In a post called "The Conservative Nanny State" Kevin Drum says

From Conor Friedersdorf, writing about a new bill reported out of the House Judiciary Committee today:

Under language approved 19 to 10 by a House committee, the firm that sells you Internet access would be required to track all of your Internet activity and save it for 18 months, along with your name, the address where you live, your bank account numbers, your credit card numbers, and IP addresses you've been assigned.

And why do they want to do that? It's all about the children, of course. Click the link for more.

Source: Mother Jones

Sigh. If they spent more time worrying about actual children at any other point after birth I might be more tolerant. As it is, while I'm sure they love their children (or at least imagine they do) at the policy level they sure treat children mainly as a hammer on other people's privacy and autonomy.

In a poignant, heartwrenching essay on Natural Family Planning method birth control use in the alt-conservative Protestant counterculture Sarah Morice-Brubaker of Religion Dispatches reflects on her own experience and that of a couple, Sam and Bethany Torode, who's book Open Embrace: A Protestant Couple Rethinks Contraception is a best-seller in it's small but ideologically passionate niche.

Morice-Brubaker makes the awesome case that "an ideal method for the couples who can make it work" isn't the same thing, at all, as ideal period.

I know couples who say that they’ve had a very positive experience with NFP. I don’t second-guess their reasons for saying so. There’s no reason not to take them at their word, as far as I’m concerned. But would their testimonies have made for a telling rejoinder to Oppenheimer’s column? I don’t think so.

Remember, Open Embrace does not advance the view that natural family planning might be a fun thing for married couples to try just for kicks—like a book club or dance lessons—on the off chance that you might be one of the married couples that turns out to bond over it. Open Embrace presents natural family planning as a really good thing for married couples, as such, to do. It is predicted to bring them closer. Married couples. In general. As a group.

In their early 20s, the Torodes believed they could predict this—about themselves, and about all the potential married couples who might read their book; including, presumably, couples facing mental or physical health problems, lack of support, or simple inability to reliably take body temperature at the same time every day.

So, really, the question is not: “Are there NO couples out there who ever have a positive experience avoiding artificial contraception?” Surely there are. Rather, the question is this: “Can every married couple everywhere really benefit from avoiding artificial contraception—and more to the point, who in the heck could possibly be in the position to know this?”

Source: Religion Dispatches

In other words? No.

In fact, so "no" that just a few years after writing their "classic" pean to NFP as the ultimate bonding experience the Torodes were divorced! Sam Torodes now says "I am out of the business of trying to tell people what they should do. I am out of that business for good."

Good rule for authors of parenting books to live by? Don't write a book about the success of... well, pretty much anything related to parenting or domesticity when you've only been doing it two years. And definitely don't wait only two years to start bragging about how radical, bonding, nurturing, and foolproof your controversial method of birth control method is until, you know, you've successfully managed to, say, space two pregnancies.

Say what you will about the (smug? extremist?) Duggar parents with their 20-odd children but at least they had the sense to wait till their first four children were out of high-school before starting to issue propaganda tracts about white Christian men's duty to keep their wives continuously pregnant and white Christian wive's duty to let them.

As Morice-Brubaker puts it

[A]s I read them, the authors of Open Embrace have thus presented their own “balance.” In 2002, they proffered the view that natural family planning is an inherent benefit to marriage as such, with the implication that it’s possible to honestly make such pronouncements about people’s lives whom one does not know. Now, in 2011, they’re saying that it’s more complicated than that

Yeah, that.

Pema Levy correctly identifies sex-that-doesn't-punish-women activist Marjorie Dannenfelser as both a liar and a bastard.

The most important way for conservatives to roll back access to family planning is to link it to abortion. To wit, at the Faith and Freedom Conference last week, Susan B. Anthony List president Marjorie Dannenfelser declared: “Every year that contraception and family planning increases, the abortion rate also increases in direct proportion. … This is an undeniable fact.” SBA List will not support a candidate that does not want to defund Planned Parenthood because of this faux-causal relationship between contraception and abortion.

Source: TAPPED

To equate a correlation with a causation is to be either stupid or a deliberate liar. Presiding over a major nationwide political organization requires considerable intelligence; to be president of the Susan B. Anthony List means categorically that Marjorie Dannenfelser not stupid. Therefore she's a calculated, categorical liar.

To a) deliberately lie about a causal relationship between contraception and abortion when b) there is no causal relationship and c) there is in fact considerable credible evidence that women who lose access to contraception instead increase their rate of abortion when d) your stated purpose of making such a correlation is your opposition to abortion and e) you've been previously identified as not stupid enough to make such a mistake in error is... to identify one's self as a mendacious bastard. Marjorie Dannenfelser and her coven of supporters are aggressively performing items A-E. Consequently Marjorie Dannenfelser is a mendacious bastard.

So if access to contraception does not in fact increase the rate of abortion for those who have access to it but instead decreases it, but the decidedly non-stupid president of a nominally anti-abortion organization makes that claim she must be making it to advance an agenda that's... well... not actually causally related to reducing the rate of abortion.

I'm thoroughly prepared to acknowledge that other people have a different view of the origin of human life. And consequently I can acknowledge that other people can honestly and ethically oppose abortion on the basis of their view of when life originates. Even if I disagree with their view. Even if I bitterly disagree!

But by moving beyond the debatable question of when human life begins into the thoroughly unambiguous question of opposing contraception itself, Dannenfelser and her ilk surrender any and all right to claim that their motivations are, at all, about protecting unborn human life.

So if, as I think is an inescapable conclusion that Dannenfelser's organization is interested in far more than opposing abortion, what is their intention instead?

Pema Levy concludes, as do I, that (emphasis mine.)

Dannenfelser's statement has nothing to do with facts and everything to do with the idea that women should, literally, bear the consequences of having sex.

I think that's about right. We can quibble about why the sam hill anyone would want women to think about sex in terms of consequences to be suffered. But there's no quibbling that that is indeed the only conceivable purpose of opposing contraception.

Want a little tip about contraception?

Not one single woman I know has had an unplanned, unwanted pregnancy with a man who's had a successful vasectomy. Not a single woman on earth has had an unplanned, unwanted pregnancy with a man after having a successful tubal ligation.

Note: Satoshi Kanazawa used the generic catchphrase "black" in the post I'm about to discuss.  Since it's not clear from his context whether his racism was directed at people of African, or African-American origin, or even just anyone with skin he determines to be darkly pigmented, in this particular I'm just going to use his terminology and say "black."

Usually when anybody types the words "Satoshi Kanazawa" my eyes start to glaze over. For obvious reasons. When I see him he's cited approvingly my blood also boils, but that's been happening less and less, so mostly when I see him referenced I just move on.

But last he became so extreme that even Psychology Today (the Cosmopolitan Magazine of science journalism) woke up enough to yank one of his posts. (After altering the title from Kanazawa's original "Why Black Women Are Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women" to "Why Black Women Are Rated Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women" because that made it better.)

And now it sounds like (finally!) his employers at the London School of Economics might have been moved to action -- if not for his overt racism, sexism, and homophobia then at least for his really capricious methodology.

So anyway, there having been such an awesome uproar this time I had to take a look. And... yeah, he's pretty special that guy.

You sort of have to admire his serenely confident but argumentatively gratuitous shot that while “black women are on average much heavier than non-black women” that’s not why black women are uglier. Oh no, he's scientifically controlled for that so they're still just ugly even when you take into account that they're fat.

Next he blithly asserts that blacks on average are stupider (have lower intelligence) than all non-blacks… but that’s not why, quoth he, black women are uglier. Oh no, because, see, even though black men are just as stupid as black women they’re still significantly more attractive than non-black men. (Or, one supposes from his amended version, black men are rated more attractive. Which I guess is supposed to be less racist.)

But wait! Maybe they’re not gratuitous structural arguments: he may have brought them up by way of eliminating the factors most favored by his superficial racist stereotypes to get to his more fundamental ones: “well, you’d think black women were uglier because blacks are fatter and stupider but no, even filtering out their fatness and stupidity black women are still ugly.

Oh, and then there's this lovely bit!

[B]ecause they have existed much longer in human evolutionary history, Africans have more mutations in their genomes than other races. And the mutation loads significantly decrease physical attractiveness (because physical attractiveness is a measure of genetic and developmental health). But since both black women and black men have higher mutation loads, it cannot explain why only black women are less physically attractive, while black men are, if anything, more attractive.

He says that black male attractiveness eliminates as a reason the “fact” that since blacks “have existed much longer in human evolutionary history, blacks have more mutations in their genomes than other races.” And, you see, purer races prefer lower “mutation loads.” But once again, despite those preferences (and, don’t forget, men’s seed-spreading willingness to screw anything that moves… er… to make lower genetic “investments”) and all those icky mutations make black men “if anything, more attractive.”

(Speaking of “objectivity,” one can imagine that were Kanazawa of black heritage he'd instead have have concluded not that rather than having more “mutations” blacks have robust genetic diversity, which instead would be superior to those icky “inbred” races with their “evolved” aversion to replenishing their degenerate gene pools. He could even use same "objective" statistics to back back up that claim! But I digress.)

(Also speaking of “objectivity,” one can imagine that black people have more “mutations” because, as you say Rob, “black” is only a race in the sense that “black” people have darker skin, with the result that while “black” people descended from populations recently indigenous to north Africa, south Africa, central, east, and west Frica, south Asia, the Pacific Islands, Australia, parts of India, and so on are, yeah, a $@^%@ of a lot “older” and racially “mutated” since some of them are likely more genetically similar to what ever relatively genetic monoculture Mr. Kanazawa calls homeland than they are to each other. But I digress again...)

But nope, nope. Instead he says he's factored that out too: “mutations” don’t make black women uglier either. In fact, says he,

The only thing I can think of that might potentially explain the lower average level of physical attractiveness among black women is testosterone. Africans on average have higher levels of testosterone than other races, and testosterone, being an androgen (male hormone), affects the physical attractiveness of men and women differently.

Yup, that’s probably the only other thing that could possibly explain the difference. (If he'd said they had less oxytocin we could all go home.)

It’s also the point at which he stops being a racist asshole using raw statistics and becomes a… free-wheeling racist homophobe "evolutionary psychologist" of the sort that gives evolutionary psychology a really bad name.*

See testosterone, Kanazawa believes, makes everybody look more manly. And black women have more testosterone. Which makes them look more manly. And it's looking manly that makes them ugly.

And so by inference that makes anyone who’s attracted to black women Teh Gay Takei. And, as we all know, Teh Takei is an evolutionary dead end. So all right-minded, offspring-maximizing men recognize that black women are ugly: QED.

And does he present any graphs or charts to back up these assertions? No. Does he bring up any counterarguments? Not at all. Does he cite any prior research? Nope. Does he cite anyone else's research? Not that either.  And does he bring up any other possible reasons why black women might be singled out as less attractive?  Not a bit.  Did he even stop check his arithmetic to make sure that, you know, the data he was using says what he wanted it to?  Evidently not(!)

Nope, nearly all the preceding crap is just Kanazawa being an unencumbered racist doing what racists are really good at doing -- selectively using the tools of a still-emerging field of science to advance his foregone conclusions. He happens to use evolutionary psychology much the way early 20th-Century racists and classists used Darwin to advance "social Darwinism," the way Dick Army, Paul Ryan, and Brian Caplan use economics to advance their defense of the status quo, the same way Dinesh D'Souza and Charles Murray use statistics to defend segregation, and just the same way Donna M. Hughes uses feminism as sheeps clothing for her neoconservatism.

With any luck, though, this time next year Kanazawa will be publishing from The Spearhead or National Vanguard and working lecturing at Bob Jones University or Liberty University. Which, his nominal Darwinism notwithstanding, should welcome him with open arms.

* I.e. he starts pulling shit out of his ass and saying "it must be evolved because it gives me such a woodie" and leaving it at that. Evolutionary psychology itself isn't objectionable in principle -- it would be hard to argue that nothing about human behavior has been influenced by natural selection. And most practitioners are actually fairly moderate people and many of them are outright Unitarian, Birkenstock-wearing, old-school liberals. And as far as I know none of them actually like, let alone admire Satoshi Kanazawa. But! Up till now he's been the closest thing to a Carl Sagan EP has had. And... yeah... how's that been working?