’s the most hated blogger, then he’s doing his job right.Report
The guy @jaybird refers to is who I thought you were talking about too. Remember the whole communionwafergate thing? Communionwafergate is exhibit “A” in my evaluation of obnoxious atheism — it made us all generally look bad in the way that Westboro Baptist Church generally makes Christians look bad even though the rest of us are perfectly aware that functionally no Christians we are ever likely to encounter are anything like those WBC jagoffs.Report
PZ and I were not on speaking terms. Our arguments, on our blogs and even more in the ScienceBlogs email forum, were not friendly. Not only did I not like his brand of atheism, but more than that I didn’t like that he, and all of his little epigones (as by far the biggest traffic source on SB, many of the other bloggers kissed his ass for traffic, which meant money since we got paid for hits), always equated science with atheism. This was in the middle of the rather heated and politically/legally/educationally/culturally impactful creationism/ID debates, and I thought it was pretty counterproductive to a.) spend a lot of time insulting the people you’re trying to convince (which they did) and b.) play right into their belief that science is inherently atheistic (not only methodologically, but metaphysically, and of necessity).Report
The intensity of one’s prevailing social environment likely plays a very strong role in the intensity of one’s own beliefs and desire to espouse them.
In the USA, Sunnis and Shias generally have little difficulty getting along. Switch from USA to KSA, you’re going to up the friction rather a lot.Report
In most of the world, sunnis and shias get along okay. The sunnis are still convinced the shias are heretics, mind, but that doesn’t mean much.Report
As I’ve said before, the harder one advocates for a personal, philosophical position, the more I have to wonder who exactly they are trying to convince.Report
The science-religion is a weird one insofar as you’d think that they’d have a better grasp of science than, say, Christians have of the Bible.
But, if I may extrapolate from my own experience, you’ve got a similar number of experts and a similar number of people who are more than happy enough to outsource learning about this sort of thing to others.Report
Right.”Science is the route to knowledge. Trust me, a scientist told me so.”Report
Not quite the same thing.
At a certain point, it makes sense to rely upon the expertise of another person. I’m not a medical doctor, for instance, so assurances of the correctness of medical advice, descriptions of medical processes and functions, and assessments of what constitutes good medical ideas is for me a matter of reliance upon a doctor’s expertise, experience, and education.
Worse, where that point of reliance on the expertise of another may be found eludes precise description.
Consequently, it’s easy to see how that sort of reliance gets characterized as “faith” by those who rely on actual religious faith for certain purposes (whether for good or for ill). Some else says something, you believe it’s true, you act on that belief, that’s faith, right?
Well, sort of. But not really. You can satisfy yourself that a person has appropriate credentials indicating appropriate education, experience, and expertise. You can satisfy yourself that a person’s peers, who also possess similar credentials, do not object too strongly to the statements made even if there are differences of opinion. The fundamentals of a discipline can be known to anyone of reasonable intelligence with reasonable effort, and statements that are susceptible of objective disproof or verification in such an environment are more likely to be reliable than other kinds.
If you’ve at least satisfied yourself that “The person who’s telling me something is in a good position to understand the thing that she’s talking about,” then accepting the truth of such a statement and relying upon it is qualitatively different than acting on “faith.”
I can accept, for instance, a Biblical scholar’s translation of an ancient Aramaic writing to contemporary English. It’s reasonable to assume that the scholar has studied Aramaic and that other scholars who actually know Aramaic will, given an opportunity to do so, point out if the first scholar’s translation is inaccurate. If I really cared, I could learn Aramaic myself and travel to a museum somewhere and read the ancient writing for myself.
It’s a different thing altogether to go from saying “This ancient Aramaic document says that Jesus is the eternally-living Son of God” to saying “Jesus really is the eternally-living Son of God.”Report
The fact that such an attitude is possible should lead me to the conclusion that everybody on “team science” has, at least, that attitude (if not one that is even more rigorous)?Report
This might explain why a lot of Jewish atheists are on the mellow side. Since Judaism is a non-missionary faith, it never occurs to Jewish atheists to go nuts with it.Report
A pity, because Coyne is often a good source of information. I’ve found atheist criticism of the “New Atheism” to be distinguished quite readily from atheist criticism of the “New Atheists,” although neither of them are new.
It’s one thing to say Richard Dawkins has said many things demonstrating an unenlightened attitude about issues of cultural equality like sex and race. It’s something different to say that maybe his argument that even “moderate” religions necessarily harbor, sanction, and promote violence and evil paints with so broad a brush as to be readily dismissed when compared with everyday experience.
To criticize an argument is not to criticize the arguer.Report
Someone for whom atheism is a cause doesn’t understand why people for whom it is not a cause don’t rally around the cause. Yawn.Report
What’s strange about it to me is that what Coyne’s complaining about was the case 10 years ago, too. I know he knows this, because he was in the thick of the conversation about New vs. “Chamberlain” atheism back then (with PZ and Moran, et al.). Now that New Atheism’s 15 minutes is pretty much over, I guess he feels the dislike more acutely.Report
Maybe they’ll be more popular if they desecrate some more communion hosts.Report
H4: Congratulations to our esteemed alumna!Report
10 points to Gryffindor for getting the Latin right.Report
P5: re Romney ’16. A beating he didn’t need yet again.Report
Space AwesomeReport
Romney ’16 slogans:
Third time’s the charm.
Sackcloth and ashes
Return of the Romney
Revenge of the Establishment (depending on whose counting method you use)
Really, three Bushes?… oh wait.
Repent!
and for the rebranded Romney running against Trump:
Nous somme the 99%Report
Catch Us, Mitt
Run Romney RunReport
This time, he means it!Report
Con Brio!Report
That the slogan I use when contemplating the United States’ eventual liberation of Canada.Report
The fly has conquored the flypaper.Report
G4 – I forgot to mention in the blurb that I mentioned this to Clancy and it just made her day. It is apparently a recommendation that she has been disregarding for some time and mentioned that anesthesiology is one of the big last male strongholds in medicine.Report
I never get tired of laughing at these liberal SJWs. I guess the term “institution of high learning” is now an oxymoron.
Columbia Student Claims To Be Traumatized By Reading About White People
http://dailycaller.com/2015/11/20/columbia-student-claims-to-be-traumatized-by-reading-about-white-people/Report
T1:
A real fear of mine is terrorists launching a minor attack on a location like a stadium and then, as people file out, laying waste. They’d be sitting ducks.Report
I sort of assumed that’s why there were two more suicide bombers outside the Stade de France: when the one with the ticket got in, it would cause people to flow out in large, panicked crowds, at which point they would blow themselves up in the middle of the chaos, causing huge numbers of casualties. When that didn’t happen, they just blew themselves up wherever they were waiting, I guess.Report
According to the articles they tried to get into the stadium but ran afoul of security and thus had to detonate outside.Report
My understanding is that one of them had a ticket. I hadn’t heard that the others did as well.Report
I saw someone on tv pointing out how lucky it was that they were too stupid to realize the spectators were equally mortal while filing into the stadium as while filing out. I’m guessing they didn’t want to foreclose the possibility of a spectacular in-stadium blast. But in terms of making people dead, the assholes at the stadium apparently suffered from a case of Not Wanting It Bad Enough.Report
I read it far more uncharitably, that the plan wasn’t to explode it in the fairly orderly queues going into the match, but in the middle of the panicked flight out of the stadium after the bombs inside had done their work.Report
My fear – the suicide vest in the airport security queue.Report
It kind of boggles my mind that they haven’t, to be perfectly honest.Report
Suicide bombers are a tough sell in prosperous places. You have to import them & deploy them fast enough that the lure of the good life can’t snare them.Report
Are France and Belgium not prosperous places?Report
Not for many of the Arabs. France and Belgium have both made a practice of bottling many of their Arab immigrants up in particular neighborhoods and failing to find them any sort of meaningful work (unemployment typically in excess of 50%). I know it’s old fashioned, but I believe that one of the necessary things a society needs to do is “tame” its males in their late teens and early twenties. Having them hang out in groups all day, every day, is a recipe for producing a violent minority.Report
If by “tame” you mean “usefully employ” then I tend to agree.
Alsotoo the women, although I’m confident you agree with that sentiment.Report
I know you are talking about France but now you expect the gov’t to find folks “meaningful work?”Report
He didn’t say “the government.” He said:
Not the same thing.Report
The part I was questioning was the portion:
It is not clear what he means when he says “France or Belgium.” Besides, societies don’t find people work, people go out and find gainful employment themselves.Report
It is not clear what he means when he says “France or Belgium.”
They’re countries in Western Europe.Report
You don’t have to necessarily find them work, but you have to make sure your economy can. If you absorb a large number of immigrants, but have policies in place that make it difficult for them to find work or start a business, then not even a robust welfare state will save you.Report
Sure, the gov’t should take into account the ability of the economy to absorb immigrants and consider the skills those immigrants have to find a job as well. However, many times it seems the gov’t just imports people to “feel good” without regard to any other factors.Report
Yeah. maybe that’s because we’ve accepted less than two hundred Syrian Refugees into Pennsylvania?
It’s easy to feel good when you’re not doing much, isn’t it?
No need to worry about finding them jobs or nothing, isn’t it?Report
Not only do you have young people hanging out with nothing to do, but with no real prospects either. Life can start to look pretty hopeless, and worse, pointless at that point.Report
Having them concentrated in particular areas wasn’t a good idea either.Report
Are you suggesting that the govt now tell people where to live? Any other social engineering you’d like the govt to engage in?Report
They’d just put a second security queue outside the airport to check for suicide vests (and clothes with menacingly vest-like sleeves). Problem solved.Report
I look forward to the day when the whole world is a series of queues, and I must queue immediately upon exiting my front door.Report
Too many Q’s, and you’ll start to mind the P.Report
I think Keith Laumer wrote a short story about this. Back before the stroke, when he was still a very good writer.Report
T1: And that’s the kind of check often dismissed as “Security Theater”.Report
In the article, the picture looks like a LOT of people milling about the pitch. What’s up with that?Report
I just read this last night and thought I’d share it – an absolutely terrific essay on Full Metal Jacket.Report
@glyph Good find, that was a really interesting and thoughtful review.Report
I’ll second @greginak here, thank you for finding that @glyphReport
Yeah, I want to watch the movie again now, I’m one of those people who always found the second half (in-country) to be less compelling (while the first half is just hypnotic – if I am channel surfing and happen across FMJ in its first half, forget it, that’s what I’m watching), but now I want to see the mirroring he talks about.
The writer was an AVClub commenter, and he started out writing recaps of The Shield in the comments of the site’s recaps that frankly just put the OPs to shame (he teased out a lot of thematic and subtextual stuff that I wouldn’t have caught on my own because the show is so plot-dense and fast-moving, but it’s deeper than it looks).Report
I haven’t read the review yet, but it seem to me the first half of the movie is setting you up for the hard punch in the second half. Like a mindfuck rope-a-dope.Report
The people i know who saw it at the time and were looking for a standard war movie hated it. It really does take you places that other war movies don’t in a visceral way. I’m not quite go all the way with his deconstruction of “dehumanization.” For almost all people it takes quite a lot of training and indoctrination to make them killers. He is certainly correct that war making is a “normal” human state. But it takes a lot to get people there and it does involve striping away many standard human attitudes and beliefs. And even then some soldiers are haunted by killing for the rest of their lives.Report
Most soldiers are, some just more than others.Report
his deconstruction of “dehumanization.” For almost all people it takes quite a lot of training and indoctrination to make them killers. He is certainly correct that war making is a “normal” human state. But it takes a lot to get people there and it does involve striping away many standard human attitudes and beliefs. And even then some soldiers are haunted by killing for the rest of their lives.
I don’t think he’s arguing against any of that. What he is arguing against is the idea that killing is *other than* human.
Look at the words you yourself use – “stripping away” – that is, the dark thing is there at the core, once we peel back the outer layers.
It’s not implanted, or alien to humanity. It’s part of what we are, and under the right circumstances it’s any of us.Report
Never disagree with me….I’ll kill you for that!!!!!
ohhhh ahhhh I see your point and agree.Report
It wasn’t so extreme as killing, but one of the most profound experiences I ever had – in understanding myself and others – was not when I was hurt badly by someone else; but when I hurt someone else badly, in a way that I never thought I would. In a way that I’d seen others do, but swore I never would. In a way that I’d had ample opportunities before to do, but never had, and so was sure I never would.
Realizing that even I – who thought I knew everything there was to know about myself, and my capabilities, beliefs and intentions – might still under the right (wrong) circumstances act completely differently than I was certain I ever would, was an incredibly sobering experience, and one which profoundly changed how I saw myself, and others.
To whatever degree I am “grown-up” now, it’s what I did to another that is responsible for that, as much or more than what was done to me.
And I similarly had to make peace with that newfound darkness inside me, accept that it too was part of who and what I am (and of course, take steps to ensure it stays in its proper place in future; accepting your darkness doesn’t mean giving it free reign).Report
Re: looking for a standard war movie and hating it: Interestingly enough, we were shown Full Metal Jacket by our Marine DI in the last week of Navy OCS. (we also became aware during our time there due to a dining out skit that he was a fan of A Few Good Men)Report
I like the review. But to quibble, I got this this line:
And like, um… did he read his own words?Report
Not sure I follow?Report
@glyph — The juxtaposition of “most of them were men” and “there’s always something universal about them” maybe kinda misses what the word “universal” means. File under “a man thinks that stories about men are ‘universal’.”
(And yes I know the sniper is a woman, but woman as symbol is something different from women.)Report
Hey, you’re right. Most men have never fought in a war, either. Also, there are, ironically, no wars on Mars. God, this guy is so full of it!
Presumably he means universal in the sense of being shared across many different cultures, not universal in the sense of something experienced by all individuals.Report
Which makes me wonder if he’d use the word “universal” to describe stories about giving birth. My guess is “no”.Report
Does the huge, cross-cultural canon of giving-birth-stories that would be necessary for that comparison to make sense actually exist? The experience is universal, sure, but he was specifically talking about stories.
Anyway, I don’t see any point in speculating, nor do I know anywhere near enough about this guy or his corpus to do so with any degree of competence. What he actually said was fine. Why complain about things you imagine he might say?Report
Does the huge, cross-cultural canon of giving-birth-stories that would be necessary for that comparison to make sense actually exist?
No,. Men wouldn’t be interested in reading them, because they’re so parochial.Report
“Why complain about things you imagine he might say?”
If people stopped complaining about things they imagined people might say, Tumblr would go out of business.Report
That essay is great, and makes me want to watch it again.Report
T2: I often get annoyed by the overuse of the word “hero.” It is a valuable word and should be saved for very special people. If this is an accurate account, Adel Termos is definitely one of them.Report
T2: I almost want to write a post on it, but I can’t think of what I’d say. Except maybe just that I find that the fact that story isn’t being run with gusto on all the US news networks is entirely predictable and entirely depressing.Report
It’s because it happened in Beirut.Report
Something just went down in Mali too.Report
The times I wish BlaiseP was around for some commentary… He had a keen sense of that corner of the world.Report
You don’t need a “keen sense” to understand Islamic terrorism.Report
@notme Of course you do. You don’t need a “keen sense” to react to Islamic terrorism, but you used the word “understand” didn’t you?
Check out the reactions over the last few days to Islamic terrorism and you won’t see a whole lot of “keen sense” using — just a lot of posturing and fear-mongering. Since I’ve already got my two front teeth, what I really want for Christmas is a lot of folks using their “keen” senses to address the situation. I know…good luck with that.Report
Why so chippy? What keen sense do you need to understand Islamic terrorism?Report
Yeah, I miss his rowdy hide at times.Report
That man bullshitted more than he actually knew.Report
To be fair, a bombing in a western country is relevant to the lives of Americans (i.e., if it can happen in Paris, in can happen here) in a way that a bombing in Beirut is not. Arguably people should care more about stuff that happens in non-Western countries, but it’s somewhat understandable that they don’t. Granted that this defense crumbles in the face of the huge celebrity news industry.
Besides, do you really want Americans getting riled up about stuff happening in the Middle East? Has that ever ended well?Report
It can always happen here. Just like non-political mass shootings, from which it’s completely unfounded to draw any conclusions other than “stuff happens”.Report
“Besides, do you really want Americans getting riled up about stuff happening in the Middle East? Has that ever ended well?”
This is an interesting point. Blinkered parochialism has its upsides.Report
UnitedHealth Group, the nation’s largest insurer, may exit Obamacare due to losses.
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/nations-largest-insurer-may-exit-obamacare-due-to-losses/article/2576726Report
Noticed that one to eh? 😉Report
I rather liked — Kevin Drum, I think’s — response to that. “Yeah, that’s what competitive markets do”. If the ACA is functioning even remotely like a market, some companies are going to lose. Some are going to win.
I’ve been noticing a lot of flack about the mapping process (if your current insurance leaves your exchange, what you are mapped to is often not even remotely close to what you would pick as the ‘closest to what I had’) and the price fluctuation in the cheapest plans of the year.
In short, if you reshop every year the odds are your prices will stay fairly steady. However, if you just re-enroll automatically you’ll likely see a jump (especially if you were in the cheapest of the previous year) and if it maps you onto a new plan, no telling what you’ll get.
The ACA prices should be fluctuating rather wildly, and the companies with the best and more accurate actuaries should be beating (or driving out) companies that are unwilling or unable to adjust to the market paradigms of the Exchange. Especially now, in early years, without the benefit of experience and historical data.
Nobody throwing up their hands and slinking back to the big employee pool (or folding entirely) would be as big a sign of a screwed up market as everyone leaving.Report
huh. Wildly-fluctuating prices, you need to change your network (and, presumably, your doctor) every year, and those are what we wanted all along?Report
Interesting words from Michel Houellebecq.
Not sure what to think, but quite interesting.Report
H5: What about a 3-year-old in a car seat? I searched, and every link seems to only be about babies and infants. Maybe that once made sense, but not anymore now that kids are in car seats until they are old enough to drive.Report
I think the more they can shift around on their own, the more okay you are.
For our part, once she crossed a certain size the car seat stopped leaving the car.Report
Positional asphyxiation is only a real risk when they have limited neck strength. And it isn’t limited to a car seat. I remember reading about it and thinking, “Our species is so smart our babies can die under the weight of their bulbous heads.” Fucking christ, parenting is scary.
But, @vikram-bath , you’re in the clear… At least for THAT threat.Report
So…what about sitting in car seats while they’re riding in cars? Is it just as dangerous, but safer than riding in a car without a car seat?
Or does buckling the car seat provide head support?Report
Angle of the seat is different, changing the comparative risk.Report
Neither this nor Kazzy’s seem to be readily available.Report
P6: I’d like to see the numbers on that. In particular, I’m curious as to whether “recruits more candidates” translates into “recruits more candidates that win.
R3: A weird article. The Author seems to be saying “I don’t know why people are upset. If you accept the idea that gay people and gay families have no place in the LDS church, then the policy is neither irrational or cruel.” Which, while probably correct, doesn’t matter to the various Mormon and non-Mormon critics who object to that inital assumption.
F2: I like how it’s all hypotheticals and absurdities. “What if their grandmother gave them ten thousand dollars?” “If they get summer jobs, they’ll have to hire expensive CPAs to fill out a two-page tax form”. I’m sure this is an actual problem for some people, but mostly it looks like rich expatriates using children as an excuse to avoid the actual substantive issues of our tax policy for citizens abroad.
F4: Agreed. In particular, these domestic partner benefits were offered voluntarily by our strongest supporters, sometimes at significant cost, because other parts of society refused us. To continue to rely on that support now that we no longer need it is an insult to those supporters.Report
Talking of candidates that win. At least mostly. The word “recruit” may be strong, but they’ve played a role promoting almost every minority GOP candidate elected since 2008: Rubio, Cruz, Scott, Love, West, Labrador. Including a couple that missed like TW Shannon (black-Chickasaw guy in Oklahoma that was beaten in the primary).
The rest of the party should be deeply embarrassed.Report
Hasn’t the Tea Party played a role in promoting just about every GOP candidate elected since 2008, minority or otherwise, though? Given that, isn’t a comparison between Tea Party and non-tea party just comparing the racial demographics across generations? That’s always going to look bad for the older generation.
I mean, there is something very interesting in the way that the Tea Party embraces certain candidates of color given the degree to which their attacks on Obama often tend towards nativism and criticism of the parts of the safety net that help racial minorities, but I don’t think that says as much about the non Tea Party portions of the GOP.Report
The noteworthy thing about most of the candidates I’ve mentioned is that they ran through competitive primaries, and many of which against (white) establishment picks. Cruz knocked off Dewhurst, Rubio knocked off Crist, etc. The non-TP have put up minority candidates, but generally in pretty hopeless races. It’s not a universal thing, but it’s noticeable over time.
Without the Tea Party, the composition of the House and Senate caucuses would be even whiter than it is. Whatever their faults on the race front, they did actually make an effort at this while the rest of the party seems to shrug.
(Which is, to be honest, not *entirely* fair to the rest of the party. They don’t disregard potential minority candidates. But they do look towards the next in line rather than thinking outside the box. That leads to situations where they overlook minority candidates with a great deal of potential.)Report
fair enough. I haven’t really followed republican primary battles as much as I probably should have. Good on the Tea Party for thinking outside the box on this one.Report
I suppose Labrador is a minority, but it’s not like he’s a Black Lab.Report
@alan-scott FWIW dealing with the IRS as an adult who didn’t grow up here is pretty fucking terrifying – I can see why expatriates get anxious. (They wrote me a letter once that threated me with deportation for filling out a form wrong (as in making a non-money-related error), if I didn’t fix it RFN. (Don’t ask; I still can’t think about it too hard more than a decade later. as ordeals that don’t involve any face-to-face conversations go, that was a nasty one.)
(And yes, it was the actual IRS, not a spammer.)Report
Wow, does mileage vary. Through this past year, I’ve always done my own taxes and basically I never get it right. Since I graduated from the EZ form, I’ve gotten dinged twice (once fairly substantially, for completely forgetting one income-generating account) and had money returned all the other times (in fact, just today I got my post-six-month-extension rebate of what was apparently a ridiculous overpayment). Since I seem to err on the correct side most years, I’ve literally never had any communication other than the yearly “you got it wrong again” adjustment. No hint of even an audit despite clear evidence that I have no idea what I’m doing…Report
@el-muneco Are you also an immigrant? If so I will have to revise my theory that the IRS particularly dislikes people who aren’t US citizens OR don’t live in the US.Report
Heh, actually I think you should double down on your theory. I’m about as privileged as it gets – Dad’s pa came down from Canada just before WW1, and the other branches came during the post-unpleasentness immigration wave. I’m the first to be above just-barely-middle-class, but the roots are there.
My point is that, yeah, they basically give me a free pass as long as any mistake is either (a) in their favor, or (b) clearly due to my idiocy.
They really don’t seem to think I’m going to cheat. This is yet another reason that my philosophy is evolving – yet another example of unexpected and possibly unrealized privilege in action.Report
Even if you DO cheat, they only assess you a fine enough to prevent you from doing it all the damn time and simply playing the stock market with your tax dollars. (Seriously, people would do this, if it was profitable).Report
They audit you all the time??Report
They love to make threats. I got a letter from them once telling me that, because I hadn’t filed a return about five years previuously, they could take everything I own including my home and I’d wind up either in the streets or in jail. (Naturally, it arrived on a Friday, and I couldn’t so anything about it until Monday.) When I called them to say that, according to my records, not only had I filed a return that year, but they’d sent me a refund, the response was “Oh.” And when I asked for a second letter to be sent acknowledging that the matter was resolved, the answer was “We don’t do that.”Report
I’ve been getting phone calls from people claiming to be the IRS, but near as I can tell it’s a scam.Report
I don’t think the IRS calls, or even emails. Whenever I’ve heard from them, it’s been via snail mail on official letterhead.Report
I’m figuring in the off chance it’s legit, I’ll get something in the mail.Report
“I’ve been getting phone calls from people claiming to be the IRS, but near as I can tell it’s a scam.”
For the record: Under no circumstances will the IRS call you on the phone unless you’ve asked them to. (If nothing else, they want the receipt from the certified letter so that in a later court proceeding they have definitive proof that you received their communication!)Report
“I’d like to see the numbers on that. In particular, I’m curious as to whether “recruits more candidates” translates into “recruits more candidates that win.”
The assertion all along has been “the Tea Party is a bunch of lily-white racist assholes”. Whether the candidates the Tea Part supports win is not actually relevant to countering that assertion.
Unless you’re suggesting that this is some kind of eleven-dimensional chess where they intentionally back minorities whom they know will lose so they can use them as examples of how American isn’t interested in non-white political leaders.Report
I would never accuse the Tea Party of playing n-dimensional chess, for any n greater than one.
I think the Tea Party has plenty of room for both lily-white-asshole racism alongside the garden-variety non-malicious-structural-racism that the rest of us participate in.Report
What to make of these comments:
Point: Rep. Steve Russell (R-OK): “I understand the genuine and heartfelt concerns that people have [about admitting Syrian refugees]. I know they are motivated by passions that are real, but we can’t let those passions damage our liberties and who we are as Americans.”
Counterpoint: Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa): “We just should remember that, when … we were in our grade school that’s when the world was right and we tend to want to recreate that idyllic scene in our adulthood thinking that’s the best thing for America. … But you know, while I was going on, [Obama] was going to a school in Indonesia, so his idea of America is entirely different than the idea that most Americans have of what we ought to be like, and he’s filling our country up with people that will continue to attack us.”
Whoa.Report
Wow. I’m somewhat less bearish about OK. Other than that, did you really expect anything different?Report
I’ve been paying attention, so the content conveyed by the King quote is exactly what I expected. 🙂 What I didn’t expect, tho, is an explicit admission that his view – and I think the views of many other conservatives as well! – is entirely driven by his/their passions to the exclusion of any objective considerations whatsoever.Report
I can’t say I’m surprised by the second quote; Steve King is easily one of the nuttiest people who’s ever been elected to Congress. This is the guy who once suggested we electrify the border fence because, quote, “we do that with livestock all the time.”Report
If we cant vet them, why let them in?
http://dailycaller.com/2015/11/19/fbi-director-its-impossible-to-vet-every-single-syrian-refugee-video/Report
I feel the same way about babies. If we can’t guarantee that they’ll turn into productive, law-abiding citizens, why allow any of them to be born?Report
Last time I checked, you didn’t need any reason for an abortion and the left is quite happy.Report
Clinton Foundation’s Colombian ‘Private Equity Fund’ Was Unregistered.
Wonder why they were running a private equity fund to start with?
http://freebeacon.com/politics/clinton-foundations-colombian-private-equity-fund-was-unregistered/Report
Climate change root cause of Syrian war: Britain’s Prince Charles
Sure, chuck whatever.
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/britains-prince-charles-climate-change-root-cause-syrian-092031663–business.htmlReport
You know who else says so? The National Academy of Sciences.
Report
Looks like Les Miles’ tenure at LSU is coming to a close with the support of the boosters, who’ve apparently agreed to pony up the $17 million!!! owed Les and his staff. Question: is this consistent with the whole “purity of amateur athletics” exemplified by the NCAA and college sports, where college athletes are suspended for taking Taco Bell money from a booster?Report