Today I learned of independent documentary, Orgasm, Inc., which examines the current race by pharmaceutical companies to develop a female sexual enhancement drug. The idea is that with the remarkable financial success of Viagra, there must be a market for a drug to offer women sexual satisfaction, to which end medical researchers have been aggressively promoting the idea of widespread female sexual dysfunction. As explained in Newsweek piece on the film, “The selling of the female orgasm,” Liz Canner, the filmmaker, was approached by Vivus, a company whose suppository for erectile dysfunction lost its market dominance with the advent of Viagra and wanted her help with their female sex research. Another article in the Guardian identifies the drug (which they subsequently gave up on developing) as an “orgasm cream“, which sounds all kinds of disgusting.
Conveniently, I learned of this film but three days after it debuted in NYC at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, so it looks like I won’t be able to watch it for the foreseeable future without coughing up $30 for a DVD. So I figured I’d help other people avoid making the same mistake and encourage anyone interested to find a screening this summer – the filmmaker is showing it on various campuses in hopes of building up to a nationwide theatrical release. It also looks to be coming to Netflix, although it’s not there yet.
Sean Carrol over at Cosmic Variance has a very nice piece today on how science and religion are not compatible. But my philosophical sense (like Spiderman’s spider-sense, only far less useful) went crazy at this sentence:
You can use words to mean whatever you want; it’s just that you will consistently be misunderstood by the ordinary-language speakers with whom you are conversing.
In fairness, I agree with the basic point. I’m really just quibbling with the word “use”. Or rather, with the claim that “you can use words to mean whatever you want,” when the second half of the sentence denies just that. Whatever you might intend by your words, if you fail to be understood by other speakers they’re not going to be of much use to you (or anyone).
Now back to your regularly scheduled internet usage.
About a month ago I went to Ruth’s lab to drop off something she forgot at home, and when I got there the doors to the building were locked. After I got someone to let me in, I asked what was with increased security. I was told, “It’s ‘Be Kind to Animals Week’,” as if that explained everything.
Turned out that all of the buildings with research labs on campus were locked down because the authorities were afraid that some people would interpret “Be Kind to Animals” as “Terrorize Scientists.” The fear wasn’t entirely unfounded. A partial timeline of terrorist acts committed by animal activists against UC employees since 2006 includes things like
October 2007: Vandals broke a window and used a garden hose to flood the house of a UCLA professor who researches nicotine addiction. More than $20,000 in damage resulted.
[...]
June 2008: A UCLA vanpool vehicle was badly damaged in a fire in an Irvine parking lot.
August 2008: Firebombs at separate locations struck a home and a car of two UC Santa Cruz scientists. The car was destroyed and the house was filled with smoke before the fire was put out. One of the scientists, his wife and two young children fled the home through a second-story window.
Fortunately, at least as far as I know, nothing much happened during Be Kind to Animals Week. But this timeline came to mind today when I read Ta-Nehisi quote someone saying, in regard to the murder of Dr. Tiller:
I mean, if I believed that a guy working in an office down the street was murdering innocent and defenseless human beings every day, and the governing authorities repeatedly refused to intervene on behalf of the victims, I might feel compelled to do something about it, perhaps even something unreasonable and irresponsible. Wouldn’t you?
Coates himself adds:
“Abortion is murder” seems like a slogan meant to whip up your own, and attract attention. But in truth, do pro-lifers really believe it? Can they truly morally maintain that all abortion, all the time, is murder? If so, I don’t know how you really condemn someone for killing George Tiller.
Um … the same way we condemn every crazy, every terrorist, every murderer. It doesn’t matter that some insane person really believes that animal research is the same as torturing humans, it’s still terrorism to firebomb the homes of researchers. People can believe all kinds of loony shit, and it’s great that we understand the motivations of terrorists, as I am sure it makes them easier to deal with. But I don’t see any reason to go so far as to say, “Yeah, OK, from where you’re standing, I guess that’d be a job well done.”
A discussion in my Torts class this week brought back, in a roundabout way, to the work I was doing in my Agency course last Spring. Our final topic in Torts is product liability, and our professor asked us to consider how the duty to warn and plaintiff’s conduct principles would apply in a wrongful death action over injuries resulting from cigarette smoke. Obviously, cigarettes come in packaging with a warning to protect against just this sort of suit, but the interesting problem raised by cigarettes in particular is their addictive properties. Let’s say our hypothetical smoker started when there were no warnings, developed cancer over years of smoking, and eventually died from it. Should we let the cigarette companies because they continued to smoke in spite of the warnings? Two types of case come to mind:
For a while this semester, the Milgram experiments kept coming up in the readings for different projects, being interpreted in different ways in each sphere. This was intriguing enough to me to make me want to post my own thoughts on it, which I’ve yet to get a chance to. Maybe I’ll do that this week. In the meantime, a new study found that people behave the same way with a virtual “learner” (which they know to be so) in the teaching task. Neat! (Via LeiterReports)