This is an open thread. Post what you like; it’s all good, baby! Self-link love has been approved of by the motion picture association of America, and also my mom.
- David Link on a marriage broken up because the husband came out as gay: “The whole enterprise of gay rights has been to deconstruct this fabric of insincerity. No one is well served, gay or straight, by making us bear false witness against ourselves. In coming out, Gareth Thomas was doing no more than admitting what could no longer be denied; his regret was not for personal wrongdoing, but for the wrongdoing he felt the world demanded of him.”
- Seven real pro-family gifts from congress.
- I’ve long admired Tony Judt’s political writings. I didn’t know that he is disabled, with a progressive condition that has almost entirely paralyzed him below his neck. His short piece “Night,” about getting through the nights when he is immobile, is excellent. (I did wonder why he doesn’t have a voice-operated computer positioned so he can use it from his bed, but my guess is that he wants to encourage sleep, not put off going to sleep).
- Why women’s rights are a lousy argument for keeping US troops in Afghanistan. “To empower Afghan women, politically, would require either some kind of permanent NATO protectorate or else a deliberate effort to restructure Afghan politics in some much more fundamental way—either take power out of the hands of armed groups, or else to empower women to become militia leaders and warlords on their terms. We’re not seriously contemplating doing any of those things, for some pretty good reasons, but given those realities we shouldn’t kid ourselves too much about what we’re doing. The Taliban are horrible for women and the plan in Afghanistan is to entice them and their horrible views into a power-sharing agreement!”
- This really amused me — a series of photos someone left on his camera, to encourage anyone finding the camera to return it to him.
- A visual guide to the scientific consensus on global climate change.
- Alyssa is right: This is profane (and includes use of the “c” word) and to call the violence “gratuitous” is like calling the Ocean “moist.” And although the trailer says “mature audiences only,” that’s obviously not true: If I was really mature I wouldn’t have enjoyed this trailer enormously.
Ya know, when I first heard about Kick-Ass, my understanding was that it was going to be a gritty, realistic look about what would really happen if a bunch of teenagers decided to become brutally violent costumed vigilantes.
Apparently I misunderstood something.
It still looks awesome.
Anyways, reposted from a thread where it was somewhat off-topic:
My wife had a tubal ligation yesterday, because anti-choicers scare her to death.
I’ve often wondered why nobody’s redone “Don Quixote” in a modern setting, with the title character having read too many superhero comics instead of tales of knights and so on. Maybe it’s just too obvious?
A bit of Googling eventually turned up this screenplay (http://www.christianaproductions.com/sitebuilder/writing/Quixote.pdf), but not much else.
XauriEL, an interesting excerpt from that link:
She had to convince her doctors to permit her to get a tubal ligation? And there was a waiting list? What’s that all about?
I checked out that link about the climate change consensus. It’s faulty. For one thing, it presumes that all scientists who did not sign the skeptic’s petition are not skeptics. There’s no reason to presume that and certainly no data to prove it. For another thing, it doesn’t say what the timing was – whether or not this was before or after Climategate. In point of fact that graphic is worthless.
And finally, regarding point 2 above on the pro-family gifts from Congress, here’s one of those “gifts”
Turning back the conservative tide on the radio waves: It would be pretty awesome if Congress’ decision to be rid of the prohibition against federal funds being used to enforce the “Fairness Doctrine” put the kibosh on right-wing hate talk radio programs, as Heritage alleges. It’s unlikely, in truth; but anything that helps to make the presentation of significant controversial issues (such as sex education, family planning, abortion, marriage equality, same-sex adoption) more truly “fair and balanced,” as the tagline goes, gets filed in the family-friendly column.
If liberal commentators can’t get a foothold on the radio waves, why should the Feds get involved? Who the hell is Congress or any regulatory creature of theirs to decide what kind of political philosophies have to be on the airwaves? I think that the TV news and entertainment shows flood the channels with liberal philosophies, but I don’t think that Congress or the FCC should get involved in making any changes to that.
RonF, given the history of climate change deniers’ behavior, assuming that the scientists whose names do get put on deniers’ petitions actually agreed to be on the list, if anything, the more unwarranted assumption. Not to mention that those scientists who actually did sign the petition and will not send them an angry phone call the next morning demanding a retraction, may not ever have conducted research in the relevant fields, may not even be IN the relevant fields, or may just be made up names and not real people at all. Don’t throw glass houses at stones, or whatnot.
Agree, though, on not bringing back the Fairness Doctrine. More on this if and when I find the time – I probably won’t.
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Don’t know about the waiting list, but I have heard dozens of stories about childless women wanting sterilization whose doctors refuse to do the procedure. What it’s about is medicine’s paternalistic view of women and their knowledge of and control over their own bodies, which dates back to well before the Comstock era but was vigorously pumped up by the battle between (mostly female) midwives, contraceptive-makers, and abortionists, versus the (entirely male) medical doctors over whether women should be allowed to control their fertility.
@Elusis
I think it has more to do with litigation. Every doctor who does tubals has stories of women with buyer’s remorse, so they worry about being sued for doing exactly what the patient asks.
SiF, a quick google for “lawsuits tubal ligation” didn’t seem to support your statement. The lawsuits I found that way were either for botched operations (i.e., women who had a tubal ligation but then got pregnant afterward), damages caused during the surgery, or were claiming that the doctor hadn’t informed them of the side effects prior to the operation.
@Amp – I have no idea. It’s just an anecdote I hear from people in the medical world every time this subject comes up.
Smells like an urban legend to me, then. “Well this guy I sat next to at the Glaxo conference said he met a guy in an elevator at this neurology symposium whose office mate told him the same thing happened to his residency supervisor.”
Here are some 2002 statistics on sterilization regret in the US:
http://www.nichd.nih.gov/news/releases/tubal_sterilization.cfm
It says, “The researchers found that the chance of a woman experiencing regret within 5 years after her husband’s vasectomy was only 6.1 percent, a figure which did not differ significantly from the 7.0 percent of women who, 5 years later, regretted tubal sterilization.”
Sadly it is true that some US doctors are reluctant, or refuse, to perform sterilizations for women who have not had children, or have not had “enough” children, or whom they consider too young.
This guide from an affiliate of John Hopkins advises family planning service providers to “further assess situation and, if appropriate, help client choose another method” if the client is single, or has no children:
http://www.reproline.jhu.edu/english/6read/6multi/pg/vs4.htm
It also says “Regret and request for reversal are higher in single women, especially young single women, than in older married women.” And “Regret and request for reversal are higher in nulliparous women, especially young nulliparous women, than in older multiparous women.” But it does not say how much higher.
Most info I have seen says that nulliparous women do not have significantly higher rates of regret. Here is an abstract for a 1999 article published in Obstetrics & Gynecology:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10362150
It says “For women aged 30 or younger at sterilization, the cumulative probability of regret decreased as time since the birth of the youngest child increased … and was lowest among women who had no previous births … CONCLUSION: Although most women expressed no regret after tubal sterilization, women 30 years of age and younger at the time of sterilization had an increased probability of expressing regret during follow-up interviews within 14 years after the procedure.”
Here’s an abstract for a rather old article (1980) on the subject:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7409229
It says “There did not appear to be a significantly higher rate of regret in nulliparous women undergoing tubal ligation than that seen in studies of parous women… Those who had requested sterilization for medical reasons were more likely to be unhappy with the resultant sterility than were the others in the group. Age was, in fact, less of a factor for regret than medical indications for the procedure.”
But aren’t regret levels low at least in part because all the hoops that the docs put in the way to weed out everyone who isn’t really serious?
Stuff I wonder about….
“Increased” by how much for women under 30? And if those who were sterilized for medical reasons are factored out, then what do the statistics look like?
And how do these regret statistics compare to, say, breast implants, nose jobs, bariatric surgeries, or other voluntary medical procedures?
I like the graph in the following link:
Neat healthcare expense to life expectancy graph
nice, jake – thanks.
I’m blogging about the fifth police officer in my city to be arrested since late 2008 this one on off-duty child molestation charges. He was one of two officers to be arrested on Christmas Eve.
Now I think the tips I received on the arrest were for this guy, not the other one who was arrested on a DV related assault. What were the odds there would be two arrested and booked on the same day?
The mainstream press hasn’t broken this story yet as it’s working on it.
But aren’t regret levels low at least in part because all the hoops that the docs put in the way to weed out everyone who isn’t really serious?
To know that, I think you’d have to know how many people actually go so far as to talk to a doctor about sterilization and then later change their minds about wanting children.