Links - 28th November 2013

Unwilling to burden family with medical bills, 95 year old samsui woman commits suicide.

Give women more time, support and choices - "Interestingly, in more than 20 years of practice, not one of my patients who made the choice to keep her baby after counselling ever came back to tell me she regretted her decision. Women need to be provided with ample information about the medical and emotional aspects of abortion, as well as the alternatives available, for their decision to be an informed one. A "cooling-off" period of 48 hours between the counselling session and the procedure is grossly insufficient. A woman or a couple should be given at least one to two weeks to weigh their options so that the choice they ultimately make is as well considered as possible. One of the most painfully poignant moments in my life took place when I came across a woman with an infertility problem who tearfully said: "Doc, I had an abortion when I was younger. And I think I might have aborted the only baby my womb would ever bear.""
This person was accused of being a fundie, of providing misinformation and of being part of an organised campaign (and a wedge for an abortion ban). Presumably we should run a factory line and give all women who ask for abortions one immediately without any time, support or choices.

Reproductive history patterns and long-term mortality rates: a Danish, population-based record linkage study - "Risk of death was more than six times greater among women who had never been pregnant compared with those who only had birth(s). Increased risks of death were 45%, 114% and 191% for 1, 2 and 3 abortions, respectively, compared with no abortions after controlling for other reproductive outcomes and last pregnancy age"

Fourth graders learn to own their ‘white privilege’ – thanks to Common Core-aligned lesson - " 4th graders are looking into their souls to see their “white privilege.”"

Check my privilege? I have, thanks. You’re still wrong - "This week, I bring you a dispatch from the frontline of pseudo-intellectual, metropolitan navel-gazing. This is, after all, what you pay me for... ‘I am a feminist!’ declares somebody, via a book or blog or Tumblr or tweet. ‘Aha!’ retort others, ever vigilant for this sort of thing. ‘But have you canvassed the views of Somalian refugees who are weekending female impersonators in Anglesea?’ ‘Um, no?’ replies our proto-feminist. ‘Check your privilege!’ retort the angry denizens of cyberspace. ‘You are a tool of the patriarchy! Go to hell!’... this instinct — to shriek ‘check your privilege!’ at anybody who says anything and then consider this the end of an argument — is pernicious, and spreading, to the extent that it’s only a matter of time before somebody does it in a newspaper that isn’t the Guardian. More importantly, it’s simply screamingly annoying when people piously employ arguments they don’t understand at all. Wrongness I can stomach. Incoherence of wrongness, not so much... it has become faddish among people who don’t read books or essays but merely tweets and internet comments, and thus don’t know what they are talking about. So what you end up is with a kind of minority Top Trumps, and a sort of spreading, infectious belief that the more box-tickingly disadvantaged a person is, the wiser, kinder and more all-seeing they must be. And it’s stupid. In truth, as anybody who has ever been mugged can tell you, society’s most disadvantaged can be right bastards. Indeed, they’re often right bastards to each other. Certainly, mainstream society might harbour issues with, say, Islamic fundamentalists and post-op transsexuals for similar reactionary conservative reasons. But this does not entail, much as the dumb left might wish it did, that these two groups are thus each other’s natural allies. I mean, come on. Think more. Sometimes, your enemy’s enemy is even worse than him... The fact that ‘Check your privilege!’ has even become a thing is symptomatic of the modern tragedy of the British left. This is what happens to a political movement when it gets colonised by sanctimonious, humourless, self-loathing middle-class hypocrites, perhaps of just the sort I’d be myself if I were devoid of any irony, wit or self-knowledge"

Big Business as a supporter of anti-racism – Noam Chomsky - "establishment conservatives are “anti-racists” who say that “race doesn’t matter.” To the plutocracy, a human being is not a creature with a mind, a culture, or any kind of identity, but simply a unit of production and consumption. Therefore race naturally “doesn’t matter” to those who think in strictly economic terms. Because of that, Multinational corporations are usually amongst the biggest supporters of anti-racism you will find anywhere. Its important to understand the link between late capitalism and antiracism, how we went from being producer to consumer societies."

The peculiar idea that you shouldn't discriminate against the disabled. - "In the term now ending, the Supreme Court issued three decisions limiting the reach of the Americans With Disabilities Act. My favorite is Toyota v. Williams, holding that carpal tunnel syndrome did not qualify as a disability for a woman who worked on an automobile assembly line... Trying to interpret a law that expects people to be abled and disabled simultaneously, the court plunges into a festival of Talmudic distinctions. Is "working" a "major life activity"? Do we mean working in a "specific job" or working in a "broad range of jobs"? What about "performing manual tasks"? Is that a "major life activity"? Can it be "specific," or does it need to be a "broad range" like "working"? (The justices' uncertainty about whether working is a major life activity makes you think it must be very pleasant to be a Supreme Court justice)... For millions of years until the ADA was enacted in 1990, discriminating in favor of ability was thought to be a good thing. It still is, most of the time... The ADA, in fact, neatly exposes the weakness and confusion of "equal opportunity"—the concept invoked in support of all our anti-discrimination laws. The closer we come to eliminating discrimination based on race or sex, etc., the more important innate ability will become in assigning people their stations in life. And if we ever were to eliminate all differences in outcome based on differences in ability, that would not be equal opportunity. That would look more like equality, period. Or, to use the pejorative term, "equality of result.""

Jason Richwine Hispanics and IQs: The Heritage Foundation scholar began researching race and intelligence at Harvard. - "A three-member panel at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government accepted Richwine’s thesis, titled “IQ and Immigration Policy.” In it, Richwine provided statistical evidence that Hispanic immigrants, even after several generations, had lower IQs than non-Hispanic whites... This week, Heritage released a damning estimate of the immigration bill, co-authored by Richwine. The new study was all about cost, totally eliding the IQ issues that Richwine had mastered, but it didn’t matter after Washington Post reporter Dylan Matthews found the dissertation... Immigration reform’s political enemies know—and can’t stand—that racial theorists are cheering them on from the cheap seats. They know that the left wants to exploit that—why else do so many cameras sprout up whenever Minutemen appear on the border, or when Pat Buchanan comes out of post-post-post retirement to write another book about the “death of the West?” Academics aren’t so concerned with the politics. But they know all too well the risks that come with research connecting IQ and race... “His mistake is that he wrote about a taboo subject,” Charles Murray told the New Republic yesterday. “And to write about IQ and race or ethnicity is to take a very good chance of destroying your career""

How Diversity Punishes Asians, Poor Whites and Lots of Others - "the same institutions that give no special consideration to poor white applicants boast about their commitment to "diversity" and give enormous admissions breaks to blacks, even to those from relatively affluent homes... except for the very wealthiest institutions like Harvard and Princeton, private colleges and universities are reluctant to admit students who cannot afford their high tuitions. And since they have a limited amount of money to give out for scholarship aid, they reserve this money to lure those who can be counted in their enrollment statistics as diversity-enhancing "racial minorities." Poor whites are apparently given little weight as enhancers of campus diversity, while poor non-whites count twice in the diversity tally, once as racial minorities and a second time as socio-economically deprived... Besides the bias against lower-class whites, the private colleges in the Espenshade/Radford study seem to display what might be called an urban/Blue State bias against rural and Red State occupations and values... Participation in such Red State activities as high school ROTC, 4-H clubs, or the Future Farmers of America was found to reduce very substantially a student's chances of gaining admission to the competitive private colleges in the NSCE database on an all-other-things-considered basis. The admissions disadvantage was greatest for those in leadership positions in these activities or those winning honors and awards. "Being an officer or winning awards" for such career-oriented activities as junior ROTC, 4-H, or Future Farmers of America, say Espenshade and Radford, "has a significantly negative association with admission outcomes at highly selective institutions." Excelling in these activities "is associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds of admission"... Military veterans and aspiring military officers, like poor whites and future American farmers, are clearly not what most competitive private colleges have in mind when they speak of the need for "diversity""

Researchers: Colleges should count gays, but fake homosexuals remain significant problem - "Students pretending to be gay in order to gain admittance to top universities is a real phenomenon"
I think this is called 'straight privilege'. Ditto for faking your ethnicity

University of Delaware: Students Required to Undergo Ideological Reeducation - The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education - FIRE - "Following an intense campaign led by FIRE and national media attention, the University of Delaware dropped an ideological reeducation program that was referred to in the university's own materials as a "treatment" for students' incorrect attitudes and beliefs. The program's stated goal was for the approximately 7,000 students in Delaware's residence halls to adopt highly specific university-approved views on politics, race, sexuality, sociology, moral philosophy, and environmentalism. The residence life education program made mandatory, among other things, one-on-one meetings between students and their Resident Assistants (RAs) where students were asked intrusive questions, such as "When did you discover your sexual identity?""

Fisher v. University of Texas decision at the Supreme Court: Affimative action at universities should switch to class-based preferences. - "a student who is socioeconomically disadvantaged, in a variety of ways, scores on average 399 points lower on the SAT than a wealthy student. By contrast, the average SAT difference between African-American and white students of the same socioeconomic status is only 56 points.* In other words, the SAT class gap is seven times as large as the SAT race gap... What happens to racial diversity when colleges stop using racial preferences in admissions? The numbers of minority students don’t necessarily drop"

Moral and citizenship education as statecraft in Singapore: a curriculum critique - "the Civics and Moral Education programme is more a matter of training students to absorb pragmatic values deemed to be important for Singapore to achieve social cohesion and economic success, rather than moral education as the development of intrinsic commitment to and habituation in the practice of values, defended on autonomous moral considerations and not mere national expediency"
This is in the 'Journal of Moral Education'. There is such a journal.