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War Predictors
What’s the best predictors of which nations are most likely to go to war or exhibit instability?
Up until now these three factors were assumed to be the most predictive: poverty levels, lack of democracy, and the nation’s adherence to Islamic values. However, Valerie Hudson and the folks of WomanStats have found a fourth factor that is a better predictor:
These results indicate that if a scholar or policymaker had to select one variable—level of democracy, level of wealth, prevalence of Islamic culture, or the physical security of women—to assist them in predicting which states would be the least peaceful or of the most concern to the international community or have the worst relations with their neighbors, they would do best by choosing the measure of the physical security of women.
I found it interesting that their research indicates of all the predictors prevalance of Islamic culture is the weakest. So much for the idea that Islam is the bogey man.
Before presenting their findings, they make a theoretical case by synthesizing insights from evolutionary biology and psychology, political sociology, and psychology. When summarizing the ideas from evolution, they state:
Evolutionary theory suffers from two common misconceptions. The first is that evolutionary predispositions are intractable. No evolutionary theorist believes this. Richard Dawkins explains, “It is perfectly possible to hold that genes exert a statistical influence on human behavior while at the same time believing that this influence can be modified, overridden, or reversed by other influences.” The second misconception is that evolutionary theory posits static and essential characteristics for males and females. This has been debunked as well. In debunking this myth, Theodore Kemper notes, “Across the spectrum of the social sciences, the results show that females are not essentially pacific, retiring, unaggressive, lacking in motives and psychological need for power and dominance. While successful ideological socialization may persuade many women that this is true of themselves, it is not biologically true.”
These misconceptions are very interesting indeed and should be remembered when examining genetic based arguments for all sorts of behavior. When they discuss social learning theory from psychology, they reiterate this point:
First, social learning psychologists argue that biology does increase the likelihood that a child will engage in aggressive or violent behavior, but does not guarantee it. For example, twin and adoption studies find that genes make a small contribution to various forms of antisocial behavior compared to environmental factors. For example, while finding that having a biological parent who was antisocial increased the risk for antisocial behavior to be seen in an adopted child, these same studies also demonstrated that having a disrupted home environment contributed more significantly to the risk for a child to engage in antisocial behavior.
They then discuss specific environmental factors that lead to violent behavior against women. It’s a fascinating article. I highly recommend it. You can find the original, “The Heart of the Matter: The Security of Women and the Security of States,” in Harvard university’s International Security, volume 33, issue 3.
Okay, okay, so how do the countries rank? Here’s a summary from the Deseret News:
A WomanStats map reveals highest levels of women’s physical insecurity in the Middle East, India, much of Africa, Brazil and Mexico. On a Violence Against Women scale, the United States sits smack dab in the middle, at a level 3 on a 5-point scale, with moderate levels of domestic violence and rape.
Why cows are important to Servant of a Dark God
BSCreviews just published my guest blog “How to Get Ideas: Talk to Cows.” For those of you unfamiliar with the genesis of Servant of a Dark God, you’ll want to check it out.
Story zing method: fiddling with knobs
One of the most basic way of coming up with story ideas is to take a familiar story or thing, list out what’s commonly associated with it, then start changing some of those elements.For example, you list out all the normal things for vampires–the coffins, black, bats, sucking blood, etc.–then you begin to twist. What if the vampire wears, instead of black, some styling plaid? What if it isn’t a person but a rabbit (whoops, that one’s been done)? What if instead of gothic places like catherals you find him in a trailer park? What if instead of being dangerously suave, he’s a drunk?
Do you see? You can do this with anything.
In this interview, Matthew Sturges talks about how he did just that with the movie The Dirty Dozen and ended up with with Midwinter, a novel about prisoners given another chance. According to Sturges, “In the case of Midwinter, the beginning of the story was, ‘What is prison like in Faery?'”
Read the whole interview. I think you’ll find it enlightening.
Laboratory Grown Meats?
How would you like to eat cuts from slabs of meat grown from stem cells?
Give the cells some water, glucose and natural proteins. To make sure you have something that feels like meat you “exercise” the muscle with electrical pulses.
Gross? Maybe. But someone is thinking about it.
http://www.popsci.com/environment/gallery/2008-09/inside-vertical-skyscraper
As with all zing, post story ideas in the comments.
The church of dead chickens
For about two hours each Sunday I get to teach a bunch of wonderful six and seven year olds at our church. 5 boys. 2 girls. One of the boys likes to rip the buttons off his shirts with his teeth. So I’m thinking, hey, this is my kind of crowd.
I teach with a man named Jed. Poor mountaineer barely keeps his family fed. One day he was shooting up some food when up from the ground came a bubbling crude.
Okay, so Jed isn’t a poor, bare-foot fellow with starving kids. He’s an eligible bachelor who helps his father run one of the biggest cattle ranches up here. Nevertheless, his name IS Jed. And we do live in the mountains.
So anyway, we have a great time with these kids. I mean, with adults, they all sit there polite in their chairs. But with these kids, well, every once in a while there’s one boy who gets up and jigs like Lords of the Flame. We appreciate his art and then get on with the lesson. You also get to say things like, “Hey, do you need to blow that schnoz,” and “get your hand out of your pants” right in the middle of class and nobody bats an eye. During the prayer one of them likes to sit Indian style, hands out, thumbs to the birdie finger (what’s the real name of that finger anyway, Tallman?), and say “oohm.” Trying to break him of that habit. That’s not quite the civilized style of prayer in these parts. But at least he closes his eyes and figures prayer is fun.
So at the beginning of each class we go around and tell one cool or interesting thing that happened that week. I think their stuff is cool. They think my stuff is cool. We have a cool chat and then move on to professionally prepared lessons. Lots of interaction. I’m a private sector teacher, right? (Look, I’d say “trainer,” but then all them snooty types would say, “So what do you want? Sex TRAINING or sex EDUCATION?” Then they’d look down on me. And I’d say, well, education can sometimes be boring. Let’s try the training part. Then I’d get kicked out of my church job. So I’m keeping my job, okay?)
Jed and I, we facilitate some good lessons. Thing is you never know what gets through. Until, of course, the parents give you some feedback.
I had a party with the kids over at my house. We couldn’t find an official slip-n-slide, so we pulled out some plastic, folded it up, and then set it up on our hill. One benefit of coming to my house for slip n slide fun is that we have a hot water tap outside. Nice for washing cars. Nice for mixing with the cold water so you’re sliding in a warm sploosh. Not some ice fest because you want to be loosey-goosey when you’re careening over grass.
It was all good until one boy zoomed down the slide at 80 mph while another was trying to straighten our redneck slip-n-slide. The first smacked the other I don’t know where with his head. All I know is that there was a nice watermelon sound and a delayed wail of extreme pain. We all admired the sound echoing around the hill we live on then moved onto some buddy tag (you call it missionary tag out here in Mormonland). Then to flying paper airplanes off our deck, after which we cooked s’mores over a fire. We ended up with hooligan fireworks on the driveway–smoke bombs and tanks. Everyone loved it. Kids didn’t want to leave. Who would?
That Sunday we had another fine lesson at the church. So what do you think this kids are going to remember?
I’ll tell you what they’ll remember. One little gal just told her mom that they needed to get some dead chickens and turkeys and put them on their porch. This is what they learned in primary from Brother John and Brother Jed. And she’s not the only one talking like that.
I deny teaching any voodoo.
Or taxidermy.
Of course, I will admit that when we were flying airplanes off the deck I told them I wanted to put up a few platforms maybe two feet square down by our garden. Put them up on 7 foot poles and throw some dead animals on them during the winter, maybe a chicken from the store, and watch the bald eagles and hawks gather. I mean, come one. Forget those weiner sparrows. Who wouldn’t want a few bald eagle badboys in the garden, looking down and scaring the cats? We all agreed that was cool then went on flying our multi-colored airplanes.
So that’s what I’ll admit to. But the parents can’t be mad because being nice to others, especially those with razor sharp beaks and talons that like to rip and tear raw flesh, hey, that’s the second great commandment. I was just teaching the gospel truth.