The family church

Some really interesting figures here at Vox about what's happening to religious belief in America.  Surprisingly, the Mormons are holding numbers, despite their conservatism on matters sexual:

One-quarter of Americans are religiously unaffiliated today, a roughly fourfold increase from a couple of decades earlier. Christian denominations around the country are contending with massive defections. White Christian groups have experienced the most dramatic losses over the past decade. Today, white evangelical Protestants account for 15 percent of the adult population, down from nearly one-quarter a decade earlier. By contrast, Mormons have held steady at roughly 2 percent of the US population for the past several years. And perhaps as importantly, Mormons are far younger than members of white Christian traditions.

At one time, sociologists and religion scholars argued that theologically conservative churches, which demanded more of their members, were successful because they ultimately provided more rewarding religious and spiritual experiences. This theory has since fallen out of favor as the tide of disaffiliation appears to be washing over conservative and liberal denominations alike. The Southern Baptist Convention, the heart of conservative Protestantism, has sustained 12 straight years of membership loses. Since 2007, the denomination has shed 1.2 million members.

But more than the rules, rituals, and rigorous theology, the success of the Mormon Church may have to do with their unrelenting focus on the family. Few religious communities have made the development and maintenance of traditional family structures such a central priority. Eighty-one percent of Mormons say being a good parent is one of their central life goals. Nearly three-quarters say having a good marriage is one of their most important priorities in life, and a majority of Mormons — including nearly equal numbers of men and women — believe that the most satisfying type of marriage is one in which the husband provides and the wife stays home.

 Actually, though, the article points out that the LDS Church can actively encourage an early sex life - as long as it is within marriage:

Recognizing the centrality of family, the LDS Church has not been shy about encouraging young Mormons to start families early. In 2005, the LDS Church leadership was actively encouraging college students to start families even before they graduated. More recently church elder M. Russell Ballard urged Brigham Young University students to not let educational goals lead them to postpone marriage. “You can accomplish both with hard work, sacrifice, and planning,” he said. “In fact, with a companion’s support, you can be more successful.” It’s a message that resonates with many Mormon college students. 

 The younger members are pressing somewhat for a more sympathetic approach to homosexuality, though:

In 2016, the LDS Church launched a website called Mormon and Gay featuring firsthand accounts of Mormons who identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual. Importantly, the church remains opposed to same-sex marriage, but church leaders have adopted much more inclusive language when discussing LGBTQ members of the church. “It shows the church is taking a step in the direction of understanding and empathy,” Monson says.

Not a sign of a healthy, happy society

Axios posted this graph of American deaths by drugs, suicide and alcohol:

An obvious lesson:  clearly, apparent strong economic growth does not alone tell the full story of the state of well being of the American society.  

Trumponomics

The Washington Post notes:

Tax revenue for October 2018 through January 2019 fell $19 billion, or 2 percent, Treasury said. It noted a major reduction in corporate tax payments over the first four months of the fiscal year, falling close to 25 percent, or $17 billion.

As part of the 2017 tax cut law, the tax rate paid by corporations was lowered from 35 percent to 21 percent.

Spending, meanwhile, increased 9 percent over the same period.

The biggest increases were for defense military programs, which saw a 12 percent increase, and Medicare, which saw a 16 percent increase.

The Congressional Budget Office has projected that the deficit this year will reach close to $900 billion, because the government spends so much more money than it brings in through revenue....

During the tax cut debate in 2017, the White House promised that slashing tax rates would end up creating more revenue because it would allow the economy to grow at a faster clip. Economic growth did pick up in 2018, but Democrats have said the growth will be short-lived. So far, the growth has not come close to the levels needed to offset the $1.5 trillion in tax reductions that were part of the legislation.

The federal government is now more than $22 trillion in debt, largely representing an accumulation of all the money it has borrowed to finance programs in past years. A deficit is the one-year gap between spending and revenue, and the debt is the total amount of money owed by the government.

The cycle of abuse?

Slate seems to have become rather more "sex tabloid" in the last 12 months, if you ask me.  The site really highlights some weird personal sex advice questions - I don't why, it brings the quality of the place down.

However, there is still a lot of good stuff there.  Like this article about the widely believed "cycle of abuse", particularly in relation to childhood sexual abuse.   As Daniel Engber writes, the research on this isn't really very strong, often showing some relationship, but it's no where near as strong as the public likes to imagine:

Psychologist and criminologist Cathy Spatz Widom was the first to make some progress through the bramble. In 1989, she published data on the cycle of abuse with a novel methodology. Instead of looking retrospectively at criminals and delinquents, she started by picking out a group of victims of abuse, then following up throughout their lives to figure out what happened. She began her work by identifying more than 900 victims of abuse and neglect whose cases had been registered in the court system of an unnamed Midwestern city between 1967 and 1971. Then she set up a control group, matching up those victims as best as she could with people of the same age, race, and sex who attended the same schools and lived in the same neighborhoods. Finally, she pulled any official records of their delinquency, detention, or adult criminal activity across the next 20 years.

Using this much more powerful and better-controlled design, Widom was able to confirm that victims of childhood abuse are indeed at greater risk of becoming criminals. Perhaps more importantly, she showed that mere neglect—even in the absence of any violent physical abuse—was a noteworthy predictor of later criminal behavior. 

She kept following her subjects, who are now well into middle age, and also gathered information from their children. In 2015, Widom published several decades’ worth of further data. One of her papers in particular focused on the question of whether someone’s experience of childhood abuse can predict their sexual offending later on. While 4.5 percent of the people in the control group had been arrested for a sex crime, nearly twice as many—8.3 percent—of the people who had been victims of abuse or neglect went on to perpetrate such a crime. So there was a link, but the details didn’t fit the expected pattern of “monkey see, monkey do.” The people in Widom’s study who were abused as children in specifically sexual ways did not, in fact, appear more likely to get arrested for a sex crime later on; instead, it was the ones who were either neglected or physically abused who ended up at higher risk. 

That may have been a quirk of Widom’s data set. Among both groups who had been arrested for a sex crime, almost all of them—84 percent—were men. Yet her study included just two dozen male victims of childhood sexual abuse, of whom three went on to be sexual offenders. It may be that this sample was too small for a true effect to show up in her statistical tests.

There's more, and even a large Australian study gets a special mention:

A similar study, published in 2016, looked at records of childhood sexual abuse and sexual offending in a group of more than 38,000 Australian men. Among those who had been molested, just 3 percent went on to commit a sexual offense. That rate was much higher than what was found among the total population (0.8 percent), suggesting a cycle of abuse. But being victimized by other forms of childhood mistreatment was also associated with committing sexual crimes, and there were no clear signs of a special one-to-one relationship in which sexually molested children grew up to be sexual molesters. 

But really—it’s complicated. A paper published two weeks ago combined and analyzed findings from 142 different studies of intergenerational transmission of maltreatment. The study’s authors, led by the University of Calgary’s Sheri Madigan, concluded that there is indeed evidence for a “modest association” between someone suffering abuse and then perpetrating it, and that specific forms of abuse may be passed down in this way.

I think it very likely that part of the reason the cycle is so widely believed is because it is so often used as part of a plea in mitigation for men convicted of sexual abuse.   It is, after all, one of the very few claims a convicted sex offender can make towards showing that it is not just their own volition that was behind the crime, but a psychological issue that was not entirely their fault.

American chicken

David Frum has a good column up talking about the odd importance of American chicken processing to the Brexit vote.

Are Australian meat chickens similarly bathed in chlorine (or whatever it is)? 

It's kind of remarkable how American food and food processing has a kind of poor reputation for all sorts of reasons - e coli outbreaks on salad veges seem so common; but then chicken meat seems to have the opposite issue with too much chemical treatment.

An odd time to be talking Catholic virgins

Well, I continue to be annoyed/appalled that both pro and anti "Pell is innocent" forces continue to wage what seem to be PR wars.  I saw some of 4 Corners last night, and am baffled as to why no one there doesn't think that they will look vindictive if he is successful on appeal, and if nothing comes of the civil action either.   This is especially the case when we know the hung jury verdict of the first trial.

Of course, I am equally upset with the pro-Pell side slandering the accuser in the case too - as they are doing with wild abandon at Catallaxy.  

Anyway,  for some odd reason (perhaps to convince us that Catholics are too obsessed with sex), the ABC website has a story up about an Australian "consecrated virgin".   I wrote about these when I first heard about them last year - and everything I say in that post still seems appropriate.

More miscellaneous observations not worthy of their own post

*   I now know where I can buy a piece of vacuum sealed wagyu steak in Brisbane that sells for - wait for it - $229.99 a kilo.   Ask in comments if you want to know.   (Wildly unlikely anyone will, but hey...)

*   Yeah, this "Curious Kids" item in The Conversation deals with something that has puzzled me more and more over the years (as we have seen more and more video from the depths):  how come in these deepest of deep sea dives, where the submarine would be crushed like an aluminium can unless it was built to super-strength standards, you see pretty normal looking, non-armour plated fish and crustaceans doodling around?   How do their puny bodies operate under such pressure?    Seems the answer goes down to the midi-chlorian cellular level, but not in entirely understood ways.  Huh.

*  The Guardian has a piece on a traditional "third sex" kind of role in the Philippines  (similar to that seen in many other cultures):

Bakla is a Tagalog word that denotes the Filipino practice of male cross-dressing, denoting a man that has “feminine” mannerisms, dresses as a “sexy” woman, or identifies as a woman. It is an identity built on performative cultural practice more so than sexuality. Often considered a Filipino third gender, bakla can be either homosexual or heterosexual, and are regarded as one of the most visible LGBTQIA+ cultures in Asia – an intersectional celebration of Asian and queer cultures. 

The bakla were renowned as community leaders, seen as the traditional rulers who transcended the duality between man and woman. Many early reports from Spanish colonising parties referenced the mystical entities that were “more man than man, and more woman than woman”. Even today, many bakla in the Philippines retain high status as entertainers and media personalities.

When I was eight years old, on my first and only trip to the Philippines, I met my older cousin Norman. He had shoulder-length hair, wore lipstick and eyeliner, and would walk around in heels. His father affectionately called him malambut (Tagalog for “soft”); his siblings called him bading, but he told me he was bakla. He wasn’t an outsider; he was part of the family – my family – and being an eight-year-old who liked to sing karaoke and play dress-up, I didn’t give it a second thought. But on returning to Australia, I told all my friends about Norman and they scoffed – the early seed of masculinity training at play – and when I asked my parents what the word meant, my mum replied, “it just means … bakla”. It didn’t translate directly to English.

Later, I learned that many people problematically mistranslate bakla to “gay” in English. As an identity not tied to sex, the word does not correspond directly to western nomenclature for LGBTQIA+ identities, sitting somewhere between gay, trans and queer. As Filipinos moved to countries such as Australia and the United States, the bakla were mislabelled as part of western gay culture and quickly (physically) sexualised. Even worse, the word can sometimes be heard in Australian playgrounds, used in a derogatory way. When I was younger, we were banned from calling each other “gay”, so the boys accused each other of being “bakla” instead. It was quite confusing to my ears when hearing the word used in a negative way, its meaning truly lost in migration.

I've never made a study of this whole, third sex, cross dressing thing that pops up in various indigenous cultures, but it's curious how it turns up in some but not others.   (Also the different status levels that they hold in different cultures.)   It's funny how the modern equivalent is just making it big in the entertainment industry.   Would Bowie (and glam rockers generally) at their campiest height count as bakla? 

Now easier than ever to get into the country you never wanted to visit in the first place

From Gulf News:

Saudi Arabia’s cabinet has approved electronic visas for foreign visitors to attend sporting events and concerts, local media reported, as the world’s top oil exporter tries to diversify its economy and open up its society.

According to officials, the Saudi Arabia Visa application will only take a few minutes to complete online and there will be no need to go to an embassy or consulate.

Once the application is approved, it will be sent to the applicant by email.

This new move symbolises a change for the kingdom, which was known to be one of the most difficult countries to enter.

Further down the report:

As part of Prince Mohammad’s agenda, the kingdom has ended a nearly 40-year ban on cinemas, allowed music concerts, including performances by Western pop stars, and organised international sporting events. There are a number of tourist attractions being developed in Saudi Arabia, including Amaala and Al Ula.

I'd be rather curious as to which concert acts would ever be inclined to do a show in that country.  Madonna's farewell tour, perhaps?

Weekend update

*  My son cut his finger near the tip, deep and bloody enough to warrant a visit to the doctor.  No stitch, but gee, fingertips bleed easily.  It made me realise I've never cut myself bad enough to warrant a doctor's trip.  I wonder what percent of people get through life with no cut warranting a medical visit.

* I noticed that ABC radio host Richard Glover made a tweet about being a victim of sexual abuse (he was commenting about the George Pell matter.)   Given that he talks about his own life a lot in his books and columns, I was surprised I hadn't heard him claim that before, and Googling the topic I see that I missed that he had published an autobiography in 2013 which apparently dealt with it, but was mainly about his highly eccentric parents.  (I have a vague feeling I had heard him talking about his mother before.)  Anyway, I listened to an interview he did with Richard Fidler in which he talked about it, including briefly about a period of sexual abuse which occurred not as a child, but at 19.   He did have a unusual early life, yet he has had only one long term partner and two sons who he has written affectionately about for many years.   His life story is really one of resilience, then, as he makes plain in the interview.   Quite interesting, really.  

* Speaking of ABC radio personalities, it was hard not to be moved by the Good Weekend article about Red Symons and the difficult life issues he has recently faced.   (His son dying, after battling cancer on and off since he was 4;  his own medical crisis; losing his job for unclear reasons; and a marriage breakup - although that last one appears to have been of his own doing.)    

* Can't everyone stop talking about the Pell conviction until the appeal is heard?  4 Corners is going back to the topic again tonight, although I gather it may be more about the nature of the investigation and the Church's role, rather than on the details of the Pell cases.   Still, I think everyone should drop the topic until an appeal is heard.  

* Not this weekend, but the one previous, I heard a fair bit of a BBC radio documentary about the quite high success of machine learning to detect susceptibility to suicide attempts.   Here it is - "Predicting Suicide".   I see that this topic got some attention late last year, but I missed it.  I must find a good written article about it.

*  Crying "SOCIALISM!":   I continue to be dismayed that Right wing punditry and politicians in the US has convinced their "base" that any policy that would formally just have been called a centrist one favoured in successful, capitalist, social democracies as  PART OF THE TYRANNY OF SOCIALISM.   I think it's a mistake for young Democrats to deal with this misuse of the term by saying "well, if that's socialism, count me in!"    No, don't concede to the sloppy (or ridiculous) re-definitions of the pathetic excuses that now pass for Conservative intellectuals.   Here's an article that is a little helpful in that regard, from WAPO:   Five Myths About Socialism.   The only thing is, I don't think it really goes in hard enough, and still gets too tied up in definitions.  Someone in comments takes the line I am more inclined to argue:

The truth is it doesn’t matter whether socialism is good or bad for democracy because nobody in Washington with any kind of a voice is advocating actual socialism - ie government ownership of the means of production.  So most of this article is fluff.

I think it’s a huge error for AOC, Sanders and the rest to not use the true term for what they are advocating, which is social democracy, not true socialism.

Social democracy is characterized by a strong social safety net and a mixed economy in which both private and public actors operate, (with more or less government regulation of the market to avoid monopolies or price gouging, employment protections, and sometimes employee slots on boards of directors)  with private operators producing consumer goods, and public actors generally producing public goods such as education, public transportation, a functioning energy grid,  and management of the healthcare sector.  There are many examples of stable Western societies which practice social democracy in many different formats.  Even the United States for all one side’s religious worship of the god Market, is still  a mixed economy with free public education up to a point, some government-managed healthcare (Medicare) and a few oddball public operators like the Tennessee Valley Authority. Or state universities.

The key here is the term “democracy”.  As a matter of fact, there is no inherent conflict between socialism as such and democracy - the British had both for much of the 60s until they decided they wanted to try something else, which happened without revolution.  The reverse tends to be true:  dictators who gain power take control of the commanding heights of the economy and claim that what they are doing is socialism, when in fact it is theft.

But “socialism” has been such a bogeyman in this country for so long that it’s politically dumb to try to repurpose the term, inaccurately, to describe social democracy.  

Or this:

Why not begin the discussion with the generally accepted definition of socialism found in most dictionaries and economics books?

so·cial·ism - /ˈsōSHəˌlizəm/Submit noun -- A political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.

I lived in Sweden for over three years, a country that many people would consider socialist. It's not. Over 95% of businesses are privately owned in Sweden.

Sweden is a capitalist country with high individual taxes to pay for social programs. It's easier to start a business in Sweden than it is in the US. And business taxes are very low there, also. The government encourages the growth of private business.

Individual tax rates are high, topping out at 54%. Those high taxes are used to support excellent schools, excellent medical care and a social safety net which are values that the public supports.

And now for something completely different

From the BBC:   The 'caravans of love' visiting Spain's empty villages

It starts:

Spain is ground-zero for rural depopulation within the European Union. Over decades, millions have migrated to the cities to find jobs. Those left behind in villages are often elderly - or they are single men working in agriculture. So, how does a lonely Spanish shepherd find love?  

The possible answer:

Then Antonio heard about the Caravan of Women - or Caravan of Love, as it is sometimes known.
This is a commercial initiative bringing coach-loads of single women from Madrid to meet unattached men in the countryside at organised dinner-dances. Manolo Gozalo has been co-ordinating these excursions with his partner, Venecia Alcantara, since 1996.

I'm not surprised no one wants to live in rural Spain - from what I can gather on shows where chefs or other folk travel through the country, its centre looks pretty dry and featureless.   

In Australia, meanwhile, I guess we're more known for a movie about a group of drag queens travelling across the interior.   (I've never watched it - Australian movies are cringeworthy at the best of times, and intense campiness is a frequent reason why.) 

Psychic debunking discussed

For some reason, I've come across a few different places discussing the debunking of psychics:

* the New York Times Magazine section has a feature article describing the ways groups have "stung" celebrity psychics, mainly by setting up detailed, fake Facebook accounts and then "registering" as audience members at psychic shows.  All very interesting, and well worth cleaning your cache to read!

*  Michael Prescott looked at an old 1995 book by James Randi and finds it underwhelming.  (I've always been a bit leery of Randi, even though he's probably right 95% of the time.)

*  John Oliver has also devoted a large part of his show to debunking psychics.  Unfortunately, HBO geoblocks it to Australia, but I have found a low res version of the episode that someone has put up.  Haven't watched it yet, but he is always pretty good (I just wish he swore less):

When showmanship fails...

My cynicism about the value of high profile QCs known for combative style continues to gather supporting evidence.

Robert Richter has made a comment during his plea in mitigation which sounds spectacularly counterproductive to his goal:   

Richter’s renowned defence style was on full display, as he tried to argue with Kidd that there were “no aggravating circumstances” to one of Pell’s offences.

It was “no more than a plain vanilla sexual penetration case where the child is not actively participating”, Richter said.

Kidd responded: “It must be clear to you by now I’m struggling with that submission. Looking at your points here – so what?”

More detail on his style during the trial:

In the aftermath of the verdict, Richter, one of the most well-known and expensive defence barristers in Melbourne, will be asking himself what went wrong. It was, by all accounts, his case to lose.

The answer may be in part that his courtroom style – at times confrontational and theatrical – is more palatable to jurors hearing cases involving criminal underworld figures than those considering harrowing crimes of child sexual abuse. His closing address was unwieldy. It lasted two days and referenced US television shows, Darth Vader and the Queen. There was even a PowerPoint presentation.

Richter closed by warning the jurors that if they convicted Pell: “You can’t can’t come back and say, ‘Oops, I’m sorry, I made a mistake.’” It may have appeared condescending.

By contrast the crown prosecutor Mark Gibson’s closing address took about one day, and was delivered with no theatrics. At times, it was almost dry. He took the jurors to direct quotes given by witnesses throughout the trial. He walked them step-by-step through what the victim said had happened. He told jurors they should find the victim was believable, an honest historian, describing as best he could horrific events that happened to him as a 13-year-old through the eyes of a man now in his 30s.

 And over at The Age's live blog of how today's sentencing hearing was going: 

George Pell has looked increasingly dejected as his defence lawyer's arguments have continued.

Pell has spent considerable amounts of time with his eyes closed, often taking off his glasses and running them across his head.

He seems tired and somewhat exasperated.

It would seem that some lawyers thought at the start that Richter was wrong for this sort of case:

 One lawyer I speak to suggests that Richter was a poor choice for the defence: he is said to be too old and too theatrical. (A former Supreme Court judge tells me Richter has a tendency to "talk a lot of bullshit".) He might even be too … male. Perhaps a woman would have been a more sympathetic option?

I think that view has been vindicated.

About The Alienist (again)

I haven't finished all of The Alienist on Netflix yet, and am still enjoying it enough, but I have realised what its style, which is often delivering what feels like a mini history lesson on New York in 1895, was reminding me of.

It's exactly the style of most of Michael Crichton's books:  not so great on characterisation; some rather stilted dialogue at times; but chock full of what is clearly the results of lots of scene setting research by the author.   That was a lot of the pleasure of his books, learning some new esoteric stuff in fictional form.   I would presume the book the show is based on must read similarly to Crichton.

One of the key things in the show is Teddy Roosevelt as a young-ish New York Police Commissioner - a job I never knew he had.  (Although, truth be told, I know next to nothing about him.)   This article gives a short account of his time in that job, and it sounds as if it was indeed fraught with conflict with the old guard in the police force, as it is in the TV show.

The ridiculous American health care system

Go read how a woman in Florida, bitten by a stray cat, got charged $48,512 by the hospital that gave her an anti-rabies injection.   (She didn't even see a doctor, and was 2 hours in the ER.)

And this was no clerical error!  Her insurance is paying for most of it - but still, it's absurd.

Defamation possibility?

Not for the first time, I have to wonder why Sinclair Davidson lets his ratbag site Catallaxy run comments that are clearly defamatory - or, shall we, at risk of being found defamatory.  The latest ones are from CL against the complainant in the Pell case.  At this stage of the court process (an appeal underway), and even if there is much commentary in the media about how many people are "surprised" at the second jury's verdict, is it really wise to be calling the complainant a outright liar on your website?  Although his name is suppressed, presumably his family and some colleagues know who he is, so obviously such claim can hurt his reputation.

And if any appeal does succeed, an acquittal does not necessarily mean something couldn't be found to have happened if you were applying a lower standard of proof than the old "beyond reasonable doubt" used at a criminal trial.   The fact that our criminal law is more about what can be proved to a certain standard, and not technically about whether it likely happened or not, surely means it's never a good idea to be accusing the complainant (even on a successful appeal) of being a liar.