Hustler ran a photoshopped image of conservative pundit S.E. Cupp with the headline, "What Would S.E. Cupp Look Like With a **** in Her Mouth?":

S.E. Cupp is a lovely young lady who read too much Ayn Rand in high school and ended up joining the dark side. Cupp, an author and media commentator who often shows up on Fox News programs, is undeniably cute. But her hotness is diminished when she espouses dumb ideas like defunding Planned Parenthood. Perhaps the method pictured here is Ms. Cupp’s suggestion for avoiding an unwanted pregnancy. [Hustler via Mediaite]

This is beneath contempt. This time the victim is a conservative pundit who is being humiliated for her outspoken views on reproductive rights, but this kind of bullying can happen to any woman who speaks her mind. Remember when tech blogger Kathy Sierra was harassed with "satirical" images of herself in pornographic poses?

I'd like to think that the scumbag(s) behind this feature hate reproductive rights as much as they hate outspoken women. How better to tarnish two objects of contempt at once? The more disturbing possibility is that the creators think of themselves as feminist allies.

The fight for birth control isn't just about freeing up women to service men, as the guys at Hustler fervently hope. It's about freeing women to participate fully in all spheres of life, including the public arena. We value women's reproductive freedom because we value women's freedom in general, including the freedom to express unpopular, offensive, and just plain ignorant views. Using sexualized attacks to silence women is antithetical to the struggle for reproductive rights.

Hordes of rhesus monkeys are besieging New Delhi, teaming up to shake down shoppers for their groceries, and worse:

In 2007, a Delhi deputy mayor died when he fell from his terrace after being attacked by monkeys, a widely publicized episode that spurred the city to step up its efforts to move monkeys to safer environments. Yet such attacks continue. This month a 14-year-old girl was seriously injured when she fell from the roof of a five-story residential building after monkeys pursued her.

“Monkeys do commonly bite people, and their bite wounds can be extensive,” Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Md., wrote in an e-mail. “They are smart enough to often attack the face of the person.” [NYT]

Some harried residents fork over $200 a month to a langur handler who brings these larger, scarier monkeys around to urinate on clients' property. As long as the stench of langur urine hangs in the air, the smaller monkeys scatter. It's hard to know if this approach is sustainable, though. The rhesus monkeys have already learned to avoid traps over the years. What happens when they figure out that the leashed langurs aren't dangerous after all? Are we looking at a primate arms race?

Right wing radio host Rush Limbaugh has seen his ratings dip after excoriating Georgetown University law student and birth control activist Sandra Fluke:

Limbaugh Sees Ratings Dip Following Attacks On Sandra Fluke The ratings for Rush Limbaugh’s radio show have dropped significantly in key markets since he attacked Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke as a prostitute and a slut; after she spoke out in favor of the Obama administration’s contraception rule requiring coverage at no additional cost. Despite claiming in March that his ratings were up 60 percent, Limbaugh’s numbers have fallen 27 percent in the 25-54 demographic in New York City, 31 percent in Houston-Galveston, 40 percent in Seattle-Tacoma, and 35 percent in Jacksonville, Politico reports. The numbers come from a selection of the March 29 to April 25 Arbitron ratings. [Think Progress]

Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow has a very interesting review of Elizabeth Badinter's book The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women:

Now an American version of Le Conflit has been released, with the title The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women. In the book, Badinter lambastes the return of motherhood to the center of women’s lives, a shift she observes throughout the West. She examines a wide assortment of policy and cultural factors at play since the 1970s. But her chief culprit is an ideology she calls “naturalism,” the belief in the infallible wisdom of nature. She sees naturalism at the heart of breastfeeding absolutism, as well as other trends, such as un-medicated childbirth and cloth diapers. In the name of nature, all of these deprive women of conveniences that could ease the burdens of motherhood. “Nature has become a decisive argument for imposing laws or dispensing advice,” she writes. “It is now an ethical touchstone, hard to criticize and overwhelming all other considerations.” [Boston Review]

I don't normally take much of an interest in debates about childrearing practices, but I'm glad a philosopher is critiquing the fuzzy-headed nature worship that permeates so much of our culture.

The board of the NAACP voted Saturday to endorse marriage equality. This is a huge development. Anti-marriage equality groups have been trying to drive a wedge between the black community and the forces of marriage equality.

The NAACP's courageous endorsement of marriage equality will help neutralize that toxic rhetoric:

The Human Rights Campaign, a leading gay rights group, issued a jubilant statement following the NAACP announcement. “We could not be more pleased with the NAACP’s history-making vote today – which is yet another example of the traction marriage equality continues to gain in every community,” said HRC president Joe Solmonese. “It’s time the shameful myth that the African-American community is somehow out of lockstep with the rest of the country on marriage equality is retired -- once and for all. The facts and clear momentum toward marriage speak for themselves.” [WaPo]

The NAACP's timing couldn't be better. More than half of all African Americans told pollsters they agreed with President Obama's decision to endorse same sex marriage.

Don't look now, but I'm blogging about the British Royal Family. My usual coping strategy is to pretend they don't exist, but there's a first time for everying...

So, anyway, Prince Philip disgraced himself again. After shaking hands with a 25-year-old woman in a red two-piece suit with a zipper down the front, he announced to a policeman, "I would get arrested if I unzipped that dress." This Telegraph story and the accompanying photo give you a sense of the event, a very public meet and greet in London, crawling with reporters.

The remark is being described as a "gaffe." I'm sorry, but a gaffe is when you say "Hello, Cincinnati" in Cleveland. This is sexual harassment.

I mentioned this on facebook and to my surprise, a few guys chimed in to argue that it wasn't sexual harassment because the woman isn't an employee, or because Philip is 90, or because he's just a pathetic figurehead. Be that as it may, these objections miss the point.

Amanda Marcotte on Jennifer Kahn's story on budding child psychopaths:

In the piece, Kahn compares psychopathy to autism, not because the two disorders are similar in their manifestation, but because psychologists believe they're both neurological disorders, i.e. based in the brain and really something that the sufferer can't help. This caused me to note on Twitter that even though the conditions are similar in this way, autism garners sympathy and psychopathy doesn't. In fact, most social discourse around psychopathy is still demonizing and utterly unsympathetic to the parents, who are often blamed for the condition. It struck me as an interesting logic hole in our cultural narrative around mental illness, since the usual assumption is that sympathy for mental illness is directly correlated with inability to control your problems. Psychopaths give lie to that narrative. Turns out that we sympathize more with austistic people than psychopaths because we feel empathy for the struggles of autism, but psychopaths just make us angry. There's no logic or rationality in play, just pure emotional reasoning, and the parents of psychopaths are the victims.

Assuming that psychopathy is a hardwired developmental disorder, we should feel great sympathy for the parents of psychopaths. If psychopathy is hardwired, it's not their fault their kids are unable to feel empathy.

Kahn's story makes it clear how horribly these parents suffer. Their children are manipulative, violent, and potentially dangerous. As long as they live, these parents will have to defend themselves against the predations of their offspring and worry that their kid is going to hurt other people. Kahn follows one couple whose psychopathic son keeps threatening his younger brother's life. They suspect their son has a horrible defect that will destroy their family, but they can't kick him out, because that's not what families do. To add to their burdens, society blames the parents for their son's condition.

Still, it doesn't make much sense to feel sorry for psychopaths themselves. They're not suffering. As Kahn explains, psychopaths are virtually immune to emotional pain and anxiety, and insensitive to punishment in general. Normal children feel anxious when they disappoint their parents, and therefore they have a built-in incentive to behave better. Psychopaths don't care:

Jennifer Kahn has a fascinating longform piece in the New York Times magazine about budding psychopaths, children whose utter lack of conscience sets them apart even from other emotionally disturbed kids at an early age:

In some children, [Callous-Unemotional] traits manifest in obvious ways. Paul Frick, a psychologist at the University of New Orleans who has studied risk factors for psychopathy in children for two decades, described one boy who used a knife to cut off the tail of the family cat bit by bit, over a period of weeks. The boy was proud of the serial amputations, which his parents initially failed to notice. “When we talked about it, he was very straightforward,” Frick recalls. “He said: ‘I want to be a scientist, and I was experimenting. I wanted to see how the cat would react.’” [NYT]

Many experts believe that psychopathy is a hardwired developmental disorder, like autism. Alike in hardwiredness, of course, not symptoms. People with autism have trouble reading other minds and sifting sensory information. Whereas, psychopaths can make very astute guesses about what other people are thinking and feeling, and they have no compunction about using these insights to prey on others because they lack empathy.

Psychologists have attempted to cure psychopaths before, only to realize that so-called anti-psychopathy training makes better psychopaths. Trying to teach adult psychopaths about empathy just makes them better manipulators.

Kahn writes about a new generation of psychologists who are focused on early intervention with budding psychopaths. One researcher runs a summer program for callous unemotional kids. The results sound decidedly discouraging:

You've heard of pink slime, aka "lean finely textured beef," a bubblegum-colored paste made from the scrapings off cattle carcasses. But what about red slime, the viscous scrapings from the skeletons of tuna and other fish, a supermarket sushi staple, and sometimes a vector for food poisoning? As nasty as it looks, pink slime is treated with ammonia to kill bacteria and served cooked. Red slime is untreated and served raw.

The brilliant nutrition scientist Marion Nestle answers a reader's questions about red slime in her montly Q&A column:

Q: I had no idea that the tuna in my sushi roll was scraped off the bones in India, ground up, frozen, and shipped to California. Is this another "slime" product? Can I eat it raw?

A: No sooner did the furor over lean, finely textured beef (a.k.a. "pink slime") die down than we have another one over sushi tuna. On April 13, the Food and Drug Administration said Moon Marine USA, an importing company based in Cupertino, was voluntarily recalling 30 tons of frozen raw ground yellowfin tuna, packaged as Nakaochi scrape.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention investigations linked consumption of Nakaochi scrape sushi to about 250 diagnosed cases and an estimated 6,000 or so undiagnosed cases of illness caused by two rare strains of salmonella. Among the victims who were interviewed, more than 80 percent said they ate spicy tuna sushi rolls purchased in grocery stores or restaurants. [Emphasis added.]

Nestle doesn't call it red slime, but I've eaten enough sketchy sushi to recognize the stuff. My advice? Steer clear of chopped and "spicy" rolls, unless you watch the chef chop the fish.

Remember the fable of the frog and the scorpion? A scorpion asks a frog to ferry him across the river. The frog balks at this request because he's afraid the scorpion will sting him. The scorpion assures the frog that he would do no such thing because it wouldn't be in his interest to sting the frog because then they would both drown. The frog agrees. As they are crossing the river, the frog feels a searing pain in his side. "What did you do that for," the frog demands, "Now we're both going down!" The scorpion replies, "You knew what I was when you picked me up." 

I was reminded of this fable by Naomi Schaefer Riley's op/ed in the Wall Street Journal. Schaefer Riley was fired from her blogging gig at the Chronicle of Higher Education for singling out three African American studies dissertation titles for ridicule. She argued that these dissertation titles proved why the entire discipline of African American studies should be purged from the academy.

Schaefer Riley admits that she hadn't read these dissertations, but she had no compunctions about assailing the work of three grad students by name.

Note that academics read the Chronicle the way that New York media types read Gawker. Being called a disgrace to your discipline in the CHE is a crushing blow for a young scholar. I mean, consider the source, but still....