The Abstinence-Only Delusion

[This is an editorial in today's NYT]

Reliance on abstinence-only sex education as the primary tool to reduce teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases — as favored by the Bush administration and conservatives in Congress — looks increasingly foolish and indefensible.
The abstinence-only campaign has always been driven more by ideology than by sound public health policy. The program’s tight rules, governing states that accept federal matching funds and community organizations that accept federal grants, forbid the promotion of contraceptive use and require teaching that sex outside marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects.
At least nine states, by one count, have decided to give up the federal matching funds rather than submit to dictates that undermine sensible sex education. Now there is growing evidence that the programs have no effect on children’s sexual behavior.
A Congressionally mandated report issued this month by the Mathematica Policy Research firm found that elementary and middle school students in four communities who received abstinence instruction — sometimes on a daily basis — were just as likely to have sex in the following years as students who did not get such instruction. Those who became sexually active — about half of each group — started at the same age (14.9 years on average) and had the same number of sexual partners. The chief caveat is that none of the four programs studied continued the abstinence instruction into high school, the most sexually active period for most teenagers, so it is not known whether more sustained abstinence education would show more effectiveness.
Supporters of abstinence-only education sometimes point to a sharp decline in teenage pregnancy rates in recent years as proof that the programs must be working. But a paper by researchers at Columbia University and the Guttmacher Institute, published in the January issue of The American Journal of Public Health, attributed 86 percent of the decline to greater and more effective use of contraceptives — and only 14 percent to teenagers’ deciding to wait longer to start having sex. At the very least, that suggests that the current policy of emphasizing abstinence and minimizing contraceptive use should be turned around.
As Congress prepares to debate further financing, it should either drop the abstinence-only program as a waste of money or broaden it to include safe-sex instruction. Abstinence deserves to be part of a comprehensive sex education effort, but not the only part.

Nap Room - a necessity not a privilege

I toured UIC in 2001 as a prospective student. One of the stops was in the wellness center where the guide showed us a nap room. It took me three weeks of this (my first) semester to find out that the nap room was cancelled, so that its space could be used for something else. The very reason I came to this school was because of that nap room.

I mention this because it is difficult to take serious issues seriously when not adequately rested.

My muse Jasmine supports me on this point.

Abstinence only complications

Noell (I hope I spelled that right!),

Here are the sites I referenced where you can research the efficacy of abstinence only programs:

http://www.yale.edu/sociology/faculty/pages/brueckner
-scroll down to "Articles" and you'll see 4 different studies that each deal with this topic

The first (I think) article in the New York Times that references these studies is titled "Muzzling Sex Education On Anything but Abstinence," 7-19-2006, by Samuel G. Freedman, and if you type in "abstinence only," articles up to the present will display. Hope this helps. -Michael

The Grizzly Man Summary (from Sarah)

In order to understand the clips I am going to show during class, please read this short summary of the film by Manohla Dargis from the The New York Times.

One rainy afternoon in the Alaskan wilderness in 2003, a self-made man named Timothy Treadwell was mauled and eaten by a grizzly bear. It may be that the animal, a scrawny male about 28 years old and 1,000 pounds, was trying to fatten up in preparation for its winter's sleep. As it happens, Treadwell, who achieved minor celebrity as an expert on grizzlies, had pitched his tent in a feeding ground. The strange story of Timothy Treadwell, a Long Island native who came to see himself as some kind of ursine Dr. Dolittle, only to die at 46 from a bear attack, is the subject of this documentary from Werner Herzog. The director has a fondness for stories about men who journey into the heart of darkness, both without and within — men like the deranged 16th-century explorer in "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" and the early-20th-century esthete in "Fitzcarraldo" who hauls a steamboat up a mountain to bring Caruso to the Peruvian jungle. Treadwell's journey was no less bold or reckless than these earlier Herzogian tales and certainly no less enthralling.

There is a presence and the lack there of the ethos, pathos, and logos in the film. Watch closely for them on Friday.

Prep for Ethos, Pathos, Logos Forum

Please read each essay below and note how it made you feel. Were you persuaded?
Angered? Indifferent? Agreeable? From there, select the essay that you
feel best represents an ethos-pathos-logos "triangle," note why, and
formulate a critique to its major, or minor, points/ideas (even if you
completely agree).

-The idea is that if you can identify an ethical, logical, or pathetic
appeal, then instead of just surmising to say, "I disagree," one should be
able to construct, however brief for our purposes, an antithetical
ethical, logical, or pathetic appeal to what it is one disagrees with.
Likewise, if you can surmise to say, "I agree," then you should at least
be able to substantiate your own agreeableness with a paraphrased ethical,
logical, or pathetic argument.
What follows is an attempt to somewhat situate each of the three authors'
ethical character prior to reading their respectful essays:

Sam Harris: Stanford graduate of philosophy; neuroscience scholar; author
of "The End of Faith," and "Letter to a Christian Nation."

John Stuart Mill: 19th century Utilitarian philosopher; prodigy of James
Mill -his father, and Jeremy Bentham -the father of Utilitarianism; author
of, among others, "Utilitarianism" and "On Liberty."

Friedrich Nietzsche: 19th century German (continental) philosopher; father
was a priest; famously declared that "god is dead;" responsible for the
saying "what does not kill me only makes me stronger;" was cited as giving
the foundation to Nazism/Aryanism, even though he was the most ardent of
anti-anti-semites; most read under his "will to power" mantra; author of,
among others, "Ecce Homo," "Nietzsche Contra Wagner," "Thus Spoke
Zarathustra," "Twilight of the Idols," "Genealogy of Morals," and "The
Anti-Christ." -I only give a longer introduction to Nietzsche because he
is often the most difficult to read, as well as the most ill understood.

-Excerpted from “The End of Faith.” -Sam Harris.

…It takes a certain kind of person to believe what no one else believes. To be ruled by ideas for which you have no evidence (and which therefore cannot be justified in conversation with other human beings) is generally a sign that something is seriously wrong with your mind. Clearly, there is sanity in numbers. And yet, it is merely an accident of history that it is considered normal in our society to believe that the Creator of the universe can hear your thoughts, while it is demonstrative of mental illness to believe that he is communicating with you by having the rain tap in Morse code on your bedroom window. And so, while religious people are not generally mad, their core beliefs absolutely are. This is not surprising, since most religions have merely canonized a few products of ancient ignorance and derangement and passed them down to us as though they were primordial truths. This leaves billions of us believing what no sane person could believe on his own. In fact, it is difficult to imagine a set of beliefs more suggestive of mental illness than those that lie at the heart of many of our religious traditions. Consider one of the cornerstones of the Catholic faith:

I likewise profess that in the Mass a true, proper, and propitiatory sacrifice is offered to God on behalf of the living and the dead, and that the Body and the Blood, together with the soul

and the divinity, of our Lord Jesus Christ is truly, really, and substantially present in the most holy sacrament of the Eucharist, and there is a change of the whole substance of the bread into the Body, and of the whole substance of the wine into Blood; and this change the Catholic mass calls transubstantiation. I also profess that the whole and entire Christ and a true sacrament is received under each separate species.³⁰

Jesus Christ--who, as it turns out, was born of a virgin, cheated death, and rose bodily into the heavens--can now be eaten in the form of a cracker. A few Latin words spoken over your favorite Burgundy, and you can drink his blood as well. Is there any doubt that a lone subscriber to these beliefs would be considered mad? Rather, is there any doubt that he would be mad? The danger of religious faith is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy. Because each new generation of children is taught that religious propositions need not be justified in the way that all others must, civilization is still besieged by the armies of the preposterous. We are, even now, killing ourselves over ancient literature. Who would have thought something so tragically absurd could be possible?

ON LIBERTY

The object of this essay is to assert one very simple principle, as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control, whether the means used be physical force in the form of legal penalties or the moral coercion of public opinion. That principle is that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise or even right. These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him or visiting him with any evil in case he do otherwise. To justify that, the conduct from which it is desired to deter him must be calculated to produce evil to someone else. The only part of the conduct of anyone for which he is amenable to society is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign. -John Stuart Mill

THE ANTI-CHRIST

The problem I raise here is not what ought to succeed mankind in the sequence of species (the human being is an end): but what type of human being one ought to breed, ought to will, as more valuable, more worthy of life, more certain of the future. This more valuable type has existed often enough already: but as a lucky accident, as an exception, never as willed. He has rather been the most feared, he has hitherto been virtually the thing to be feared - and out of fear the reverse type has been willed, bred, achieved: the domestic animal, the herd animal, the sick animal man - the Christian…

One should not embellish or dress up Christianity: it has waged a war to the death against this higher type of man, it has excommunicated all the fundamental instincts of this type, it has distilled evil, the Evil One, out of these instincts -the strong human being as the type of reprehensibility, as the 'outcast'. Christianity has taken the side of everything weak, base, ill-constituted, it has made an ideal out of opposition to the preservative instincts of strong life; it has depraved the reason even of the intellectually strongest natures by teaching men to feel the supreme values of intellectuality as sinful, as misleading, as temptations. The most deplorable example: the corruption of Pascal, who believed his reason had been corrupted by original sin while it had only been corrupted by his Christianity…

…as though humility, chastity, poverty, in a word holiness, had not hitherto done life unutterably more harm than any sort of frightfulness or vice whatever. ... Pure spirit is pure lie. ... So long as the priest, that denier, calumniator and poisoner of life by profession, still counts as a higher kind of human being, there can be no answer to the question: what is truth? One has already stood truth on its head when the conscious advocate of denial and nothingness counts as the representative of 'truth'...

I make war on this theologian instinct: I have found traces of it everywhere. Whoever has theologian blood in his veins has a wrong and dishonest attitude towards all things from the very first. The pathos that develops out of this is called faith: closing one's eyes with respect to oneself for good and all so as not to suffer from the sight of incurable falsity. Out of this erroneous perspective on all things one makes a morality, a virtue, a holiness for oneself, one unites the good conscience with seeing falsely -one demands that no other kind of perspective shall be accorded any value after one has rendered one's own sacrosanct with the names 'God', 'redemption', 'eternity'. I have dug out the theologian instinct everywhere: it is the most widespread, peculiarly subterranean form of falsity that exists on earth. What a theologian feels to be true must be false: this provides almost a criterion of truth. It is his deepest instinct of self-preservation which forbids any part of reality whatever to be held in esteem or even spoken of. Wherever the influence of the theologian extends value judgment is stood on its head, the concepts 'true' and 'false' are necessarily reversed: that which is most harmful to life is here called 'true', that which enhances, intensifies, affirms, justifies it and causes it to triumph is called 'false'. ... If it happens that, by way of the 'conscience' of princes (or of nations), theologians stretch out their hands after power, let us be in no doubt what at bottom is taking place every time: the will to the end, the nihilistic will wants power …

-Friedrich Nietzsche “The Anti-Christ,” “Twilight of the Idols”

Pathos Forum (Tahanee and Sam)

Pathos

I. Topics (Explain from Text)

Emotional Appeals

- Emotions (feelings) vs. appetites (pleasure, instinctive) vs. values (good/bad, relative) (p. 205)

- Humans have similar emotional pattern: aka they are communal (excited by our relationships with people. we all need love /family etc. we all understand this i.e. transference and the lamp) (p 209).

- Emotions are ‘logical’ (fear of death, greed, etc) (p 208).

- Aristotle’s 3 criteria: know your audience’s emotion, know who can excite those emotions, know the reason for those emotions (p. 209)

- Enargeia – vivid picture (empathy) (p.214)

- Honorific (praise) and Pejorative (demeaning) language (p. 217)

II. Examples (Finding Pathos in arts and literature)

- Mayor Daley’s speech (does he have pathos?).

- Ikea Lamp Clip: empathetic of sadness/sympathy.

- Article: Anti-war flyer.

Pathos Forum Prep

1)If you attended Mayor Daley's speech think about how pathos factored into it. Do you think he used to much pathos, not enough pathos, or do you believe he used it effectively? Why?

2)Think about your favorite movies and tv shows. Who are your favorite characters. Why are they your favorites? Think about how pathos is used to endear you to a show, movie, or character. Also keep in mind your favorite scenes from movies and tv shows. What made them so great. How was pathos used (music, gestures, camera angles, lighting etc.)
~Sam and Tahanee

Ethos Forum (Alex, Bliss, Tali)

During the forum for ethos the class covered a variety of interesting topics and I think there was some nice discussion going on. We managed to stay on task most of the time with little deviation from the discussion of ethos.
There was a brief section there in which we talked about the ethical implications of ethos, which the class seemed devided upon. It seemed that the morality of the subject that a rhetor is discussing must in some way effect the creation of their ethos, however this is not necessarily true.
We covered different interpretations and reactions of the State of the Union speech given by President Bush, as well as touched on how his ethos may have changed from previous speeches during his terms as president.
There were some good examples of how a rhetor may create a "negative" ethos with their audience by failing to adhere to the three ethical proofs. By understanding how one would create a negative relationship with their audience it will aid in avoiding this and creating a "positive" ethos for the rhetor.

Some ways to avoid "negative" ethos would be

• to have an understanding of your topic; in other words, know your facts
  
• an understanding of who your audience is and your relationship to them
  
• know whether or not you have situated ethos with your audience and whether that's a good or a bad thing
• do not appear impartial to the issues you are discussing. Detatchment from the subject will detatch you from your audience

Ethos Forum Prep

In order to prepare for Friday's discussion here are a few things to think about:
- Your reaction to the State of the Union
- Places where you have seen the effects of negative ethos during the week, either at your community happening or elsewhere.
- Examples of the three ethos proofs (intellect, character, will) at your community happenings.

Also here are some things to read in preparation.
http://www.c-span.org/executive/stateoftheunion.asp
Transcripts from most of the State of the Union speeches given since 1945 may be found here, as well as video, although I wasn't able to bring up the video on my computer. We will be looking at the most recient 2007 State of the Union address and perhaps comparing it to the ethos used in Bush's 2006 address.