What is obscene?

I was watching TV recently. At the climax of one of my favorite shows a man was murdered. He was stabbed twice in the chest. I watched as the blade entered his chest two times, piercing his lungs and heart. The man fell to the ground and was kicked into a nearby fire where he burst into flames as he was dying. This was shown on television, during prime time, with no outcry from the public or the censors. And why would there be an outcry? One can witness murders of this kind and worse on TV many times a week. Now imagine this scenario... Prime time TV. A loving husband and wife wish to have children. They take off their clothes and get into bed, as married couples do. We then clearly watch his erect penis enter her vagina two times as he tells her he loves her. Cut to nine months later and she gives birth to a healthy baby boy. The couple rejoices. The husband kisses his wife on the forehead and we...Fade to Black. Can you imagine the outrage? Can you imagine the FCC fines and the righteous letters of condemnation? In the first case we see the brutal, senseless ending of a life, and we get to see it in great detail. In the second scenario we are witnessing the loving, natural creation of life between two married adults. Which one is obscene?

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Mormons Win in California, For Now

Anyone who has been following the 2008/2009 contest of California's Proposition 8 (constitutional prohibition of marriage between people of the same sexual preference or same sexual identity) knows that it was submitted and promoted by Salt Lake City. The paper trail is clear. Arguably, Salt Lake City isn't even in California. But that was not the issue, because the Utah money did persuade California voters. Recently, the California Supreme Court upheld the amendment. But Friendly Atheist Hemant Mehta posted Am I a Bad Person If I Think The Prop 8 Ruling Was Correct?. His point is that this ruling will make it harder for anti-gay activists the next time around. States are beginning to domino into accepting marriage between those of same gender much like they did for those of different races in the mid 20th century. Conservatives have a valuable role to play; they fear and resist change. They function as a drag anchor to force those who would move ahead to work out iron-clad methods before change is implemented. Our legal system therefore resists implementing anything new from the grass roots direction until it is acceptable to at least half of the voting population. Very frustrating, but a historical necessity. When the process is short-circuited, we get embarrassments such as the 18th and 23rd amendments to our Federal Constitution.

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My comfort zone lost its sense of peace –

As was alluded to in a recent comment from Erich, my house was burglarized a couple of weeks ago. I'd enjoyed one of those rare, delightfully spontaneous evenings; after a dance recital for my daughter, I ran into a date I hadn't seen in awhile who invited me to a club to listen to music. Said daughter and her sister were off to their dad's for the weekend, so I was free to stay out. We had a lovely time and I headed home around 11:15. As I turned my key in the front lock and opened the door, I saw movement. I looked up just in time to see a kid run out of my bedroom, glance back at me then run down the hall toward the kitchen, away from me. In that moment, I snapped. Instead of backing out the door to safety and calling 911, I barreled straight toward him, screaming at the top of my lungs. Screaming at him to get the $%#^ out of my house - him AND his com-padre, whom I heard running down the back stairs. They both ran out the back door, one crossing the alley and running between the houses, and one running down the alley. I screamed again, ran back to my car and raced around the block hoping to spot one or both of them. No luck. I was sobbing with rage; I could not believe this had happened - again. I called 911.

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The wide and deep dysfunction of inequality

Is social inequality merely something to be ashamed of, or does it bring ruin upon a society? I just finished reading a book review of The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (2009). This book by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett was reviewed in the April 30, 2009 edition of Nature (available online only to subscribers). The reviewer was Michael Sargent, a developmental biologist. The Wilkinson/Pickett book explores the social consequences of income inequality.

Using statistics from reputable independent sources, they compare indices of health and social development in 23 of the world's richest nations and in the individual US states. Their striking conclusion is that the societies that do best for their citizens are those with the narrowest income differentials-such as Japan and the Nordic countries and the US state of New Hampshire. The most unequal-the United States as a whole, the United Kingdom and Portugal do worst. Many measures of the quality of life, including life expectancy, are correlated with the degree of economic equality in each country.

Here's the elephant in the political room: there is nothing in the Republican platform to address this damage being inflicted upon society. Quite the opposite: the Republican platform has continually stoke a wild unregulated capitalistic engine that disproportionately rewards some at the expense of others. What kind of damage is caused by this widespread disparity? You name it:

Problems such as mental illness, obesity, cardiovascular disease, unwillingness to engage with education, misuse of illegal and prescription drugs, teenage pregnancy, lack of social mobility and neglect of child welfare increase with greater inequality. Violence, from murder to the bullying of children in school follows the same pattern. These trends are tied up with the issues of trust: the authors chart a profound decline in trust and United States from the 1960s to the present, which matches rising inequality during the long Republican ascendancy.

The authors go so far as to suggest a local hardwired biological mechanism: neuroendocrinological stress. The perception that others are reveling in the good life at one's expense undermines self-esteem and releases the hormone cortisol which causes stress, accompanied by high blood pressure and high blood sugar levels. The cortisol overwhelms hormones, such as oxytocin, that are critical for trust-building. The damaging effect of long-term cortisol has been well-studied and established in other animals. In some experiments, monkeys that were chronically shoved to the bottom of a wide social hierarchy "are more inclined to self medicate with cocaine, if given the opportunity." This article give me yet more evidence that we would be often better off to relinquish much of our judgmentalism and to reconceptualize morality as an aspect of ecology.

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Suggestion for Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian. Hire real script writers.

My family doesn't go to many movies at theaters. In our experience, modern movie theater audiences tend to be far too talkative during the shows and prices are not cheap. Netflix is the default option for my family. I made an exception for Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (2009). On Friday, I had heard an director interviewed on NPR. She indicated that the producers had to work hard to earn the trust of those who run the various Smithsonian Museums, the setting for the movie. Plus the movie featured Robin Williams and other notable actors. Thus, I gathered up my willing daughters (aged 8 and 10) and assumed that even though this was a movie geared for kids, there was a decent chance that it would have some take-home value. I was sorely disappointed. The problem is that this movie, despite the almost-constant high-quality special effects, had no meaningful plot and no meaningful resolution, even for someone willing spend disbelief for the duration. I was already dissatisfied with the movie while the credits ran, but now that I have had further chance to consider the work both as a parent and a member of the audience, I'd have to say that I'm all the more disappointed. Those special effects constituted eye-popping pyrotechnics, but it's an old story for so many American movies: the producers forgot to hire a real script writer. Thus, the movie was merely one damned thing after another, with Ben Stiller and company dashing here and there, in a wacky and barely-connected series of scenes that continually threatening to break out into needless violence. What especially aggravated me is that the attention-deficit afflicted characters made almost no effort to think things through, quite a feat for 105 minutes. There was no sustained effort at problem solving, but only a constant need to drop buckets of wise-cracks and put-downs and to keep on the movie moving--to keep doing something, anything. This movie exemplifies one of the most prominent social illusions: that movement is necessarily progress. Here's my bottom line: Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian presents a collection of paper-thin characters running amok, somehow not getting each other killed. Most notable is the prominent appearance of the character of heroic aviator Amelia Earhart (played by the fetching Amy Adams), who was quickly reduced to a woman who became all-too-willing to take orders from a numbskull ("Larry," played by Stiller) while maintaining her schoolgirl crush on him for most of the movie's 105 minutes. This movie must have cost many tens of millions of dollars to produce. Whatever it cost, the producers of Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian could have spent a pittance more ($50,000??) to hire a real writer so that all of those special effects could have told some sort of story. Sheesh. [Hint: there are many good writers looking for work.] It was like the producers were concocting the scenes even as they were shooting them, even though this couldn't have been true, since big teams of computer artists had to be finessing in those dozens of special effects. What an embarrassment it must be for them to see their first-rate special effects put to such piss-poor use . . . .

Continue ReadingSuggestion for Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian. Hire real script writers.