The statute books not always a reliable guide

One of the interesting things in the story out of Egypt today about a bunch of men being acquitted after being arrested on national TV for being at a bathhouse is this:

Five of them - the owner of the bathhouse and four staff members - were tried for facilitating "parties of debauchery, orgies among male homosexuals" in exchange for money. The 21 others were charged with practising debauchery and "indecent public acts".

It is not illegal to be homosexual or engage in homosexual acts in Egypt. But the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA) says the charge of "debauchery" is often used to crack down on homosexual activity in the country.

The charge is more often used in cases involving prostitution, but Egyptian legislation - specifically Law 10 of 1961, On the Combat of Prostitution - mentions "prostitution" and "debauchery" together.

The Collins English Dictionary defines the world as "an instance of extreme dissipation"; other descriptions relate to "sensual pleasures".

Homosexuality remains a social and religious taboo within Egypt. However, the country is not the only place where, while not illegal, it is punished or discouraged using other laws.

Goes to show that it's not always a simple matter of seeing what's on the books to know how laws are used in a country.

I also saw at the end of the LA Times report on the matter:

Other often-ostracized groups have been targeted as well; on Saturday, an Egyptian court sentenced a 21-year-old man to three years in prison after he declared on Facebook that he was an atheist.

 And this in a country where the President just got kudos for calling on Islam to reform itself.  He's got his work cut out.

Even more reason to not see a movie

I missed this lengthy commentary at the New York Review of Books in December which is an even stronger attack on The Imitation Game for inaccuracy than the one I had previously linked to.

It sounds to me very much like what happened with the Anthony Hopkins version of Shadowlands - the bones of a true life story but with the details changed enough "for dramatic purposes" that the movie ends up not being all that true to the spirit of the characters it portrays.

Tolstoy re-visited

Somewhere on the net tonight I saw brief mention of Tolstoy having had a venereal disease as a young man, and thought to myself "did I know that before?"  Googling around, I stumbled across a lengthy extract from Paul Johnson's Intellectuals, which I read around 20 years ago, and indeed, it did have a full chapter on the many - and I mean many - character flaws of Leo, including the bit about VD. 

Intellectuals remains the most amusingly appalling book about character flaws of the famous that I have ever read.  Even though I am clearly forgetting the details, I remember how much I liked it at the time.  Of course, later it came out that Johnson had engaged in a lengthy marital sexual indiscretion himself, which would not have been quite so hypocritical if he hadn't spent so much time in his columns criticising the British Royal family for not sucking it up and foregoing extra marital relationships as an example to the nation.

Anyway, back to Tolstoy.  Another website (PBS, so the tone is slightly less scurrilous) talks at length about Tolstoy's life-long, um, neuroticism? about women and sex.   It seems he would, in modern parlance, probably be classified as a sex addict, but seemingly spent his entire life not only   intellectually disgusted with it, but also blame shifting onto women. 

It's a wonder his wife went ahead with the wedding at all:

Leo Tolstoy waited until he was 34 years old to marry, but once he had settled on 17-year-old Sofia Behrs, "Sonya," as his bride, he saw that events moved very quickly. At his insistence, but a single week elapsed between his proposal and their wedding on September 23, 1862 -- and in the course of that week Tolstoy asked, really required, his fiancée to read the intimate diaries he had kept for much of his life.

Sonya, the middle daughter of the Tsar's court physician, had grown up in the sheltered, innocent circumstances typical of girls of her class and time, and she had scant knowledge of men, including the man she had agreed to marry, beyond mild flirtation and adolescent fantasy. But now, days before her wedding, she found herself plunged into the sexual autobiography of a vigorous man in early middle age -- page after unsparing page recounting his initiation by a whore when he was 14, the string of impulsive, guilt-ridden erotic adventures with parlor maids, gypsies, and married women, the repeated bouts with venereal disease, and finally, and most recently, the deeply satisfying love affair with a peasant woman, with whom he had fathered a son just a few months before proposing to Sonya.

"I don't think I ever recovered from the shock of reading the diaries when I was engaged to him," Sonya wrote nearly 30 years later. "I can still remember the agonizing pangs of jealousy, the horror of that first appalling experience of male depravity."

 This episode apparently features in fictional form in Anna Karenina.

The article gives a short chronicle of how their marriage deteriorated (and yes, I had remembered that it developed into a high conflict relationship - I wonder if that is made clear enough in that recent movie about the end of his life?).  But this detail shows his incredible insensitivity:

In Sonya's eyes the ultimate affront was "Kreutzer Sonata," a story Tolstoy wrote in 1889 about a man driven by hatred, jealousy, and sexual disgust to murder his wife. Aside from the murder, it was an exact transcription of his feelings about her and the state of their marriage. At the heart of "Kreutzer Sonata" is a savage indictment of marriage as "legalized prostitution," of women as vengeful sirens bent on seducing and controlling men, and of human sexuality itself. For Sonya it was as if Tolstoy had hauled her naked onto a vast public stage and proceeded to sermonize about her moral and physical hideousness. And on top of everything, after railing against the act of love as "perfidious" and piglike, he continued to force himself on her sexually. To her, it was a betrayal worse than adultery. 

I really think he should have spent more time looking into her eyes.   (Ha.)
 

Causation very hard to believe

Circumcision doubles autism risk, study claims - Telegraph

There must be a hundred different ways to confirm or (much more likely) debunk the question of whether they have found anything indicating causation here, given the widely varying populations of males with and without a foreskin around the world.  Must be lots of researchers doing up grant applications on the topic as I write.

Falling in love made easy

To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This - NYTimes.com

I had not heard of this study before, indicating a way to make a couple fall in love (or, at least, push them strongly in that direction?):

“Actually, psychologists have tried making people fall in love,” I said, remembering Dr. Aron’s study. “It’s fascinating. I’ve always wanted to try it.”

I first read about the study when I was in the midst of a breakup. Each time I thought of leaving, my heart overruled my brain. I felt stuck.  So, like a good academic, I turned to science, hoping there was a way to love smarter.

I explained the study to my university acquaintance. A heterosexual man and woman enter the lab through separate doors. They sit face to face and answer a series of increasingly personal questions. Then they stare silently into each other’s eyes for four minutes. The most tantalizing detail: Six months later, two participants were married. They invited the entire lab to the ceremony.

Interesting.  I wonder if there is some connection with mutual eye staring as a common occurrence during or after sex?

More about free speech in France

I've been reading up about the anti-Semitic comedian Dieudonne M'bala M'Bala at the New York Times, the New Republic and Wikipedia.

While convicted many times for anti-Semitism, and facing currently legally questionable bans on performing his shows, he apparently remains popular with the young, male Muslim population, as well as the National Front.   He ridicules the Holocaust, encourages disbelief that it happened, and is a 9/11 "truther". 

At a time when Jews have good reason to feel an increasing threat to their safety in that country, the example of this comedian perfectly illustrates the double edged sword of free speech, the subject of yesterday's post.  From a free speech purist's point of view, I suppose it may be argued that the laws that have been used against him have not succeeded in silencing him, and in fact may well have made him a martyr in the eyes of his fans, so why keep such laws anyway?  On the other hand, who can say what size following may he have developed if there had never been any attempts at legal hinderance to his views being expressed?

In any case, we can say as follows:  both the anti-Semitic comedian and the religion (including Islam) ridiculing magazine have been the subject of legal actions under French laws that do affect free speech.  Neither of them were actually silenced by the legal actions.  (The action against Charlie Hebdo was not successful.)   We can therefore say that the country has had both of their contributions to the "marketplace of ideas".

The problem is that in this marketplace, the ideas and facts we want all Muslims in France to believe are not spreading to enough of them fast enough.    

Update:   And here, from an Atlantic article by David Frum, is a list of the poisonous ideas far too many French Muslims have (including the anti-Semiticism promoted by Dieudonne):

A pair of Pew surveys in the mid-2000s, for example, found that substantial minorities of Muslims in every European country surveyed did not rule out violence against civilian targets perceived as anti-Islamic. Two-thirds of French Muslims said the use of violence in such a case was never justified, which is reassuring, but one-third felt that it was sometimes or rarely justified. Significant numbers—including an outright majority in Britain—refused to acknowledge that Arabs had carried out the 9/11 terror attacks. A plurality of French Muslims (46 percent) and a crushing majority of British Muslims (81 percent) considered themselves Muslims first, identifying with their respective European nations only to a secondary extent....

A survey of French Muslims in 2014 found a community seething with anti-Semitism. Sixty-seven percent said “yes” when asked whether Jews had too much power over France’s economy. Sixty-one percent believed Jews had too much power in France’s media. Forty-four percent endorsed the idea of a global Zionist conspiracy of the kind described by the Holocaust-denying French Muslim comedian Dieudonne. Thirteen percent agreed that Jews were responsible for the 2008 financial crisis.

Tackling blasphemy

In Defense of Blasphemy - The Daily Beast

Michael Tomasky here makes a well reasoned case for the world's governments to get serious about removing (rarely used) blasphemy laws from their own legislation, and then to put pressure on those countries where it's use really is a major issue.

From the Pew Research article that he links to:

Nine of the 50 countries in the Asia-Pacific region (18%) had blasphemy laws in 2012, and in Europe such laws were found in seven out of 45 nations (16%). In November 2012, the Dutch parliament dissolved its blasphemy law, which was drafted in the 1930s and had not been used for half a century.

In the Americas, 11 out of 35 countries (31%) had blasphemy laws, including the Bahamas, where the publication or sale of blasphemous material can be punished with up to two years imprisonment. The U.S. does not have any federal blasphemy laws, but as of 2012, several U.S. states – including Massachusetts and Michigan – still had anti-blasphemy laws on the books. However, the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution would almost certainly prevent the enforcement of any such law.

In South America, Peru’s federal law does not formally prohibit blasphemy, but local government authorities have enforced penalties for it. In October 2012, a district mayor in Lima closed a public art exhibit that featured a naked statue of Christ after religious groups condemned it as blasphemy. According to the U.S. State Department’s International Religious Freedom Report, representatives of the local art community “expressed concern over censorship and freedom of speech” after the incident.

Blasphemy laws are least common in sub-Saharan Africa (three of 48 countries), according to 2012 data. In April of 2012, anti-slavery activists in Mauritania were charged and imprisoned for blasphemy after publicly burning religious texts to denounce what the activists viewed as support for slavery in Islamic commentary and jurisprudence.

 

Riding the stream

British Airways Boeing 777 approaches supersonic speed

Well, good to get away from Islamism for a moment, and read about the way a strong jet stream speeds up some flights.  Didn't know they sort of deliberately use it.

Not helpful, Rupert

As tweeted a short time ago:

Rupert Murdoch @rupertmurdoch · 47m47 minutes ago

Maybe most Moslems peaceful, but until they recognize and destroy their growing jihadist cancer they must be held responsible.

0 replies .405 retweets198 favourites

What if the free speech competition of ideas results in the better ideas losing?

It's completely understandable that pro free speech sentiment should be running sky high as a result of the bloodshed in Paris this week, but, perhaps once things have cooled down a bit, it will be time to consider some points that are not being much considered in the current atmosphere.

First, the almost trite, but nonetheless highly relevant, point that free speech is a two edged sword.  It allows bogus claims of current or historical fact, gossip, rumour and all sorts of poisonous attitudes and ideology to have an audience and influence.   The argument for free speech is that the good and true needs its own outlet to overcome the bad and false, and that, eventually at least, the better and true ideas will win.   But what guarantee do we have this process really works out for the best, or at least, is working fast enough in the modern world?

Surely, this is extremely relevant to the matter of the current state of Islam.

There has been some commentary from the pro-free speech side in the last couple of days that Western political correctness actually encourages radicals in Islam (and, perhaps, simple anti-Western sentiment in the Muslims more generally) by demanding self censorship from legitimate challenge to some of its ideas.

Well, in some limited respect I can see grounds for that complaint.  For example, I think some of the politically correct "hands off" approach to female genital "circumcision" is very ill considered; although, perhaps that's not the best example, as it is more of a cultural-regional thing that a particularly Muslim one.  Perhaps the case of actual laws forbidding insulting depictions of Mohammed is a good case, as is exampled by this story out of Ireland a couple of days ago.  But to be honest, I am not sure how many Western countries do have such a law anyway.  (Although, I did, by co-incidence, note just before the Paris events this week that British law has genuinely gone too far in making generic offensiveness a matter of criminality.)

But looking at the bigger picture, do the free speech advocates really think that if every bit of legal or (so called) self imposed "censorship" was removed that it would make any great practical difference to the state of Islam across the world?

It seems to me that there is a good argument to be made that the poisonous and false ideas which are distressingly highly influential in much of Islamic society (including those within the West) - the disbelief in the Holocaust; the beliefs that death for apostasy is a reasonable thing, that blasphemy should be punished by jail or worse, that the IS fighters are taking part in a great "end times" conflict - actually benefit from the fact that the internet and modern communications generally has given free speech a wider and more unfettered reach than it has ever had.  

This is why I think that the sort of reaction of "if only more in the West ridiculed Islam, the better things would be"  is shallow idealism.   What evidence is there that it would help win the competition of ideas?  Why should it?

 Let's be practical here:  if you are actually engaged in a life or death war time struggle with another nation (the West against Nazi Germany, for example) ridicule has a propaganda value but it is done with a clear, short term, end point in sight (the defeat of the other regime).     But no one in their right mind thinks the West is going to militarily wipe out all Islamic regimes with views we find quite medieval.  Modern trade relationships in fact mean that showing some respect to Islamic countries is in your economic self interest.

In any event, calling the desire to not cause offence on religious grounds "self censorship" is unjustified politicisation of matters relating to mere decency and respect.  Sure, the Right typically complains that the media feels a free hand to ridicule Catholicism or Christianity but won't treat Islam in the same way.   But if one feels that some attacks on one religion are in poor taste, I am not sure how insisting they attack another in the same way is meant to make amends for the former.  In the current situation, provided you accept that being religious and not being happy with ridicule of your religion does not of itself make you an extremist (as all people should), I think there are perfectly legitimate and well reasoned cases to be made on both sides of the question of whether mainstream media should re-print the French cartoons - and actually, I think either decision should be respected as a matter of editorial conscience and ethical arguments that led to no black and white conclusion.    

I also see that the argument has been put that Islam does not need "reformation", and that, if anything, the Wahhabi movement was its Reformation and was a regressive rather than progressive change.  What it needs is for the Enlightenment to reach it. 

This is a valid enough argument, and it is relevant to the theme of this post.   Unless you're talking about some of the really undeveloped Islam backwaters (rural Afghanistan) or countries which really do have effective free speech control over the internet and airwaves (Saudi Arabia, perhaps?) you surely can't argue that Enlightenment ideas are not already out there to be seen and understood by Muslims.

Isn't what's happening that in the marketplace for ideas, the ideas and values we want all Muslims to adopt are not winning out.  Or not winning out fast enough.   Not that there is a crisis in global free speech.

This is why I am not convinced by this column from Frank Furedi at Spiked, who notes that in education, both Britain and France has been accused of not challenging in the classroom Muslim student's disbelief of the Holocaust, or other ideologically driven views of history.   Well, OK, that may be true, but at the core of that problem is that the students have already come to school with set beliefs that they have inherited from their parents, mosque, and/or the internet, and such home bred beliefs and biases can be incredibly hard to dislodge.     And in the case of France, the free speech that allows Charlie Hebdo to draw rude cartoons of Mohammed has not made any difference to that problem.

Furedi seems to admit as much in his final paragraph:

The chain of events that led to the massacre in Paris may well have been sparked off by a classroom discussion in the banlieus of Paris or Marseilles. Some pupils were no doubt certain that the Holocaust was a myth. And the defensive way their teachers dealt with their points would only have strengthened their conviction, itself informed by their older peers at home. Throughout their teenage years, their alienation from French society would have gained in force. They then encountered radical Islam, a medium to express their alienation, and the rest is history.

He also adds as his final sentence:

But if Europe wakes up, this won’t necessarily be the future.

What he leaves unsaid is what Europe is meant to do, once it does "wake up", about the cultural segregation that he cites as being at the core of the problem.

I don't have clear suggestions either.  All I am arguing is that the true issue is what's happening in the competition of ideas and the dissemination of what is true historical fact, and that making a bit of a fetish out of freedom to ridicule is putting the emphasis in the wrong place.

Updates:

On re-reading this post, I realised I had not emphasised enough the role of the internet in enabling radicalism, rumour and false claims of all types to spread quickly and have influence. It has sped up the process enormously compared to what was previously possible with books, pamphlets or even broadcast media, given its 24 hour availability, instantaneous publishing, and the echo chamber effect where people with the craziest ideas can find a support network of the likeminded agreeing with and supporting them.  

Its exact role is going to be inherently hard to study or prove, but I have mentioned before that I suspect  that the political success of the climate change denial movement is virtually a creation of internet.  It is hard to imagine it maintaining the grip it has for so long without it.

Whether or not this will prove true of Islamic radicalising material is hard to say.

The issue of free speech and the internet is therefore particularly vexed, with free speech advocates routinely deriding (with rare exception) any suggestion whatsoever of government interference with content.    I am also curious as to what they think about hack attacks if they are well motivated.   It will be interesting to see if anything comes of the threatened hacking of Islamic extremists.   I would find it hard to be concerned if renegade hackers achieved things of value which Western governments consider they cannot.

Oh - and just after typing this, I have found a post from the University of Pennsylvania which makes the exact same point.  It proposes using a deliberate public-private campaign of messaging on digital media to oppose extremism.   Sounds good - except for the question of how to get it to be viewed by the people who need to see such content.   (The example of climate change denialism is again relevant - the fact that there is a huge resource of good scientific material on the internet to rebut their specific claims has actually had little effect on those who are ideologically committed to their view.  They simply dismiss such sites and will not read them.)

With respect to the competition for ideas generally, I think Mohammed El-leissey made some good points in his recent article at the Drum.   He notes that Western media pays little attention to the idealogical war being fought within Islam itself, and I was surprised to learn that Iraq has a satirical "sitcom" on TV about Islamic State.  (You should go view the separate story about that which appeared in October 2014.) 

While accepting this, it doesn't really go to the larger point that people like Bill Maher have been making (although in his case, with some exaggeration) - that across the globe, there is much to be concerned about regarding the apparent attitudes of Muslims, and the question is how to get "Enlightenment values" more widespread.

Kind of a depressing read

Blacklist proposed for fossil fuels : Nature News & Comment

Summing it up

I think the reaction to the Paris terrorism has been pretty encouraging, actually.   The Parisians themselves have been dignified and very impressive.  To a large extent, it has unified the Right and Left in revulsion.

Sure, more broadly, on both sides of politics, there will always be someone who makes silly and inappropriate statements, but I think the fact that this was an attack on a Lefty publication in a Left leaning country has meant that there has been actually next to nothing of the excuse making sometimes seen from the soft Left.   Waleed Aly wisely avoids any contextualizing about it, except to the extent of pointing out that, in Australia at least, anyone's risk of being a victim of terrorism is still vanishingly small.  This is a valid enough point, and perhaps even a needed response to the more extreme "We are at War!" commentary that comes from some.   Still, imagining that there are even a few hundred men in your country who are willing to commit extreme acts of terrorism for purely ideological reasons is not encouraging.

Which brings me to the point:  yes, we've all know for quite a while now extreme or radical Islamism is not compatible with Western values; there is actually no new news in that - the question is how to deal with it, especially in your own country.

And here it seems to me no one has complete answers.   Certainly, some are more useless than others, and  here's roughly how I see it:

*  strong conservatives mutter about ending all Muslim immigration and refuse to believe that moderate Islam exists at all.  Always prepared to see the end of the West as being just around the corner due to what is still a small minority of their population, most of which is not radical; they always want to leap to exaggerate a (claimed) weakness of  most citizen's attachment to Western values.   From such unrealistic premises, you can't expect useful contribution at all. 

*  the libertarian Right are the most obsessed with privacy and most opposed to increased surveillance by security services.  They are also most obsessed with free speech, to such a degree that it seems some think that not causing offence to moderate Muslims is harmful to the cause of de-radicalising the radicalised - a position I find hard to fathom.  They exaggerate the effect of something like s18C RDA, acting as if its existence is the greatest crisis to free discussion ever, despite the fact that it doesn't even address religious discrimination (although some State legislation does) and no one can go to jail for breaching it.    Some also have a silly "open borders" idea, in which they (oddly) come close to the Greens soft and impractical position on this.   And let's not mention their nutty obsession with guns, and how they think arming everyone helps a society be safer.   All in all, they (both libertarians and the Greens) are therefore all over the shop, and have no great practical contribution to make.

*  the soft Left:  can spend too much time on contextualising and fretting how it really is our own fault for not being nice enough to men before they become radicals, and while they do have some suggestions for better social integration (more sports clubs for young Muslim men, I heard this morning) but they all sound rather whimpy and well intentioned but hardly convincing.

*  the "hard" Left:   well, not sure that it really exists anywhere apart from a few corners of Europe, although many on the Right put virtually the whole of France in that category.   But really, if you consider the ban on face coverings as one of the most interventionist ways of seeking to get better cultural integration of  Muslims that has been attempted anywhere, those on the Right should at least be congratulating the country on the attempt.   (I guess that whether it's an idea that appeals more to the Left due to it being a legislative attempt at social manipulation that they tend to like, or to the conservative Right, which just wants to make life as difficult for Muslims as they can, is hard to say.)   Of course, it's not clear that its working, but hey, what is?

In any event, as I say, no one has all the answers.   Reasonable surveillance powers for our intelligence services make sense;  effective gun control and potential weapon checks and balances (such as the controls on potential bomb making ingredients) make sense;  as does active action against radical leaders encouraging killing, of course;  continued engagement with moderate Islamic leaders makes sense.

But ultimately, radicalism within Islam probably has to burn itself out within Islam, and its unclear how much the rest of us can do to assist that ideological (and actual) war.

Update:  it has occurred to me, I should probably say that the conservative Right takes a too strongly one-eyed view always in favour of whatever Israel does, and the hard Left - and sometimes the soft Left too - can be too one-eyed in favour of Palestine.

Before anyone gets too carried away with accusing any on the Left of "appeasement" of Islamism...

...have a read of some of the extraordinarily inane political point scoring attempted in American Right wing media sources in light of the attack.

I also note that David Leyonhjelm could not resist the temptation to (indirectly, via re-tweet) re-publish his "if only more people had guns for self protection" line.  That's pretty offensive, in my books:

Of particular interest at the moment

Reforming Islam: Where change comes from | The Economist

Decent analysis, but light on suggestions for solutions

Europe’s confused debate about Islam and terrorism: Europeans are both too Islamophobic and too timid about facing the roots of Islamic fundamentalism.
Well, not just "light".  Actually non-existent. 

Free speech where it's genuinely an issue

Is it right to jail someone for being offensive on Facebook or Twitter? | Law | The Guardian

The article may be from mid 2014, but it really is quite surprising to read about the law in the UK, and how "offensiveness" in on line communications there has led to jail terms (and, no doubt, hideous legal expenses to those who have escaped conviction.)

Once again, I will make the observation that Australia seems to often manage to strike the happy medium between the two extremes one sees between the US on the one hand, and Britain or other parts of Europe on the other.

And it is pretty puzzling that Britain manages to exist without serious internal debate about this issue, especially when in other respects it has a very retrograde social approach to matters such soft porn in newspapers.  I mean, why are those who want any form of offensiveness on line illegal not prominent in seeking to have Rupert Murdoch stop using soft porn as offensive to women?    Or, I guess, is it the case that the page 3 girl is seen there by some as the last bastion of "free speech", or some such guff?   It's a very mixed up country, it seems...

Cater goes "frightbat"

Long March with bra-burning Bill | The Australian

I just got around to reading Nick Cater's column from yesterday, in which he gets all worked up about Bill Shorten and one line about women he used in November.   In the course of his column, Cater adopts the immature "frightbat" terminology invented by Tim Blair.

I find this all very strange.   Immaturity in politics used to be the province of the young Left.  (And indeed, it's still to be found there - it always will, while ever young people are generally more idealist than pragmatic in their early political views.)

But with this bunch of nutty Right wannabe culture warriors (all climate change deniers, by no coincidence at all) who want to try to provoke fights over matters where the great majority of the public and governments have become centrists anyway, you see so many of them openly showing rude immaturity.

Yet they are not of tender years themselves.  In fact, they skew heavily to white, male and over 50.  Or being Judith Sloan.

Strange, very strange. 

A set of grooming observations

*  My favourite deodorant is now made in South Africa and seems to me to not be as good as it used to be.

* I was given after shave balm from L'Occitane as a Christmas gift, and I note that it has "wild juniper" in it.  It does remind me of gin a little bit.  It's nice.

*  At Daiso, the cheap Japanese style "dollar" store, I bought a metal dental pick several months ago.  It certainly does help with that problem which is not uncommon - the formation of "scale" behind the lower front teeth, regardless of how routinely the area is brushed.  I once asked a dentist why it forms there in particular, and the answer is to do with the close proximity to salivary glands and the fact that saliva contains calcium and other ions.   Here, from the internet, I see confirmation of this:

Calculus formation is related to the fact that saliva is saturated with respect to calcium and phosphate ions. Precipitation of these elements leads to mineralization of dental plaque giving rise to calculus. The crystals in calculus include hydroxyapatite, brushite, and whitlockite, all of which have different proportions of calcium and phosphate in combination with other ions, such as magnesium, zinc, fluoride, and carbonate.

The cheapo dental pick I am using does seem very pointy, though, and I do worry that if it is not used cautiously enough, I may damage real tooth enamel.  So far so good, though.

Addiction considered

What Heroin Addiction Tells Us About Changing Bad Habits : Shots - Health News : NPR

I remember Theodore Dalrymple citing the American soldiers returning from Vietnam who successfully kicked the heroin habit as a reason to not overly pander to heroin addicts who claim an inability to get off methadone.  (My post about this is here.)

Well, this NPR article puts more flesh on the bones of the Vietnam vet story, and makes the point that researchers think it is the change of environment that makes all the difference.

This makes some sense, and also suggests a reason why urban addicts who are stuck in their domestic environment may well find it harder than returning soldiers to kick drug habits.

It also suggests why remote aboriginal communities with drugs problems look so hopeless.

Not decanting babies any time soon

The High-Tech Future of the Uterus - The Atlantic

Quite a good article here on the remarkable medical advances with respect to the uterus, as well as looking at past ideas (artificial wombs, or "in-vitro gestation") that no longer look viable.

This section is particularly interesting:

Since Liu’s mouse experiments, the medical community has more or less abandoned in-vitro gestation. The past decade saw a renaissance in transplant technology, and advances in the burgeoning field of human prenatal epigenetics have rendered gestation outside a mother’s body a less plausible concept. Scientists are learning more about the interplay between fetal
development and the mother’s whole body—not just her uterus.


“The fetus gets an advantage by developing within a maternal body,” says Janet DiPietro, associate dean for research at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. DiPietro oversees the Johns Hopkins Fetal-Development Project, a 20-year endeavor that tracks how
physiological aspects of the maternal-fetal bond shape development. DiPietro told me that everything from a mother’s circadian rhythms to her posture sends cues to the growing fetus.

“The maternal voice is heard very well, which probably sensitizes the baby to the sounds of their own language. Amniotic fluid develops the odor of certain foods that women eat, and so there’s a notion that cultural likes and dislikes are transmitted to the fetus via the amniotic fluid,” she says, “So the maternal context provides an environment that goes far beyond the direct circulatory-system connection.”

DiPietro explains that in the future, an artificial-uterus transplant is “far, far more likely” than in-vitro gestation, in part because the placenta, which grows from the uterus after implantation, is “one of the most enigmatic organs that we have.” Scientists can’t understand it, let alone construct it from scratch. The complex interplay between the placenta—which grows from the fetus’s own cells—and the mother’s blood flow, immune system, and circulating oxygen has been so poorly researched that Alan Guttmacher, director of the National Institute of
Child Health and Human Development, recently called it “the least-understood human organ.” But with a bioengineered uterus, the assumption is that if you get the uterus right, a placenta,
amazingly, will grow on its own once the transplant recipient becomes pregnant.