MD Legislature Censors Porn at University

Just to show how out of touch I am with local news, the Hoff movie
theater at the University of Maryland was going to show a porn film,
Pirates II: Stagnetti’s Revenge
(Wikipedia link; should be SFW), preceded by a talk by a representative of Planned
Parenthood
(Washington Post,
UMD
Diamondback
coverage).

Then the Maryland General Assembly heard about this, and pushed
through an amendment to a budget bill denying the university state
funds if it showed a XXX-rated movie. The university pulled the film,
and the amendment was withdrawn.

As you can imagine, this has caused a certain amount of discussion on
teh Intertubes.

The Post says that the state funding that would have been withdrawn
amounted to $424 million. I haven’t managed to find the current
budget, but in
FY2003, the
total budget for this campus was $1.16 billion, of which $633 million
(54%) came from the state. Assuming that the current year’s budget is
comparable, clearly this amounts to a threat by the legislature to
cripple the university, if not shut it down entirely. I’ll leave it up
to the courts to decide whether this is legal or not, but clearly it’s
an attempt at censorship.

The Diamondback quotes Vice President for Student Affairs Linda
Clement as saying,

We thought it was an opportunity to have a dialogue revolving around pornography as a film genre and promote student discussion

and in that spirit, the Mod +1: Insightful award of the day goes to
commenter Stephanie,
responding to another comment:

“Psychological studies have shown that pornography creates a subconscious idea of what sex should be and how females should behave, and generates anger.”

This is exactly why we need to have conversations about pornography instead of just relegating it to a private space.

One thing to bear in mind is that the movie in question isn’t Jamaican
Amateurs 19 or Asian Cum-Shots 116 or some similar
piece of Extruded Pr0n Product. Evidently Pirates II had a
budget
of $8 million,
sets,
(NSFW), costumes, CGI effects, and even a
plot.
It was released both as a hardcore porn movie, and also in an
abbreviated R-rated version.

So presumably it would have served as an illustration of what porn can
be, not what it usually is (something like what Moore and Gebbie did
with
Lost Girls).

Of course, I haven’t seen this movie, so I’m probably assuming too
much. But if you were going to have a conversation about pornography,
and show a movie so that everyone’s talking about the same thing, this
movie seems like a reasonable choice.

I wouldn’t mind exploring questions like, does porn degrade women? If
so, is this a necessary feature of porn? Does it set unrealistic
expectations about sex?

I can understand the latter objection. But on the other hand, one
might also argue that romance novels and “chick flicks” set
unrealistic expectations about love and romance. And why doesn’t
anyone complain that action movies set unrealistic expectations about,
well, a whole slew of things? Does anyone think they can jump out of a
fourth-story window while dodging a hail of bullets, roll behind a
parked car, and fire back at one’s attackers? Or engage in a 60 mph
car chase through crowded city streets without wrapping oneself around
a streetlight? In these cases, we understand that what’s on the
screen, while grounded in reality, frequently takes flights of fantasy
because it looks cool. Why can’t we take the same approach to porn?
(The first piece of advice that I saw on cunnilingus, possibly in
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid
to Ask, basically said to forget how it’s done in movies; if
you’re doing it right, you’re blocking all the action with your head,
so it doesn’t make for good cinema.)

Another comment that caught my attention was
this one
by Jor:

The screening wasn’t intended to be recreational but rather educational.

which brings to mind the words of Tom Lehrer:

I do have a cause, though: it is obscenity. I’m for it.

Unfortunately, the civil liberties types who are fighting this
issue have to fight it, owing to the nature of the laws, as a matter
of freedom of speech and stifling of free expression and so on, but we
know what’s really involved: dirty books are fun, that’s all there is
to it. But you can’t get up in a court and say that, I
suppose.

I have to ask: what if this screening were purely
recreational? How would that change anything? The Hoff theater
shows
plenty of movies just for fun, without a lecture or discussion
attached. It’s at the student union, fer cryin’ out loud. Downstairs,
there’s a bowling alley with pool tables and video games, but no one’s
suggesting that those should be frowned upon unless you can tie them
to a talk about newtonian mechanics or computer graphics. Across the
street is a football stadium; I’ve never heard the slightest inkling
of a suggestion that it be used only to teach about game theory or the
dynamics of competing groups.

So how is a screening of Pirates II different? Well, it’s
got sex in it, obviously. But why is sex always
the great exception?

In recent years, I’ve seen the term “porn” applied metaphorically to
non-sexual content. E.g., The Passion of the Christ has
been called
“biblical porn“,
and the Left Behind series has been called
“Armageddon porn“.
The idea is that the point of the œuvre is quite
obviously to show some subject (Jesus’ suffering and pre-tribulatin
suffering, in the examples above), and everything else is there to
allow that depiction to happen. There are plenty of videos that fit
that description, usually filed under “special interest” at the video
store.

Then there’s
this gem:

Pornography IS the largest industry on the internet … why try to draw MORE viewers to it by attempting to make it publicly acceptable? Check out Patrick Carnes book, “Out of the Shadows”. Sex addiction is right up their with alcoholism and food addiction. But it’s worse because the shame of it is often carried by the addict alone, while the addict destroys his world trying to keep it a secret. I’m speaking from experience. Please don’t dismiss this as fun or educational.

The argument here seems to be “porn is not socially acceptable, so
people feel ashamed when they watch it in private. But if it were
socially acceptable, more people would watch it, and would feel
ashamed”. Obviously a circular argument, along the same lines as “gays
should stay in the closet, because otherwise they’ll be made to feel
miserable by homophobes like me”.

Okay, there’s the other argument, that some people have a real problem
with sex addiction. This may even be true. But hiding porn and trying
to pretend that it doesn’t exist doesn’t solve anything, any more than
Prohibition helped alcoholics.

And no, I’m not denying that 90+% of porn is crap, and that many of
the prudes’ allegations may be true. But can we at least face the
problems head-on, openly, like adults, and not try to sweep them under
the rug?

Unicode and the Pope

I keep thinking that
Unicode
has everything, but it turns out that it doesn’t. In particular, there’s a
collection of emoji
that’s been proposed, but hasn’t been approved by the powers that be.

The reason I bring this up is that recently, the pope made some
remarkably boneheaded comments; naturally, people pointed and laughed,
because that’s what you do when someone says something embarrassingly
stupid.

In response, the Catholic News Service published
a story
chiding people for that:

ROME (CNS) — Mockery is not acceptable in public discussions, especially when the subject is the pope, said the president of the Italian Catholic bishops’ conference.
[…]

“We will not accept that the pope, in the media or anywhere else, is mocked or offended,” said Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco of Genoa, opening the spring meeting of the permanent council of the Italian bishops’ conference.

I hope that emoji proposal passes; that way, the next time something
like this happens, I’ll be able to write

<span style="font-size: 1">💚</span>

to represent the world’s smallest violin, playing for the poor little
WATBs
and their hurt feelings. To quote Bender, “Oh, wait. You’re
serious. Let me laugh even harder.”

Meanwhile, maybe someone can explain to the Catholic church that if
they don’t like being ridiculed, they shouldn’t say such ridiculous
things.

Seriously, is this the best they have left? People shouldn’t make fun
of religious people because it hurts their feelings?

Oh, and the article also says:

The pope has often urged the world to become “more God-fearing while building a society based on humanitarian values and moral principles of life,” they said.

Maybe the problem is that he’s trying to pull in opposite directions:
it’s hard to build a society “based on humanitarian values and moral
principles” while at the same time telling them to be afraid of a
magic man in the sky. Drop the fear and the superstition, and then
we’ll talk.

Teasing Information Out of Noise

Humanist Symposium

Bennett Haselton has an interesting
article
at Slashdot about how to develop a “scientific” test for child
pornography.

Given that Slashdot is all about technology and gadgets and stuff, you
might expect the article to describe a new image-recognition algorithm
or something, and wonder how it could possibly work on such a
subjective problem. But he doesn’t; in his proposal, the
“measurement”, if you will, consists of people looking at photos that
may or may not be illegal pornography.

In other words, the problem is that we don’t have a good
scientific instrument that we can point at a photo and have a red
light go on if it’s illegal pornography. All we have is people, who
have to make a judgment call as to whether a given photo is legal or
not.

One problem with this is that we’re asking people to make a subjective
judgment call. And that means they’re likely to get the wrong answer.

So Haselton’s approach is to use people as his instrument, then say
okay, we know that this instrument is unreliable; let’s find out under
which circumstances this instrument fails, and try to counter that.

For instance (he claims), you can take a given photo, mix it in with a
bunch of others that are illegal, and people will condemn the whole
set. But you can then mix the same photo with a bunch of innocent
photos, and people will declare the whole set legal. This tells us
that our instrument is a) unreliable (a photo can’t be legal and
illegal at the same time), and b) affected by context. He then proposes ways to work around this problem.

What I found interesting about this article is that Haselton tries to
apply the scientific method to a highly-subjective area. A lot of
people think science is about labs and test tubes and computer models
and such. But as I’ve argued
elsewhere,
the hardware is secondary, and the core of the scientific method
is really a mindset, and asking the questions “what is the world
like?” and “how do I know this isn’t garbage?”

The other remarkable thing about this article is that it demonstrates
how to tease information out of noise: you have witnesses making
subjective judgment calls on an emotionally-charged subject, biased
prosecutors, biased defenders, and fuzzy legal guidelines. You might
be tempted to throw up your hands and declare that under these
conditions it’s impossible for justice to be served reliably. And yet,
he takes the optimistic approach that no, we can serve
justice, or at least improve our odds of getting the right answer.

It’s a bit like John Gordon’s
summary of coding theory
(aka the biography of Alice and Bob):

Now most people in Alice’s position would give up. Not Alice. She has courage which can only be described as awesome.

Against all odds, over a noisy telephone line, tapped by the tax authorities and the secret police, Alice will happily attempt, with someone she doesn’t trust, whom she cannot hear clearly, and who is probably someone else, to fiddle her tax returns and to organise a coup d’etat, while at the same time minimising the cost of the phone call.

A coding theorist is someone who doesn’t think Alice is crazy.

I often hear that such-and-such problem can’t be approached
scientifically (morality, the existence of God, beauty, whether
something is pornographic or obscene, etc.). A lot of times, though,
it’s because people either haven’t bothered to see how far a
scientific or rational approach can take them, or else they’re unaware
of how much can be done with such an approach, or how
simple it can be. (The reason I don’t make a big deal of whether a
restaurant serves Coke or Pepsi is that my brother and I once tried a taste
test, and I found that I couldn’t really tell them apart.)

It’s also awe-inspiring to think about how far we’ve come, as a
species: not only have we improved our instruments — from naked
eyes to Galileo’s telescope to Hubble — but through statistical
methods, experimental design, and others, we’ve increased the amount
of information we can glean from existing instruments.

Not bad for a bunch of naked apes with oversized brains and a knack
for cooperation.

Religion and Legal Insanity

You may remember a
story
from last year about a 16-month-old infant who was starved to death by
his mother for not saying “Amen” at mealtime. Today’s
Post has a
followup.

The story is ghastly and appalling, and the mother is obviously crazy
by any reasonable definition of the term. But that doesn’t mean that
she’s legally insane:

Tomorrow, five of the group’s alleged members — including the boy’s mother, Ria Ramkissoon — are scheduled to be tried in Baltimore on murder charges. Sources and Ramkissoon’s mother said Ramkissoon, 22, has agreed to plead guilty to a lesser charge on one condition: The charges against her must be dropped if her son, Javon Thompson, is resurrected.

Psychiatrists who evaluated Ramkissoon at the request of a judge concluded that she was not criminally insane. Her attorney, Steven Silverman, said the doctors found that her beliefs were indistinguishable from religious beliefs, in part because they were shared by those around her.

“She wasn’t delusional, because she was following a religion,” Silverman said, describing the findings of the doctors’ psychiatric evaluation.
[…]

Silverman said he and prosecutors think Ramkissoon was brainwashed and should have been found not criminally responsible; prosecutors declined to comment. Although an inability to think critically can be a sign of brainwashing, experts said, the line between that and some religious beliefs can be difficult to discern.

“At times there can be an overlap between extreme religious conviction and delusion,” said Robert Jay Lifton, a cult expert and psychiatrist who lectures at Harvard Medical School. “It’s a difficult area for psychiatry and the legal system.”

(emphasis added.)

This is one of those areas that can keep legal scholars arguing far
into the night. On one hand, religious beliefs enjoy special
protection under US law. Crazy beliefs do not. So what about crazy
religious beliefs? And where does one draw the line?

One obvious place is between beliefs that cause harm, and those that
don’t. Of course, this ignores things like the pope’s and the Russian
Orthodox church’s pronouncements that condoms make the AIDS problem
worse. The problem there, as
Calli Arcale pointed out,
is that while the people who make these statements don’t actually want
people to die, that is the inevitable, demonstrable outcome
of their beliefs. (Of course, one could draw a similar line from a
belief like “healthcare should be entirely in the hands of the free
market, free from government interference” to people dying from lack
of medical attention; but with any luck, a person holding such an
opinion could be persuaded by empirical evidence).

Sorry for just trailing off at the end like this, but I’m still aghast at this whole situation.

(HT D. Edward Farrar.)

Update, Mar. 30: Given the number of times I’ve been told that right and wrong come only from religion, I wouldn’t think there’d be any gray area between religion and insanity. And yet there is. Go figure.

A Smart Person With Daft Beliefs

PZ has a
post
today about how intelligence and atheism don’t always go hand in hand.

Intelligent people who are indoctrinated into a faith can build marvelously intricate palaces of rationalization atop the shoddy vapor of their beliefs about gods and the supernatural;

A perfect case in point is
this post
in the “On Faith” section of Thursday’s Post by John Mark
Reynolds. The bio says he’s a professor of philosophy at Biola
university. So we have an apparently intelligent, apparently educated
person in the 21st century who writes things like this:

Satan’s existence is suggested by human experience and the Bible and is confirmed by reading the Washington Post. The Post is almost surely not a particularly diabolical organ, but it does report the news, and the news often shows signs of the demonic.
[…]

Religious experiences can be confusing partly because we misunderstand them, but partly because some spiritual beings are deceptive and malevolent.
[…]

Nobody save a prophet can look at the Post and be sure what God or the Devil is doing at any given moment or in any given news story. God’s providence is inscrutable in its complexity, but rational, while the Devils work is manifestly irrational and thus difficult to discern.
[…]

The irrational, wicked, continuous, and destructive hatred of the Jewish people has a bloody and sordid history. Anti-Semitism has sponsored so much wickedness that it is reasonable to suspect diabolical force behind it.
[…]

Satan exists with his demons and he is intent on destroying as much that is beautiful as he can. We need not fear him, but cannot ignore him.

In other words, here’s an intelligent, educated, respected man who
believes in a magic man with a personality more one-dimensional than
any Saturday morning cartoon villain’s who causes trouble because…
well, because he’s a bad guy. A man who can look at an obvious fairy
tale and rationalize his way into thinking that it’s real.

When Alan Moore
retconned the adventures of Miracleman,
it was interesting and entertaining. At least both he and his readers
knew that both versions of Miracleman were just stories. Here, it’s
just sad.

I’ll give Reynolds props for sticking around and participating in the
comments. There, he
writes

I should add that the argument (roughly) is that:

1. We have reasons from private experience to think the Devil exists.

2. We have reasons from religious literature to think that the Devil exists.

3. The existence of the Devil seems consistent with human history and in fact helps explains certain events.

Therefore: it is reasonable to think the Devil exist.

Except, of course, that 1) private experience is often suspect. 2)
Just because some people who wrote a book a long time ago believed in
devils does not make it so. 3) If you’re predisposed to see evidence
of the devil’s work in world affairs, of course you’re going to see
it; it’s called confirmation bias.

When we hear about Africans who believe in witchcraft, we shake our
heads in dismay that such superstition still exists. We laugh at
Icelanders who believe in elves and fairies.
Is there any reason not to put Reynolds’s magic man in the same
category as those beliefs?

(Tip o’ the fez to Fez.)

HPV Vaccine: Then and Now

Remember back in the summer of 2007, when two pharmaceutical companies
released a vaccine against human papilloma virus (HPV), how if girls
were vaccinated against HPV, it could prevent them getting cervical
cancer later in life, and the religious right
got all bent out of shape about it?:

A spokeswoman for the Family Research Council (FRC) says young women should have to deal with the consequences of a rapidly spreading sexually transmitted disease rather then rely on a new vaccine.

The FRC’s Bridget Maher said her group believes over-reliance on the vaccine for the human papilloma virus (HPV) could send the wrong message to young women. “Abstinence is the best way to prevent HPV,” Maher told New Scientist. “Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful because they may see it as a license to engage in premarital sex.”

Rivka at Respectful of Otters has a
summary
of similar sentiments from the theosphere in 2006.

But that was then. Now, Merck has
released a new version of the vaccine
suitable for boys, which can prevent penile and anal cancer later in
life.

Groups that initially were critical when Gardasil was introduced for girls say they now want to make sure the decision is left up to parents.

“We do not oppose the development or distribution of the vaccine,” said Peter S. Sprigg of the Family Research Council. “The only concern we have is about proposals to make vaccination mandatory for school attendance. It’s a parental rights issue.”

In fairness, I should note that the FRC’s official position
in 2007
and
today
seems to be the same:

Q: Would vaccinating individuals against a sexually transmitted disease lead them to be more sexually active?

A: Not necessarily.

so it may be that Bridget Maher wasn’t speaking on behalf of the FRC,
or it could be that they were careful not to put their fearmongering
on the web where it could be scraped by the
Wayback Machine. It’d be
interesting to go through the organizations mentioned at Respectful to
Otters and see if there’s the same kind of indignation against a
vaccine for boys as there was against one for girls.

Russian Orthodox Church Also Wants People to Die

A lot of people have written about the
pope’s remarks about
about condoms in Africa and AIDS. Comments that, if heeded, will cause
the death of hundreds or thousands of people.

But Ebonmuse at Daylight Atheist
points out
that the Russian Orthodox church, in which I was raised,
agrees with the pope
(original in Russian
here).

“It is incorrect to consider condoms as a panacea for AIDS,” the deputy chairman of the Moscow Patriarchate Department for External Church Relations Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin told a round table in Moscow on Friday, commenting on the international row concerned with the pope’s statement in Africa.

AIDS can be prevented not by contraceptives but by education and a righteous life, the priest said.

“If a person lives a sinful, aimless and senseless life, uses drugs and is lewd, some disease will kill him one day, neither a condom nor medicine will save him,” Fr. Vsevolod added.

This is typical of the black-and-white, all-or-nothing attitude one
sees so often in religion. Condoms aren’t a total solution, therefore
they shouldn’t be used at all.

Well, guess what? We don’t live in an ideal world. In the real world,
people do have sex with multiple partners, do share needles when
taking illegal drugs, do engage in all manner of unhealthy behavior,
and condoms are a cheap and effective way of reducing the
number of people who die of sexually-transmitted diseases.

BTW, there’s a missing final paragraph in the English version of the
story above. My translation:

“For the most part,” he
opines, “the spread of AIDS can be stopped only by
the moral growth of society, and not through the use of condoms,
single-use needles, or new medical treatments.”

I don’t particularly enjoy wearing a seat belt when I drive. But until
we manage to figure out how to prevent accidents altogether, they help
reduce the number of fatalities. What the Catholic and Orthodox
churches are saying is analogous to saying that people should learn to
drive better instead of wearing seat belts.

There is no total solution. But there are things we can do that help.
As a sysadmin, I run into this all the time. The perfect is the enemy
of the good. All too often, there is no ideal solution, and we have to
settle for something that merely leaves us better than before.

Bill Nye Booed for Stating Fact

Looks like Texas is the new Florida.

Think Atheist is reporting
that
Bill Nye the Science Guy was
giving a talk in Waco, TX, and mentioned that despite what it says in
Genesis 1:16,
the moon does not emit light, but merely reflects the light of the
sun. So he got booed, and one woman left with her children, so that
they wouldn’t have to hear such antireligious hate speech.

Note that this story does not appear at the Waco Tribune web site, or
in
Google News,
so take it with a grain of salt.

Update, 13:20: Fez points out that according to the nonfunctional link on Think Atheist, this story apparently dates to 2006.

Catholic Clergy Have Their Own Psychiatric Hospital?

Today’s Post
reports:

A Silver Spring psychiatric hospital that specializes in treating Catholic clergy has been cited for problems that are “serious in nature,” according to a report from Maryland health officials who investigated the facility after a patient drowned himself in a bathtub there in January.
[…]

St. Luke, which sees about 600 people a year, almost all of them priests and nuns […]

The thrust of the story is about poor conditions at the hospital, it
being ill-equipped to deal with suicidal patients, and so forth. Which
is a scandal, but not what caught my attention, which was:

There’s a psychiatric hospital that specializes in priests and nuns?
Seriously?

There are hospitals that specialize in soldiers, like Walter Reed. And
I imagine there are psychiatric hospitals that specialize in police
officers and firefighters. But clergy? Really?

If it’s that stressful a lifestyle, then maybe they should rethink how
they’re doing it.

GOP Not Reactionary Enough for Dwyer

Don DwyerLegum’s New Line is reporting that Maryland General Assembly member, arch-reactionary, homophobe, reanimated corpse, and all-around asshat Don Dwyer (R-I Feel Sorry for Anne Arundel) has left the Republican caucus because they wouldn’t support his attempt to amend the Maryland constitution to define anything from a fertilized egg onward as a person.

I realize that Maryland is a fairly liberal state, but even so, it’s fairly impressive that Dwyer is so far to the right, he won’t even play with the Republicans.