Sex, plants, GOP, mass extinctions, crack, dirt, IUD

[mindstalk]

Slush and sleet. Winter sucks.

* Female desire
* Old Newsweek article on the Bible and gay marriage
* Old Chomsky interview on anarchism; as vague as most things on anarchism I see, plus talk of "spiritual transformation".
** I saw someone say today that the anarchist conception of the state is of minority (including traditional elected representatives) ruling a majority, and that if I think of their vision not as no-state but as direct-democratic state it'd make more sense. That does help, though at the same time they often talk about direct representation, which I favor but isn't clearly not-minority, and of having no money, which makes no sense.
* Using plants in RPGs.
* Urban farming
* Mercury found in corn syrup
* Kansas GOP: cut the school budgets!
* Yesterday's Krugman column, Bad Faith Economics, was listed on the front page as "Bad Economics". Also appropriate, but an interesting difference.
* No unified theory for mass extinctions. Impact here, vulcanism there and there, glaciation over there...
* Caltech's magazine "Engineering and Science has an article (PDF) on the crisis, by two Caltech economists.
* Tracking Obama campaign promises
* Perspectives (by a nuanced pro-lifer) on birth control, abortion, and adoption in the Philippines.
* 1990s crack baby epidemic: didn't happen.
* Babies eat dirt for health
* Wikipedia on the IUD. I'd never known much about them. Seem pretty effective, even usable as emergency contraception, oddly unpopular in the US.

Comments

[heron61.livejournal.com]

Interesting (and admittedly not terribly surprising) data on so-called "crack babies" - yet another case of doomsayers vastly overstating something.

The article on female desire was interesting, but also seriously flawed. When you have passages like

Are men simply more inhibited, more constrained by the bounds of culture? Chivers has tried to eliminate this explanation by including male-to-female transsexuals as subjects in one of her series of experiments (one that showed only human sex). These trans women, both those who were heterosexual and those who were homosexual, responded genitally and subjectively in categorical ways. They responded like men. This seemed to point to an inborn system of arousal.

I know there is serious bias against cultural explanations for sexuality involved. The article did go on to say that these responses could be attributed to early upbringing, but I did detect a vast bias against the rather obvious idea that men in most western cultures and especially in the US are heavily trained and enculturated against bisexuality and flexible sexual response, while women do not receive training and enculturation that is nearly as intense.

I also see a very easy answer - large-scale cross cultural studies, there are cultures where male homosexuality is not as heavily stigmatized, as well as (I think) a few where female homosexuality is heavily stigmatized. I'd be very interested in seeing cross-cultural data. However, what I see here (as in almost every other article I've ever read about gender sexuality and especially sexual preference) is at least some degree of reification of US cultural norms *sigh*.