Logic Bomb

[rinue]

There is a weeping sore on my forehead, which for lack of a better option I have decided to find attractive.

The last few days have been all-work-all-the-time, which I enjoy but which is a monotonous subject.

Ciro has registered for his final set of classes, which means another few months of hard slog for him, and then . . . graduation! He insisits the only appropriate way to celebrate this is to act like he is 22 and hold a kegger, which I think I will opt out of (unless perhaps there are video games).

Although my day-to-day is going smoothly, it has been a difficult time for me intellecutally. I do not agree with the Christian Right in many areas, but I do agree with them (1) that it is alarming to be unable to assume that the people around you share your values [which is a situation they and I are both in, although the values we want shared are different], and (2) that I'm tired of postmodernism. I am tired of people who think consensus is automatically suspect. I am tired of people who don't believe in expertise. I am tired of people appointing themselves experts and trying to blow my mind with things that are not supported by data. I am tired of the fact that doctors have training but patients are the only ones doing the research, accumulating vast data without being able to tell whether it's good or bad, so that the doctors are wrong and the patients are also wrong. I'm fed up with magical thinking. I'm fed up with inequality, and I'm fed up with people trying to solve inequality by just declaring things equal. I am tired of people following their hearts and doing what the spirit moves them to do because it feels right. I am tired of your feelings. I am tired of talking to you when you have decided irrationality is the answer. And I am tired of being quiet about it when it directly endangers me.

It is a difficult world when fully a quarter of the people I can depend on to even care about whether they are behaving logically are named Tom. At least there are two friends of mine named Tom. I am on the verge of becoming very savage, because I don't see the point of things when I am outnumbered this badly even by people who are nominally on my side.

P.S. Somebody anonymous did bring donuts to work, which I acknowledge as a shared value, especially when they leave me the one with coconut sprinkles.

Comments

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

(2) Amen.

[valancy.livejournal.com]

I get worn out by people who think it is cute when I research, rather than a necessity. Or the fact that so many people at work think I am magicla and just "know everything." No. I look things up. I research. I work hard to understand. I know. It's a stupid world sometimes in the most literal and disappointing of ways.

Love you.

[rinue.livejournal.com]

I was researching recently because there is a warning on my tea-with-valerian-in-it that it's not safe for pregnant or breastfeeding women, and I was like "why not?"

Turns out there is not a reason to believe it is not safe. There have been no reports of a pregant woman (or fetus) being hurt in thousands of years of people taking valerian while pregnant. It's just that nobody has done a large controlled study and definitively proved it's safe, which makes perfect sense because that would be expensive and pregnant women are hard to study anyway because they're not pregnant all the time and also are unlikely to casually try something that might be dangerous. Most drugs have never been studied in pregnang women. They have done smaller studies of valerian in Europe which found it was not dangerous. (This being science, it's really difficult to find something safe; what you slowly accumulate is evidence that danger did not occur.)

But this herbal tea put it on their box so they couldn't get sued just in case (which, you know, why don't carrots start saying "OMG vitamin a could be bad for babies (which actually yes)" or "jesus christ has mint been tested") and every website in America is all freaked out like "there is no evidence that it could hurt your baby, but just in case!!!!!!1111" like they do about EVERYTHING, including non-VOC paint, dusting, being anywhere near alcohol, being anywhere near caffeine, being anywhere near cats, exercizing, not exercizing, etc. And, you know, I could not take valerian for several months and it would not be a real hardship, but I pretty much want to take it and also drink a half glass of wine from time to time and just generally act like a human being because I'm tired of people's unfounded bullshit.

[valancy.livejournal.com]

Okay, I grant I'm pretty much on the opposite side in that the more I read (even men's infertility is based on in-utero; apparently we could be in a crisis: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/out-for-the-count-why-levels-of-sperm-in-men-are-falling-1954149.html) the more I think I should practically lock myself in a safehouse and eat nothing but food I grow, but I really do feel your pain on unnecessary worries, because, my God, there are so many real ones already.

Tangentially, Sus sent me an email linking to a site all about celebrating women's bodies after birth, and it made me sick to my stomach. Now that's some effective birth control. Cripes, do you want women killing themselves when they get pregnant? No every woman ends up that way! Look at Kim! Think hopefully!

Oh, Kim. Now I'm depressed again. I cried half the morning. On the upside, his heart is NOT enlarged (latest update), so they must have caught it early.

[rinue.livejournal.com]

I am glad Jackson's getting seen to; I tend to be optimistic since if whatever it is hasn't killed him already it's probably fixable. It is amazing how many of the people I know went through horrible childhood medical traumas with no ill effects. I perhaps have a false sense of security, but right now I'm seeing this as something stressful the family will get through rather than something likely to be terminal and tragic. I mean, how many miserable medical disasters have you been through? You're still here, thank goodness. :)

As far as your other point . . . a lot of that stuff is not so statistically significant. There's a disproportionate amount of press about the things we can control, but it's a little bit like . . . it doesn't matter if you have a perfect roof or a crappy roof if a tornado hits. 8% of live births in the U.S. involve birth defects, of which about 6% are immediately reversible. That first number has been stable for a long time. The second has gone up over time. The number of birth defects attributable to environmental factors like what the mother eats or whether her neighbor used pesticides is maybe only 2%. In other words, of that 8%, 98% are due to replication errors - random chance - or genetic factors.

There's a point at which I say there is too high a cost of trying to prevent a tiny percent of an already small fraction, especially when the things one would have to stop would mean large numbers of people starving or dying of malaria or any number of other terrible things. Let alone the sanity of the mother.

I will say straight up regarding men's infertility that there's a lot of credible evidence that it's the result of a lot of soy consumption (as fetuses, as children, as adults), because soy is a pseudoestrogen. That seems to be one of the credible actual dangers. However, generally, I'm skeptical of a lot of the numbers of "increasing rates of whatever due to environmental factors of the last 50 years" because one of the reason we're seeing increasing rates of all kinds of things as adults is because in the past those people wouldn't have survived to become as adults, or we wouldn't have had the sophistication to diagnose their problems and database them. If something doesn't have a clear effect over a 10 year period or shorter, I discount it because there are too many complicating factors. I say this as someone who's studied econometric analysis, which is what a lot of these long-term studies rely on.

[offbeatentrack.livejournal.com]

Ironically...after this HUGE campaign about how even a drop of alchol could result in fetal alcohol syndrome...they've found that it's a load of bullshit in European studies. The lengths that our society goes to to both medicalize pregnancy and childbirth and to make them into socially public events astounds me. This idea that pregnant women are somehow public property and somehow lose all rights regarding personal space is insane.

[rinue.livejournal.com]

I find it really alarming, especially when paired with the "parents know what's best" trend - so a woman has full responsibility for raising her child, and if nobody's helping her she should really work harder, but also we can shame her for picking a different diaper bag than we might choose. And of course if anything goes wrong - anything at all, including stuff we recommended - it's really her fault because she should have known and how could she think her adult concerns were as important as the fate of a child. It's like we've misinterpreted "it takes a village" to mean "go ahead and be judgy and nosy."

If I am pregnant and anybody tries to mess with me for taking a sip of coffee or wine, I intend to break their jaw.

[rinue.livejournal.com]

In any case, I have ordered some new shoes which will hopefully be very comfortable for rambling around in. I have been putting that off because good shoes are expensive, but it's getting ridiculous that I don't have anything I can walk around in for more than an hour without getting callouses or giving myself a backache (my cowgirl boots mostly excepted). Sometimes my frugality is a little on the absurd side.

[valancy.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm glad you did. If nothing else, you've got to get good shoes. The foot is so easily damaged. Plus, shoes!

[oddment.livejournal.com]

You could start a terrible novelty bandage trend. I really want to believe that it would also help you identify kindred spirits, but I think that might be a stretch (and of course it would catch on so fast that soon it would be meaningless anyway).

[rinue.livejournal.com]

I will admit that I wear novelty bandages whenever possible and perhaps slightly look forward to mild injuries in order to indulge this. I have in the past sported said pirate bandages.

I was very distressed when I searched for "Back off, man. I'm a scientist" t-shirts and found that several people were making them with very bad font choices so that I had to feel they weren't my sort of people at all. What have things come to when I can't even identify a kindred spirit via t-shirt slogan? What has the world . . . I shake my empty hands.

[oddment.livejournal.com]

We're all going to have to resort to wearing strange things in our lapels if this kind of thing keeps up.

(I admit I didn't check the dimensions of the linked bandages, and they would probably look silly on someone's forehead. I have made a terrible mistake!)