Liberal activists seemed to have slightly more influence with their campaign to persuade Senate Democrats to filibuster the Supreme Court nomination of Samuel A. Alito Jr. Despite several polls showing that the public opposes the effort, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) on Thursday strongly advocated the filibuster plan -- and wrote about his choice on the Daily Kos, a Web site popular with liberals. Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.), a leading liberal and critic of the Iraq war, told reporters Kerry's viewpoint is not shared by most in a culturally conservative swing state such as West Virginia. Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) also opposes the filibuster.

Well, you know my thoughts on the matter. And ...

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) is another frequent target of the Internet attacks. Code Pink, an antiwar women's group with a flashy Web site, plans to protest one of Clinton's weekend fundraisers and is using the Web site to rally people against the New York Democrat. The critics say Clinton has not challenged Bush aggressively enough on Iraq.

"Clintonian Triangulation" gets two thumbs down from the Kos crowd; noted. Maybe y'all should just, you know, fight harder! I mean, on every issue. Think - maybe it's just that you're not quite left-wing enough for all those middle-class midwestern and southern voters ...

And after all, what does a Clinton know about winning elections anyway, right?

The Kos-wing of the Democratic Party is like a chimp caught in a chinese finger trap.

Borrowing from John Avlon's Independent Nation:

American history demonstrates just as clearly that when either of two parties becomes intoxicated by ideology and nominates a candidate associated with its most extreme wings, the result is defeat of epic proportions. For example, the candidacies of radical conservative Republican Barry Goldwater in 1964 and liberal George McGovern in 1972 each resulted in more than 60 percent of Americans voting against these apparent advocates of extremism.

The fundamental strength of the centrist position remains much the same as it was in 1965 - after LBJ's crushing defeat of Barry Goldwater - when the New York Times columnist James Reston wrote, "The decisive battleground of American politics lies in the center and cannot be captured from either of the extremes, and any party that defies this principle does not improve its chances of national power or even effective opposition, but precisely the opposite."

Ok, ok - as bad as Mr. Britney Spears' musical debut may sound, it's really not any worse than the standard-issue simplistic, repetitive hip hop beats and hooks that dominate the kids' Ipods these days. If Ludacris released the same damn song, it'd be a hit. And come to think of it, it's really no worse than his wife's music, either.*

Nevertheless, watching the world's most successful gigolo boast and head bob like a gooney peacock is pretty damn funny.

* I lay odds that Ghost of a Flea will actually like it. Did I mention that he's Canadian?

the Pope is 100% correct. What we are doing in the Middle East is to try and reform the countries, not Islam itself. We are trying to make people realize that Islam doesn't have all the answers to society's questions, but Islam itself cannot have a reformation in the way Christianity had because the Koran is believed to be the literal word of God. Kinda difficult to tell God you are just going to disobey his will and do what you feel like if you're raised in a culture where your will is meaningless compared to the will of Allah.

So far, not so bad. But ...

We're planting a seed of doubt into the Middle East as to whether the Islamic faith is the one true faith. And that's a very good thing.

When exactly did Western efforts to change broken political systems and pluralize culture equate to a practical end of undermining Islam as the chosen faith of a billion people?

To edit and expand my comment under the post, I believe that viewing Islam - or any other religion - as a concrete rulebook immune to illogical human interpretation is a serious miscalculation. One might make a very cogent and accurate argument that Islam is much more resistant to change because of its self-reinforcing structure; I recognize the theological validity of the point. But any immutability still relies on immutable human devoutness and cooperation with its tenets to truly mark it as "incapable of reform." And assuming that culture and society reform in the Islamic world, due to economic realities, the injected Democracy of America's interventionist foreign policy and the unstoppable rise of information availability and consumerism, what do you think is going to win?

A. The strict structure of Islam?

B. A sudden mass-conversion to atheism or Judeo-Christian religion?

C. Or the desire of the human individual to see Islam through adaptive eyes that maintain the religious identity, yet embrace new cultural norms that violate Islam's historically strict tenets?

If one thinks that the spread of pluralism can change culture but can't in turn change Islam itself, then it follows logically that the effort to modernize the Islamic world is boxed into a corner of assured failure. Why? Because a billion Muslims aren't going to suddenly and completely forsake their religious and cultural identity for Yu-Gi-Oh, the right to vote and HDTV. The Islamic world may be a tougher nut to crack because of the scripture's structure, but I'll still place my bet on illogical human adaptability of a logically unadaptable religion over the ability of religious doctrine to hold back the floodgates of a human desire for freedom, or the naive belief that individuals will forsake an ancient religious affiliation in favor of Western religions or extremes of secularism.

They'll do what all followers of various religions do at some point - engage in periods of apparent apostasy and hypocritical behavior, until such time as that behavior becomes an accepted mutation and fabric of the religion when viewed through the prism of era and culture. Arguments to the contrary strike me as assigning too much credence to unflappable human logic, unduly negative, exaggeratedly culturally triumphalist, or various combinations of the three.

Be sure to read the comment thread under Feisty's post, as there are some well-argued comments that disagree with my optimism.

* I almost gagged from earnestly employing the pedantic cultural identity term "the Other," but it fits. Shrug.

EsmayDean: Tories are kicking ass.
INDCBill: "Tories?" That's some Canadian party moniker ripped off from the Brits, right?
EsmayDean: Yeah.
INDCBill: I dont pay attention to canada
INDCBill: I hate it
EsmayDean: I loved them until they hated us.
INDCBill: did you ever read my post explaining why?
EsmayDean: no
INDCBill: Read it and go.
EsmayDean: But the America-hating party is getting its ass kicked.
INDCBill: whatever
EsmayDean: In fact BOTH the America-hating parties are getting their asses kicked.
INDCBill: did you read my post?!
INDCBill: I DONT CARE. I HATE THEM
EsmayDean: Yes, but ...
INDCBill: HATE HATE HATE
INDCBill: ee-OW! eeHeeHOOOH! ee-OOW! ee-HOW! yep yep yep yep yep yep ee-OW! yepyepyepyepyepyep ee-OW! yepyepyepyepyepyep ee-OW! ee-OW!

yepyepyepyepyepyep ee-OW!

INDCBill: YOU LISTEN TO THAT FOR A YEAR! TELL ME HOW YOU FEEL!
EsmayDean: But, just think:
EsmayDean: Your obnoxious vegan moonbat Canadienne is almost certainly, right now, sobbing hysterically, as Bush has been effectively elected Prime Minister and Rove controls Ottowa.
INDCBill: ah
INDCBill: that is nice. What's an ottowa?
EsmayDean: I mean, she's SOBBING.
EsmayDean: Deeb, welling sobs.
EsmayDean: Shrubbie McHalliburton now owns Canada!

See that? He almost got me to care. But despite the delicious prospects for sweet Canuckian schadenfreude, I still don't. Care. In fact, I don't care so much, I wrote a top ten about not caring:

Top Ten Things I Think About/Care About/Root For More Than Canadian Politics
10. Maureen Dowd's second pulitzer!
9. Canadian sports.
8. Whether Oliver Willis ever thinks fondly of me as he's soaping himself with a honeycomb natural sea sponge, in bubble gum-scented bathwater.
7. Wherefore art thou, Brian Dunkelman?
6. The terminal velocity of dead ocelot dropped from the ionosphere.
5. Mulch.
4. Canadian literature.
3. Whether or not broccoli feels pain.
2. Why Osama bin Laden hates us.
1. The Llama Butchers.

Now leave me.

Your regard for Hitchens aside, in your book you're pretty rough on the neocons. You describe them as "murderers, despots, enemies of the human race, slaughterers of the children of civil, doctor strangeloves..." Or is this sarcasm?

Yes, I'm just making fun of the way the French press describes them. They are demonized, which they don't deserve. I far prefer the neoconservatives, like Kristol, to someone like Pat Buchanan, who is fascist. I far prefer the neoconservative idea of spreading democracy all over the world, to Buchanan, who says that people in the rest of the world don't deserve democracy.

It's amusing (and telling) that the Salon interviewer has to ask whether Lévy's over-the-top rhetoric about neocons is intended as sarcasm. It's also concurrently amusing and annoying how many of those on the left equate "neocon" with their worst "social conservative" nightmares; there are indeed neocons with socially conservative impulses (Bill Kristol's semi-luddite rejection of extreme human enhancement through biotech, for example), but neoconservatism largely speaks to an assertive philosophy regarding foreign policy and a practical philosophy governing domestic policy, a practicality which forms convenient alliances with social conservatism, contingent on the issue. He goes on:

You like them because they're thoughtful.

Because they are democrats. Because they believe in democracy. They believe in a naive way. They believe sometimes in an absurd way. But I much prefer a neoconservative who believes in democracy to an isolationist who believes in America only. I was very shocked when I saw the Michael Moore film "Fahrenheit 9/11." I agreed with him on one point, that the war was a bad idea. But I was shocked by the way he expressed it. The core of his argument was that we have no reason to be interfering in this area of the world. As James Baker said, We don't have a dog in this fight. I think that we do have a dog in this fight. We have something to lose in Iraq. I feel brotherhood, as I have felt all my life, for the Afghan, the Bosnian, and for the Iraqi. But in his movie Moore simply suggests that it is not our affair.

We may disagree on means to ends, but this is an intellectually honest opponent of the Iraq war - a serious man, worthy of serious consideration and debate; the kind of guy you'd love to lock in a cage with Charles Krauthammer for two days, sell tickets and chant "Two men enter, one man leaves!"

His thoughts on "American Empire:"

Your remarks on isolationism remind me of what you say in your book about so-called American imperialism. You seem doubtful that there is such a thing.

Look at your army in Iraq. Look at your army in Vietnam, 40 years ago. Is this an imperialist army? This is the myth, the myth of American empire. Where are your positions? Where are your conquests? Where are your successes abroad? Even in Latin America you went from failure to failure for 40 years. Each time you tried to act as an imperialist you failed. No, European countries are colonialist. We know how to do it. England, France, even Germany. America, no.

So you think that the American left gets distracted by the idea that we're this terrible, imperialist power?

Of course, yes. They should be a little less obsessed with your so-called imperialism and little more obsessed with the death penalty, with the sale of handguns, with creationism. To me, this sort of thing is much more important than worrying about so-called imperialism.

Shhh. Can you hear that? Hush.

Listen.

...

If we're lucky, we'll hear the distant, soft wet plopping sound that whispers the implosion of hundreds - if not thousands - of regular Salon.com readers' heads.

...

...

...

**plop**

Seriously though, a thoroughly interesting read. He's like the French Christopher Hitchens.

The US navy’s Fifth Fleet, which is based in Bahrain and patrols the Indian Ocean, received reports of “an attempted act of piracy” approximately 50 miles (80km) off the Somali coast on Friday, it said in a statement.

Not to pick on the Commissar (his suspicion sure isn't baseless with the BBC), but those are just quotes, sans "scare." When a reporter wants to use the exact phraseology employed by the source - which is both precise and conveys added meaning about how the source described the action - it's good form to incorporate a directly attributed quote into a sentence. Yes, the technique is sometimes abused in a biased way via an injected undercurrent of irony - usually when immediately juxtaposed with contrary "analysis" by the reporter, or a conflicting source's quote which is assigned more credibility by the reporter - but incorporation of quotes into a sentence is also good journalistic style that conveys added, emotionless specificity. I've seen a lot of bloggers react negatively when a report employs this technique, but I think it's relevant to recultivate the perspective that the use of quotes does not default to questioning the source's credibility. Helps keep the blood pressure down, too.

UPDATE: Florida Cracker delivers the short version in the first comment.

And a place for me to troll obnoxiously, really.

**sniffle**

The Washington Post shut down one of its blogs Thursday after the newspaper's ombudsman raised the ire of readers by writing that lobbyist Jack Abramoff gave money to the Democrats as well as to Republicans.
...
In her Sunday column, ombudsman Deborah Howell wrote that Abramoff "had made substantial campaign contributions to both major parties," prompting a wave of nasty reader postings on post.blog.

There were so many personal attacks that the newspaper's staff could not "keep the board clean, there was some pretty filthy stuff," and so the Post shut down comments on the blog, or Web log, said Jim Brady, executive editor of washingtonpost.com.

"We're not giving up on the concept of having a healthy public dialogue with our readers, but this experience shows that we need to think more carefully about how we do it," Brady wrote on the newspaper's Web site. "There are things that we said we would not allow, including personal attacks, the use of profanity and hate speech."

I believe this is the phenomenon that Matthew Yglesias euphemistically refers to as "workaday meanness" from his more enthusiastic ideological brethren. Don't get me wrong, nasty, angry righties exist, but that breed seems far too busy slithering from cold underside of rock to cold underside of rock to bother commenting on most of the popular rightie blogs.* Either that, or they haven't yet figured out how to work the internets en masse.

UPDATE: Via commenter Mike Mcconnell, we can look at the cache of the comments that were taken down, as well as see a more thorough version at a dedicated blog. To be fair, I don't see much profanity, though there are the expected animated charges of "liar," "republican paymasters," "fire this broad," "accepting payola from the Bush Administration," "shill," "Howell should be fired," and "Howells should have a more accurate idea as to who's on the GOP slush fund gravy train. After all, she's pretty obviously on it herself," etc, among calmer criticisms. The tone is definitely, as one commenter humorously put it ...

My God- there's a prison riot going on here- call the authorities! Take some hostages!

... but it's also not the cesspool that one regularly sees over at Kos, Atrios or Democratic Underground, either. The WaPo looks to have gotten a taste of aggressive political commenter criticism and decided to shut the thread based on repeated charges of "accepting payola" and "lying." I wouldn't put up with such personal attacks here, but, well, welcome to the blogosphere. Not nearly as bad as I'd assumed.

UPDATE: Via Dean, Deborah Howell responds to critics attacking the veracity of her assertion that Democrats took tainted money from Abramoff:

Records from the Federal Elections Commission and the Center for Public Integrity show that Abramoff’s Indian clients contributed between 1999 and 2004 to 195 Republicans and 88 Democrats. The Post has copies of lists sent to tribes by Abramoff with specific directions on what members of Congress were to receive specific amounts.

UPDATE: Reynolds:

It's hard for me to get very exercised about this. Given the Post's addition of technorati links to many of their stories, they're in a better position than most to say "the blogosphere is our comment section." And, you know, it is.

* Okay, LGF has a few stars in the ballpark.

The case is more limited than the usual hot-button social-issue case, since the Court was only asked to decide how far Congress intended the statute to go and not what the Constitution says on the matter. I haven't waded through all the conflicting arguments about the statutory issues in sufficient detail to have a firm grip on who has the better argument here; I'm inclined to side with Scalia, but that's not really an educated opinion and much turns on the abstruse issues of administrative law standards of deference. Justice Thomas, though, does have a rather compelling point that if the statute's breadth is as sweeping as the Court claimed in Raich, it's hard to see why it wouldn't also cover the proscriptions here.

He specifically references my earlier post:

In any event, charges of hypocrisy against the dissenters seem to misunderstand the narrowness of the issue the Court was asked to resolve.

Though not speaking as a vaunted legal scholar, I'm still not certain that I misunderstand the narrowness of the issue. Upon further examination, I don't now view this case as an overt Constitutional litmus test for the weighty political issue of assisted suicide; both the narrow, technical dissents and the majority opinions avoid that scope and resonance. But I also don't subscribe to the idea that legal scholarship is an exact science or completely technical endeavor; and thus, given that there is distinct room to interpret the breadth of the FCSA either way - as having authority to govern medically prescribed overdoses or not, in light of both the limited stated intent of the original law as well as contrary precedent that grants the federal government broad powers in such areas - for the conservative strict constructionists to choose the subjective interpretation that expands federal power, based on consistent precedent, especially in a way that happens to mirror conservative ideology ... well that scenario strikes me as at least a minor contravention of consistent federalist impulses.

Because if you think the FCSA oversteps Constitutional authority over the states to begin with (a true federalist ideal), and recognize that the statute didn't expressly grant authority to govern physician-assisted suicide (a popularly determined state law, not even an individual act), then why would you vote to endorse an effective expansion of Federal powers? Bottom line: I'm not certain that respect for precedent and consistency in the Court's rulings is the only factor in the conservative dissent, though I certainly can't read minds.

And a larger implication that I get from this decision is the following: if Scalia, Thomas and Roberts prioritize authoring decisions that respect stare decis and specifically maintain continuity of well-established legal precedent regarding the scope of federal authority, such respect has implications for cases revolving around other hot-button issues that will be out-of-step with their personal ideology, like federal interference in state abortion law.

A hypothetical litmus test for future legal consistency: a case regarding abortion comes before the Supreme Court regarding a state's attempt to restrict access, and the case specifically questions a narrow hypothetical Federal power conferred by an earlier decision from a more liberal incarnation of the Court. Do you lay odds that Scalia votes in favor of Federal power to effectively prevent the state from enacting the restrictive abortion law, or does he vote to restrain Federal power, which practically favors the state's restriction of access to abortion? Even if the case is not overtly framed within direct Constitutional authority, like a high-profile test of the inferred Right to Privacy?

I realize that this is an incredibly muddled and hypothetical hypothetical, but I'd put my money on Scalia subjectively choosing to restrain any Federal authority that would prevent the state from restricting access to abortion in that case, precedent be damned. Because ideology informs legal philosophy, especially in Scalia's case, whether we'd like to think so or not. I suppose we'll see.

Again, this entire post is caveated by the fact that I'm a terribly amateur legal analyst. Though I did watch LA Law religiously as a kid, and can do a wicked-awesome Benny Stulwicz impression. Frankly - and if I'm lyin' I'm dyin' here - it's off the fucking chain. "Arnie! Arnie!" Better in person.

UPDATE: Goldstein agrees with my endorsement of what overarching federalism should look like when weighed against subjective interpretation relying on anti-federalist precedent (anti-federalist precedent initially set by Scalia in Raich), but disagrees that morality was a motivating factor in the conservative dissents:

I don’t think the dissenters ruled on “moral” grounds here (that is, I think that though they recognized the moral character of the case, they ruled, ultimately, on expanded DoJ powers, which were legally defensible, though wrong, in my estimation); ulitmately, I believe their decision came down to looking at the case as one of statutory interpretation, and they sided with an increased power of the justice department to regulate and define proper drug usage.

I disagree with the dissenters (which puts me at odds with Scalia, Thomas, and Roberts—and I generally find myself in agreement with Thomas), but I do so only because I believe this was a separations of powers issue, and I think state’s rights and the rights of the voters of the states to make what are essentially personal decisions writ large should, whenever possible, trump technical questions of dubious semantic dickering that are simply too close to call.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., dissenting for the first time since he joined the court in September, sided with the two most conservative justices -- Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas -- in voting for the minority view.

At issue was whether the federal Controlled Substances Act, enacted in 1970 to combat drug abuse and trafficking, allowed the attorney general unilaterally to prohibit doctors in Oregon from prescribing regulated drugs for use in physician-assisted suicide, despite state law permitting them to do so.

From my post about the then-pending case last October:

I've previously (and perhaps clumsily) made similar arguments about conservative inconsistency in the application of the "judicial activist" label.

I think Balletshooz prematurely judges Roberts' ultimate opinion based merely on remarks during the case, and I'll wait for the decision before cutting loose with condemnation, but I'm also very interested to see if the Court winds up leaving the power to regulate this medical practice in the hands of the state, specifically since Oregonian voters have directly approved the measure twice via ballot.

Since the Constitution provides no specific instruction on Federal regulation of medical practices - and Ashcroft and now Gonzalez's legal rationale for challenging the Oregonian law, the federal Controlled Substances Act (which itself relies on inferred Constitutional authority based on "'interstate commerce' and the 'general welfare' of the American people") was not written with physician-assisted suicide in mind - how would the SCOTUS overturning the will of Oregon's voters not constitute "legislating from the bench?" How would it not represent a violation of a strict constructionist's interpretation of the 10th Amendment?

"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

There are dissenting explanations (notably from John Tabin) in the comments under that post. But assuming that I'm not overlooking an overriding angle, John Roberts failed his first test of commitment to Federalist principles. More informed legal scholars are free to explain the error in my judgment.

An amusing quote from Scalia's dissent:

Scalia backed the government's position that assisting in suicide was not a "legitimate medical purpose." Saying that the court's decision "is perhaps driven by a feeling that the subject of assisted suicide is none of the Federal Government's business," Scalia wrote that "it is easy to sympathize with that position." However, the government has long been able to use its powers "for the purpose of protecting public morality," he said.

Translation: States' Rights! Until Scalia feels that the Federal government has an overriding interest in "protecting public morality," that is. Federal public morality.

John Cole has more:

All together now, conservatives- “States Rights!”

UPDATE: Channeling strict constructionism:

"The founders didn't write NUTTIN' 'BOUT NO CYANIDE DOCTORIN'!"

UPDATE: See my additional thoughts here.

Because I know there's going to be a sequel.

It's a frequent complaint that in our politically correct climate, talking about behavioral, psychological, and intellectual differences between men and women has become a taboo, at least in enlightened academic circles (as Larry Summers found out the hard way). I am certainly not even favor of any such taboos. But the truth is that on the popular level -- and also among the anti-PC set -- talk about sex differences often tends to lapse into unwarranted generalizations and rather egregious stereotyping.

Unmistakably, 100% true. And as Young points out, lapsing into "unwarranted generalizations and rather egregious stereotyping" cuts both ways, demonstrated by Lauren's casual "bs" call, Amanda Marcotte's typically charming take on evolutionary psychology ...

... your average evo psych theory as to why women are destined to be inferior to men is a "make up your own bullshit" effort, because no matter how stupid it is, people will eat it up.

... and Echnide's head-scratching "if-then's" posited in the course of her takedown of a column by the NYT's David Brooks:

Let's give a little more attention to one of David's wholesale conclusions, this one:

One of the findings of this research is that men are more interested in things and abstract rules while women are more interested in people.

If this is true, shouldn't women be running all political systems in the whole world? And how would you divide fields such as medicine?¹ After all, people have things inside them. People also do things. So confusing, isn't it? Much easier to argue that women are more interested in people and that means that women are better suited to rearing children and men for everything else.

The subtext and/or text of the latter three defensive condemnations of behavioral/bio/psychological/evolutionary gender differences is that such differences are effectively non-existent and/or practically irrelevant, abused as a tool of the patriarchy to subjugate and ghettoize women into certain "natural" roles. This analysis is situationally ironic in that two of the three feminists approvingly link Cathy Young's piece decrying "unwarranted generalizations and rather egregious stereotyping," while effectively engaging in their own, opposite "unwarranted generalizations and rather egregious stereotyping" motivated by their given ideology. (To be specific and fair, David Brooks is indeed engaging in loose (though not baseless) gender characterizations in Echnide's critique)

The truth (or something that I'd argue is closer to objective "truth") regarding gender differences is somewhere in between. Narrowing down the above links to illustrate my point, take the fact that Young's otherwise reasonable criticism of both studies largely hinges around an apparently insignificant percentage gap in male-female behavior. Her judgement regarding the internet study:

Other Internet behavior differences found in the study:

-seeking health information: women 74%, men 58%
-getting support for health problems: women 66% men 50%
-pursuing religious interests: women 34% men 25%
-checking the weather: women 75% men 82%
-reading the news: women 69% men 75%
-getting DIY information: women 50% men 60%
-checking sports scores: women 27% men 59%
-investigating products: women 75% men 82%
-downloading music: women 20% men 30%

Yes, a lot more men check sports scores. Surprise, surprise. The other gender gaps strike me as ... well, not exactly of Grand Canyon magnitude. Or Mars/Venus magnitude.

Her conclusion is dependent on a subjective interpretation of what constitutes "Mars/Venus magnitude." But in statistical terms, especially over a large population (say, 300 million Americans), the mean 12.5% difference in Young's sample behaviors is pretty darn significant.

Let's narrow it down even further and look at two related measures from the Pew study that Young excerpts, from a statistical, related research and practical perspective - male vs. female propensity to "seek health information" and "get support for health problems" online.

Statistical Perspective

Both questions show a 16 point divide between the online behavior of women and men regarding propensity to do medical research online (74 vs. 58% and 66% vs. 50%, respectively). Statistically assessing the first measure (74 vs. 58%) - noting Pew's proper random sampling and test design, and assuming a 51 to 49 gender split among the 6,403 interviewees in 2005 - reveals an extremely high "z-score" of 13.69.

Translated, this z-score means that the possibility that this 16 point difference based on gender is due to chance is essentially zero, or about 1 in Infinity. Further translation: for purposes of establishing the statistical significance of differences between two groups, the difference in response to this question based on gender is statistically significant and reproducible. And to elaborate with some subjective, contextual stats analysis, I'd personally classify a z-score of 13.69 as "super-dee-dooper-ooper statistically significant," also known as "yowzas, that's a Hell of a statistically valid difference!" when comparing two groups. And given the proper test design and execution, including a large sample size and parity between genders of test subjects, this 16 point difference is reproducible (within a margin of error of only about +/-2%) in subsequent tests, and can be extrapolated to draw accurate conclusions about the behaviors of men vs. women in the larger population.

So we've established that it's a reproducible, statistically significant difference. What does that mean? We'll get to that in a second. First ...

Related Research Perspective

... are the gender-disparate results to these questions about online medical research logically unconventional? In a word, no.

A casual google turns up related references:

Item:

Almost a third of men under 40 do nothing about bad health in the hope that illness will "go away", according to a survey from the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain (RPSGB).

Item:

The data bear that out: One recent Commonwealth Fund study found men to be much less likely than their wives or girlfriends to see a doctor, especially in their younger years.

"The majority of men surveyed also stated that even if they were sick they would delay seeing a doctor as long as possible," says Dr. Jean Bonhomme, an Atlanta-based consultant to the MHN and president of the National Black Men's Health Network.

Item:

A new report which surveyed more than 44,000 GP visits has found that one-quarter of Australian men have not seen a doctor in the past year, compared with just over 10 per cent of women. Men aged between 18 and 24 were least likely to have made an appointment and most likely to smoke and drink heavily - classic risk factors for cancer, heart disease or stroke.
...
Previous research has found that men are much less likely than women to engage in preventative health screens, such as checking for testicular cancer or requesting cholesterol or blood pressure tests. Men's diets are also poorer than women's and they're less likely to use sunscreen or receive vaccines and flu shots.

Item:

Why are men so bad at going to the doctor? Men are four times less likely to consult a doctor when they experience medical problems, even though a man's average life expectancy is six years less than a woman's, and men are much more likely to be admitted to hospital as an emergency with something serious or life threatening!

Thus, tabling the complexities of motivation, cultural influences, etc., related research tells us that the Pew results about online behavior related to medical research make sense. There is an apparent, widely recognized pattern regarding how likely men and women are to seek health advice and engage in preventative care. While not definitively tied to the specific variation of online research behavior, a strong, reasonable inference can be made between the general trend in the items noted above and our chosen sample section of the Pew results.

So we've established a vaunted level of statistical significance for the specific gender difference, as well as noted related practical research that inferentially validates our slice of the Pew results - again, what does it mean?

Practical Perspective: The Search for Meaning in Stats

As Young is driving at, it does not mean the following ...

Women go online for health information/support, whereas men don't.

or

Women go online for health information, whereas, in contrast, men like to "investigate products."

... which are the typical simplistic binary implications seen in media write-ups of all forms of research. More specifically stated, our Pew results related to gender differences in medical research mean ...

Women are 27.59% ('more than a quarter') more likely to go online to look for health information or support than men, though a majority of both sexes (6/10 men and 3/4 of women) use the internet to acquire health information.

Thus, as with correct interpretation of many statistics associated with politically or culturally charged topics, there is a significant difference, though the difference resists binary classification and is not individually deterministic.

The study is neither "bullshit" nor is it an oracle of individual male and female behavior online. But for the purposes of allocating resources based on advertising gender-specific products or tailoring online information portals based on gender (for two specific practical examples), the numbers can be situationally very relevant, and a mean difference in behavior by gender does exist. A significant difference.

Another example of situational meaning of statistics can be found while sorting through the can of worms opened after Larry Summers' discussion of gender differences in mathematics-based academia. Overall, from the perspective of averages, the conclusion that "boys are good at math, girls aren't" is totally false, as the male advantage in mean math scores is relatively small over a large population (though boys hold a slight advantage), and girls get better grades in math. The differences become situationally significant at the extremes:

Through high school, girls earn better grades in math than boys, but boys usually do better on standardized tests. The difference in means is modest, but the male advantage increases as the focus shifts from means to extremes. In a large sample of mathematically gifted youths, for example, seven times as many males as females scored in the top percentile of the SAT mathematics test. We do not have good test data on the male-female ratio at the top one-hundredth or top one-thousandth of a percentile, where first-rate mathematicians are most likely to be found, but collateral evidence suggests that the male advantage there continues to increase, perhaps exponentially.

Tabling the issues over innate biological differences² vs. culture as root cause, a statistical difference exists, and depending on its situational application, this difference can spur both meaningless, imprecise, or incorrectly loaded conclusions ("males are better than females at math") or quite significant conclusions ("a much greater proportion of the tiny number of people that are extremely good at standardized math tests are male, and this could at least partially account for gender disparities in employment at world-class positions in academia, rather than hiring bias"). But for those interested in trashing Summers without analyzing the statistics, the chosen methodology is to work backwards from a chosen political premise, numbers be damned.

Again, selective stats interpretation is both twisted by interested parties, as well as used to erect easily vanquished strawmen as representative of opposing positions. Whether it's the Larry Summers flap or something as mundane and light as the Pew Internet research study, Young hits the nail on the head by maligning "unwarranted generalizations and rather egregious stereotyping," a consequence of the natural human impulse to engage in simplistic binary classification.

It's easy to engage the binary impulse in an effort to counter a simplistic binary conclusion, casually dismissing the more complex, relevant interpretations of statistics while fighting their overly broad interpretations in service of a disparate ideology. Yes, efforts like the Pew Study are simplified and distorted by media outlets and popular understanding in an attempt to quickly assign meaning to the results. No, these results are not deterministic. But is a Mars-Venus divide buttressed by the study results?

Let's adjust the perception of the given difference and call it a Venus-Pluto-Mercury-Earth vs. Mars-Jupiter-Saturn-Uranus-Neptune divide, while acknowledging it as a statistically significant, consistent and situationally relevant divide nonetheless.

More on the larger implications of like divides in Part Two.

Bonus Section!

¹ Reviewing Echnide's quote regarding David Brooks:

Let's give a little more attention to one of David's wholesale conclusions, this one:

One of the findings of this research is that men are more interested in things and abstract rules while women are more interested in people.

If this is true, shouldn't women be running all political systems in the whole world? And how would you divide fields such as medicine?¹ After all, people have things inside them. People also do things. So confusing, isn't it? Much easier to argue that women are more interested in people and that means that women are better suited to rearing children and men for everything else.

To answer her specific counter regarding the medical field, one only needs to look at specialty breakdown by gender to find some backing for Brooks' (admittedly imprecise) "things" vs. "people" comparison:

At present, it is not clear whether or not the choices of specialty areas by male and female medical students are converging. Historically, women have selected specialty areas with high patient contact. In the study reported here, the authors address whether or not there are differences in perceived specialty choice among the newest entrants into medicine. A total of 180 freshman medical students at one medical school (120 males and 60 females) participated. It was found that 70.4 percent of the women stated that they expected to select a specialty in primary care compared with only 44.4 percent of the men. On the other hand, 30.8 percent of the men expected to enter a surgical specialty area compared with only 11.1 percent of the women. A higher proportion of women than of men indicated that patient contact and family life were instrumental in the selection of a medical specialty. Seventy percent of the men expected an annual income of more than +75,000 (in 1984 dollars) compared with 43.3 percent of the women, who generally expected a smaller income. The authors in this study found that the traditional identifications of both male and female specialty choices are not changing.

While my cited study is rather dated and doesn't have an awe-inspiring sample size, it's illustrative of a "people" vs. "things" gender dichotomy in the field of medicine. (And if you still don't believe it, please call your local trauma center and ask for a breakdown of the surgery staff by gender) Again - this does not mean that "women" don't want to be surgeons, nor that "men" aren't or don't want to be internists. It just means, for reasons probably related to both culture and biology, statistically significant differences in behavior by gender can play out with measurably differential results over large populations. In this case, by chosen medical specialty.

² I lied about tabling innate biological differences. The key to why men may have an advantage at the extremes of achievement in mathematics may lie here:

The difference between the sexes may boil down to this: dividing the tasks of processing experience. Male and female minds are innately drawn to different aspects of the world around them. And there's new evidence that testosterone may be calling some surprising shots.

Women's perceptual skills are oriented to quick -- call it intuitive -- people reading. Females are gifted at detecting the feelings and thoughts of others, inferring intentions, absorbing contextual clues and responding in emotionally appropriate ways. They empathize. Tuned to others, they more readily see alternate sides of an argument. Such empathy fosters communication and primes females for attachment.

Women, in other words, seem to be hard-wired for a top-down, big-picture take. Men might be programmed to look at things from the bottom up (no surprise there).

Men focus first on minute detail, and operate most easily with a certain detachment. They construct rules-based analyses of the natural world, inanimate objects and events. In the coinage of Cambridge University psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen, Ph.D., they systemize.
The superiority of males at spatial cognition and females' talent for language probably subserve the more basic difference of systemizing versus empathizing. The two mental styles manifest in the toys kids prefer (humanlike dolls versus mechanical trucks); verbal impatience in males (ordering rather than negotiating); and navigation (women personalize space by finding landmarks; men see a geometric system, taking directional cues in the layout of routes).

Almost everyone has some mix of both types of skills, although males and females differ in the degree to which one set predominates, contends Baron-Cohen. In his work as director of Cambridge's Autism Research Centre, he finds that children and adults with autism, and its less severe variant Asperger syndrome, are unusual in both dimensions of perception. Its victims are "mindblind," unable to recognize people's feelings. They also have a peculiar talent for systemizing, obsessively focusing on, say, light switches or sink faucets.

Autism overwhelmingly strikes males; the ratio is ten to one for Asperger. In his new book, The Essential Difference: The Truth About the Male and Female Brain, Baron-Cohen argues that autism is a magnifying mirror of maleness.

Similar to how creative genius knocks on the door of insanity, it's also intuitive that mathematical genius would correlate with a systemizing affliction like autism.

Anecdotally, while I tend to systemize political arguments into geometric diagrams in my head ("male"), I can't read a map to save my life ("female"), and math was always my weak suit ("female"). I also have decent verbal and empathic ability ("female"), don't watch football ("female") and like to softly cry myself to sleep after watching Beaches ("pathetic"). Lauren at Feministe is more like a guy than many guys I know. Don't even get me started on Marcotte, who could probably easily give me an atomic-wedgie until I shouted "I love Gloria Steinhem" and then casually beat me comatose. Go figure.

The lesson from these exceptions is that many people have personal traits that directly defy broad gender patterns, and that there is more variation within genders than between genders - BUT - it's relevant not to view mean-defying personal traits as a falsification of the differences that play out over the larger population.

³ I say that I'm going to write a "Part Two," but am I? Who knows, man? Who knows?

Flashback:

Surrealist Punditry

Abstract Punditry

Dadaist Punditry

Minimalist Punditry

Now the relevant legislation is 1801 through 1811, Title 30, Chapter 36 ("Foreign Intelligence Surveillance"), Subchapter I ("Electronic Surveillance"). But since the adminstration ignores these statutes, we can too.

It bears repeating, the letter is from the Assistant Attorney General of the United States and is supposed to explain to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence how this program is legal, and it barely touches on the relevant statutes. Instead it makes the argument that since part of FISA says "except as authorized by statute" and the AUMF is a relevant statute, because the AUMF says "such acts render it both necessary and appropriate that the United States exercise its rights to self-defense and to protect United States citizens both at home and abroad" and "the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force."

Well, hell, the AUMF also says "To authorize the use of United States Armed Forces against those responsible for the recent attacks launched against the United States" and al Qaeda members are in the US, let's just let the Army patrol the streets while we're at it. Posse Comitatus is just a "law", it has no power over us! And why did we even bother with the McCain amendment? We can just ignore it. (In that case, it's not a hypothetical.) Not sure why we bothered passing the PATRIOT Act after the AUMF either.

Again, my problem is not with the program (because I don't know the details), but with the Administration's justification of the program. It is simply too broad a reading of Article II. Article II does not vest all war powers (besides declaration of war) in the Executive. FISA should be viewed in light of Article I. Article I, Section 8 lists the powers of Congress. These include "To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water" (McCain Amendment) and also "To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces."

(My analysis isn't substantially different than Orin Kerr's: "probably constitutional but probably violated the federal law known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act" ("constitutional" referring to the constitutionality of the program under the 4th amendment, not the Article II argument.) and also "...at bottom, I think the AUMF probably didn't authorize this, although the Hamdi case gives some colorable (if ultimately unpersuasive) arguments that it might." My argument that the fact that the DoJ doesn't directly argue that the program was legal under FISA implies that it was probably illegal under FISA is addressed by Kerr here: "This is a decent point, but I think it's sensible to be cautious here. My thinking is that there may be strategic reasons why the administration isn't making this argument. Based on my research, an explanation of why the program may not violate FISA would require them to explain the technical details of how the program works..." This is certainly possible. If the technical details are such that it involves a situation that is not covered under FISA, it would be proper under Executive authority.* (Courts have generally given the Executive quite a bit of leeway for warrantless searches when there were no governing statutes.) But considering the administration seems to be using the same arguments to ignore the McCain amendment, I don't think it's likely.

*UPDATE: See the next post. I still think the AUMF argument is awful, the idea that the Executive can just throw away entire chunks of US Code is not respectful enough of Congress' power under Article I "To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces." But the program in question seems to be proper.