You are currently browsing Angus Johnston’s articles.
At last night’s CNN/Tea Party Republican presidential debate, Texas governor Rick Perry was slammed for his 2007 support of a state program vaccinating girls against Human Papilloma Virus — a sexually-transmitted virus that can lead to cervical cancer.
In the debate itself Michele Bachman described the vaccine as a “government injection,” and Perry’s decision as “a violation of a liberty interest.” She also accused Perry, whose chief of staff was a former lobbyist for vaccine manufacturer Merck Pharmaceutical, of pushing the program as payback for campaign donations from Merck.
But after the debate, in a CNN interview, she took it to a really weird place.
One objection to the HPV vaccine is the idea that it might encourage promiscuity by reducing the risks of sexual activity. In her interview, for whatever reason, Bachmann chose to hint at this objection rather than state it openly, and the result was a truly bizarre depiction of mandatory vaccination as — and there’s really no other way to put this — Uncle Sam raping your daughters with needles.
Here. Look:
“When you have innocent little 12-year-old girls,” she said, “that are being forced to have a government injection into their body — this is a liberty interest that violates the most deepest personal part of a little child. … A little girl doesn’t get a do over — once they have that vaccination in their body, once it causes its damage, that little girl doesn’t have a chance to go back.”
That’s just … wow. I don’t … I can’t …
Update | When I first posted this, I was gobsmacked by the language itself — the use of such heavily loaded molestation imagery to describe a non-invasive, voluntary medical procedure. But a little while ago a friend reposted it on Facebook, and two friends of his quickly commented to point out something else.
You know what, if anything in this discussion, “violates the most deepest personal part” of you? You know what “causes its damage,” and doesn’t give you “a chance to go back”?
Cervical cancer.
Second Update | I’ve asked the women who commented on my friend’s Facebook page for permission to repost their notes, and they’ve graciously given it. They sum this all up far better than I could:
Jeannette Elizabeth: “Someone should maybe describe for Bachmann, in intimate detail, the violation of lying in a hospital room, knees shaking, legs spread wide, having cancerous cells scraped from one’s cervix.”
Melinda Kersha McDonald: “I couldn’t agree with Jeanette more. I’ve been there and done that. I have scars that can’t be seen and complcations that will haunt me for the rest of my life. This vaccine could have saved me from that. Making cancer a thing of the past can never be a bad thing.”
Norway held its first elections since the Utoya massacre Monday, and the results show a repudiation of the views — and the party — of the man responsible for the carnage.
It’s been seven weeks since anti-immigration zealot Anders Breivik murdered sixty-nine people at a Labor Party youth retreat on the island of Utoya. Yesterday’s results showed 33.2% of voters supporting Labor candidates, giving that party its best result in a municipal election in two decades. The big swing came on the right, however, as the anti-immigrant Progress Party, of which Breivik was a member until 2006, lost more than a third of its support.
With the Progress Party dropping from 18.5% to 11.8% in the polling, most of its support landed with the Conservative Party, which had been losing ground to Progress in recent years. Labor’s 3.6% jump, however, was enough to give it an overall victory.
Youth voting in Norway also took a big step forward yesterday, as twenty-one municipalities were granted permission to lower their voting age to 16 on a trial basis. More than a hundred local governments applied for permission to participate in the trial, which was offered as a first step toward allowing municipalities to reduce the voting age at their own discretion.
Ten years ago yesterday I was at the same place I was twenty years ago — on the Binghamton University campus in upstate New York. (In 1991 I was a student, in 2001 I was advising a statewide student organization.)
I woke up in Albany on the morning of September 11, and drove on empty highways to Binghamton for a scheduled meeting, listening to reports of the attacks on the radio. A few days later I wrote this summary of what I found when I arrived:
Binghamton was surprisingly subdued — much calmer than I’d seen it when the Gulf War started in January 1991. Lots more people have cable in their dorms now than did then, though, so I expect most of the students who were really worried were in their rooms by the phone.
In 1991, if you wanted to keep up with a breaking news story on a college campus, you usually had to go to the student union and gather around a communal television. In 2001 if you wanted to keep in touch with family you needed to stay in your dorm room.
Ten years ago, twenty years ago. No Facebook, no Twitter. Today you can sit on a couch in the union surrounded by dozens of your fellow students while you hear your parents’ voices from a hundred miles away and read what your friends are doing on their couches in their unions all over the country. All at the same time. You don’t have to choose between connecting with a global experience and your local community and your far-flung networks of loved ones. You used to have to choose, but you don’t anymore.
I wrote a few weeks ago about how impoverished the Beloit College “mindset list” is, how trivial and how silly. But it’s not just in matters of educational policy and campus politics that the list missed the mark. The American campus, and the American student experience, is changing in all sorts of ways, in ways it’s easy for both students and faculty to miss.
Technology doesn’t shatter community, it transforms it.
There’s a lot of chatter this morning about Groupon’s latest deal in the Chicago area: A 60% discount on university tuition at National-Louis University.
Sounds amazing, but the full story isn’t quite as impressive.
The offer is for one graduate-level course. Not one course as in “any one course,” but one course as in “one particular course.” A course that was concocted specifically for the Groupon promotion. It does apply toward a master’s in teaching, but only if, after completing it, you apply for, are accepted to, and enroll in NLU. (Given the nature of the class, it’s hard to imagine it being accepted as transfer credit at any other school.) All in all, this “deal” is clearly more a marketing initiative than an educational innovation.
And that shouldn’t come as a surprise, given National-Louis University’s past…
Until 1990, NLU was known as the National College of Education. It changed its name to National-Louis University to honor to its largest donor, Michael W. Louis, who had made a $30 million pledge to the college the previous year. In 1982 Louis had given NCE three million dollars to create a college of arts and sciences, which the school had also named for him. In 1983 they granted him an honorary doctorate as well.
So. Yeah.
The always-thoughtful danah boyd (those lower case letters are her idea) speaks up for youthful recklessness:
I’m worried about our societal assumption that risk-taking without thinking of the consequences is an inherently bad thing. We need some radical thinking to solve many of the world’s biggest problems. And I don’t believe that it’s so easy to separate out what adults perceive as ‘good’ risk-taking from what they think is ‘bad’ risk-taking. But how many brilliant minds will we destroy by punishing their radical acts of defying authority? How many brilliant minds will we destroy by punishing them for ‘being stupid’? It’s easy to get caught up in a binary of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ when all that you can think about is the consequences. But change has never happened when people simply play by the rules. You have to break the rules to create a better society. And I don’t think that it’s easy to do this when you’re always thinking about the consequences of your actions.
I’m not arguing for anarchy. I’m too old for that. But I am arguing that we should question our assumption that people are better off when they have the cognitive capacity to think through consequences. Or that society is better off when all individuals have that mental capability. From my perspective, there are definitely pros and cons to overthinking and while there are certainly cases where future-aware thought is helpful, there are also cases where it’s not. And I also think that there are some serious consequences of imprisoning youth until they grow up.
studentactivism.net 
Recent Comments