Ammunition

Even though I don't agree*, everyone generally seems to think that babies are really cute and that we should save them. OK, well I meant more that I don't agree with the cute thing, because otherwise they're right: we should vaccinate, intubate, and swaddle in bubble-wrap as needed!

HOWEVER, there is a huge difference between a full-term, autonomously-living baby and a 16-cell blastocyst. One is alive, the other is a tissue. I feel no compunction whatsoever supporting a woman's right to self-determination, and that includes what's going on with her womb. Basically, I don't have the organs or biogeneic capabilities that women do, so I can't really ever truly understand their situation in an unwanted pregnancy and therefore I have absolutely no right to project my opinion all over their rights.

This is a well-written reminder of the cost to fully-formed women when abortion isn't available. In these situations desperate women do desperate things that, all too often, wind up in permanent injury or even death. Here in the West, it's all too easy to think of child-birth as a safe, happy event where women painlessly pop out laughing little bundles of joy. It's too easy for soft-minded hypocritical middle-class people to forget that poverty and hunger are very real and that many women would rather terminate an inopportune pregnancy than try to raise a child in hardship.

So if you ever find yourself locked in an interminable argument with someone Who Just Doesn't Get It, point them back to the article and hopefully it'll remind them what's what.

*Metaphor.

Disgusting Misogyny

[No science in this post.]

This is disgusting, even for the Huffington Post*.

Guess The Celebrity Breast Implants (PHOTOS)

What happened to egalitarianism? Why is this acceptable?

This kind of shit:
1) objectifies women for their bodies and in doing so denigrates their intellectual self-worth by making them seem like nothing more than a collection of parts to be groped and drooled upon;
2) legitimizes my fellow mens' too-often outright skeevy objectification of said women when this appears in "respectable" publications. If it belongs anywhere, it belongs in Playboy or Hustler;
3) oppresses all women everywhere;
4) perpetuates stereotypes;
5) gives assholes and douchebags an excuse to be assholes and douchebags in public (in the comments).

You know, the 1950s may have been a period with some serious social inequalities and major hypocrisies built into its zeitgeist, but at the very least the adults of that time would have had the decency and sense to label this kind of B.S. as rude, objectionable, and crass. I am not advocating a return to the '50s values, but maybe that sense of decency wasn't such a bad thing.

I think about the sacrifices my grandmother and mother have made in their lives, the uphill battles they had to fight to see the world become what it is today and I appreciate them for it because greater gender equality isn't just good for women, it's good for everyone. I even think back to my great-grandmother and how she was perceived as daring simply for having a job outside of the home. We have come so far, that we can live in a world where it is seen as perfectly OK that our grandfather could teach my brother and I how to feed ourselves with nothing more than a fishing pole and at the same time our grandmother could teach us how to clothe ourselves with nothing more than a needle and a bolt of fabric and NO ONE GIVES A SHIT. We have come so far that my cousin can be good at volleyball, make-up, texting, AND math and NO ONE GIVES A SHIT. We have come so far that my mother can walk down the streets holding her partner's hand and NO ONE GIVES A SHIT.

But then at the same time we have this kind of utter hogwash plastered through the news, these regressive pop stars selling their KY-fit leather jeans and plastic surgeries over their opinions and intellects. We have so many wonderful and intelligent women out there in the world making differences and kicking ass, but all we seem to pay attention to is fashion and cleavage and who's fucking whom in Hollywood. This is an injustice, a gross disservice to the women reclaiming their intellectual heritage as people from crusty old men who can't see out of their pants scared of competition and unfortunately NO ONE GIVES A SHIT...

It's not so much indecency as it is injustice. The men-children who run amok on campus and embarrass me deeply use feminism as an excuse to be lazy douchebags or subtextual misogynists. That because women are liberated they shouldn't be given "special-treatment" and forgetting that respect and "special-treatment" are very different things. These assholes who whine that feminists are too complex and man-haters when it really is just as simple as respecting women. Failure to show respect to a person for being a person regardless of their whatever whatever is a form of injustice. And that, fundamentally, is why I am pissed off about this piece in the Huffington Post, because it is deeply disrespectful, regressive, and bullshit...and I really thought we, in 2009, were better than this.

*Not that I had high expectations anyway.

Toaster's Late to This Party, Apparently

Rep. John Conyers (D-MI, 14th district [Detroit]) has introduced legislation into the House of Representatives, H.R. 6845, the "Fair Copyright in Research Works Act", that will apparently effectively prevent the public at large from accessing publicly-funded (e.g., NIH) research. This is bad, and in my mad opinion, also rather stupid. I don't think it is inappropriate to compare this to buying a book and then finding that the pages are all glued together.

This issue has been covered by the Scimese over at ScienceBlogs in great detail already (this is why I am late to the party). For broader commentary, check out Coturnix from Blog Around the Clock here and here, Greg Laden here, and Effect Measure here.

What I do not understand is the why of this legislation. ARRA had a clear purpose: beginning to fix the economy. However, this act just seems recidivist and arbitrary. Scientists are not publishing dangerous methodologies and subliminal evil schemes along with their important research, so unless the sponsors of the bill believe that the American people are too stupid and fragile-minded to read raw research and thus must be protected, I don't know why they are doing this. Or, wait, are we too dangerous to be allowed to communicate with the public? Are they afraid we're going to corrupt their constituents with logic, reason, research, and mad science!? Are we all so diabolical that we need to be contained? Maybe this is just the first volley and soon they'll be installing public relations officers at all MRUs whose job it is to Taser us whenever we attempt to speak to the press...

Well, I do have a sign on the door of our lab with everyones' names and the undertitle "Keeping otherwise dangerous minds off the streets and in the lab." Think about it, if scientists intensely curious about the physical world weren't in the lab doing science, wouldn't we probably be doing it at home in much more dangerous conditions instead?

I was under the impression that the big science publishers were not profitable or big enough to have the clout to write this bill, but maybe there have been arcane corporate mergers or something that have made them more powerful than we know (suddenly PLoS seems like Link up against Ganondorf and Zant at the same time). As far as I know the corporate entities of Science, Nature, et al are not publicly held and as such aren't profit driven like the businesses in the RIAA.

My Point:
I have contacted Rep. Conyer's office to ask them why this legislation has been deemed necessary. They said they'd call me with the information once they've gathered it. I'll be posting this conversation as it progresses.