The Official Back-From-The-Vacation Post

With a smidgen of jet lag and the usual post-flight migraine.  It's nice to be back at the Snakepit Inc. and it's also oddly nice to once again hear the louder American speech pattern.

My usual type of blogging will commence after the weekend.  Until then you will only get fuzzy thoughts.

The War Inside My Body: Or What Ben Carson Thinks.

The Republican Presidential hopeful Ben Carson promises to give a lot of grist for my sarcasm mill!  Just ponder this fairly recent comment of his:

“They tell you that there’s a war on women,” he said. “There is no war on women. There may be a war on what’s inside of women, but there is no war on women in this country.”

A very fine distinction our Ben tries to make there!  If only women had, say, prostates and penises, then we wouldn't have a war about their insides!

But more seriously, Carson hints at the dismal treatment of women in many other countries, and he is correct about that.  Women are not equally oppressed everywhere in the world. 

That's no excuse to let things get worse here or in any other country where older battles were won, because then we have to fight those battles again.

And even more seriously, much of the forced-birth movement is ultimately about who gets to control fertility and changes in population size.  Because such large parts of the "fertility factories" are inside women's bodies, of course the war on women is about those insides.

Research Monday 5: Wrapping It Up

This is the last day of this series.  You might want to end it by reading this audit study about white privilege on Australian buses.  Audit studies are very useful, because they manage to hold lots of stuff constant while analyzing the impact of something like race or gender or ethnic group on the way people are treated.

That "holding constant" means that the actors playing the roles in the study are trained to do everything the same.  For instance, if the actors are to look for jobs in the study they are provided with equally good resumes and trained to ask and answer all questions the same way.  If this is done well, any differences in the average treatment of, say, men and women or blacks and whites can be attributed fairly safely to discrimination.

And here are some of my thoughts about the kind of group blog we'd need for the critical evaluation of research and its popularizations.

No, there will be no quiz.  But I hope you found some of this series useful.