What does psychology consider harassment?

Because certain entities on the web feel like redefining all forms of internet harassment and threat as “trolling” just because it happens online or via unusual media, I decided to look at what actually qualifies as harassment in psychology (rather than in law, since we’re talking about whether it affects people, not whether it’s illegal). I looked at a couple psych studies that were doing experiments on the effects of harassment, and excerpted the part where they describe the form of experimental harassment they subjected their test subjects to, as well as relevant results:

http://www.jpsychores.com/article/S0022-3999%2898%2900075-0/abstract
Harassment used in experiment:

For subjects in the harassment condition, scripted harassing comments were delivered on a fixed schedule, at minutes 2, 6, and 10 of the task, by an experimental assistant of the same gender as the subject. All experimental assistants (three women and three men) were trained to deliver the harassing statements in a firm, authoritative, but neutral (i.e., not angry) tone of voice.

Results:

The harassed subjects reacted more strongly than the control subjects to the stressor on all cardiovascular and cortisol measures and recovered more slowly than the nonharassed controls. In addition, several gender differences in response to the stressor and during the recovery period were observed. The harassed men exhibited the largest reactivity on cortisol and DBP indices, whereas the harassed women showed a more pronounced response on the subjective ratings of hostility and HR. The harassed groups were the only ones to show significant cortisol responses, with cortisol reactivity in harassed men approximately twice that of their female counterparts. Control groups did not exhibit significant cortisol reactivity. During the recovery period, harassed men exhibited attenuated return to baseline on cardiovascular indices and cortisol, whereas women, overall, tended to exhibit an overcompensation response on cardiovascular measures.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10661604
Harassment used in experiment:

For subjects in the Harassment condition, the procedure for the first four TAT cards was identical to that just described for subjects in the Nonharassment condition. Before the fifth card, however, the experimenter said that the last four stories had been “somewhat boring,” and that the subject should try harder to make the next few stories interesting. After the fifth card, the experimenter said “you still do not have it right.” After the sixth and seventh cards, the experimenter again indicated that the stories were inadequate, and said “I cannot see what the problem is,” and that “you should make some effort” to improve them. During the eighth story, the experimenter interrupted the subject with a critical comment.

Results:

Results indicate that the harassment manipulation affected increases in [heart rate], [systolic blood pressure], and [diastolic blood pressure]. Furthermore, among subjects in the Harassment condition, anger repressors showed greater HR reactivity than low anger expressors, but similar HR reactivity to that shown by high anger expressors. [...] among subjects in the Harassment condition, anger repressors reported levels of anger arousal similar to those of low anger expressors, but lower than those reported by high anger expressors. For subjects in the Nonharassment condition, no such effects emerged

There are other definitions, e.g. cyberbullying being typically defined as intentional and/or repeated harassment, which is ok except intent is hard to prove and easy to deny; and vague definitions that include terms like “verbal abuse”, which don’t explain anything. When studying entire organizations, there tends to be also a requirement of “creating a hostile environment” for harassment, so that even when each person only commits a harassing act once, it still counts.

Conclusion: Even mild interruption, ridicule, and criticism elicits stress responses, and all these mild stress-response-elicitors count as harassment in psychology. That doesn’t mean we should stop criticizing people, and it doesn’t mean that people who want to be skeptics, scientists and/or activists don’t need to learn to deal with a certain degree of both criticism and “trolling”. However, as with microaggressions, a constant barrage of aggression (some low-grade some decidedly less so) is typically more wearying/damaging than the occasional blatant, massive outburst. Consequently, telling a person who’s subjected for months to non-stop criticism, “satire”, parody, “trolling”, and plain old “as defined by every college campus everywhere” harassment* on multiple fronts that they aren’t being harassed is pure, unadulterated bullshit. Even the thickest skin will eventually be worn down** my months, or even years, of this sort of thing.
What this means in effect is that even harassment that doesn’t quite live up to persecutable legal standards*** still causes harm to people. Real, measurable harm.

What the pitters & their associates have been doing to certain individuals for months, even years now is definitely this kind of long-term harassment that creates a toxic environment and has negative physiological effects on people.

And the Horde isn’t entirely guilt-free here, either. The Reset rule and the Three Post rule exist for a reason, m’kay?

EDIT: more studies on this and related topic can be found at the bottom of this comment, because I’ve talked about this before.

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*for example, NDSU defines it as “unwelcome verbal or physical behavior which has the intent or effect of unreasonably interfering with the individual’s employment or academic endeavors or creating a hostile, intimidating or offensive environment. Harassment may include (but is not limited to) jokes, derogatory comments, pictures, and/or direct physical advances.”
**interestingly, the second study cited here also points out that people who repress their anger still have a hightened physiological response, but they don’t seem to perceive it (or want to disclose it to the researchers)… so “thick skinned” people may well not actually all be that thick skinned, just good at repressing their emotions. The physiological harm is still there though.
***according to USLegal.com, the legal definition of harassment in the US is determined by state, but typically includes this basic core:

Harassment is governed by state laws, which vary by state, but is generally defined as a course of conduct which annoys, threatens, intimidates, alarms, or puts a person in fear of their safety. Harassment is unwanted, unwelcomed and uninvited behavior that demeans, threatens or offends the victim and results in a hostile environment for the victim. Harassing behavior may include, but is not limited to, epithets, derogatory comments or slurs and lewd propositions, assault, impeding or blocking movement, offensive touching or any physical interference with normal work or movement, and visual insults, such as derogatory posters or cartoons.

Forbes is lying about a study to promote AGW denialism

So there’s this Op/Ed piece titled “Peer-Reviewed Survey Finds Majority Of Scientists Skeptical Of Global Warming Crisis” in Forbes right now. It refers to this paper in Organizational Studies, a journal largely focusing on the sociology of organizations.

The Op/Ed piece is blatantly lying about the paper.

Let’s start with the title. For one, the paper is not a survey. Surveys are quantitative, and therefore strive for large and representative samples; this paper was a qualitative study, with a sample selected on the basis of usefulness to the topic, not because it’s representative. Secondly, the author of that Op/Ed piece, James Taylor, claims that a “majority of scientists” is skeptical of AGW. Except that the paper doesn’t study “scientists”; it studies “professional experts in petroleum and related industries”*, and refers to them collectively as “professionals”, not “scientists” like Taylor does. Plus, right in the introduction the paper explains that “there is a broad consensus among climate scientists” about AGW being real. Which is not a group of scientists the paper studies, because its focus is not what the scientists doing research on climate issues conclude from their research. The abstract of the paper (emphases mine):

This paper examines the framings and identity work associated with professionals’ discursive construction of climate change science, their legitimation of themselves as experts on ‘the truth’, and their attitudes towards regulatory measures. Drawing from survey responses of 1077 professional engineers and geoscientists, we reconstruct their framings of the issue and knowledge claims to position themselves within their organizational and their professional institutions. In understanding the struggle over what constitutes and legitimizes expertise, we make apparent the heterogeneity of claims, legitimation strategies, and use of emotionality and metaphor. By linking notions of the science or science fiction of climate change to the assessment of the adequacy of global and local policies and of potential organizational responses, we contribute to the understanding of ‘defensive institutional work’ by professionals within petroleum companies, related industries, government regulators, and their professional association.

In the paper the authors state the purpose of the paper as follows:

Our aim is to examine the construction and disputation of expertise in a contested issue field and the consequences this has for the mobilization for or against regulation.

and

How do professional experts frame the reality of climate change and themselves as experts, while engaging in defensive institutional work against others?

It’s a sociology paper; about social construction of “expertise” on AGW which justifies in the minds of professionals “defensive institutional work, i.e., the maintenance of institutions against disruptions” caused by demands for climate-action. It wouldn’t make sense to study research scientists in climatology for this.
Plus, studying specifically professionals working for oil companies and oil-related industries (in Alberta, no less!) is going to severely skew the proportion of professionals studied who are denialists. Which the authors of the study are quite upfront about**, but which Taylor completely ignores in favor of claims like:

the overwhelming majority of scientists fall within four other models, each of which is skeptical of alarmist global warming claims.

Taylor then quotes parts of the paper where the oil-industry professionals are classified into 5 groups of positions about AGW. Mostly the quotes are ok, but they are trimmed to look less like the “social construction of climate change” categories that they actually are in the paper.

Lastly, Taylor takes a swipe at the authors of the paper (where he once again calls it a survey. dude, no.) for being “alarmists”, because they use accurate terms (“deniers”, etc.); he then claims that because of the obvious pro-AGW-bias of the authors, “alarmists will have a hard time arguing the survey is biased or somehow connected to the ‘vast right-wing climate denial machine.’”. Which is silly, since of course the study is connected to the denial machine; it’s about the denial machine, sampling a group of people who have every reason in the world to deny that their institution (the oil industry) is fucking with the climate.

And then another blatant lie:

Another interesting aspect of this new survey is that it reports on the beliefs of scientists themselves rather than bureaucrats who often publish alarmist statements without polling their member scientists.

Again, this is neither a survey, nor does it study scientists. It confirms that among climate scientists, there is a consensus that AGW is real and a problem. But these folks are not the subject of the study; it’s a study about denialist self-rationalization, so of course it’s full of deniers. Also, it’s of course not “bureaucrats” that publish consensus reports on AGW; unlike the subjects of this study, the IPCC is actually a body of actual climate scientists doing actual research on our climate.

The Forbes article concludes thusly:

People who look behind the self-serving statements by global warming alarmists about an alleged “consensus” have always known that no such alarmist consensus exists among scientists. Now that we have access to hard surveys of scientists themselves, it is becoming clear that not only do many scientists dispute the asserted global warming crisis, but these skeptical scientists may indeed form a scientific consensus.

1)”hard surveys of scientists”, my ass. 2)1/3 of people even within the oil industry agreeing that AGW is a thing and a serious problem, plus another 17% basically answering “I don’t know, and neither do you” cannot in any way be construed as a “consensus” against AGW even among the group studied.

Lastly, and slightly OT, I’ll also note that the denialist goalposts have moved so thoroughly that even in the oil industry, “virtually all respondents (99.4%) agree that the climate is changing”. Now it’s all about whether to do anything about it.

The paper itself is quite interesting, since the concepts they’re analyzing apply to other debates about what is or isn’t scientific and who is or isn’t a legitimate authority on any given topic is relevant to many other areas***, especially where “defensive institutional work” is being done****. Really though, the most amazing thing about it is that a paper examining the ways in which denialists frame their denialism by defining experts as those who agree with them in order to justify defensive responses to attacks on the oil industry ends up being used to define experts (i.e. “scientists”) in such a way that it agrees with denialists and justifies their defensive, anti-regulatory reactions. It’s so very meta.
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* specifically, members of The Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta (APEGA); no research scientists.
**they definitely don’t claim they have a representative sample of “scientists” or “experts on AGW”, since that’s not the point of the study. Quite the opposite, since this is not a quantitative study, but one using qualitative methodology. They’re not interested in how many people believe what, but in the content and diversity of these positions and the methods of justifying them.
**(examples: defining Rebecca Watson as an illegitimate authority in skepticism, because she has a communications degree rather than a science degree; shifting boundaries of what is or isn’t True Science^TM to exclude many social sciences; hyperskepticism; etc.
****any claim of “you’re harming The Movement”, and “I like this community the way it is, stop trying to change it”, ever.

A kitteh and a link dump

I was going to write a post using most of these, but I changed my mind. Still, the links are informative reading, so I’m just going to post them without the article that was supposed to go around them. And just to make the post more than just a dry linkdump, here’s a picture of Dusty:

Not a safe space — a good 101-level explanation of what the term “safe space” even means.

Michigan Legislators Demand Control of the Organ Which Must Not Be Named — summary of what thedrama in Michigan, with summary of the effects of their anti-woman bill

Chicago Police misclassifying trans women of color in the sex trade as “johns” in its “end demand” initiative — article on how the police manage to turn a anti-procurers-of-prostitution campaign into a campaign to arrest, out, and shame poor trans women of color

Despite The Evidence, Anti-Choicers Persist in Lying About Emergency Contraception — article by Amanda Marcotte about something I’ve been saying repeatedly: the science has already shown that hormonal contraceptives, including Emergency Contraception, doesn’t cause implantation failure.

Respect as it applies to anti-harassment policies — A conference organizer states his opinion about the relative importance (or lack thereof) of whether anti-harassment policies will make it harder for people to get laid.

Playing Cassandra

I’m feeling distinctly pessimistic today. As I’ve written in the past, the notion that “The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice” may be a necessary belief to remain motivated in generations-long battles for justice, but as an “is” statement (as opposed to an “ought” statement), it is naive at best in light of the cyclical nature of civilizations. All civilizations in the history of humankind have, sooner or later, declined and fallen into a “dark age”.

And with that cheery introduction, I’ll give you the following:
1)Rachel Maddow analyzing the effects of money on US politics. Basically, Republicans and corporations now have enough money at their disposal to win even extremely unlikely electoral races. And the Democrats’ plan to survive and counter this? winning, then amending the constitution. except that, as just noted, they can’t really win anymore. So basically, unless the Repubicans actually manage to self-destruct, the US government is now wholly theirs, on all levels, for years to come.

2)A graph and summary about oil prices since the economic crisis. oil prices are currently falling because of assorted political clusterfucks, but for the last year, despite fluctuations, they are as high as they were at the beginning of 2008. and anything “good” happening economically will instantly reverse the current downward trend. so, it seems our choices right now are economic collapse somewhere important and the continuation of the Era Of Cheap Oil, or economic stabilization/recovery and the official end of oil below $100/bbl. Peak Oil, anyone?

3)In Europe, xenophobia always lurks just under the surface, threatening to erupt. The EU and its predecessor were created to end a history of conflict that includes the Hundred Year War, the 30 Year War, and that started both world wars. And they were doing a decent job of it, considering, before the global economic meltdown. But because the meltdown happened before the EU figured out how to manage itself in crisis situations, it is now in a political as well as an economic crisis. With predictable results: Fascists are getting elected wherever sufficient distrust of the other EU members has managed to break to the surface

4)And last but not least, speaking of the long arc of history: here’s a paper in Nature (I haz pdf) about possible “critical transitions” in the global ecosystem in the next century or so. I’ve kind of written about these transitions before. They’re basically what happens to an ecosystem when it stops being resilient enough to withstand a particular environmental pressure: it undergoes a drastic change until it can regain (relative, temporary) equilibrium as an entirely different ecosystem, one that usually doesn’t sustain the same species and communities as before. And this paper basically discusses the possibility that our biosphere is about to undergo a critical transition as a result of human-caused pressures on the system. Some choice quotes:

Here we summarize evidence that such planetary-scale critical transitions have occurred previously in the biosphere, albeit rarely, and that humans are now forcing another such transition, with the potential to transform Earth rapidly and irreversibly into a state unknown in human experience.

This Modelling suggests that for 30% of Earth, the speed at which plant species will have to migrate to keep pace with projected climate change is greater than their dispersal rate when Earth last shifted from a glacial to an interglacial climate, and that dispersal will be thwarted by highly fragmented landscapes.Climates found at present on 10–48% of the planet are projected to disappear within a century, and climates that contemporary organisms have never experienced are likely to cover 12–39% of Earth48. The mean global temperature by 2070 (or possibly a few decades earlier) will be higher than it has been since the human species evolved.

Although the ultimate effects of changing biodiversity and species compositions are still unknown, if critical thresholds of diminishing returns in ecosystem services were reached over large areas and at the same time global demands increased (as will happen if the population increases by
2,000,000,000 within about three decades), widespread social unrest, economic instability and loss of human life could result.

Inequality in science, race edition

I’m surprised none of the science-related blogs I read have picked up on this story yet(which has been reported by the NYT, as well as Democracy Now), so I guess I’ll have to do it myself. From a study just published in Science showing that black scientists less likely to receive NIH-funds than white scientists:

Although proposals with strong priority scores were equally likely to be funded regardless of race, we find that Asians are 4 percentage points and black or African-American applicants are 13 percentage points less likely to receive NIH investigator-initiated research funding compared with whites. After controlling for the applicant’s educational background, country of origin, training, previous research awards, publication record, and employer characteristics, we find that black applicants remain 10 percentage points less likely than whites to be awarded NIH research funding.

That’s unfortunately unsurprising, but sad nonetheless. If I understand the paper properly (and there’s no guarantee that I have, so take the following discussion with all the skepticism it’s due), it seems to indicate that a lot of the discrimination isn’t directly related to bias in the selection, but to bias in career advancement elsewhere (access to resources). That’s probably a large chunk of it, and certainly racial discrimination as well as cultural hurdles aren’t improbable. But AFAICT from the study, even taking into account all of these, there’s still a remaining bias. So is it possible that there’s bias in the selection process itself?

My main question, which the article doesn’t answer, is how the NIH would know the race of their applicants; and if it doesn’t, what the factor that leads to this discrimination could be. A particular focus in the research? Maybe it’s not so much the race of the scientist that’s being discriminated against; minority researchers often try to fill the gap of lacking research about the special circumstances of the groups they belong to, so possibly it was the “race” of the proposal that was being discriminated against (I hope that sentence makes sense; obviously proposals don’t have a race, but may have a “non-standard” (AKA non-white) focus that could be identified as less-than by subconscious bias or even outright bigotry). This may also explain the much lower citation count (but doesn’t explain the much higher citation count for Asian and Hispanic authored papers; it would be necessary to see whether Black, Asian, and Hispanic authors are comparably likely to focus on minority-relevant research topics, and whether minority-focused subjects correlate with citation count to figure out what’s going on there). If the bias is indeed related to research topics, it would be very difficult to circumvent subconscious bias, since there would be no possibility of blind applications for obvious reasons.

The study shows a few other interesting things aside from that main point. For one, the ridiculously low number of Native scientists in biomedical research (only 41?! That’s fucking tragic in and of itself). Two, it seems to me from the data that the reason Asians and Hispanics don’t show the same disparities might not be because they’re not discriminated against. I can’t precisely parse what it says on this subject, but doesn’t it seem to say that Hispanics and especially Asians outperform whites on certain measures, but that those don’t translate in proportionately higher rates of proposal acceptance? It’s either that, or it says that these measures are irrelevant for proposals by non-blacks, and only seem to matter for blacks, who have the lowest citation and publication counts, and the fewest last-authored papers as well. *confused*

“post-modernism”, physics-style

The ubiquitous use of “post-modernist” as an insult meant to describe some sort of uber-relativistic, solipsistic mental-masturbation has always bugged me. Post-modernism was a very important development that deconstructed the illusion of humans (or “scientists” or “men”, depending on the topic) as objective observers of reality. It posited humans as interpreters of reality, who constructed models, symbols, etc.to make a counter-intuitive reality comprehensive to brains that never had any “reason” to evolve the ability to do so. And yet, people sneer at post-modernism and constructivism (the idea that reality is constructed by people) as some sort of wooey, New Agey “everyone can have their own reality and their own facts” sort of BS.

Well, imagine my glee when, while reading an article in Skeptic about Stephen Hawking’s 2010 book The Grand Design, I come upon a discussion of Hawking’s “Other Controversial Theory”: Model-Dependent Realism.
The article in Skeptic explained MDR in the terms very similar to the ones the social sciences have been using for years (but with more neurologyscience*), and the more I read about it, the more it seems to be the very same thing. But this time, it comes from a source not so easily dismissed by nerd-snobbery: the world’s most famous physicist**. A relevant quote from the book:

[Model-dependent realism] is based on the idea that our brains interpret the input from our sensory organs by making a model of the world. When such a model is successful at explaining events, we tend to attribute to it, and to the elements and concepts that constitute it, the quality of reality or absolute truth. There is no picture- or theory-independent concept of reality. Instead we will adopt a view that we will call model-dependent realism: the idea that a physical theory or world picture is a model (generally of a mathematical nature) and a set of rules that connect the elements of the model to observations. This provides a framework with which to interpret modern science. According to model-dependent realism, it is pointless to ask whether a model is real, only whether it agrees with observation. If there are two models that both agree with observation … then one cannot say that one is more real than another. One can use whichever model is more convenient in the situation under consideration. It might be that to describe the universe, we have to employ different theories in different situations. Each theory may have its own version of reality, but according to model-dependent realism, that is acceptable so long as the theories agree in their predictions whenever they overlap, that is, whenever they can both be applied.
According to the idea of model-dependent realism …, our brains interpret the input from our sensory organs by making a model of the outside world. We form mental concepts of our home, trees, other people, the electricity that flows from wall sockets, atoms, molecules, and other universes. These mental concepts are the only reality we can know. There is no model-independent test of reality. It follows that a well-constructed model creates a reality of its own.

source

So: I’m going to have to read that book now, just to make sure I’m not entirely deluding myself about this (wouldn’t want to end up like those morons who think relativity and quantum physics “are what Eastern religions have been saying for millenia”), and if it turns out to be that MDR really is a physicy version of constructivism/post-modernism, next time someone sneers at those concepts because they’re primarily used in the social sciences (and, *gasp* the arts and humanities), I might have to link them to a discussion on MDR and/or suggest the book to them.
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*dum… dee… dum…
**Yes, I’m fully aware I’m making an appeal to authority. However, nerd-snobbery is an argumentum ad hominem, and I find that, in non-formal discussions, those two cancel each other out nicely. So, to get those who commit the ad hom against constructivism to get past their mistake, I present them with an authority their tribalist brains might be willing to take seriously. In terms of intellectually honest debate, this might be cheating a bit, but fuck it: if it gets the morons to pay attention to such important concepts, it might be worth it.

Non-custodial parents, the numbers

In arguments about the fairness of family law, most of the time the argument centers on anecdotes, or, at best, around partial, cherry-picked statistics, so I decided to look into what the numbers say as a whole about divorce, unmarried parents, custodial parents, non-custodial parents, and their socioeconomic situation.

So. For starters, most studies done on divorce show that women end up economically worse off, while men end up economically better off after a divorce. Now, this data skews a bit because the further into the past you go, the stronger the effect is, and most of the studies I was able to find were old. The most frequently reappearing study is one done in the 70′s (here is a re-evaluation of said study, from 1995), and most other ones are longitudinal studies written up in the 90′s (if someone has more recent data on this, I’d be grateful), or are studies about Europe. The last paper I link to cites non-divorce-related discrimination as the source of this impoverishment of women. This discrimination, while diminished from the 70′s and 80′s, still exists, and so a base difference in divorce outcomes very likely still exists*. The question then would be whether family court decisions are making up or even inverting the effect of this discrimination and thus lessening or reversing the impact divorce has on the people involved. And since this post is specifically about parents, whether and how divorcees with children are affected.
A study from Washington (the state, not the city) shows how the economic situations differ for joint households vs. single-parent households, and how the economic situations of parents change after a divorce. In most cases, everybody is worse off uncoupled, but the mother is worse off than the father regardless of whether she’s the custodial parent or not. Custodial mothers experience a smaller reduction than non-custodial mothers (42% vs. 48%), but custodial fathers experience a greater reduction than non-custodial fathers (14% vs. 11%). The situation looks somewhat different in Title IV-D cases(pdf link!) in which the father is the custodial parent, where the noncustodial mothers actually end up with an increase of economic well-being from a shared household, while the custodial fathers end up with a large reduction (31% for divorcees, and a drastic 85% for all cases). Despite what MRA’s claim though, custodial mothers are not better off than non-custodial fathers in any of the scenarios, both in absolute and in relative terms.
What those statistics seem to tell us that child custody does not impoverish fathers and enrich mothers, and that the only situation in which men end up worse off than women are custodial fathers in IV-D cases (but the divorced custodial fathers are still better off than the divorced custodial mothers, so I’d REALLY like to know how large the cohort of unmarried single fathers in IV-D cases is, and what causes the DRASTIC departure from all the other statistics). But the demographic most bemoaned by MRA’s, the non-custodial fathers, end up on average getting the best economic deal out of living in a separate household (meaning the least reduction of economic well-being), be it because of divorce or being unmarried, only second (and only in relative terms) to the much smaller cohort of non-custodial IV-D mothers.

The other thing that MRA’s often argue is that the Family Courts are biased because mothers are more likely to get custody than fathers, and more likely to get sole custody than have a shared custody. Apparently this was true in the 90′s, when 75% of all cases resulted in sole custody for the mother(in 40% of which the father didn’t even have visitation rights). That number however includes the 1/3 of all fathers who wanted the mother to have sole custody. When custody had to be decided by outside sources (trial or mediation), sole custody for the mother only happened 44% of the time. Still more than joint custody or sole custody to the father, but evidently it was possible for fathers to gain at least some access, if they wanted it. 70% of fathers still reported not having as much access to their children as they wanted, though (interestingly, no one compiled that statistic for women, even though 25%-56% of them might theoretically feel the same).
So, yes, at least in the 90′s there was discrimination against fathers in custody agreements. Prejudiced attitudes of fathers and mothers against the need for the father to be involved seem to have figured very heavily into this, and probably this also reflected the attitudes of the courts. How this has changed over the last 15-20 years I don’t know, but neither complete parity nor a lack of change is likely (the former because social change doesn’t happen that quickly, and the latter because attitudes towards fathers’ involvement in parenting have been changing significantly). One thing that has been happening is an increasing demand for joint custody, and some states even made joint custody mandatory, at least temporarily. That would improve the situation of the non-custodial parent in terms of access to the child, but it is not at all clear that it improves the situation of the child. Certainly, in cases where a couple chooses joint custody (or for that matter, intra-marriage co-parenting, since a lot of studies simply focus of father-involvement in raising children), the children are better off; but comparing that to cases in which joint custody wasn’t voluntarily chosen and then mandating it is a bit like saying that because children of married couples are better off than children of divorced couples, we should ban divorce. In both cases, the conflict and antisocial behavior most likely responsible for the problems won’t disappear just by removing the most obvious indicator of problems. In fact, it can make things worse.
From my personal perspective, then, joint custody mustn’t be mandatory, but it should be the default assumption of courts unless evidence is present that another arrangement is better for the child (i.e. evidence of harmful and antisocial behavior of one parent, as well as evidence for high-conflict between the parents).

In conclusion, there does seem to be some discrimination against fathers in family-court, but it’s not at all what MRA’s claim it is. Non-custodial fathers come out of a separation a lot better off than anyone else, even if they have to pay child-support. The discrimination that IS present seems to be focused on the good-oldfashioned sexist assumption that men pay and women do everything else, which means fathers who want more involvement in their children’s lives won’t necessarily get it. However, forced joint custody, while certainly better taking into account the rights of the fathers, might well be trampling on the rights of the children, and is therefore not necessarily the best solution to the problem, either. Getting away from patriarchal attitudes and patriarchal child-care assumptions would probably make it more possible to see to the welfare of a child on an individual basis.

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* originally, I’d thought to point out that this might have changed during the current recession, which resulted in a greater loss of traditionally male jobs than traditionally female jobs, but while this is true, the losses between 2007 and now were from 88% to 81% for men, and from 73% to 69% for women, and I’m not going to just assume that all these non-working women are trophy wives and voluntary SAHM’s, though I’m sure some are. And apparently, women are starting to catch up, and unlike men, they’re not just becoming unemployed, they’re leaving the labor force altogether.

Farmers in developing countries reject GMO’s. Why?

I recently found this article about Haitian farmers planning on destroying Monsanto seed. It reminded me of the stories of Indian farmers doing the same, and it stunned me that people in these extremely poor countries would be willing to destroy crops; especially Haiti, which just suffered a huge disaster, and where just a few years back people were eating mud. Now, I’m personally biased, but I wanted to really know whether these farmers were really acting in their best interest, based on experience with these crops, or whether they were like the teabaggers, talked by outsiders into acting against their own interests out of ignorance and fear.

After a little bit of digging, what I discovered was a massive discrepancy between scientific papers, which claim increased yields¹, as well as reduced need for pesticide use², and the writings of NGO’s and social workers which reported increased pesticide use and increased debts accumulated by the farmers. Usually I’d just go with the scientific studies, but I was having a hard time believing that thousands of Indian farmers would commit suicide if their financial situation weren’t as bad as reported. And eventually, I came across a somewhat comprehensive article^3(pdf!) that explained the discrepancy at least in part: all the scientific studies are usually done within 1-3 years of adopting the GM crop; but a few studies showed that over a longer period, pesticide use between bt and non-bt crops evens out after longer periods of time either because of increase of secondary pests, or because of resistance:

‘Bt Technology Adoption, Bounded Rationality and the Outbreak of Secondary Pest Infestation in China’ claims that after seven years of Bt cotton introduction in China (1996 to 2004), the expenditure on pesticides for Bt and non­Bt was identical in 2004 at $101 per ha and the earnings from Bt cotton were lower [Mishra 2006]. Narayanamoorthy and Kalamkar (2006) reported the economical viability of Bt cotton for Indian farmers (Maharashtra). Contrary to expectations, the total quantity of pesticides used in Bt cotton variety MECH 162 was higher than non­Bt cotton varieties. The average net profit from Bt cotton was Rs 31,880 per ha, about 80 per cent higher than that from non­Bt cotton. There was no significant difference in pesticide use between Bt and non­Bt cotton varieties. However, it is too early to generalise in India, where four million small and marginal farmers have taken up cultivation of Bt cotton with estimated adoption rate of 50 per cent by the end of 2007 [Mishra 2006]. Illegal and spurious seeds coupled with non­maintenance of minimum 20 per cent refugia by these farmers may result in severe pest attack on Bt cotton due to selection pressure and outbreak of secondary pests like whitefly [Chari 2006]. The bollworm is expected to develop resistance in 2007­/08, where it was introduced in 2002 [Kranthi 2006][ed.:and indeed, it apparently has].

The same article also notes the significantly higher fertilizer reqirements of bt-cotton:

Fertiliser use was the highest in the case of Bt cotton, fol­lowed by hybrid cotton and was the least in the non­hybrid cotton varieties. The nitrogenous fertiliser use in Bt cotton was higher by 23 and 31 per cent when compared to the other hybrid and non­hybrid varieties, respectively. The respective phosphatic fertiliser use was higher by 17 and 50 per cent and the potashic fertiliser use was higher by 104 and 413 per cent. The use of zinc­sulphate was also higher in Bt cotton by 25 and 10 per cent, respectively.

Note also that at least the potash is an energy-intensive fertilizer, since it’s mined and then transported; phosphate is also usually mined. This means that as oil-prices rise, so will the cost of those fertilizers.

Anyway, the term “incorrect use” shows up in that article as well as a couple others that mention less-than-expected yields of GM-plants. I’m suspicious of that term, since it seems to mean that these crops can only grow in very specific circumstances. In wealthy countries where farmers can control the environment in which their crops grow more thoroughly and consistently, this might not be too big of a problem (though, with global warming and Peak Oil looming on the horizon, even wealthy Western farmers might loose control of conditions just enough to cause problems, maybe); but in poorer countries more prone to various environmental disruptions, and where the profit margins are smaller and income and financial relief in case of drought or other possible disasters is significantly less certain, it might be too difficult to expect the maintenance of the exactly necessary conditions by a sufficiently large percentage of farmers, year after year, to prevent these problems from eventually cropping up and rendering GM-plants unprofitable.

There were other reports of GM-plants failing (or not succeeding enough to be worth implementing): GM sweet potatoes in Africa and bt-cotton in Indonesia⁴; bt-cotton on small South African farms⁵ (their conclusion is especially noteworthy, since a lot of agriculture in developed countries consists of small farms, and any shift away from that has always resulted in massive misery, starvation, homelessness, etc. for the suddenly landless). There’s suspicion that GM-plants are toxic when consumed⁶. GM-companies are prone to stealing traditionally developed/discovered traits, patenting them, and therefore potentially depriving the original developers of the free use of those traits⁷. And lastly, the development of GM-plants is just another step in the arms-race that has, over the last 50 years or so, led to an explosive growth in use of herbicides and pesticides, which has impoverished and bankrupted many farmers, disrupted many ecosystems with its poisons, and even poisoned people themselves, while only modestly improving yields for short periods of time, while at the same time destroying top-soil and demanding increased fertilizer (which I already mentioned will be more and more of a problem in the future).

So, overall, I have to come to the conclusion that GMO’s are indeed not a good thing for farmers in developed countries; alternatives such as organic farming with local, non-patented seeds seems more promising than the participation in a race that makes agriculture more expensive, more fuel-intensive, more toxic to humans and the environment, more sensitive to any and all imperfections in implementation, and robs farmers of the freedom to use their seeds as they see fit. And sometimes, it robs them of their livelihood altogether.

The Madonna/Whore Dichotomy and domestic violence

The phenomenon of victim-blaming in cases of rape is pretty well known, but apparently the same thing happens in cases of domestic violence:
part 1, part2.

The difference between the two videos is fucking huge. People immediately help both the white and the black woman in the first video. It’s especially striking that the black woman is helped by two women, who aggressively go against a Big Black Dude who looks like he could knock them across the room, too (and has clearly no compunctions in doing so, judging from his girlfriend’s face). This makes the excuses from the 2nd video look pretty unconvincing. Alternatively, it can be seen as the man being judged by the appearance of the woman he’s with, i.e. a man with a “slut” at his side is judged more likely to pull a weapon than a man with a “nice woman”.
Also striking is that in the 2nd video, you can clearly see the blame shifting, when a dude at a neighboring table says that “they” are making a scene and embarrassing themselves “as a couple”: the situation is now both the man’s and the woman’s fault, something completely absent from the first video.

There’s a whole bunch of interesting things going on in the videos, like the fact that men act against the skinny white dude, but women act against the black dude (though obviously with such a tiny sample size, that might just be coincidence), and that in both these cases, the helpers are willing to physically defend the women, while physical harm is used as an excuse to do nothing in the second video. The clothes and statures they put the men in are also interesting, since the white skinny guy is wearing a suit, while the big black guy is dressed more casually, which looks to me like they’re projecting different, somewhat racially stereotypical, forms of power.

So anyway, the blond, white, conservatively dressed woman gets the most and most immediate help, by the most people (both men and women). The black “slut” gets the least, and is accused of being a prostitute and of being partially responsible for the situation. It seems then that there’s both positive and negative gender (and race) stereotypes involved ¹: the former is the best fit for the “damsel in distress”, while the latter is the best fit for the “trashy slut”. Also, the black conservative woman and the white “slutty “woman are helped only by women (the former directly, the latter indirectly via a phonecall to the cops); this might be because women are less likely to attribute blame for domestic violence to the victim than men are², i.e. the “innocent victim” signal seems to disappear sooner for men than for women.

Now, the connection between dress and morality is pretty obvious from the videos, but I’m thinking class enters into it too. The women in the black minidress are judged as lower-class (all the way down to prostitute), and like I said, this seem to transfer onto the man at least in the case of the black couple, who is also judged as lower class, and therefore possibly more likely to become violent on the spot; they also are judged as “trashy”, and therefore the situation isn’t perceived as domestic violence, but as one of those stereotypical “embarrassing” arguments that “trashy” couples have in public. The case of the white couple probably has different class dynamics since they dressed the guy in a fancy suit, but even so, the other people in the restaurant fail to identify with the “trashy” woman and therefore don’t bother acting. I’d have loved to see them attempting to dress the women in a sexually revealing but high-class outfit, to see if the change in perceived class would have made a difference. The reason I’m thinking it might have (thought not necessarily so) is because of stronger empathy by middle-class people for middle-class people, and because the Western Cultural tradition attaches morality stronger to the choices of the poor than to the choices of the rich, especially in terms of women’s clothing.³.

All in all, a pretty fucked up situation, but apparently quite typical for our society (though… I’m mildly concerned that all the studies I found were done on undergrads. I know they’re easy to get a hold of when you’re a scientist, but I have my doubts about just how representative they are of society as a whole)

Today, and image-post

still having brain-freeze, despite David’s accusations of lying, so I’m posting images. Those don’t require much thinking.

first, an old picture from when I was doing a lot of photo-manipulation(in case you’re wondering, yes, that’s a photo of me):

second, an extremely fitting snapshot found on the internet:

and last, something sciency on interconnectivity: