Zack :' (

Zack :' ( is a 16 year old blogger who just came out to his parents and has been sent to a "Christian" re-education camp.

Via Majikthise

Update: scare quotes added to the word "christian"

second update: The Republic of T has collected links on this evolving story here and here.

The are pictures from day for of the protest in front of the "Christian" re-"education" "camp" here.

link to good "embryo adoption" post

Molly pointed me to this post at A Little Pregnant about Snowflakes, the fundamentalist "embryo adoption" group.

A teaser:

Why, lingering in insensate stasis is every bit as bad as being branded, mutilated, and hanged for disobedience. Yep, postponing telophase? That right there is a dream deferred, my friends, and therefore a dream denied.

Against Leadership

I have a visceral, instinctive dislike of the word 'leadership'. My dislike of 'leadership' does not sink to the level of the loathing I feel for words and phrases like 'detainee' or 'extraordinary rendition'. 'Leadership' is not a word built to obfuscate, nor is it some piece of Newspeak creeping out of Orwell's fiction and into the actual world. Still, I suspect 'leadership' is a bad word. The first thing I imagine when I hear the word 'leadership' is a place called the "Center for Leadership Excellence," which I imagine Dilbert's Pointy Haired Boss graduated from. And lo and behold, there are many such places.

I speak out against the word 'leadership' at my own peril, for not only does SLU have its own center for leadership, the "St. Lawrence University Leadership Academy," but its center for leadership is an important partner in the CBL program, which I believe strongly in. (In fact, according to the document I just read, the CBL has a dynamic partnership with the St. Lawrence University Leadership Academy.) The Leadership Academy offers a half credit course on "the role of leaders and leadership from both historical and theoretical perspectives" and sponsors a conference on leadership.

I am hardly in a position to complain about studying historical and theoretical perspectives on leadership. Many philosophers I teach--Aristotle, Confucius--develop theories of the rights and duties of those on the top side of various hierarchical relationships. Many of the things they say are still important in a democratic context. Certainly Plato felt that the education of leaders was the most important element of politics.

Still, I distrust these sorts of studies when they use the word 'leadership'. I distrust them almost as much as I distrust leaders. 'Leadership' is such a vague word. When Confucius talks about the duties of nobility, he had in mind five relationships that had concrete meanings in his society: father/son, ruler/subject, husband/wife, older brother/younger brother, friend/friend. When people talk about leadership in America, there is no particular relationship they refer to. They really mean any situation where one person can take credit for being the guy who gets things done, the go-to guy, the rainmaker. Yes I know someone else did the work, but I made all the phone calls. I sent out a lot of emails on my blackberry. I appropriated the surplus value of your labor. With the word 'leadership' you get pure managerialism, tradition efficiently stripped away, leaving pure exploitation.

Of course, at the Leadership Academy they teach people to be better leaders than that. Their course on leadership promises

A focus on relational models of leadership which emphasizes leadership as “a relational process of people together attempting to accomplish change or make a difference to benefit the common good” (Komives and McMahon, p.68).

But if people are working together for the common good why privilege one of them as "the leader"? The best sort of leadership studies would be suicidal to the concept of leadership. (I bet you could assign the Tao Te Ching in such a course.)

'Leadership' is a different sort of bad word than 'extraordinary rendition'. The phrase 'extraordinary rendition' is evil because it obscures the concept it names (outsourcing torture). 'Leadership' is bad because it accurately names precisely the part of the concept that does the most damage to human society. It identifies the part of a social relationship where one person gets to be more important than all the others.

I don't think the academy should teach leadership. I know Plato said that the education of leaders was the most important part of politics, but my utopian vision doesn't involve perfectly education leaders. Back when I actively developed utopian schemes, I was a communitarian anarchist (one of those anarchists who thinks everyone should share stuff, not the Ayn Rand type anarchists.)

So, with all due respect for my coworkers who teach leadership, I ask you to stop. There are much better kinds of civilization we can teach.

Downing Street Memo Petition

Moveon is looking for 500,000 signatures on a petition sponsored by Representative John Conyers demanding that Bush come clean about the lead up to the war and the evidence of his perfidy in the Downing Street Memo.

sign the petition here

Post Mortem for the CBL part of my ethics class

“Our examination does not aim, as our others do, at study; for the purpose of our examination is not to know what virtue is, but to become good, since otherwise the inquiry would be of no benefit to us.” –Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics 1103b26

So last semester I had students in my ethics class participate in the community based learning program. This was my first venture into the enterprise that used to be called "service learning" until people realized how condescending that sounded. I had long been convinced that CBL should be a part of ethics courses, in part because I believe in two theses originally put forward by Aristotle: we study ethics to become more virtuous, and virtue is acquired by habit. I didn't think these premises were sufficient to show the importance of CBL, because there wasn't a connection to the kind of learning done in the university: how can you work the development of virtuous habits into a course that is based on reading and discussion, and where the instructor is required to be neutral on controversial political issues?

Then I saw Jim Liszka give a talk on community based learning. He clued me in to the importance of reflection in modern community based learning projects. Here is a description of the role of reflection in CBL from Edward Zlotkowski (????), which I encountered recently:

Indeed, service learning practitioners tend to place special emphasis on reflection as the key to making service yield real learning...What is distinctive about reflection in a service-learning context is its multi-layered quality: what students reflect on results not just in greater technical mastery ("course content") but also in an expanded appreciation of the contextual social significance of the discipline in question and most broadly of all, in "an enhanced sense of civic responsibility"

(Z is quoting key phrases from Bringle and Hatcher 1996) This is real. This is what the university should be doing. Indeed, Zlotkowski argues, it may save the university's ass.

The problem is that many people think that CBL, like blogging, is career suicide. It sucks up all your time and isn't rewarded by the administration because it is not another publication line on your CV. Liszka said you shouldn't try it until after you have tenure. So when I approached Ron Flores here at SLU about adding a CBL component to my ethics class my primary concern was that it not suck away all my time. Ron and his team assured me that they had everything set up so that it wouldn't, and he was right. From my perspective, using CBL was effortless.

Which turned out to be a problem. I was teaching a general ethics course using Liszka's Moral Competence. (More on this brilliant text in another post.) I decided to focus on caregiving in the CBL, simply placing students in situations where they would have to provide care for others (like the local nursing home or NYSARC, a local group that works with the retarded) and then inviting them to reflect on the experience in a journal. Ron and his team did an excellent job of handling the placements. I graded the journals. The whole thing took no more of my time than any assignment.

The lack of involvement meant that I had no way of dealing with problems that came up. While a many students reported having great experiences, many others had problems. The first warning sign was the low rates of participation. I had set the bar high: I wanted 40 hours from them for the semester. My impression was that most SLU students could spare that much time. This is a wealthy residential campus. People aren't commuting four hours a day and they typically are not working full time jobs. I thought the few that did work full time could strike individual deals with me.

No one gave the required 40 hours. The average student gave 10 hours. The student who did the best gave 27. Two CBL reports do not list the student hours, and I seem to have misfiled two more reports. (Should I gratuitously admit that in my blog? I'm sure they're here somewhere.)

More importantly, students at best managed to draw formal, strained connections between their CBL experience and the classroom material. My best student catalogued the feelings she had during her placement using Liszka's categories of moral emotion. The root problem was that I tried to do this on the cheap. I was unable to either motivate my students or help them draw connections, because I had no real idea what they were doing.

What to do for this class next year? Well, first of all, I'm not going to worry about committing too much time to the project. I am no longer playing the philosophy game to win; I'm playing for love. I don't care whether things I write will be cited after I am dead. I don't care if I ever get tenure. The important thing is to do the job I do well right now.

So the main thing I've decided is that I need to do a CBL placement myself, and see what the students will be doing. I can then pick out readings and topics based on what happens on the ground. Should I reduce the number of hours I require? If I can make the CBL component relevant to the class, I won't have to, at least not by much.

Also, I think I'm going to make all the students blog their CBL next time.

Citations

Bringle, R.G., and J.A. Hatcher. 1996. Implementing Service Learning in Higher Education. Journal of Higher Education 67:221-239.

Edward Zlotkowski (????) Pedagogy and Engagement

This Week in Blogging History

Sunday 8 June 1662 Sam Pepys gets in a fight with "my man Will," his apprentice and surrogate son. Will was seen out and about "with his cloak flung over his shoulder, like a Ruffian." Which so engraged Pepys that he boxed the boys ears, twice. Later, he has misgivings about it.

This is also an unusual Pepys post because he mentions no modes of transportation.

June 12 2003 Invisible adjunct posts again after a brief hiatus and migrates to movable type. Shout outs to a lot of people who are still blogging and on my blog roll. I didn't enter blogistan until after she left, so I had no idea she was so close to the blogs I currently surf.

Wednesday, June 09, 2004 Giblets surfs the tube looking at all the Reagan tributes. Reagan on the Food Network. Reagan on VH1. Good times.

Genetic link to ability to orgasm in females (CFO, pt. 7)

From Steve Horwitz, via email.

A new article in Biology Letters reports on a British twin study which estimates that 34% of the ability of females to have orgam during intercourse is genetic (confidence interval 27–40%). The number goes up to 45% for orgasm in masturbation (confidence interval 38–52%). The study sent questionnaires to members of the British national twin registry. They received replies from 683 non-identical twins and 714 identical twins.

This follows an earlier Australian study which I am trying to track down. It would help if I could get the Biology Letters article.

So how does this bear on the Symmons evolutionary hypothesis that we have been discussing on this blog? If the female orgasm is a developmental byproduct of the male orgasm, we should expect genes associated with female orgasm to show a lot of variation. If there was direct selective pressure on the genes, that should show up as reduced genetic variability.

Here is the write up from SFGate.

This is the write up in New Scientist.

Note some of the discrepencies in science journalism. New Scientist says this is the first study of this kind. SFGate points to the Australian study earlier this year. Also, New Scientist opens with some cheap jokes. On the other hand, they gave Lloyd a phone call. Both articles mention use of these findings to develop drugs to promote orgasm in women. Alert feminists will note that the FDA has been slow to approve drugs that help women sexually. Women's use of viagra, for instance, has never been approved.

Infertility Blogs

I followed a link at Timna's to this blog by a woman going through IVF. Retrieval and fertilization were last thursday. Implantation was sunday. If you didn't know that IVF was harrowing, read the blog.

One thing that struck me was the PGD was a routine part of the process for our blogger. In my one good publication, I listed PGD as a form of genetic engineering. I stand by that analysis. This lets you know where reproductive technology is now.

Infertility blogs are a huge genre. Molly has been reading a lot in that area. She is fond of Chez Miscarriage. Also, A Little Pregnant has a nice list of infertility blogs.

Odd how blogging brings together personal and professional interests.

Who else is named caroline?

A random selection of other photos tagged "Caroline"




self
Originally uploaded by doctor paradox.

Objectively cuter than other children

013
Originally uploaded by rob helpychalk.

It took us a while to realize this, because it goes against common sense. Normally parents think their child is cute because they are her parents. But after a while, it just became clear to us that Caroline is objectively cuter than other children. Indeed, by any rational standard of toddler cuteness, she may be the cutest toddler in the history of the species, if not the genus. Molly and I have begun to discuss how this might affect her development as a person.

Well, this is a cute picture from the pre-toddler days.

added: I'm not trying to brag, or run down others' kids. I just am trying to state a simple fact, like the fact that gravity obeys an inverse square law. Objects close to the earth accelerate at 9.8 meters per second per second, and Caroline is the cutest creature in the hominid line.

IMG_7221

IMG_7221
Originally uploaded by rob helpychalk.

I uploaded a bunch of Caroline pictures, because everyone knows she's the cutest. This one is from the summer of 2004. There's another batch clustered around winter-spring 2003. We seem to be irregular documenters of our child, with the photos coming in bursts.

Where all the drugs go

From the Milwakee Journal-Sentinel this piece on the effect of pharmaceuticals that pass through the body and into the ground water. These are agents that were designed to be biologically active even in small doses, and sewage filtration systems weren't designed with them in mind. (Via bioethics.net)

Walden by Day, Bedford Falls by Night

There were two gatherings in the town square today, each drawing on different populations of our tiny hamlet. In the afternoon, the residents of Walden gathered for the Farmer's Market. Walden gets the downtown park every friday afternoon, and I have never seen a better gathering of organic, locally grown produce. It is also a great time for snaking. The Carriage House Bakery sells tofu curry pockets and pesto knots. An Asian woman with a thick accent, whose name I have never learned, sells dumplings and odd savories. This year she seems to be trying to assimilate more to local culture, and is selling more whole-grain snacks, whose health benefits she trumpets. Fortunately she is still selling those dumplings with the sweet red bean paste in them. Generally there is a guy with an acoustic guitar and two mics, one for the vocals and one for the guitar.

Tonight Beford Falls had their turn at the park, and we saw a different turn on food and agriculture. It was "John Deere Day." We saw no local agricultural outputs, but there was an impressive array of agricultural inputs. Well, really just tractors. tractors in various shapes and sizes but all the same color, that shade of greene John Deere has no doubt trademarked. The food was not local. There were stands selling coke and popcorn and pretzels. Kids from the high school were selling candy. I have noticed that the crowd at Bedford Falls gatherings tends to be about 10 years older and 50 pounds heavier than the crowd at the Walden gatherings.

To be honest, I like the music at Beford Falls gatherings better. Country bands playing standards: Hank Williams senior, George Straight, Chuck Berry and other pre-Beatles rock and roll. This is the real folk music, not because it is made by the folk, but because it has been shaped by the needs of the social setting: what the audience is familiar with, what works with the state fair atmosphere. The self consciously folk musicians at the Farmers Market are too dominated by Dylan and the image of the poet as romantic genius. You cannot underestimate the damage the sixties did to folk music.

My names for the two communities in Canton are not quite apt. Although "Walden" reminds people of the back to the land movement that populated this region with hippies, Henry David himself put nature on such a pedestal he could never be a good farmer. Any attempt to shape nature was beyond him. Michael Pollan said that trying to draw an environmental ethic from Walden was like learning about marriage when your only categories are chasitity and rape.

I don't like Bedford Falls as a name for the Red Sate contingent in upstate New York either. I don't recall anyone in Frank Capra's movies having such a fascination with vehicles. While at John Deere day I had a longish conversation about Corvettes, prompted by an effort to guess the year of one passing buy. Not five minutes later I overheard some people trying to identify the year a passing harley was made.

Still, I think people know what I mean when I call this place Walden meets Beford Falls. There are some interactions between the sides of the community. The Rotary Club is getting behind SLU's efforts to establish a sister village in Sri Lanka. With any luck I will be taking students there next summer to help with the rebuilding effort. It is a purely low level connection: US rotary club to Sri Lanken rotary club. There are values we all share.

Requiem for a Haircut

Picture 004
Originally uploaded by rob helpychalk.

The mohawk did not last long. I have too many meetings coming up: one with the dean, one which includes a guy from the Rotary club.

In somewhat related news, a group of conservative intellectuals have listed J.S. Mill's On Liberty as a runner up for the ten most harmful books of the 19th and 20th centuries. (via Wonkette) Other runners up include Darwin's Origin of Species and Descent of Man. What made the list? The top 3 are to be expected, The Communist Manifestor, Mein Kamf, and The Quotations of Chairman Mao. Number 4 is weird: The Kinsey Report. That's right Kinsey caused nearly as much damage as Chairman Mao.

In any case, I leave you with a quote from the Chapter "On Individuality, as an Element of Well-Being" from Mill's contribution to the most harmful books of the 19th and 20th centuries.

He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice. He gains no practice either in discerning or in desiring what is best. The mental and moral, like the muscular powers, are improved only by being used. The faculties are called into no exercise by doing a thing merely because others do it, no more than by believing a thing only because others believe it. If the grounds of an opinion are not conclusive to the person's own reason, his reason cannot be strengthened, but is likely to be weakened, by his adopting it: and if the inducements to an act are not such as are consentaneous to his own feelings and character (where affection, or the rights of others, are not concerned) it is so much done towards rendering his feelings and character inert and torpid, instead of active and energetic.

He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his faculties. He must use observation to see, reasoning and judgment to foresee, activity to gather materials for decision, discrimination to decide, and when he has decided, firmness and self-control to hold to his deliberate decision. And these qualities he requires and exercises exactly in proportion as the part of his conduct which he determines according to his own judgment and feelings is a large one.