Frank Zappa on Crossfire

I thought this was fascinating. CNN's Crossfire, 1986. A glimpse of the culture wars from 20 years ago with Robert Novak, Frank Zappa, and others.



Via metafilter.

Conservative vs. Liberal Morality, or Why Conservatives Just Don't Care

From opposing HPV vaccines because it "might encourage" sex to opposing lifesaving overdose-reversal medication because it "might encourage" drug use, social conservatives frequently take stances that liberals find baffling, if not downright evil.

These guys might be able to explain conservatives' behavior:

Moral Foundations Theory proposes that five innate psychological systems form the foundation of “intuitive ethics.” Each culture constructs its particular morality as a set of virtues, values, and ideas based on or related to these five foundations (as well as to many other non-moral aspects of the evolved mind). The current American culture war can be seen as arising from the fact that liberals try to create a morality relying almost exclusively on the Harm/Care and Fairness/Reciprocity foundations; conservatives, especially religious conservatives, use all five foundations, including Ingroup/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/Sanctity. In every sample we have examined (including samples in the US, UK and Western Europe), political conservatism correlates negatively with endorsement of the Harm and Fairness foundations, and positively with endorsement of the Ingroup, Authority, and Purity foundations.

Maybe I'm just a hopeless liberal atheist, but Harm/Care and Fairness/Reciprocity appear to be legitimate moral values while Authority/Respect and Purity/Sanctity are just a bunch of nonsense. Ingroup/Loyalty is good in some circumstances, but is probably also at the root of most evil that goes on in the world.

What good is Authority/Respect? Is "I was only following orders" really a moral justification? Following authority is moral when the authority figure commands moral action and immoral otherwise.

Do I even need to point out how dangerous Ingroup/Loyalty is? It's nice to watch out for your siblings and countrymen, but there's nothing moral about, e.g., going to war for your side when your side is in the wrong.

As for Purity/Sanctity, how is that a moral issue? Oh, she had premarital sex, therefore she's immoral? She's on her period, so it's immoral for her husband to touch her?

Obviously, this is an over-generalization, but this confirms my intuition about the American culture wars. One side cares more about people; the other about abstractions like Authority, Loyalty, and Purity. In my book, any time you support a policy that leads to more deaths, more harm, or more unfairness for some intangible reason, you're probably doing the wrong thing.

This divide is quite clear even within religion. Conservative religious groups worry about following rules (authority) and being holy (purity) while the liberal ones focus on charity (care) and social justice (fairness.)

Shocking News: Abstinence-Only Sex Ed Has No Effect

Via Oliver Willis, a new study:

WASHINGTON - Students who took part in sexual abstinence programs were just as likely to have sex as those who did not, according to a study ordered by Congress.

Also, those who attended one of the four abstinence classes that were reviewed reported having similar numbers of sexual partners as those who did not attend the classes. And they first had sex at about the same age as other students — 14.9 years, according to Mathematica Policy Research Inc.

The federal government now spends about $176 million annually on abstinence-until-marriage education. Critics have repeatedly said they don't believe the programs are working, and the study will give them reinforcement.

However, Bush administration officials cautioned against drawing sweeping conclusions from the study. They said the four programs reviewed — among several hundred across the nation — were some of the very first established after Congress overhauled the nation's welfare laws in 1996.

Officials said one lesson they learned from the study is that the abstinence message should be reinforced in subsequent years to truly affect behavior.

"This report confirms that these interventions are not like vaccines. You can't expect one dose in middle school, or a small dose, to be protective all throughout the youth's high school career," said Harry Wilson, the commissioner of the Family and Youth Services Bureau at the Administration for Children and Families.

Doesn't that just sum up the Bush administration? "What we're doing isn't working? Let's do more of it!"

There was some good news, though:

"I really do think it's a two-part story. First, there is no evidence that the programs increased the rate of sexual abstinence," said Chris Trenholm, a senior researcher at Mathematica who oversaw the study. "However, the second part of the story that I think is equally important is that we find no evidence that the programs increased the rate of unprotected sex."

Trenholm said his second point of emphasis was important because some critics of abstinence programs have contended that they lead to less frequent use of condoms.

Maybe sex ed isn't really that important. I mean, what is there to teach, from a health standpoint, besides, "Use a freaking condom!"

I still think purity balls are the creepiest thing ever.

The Duke Rape Case

(For those living in a cave. Or in other countries, I guess.)

The prosecutor's behavior was outrageous. He and the accuser should be prosecuted. The people in the press and at Duke who jumped on the bandwagon against the boys were in the wrong.

But spare me your faux-outrage, conservatives.

Radley Balco (a libertarian blogger and FOXNews.com contributor) has a great response to this idiotic statement by Glenn Reynolds:

In the conventional imagination, it used to be -- see To Kill a Mockingbird or reports of the Scottsboro rape trial -- that it was the noble fairness-obsessed lefties who supported due process against the ignorant right-wing hicks who tried to lynch people out of a mixture of racism, political opportunism borne of racism, journalistic sensationalism, and sheer meanness. Now the hats have switched. That's worth noting.

Balco's response:

I'm not left-wing or right-wing (though I've been accused of both).

But the reason why the narrative for most of the last century has been that of noble, left-wing ACLU and NAACP lawyers coming to the aid of black people wrongly accused by racist white people is because for most of the last century, that's the way it has actually happened. Over and over and over. And I'm not just talking about the Jim Crow era. See Tulia. Or Hearne. Or the dozens of people freed by the liberal lawyers at the Innocence Project.

And let's not go overboard in heaping praise on the Duke players' more conservative defenders. Reynolds is an honest-to-goodness civil libertarian. So I don't include him in this. But to hear law-and-order right-wingers like Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage, or the Powerline crew scream about prosecutoral excess, the rights of the accused, and political opportunism on the part of a prosecutor these past few months really strained all credulity. Yes. I'd love to think their interest in this case was motivated solely by their sense of justice. But come on. Does anyone not think the race and class of the accused, the race and class of the accuser, and the politics of feminism and anti-feminism had something to do with their sudden embrace of and familiarity with NACDL talking points?

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe these conservatives have gotten religion. Maybe in the future, O'Reilly, Hannity, & Co. will actually make a cause celebre about cases where the accused aren't rich white kids with high-paid attorneys accused of raping a poor black woman. I'm skeptical.

Wikipedia Hopelessly Biased; Conservapedia to the Rescue!

Via Ed Brayton, the Conservapedia.

From Conservapedia's front page:

Conservapedia is a much-needed alternative to Wikipedia, which is increasingly anti-Christian and anti-American. On Wikipedia, many of the dates are provided in the anti-Christian "C.E." instead of "A.D.", which Conservapedia uses. Christianity receives no credit for the great advances and discoveries it inspired, such as those of the Renaissance. Read a list of many Examples of Bias in Wikipedia

Because not saying, "In the year of our Lord" (Anno Domini) is anti-Christian. Oh those poor, persecuted Christians. By that logic, not using Jewish years makes them antisemitic. It's 5767, you Nazis!

I wouldn't be surprised if wikipedia does have a slight liberal/libertarian bias, depending on the topic, but Conservapedia is just hilarious. They also don't have much content as of yet.

Some of the comments at Dispatches put Conservapedia into context:

Raging Bee:

This sounds like it could grow into a viable strategy for extremists who want to keep their followers isolated from reality: simply create their own "reality," with its own encyclopedias and other authoritative-looking backups, so people won't have to -- or think they have to -- look outside their own bubble-verse for any answer to any question that might pop up in their minds.

DuWayne:

This is just what these folks have been doing for a long time. One of my friend's from church (from when I was a teen) was homeschooled. His dad said, on more than one occasion, that the reason a woman should go to college, is to make her qualified to teach her children at home.

All of their text books came, either from a Christian publishing house, or off the list of approved texts from the same publisher (sorry, I don't recall the name of the publisher). They also had a set of encyclopidia's from the same publisher.