Stepping back from the noise.

I entered into a discussion about breastfeeding at James Nicoll's lj, and now I've exited it (without flouncing: I don't want to be that person). There's only so many responses a person can make without becoming an asshole. So here's my private musings about the fallout from the dscussion. I've not friendslocked this because why bother? But I'm not going out of my way to invite people to continue the discussion over here because, again, why bother? I think I'm doing this because I am annoyed, want to express my annoyance, and I don't want to keep arguing, but even more so because I want to be really clear in my mind about what I'm thinking and saying and doing, and this is an opportunity to work on that clarity.

One tremendously useful thing has come out of this. I've figured out why the phrase "agree to disagree" always makes me want to be violently rude. It's because "agree to disagree" actually means "agree that the less-privileged position will shut up and the more-privileged person will continue to say whatever they feel like, without challenge."

And the privileged position in this case is: "you can recommend breastfeeding, but you must put my very specific and unusual difficulties front and center to make sure you don't offend me."

One person (who says they're not intending to have children, so I don't know why they took this so hard: I never said everybody who raises babies has to breastfeed, them much less that everybody in the whole world has to breastfeed babies whether they have any babies or not) said that it was "deeply antifeminist" of me to suggest that breastfeeding is nearly free. Because see, this person makes 35 dollars an hour and so therefore they shouldn't be throwing that time away on baby care. I did point out that it takes more time to bottle feed a baby than to breastfeed them, and somebody else said -- oh, I forget, and I am too weary to go heck, but it was something to the order that you can have somebody else do all that icky baby feeding if you're not using the breast.

Several other people objected to my saying that breastfeeding becomes enjoyable after a while, because they knew somebody who didn't ever enjoy it but did it for two years or something anyway out of duty (I don't get that. Six months, yeah, but two years? For why? So you can throw it in the kid's face later when they aren't sufficiently grateful?).

Then there was "What if you're taking medications that babies shouldn't have in their breastmilk? What if your working hours are long and terrible?"

Honestly, there's individual exceptions to every epidemiological recommendation I can think of except perhaps for "don't smoke cigarettes" and "don't inhale carbon monoxide" amd "stop making candy and wallpaper colored with Paris green." Everybody should eat a nice amount of protein foods every day -- except if they have phenylketonuira. Everybody should eat foods rich in fiber -- except if they have certain malformations of the digestive tract. Children with chronic diarrhea should eat lots of rice, bananas, applesauce and toast and not much else till it resolves -- unless they have the apple allergy that causes diarrhea, skin rash, and potentially anaphylactic shock. With a bit of research I could go on.

It's a typically libertarian tack taken by typically privileged people. They find the rare exception and insist that it disproves the common (and scientifically demonstrated)situation. They debunk epidemiology. Reflexively, as far as I can tell, because also, as far as I can tell, none of these people actually want to tell people not to breastfeed -- they just don't want me to tell people to breastfeed. At least not in sincere, comprehensible language.

For a moment here and there I thought maybe they were confusing what I was saying with the weird narcissistic homeschool-novaccination-everything-has-to-be-done-in-the-most-difficult-and-intensive-manner people, but I don't think it was possible for a person to actually think that and be honest, given what I actually did say.

Apparently the reason James invited this shitstorm on his journal is that Michelle Obama has suggested that people should breastfeed their babies to cut down on the incidence of obesity. Apparently this is offensive to people. Of course this is a controversial subject on a lot of fronts. The science of obesity is not well developed. There's a lot of claimas about obesity that are dumb. The causal direction of the diseases of obesity are not clearly established, though since it looks like moderate weight loss improves health and longevity for a lot of obese people, there's something to the idea that it's better to be less obese than more. And there are studies that show greater incidence of obesity in people who were bottle-fed for their whole infancy. Trying to get a nice roundup of the studies led me to stuff I wasn't looking for, including abstracts of two studies about obese mothers and breastfeeding, one seeming to show that obese mothers were less likely to continue past 6 weeks than overweight ones, and another finding different prolactin levels in obese mothers and other mothers. I don't lknow anything about the quality of the studies, but that's interesting.

Apparently the Tea Party types are offended that Michelle Obama should be taking this on. Because, um, why? Because Michelle Bachmann has to oppose anything from Michelle Obama? There can be only one Michelle?

So, anyway, James asked whether it was a good thing to promote breastfeeding or whether we could just all agree to disagree, and I said I wouldn't agree to disagree, and gave a few of the arguments in favor of breastfeeding, and then I was told I was deeply antifeminist.

I swear, there are some really strange people hanging out at James's journal. A while back I said I thought it was selfish and wrong for post-menopausal women to enlist a big chunk of expensive medical care to reactivate their wombs to bear their "own" babies rather than spend those resources, for example, improving the lives of existing children, and one of the commenters suggested that I might possibly therefore be anti-abortion.

Originally I was going to go into a contrast between the kind of breastfeeding promotion I do, and the kind that these folks seem to think I should do, and the kind that hey seem to think I actually do. But it's taken me this long to say what I have said so far, and I do need to go to bed eventually. So I think I'll stop here.

On another front, I am in lesson 4 of "Chcete Mluvit Česky?" ("Do you want to speak Czech?") and I have found out why it is so hard to tell Czech verbs apart. It is because they tend to be made of base verbs plus prefixes that change their meaning in specific ways, for example, they make them into perfective or imperfective verbs, which are described as being verbs that finish and verbs that don't, though I can already tell that is an insufficient description. Other prefixes have functions more like what we're used to (those little bits of usually Latin detritus that indicate direction or whatever, except when they don't, like and obverse and converse and diverse and perverse and universe and subversive and like that there. But the thing is, Czech prefixes are not mostly from Latin, they are mostly from Old Slavonian or whatever that is, and they have a different logic that I have not grokked yet.

Also, the adverbs and preopisitions and conjunctions and quasi-pronouns and not-really-articles and occasional nouns and adjectives tend to sound a lot alike, much like words of those categories in English (these this that those there then thing thus: which who what why when where whither whence). Notice that these kinds of words in English don't come from Latin, they come from Old English. Anyway, I've learned some of these -- kdo kdy kde and I'm struggling with others -- ten tenhle tam tady taky ted' to ta which overlap because some of the same forms which are gender and case forms of one word are different gender and case forms of other words, and I just have to memorize the whole lot of them because there's no more logic to it than there is to English (probably no less as well, but I don't have a lifetime of experience with it).

Frank says there is no excuse for Czech, it is just a horrible language. But I don't know. Certainly it is a lot harder than Spanish, but I imagine that ninety percent of the world's languages are harder than Spanish.

On a further front, we had almost every possible kind of weather you can have in February in Santa Cruz in the last two days, with the exception of lightning and snow that sticks. And both of those are rare.