Do we have a term for someone who articulates a position you more-or-less agree with... in such a manner that you find you don't agree with it any more?
Saletanning. I believe he has just argued for every position and annoyed me so much that I don't agree with any of them.
But do his annoying arguments make you reject your initial positions outright, or just refine them so as to differentiate your own beliefs from his?
I am now a member of DETS, Dolphins for the Ethical Treatment of Sponges.
3 sets of twins per 100 live births? That seems like a lot. Still not going to get me to give up my cheese, though. Yum.
My wife is petrified of having twins. On the other hand, she loves cheese. I'm expecting a freak-out when I send her this article.
(Wait, so what about organic rGBH-free milk? Are we cool?)
5: 4 references an update to the original post.
My wife is petrified of having twins.
I don't think I've ever heard of that. Not that it seems implausible, I've just never heard of it.
I'm curious what the twinning rate is in Manhattan. Seems like every stroller I see is a double-wide. (Although I'm sure that has more to do with IVF than rGBH).
IDP, I'd never heard of it either. It's weird. She's keen on having children, but the idea of having more than one at a time really wigs her out.
I don't deny that having twins would be a lot more work than having just one baby, but I don't regard the possibility with terror.
9: A lot of adoption agencies have their "Summer Sale" about now, as well.
I very much don't want to have twins either, mrh, although I wouldn't exactly say I'm pertrified at the prospect.
Synthetic growth hormone is one of those things that I've always been just plain suspicious of. In a number of years, I believe it'll be linked to all sorts of harms in humans--beyond the antibiotic resistance stuff, I mean.
I suppose I'm exaggerating slightly for rhetorical effect. She very much doesn't want to have twins. I don't particularly want to have twins, but possibly because I have siblings who are twins I'm more confident about our ability to handle it.
"In the beginning of this Saletan piece arguing that society should move as rapidly as possible toward eating meat grown from lab cultures...."
I'd like some Coffiest to go with my Chicken Little, please.
If ogged knew that people were using Seinfeld jokes in their post titles, he'd roll over in his grave bed.
Or if he knew that we were not rejecting out of hand the idea of in vitro meat.
because I have siblings who are twins
That right there is why she's petrified. I would be too.
She's more likely to have twins if there's a genetic predisposition to same. I think. Actually, maybe that's not true if the predisposition is on the man's side....
I have a friend who had twins not once, but twice. The second pair were born before the first were three years old. Seriously, even though twins are cute and all, they're just way, way more work. One baby means exhaustion for at least a year. Two?!?
18: Me either. Though I have to say, IIRC, women still end up doing the vast majority of the work in child rearing, so it's not entirely unexpected that mrh's wife might worry about twins and he might not.
Just think for a few minutes about the logistics of feeding two newborns, knowing that they want to nurse about every hour.
I'm pretty sure that fraternal twins on the male side don't indicate a genetic predisposition to twins. 'Sides which, my little brother and sister are delightful.
While it's true that I probably won't be able to contribute much to the nursing of our hypothetical twins, I don't think the assymetry of our concern has to do with our expected shares of child-rearing duties.
I'm curious what the twinning rate is in Manhattan. Seems like every stroller I see is a double-wide.
In certain neighborhoods in NYC, I was always struck by the fact that pretty much every stroller was either:
1) A middle-aged white woman pushing a Chinese baby.
or
2) A young Asian woman pushing a white baby.
23: Oh, I'm sure they're delightful. That's beside the point, though. Just think about the laundry. . . .
I'm not petrified of having twins, but damn, the thought of one baby kicking my bladder is enough. Two? Where would they fit? Forget hypothetical worries about asymmetrical child rearing responsibilities? Where they gonna fit?
Well, usually they're smaller than singletons, but yeah. My twin-bearing friend got enormously huge during her pregnancies....
Smaller, feh. Even a singleton is going to fit in there how? My mom got enormously huge bearing only one child at a time. Two is right out. I'd need a wheelchair to carry my stomach around in.
Yeah, I got pretty bulbous too. PK was over 10 lbs.
I remember hearing it said about Margaret Thatcher that she'd been lucky to have fraternal twins, because that meant she could get back to work so much faster. I'm sure she and Denis had help for those pesky details. Although she was of lower-middle-class background, she rose rapidly.
I actually used to say I wanted a singleton, and then twins. B/c I thought three kids would be cool, y'see, so might as well get it over with. Now I'm wondering if I even want two.
We were all between 6 and 8 pounds, but my mom was bulbable, I guess.
Erm, we're not twins or multiples. (Four kids.)
Four non-twins = four pregnancies. My sympathy to your mother!
My mum got truly enormous with my brother (he's 20 years younger than me) and he was almost a month late too. He was 10.5 lbs which is pretty large, imho. He looked like he was about to get up and walk.
Also, re: the anecdotal observed rise in twins -- fertility treatment and in vitro fertilisation in particular make twins and triplets much more common. I'd imagine the fact that many people are leaving childbirth till later in life also contributes to the apparently larger number of twins seen out and about.
Yeah, PK was 10 lbs 1 oz, and two weeks late. The picture of him on the scale, he looks like a huge Tgiving turkey.
38 is certainly correct for my Brooklyn neighborhood. Double- and triple-wides abound due to the extremely high average age of mothers during their first pregnancy. Park Slope is where you go when you turn 45 and suddenly go, "Whoa, shit! I gotta make copies of this shit!"
I agree with 1 wholeheartedly. I started reading the article and thought, huh, okay, yeah, there are really good economical reasons for vegetarianism (one of the reasons I have been veg for 11 years), yes, and. Oh. This is taking a left turn. Now it is stupid. This is why everyone gives vegetarians a hard time about everything.
AWB, learn to use the "preview" button. I'm not always dumb enough to use the word "shit" twice in eight words.
Heh, I thought that was on purpose, and I enjoyed it as being really humorous and colloquial. So there.
I am funniest when unintentional.
36: "Indeed. She's a trooper."
I've noticed for a while that this has become one of the most popular malapropisms.
The actual traditional phrase is "trouper," as in someone who participates well in the "troupe" -- not that they're members of the military, or on a horse.
No, no, don't thank me! I know people love to be corrected. I live to please.
19/22- I understand having twins would be rough, lots of work. I was confused because, as has been pointed out, having twins in the father's family doesn't in any way affect the chance of a mother bearing twins. There's already billions of sperm in there; the key to twins in multiple eggs, and releasing multiple eggs is a female quirk. Men have nothing to do with it.
I was confused because I thought this was well-known.
The key to fraternal twins is multiple eggs. Identical twins result from the splitting of a single egg -- I don't know whether a tendency for identical twins is genetically transmitted, but if it is, I don't know that it couldn't be transmitted through the male line.
Yes, but not all twins are fraternal (multiple eggs). Some are identical (a single zygote splits). Genetic predisposition contributes to identical twins, too, but I don't know if that's exclusively the mom or if the dad has a hand in it as well.
Goddamnit, it told me the comment hadn't posted.
46 was me. 47/48- yes, not sure why I didn't mention identical twins. That too is a girl problem. Not sure to what extent it's genetic, but very sure the man's genetics play zero role.
My mom had two kids, me and my sister, and then (fraternal) twins. She was enormous. My dad said she'd stop traffic walking down the street. And they were definitely hard work: in all the pictures of her in the year or two after the twins were born she looks exhausted.
Is your wife aware of this narrative, not just the fact but the hugeness, the exhaustion? That might be it, you know.
My favorite twinning concept is superfecundation -- that if a woman has sex with two men while she is ovulating, she can end up with twins from different fathers.
And even weirder (and rarer) - superfetation, twins of different ages.
The Montaigne essay refers to a case of stuporfecundation.
54: Oh, I don't think there's any doubt that's it.
My mother and her two best friends averaged 7 2/3 kids. They all lived past 85, 2 in good health. I think that the traditional ill health effects of multiple childbirth were mostly the result of malnutrition, and of overwork between births.
It may not kill you, but dude, pregnancy sucks. Doing it 7 or 8 (or god forbid 13 or however many) times in a lifetime would just be appalling, I don't care how long you lived afterwards.
Both of my wives LOVED being pregnant.
64: It didn't take the evidence in 63 to convince you of that, did it?
They had easy pregnancies. Difficult deliveries, but easy pregnancies.
I didn't mind it all that much, and less the second time than the first -- it was much less weird the second time. Still wouldn't say I liked it, but if I were living in a social milieu where having six kids made sense, I wouldn't be dreading the pregnancies particularly.
Well, sure, but I'm a modern girl, and I'm not used to waddling or throwing up all the time.
You really couldn't find three more cheerful, more active women. One had a stroke when her youngest kid was about 30, and that was horrible, but I don't think that pregnancies contributed to that.
None of them worked outside the home. None were rich, either, or had servants.
Neither one had a hint of morning sickness and both are tall enough that they didn't really waddle until the very last bit. Shrug.
45: Sounds more like an eggcorn than a malapropism.
Is the jury still out on whether there are health benefits long-term of having been pregnant? Other things being equal, as if there was any way to know except in large aggregates.
In Brave New World, 1932, Aldus Huxley has women, who are not breeders in the test-tube world of the future, take a periodic "pregnancy substitute" pill. He was presumably sophisticated about then-current biological thinking through his brother Julian.
There's a breast cancer protective effect, I believe -- nothing else I know about.
73: Don't your breasts get bigger, too? That's got to count as a positive health effect, I think.
45: Thanks. I couldn't remember which was the malapropism and which was the correct form, and I didn't care enough to research before posting a four-word comment.
67: My mother had three relatively easy pregnancies and deliveries, aside from the short woman-hiding-a-beachball-under-her-shirt look. And a strange aversion to the smell of beef. I'm not sure she would have minded having more kids except that her body was clearly telling her during the fourth that five would be pushing it.
73: I'd heard there was a cervical cancer protective effect, too, but I can't remember if that was in the context of anti-abortion propaganda (perhaps something like: women who have children have a less of chance of a certain cancer, so, that means abortion causes cancer, because correlation is too causality. (Take that, Hume.) )
The breast cancer thing is related to nursing, not pregnancy, I think.
I don't think that's quite the case, B. What reduces breast cancer rates is halting the menstrual cycle; it's the constant up and down of estrogen levels that makes breast tissue go awry. Nursing helps prolong that, but not as reliably as just staying pregnant.
76 -- as Frank would say, "You can't have one with out the, other."
I think you're mistaken. You can halt the menstrual cycle by just taking b.c.p. But like I said, I'm remembering what I've read pretty vaguely, though I'd swear it had to do with nursing and that women who bottle-fed had breast cancer rates that weren't different from women who'd never been pregnant.
78: In fact, that's not true. There are adoptive moms who've managed to stimulate lactation in order to breast-feed their babies.
You can halt the menstrual cycle by just taking b.c.p.
Right, but that's still monkeying with estrogen levels. BC reduces levels of certain cancers and raises others, depending on whether they are estrogen-positive or estrogen-negative.
women who bottle-fed
Right, but they only stopped their cycles for nine months, which isn't really significant measured against, say, 40 years of fertility. Historically, women have spent much longer periods of their lives pregnant than they do now, so most modern women have many, many more cycles than their great-great-(etc.)-grandmothers did.
The historically pregnant thing is true, but if memory serves, even breast-feeding one baby for a few months = protective effect. So it seems that it really is the lactation, rather than the pregnancy.
Bcp don't necessarily contain estrogen. Mine don't; the stuff gives me migraines. (Insert joke about femininity or lack thereof here.)
May I suggest this Timesonline piece about attraction for the sort of thread we can't get enough of?