From Dr. King’s anti-war speech “Beyond Vietnam,” April 4, 1967, Riverside Church, New York City.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. … A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war.

Kai Wright has written a good article about the whitewashing of Dr. King’s politics. The radicalism of his vision, against racism but also against poverty and against war, is too often forgotten.

Once upon a time, social scientists showed that couples who lived together before marrying, were more likely to divorce than couples who didn’t live together until marrying. This was true in Europe, Canada and the USA.

This surprised a bunch of people, and seemed to disprove the “try it on before you buy it” theory of marriage.

This did, however, greatly please those social conservatives who prefer to go though life in a constant panic, screaming “the marriage rates are falling! The marriage rates are falling!” They felt this proved their theory that sex without God’s blessing introduces some sort of intrinsic rot into marriages and made them more likely failures.

Then the shacking up effect seemed to go away in some of Europe. For instance, a social scientist showed that although it used to be the case that shacking up made divorce more likely in Denmark, once shacking up became more commonplace, it stopped having any relationship with divorce. Couples who shacked up before marrying were no more likely to get divorced than couples who lived apart until the wedding.

This supports the theory that when shacking up is a radical, unusual thing to do, the people who self-select into shacking up are also the people who, due to their unconventional preferences, are less likely to remain married.

Now shacking up has become the norm in the USA; slightly over half of all American women live with someone before they get married. And the most recent data (.pdf link) shows that Americans who shack up before marrying aren’t more likely to get divorced.

This seems to put the kibosh on the “living in sin = doomed to divorce” theory.

Oh, and Americans getting married for the first time have a 33% chance of getting divorced someday — not “over half,” as is often claimed. In fact, the US divorce rate is lower than it’s been in decades — and it’s lowest of all in Massachusetts, home of same-sex marriage. Wait, wasn’t same-sex marriage supposed to destroy marriage rates?

For more discussion, see Pandagon.

Curtsy: Ezra Klein, Marginal Revolution.

Please use this thread to say whatever you’d like to say, or to share any links you’d like to share. Self-linking is encouraged.

* * *

As a Harvard-trained neuroanatomist, Jill Bolte Taylor has always known more about brains than most people. But when a brain hemorrhage triggered her own stroke, she suddenly had a front-row seat on the deterioration of the brain.

Dr. Taylor recounts the details of her stroke and the amazing insights she gained from it in a riveting 18-minute video of her speech at the Technology, Entertainment, Design Conference in Monterey, Calif., last month. Her fascinating lecture includes a detailed explanation of the differences between the left and right sides of the brain, complete with an incredibly cool prop — a real human brain.

The New York Times reports that social scientists have once more demonstrated the obvious:¹

Fat Bias Worse For Women

Based on body mass index, which is a measure of body fat based on height and weight, a normal weight is in the range of 18.5 to 24.9. The study found that women begin to experience noticeable weight bias — such as problems at work or difficulty in personal relationships — when they reach a body mass index, or B.M.I., of 27. For a 5-foot-5-inch woman, that means discrimination starts once she reaches a weight of 162 pounds — or about 13 pounds more than her highest healthy weight, based on B.M.I. charts.

But the researchers found that men can bulk up far more without experiencing discrimination. Weight bias against men becomes noticeable when a man reaches a B.M.I. of 35 or higher. A 5-foot-9-inch man has a B.M.I. of 35 if he weighs 237 pounds — or 68 pounds above his highest healthy weight.

The study also revealed that women are twice as likely as men to report weight discrimination and that weight-related workplace bias and interpersonal mistreatment due to obesity are common. The researchers found that weight discrimination is more prevalent than discrimination based on sexual orientation, nationality or ethnicity, physical disability and religious beliefs.

“However, despite its high prevalence, it continues to remain socially acceptable,” said co-author Tatiana Andreyava.

“Despite its high prevalence, it continues to remain socially acceptable”? Uh-huh. Doesn’t it seem more likely that because of its social acceptability, it remains highly prevalent?

Especially since what they’re really measuring is perceived discrimination and bias. All those other forms of discrimination are less socially acceptable to state openly than weight bias; they are therefore more likely to be kept secret, and less likely to be noticed as discrimination. So this study doesn’t necessarily show that discrimination based on “sexual orientation, nationality or ethnicity, physical disability and religious beliefs” necessarily happens any less often than weight-related discrimination; it may be that these other discriminations happen just as frequently, but are more frequently kept secret, and so less likely to be perceived as discrimination.

1. Which is a very useful think for social scientists to do, in my opinion. (back)

I’m going to get back to regular posting soon. I’ve been really tired and busy over the past couple weeks, so I’ve neglected posting. Between nesting, midterm grading, sleeping, and trying to catch my breath, I’ve been a little preoccupied. I definitely want to respond to the Obama race speech…just to tease everyone a little I think there were many problems with the speech, and I want to address some of them in a post.

In the mean time, let me know what I’ve missed in the blog world.

From an LA Times op-ed:

Prison rape occupies a fairly odd space in our culture. It is, all at once, a cherished source of humor, a tacitly accepted form of punishment and a broadly understood human rights abuse. We pass legislation called the Prison Rape Elimination Act at the same time that we produce films meant to explore the funny side of inmate sexual brutality.

Occasionally, we even admit that prison rape is a quietly honored part of the punishment structure for criminals. When Enron’s Ken Lay was sentenced to jail, for instance, Bill Lockyer, then the attorney general of California, spoke dreamily of his desire “to personally escort Lay to an 8-by-10 cell that he could share with a tattooed dude who says, ‘Hi, my name is Spike, honey.’ ”

The culture is rife with similar comments. Although it would be unthinkable for the government today to institute corporal punishment in prisons, there is little or no outrage when the government interns prisoners in institutions where their fellow inmates will brutally violate them. We won’t touch you, but we can’t be held accountable for the behavior of Spike, now can we?

To quote myself: The prison rape epidemic is probably going to get worse. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ projections, if our current rate of sending men to prison is maintained, then at some point in the future 15% of American men will have spent time in prison. (6% of white men, 17% of Latinos, and 32% of Black men. For comparison’s sake, the projections for women are 1%, 2% and 6%.)

If those projections are true (or even partly true), and if the prison rape epidemic continues unabated, the overall number of American rape victims will vastly increase over the coming decades. This is true even if rape prevalence outside of prison doesn’t change at all. This is one reason why it’s essential to support strong measures to combat prison rape; unfortunately, all that’s gotten through congress so far are weak half-measures.

PodCastle is the world’s first fantasy audio magazine. Each week we bring you short stories across the spectrum of fantasy from leading authors and new discoveries. Like our sister podcasts, Escape Pod and Pseudopod, PodCastle is entirely free to listen and share.

Podcastle is also edited by noted fantasy writer Rachel Swirsky, aka Mandolin. I regularly listen to Escape Pod (which is science fiction focused), but I’m really more a fantasy reader, so I’ve been looking forward to this.

The premiere podcast features one of the biggest names in fantasy fiction, and a short story I was once obsessed with: “Come, Lady Death” by Peter. S. Beagle.

(Links NSFW. Depending on your workplace, I guess.)

Bechdel doesn’t seem too torn up about it, though.

From KSL channel 5 in Utah:

Time Magazine voted it the book of the year, but some students are calling it pornographic and asking it be removed from their curriculum.

Thomas Alvord, with the group “No More Pornography,” says, “The issue is exposing people to pornography.”

The issue is with “Fun Home,” a book assigned for reading in a mid-level English class at the University of Utah. The class introduces students to different literary genres. In the case of “Fun Home,” it’s told in the style of a comic book. The story centers around the author as she comes to terms with her own and her father’s homosexuality.

Drawings depicting sex acts are included in the 230 page novel. A student in the class was offended and approached the group “No More Pornography,” which made headlines earlier this year when it staged a successful protest of music videos shown a gym in Provo. The group has started an online petition in protest of the book. [...]

The student in question accepted an alternate assignment but would like to see further changes. The university has no plans make any. It says while a student has the right not to read the book, other students in the class have the right to judge for themselves.

“No More Pornography” hopes to continue talking with the University of Utah and will continue the online petition. The group is also asking that filters be installed on campus computers to prevent students from accessing explicit images.

I’m pretty sure these are Christian anti-porn activists, not Feminist anti-porn activists. But this still reminds me of one of my primary arguments against the MacKinnnon/Dworkin anti-pornography legislation, back when that argument hadn’t yet been made moot by court rulings that the M/D ordinance was unconstitutional: Any anti-porn legislation that isn’t extremely narrowly defined will be used by right-wing Christians to harass queer and feminist cartoonists.¹

Fun Home is, for those of you who haven’t read it, one of the best American comics of the last decade. I posted about Fun Home previously here.

Curtsy: Dykestowatchoutfor.com and Journalista.

Illustration beyond the fold is NSFW.

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1. And other sorts of artists, as well, I suppose. But it’s only cartoonists who are really important, needless to say. (back)