L.S.D., R.I.P.

Posted on January 19, 2006 by Ampersand

It saddens me that – apart from a few lucky areas with local producers – the drug LSD has ceased to exist. The one time the war on drugs actually succeeds in wiping a drug out, why must it be a drug I like? (They could have wiped out Meth instead. That would have been just fine with me).

Yes, some folks (me included) have very frightening or unpleasant experiences with LSD. But LSD, at best, creates an absolute conviction in the user that they’ve moved beyond the mind’s ever-present limitations of thought and perception, and that’s a stunning and worthwhile experience. The better LSD trips I had are probably the closest I’ll ever come to life-altering religious ecstasy.

(Admittedly, trying to talk about the experiences to folks who have never had them tends to make LSD users sound like our brains are made of slugs and we’ve had salt poured in our ears, but the near-impossibility of describing the experience is part of what makes it valuable.)

I don’t feel a strong desire to drop acid again. But I find it difficult to comprehend that my generation may have been the last generation (give or take) ever to have our minds blown into fractal patterns and endless connection-generating by LSD. That seems very unfair to the post-LSD generations – as if my generation had used up all the endless summer afternoons with perfect babbling brooks, or something, and no generation will ever get that feeling again.

* * *

Actually, what it reminds me of – and this analogy will probably get me in trouble – is September 11th, listening to the newscasters say that the World Trade Center was gone. Gone? Gone? How can it be gone?

I wasn’t reacting to the death toll – I was reacting to the idea that part of the skyline was gone. I used to spend my lunch breaks at the top of the WTC, looking over Manhattan while munching on a brown-bag sandwich. Surely the newscasters must be wrong. They must mean the buildings have been damaged. The towers are too big to ever be gone.

It wasn’t until later in the broadcasts – when they had footage of the buildings seemingly turning into powder and disintegrating, over and over – that I finally believed something that big and solid, could actually be gone.

Needless to say, the loss of life at the WTC makes that by far the more important loss. Nonetheless, in much the same way I found it hard to comprehend that the WTC could just be gone, I’m finding it hard to beleive that LSD is gone.

Posted in Mind-blowing Miscellania and other Neat Stuff | 125 Comments

Men’s Rights Myth: Typical Child Support Payments Are Insanely High

Posted on January 18, 2006 by Ampersand

I frequently read and hear anecdotes about non-custodial parents (usually fathers) being ordered to pay outrageously high child support – amounts that are impossible for anyone with an ordinary income to afford. No doubt some of these anecdotes are exaggerated, but I’m convinced that some are not. Unaffordable child support payments don’t benefit anyone – not even the children – and should not be imposed. Furthermore, some measures to help non-custodial parents pay child support – such as a tax deduction of some sort – would be reasonable.

However, some men’s rights activists (MRAs) use rhetoric which suggests that child support payments are often or typically outrageously high, or that child support has made single motherhood a profitable situation for women. Neither claim is true.

According to a recent U.S. Census Bureau report (pdf link), the median child support payment in the U.S. is $280 a month. The average child support payment is a little higher – $350 a month. That’s a noticeable amount – similar in scope to payments on a new car – but it’s hardly the crushing, slavery-like burden some MRAs seem to describe child support as.

Although the Census Bureau report doesn’t provide detailed income breakdowns, what information it has indicates that child support amounts are sensitive to income. For instance, among fathers who are below the poverty line, the median child support payment is $125 a month, compared to a median of $300 a month for those above the poverty line.

So despite the terrible anecdotes that we hear (and if you think about it, it’s those who are mistreated by the system who are going to talk about their experiences the most often), the evidence shows that typical child support payments are not ridiculously high. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be concerned about those outliers who are being ordered to pay unaffordable amounts of child support; however, I think the weight of the evidence suggests that while the system may need some tweaking, on the whole it’s not broken.

* * *

So the typical child support payment is $280 a month – put another way, half of custodial parents who receive child support get $280 a month or less. How does that compare to the costs of raising a child?

Again, the federal government compiles some good statistics on this (pdf link). For a single parent with an income of about $17,500, raising a single child for 17 years will cost about $10,125 a year, or $840 a month.

Of course, a single parent who earns $17,500 a year is pretty poor. What about single parents who aren’t poor? For better-off single parents – those earning an average of $65,000 a year – raising a single child for 17 years will cost almost $21,600 a year, or a little over $1,800 a month.

All told, the typical child support payment in the USA covers much less than half the expense of raising a child. Custodial parents – usually mothers – are taking on not only the majority of the work involved in childrearing, and the majority of the opportunity costs – they’re taking on the majority of the cash expenses, as well.

Therefore, I’d support a two-tiered reform to child support. Child support payments should be made more sensitive to individual situations, so that noncustodial parents are not saddled with irrational and impossible-to-pay child support orders, as has happened in some outlier cases. At the same time, typical child support payments are simply too low, compared to the cost of raising a child; therefore, most non-custodial parents should have their child support obligations increased. (This will also have the side benefit of reducing unwed motherhood.)

NOTE FOR COMMENTS: Please don’t post about how you have an income of $500 a month and the judge ordered you to pay $2000 a month in child support to your ungrateful lazy ex-spouse who spends all the child support money on dresses she can wear to the track and she earns more than you do anyway and the judge won’t even reply to your motions. Unless I know both you and your ex-spouse, and can verify for myself that she’d tell me the same version of events that you’re telling me, I don’t think anecdotal evidence of that sort is more useful than the federal data.

Posted in Anti-feminists and their pals, Families structures, divorce, etc, Whatever | 1,309 Comments

Men’s Rights Myth: Women Trick Men Into Fatherhood So They Can Collect Child Support

Posted on January 18, 2006 by Ampersand

In the comments to another thread, “Ed” – whose views are typical of many Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs), although I don’t know if Ed himself identifies as an MRA – writes:

…Women have more incentives to become pregnant than a men do. […] There are … the financial benefits that child support laws now provide. I would hate to believe it is common but I assure you that it is abused.

It’s true that some women have “tricked” men into fatherhood and child support – for example, the 1997 case of State of Louisiana v. Frisard, in which a woman gave oral sex to a man wearing a condom, and then secretly used the sperm in the condom to get pregnant. (The courts decided that Mr. Frisard was liable for child support, a result I find appalling). (For more information about Frisard and some similar cases, see this article).

But even acknowledging that such cases happen, that still doesn’t support the idea that child support payments significantly motivate women to “trick” men into involuntary fatherhood. In the Frisard case, it appears the woman was motivated by a desire for motherhood, and so would probably have acted the same way even if no child support laws exist.

Do women seek pregnancy in order to get the financial benefits of child support, as David suggests?

And who has the most incentive to prevent pregnancy, women or men?

I’d say women do. Women, after all, face the risks and physical burdens of pregnancy, and (if they wind up collecting child support) face not only the financial expense but the enormous workload of raising a child – a workload that will make much more difficult, and possibly entirely derail, any other plans the woman had for her life. The workload, unlike the expense, is not split with another adult. On the other hand, for those women who want to be mothers, that could be an incentive in favor of getting pregnant.

Next to all that, the benefit of receiving child support is so minor that I wouldn’t expect it to have a significant effect on women’s incentives.

Many MRAs – and Ed, if I’ve understood him correctly – believe that child support laws give women a strong incentive to get pregnant and thus “trap” men into financially supporting them. Furthermore, many MRAs seem to believe that there is very little men can do to prevent pregnancy (hence the frequent claim made by MRAs supporting “choice for men” that all reproductive decisions are made by women).

This is a conflict, between what many MRAs believe and what many feminists believe. Is there any way we can settle this conflict empirically?

I believe there is.

Not all states have the same child support laws. In some states, the child support laws are relatively weak; noncustodial parents don’t pay much, and can relatively easily get away with defaulting on child support payments – or can depend on never being identified as the father at all. Other states have higher child support awards, laws that aggressively establish paternity, and collection techniques that make defaulting unlikely (such as garnishing child support from paychecks).

If the MRAs are correct, then states with strong child support laws will have higher rates of single motherhood, due to more women – tempted by the prospect of well-enforced child support awards – choosing to trick men into getting them pregnant.

If I’m correct, however, then states with weak child support laws will have higher rates of single motherhood, because while women’s incentives aren’t changed much by child support laws, a significant number of men are less motivated to avoid pregnancy if they think they can get off the hook.

So what do studies comparing how weak and strong child support laws effect single motherhood find? It’s men, not women, who have their incentives changed by child support laws. The stronger child support laws are, the lower the rate of single motherhood.

Robert Plotnick, of the University of Washington, published a study in 2005 which included a brief review of the literature.

Five studies are particularly relevant to the argument that child support policy is likely to have empirically significant effects on nonmarital childbearing. Sonenstein, Pleck and Ku (1994) find that a substantial proportion of adolescent males are aware of paternity establishment and may modify their sexual behavior and contraceptive use accordingly, especially if their peers are doing so. Case’s (1998) analysis of state data reports that, net of economic and demographic conditions, states that adopted presumptive guidelines for setting child support awards or allowed establishment of paternity up to age 18 had lower out-of-wedlock birth rates. Garfinkel et al. (2003) also analyzes state level data and find that effective child support enforcement deters nonmarital births. The effect is robust across all models and specifications.

Huang (2002) and Plotnick et al. (2004) use micro-data to examine the effect of child support enforcement on nonmarital childbearing. Both use the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) to analyze the likelihood that a woman’s first birth is premarital. Focusing on the teenage years, Plotnick et al. (2004) finds that young women living in states with higher rates of paternity establishment are less likely to become unwed teenage mothers. Because of the nature of the NLSY and the focus on teenage behavior, the study examines behavior during 1979-1984. Huang (2002) examines 20 years of data and different indicators of support enforcement. He reports similar relationships when women are age 20 or older but, unlike Plotnick et al., not when they are teenagers.

Plotnick’s 2005 study (available in pdf form here) replicated the earlier studies’ findings.

What does this mean?

It could mean, as I believe, that women already have such strong incentives to avoid pregnancy, that child support awards (which are, typically, not all that generous) don’t significantly alter the equation for most women.

However, it is also possible that Ed is correct, and that child support laws do strongly increase women’s incentive to get pregnant. However, this is only possible if we assume that men’s incentives to avoid pregnancy are even more strongly increased – so that even though women are trying harder to entrapt men into paying child support, men are nonetheless successful in preventing pregnancy, despite women’s increased efforts. So the MRA belief that women are motivated by child support payments into trapping men, ironically can only be rescued by giving up the MRA belief that men are not able to prevent pregnancy from happening.

The empirical evidence is clear: the net effect of child support laws isn’t that women get pregnant more often to collect on child support. Rather, the stronger child support laws are, the more men work at avoiding pregnancy.

Posted in Anti-feminists and their pals, Choice for Men | 233 Comments

New prostitution strategy in the UK

Posted on January 17, 2006 by Nick Kiddle

The British government has set out a new prostitution strategy. It seems to consist of helping sex workers, for instance by allowing them to work in pairs away from the street and offering them help with any drug or alcohol problems that might have forced them into prostitution, raising awareness among johns and pursuing exploitative pimps and people traffickers.

Changes like this don’t always produce the desired effect when they’re implemented, but it looks reasonable on paper.

Posted in Sex work, porn, etc | 57 Comments

Top Ten Reasons Americans Like Our Cars So Darn Big

Posted on January 17, 2006 by Ampersand

Cartoon about big cars

Posted in Cartooning & comics | 53 Comments

Chomsky and Holocaust Denial

Posted on January 16, 2006 by Ampersand

Over at The Debate Link, David links to a news story about an upcoming conference on the Holocaust, sponsored by the Iranian government. Since the president of Iran has called the Holocaust a “myth,” David quite reasonably predicts that the conference will be an appalling morass of anti-semitism.

So far, so good. David then goes on to say:

So my only question is this: which Westerners are going to show up and support one of the world’s most despicable ideologies on its home turf? Will we say David Irving? Noam Chomsky? The architects of Great Britain’s boycott of Israeli universities?

My goodness.

David Irving is a flat-out Holocaust denier. But to put Chomsky – or activists who organize a boycott – on the same level as Irving is unsupportable.

The primary evidence linking Chomsky to Holocaust denial is that he once wrote an essay defending the free-speech rights of Robert Faurisson, a Frenchman who has been (justifiably, as it turns out) accused of Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism. Chomsky’s essay was later reprinted, without his knowledge, as the introduction to one of Faurisson’s books.

Nearly all of Chomsky’s essay was a well-worn argument for free speech. A single paragraph addressed Faurisson himself. Here’s the most controversial passage in Chomsky’s introduction:

Putting this central issue aside, is it true that Faurisson is an anti-Semite or a neo-Nazi? As noted earlier, I do not know his work very well. But from what I have read — largely as a result of the nature of the attacks on him — I find no evidence to support either conclusion. Nor do I find credible evidence in the material that I have read concerning him, either in the public record or in private correspondence. As far as I can determine, he is a relatively apolitical liberal of some sort. In support of the charge of anti-Semitism, I have been informed that Faurisson is remembered by some schoolmates as having expressed anti-Semitic sentiments in the 1940s, and as having written a letter that some interpret as having anti-Semitic implications at the time of the Algerian war. I am a little surprised that serious people should put such charges forth — even in private — as a sufficient basis for castigating someone as a long-time and well-known anti-Semitic. I am aware of nothing in the public record to support such charges.

In retrospect, this is a stupid thing for Chomsky to have written; under the circumstances, if Chomsky wasn’t willing to undertake a thorough review of all of Faurisson’s writings, he should have simply said “I don’t know his work well enough to comment on the matter” and left it at that. Instead, Chomskey concluded from the weakness of the evidence presented to him, that Faurisson probably wasn’t an anti-semite. That conclusion is wrong, I believe, but the error is understandable; there is no need to say “Chomsky supports Holocaust denial” in order to plausibly explain Chomsky’s error.

Chomsky also argued that, in principle, it was possible to doubt the facts of the Holocaust without being motivated by hatred of Jews:

…Even denial of the Holocaust would not prove that a person is an anti-Semite. I presume that that point too is not subject to contention. Thus if a person ignorant of modern history were told of the Holocaust and refused to believe that humans are capable of such monstrous acts, we would not conclude that he is an anti-Semite.

I think Chomsky’s argument here is disingenuous. Logically, he is correct – it is possible for an ignorant schmuck (such as myself, when I was about 17) to take Holocaust denial seriously without hating Jews. But while Holocaust denial is not, in and of itself, absolute proof of anti-semitism, it’s certainly grounds for a very strong suspicion. The real-world association between Holocaust denial and anti-semitism is too obvious to be reasonably ignored.

On the other side of the equation, it is clear that Chomsky does not doubt the existence of the Holocaust. In 1969, he wrote:

I remember reading an excellent study of Hitler’s East European policies a number of years ago in a mood of grim fascination. The author was trying hard to be cool and scholarly and objective, to stifle the only human response to a plan to enslave and destroy millions of subhuman organisms so that the inheritors of the spiritual values of Western civilization would be free to develop a higher form of society in peace. Controlling this elementary human reaction, we enter into a technical debate with the Nazi intelligentsia: Is it technically feasible to dispose of millions of bodies? What is the evidence that the Slavs are inferior beings? Must they be ground under foot or returned to their “natural” home in the East so that this great culture can flourish, to the benefit of all mankind? Is it true that the Jews are a cancer eating away at the vitality of the German people? and so on. Without awareness, I found myself drawn into this morass of insane rationality — inventing arguments to counter and demolish the constructions of the Bormanns and the Rosenbergs.

By entering into the arena of argument and counterargument, of technical feasibility and tactics, of footnotes and citations, by accepting the presumption of legitimacy of debate on certain issues, one has already lost one’s humanity.

Chomsky has returned to this formulation several times, applying it not only to Nazis but to Holocaust deniers. So in 1992, he wrote:

…The Holocaust was the most extreme atrocity in human history, and we lose our humanity if we are even willing to enter the arena of debate with those who seek to deny or underplay Nazi crimes.

Chomsky does arguably revise history a little – discussing that 1969 comment as if it were referring to Holocaust deniers, rather than to the Nazis themselves – but that’s a little besides the point. Chomsky simply cannot be fairly accused of advocating Holocaust denial. The suggestion that he’d endorse the Iranian conference is unwarranted.

I won’t discuss the British petition to academically boycott two Israeli Universities, which I assume is what David is referring to. Instead, I’ll refer readers to this link; Ilan Pappe’s and Henri Picciotto’s essays demonstrate by example that it is possible to support boycotts and divestment campaigns against Israel without being anti-semitic or supporting Holocaust denial.

Posted in Anti-Semitism, Palestine & Israel | 16 Comments

Monday Baby Blogging – Early Signs Of Criminal Behavior Edition

Posted on January 16, 2006 by Ampersand

Is something missing from Bean’s purse? Maybe reading this blog entry will give her a clue!

It’s tragic, when delinquency strikes so young….

Posted in Baby & kid blogging | 10 Comments

Ten Reasons Same-Sex Marriage Is Wrong

Posted on January 15, 2006 by Ampersand

This has been going around… I got it from Shades of Grey.

Ten Reasons Gay Marriage Is Wrong

1. Being gay is not natural. And as you know Americans have always rejected unnatural things like eyeglasses, polyester, and air conditioning.

2. Gay marriage will encourage people to be gay, in the same way that hanging around tall people will make you tall.

3. Legalizing gay marriage will open the door to all kinds of crazy behavior. People may even wish to marry their pets because, as you know, a dog has legal standing and can sign a marriage contract.

4. Straight marriage has been around a long time and hasn’t changed at all; women are still property, blacks still can’t marry whites, and divorce is still illegal.

5. Straight marriage will be less meaningful if gay marriage were allowed. The sanctity of Britany Spears’ 55-hour just-for-fun marriage would be destroyed.

6. Straight marriages are valid because they produce children. Gay couples, infertile couples, and old people shouldn’t be allowed to marry because our orphanages aren’t full yet, and the world needs more children.

7. Obviously gay parents will raise gay children, since straight parents only raise straight children.

8. Gay marriage is not supported by religion. In a theocracy like ours, the values of one religion are imposed on the entire country. That’s why we have only one religion in America.

9. Children can never succeed without a male and a female role model at home. That’s why we as a society expressly forbid single parents to raise children.

10. Gay marriage will change the foundation of society; we could never adapt to new social norms. Just like we haven’t adapted to cars, the service-sector economy, or longer life spans.

Posted in Same-Sex Marriage | 144 Comments

Even with Alito, reproductive rights are not doomed

Posted on January 13, 2006 by Ampersand

Yesterday, I posted a rather doom-and-gloom post, arguing that if they get the chance, Republicans will not be content merely to allow the abortion decision to return to the states. Instead, as the nationwide “partial birth” abortion ban suggests, they will seek to chip away at abortion rights on the national level, stripping away the availability of abortion even in firmly “pro-choice” states like New York.

Nor do I expect Roe to be overturned, because they don’t need to overturn it. Especially if the Supreme Court decides that “the Salerno standard” should be used for abortion law, Roe could be turned into an empty, powerless decision without actually overturning it.

However, I should have also pointed out that even when Alito is confirmed, his anti-abortion views won’t dominate the Court. With Alito on the Court, the person replacing O’Connor as the swing vote will be Justice Kennedy. And although I think Kennedy is worse than O’Connor on abortion (most notably, he voted in favor of vague “partial birth” abortion bans), it doesn’t seem likely that Kennedy – who voted with O’Connor on the Casey decision – would want to eviscerate Roe.

So while it’s not impossible that my doomsday scenario will come about, I don’t expect it to come about just because Alito is confirmed. (But if Bush gets to replace a second pro-choice vote in the Court, and if Republicans keep control of Congress…)

Posted in Abortion & reproductive rights, Supreme Court Issues | 33 Comments

Worst. Newspaper error. Ever.

Posted on January 13, 2006 by Ampersand

My, did this crack me up. Fuller documentation on educe me.

Curtsy: Pandagon.

Posted in Supreme Court Issues | 33 Comments