Nicholas Culpeper's 17th century midwife manuals espoused that it was a woman's "womb, skipping as it were for joy" that produced "in that pang of Pleasure" the "seed" needed for conception to occur. If both husband and wife were not properly in love and enjoying sex, conception would fail, he asserted, because "the woman, being averse, does not produce sufficient quantities of the spirits with which her genitals should normally swell."

Although many women in early America undoubtedly knew that orgasm was not required for pregnancy to occur, many women also embraced the two-seed theory of reproduction.

Jane Sharp's 17th century manual, for example, explicitly discussed the clitoris, and described it as the location for women's physical sexual pleasures and the key to women's ability to conceive. "By the stirring of the Clitoris," she wrote, "the imagination causeth the Vessels to cast out that Seed that lyeth deep in the body."

Such notions of fertilization could have profound implications for women who sought justice after rape resulted in pregnancy. As historian of rape in early America Sharon Block has shown, colonial courts were notoriously suspicious of women who brought rape accusations. Women were seldom taken at their word and the status of the accused and the accuser became central to the outcome of the case. Moreover, a recurring theme in newspapers of the era was that that men needed to protect themselves against women — "the cunning sex" — who were out to falsely accuse them of rape.

Full article: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-foster-akin-sex-20120822,0,5241846.story

I’ve spent a lot of time considering (here, here, here, and here) the notions of technological unemployment and the Luddite Fallacy: the idea that technologically driven productivity — machines — will replace, are replacing, human labor. I’d like to revisit that here. My basic conclusion: the Luddites were obviously wrong at the time. But they’re right now — at least in the U.S. Even a stopped clock is right eventually.
Full post: http://www.asymptosis.com/the-luddite-fallacy-fallacy.html

You already know what I think: rather than arguing against automation because it’ll lead to unemployment, we should be automating more and more and putting an end to human drudgery. At the same time, we must decouple subsistence from employment–because, pretty soon, we’ll *all* be out of work (as most jobs are currently constituted). Guaranteed subsistence income is pretty much the only way we’ll survive. You know I’m not saying that work will or should go away–I have enormous amounts of work I want to do that I’m currently prevented from doing because of the need to earn a living.
Link: http://www.asymptosis.com/the-luddite-fallacy-fallacy.html#comment-5320

To put it just a bit too bluntly, an awful lot of Americans feel like losers. They know that they are hard-working citizens who play by the rules. But they aren’t getting ahead and they don’t feel they’re getting a fair shake. ... So they are ready to agree with the story Obama tells on the campaign trail: Inequality is a big problem. ... But Obama can’t solve their biggest problem: How to explain why they are losing out. ... Enter Romney and Ryan.

...

There’s a lesson here for progressives who wonder why their movement has so much trouble gaining political traction with the masses. Yes, the masses are manipulated, but not as much as many progressives think. The problem progressives ignore is that they still believe what they learned in civics class: Give the people the true facts and their minds will lead them to logical conclusions. What the civics teacher left out is the powerful, perhaps ineradicable, human tendency to look for meaning by thinking in (or by means of) mythic narratives.

Full post: http://hnn.us/blogs/why-are-americans-so-confused

At a LeadsCon conference in Midtown Manhattan last month, eBureau was among those making its sales pitch. Its exhibition booth depicted a multiethnic group of fictional consumers and their hypothetical scores.

Score boxes superimposed over a young African-American male read variously: “eScore: 811, high lifetime value potential” and “eScore: 524, underbanked, but safe credit risk.” Another caption floating over the crowd read: “eScore: 906, route to best call center agent NOW!”

It’s just another sign of the rise of what might be called the Scored Society. Google ranks our search results by our location and search history. Facebook scores us based on our online activities. Klout scores us by how many followers we have on Twitter, among other things.

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But the spread of consumer rankings raises deep questions of fairness, says Frank Pasquale, a professor at Seton Hall University School of Law, who is writing a book about scoring technologies. The scores may help companies, he says. But over time, they may send some consumers into a downward spiral, locking them into a world of digital disadvantage.

“I’m troubled by the idea that some people will essentially be seeing ads for subprime loans, vocational schools and payday loans,” Professor Pasquale says, “while others might be seeing ads for regular banks and colleges, and not know why.”

Full article (~2,800 words): http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/business/electronic-scores-rank-consumers-by-potential-value.html&pagewanted=all

"The same moral principles and considerations apply to the issue of accepting social security, unemployment insurance or other payments of that kind. It is obvious, in such cases, that a man receives his own money which was taken from him by force, directly and specifically, without his consent, against his own choice. Those who advocated such laws are morally guilty, since they assumed the “right” to force employers and unwilling co-workers. But the victims, who opposed such laws, have a clear right to any refund of their own money—and they would not advance the cause of freedom if they left their money, unclaimed, for the benefit of the welfare-state administration."

Democrats cannot do better among working-class whites if they envision them as a uniform group that thinks and feels the same way everywhere, as the political pros quite often do. That is, an overwhelmingly middle-class and upper-class set of politicians, operatives, and pundits appear to have so little direct experience of working-class people of any color that they consistently fall into stereotyping that clouds their vision and often insults the voters they are trying to persuade. At a San Francisco fundraiser in 2008, President Obama articulated the stereotype with unusual clarity (and nuance if you listen to the whole speech) when he expressed some empathy for those who “cling to their guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment.”

There are white workers who cling to their guns or religion or their racism and nativism – I could give you some names and addresses! But there are many others who do not. It seems as if sophisticated, very well-educated people whose vocation involves electoral politics should recognize that within a demographic category including nearly 50 million voters, not everybody thinks and feels the same way. Start with the 40% nationally who vote pretty consistently Democratic in presidential elections. Why do they do that? How are they different from those who vote consistently Republican or the group that goes back and forth?

These are the questions Andrew Levison recently addressed in an article posted on the Democratic Strategist blog, "The White Working Class is a Decisive Voting Group in 2012 -- and Most of What You Read About Their Political Attitudes Will Be Completely Wrong." Using the 2011 Pew Political Typology survey that asked voters to choose between “liberal/progressive” and “conservative” policy statements, Levison found that about 26% of white working-class voters were “progressive true believers” and 27.5% were “conservative true believers.” The largest group, at about 46%, however, is what Levison calls “ambivalent/open-minded.” These may be congenital “moderates” or “low-information voters,” but Levison focuses on something he has directly observed among white workers – a willingness to acknowledge truth in both of two contradictory positions. These are people, he says, “who do think quite seriously about issues, but do so in a fundamentally different way than do ideologically committed people.” He calls them “on the one hand, but on the other hand” thinkers (emphasis added).

The answers in the Pew survey are interesting and insightful in themselves, but Levison’s willingness to wade into the complexity of white working-class political thinking and to come out with a clarifying (if necessarily simplifying) analysis is especially rewarding. There is rarely a clear majority of those who “strongly agree” with either of the two statements presented by Pew, but there are some. For example, 53% strongly agree that “Immigrants today are a burden on our country because they take our jobs, housing and healthcare,” while another 53% strongly agree that “Business corporations make too much profit” and 70% that “Too much power is concentrated in the hands of a few large corporations.” Levison finds that the largest group of working-class whites are “cultural traditionalists,” but that “The genuinely consistent white working class conservatives – the Fox News/Talk Radio” hard-line ideologues – represent only about one fourth of the white working class total.”

Link: http://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/2012/08/20/stereotyping-the-white-working-class

First, Democratic political strategists should forget—no, indeed, actively reject—the notion that “the typical conservative white worker” is in any possible way a useful political concept. It is empirically false, politically destructive, psychologically misleading and morally corrosive...

Second, using the term “moderate” to describe the substantial group of workers who are not conservative true believers does not in any way imply that they actually conceptualize their philosophy as seeking some sort of abstract “middle of the road,” centrism along the lines promoted by beltway commentators who endlessly dream of finding some magical policy agenda that is exquisitely balanced precisely midway between left and right.

Link: https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.thedemocraticstrategist.org/_memos/tds_SM_Levison_WC_Americans.pdf

Physicians who liberally prescribe empiric antibiotics are often maligned as irresponsible or unthinking by condescending colleagues and policy wonks. But are these doctors actually courageous and prudent, saving countless thousands of lives every year by refusing to bend to misguided pressure from antibiotic-conserving paper-pushers?

As antibiotic resistance has emerged, many hospitals have begun requiring physicians to provide a rationale for every antibiotic dose prescribed. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) is considering making this standard for every antibiotic dose, at every hospital, on every Medicare patient nationwide.

There’s every reason to have a rationale for antibiotics, or any other plan in patient care. But the development is part of what I perceive as a larger “pendulum swing” toward pressuring physicians to avoid prescribing empiric antibiotics whenever possible. That may not be such a great idea, since (unlike a lot of the things we do) antibiotics actually save lives on a fairly regular basis.

At academic training programs, a seductive and self-serving myth reigns: that doctors can usually know whether or not their ill-feeling patients are infected, and in what part of the body, and with what likely organisms. And all this can be done in a few moments, on rounds, with the internist’s tools of history, exam, and a few labs! This would be a miraculous feat if even one living physician could do it consistently — but in training programs, it’s presented as routine, a mundane and expected part of any physician’s job.

Full post: http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2012/08/doctors-prescribe-antibiotics-simple.html

The plagiarism, or problematic paraphrasing, parade continued on Thursday as several reporters from Science News complained on Facebook that the wire service UPI had cribbed their stories.

Reporting on the charges, the Knight Science Journalism Tracker’s Paul Raeburn laid out three examples of passages from Science News articles that UPI reporters loosely rewrote and included in their own pieces. Raeburn contacted UPI’s executive editor, John Hendel, seeking an explanation, and received the following response:



Frustrated by Hendel’s dismissive reply, Raeburn wrote back to say that merely rewriting the story was insufficient. He asked how often UPI’s reporters relied on light paraphrasing of others’ work, and what steps UPI was taking to prevent the practice. Indeed, Raeburn noted, Science News staffers had accused the wire service of similar piracy last year and received the same “whoops-we-didn’t-mean-to” reply from Hendel.

Full story: http://www.cjr.org/the_observatory/science_news_accuses_upi_of_pl.php?page=all

Fact-checkers are no longer enough: If lies are going to be repeated, the truth needs to be, too.

Fact-checking was a great development in accountability journalism -- but perhaps it's time for a new approach. It's no longer enough to outsource the fact-checking to the fact-checkers in a news environment where every story lives an independent life on the social Web and there's no guarantee the reader of any given report will ever see a bundled version of the news or the relevant fact-checking column, which could have been published months earlier. One-off fact-checking is no match for the repeated lie.

...

The solution now as then lies in repeated boilerplate, either inserted by editors who back-stop their writers, or by writers who save it as B-matter (background or pre-written text) so they don't have to come up with a new way of saying something every single time they file. Basic, simple, brief factual boilerplate can save an article from becoming a crutch for one campaign or the other; can save time; and can give readers a fuller understanding of the campaigns, even if they haven't had time to read deep dives on complex topics.

...

B-matter has kind of fallen by the wayside in the age of the Web, where blog standards often involve reporting just one new thing, not comprehensively, or just the latest thing that was said, rather than its history. But a deft use of B-matter can really solve a wealth of problems, and show political lies for what they are. And if lies are going to be repeated, the truth has to be, too.

The other solution, of course, is to treat repeated lies as a story (something I suspect we'll see much more of in the months ahead). What is Romney trying to do by repeating false statements about the tweak to welfare rules over and over before working-class white audiences? What is Obama trying to do by focusing on Ryan's 2011 budget and ignoring his 2012 one? Well, that second one's kind of obvious. But you get the drift.

Full article: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/08/what-to-do-with-political-lies/261189