ECHIDNE of the snakes

How Awkward...

2012-02-02T16:36:00.000-05:00

The Susan G. Komen Foundation, which recently announced that it is ending grants to Planned Parenthood for breast cancer screening because of a controversial investigation launched by an anti-abortion Republican congressman, currently funds cancer research at the Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center to the tune of $7.5 million. Like Planned Parenthood, Penn State is currently the subject of a federal government investigation, and like the Planned Parenthood grant, the Penn State grant appears to violate a new internal rule at Komen that bans grants to organizations that are under investigation by federal, state, or local governments. But so far, only the Planned Parenthood grants appear to have been cancelled.

And so very awkward for the Susan G. Komen Foundation.

Having Forced-Birth Values Increases The Risk of Prostate Cancer in Men!

2012-02-02T04:38:00.000-05:00

That's absolutely and totally true, my friends. I can prove it easily. Just call lots of men, ask them about their abortion views and then about whether they have prostate cancer or not, and I'm willing to bet you anything that you find a positive correlation between being opposed to abortion and having prostate cancer. This obviously means that forced-birth views cause prostate cancer. QED.

Except, of course, for that little problem which is that both anti-abortion views and prostate cancer increase with age. Drat.

But such considerations as bad study design never hold people back when it comes to women's cooties and other issues of no interest to anyone else but women. The august Washington Post decided to use the Susan G. Komen case to bring back the idea that abortions cause breast cancer in women. The piece concludes, after admitting that the "research is spotty (hah! blood in the panties)":

But the bulk of evidence appears to argue against abortion’s causing breast cancer. That’s according to the American Cancer Society and the National Cancer Institute, which offer overviews of existing research and conclusions scientists have come to after examining those studies. While research suggests a slight increased risk of breast cancer among women currently using oral contraceptives, that’s not the case with abortion and breast cancer risk. As the American Cancer Society’s Web site concludes: “Linking these 2 topics creates a great deal of emotion and debate. But scientific research studies have not found a cause-and-effect relationship between abortion and breast cancer.”
Komen’s decision to stop funding Planned Parenthood will certainly revive this debate.

Err. You just revived the debate, you idiot. I should have realized when the Washington Post published an utterly misogynist opinion piece of crap about the inanity of all women that it's not a newspaper that exactly cares about being objective on the topic of women (half of humanity and all that). I'm going to start attacking them from now on, by the way, because enough is enough.

Let's explain to that WaPo writer why all proper studies have failed to establish any kind of correlation between abortion and breast cancer. It's not terribly hard to do, and Googling can help you. Honest.

For instance, it's important to understand that retrospective surveys have serious problems in this context. "Retrospective" means that you look at the data at a point in time when at least some women already have developed breast cancer, and then you ask the women whether they ever had had abortions (including spontaneous abortions) or not in the past.

The bias that is introduced by this method goes like this: First, women in general under-report abortions because of societal disapproval. But second, those women who have breast cancer are less likely to under-report abortions. This is because it is human to try to explore one's past for possible reasons for the cancer, to repent all sorts of stuff and so on. These two things combined can create a spurious (false) correlation between breast cancer, and various types of abortions.

It's not difficult to see how an ideal study of this question should be performed. It needs to be prospective, meaning that the data on abortions is entered when they take place, not at the later time when breast cancers are diagnosed. And it should not be based on the memory and responses of the women themselves but actual medical records.

And you know what? Those ideal studies do exist! Here's what they have found:

Results from major prospective studies
The largest, and probably the most reliable, study on this topic was done during the 1990s in Denmark, a country with very detailed medical records on all its citizens. In this study, all Danish women born between 1935 and 1978 (a total of 1.5 million women) were linked with the National Registry of Induced Abortions and with the Danish Cancer Registry. All of the information about their abortions and their breast cancer came from registries – it was very complete and was not influenced by recall bias.
After adjusting for known breast cancer risk factors, the researchers found that induced abortion(s) had no overall effect on the risk of breast cancer. The size of this study and the manner in which it was done provide good evidence that induced abortion does not affect a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer.
Another large, prospective study was reported on by Harvard researchers in 2007. This study included more than 100,000 women who were between the ages of 29 and 46 at the start of the study in 1993. These women were followed until 2003.
Again, because they were asked about childbirths and abortions at the start of the study, recall bias was unlikely to be a problem. After adjusting for known breast cancer risk factors, the researchers found no link between either spontaneous or induced abortions and breast cancer.
The California Teachers Study also reported on more than 100,000 women in 2008. Researchers asked the women in 1995 about past induced and spontaneous abortions. While the women were being followed in the study, more than 3,300 developed invasive breast cancer. There was no difference in breast cancer risk between the group who had either spontaneous or induced abortions and those who had not had an abortion.

So how about that revival of a discredited hypothesis, Washington Post?

The Danish study, in particular, is as good as a study of this kind can be. All the data came from medical records and everyone knows that the Danes keep excellent records. It also looked at the one question forced-birthers are focused on which is induced abortions.

What is the theory the forced-birthers have in mind when they keep arguing that abortions cause later breast cancer? Probably a theory of divine retribution. The sluts are punished for their sluttery.

But the actual medical hypothesis is something quite different, and would apply equally to all women who have never had children and all women who have had miscarriages. That hypothesis is about the possible protective role that pregnancies before a certain age might have against later breast cancer, and it asks questions about how, exactly, being pregnant might convey such protections.

But those protections are not dependent on just one single pregnancy. Note that women who have had abortions or miscarriages are very likely to also have had completed pregnancies, with all those benefits. After all, many women who have abortions have already had children. Thus, what the hypothesis is really about is the possibility that a woman who has an abortion, whether induced or spontaneous, and no more children during that beneficial time window might have the same higher average risk of breast cancer as women who have no children.

Makes you see the whole thing a bit differently, right?

The Susan G. Komen for the Cure. For Some, Not For All.

2012-02-01T04:18:00.001-05:00

You probably already heard that Susan G. Komen for the Cure, the largest breast-cancer charity in the country, has decided to defund Planned Parenthood:

According to the AP, the move will mean “a cutoff of hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants, mainly for breast exams.”Planned Parenthood confirms that Komen is the first, and only, organization to cut off funding since the Congress began debating the issue in earnest last winter.

Komen said it could not continue to fund Planned Parenthood because it has adopted new guidelines that bar it from funding organizations under congressional investigation. The House oversight and investigations subcommittee announced in the fall an investigation into Planned Parenthood’s funding.

The linked source suggests that Kamen folded under Republican hammering about abortion and Planned Parenthood and so on. And perhaps that is the case.

On the other hand, one of the top officers at Susan G. Komen for the Cure is Karen Handel, the senior vice-president of public policy. She is known for her forced-birth views. When she unsuccessfully ran in the Republican primaries for the governorship of Georgia she wrote this on her campaign site:

I believe that each and every unborn child has inherent dignity, that every abortion is a tragedy, and that government has a role, along with the faith community, in encouraging women to choose life in even the most difficult of circumstances. And while I will not seek to prohibit abortions in the extremely rare cases of rape, incest, or where there is a real threat to the life of the mother, I will do everything in my power to encourage and promote alternatives to abortion in these tragic situations. In this respect, I strongly support the noble work of crisis-pregnancy centers across the state and those who compassionately and lovingly counsel women on a daily basis. Finally, I oppose embryonic stem cell research, which creates life solely for the purpose of destroying it. I do, however, strongly support adult stem cell research, which has produced numerous scientific achievements without terminating innocent lives in the process.
My opponents have recently recycled old attacks against me concerning Fulton County’s funding of some programs through Planned Parenthood. They are doing so without providing any context and continue to omit several key and important facts. First, let me be clear, since I am pro-life, I do not support the mission of Planned Parenthood. During my time as Chairman of Fulton County, there were federal and state pass-through grants that were awarded to Planned Parenthood for breast and cervical cancer screening, as well as a “Healthy Babies Initiative.” The grant was authorized, regulated, administered and distributed through the State of Georgia. Because of the criteria, regulations and parameters of the grant, Planned Parenthood was the only eligible vendor approved to meet the state criteria. Additionally, none of the services in any way involved abortions or abortion-related services. In fact, state and federal law prohibits the use of taxpayer funds for abortions or abortion related services and I strongly support those laws. Since grants like these are from the state I’ll eliminate them as your next Governor.

Bolds are mine.

Planned Parenthood is an important source of reproductive health care checkups for lower-income women, including breast examinations. Does Komen have an alternative plan to make sure that the necessary screening services that would be cut by this defunding are still available in those communities? I wonder.

Echoes of Egypt?

2012-02-01T03:43:00.000-05:00

If this is true it brings to mind the virginity tests carried out on Egyptian demonstrators:

The National Lawyers Guild San Francisco Bay Area Chapter (NLGSF) condemns Oakland Police (OPD) and Alameda County Sheriff’s Office (ACSO) violence, mass arrests and abuses against Occupy demonstrators at Saturday’s demonstration. Police violently attacked activists with chemical weapons, so called Less-Lethal munitions, and physical assaults. Hundreds were arrested unlawfully, without opportunity to disperse, and then detained for many hours on the street and then in buses, in stress positions, and without bathrooms, food or water. Once in jail, protesters faced inhumanely crowded conditions, abusive treatment and were denied access to legal counsel. Many remain unaccounted for, though certainly arrested and awaiting booking two days after being detained.

...

Once in Alameda County custody, the arrestees have been held for a prolonged period under horrendous conditions, often remaining overnight in holding areas with no beds or blankets. Some arrestees were apparently held in a shower room. NLGSF has received many reports of injured persons being denied medical care and arrestees denied access to necessary medications. Women arrestees were forced to give urine samples in front of male officers, ostensibly for pregnancy testing.

Bolds mine.

David Brooks Loves Charles Murray. A Marriage Made in Hell

2012-01-31T23:54:00.002-05:00

Do you remember Charles Murray? One of the authors of the infamous Bell Curve book about the presumed lower intelligence of blacks? The man who has argued that a) blacks, b) Latinos and c) all women are intellectually inferior creatures. The man who has argued that poverty cannot be helped by anything the government could do, because that breeds indolence and poor work habits and in any case poverty is caused by the innate stupidity and bad work ethics of the poor.

Guess what. Murray has written yet another book, and this time even white guys can join the rest of us in Murray's humongous group of cretins. But only if they are not rich. The book, titled Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 was reviewed by Joan Walsh. She concludes:

At bottom, Murray’s old genetic fatalism undoes him in “Coming Apart.” Clearly the new lower class can’t be helped by government programs, but Murray doesn’t seem to think they can climb into the upper class by hard work and self-discipline either. Ultimately, he believes the sorting and separation of the classes is inevitable, given the cognitive intelligence differences between them. And here we’re back to IQ again.

Walsh's review is good. But it doesn't go deep enough. To review the final product of someone like Charles Murray (who has shown himself biased in the past) you can't simply assume that his data is good and reliable. Instead, you have to go and poke around in the garbage dumps where he might have found his data, and whatever you find must be taken home in plastic bags and subjected to careful forensic scrutiny. Then you have to go out again to acquire all the data he will have excluded, on purpose.

That's the job for someone in a hazmat suit and a couple of decades of time.

All this is background to explain to you why my holy inner rage flared like a volcano this morning when I read the introductory sentence in David Brooks' column "The Great Divorce":

I’ll be shocked if there’s another book this year as important as Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart.” I’ll be shocked if there’s another book that so compellingly describes the most important trends in American society.
Murray’s basic argument is not new, that America is dividing into a two-caste society. What’s impressive is the incredible data he produces to illustrate that trend and deepen our understanding of it.

And Hitler was the up-and-coming world leader of the 1930s, too. I keep being reminded of this quip about David Brooks:

When you want a truly vile opinion dressed up to sound innocuous, Brooks is your guy.

Indeed. My righteous anger left me stuck there, in those first few sentences. For the whole day.

Charles Pierce has a funny review of the rest of Brooks' ramblings. Brooks carries out the usual high-school class level analysis of what he calls the two tribes of America in Murray's book: The industrious rich people with 1950s values and the poor fat slobs who spend their days watching television and having children out of wedlock:

Murray’s story contradicts the ideologies of both parties. Republicans claim that America is threatened by a decadent cultural elite that corrupts regular Americans, who love God, country and traditional values. That story is false. The cultural elites live more conservative, traditionalist lives than the cultural masses.
Democrats claim America is threatened by the financial elite, who hog society’s resources. But that’s a distraction. The real social gap is between the top 20 percent and the lower 30 percent. The liberal members of the upper tribe latch onto this top 1 percent narrative because it excuses them from the central role they themselves are playing in driving inequality and unfairness.
It’s wrong to describe an America in which the salt of the earth common people are preyed upon by this or that nefarious elite. It’s wrong to tell the familiar underdog morality tale in which the problems of the masses are caused by the elites.
The truth is, members of the upper tribe have made themselves phenomenally productive. They may mimic bohemian manners, but they have returned to 1950s traditionalist values and practices. They have low divorce rates, arduous work ethics and strict codes to regulate their kids.

Strict codes to regulate their kids? Whooah. And 1950s traditionalist values and practices? A housewife in every kitchen? Racist and sexist beliefs? McCarthyist fear of the communists? Is that really the way Brooks sees the top 20% of American earners (assuming that this is what the upper tribe might be based on)? Pierce responds:

(Mmm, word salad. "Postmodern neighborhoods"? Do you know what some of those elites "worked arduously" at in the first decade of the 21st century? Devising complicated financial instruments by which they could steal most of the money from the rest of the country and get away with it. They haven't "returned to 1950's traditionalist values and practices." Too many of their wives are working and taking the pill, which is covered by the gold-plated health-care plans The Firm offers to its most valued employees. I'd like to see data on how well they're "regulating" their kids, too, and find another verb, fool. Kids are not water heaters. David Brooks is impressed that Charles Murray, career hack, has found some white people he can treat like black people, and just in time, too. The country was beginning to notice that some of the fundamental economic unfairness built into the society, largely through policies that people like David Brooks supported. Save me, Racist Data Man!)

In Brooks' world values are odd things. The ones he likes he attributes to the 1950s conservative era. The ones he doesn't like he attributes to the 1960s hippies. Given that divorce rates are the lowest in places such as Massachusetts, the Sodom and Gomorrah of conservative imagination, I resent that false linkage. But what do you expect from the go-to-guy when vileness needs to be garbed in innocence?

The overall topic is well worth discussing. But Murray has pretty much poisoned the well, given his basic approach. What we really need is a good and objective survey of the statistical data and a concerted effort by many researchers to explain the various theories for what we observe. But the role of rising income inequality, the role of outsourcing, the role of dying factory towns, the role of poor schools, the role of cutbacks in the government safety nets, the death of good unionized jobs and the role of the flaws in the traditional patriarchal marriage certainly should enter the conversation.

Brooks wants to keep all that outside the door, to mute what the media sells us (soaps, scandals, sex and serial killers), to ignore the fundamental role of Americans as consumers for the products of global firms. He pretends that values are something fairy godmothers (well, probably fairy godfathers) offer people and all the people need to do is to pick the right ones! Then you, too, can be rich though you won't enjoy it very much, given Brooks' description of those austere and rigid church-goers who adamantly regulate their children.

I have not read Murray's book yet, so I cannot tell what kind of data mining he has carried out. But I do note a selective flavor in Brooks' quote, this one:

His story starts in 1963. There was a gap between rich and poor then, but it wasn’t that big. A house in an upper-crust suburb cost only twice as much as the average new American home. The tippy-top luxury car, the Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz, cost about $47,000 in 2010 dollars. That’s pricy, but nowhere near the price of the top luxury cars today.
More important, the income gaps did not lead to big behavior gaps. Roughly 98 percent of men between the ages of 30 and 49 were in the labor force, upper class and lower class alike.

That reference to the income inequality is the extent of Brooks' nod to the economic realities. He quickly moves on to everyone in 1963 having egggzactly the same values! Men were out there working very hard. Women are not mentioned because they are supposed to be in the kitchen, for the benefit of the country.

But what really drew my attention was that reference to the labor market participation rate of men between 30 and 49. If you want to find out the group of men with the highest participation rate you would zone in on that age group, sure. So picking that number is intended to provide a high estimate of the great work ethics of men in those days.

But note that we are not told what the corresponding percentage would be today. Neither are we told that economic opportunities have changed, some for the better (such as more men and women perhaps studying rather than working, even in this age group) and some for the worse (manual and many service jobs leaving the country) and that there are now families where the man might be a stay-at-home dad while his wife works full time. We are simply given that one number as a sign of how horribly everything has changed.

I must hand it to these guys. Their task is to make us look away from the ever increasing income inequality of this country which is happily turning into a banana republic, and they are so good at that! Here I sit actually arguing with David Brooks! As if arguing with word salad makes any sense. Just stick a fork in it already.

What Murray really says is that the poor are at fault because they are stupid, fat, lazy and without sexual morals. The rich deserve their wealth because they are smart, slim, monogamous and rigid parents. Brooks chimes in about the proper guilt liberals and progressives should feel about this, presumably because they advocate sloth and obesity and group sex, and about the crucial role of the 1960s hippies. Those are the groups which really caused the obesity epidemic, the increasing income inequality and the high divorce or non-marriage rates of the less wealthy Americans. Probably the global climate change, too.

That's miraculously inane.
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Added later after some calming down: The basic problem in most of Brooks' pseudo-sociological and pseudo-psychological theories can be clarified with this particular example: If poorer people have different values, hobbies or interests then Brooks assumes (without even mentioning that it's an assumption) that it is those values, hobbies and interests which are the cause of poverty. That a somewhat more likely explanation goes in the other direction, from poverty to particular lifestyles, hobbies and interests, is completely ignored. The true explanation is most likely even more complicated, given the vicious cycle aspect of poverty.

Jeanette Winterson v. Henry Miller (by Suzie)

2012-01-31T09:11:00.000-05:00

You must read Jeanette Winterson reviewing a new biography of Henry Miller by Frederick Turner in the NYT.

Miller was obsessed with masculinity but felt no need to support himself or the women in his life. Turner sympathizes with the Miller who must sell his well-cut suits on the streets of Paris for a fraction of their worth, but is apparently indifferent to the fact that [his wife] June was selling her body on his behalf. ...

It never occurred to him that no matter how poor a man is, he can always buy a poorer woman for sex. It does not occur to Turner either, who calls Miller throughout a “sexual adventurer.” This sounds randy and swashbuckling and hides the economic reality of prostitution. Miller the renegade wanted his body slaves like any other capitalist — and as cheaply as possible. When he could not pay, Miller the man and Miller the fictional creation worked out how to cheat women with romance. What they could not buy they stole. No connection is made between woman as commodity and the “slaughterhouse” of capitalism that Miller hates.

Winterson ends with this:

The question is not art versus pornography or sexuality versus censorship or any question about achievement. The question is: Why do men revel in the degradation of women?

Her biography, "Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?", comes out in March.

The Contraception Wars. Preliminary Negotiations by E. J. Dionne

2012-01-30T18:37:00.001-05:00

E.J. Dionne at the Washington Post ended up in a pretzel shape trying to explain why Obama wasn't sufficiently fawning towards the US Catholic bishops* in the contraception wars:

One of Barack Obama’s great attractions as a presidential candidate was his sensitivity to the feelings and intellectual concerns of religious believers. That is why it is so remarkable that he utterly botched the admittedly difficult question of how contraceptive services should be treated under the new health care law.
His administration mishandled this decision not once but twice. In the process, Obama threw his progressive Catholic allies under the bus and strengthened the hand of those inside the Church who had originally sought to derail the health care law.

...

As a general matter, it made perfect sense to cover contraception. Many see doing so as protecting women’s rights, and expanded contraception coverage will likely reduce the number of abortions. While the Catholic Church formally opposes contraception, this teaching is widely ignored by the faithful. One does not see many Catholic families of six or 10 or twelve that were quite common in the 1950s. Contraception might have something to do with this.

...

And it was offered a compromise idea to do just that by Melissa Rogers, the former chair of Obama’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. (Rogers and I have worked together on religion and public life issues over the years, though I played no role in formulating her proposal.) In The Washington Post’s “On Faith” forum in October, she pointed to a Hawaii law under which “religious employers that decline to cover contraceptives must provide written notification to enrollees disclosing that fact and describing alternate ways for enrollees to access coverage for contraceptive services.” The Hawaii law effectively required insurers to allow uncovered individuals to secure this coverage on their own at modest cost.

As I've written before, the bishops' stance is not logical. They want the religious right not to offer contraception to any worker at a Catholic institution, whether that person is a Catholic herself or not. A more logical argument for them to make would be that no Catholic person should be provided such insurance, wherever she happens to be working. I'm not advocating that point of view, just stating it as the more logical interpretation of the demands of the Roman Catholic church.

But what would that "modest cost" of the contraceptive pill be, the arrangement Dionne appears to favor? How much would the women working for Catholic universities and hospitals have to pay out of pocket? Who would subsidize that cost?

What does this mean? Let's break it down another way. Technically, the poverty line in the US for a four person family is $22,350. That's $1,862.50/month. Nearly half of the women previously mentioned in the "sexually active, but not interested in having children" bucket fall below that poverty line. Having an infrastructure that forces a woman to pay up to $50/month for contraception in that budget is a huge burden on families.

I doubt anyone would subsidize the cost of contraceptives for the workers whose choices would be determined by the US Catholic bishops. They'd be on their own and would have to pay more for their contraceptives than others, simply because of the religious identity of their employer.
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For some odd reason that term in my mind is now inextricably linked with all those Monty Python "Nobody Expects The Spanish Inquisition" skits. Probably because these guys suddenly appear from nowhere and appear to take over the political process.

The Return of Feudalism

2012-01-30T17:36:00.000-05:00

Digby shows us an interesting graph about income inequality in selected countries in 1980 and 2008. The income shown omits capital gains but otherwise reflects the income share of the top 1% of all earners:

The conclusion is pretty obvious: The United States leads the race towards a banana republic. Or perhaps the return to a feudal society, given that upward class mobility in this country is weaker than in those socialist old-Europe countries.

Is this a fair development? According to Fox News, it is! Quelle surprise as the French surrender monkeys would say:

Fox Blasted Obama's Speech On Inequality By Accusing Him Of "Class Warfare." Fox News figures responded to Obama's December 6, 2011, speech on inequality in American by accusing him of engaging in class warfare. [Media Matters, 12/6/11]CARLSON: I think, so when the president says "fair share" there's a couple points here, and earlier last hour I said maybe there should be a disclaimer underneath, which is the reason that we're putting up this graphic for you. Because if in fact you're paying tax on ordinary income, and you're in the highest tax bracket, then you're paying 30-some percent. But then if you take that money that you've already paid taxes on, and you go and invest and you make a profit, a long-term profit, more than a year of investment, then you pay another 15% on top of that. And by the way, with the "fair share" argument, 47% of Americans don't pay federal income tax.
KILMEADE: That didn't get into the State of the Union.
CARLSON: But that didn't get into it, but that is also part of the fair share. So if we are going to be fair to everyone, should those people then starting paying at least something?
DOOCY: Kick in a buck, kick in something!
KILMEADE: And in many cases some are getting refunds on money they haven't earned, They go beyond the money they earned for the year come April, so that's where a lot of that tax money's going. [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 1/25/12]

America: Love It Or Leave It

2012-01-30T17:07:00.000-05:00

That's what hippies used to be told. Or so I have been told. It was fun to see the same argument used now:

Speaking to a Lincoln Day Dinner in West Palm Beach for the Palm Beach County GOP, Rep. Allen West (R-Fla) fired off a humdinger of a line that within minutes drew recriminations from Democrats on Twitter.
"We need to let President Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, (audience boos) and my dear friend the chairman of the Democrat National Committee, we need to let them know that Florida ain't on the table," West said. "Take your message of equality of achievement, take your message of economic dependency, take your message of enslaving the entrepreneurial will and spirit of the American people somewhere else. You can take it to Europe, you can take it to the bottom of the sea, you can take it to the North Pole, but get the hell out of the United States of America."

Contrast this to the often-heard false equation politicians make between the government and the family. We must all tighten our belts! We must decide if granny gets her heart fixed or if the children get dental care! Just like a real family.

That parable doesn't work. Families can't print money and don't have private military forces. Families don't have the same tasks and functions as governments do, and arguing that governments should tighten their belts in a recession simply makes the recession much worse.

But still. If the United States is seen as a family, then surely it is a most dysfunctional one when a politician suggests that some members of the family should just get the hell out of here.

This is a trivial post. But it's a nice way to show the two common angles in political debates: The "Murkan People All Want The Same Thing" angle and the "Kill The Opposition" angle. Neither is very adult.

On Nature Programs

2012-01-28T21:11:00.000-05:00

Why do nature programs concentrate so much on the last day in the life of various prey animals? What is the underlying message they are sending us? Nature red in tooth and claw? But each of those animals had other days in their lives, some many other days. Note, also, how rarely these programs portray the last day in the life of a predator.

It's as if we are being told to look at only one of the many faces of nature, and perhaps to identify with the predators.

Civil liberties v. civil rights (by Suzie)

2012-01-27T00:43:00.008-05:00

What do you think when you hear the phrases "civil liberties" and "civil rights"? I hope a discussion of the differences will shed light on why Glenn Greenwald and others considered progressive have praised Ron Paul.

Definitions vary, but "civil liberties" generally refers to rights guaranteed by the government for all citizens, while "civil rights" describes laws passed to remove barriers that keep certain groups from enjoying the same liberties that others have.

Civil liberties are concepts; civil rights pertain to practice.

The Bill of Rights was meant to limit the power of the federal government to infringe on the rights of white men who owned land. Movements for civil rights often end up giving more power to the federal government.

Thus, it's not surprising that libertarians -- and I count Greenwald among them -- would praise at least some of Paul's views while people like me don't want to give any credibility to a man whose actions would remove civil-rights protections.

As I've written before, some men fear government the way I fear men. I keep my windows shut on a warm Florida night, and it's not because I fear a black ops team is going to leap in and assassinate me. Government entities have threatened me at least twice for not naming sources, but they've never tried to rape or kill me. If you're a man, don't 'splain to me how it's the evil State that robs me of my freedom.

Amnesty International and other human-rights organizations have come to understand that government doesn't just restrict liberty by its actions, but also by its inaction.

Although the First Amendment made my career possible, I don't worship it the way Greenwald and others do. I understand that "free speech" means "free from many government restrictions," but other than that, you're on your own, pal. Violence and the threat of violence, great gobs of money, etc., control speech.

Defend free speech, but please don't pretend there's no link between speech and actions. Example: Pornography is propaganda.

To better understand these issues, let's look further at Greenwald's views. Salon, which publishes his columns, calls him "a former Constitutional and civil rights litigator." Out magazine elaborates:

By the third year of law school, he was working for a large law firm. But realizing that representing Goldman Sachs would have destroyed him psychologically, he set up his own firm, which represented several neo-Nazis and other unpopular clients.

I hope someone will point out his significant civil-rights cases. The only mention I found was his suing his landlord over discrimination. Perhaps his most unpopular client was Matthew Hale, "pontifex maximus" of a white-supremacist church engaged in a "racial holy war." Church members had committed racial violence before, and their holy books encouraged violence. Read what the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks white-supremacist groups, says about Hale.

One of his friends and followers, Benjamin Smith, was a character witness for him in his application to join the Illinois Bar. Two days after Hale was rejected, Smith went on a shooting spree, killing two people and wounding nine others.

Hale was sued on behalf of two Jewish teens and a black minister who had been shot. The Center for Constitutional Rights and others helped, and Greenwald defended Hale. (Irony alert: In Anderson v. Hale in 2001, a U.S. district court found that Greenwald "recorded telephone conversations with various third party witnesses, without disclosing to those witnesses that they were being recorded.")

In 2003, Hale was arrested "on charges that he had solicited someone to kill a federal judge," who presided over another case against him. In April 2005, he was sentenced to 40 years. (Two months earlier, a man, not tied to Hale, had killed the judge's husband and mother.)

In 2004, the Chicago Tribune ran a commentary by current and former officials with the Anti-Defamation League. Greenwald responded:

Once we head down the road of holding people legally responsible for the consequences of expressing their beliefs, meaningful 1st Amendment protections would quickly cease to exist. For instance, individuals who espouse pro-life views could be held responsible for the murder of abortion doctors on the theory that pro-life speeches "incited" these murders. Black leaders who rail against white racism can be blamed for race-motivated, black-on-white crime. People who condemn homosexuality can be blamed for gay-bashing attacks. Those who speak out against the extremism of Muslims could be held responsible for hate crimes against Muslims.

The vast majority of people find Hale's racist beliefs to be odious and evil. Far more odious, and far more dangerous, is the belief that criminalizing certain viewpoints by calling them "hate speech" is something that can be done while still retaining our 1st Amendment freedoms.

I'm wary of criminalizing "hate speech," too, but Hale didn't simply speak in a hateful manner, [ETA] as the ADL commentary points out. A better comparison would be a crime boss who says another group needs to go, without specifying what should be done and who should do it. I might characterize opponents as misguided, but I would never suggest they were more odious and dangerous than neo-Nazis. (Credit goes to the Reid Report for pointing me toward this case and other writing.)

Feminists may see parallels with anti-abortion extremists, as Greenwald did. Amanda Robb had a terrific piece of investigative journalism in 2010 in Ms. Magazine on Scott Roeder, who murdered Dr. George Tiller, and those who supported Roeder. Although he pulled the trigger, she argues, he didn't act alone.

I don't know Greenwald's current views on abortion, but in 2005, he didn't mind the government imposing some restrictions. On his blog Unclaimed Territory, he argued that it wasn't good strategy to oppose Samuel Alito's Supreme Court confirmation because of his dissent in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Greenwald wrote:

A law requiring a woman to notify her husband before she can abort her baby (not that she obtain consent of her husband, and not that she notify the father of her baby -- only that she notify her husband, if she has one) -- does not seem that it would greatly offend very many people beyond the hard-core, absolutist pro-choice minority, which is going to oppose Alito no matter what.

Two months later, in a list of the 10 worst Americans, he included Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, who authored Roe v. Wade.

With a single, intellectually flimsy judicial opinion, [he] did more than anyone else to inflame and render irresolvable America’s paralyzing and internally destructive culture war.

Greenwald said the list included names from commenter Hypatia, and he didn't agree with all of her choices. This gave him plausible deniability. Although he published the list, he could argue that he disagreed with the inclusion of Blackmun, and I have no way to contact Hypatia to prove otherwise.

This post was one reason I chose "hermeneutics" to describe my attempt to figure out what Greenwald does or does not believe. His writing reminds me of food critics who write with an invisible I, such as: “The truffled hummingbird wing pleased the palate,” or old-style journalists who write, "One might believe that X lied." If someone says the writer called X a liar, the writer can say, no, some people might believe that, but I'm not expressing my opinion.

Greenwald has written that he was neither liberal nor conservative and didn't vote in 2000. He supported Bush and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Out magazine says: "In his early days as a blogger, Greenwald supported Democratic candidates who shared his pro-civil liberties views." Was that 2005 when he started Unclaimed Territory? I read through those posts and didn't notice much support for Democrats. Instead, he argued against gun control and considered "few problems ... more pressing" than illegal immigration.

In 2005, he contrasted Bush and Clinton, saying Bush had remained “steadfast” in refusing to cave to the pressure of “the preening, hubristic, status-obsessed Washington media elite.” Among these elites, Greenwald included investigative journalist Seymour Hirsch, who won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing the My Lai Massacre, and later exposed torture at the Abu Ghraib prison.

On CNN, Hersch had said generals were worried that Bush wasn’t listening to them and others, including himself. They worried about an escalation of air strikes and the death of civilians. (Is Greenwald now an elite for wishing that Obama would listen to him?)

In the following, Greenwald had links to whom he was referencing. I'll put them in brackets.

Ever since he took office, Bush has refused to play by many of the long-standing rules of the Washington game. He doesn't fire his cabinet secretaries and aides when editorial boards and other politicians demand that he do so. [Donald Rumsfeld] The appearance of as-yet-unproven scandals doesn't cause him to dump whomever is said to be associated with them. [Karl Rove]

In 2006, he wrote that, in the past, "conservatives vigorously opposed every proposal to expand government investigative and surveillance power on the ground that such powers posed intolerable threats to our liberties."

He criticized Bush for expanding presidential powers, saying: "It has long been clear that there is nothing remotely 'conservative' about this Administration, at least in the sense that conservative ideology has stood for a restrained Federal Government which was to be distrusted."

In 2005, he wrote about Scooter Libby leaking information on CIA agent Valerie Plame: "It is illegal to disclose classified information to individuals who are not cleared to receive it. Period." Now he considers Bradley Manning and Julian Assange heroes. He has "blinding contempt" for Adrian Lamo, who turned Manning in to the FBI. If someone thinks wrongdoing has occurred, why is it heroic to go to WikiLeaks but horrid to go to the FBI? Why do Assange fans tell writers that we must assume he's innocent, and yet, talk about Manning exposing "war crimes," even though no one has been convicted, to my knowledge?

Greenwald has accused the government of torturing Manning, but at least the government didn't make him eat his own vomit, as Max Hardcore did to women in porn videos. I realize that sounds flippant, but it underscores what gets called torture. For example, plenty of men beat and rape their partners, and restrict their movements, but the media rarely calls that torture. This story is an exception because authorities used the word.

The Reclusive Leftist wrote about Greenwald's defense of Max Hardcore and torture porn. (Here's what I wrote.) She linked to the Feminist Law Professors, in which Ann Bartow criticized Greenwald.

"You’re the one who is drowning in misogyny and contempt for women," he responded, because he thinks women who say they consented should be believed. But Ann and others noted that fear and financial need may influence what porn actresses sign and what they say. A woman may give consent initially, but change her mind later. Would Greenwald want us to assume she consented, even if she's struggling and crying? The right to consent to certain sex acts, but not others, and the right to withdraw consent are at the crux of the sex-crime accusations against Assange.

In 2006, Greenwald criticized Austria for imprisoning David Irving for denying the Holocaust in print.

I know from debating these issues that there are handfuls of people on the Far Left who will defend free speech restrictions of this sort on the ground that the right of people to be free from feelings of "intimidation" or "discomfort" outweighs the rights and virtues of free expression. And there are people on the Far Right who favor their own pet restrictions on free expression, whether it be prosecuting people for burning flags or prohibiting the expression of ideas they claim are "pornographic" or "obscene."

But outside of these fringes and aberrational viewpoints, the notion that the Government can define a set of ideas which is criminally prohibited, and which can serve as a basis for criminal prosecution, is sharply distasteful and even infuriating to most Americans.

[Indefinite military detention of U.S. citizens is] at least as repulsive to core American political values as imprisoning people for expressing prohibited ideas. Very few Democrats have actually tried to make Americans aware of these matters, and to the extent that this case has been made at all, it’s been made most potently by conservatives.

Two Articles on Apple

2012-01-26T16:25:00.000-05:00

It's an awkward juxtaposition, to say the least. First the New York Times writes about the treatment of Chinese workers who assemble the iPhones, iPads and so on:

In the last decade, Apple has become one of the mightiest, richest and most successful companies in the world, in part by mastering global manufacturing. Apple and its high-technology peers — as well as dozens of other American industries — have achieved a pace of innovation nearly unmatched in modern history.
However, the workers assembling iPhones, iPads and other devices often labor in harsh conditions, according to employees inside those plants, worker advocates and documents published by companies themselves. Problems are as varied as onerous work environments and serious — sometimes deadly — safety problems.
Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Under-age workers have helped build Apple’s products, and the company’s suppliers have improperly disposed of hazardous waste and falsified records, according to company reports and advocacy groups that, within China, are often considered reliable, independent monitors.

Then these news:

Apple Inc. has Wall Street’s full attention after hinting at plans for the company’s $100 billion cash pile that may lead to stockholders receiving a dividend.

Apple is “actively discussing” uses for its cash, including a dividend, buyback, acquisitions and supply chain investments, Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer told analysts and investors yesterday in an earnings conference call.

The comments were a welcome sign for investors who have called for a dividend as Cupertino, California-based Apple has added to its balance sheet. Apple’s $97.6 billion in cash and short- and long-term investments is larger than the market value of all but 26 companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index. The total could reach $150 billion by year-end without giving money back to shareholders, said David Rolfe, chief investment officer of Wedgewood Partners Inc., an Apple investor.

Misery Bear And Writer's Block

2012-01-26T15:41:00.000-05:00

This applies to most any deadline, not just writer's block.

What Was He Thinking?

2012-01-26T13:17:00.000-05:00

Mark Cenedella wants one day to be a U.S. Senator from the state of New York. This is the groundwork he has laid:

Marc Cenedella, a Republican businessman laying the groundwork for a possible run for a United States Senate seat in New York, said on Tuesday that he took “full responsibility” for blog posts about sex, women and drugs that have drawn criticism.

...

The entries had headlines like “Sexy vs. Skanky,” “Dating Advice for Girly Girls,” “He Stole My Weed” and “High Quality Dope,” according to the article.
In an entry titled “A New Holiday for Men,” there was a link to a separate site that designates March 14 as a special occasion on which women are encouraged to offer steak and oral sex “to show your man how much you care for him.” Another entry linked to a site that purports to provide biblical justification for a man’s having more than one wife. “I wasn’t so sure about all this Bible stuff,” the entry accompanying the link said, “but I’m starting to cotton to it.”

Mr. Cenedella can't seem to decide who it was who wrote those posts. It could have been all sorts of posters from his old site, it could have been spam or it could have been Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand (whom he wants to beat)! I wish he made up his mind.

But nowhere do I see anything about him apologizing for those posts.

Internet Misogyny For The Day

2012-01-26T00:24:00.002-05:00

This is such fun! I somehow got on a weird site, barstoolsports.com, and found this:
Remember that Saudi Chick Who Was Protesting The Fact It Was Illegal For Women To Drive. She Died. In a Car Accident.

The writer continues, after slurs aimed at Rosa Parks:

But Manal al-Sherif just haaaaaad to get behind the wheel. Just had to show the world that a set of tits doesn’t mean you’re a terrible driver. Wrong! I bet she was putting on makeup and eating PinkBerry and tailgating the other drivers too. Fucking chicks, can’t do anything. Am I right, guys? Am I right?! Someone give me a high five.

The link on that crummy site is to the UK Telegraph which tells us that women who drive can get into car accidents! Of course women who are passengers in cars can also get into car accidents.

Here's the hilarious bit! The woman in that accident is not the same Manal al-Sherif at all:

On Monday, a woman in Saudia Arabia, where women are banned from driving, died in a car accident and was mistakenly identified as a famous activist. The event was a tragedy for those involved, but for news sites around the world it was a chance for cheap, inaccurate irony.
The story appears to have started with an Agence France Presse story that was published on Monday with a slightly over-sold headline "Saudi Female Driver Defies Ban, Has Fatal Accident." No names were given for the victims, but something happened as other news sites rewrote the story and suddenly it was reported that Manal al-Sharif, the head of a Saudi female driving campaign, had died. Considering the international headlines her campaign for women's right to drive merited, that would be a huge news story. Except for one problem: Manal al-Sharif is alive and was not involved in any car accident. She revealed the little detail to The Guardian on Wednesday.

Cheap and inaccurate irony, indeed. It tells us a lot about how some news writers really think.
---
Added later: Information on accidents by gender of the driver and other related questions can be found here and here. This is one field where irrational prejudices tend to be very strong. And note the impact of the stereotype threat in the first linked article.

From The Twilight Zone Archives

2012-01-25T18:55:00.000-05:00

I quote TPM:

An Oklahoma Republican is pushing a bill to outlaw the use of human fetuses in food, because, as he says, “there is a potential that there are companies that are using aborted human babies in their research and development of basically enhancing flavor for artificial flavors.”
State Sen. Ralph Shortey introduced a bill on Tuesday “prohibiting the sale or manufacture of food or products which contain aborted human fetuses.”
Though he has allowed that he is not aware of this occurring in Oklahoma, or anywhere for that matter, Shortey cited research he did on the internet that claimed that some companies use embryonic stem cells to help develop artificial flavoring. “It would be a public relations nightmare for a company to use” aborted human fetuses for R&D, Shortey told KRMG Radio, so when asked they usually say something like “we strive to do things ethically.”
“I’m not entirely sure if there are any” companies doing this, he continued. “But the fact is that there is a potential that there are companies that are using aborted human babies in their research and development of basically enhancing flavor for artificial flavors. And if that is happening — because it is a possibility — and if it’s happening then I just don’t think it should even be an option for a company.”

Soylent Green.

How Much Is That Appendectomy? Consumer-Based Market Strategies

2012-01-25T18:09:00.000-05:00

Do you know what would really lower the prices of health care in this country? According to Peter Orszag it would be people shopping around for the best price, going to sales, looking for spare knees on craigslist and so on.

Let me hasten to say that making health care prices more transparent, as he advocates, is a wonderful idea. Wonderful. But it would have at most a very limited impact.

Why? Let me count the ways!

First, a considerable chunk of health care spending takes place at emergencies or when a person is critically ill. There is no time for shopping around, assuming that the patient is either conscious or has someone working on those price comparisons.

Second, price comparisons are meaningful only if they are for the same product and the same amount and quality of that product. It's pointless to try to deduce anything from the price differences of one pound of Idaho potatoes and a gallon of orange juice. It's even pointless to try to deduce anything from the price differences of one pound of fresh Idaho potatoes and one pound of very tired sprouting Idaho potatoes.

That looks a bit preposterous, right? But it truly is pretty similar to many choices in health care. Suppose two providers give you different diagnoses and recommend different treatments for those diagnoses. Are you going to decide on the basis of price?

Third, suppose your hip hurts a lot and you go to a physician who tells you an artificial hip is needed. Will you then just go out and compare the prices of hip replacement surgery in various nearby hospitals? But what if the initial diagnoses was all wrong and you have been given the script for a pound of potatoes when what you really need is a gallon of orange juice?

The problem here has to do with the fact that we go to the providers not only to get the treatment but also to be told what is wrong with us. Proper price comparisons require not only second and third opinions of the usual kind, but actually going to several physicians with the same symptoms to make sure that a hip replacement is the recommended treatment by all.

Fourth, quality comparisons matter when judging prices. Orszag argues that quality is not terribly correlated with price. But would that still be the case if consumers indeed were somehow made to be extremely price conscious?

I doubt that very much, because the easiest way to get prices lower is to cut back on some aspects of the treatment. This would not necessarily lower quality of actual care (in terms of health outcomes) because the current system may have incentives to over-treat. But it would certainly provide incentives for lower quality treatments, too.

The real problem with quality concerns in health care is this: Patients do not have the information to spot when wrong treatments are taking place and the consequences of poor quality care can be devastating. Without some sort of quality safeguards an attempt to judge by price alone leaves patients very vulnerable.

Fifth, the demand in health care can be very price inelastic, meaning that consumers are not just very price sensitive when it comes to seeking relief from pain, discomfort and certainly from life-threatening conditions. Combine this with local markets which are often highly concentrated, and what you get is a setup where price competition will not happen without something as "ominous" as, say, an outside agency which monitors prices and quality and outcome data.

But that's not what Orszag has in mind in his article. He's advocating that consumers actually shop around, learn humongous amounts of medical science and then construct carefully thought-out treatment strategies for themselves to use in price shopping. All this while possibly suffering from a debilitating disease.

Sixth, and finally, most consumers still have insurance. Insurance decreases price sensitivity, because the total payment will not be coming out of the consumer's pocket. Orszag notes that this problem will be gone in the future!

In the future, though, health-insurance plans are likely to shift toward a defined-contribution model -- in which the employee is given a set contribution toward buying an insurance policy -- and, in that setting, price transparency could become more effective. After all, when people bear more of the financial risk associated with their own health care, they are likely to become more responsive to information about price and quality.

Mmm. If you are not covered you will become more price sensitive! Whether that is seen as an advantage depends on whether you think that health insurance is a nifty idea or not.

But all the earlier problems I stated would still apply. The final consumers' ability to affect price competition in health care is minimal, and the reasons for that are in the basic attributes of the product, the lack of information consumers have when it comes to complicated treatments and the unusual aspect of medical care where the seller of the product also serves as the buyer's informant about how much to buy.

Having said that, it's obviously true that greater price transparency would be a good thing. It would help consumers to choose among certain standard packages of care such as basic checkups or routine dental care. But otherwise its impact would be very limited.

Now what would be nice is if we had something like a government agency which monitors the prices and the quality of medical care and then reports on that to consumers and providers! Such a third party agency (independent of both the consumer and the producer side) would not suffer from the limitations consumers of medical care have and could focus on studying the marketplace full time. It could make the prices more transparent and it could also take care of the price collusion Orszag refers to:

A 2008 Congressional Budget Office report, published while I was director of that agency, noted the same concern for health-care price transparency: “The markets for some health- care services are highly concentrated, so increasing transparency in such markets could lead to higher, rather than lower, prices because higher prices are easier to maintain when the prices charged by each provider involved can be observed by all the others.” The best way to mitigate this concern is aggressive antitrust oversight. But it would also help to make prices more transparent to consumers, but not providers.

On that last sentence: There's no way in hell that prices would not become known by the other providers under Orszag's scheme. No way. All they would need is one consumer's information.

But sure, apply aggressive antitrust oversight. Preferably with that price monitoring agency I mentioned above. Just don't expect consumers to to be the engine of price competition in health care.

Economic and Framing Comments On The 2012 SOTU

2012-01-24T23:21:00.001-05:00

Which I watched, all the way, through! Do I hear applause?

Whether the speech deserves applause depends on what its intended audience might be. Not the so-called liberal/progressive base, in any case, though it had many good parts, sure. Still, I noticed that the president has adopted several Republican frames without perhaps noticing that he has done so. Examples:

Those are the facts. But so are these. In the last 22 months, businesses have created more than three million jobs. Last year, they created the most jobs since 2005. American manufacturers are hiring again, creating jobs for the first time since the late 1990s.

Businesses don't have magic wands which they use for creating jobs. Unless consumers are there with money to buy things with, few businesses will create jobs. Jobs are created by the whole system, not just the corporate system.

We should start with our tax code. Right now, companies get tax breaks for moving jobs and profits overseas. Meanwhile, companies that choose to stay in America get hit with one of the highest tax rates in the world. It makes no sense, and everyone knows it.

Mmm. Except that the US corporate tax rate does not reflect the taxes companies actually end up paying, what with the gigantic number of allowed deductions. The actual corporate tax payments in the US are among the lower ones inside the OECD.

Tear down regulations that prevent aspiring entrepreneurs from getting the financing to grow. Expand tax relief to small businesses that are raising wages and creating good jobs. Both parties agree on these ideas. So put them in a bill, and get it on my desk this year.

Now that one sounds like something George Walker Bush would have said! Purely Republican framing with that "tax relief" and "tear down regulations."

Of course tearing down regulations worked so wonderfully well for both the housing industry and the financial industry and is one of the reasons (perhaps the main reason) for the current global recession. But yes, sure, let's make a joke about farmers and the dangers of spilt milk as Obama did. To make regulations look even less important.

I recognize that people watching tonight have differing views about taxes and debt; energy and health care. But no matter what party they belong to, I bet most Americans are thinking the same thing right now: Nothing will get done this year, or next year, or maybe even the year after that, because Washington is broken.

That, too, is pure conservative framing. A bit odd coming from the guy who right now owns Washington.

And this is the bit of conservative framing which I want to analyze in more detail:

I’m a Democrat. But I believe what Republican Abraham Lincoln believed: That Government should do for people only what they cannot do better by themselves, and no more. That’s why my education reform offers more competition, and more control for schools and States. That’s why we’re getting rid of regulations that don’t work. That’s why our health care law relies on a reformed private market, not a Government program.

There's something very odd about those particular pairings: Competition with basic education and competition with health care. What might that oddness be?

This: When economists look at which products and services are best supplied via profit-making firms and which are not, education and health care are always presented as the ones with most problems in a market-based distribution system.

Why? Because lack of information and the imbalance of information between the buyers and sellers are the greatest in those two industries. If the buyers cannot really tell the quality of what they are purchasing (because it is embodied, dependent on cooperation between the buyer and the seller and also sometimes only verifiable years later), the price of that product becomes meaningless and the ways of cheating customers a legion. Historically, education and health care (of the institutional type) have never been offered by for-profit firms as the main organizational form.

Instead, the dominant corporate form in these industries has always been the not-for-profit firm. And there's the problem: The arguments about how efficient markets are, how low they can drive prices and so on do not necessarily apply to not-for-profit firms because they don't have the profit motive.

So the case for the markets is the weakest in education and in health care. I'm not sure why the president would pick those as his examples. But then he also said something quite muddled about markets:

Rules to prevent financial fraud, or toxic dumping, or faulty medical devices, don’t destroy the free market. They make the free market work better.

That "free markets" is another bit of conservative framing. Markets also cannot be both free AND regulated.

Meanwhile, in the New Egyptian Parliament

2012-01-24T20:32:00.000-05:00

Women are less than two percent of the members. As the most important task of this new parliament will be to draft a new constitution, this constitution will be drafted by men. And by Islamist men.

Why so few women? One reason is that Egypt is a patriarchal country:

[W]e did a survey that was composed of only one question. Would you accept to see your president as a woman? One hundred percent of them said 'no.' This is what people think, it's OK to have democracy, but women are not in the equation of democracy.

Another reason has to do with the way the election lists were constructed:

Also, the women who ran on party lists were placed far down on those lists, meaning they had virtually no chance of getting into office. And that was true of all parties, Islamist as well as liberal.

"It really hurts so much when the same people you were with in that square that day, who are fighting against the regime ... are now turning against you," says Dalia Ziada, an activist who ran for Parliament. "It's like betrayal, betrayal from our companions."

It's not at all hard to predict that the new constitution will not give women equal rights.

Today's Totally Trivial Thought

2012-01-24T19:21:00.001-05:00

To become an inspiring author an aspiring author must first spend years being a perspiring author.

Noli Me Tangere?

2012-01-23T13:17:00.000-05:00

Rand Paul refused to be patted down at an airport:

The T.S.A. said that Mr. Paul had been screened by a version of its millimeter-wave body imaging device that uses a generic image of a passenger and, if it detects any anomaly, puts a yellow box on the body area that requires greater scrutiny. An alarm was triggered when he was in the machine, which – under administration procedures – required a “targeted pat-down” to see what caused it. But Mr. Paul refused to submit to the pat-down, the agency said.

He was en route to an anti-abortion event:

A posting on the senator’s own Twitter account shortly before the incident announced that he was headed to Washington to speak at the “March for Life,” an anti-abortion rally.

tweet avatar

@SenRandPaul Senator Rand Paul

Today I’ll speak to the March for Life in DC. A nation cannot long endure w/o respect for the right to Life. Our Liberty depends on it. #ky

Digby has more on why this is all rather farcical:

Having said that, I cannot help but be reminded of the fact that his home state of Texas just passed a law that goes a good deal further: forced vaginal probes of women seeking an abortion.

Worth Noticing

2012-01-23T12:42:00.000-05:00

This piece of military news from Afghanistan:

It was an unusual job even for the Seabees, the U.S. Navy’s construction forces trained to hold a hammer in one hand and a Beretta M9 in the other.
First, the team selected to build barracks high in the mountains of Afghanistan consisted of eight women, who are all stationed at Naval Base Ventura County. And second, the women completed the job far ahead of schedule.

I have promised myself (and you, my erudite readers) more good news and less the usual kind of wallowing in all the misery.

We shall see how it goes.

The Violent Ape. Today's Evolutionary Psychology Story about Men's Sex Drive As The Cause Of Wars

2012-01-23T06:16:00.000-05:00

Today's evolutionary psychology study is most unusual. It applies the same story-telling approach to men as it normally applies to women:

Male sex drive is at the root of most conflict in the world, from football violence to world wars, scientists have claimed.
A review of psychological evidence concludes that men are shaped by evolution to be aggressive towards "outsiders".
The tendency, at the heart of all inter-tribal violence, emerged through natural selection as a result of competition for mates.
Today it can be seen in large-scale conflicts between nations as well as clashes involving rival gangs, football fans or religious groups, say the researchers.
Women, on the other hand, are said to have evolved to resolve conflicts peacefully. Natural selection has programmed them to "tend and befriend" to protect their offspring.

Mmm. How would "tending and befriending" work against predators or hostile strangers attacking the tribe? Anyone who has once been a teenage girl knows that the above description is at least partial bullshit. Weaker members of a group learn to use "tending and befriending," sure, but that's because they are the weaker members. It's not at all clear to me that some kind of hard-wired evolution is what is going on in here.

Besides, the study of violence in the history of human beings should also take into account the general way in which women and men are trained in that context. Women have traditionally been discouraged from using physical violence and from learning the use of weaponry. Men, on the other hand, have been pushed and prodded into those roles, to meet the needs of armies for the leaders.

But whatever the case might be, studies of this kind suffer from the odd fusing together of data and just one possible explanation: an evolutionary one. I find that approach ultimately a dishonest one because it suggests that only one story was supported by the data.

But it also appears to abstract away from the fact that the levels of violence in the society are not constant, that many people have lived through their natural lives without ever experiencing war, and that conflicts do have environmental causes such as shortage of food, potable water or land for farming. Thus, something that in fact IS variable in reality turns into a life-long sentence of violence and more violence for all humanity.

Why do these studies get so much publicity? The question is rhetorical, of course, because they are published to incite gender wars. Just read the comments here on this particular study to see what happens. But from a different angle these studies bring us no new knowledge. It's pretty obvious that most wars have been fought by men. Why that is the case is no clearer now than it was before this particular study was published.

But the argument that the only reason for wars lies in men's sex drive seems very odd to me. Violent raids and such may have been used to acquire women but surely they were most often about general resources and space? The researchers quote chimpanzees as the Comparison Animal Of The Day:

At a basic level, such ‘tribal’ aggression helped men in a group to obtain more females, increasing their chances of reproduction.
‘We see similar behaviour in chimpanzees,’ said Prof van Vugt. ‘For example, the males continuously monitor the borders of their territory.
‘If a female from another group comes along, she may be persuaded to emigrate to his group. When a male strays too far, however, he is likely to be brutally beaten and possibly killed.’

How did that male stray too far? Wasn't he supposed to be monitoring the perimeter of his territory? And who let that female out of her group? Note also that the cost of violent raids might be getting brutally beaten and even killed.

One problem with the way this story is told is that it looks at only one group of chimpanzees. If you add a second group to that you may get a situation where the females from both groups visit males in the other group and get impregnated by them. Some studies suggests that this is quite common:

Female ‘infidelity’ is also much more common than assumed. A few years ago, the first DNA paternity tests among chimpanzees showed that over half of the infants were sired by males outside the community - a fact the human researchers and probably also the dominant males had been totally unaware of (Hrdy 1999, 85).

In other words, the overall situation is quite a bit more complicated and might even be a reproductive draw. And what if we picked a different "promiscuous" primate species for the purposes of comparison? Say the bonobos:

To understand human mating we have to understand the mating system of our species. Chimpanzees and bonobos (who share around 99% of our DNA) have what's referred to as a multimale-multifemale mating system. Females have sex with multiple individuals in their troop and make positive choices about which males they're most interested in. The evolution of sexual jealousy is seen in nascent form in our evolutionary cousins when a low-ranking chimpanzee is caught mating with a female that a higher ranking male is sweet on. The forest isn't at peace for some time afterwards. In bonobos the situation is a little different. Females largely call the shots and have been known to harass males (and other females) for mating with their preferred partners.

In any case, I'm not at all convinced that the human mating system is a multimale-multifemale one.

Out of the Mouths of Children

2012-01-22T18:12:00.000-05:00

A Finnish story asking a bunch of very young children their views on the photos of candidates for the next president of Finland (they have elections right now) is hilarious. The jury consisted of

Otto, 1, Saara, 3, Elsa, 5, Noora, 5, Elmeri, 7, Eemeli, 7, Veikko, 9 and Helmi, 11.

Otto obviously did not say much at all, but even Saara did! As an example of the kinds of comments, let's translate the assessments concerning the Center Party Paavo Väyrynen's electability among these very young judges:

Saara: His eyeglasses are too fancy, not good.
Elsa: No. His nose is really big, too big eyes, ears and a tall forehead. He also has a sad mouth.
Noora: Looks like a president but I don't want him because I like Biaudet. He looks boyish.
Elmeri: Looks ever so slightly good for a president.
Eemeli: Looks fine but not like a president.
Veikko: Not a good president, slightly abstract style in my view.
Helmi: Not quite the presidential type.

It's all meant as something fun and silly, of course. But that's not why I write about it.

The current president of Finland, Tarja Halonen, is a woman, and she is the only president these children remember. This gives us an opportunity to look at the impact of the environment/culture on gender roles in children's minds. And what do we find?

When asked about what the job of a president entails, Elsa, 5, answers: " The president is followed by men who carry her handbag. She decides on all Finnish stuff."

And when asked their opinions about Sari Essayah, a female candidate in the race, Noora, 5, states: "Yes, she could well be a president because she is a girl." To which Elmeri, 7, answers: "No, because we have already had a girl."

Blatant Racism

2012-01-21T23:33:00.000-05:00

Newt Gingrich resorted to that weapon in his determination to win the South Carolina primaries.

The story began last Monday night at the Myrtle Beach Republican presidential debate. The following exchange took place between the journalist Juan Williams, moderating the debate, and Newt Gingrich. I quote the whole of the exchange so that you can get the full flavor of it. I have bolded Williams' comments below to make it easier for you to see what he actually says:

WILLIAMS: Speaker Gingrich, you recently said black Americans should demand jobs, not food stamps. You also said poor kids lack a strong work ethic and proposed having them work as janitors in their schools. Can’t you see that this is viewed, at a minimum, as insulting to all Americans, but particularly to black Americans?

GINGRICH: No. I don’t see that. (APPLAUSE) You know, my daughter, Jackie, who’s sitting back there, Jackie Cushman, reminded me that her first job was at First Baptist Church in Carrollton, Georgia, doing janitorial work at 13. And she liked earning the money. She liked learning that if you worked, you got paid. She liked being in charge of her own money, and she thought it was a good start. I had a young man in New Hampshire who walked up to me. I’ve written two newsletters now about this topic. I’ve had over 50 people write me about the jobs they got at 11, 12, 13 years of age. Ran into a young man who started a doughnut company at 11. He’s now 16. He has several restaurants that take his doughnuts. His father is thrilled that he’s 16 because he can now deliver his own doughnuts. (LAUGHTER) What I tried to say — and I think it’s fascinating, because Joe Klein reminded me that this started with an article he wrote 20 years ago. New York City pays their janitors an absurd amount of money because of the union. You could take one janitor and hire 30-some kids to work in the school for the price of one janitor, and those 30 kids would be a lot less likely to drop out. They would actually have money in their pocket. They’d learn to show up for work. They could do light janitorial duty. They could work in the cafeteria. They could work in the front office. They could work in the library. They’d be getting money, which is a good thing if you’re poor. Only the elites despise earning money. (APPLAUSE)
 
WILLIAMS: Well… (APPLAUSE)
 
(CROSSTALK)

 WILLIAMS: The suggestion that he made was about a lack of work ethic. And I’ve got to tell you, my e-mail account, my Twitter account has been inundated with people of all races who are asking if your comments are not intended to belittle the poor and racial minorities. You saw some of this reaction during your visit… (BOOING) … to a black church in South Carolina. You saw some of this during your visit to a black church in South Carolina, where a woman asked you why you refer to President Obama as “the food stamp president.” It sounds as if you are seeking to belittle people. (BOOING)
 
GINGRICH: Well, first of all, Juan, the fact is that more people have been put on food stamps by Barack Obama than any president in American history. (APPLAUSE) Now, I know among the politically correct, you’re not supposed to use facts that are uncomfortable. (LAUGHTER) (APPLAUSE) Second, you’re the one who earlier raised a key point. There’s — the area that ought to be I-73 was called by Barack Obama a corridor of shame because of unemployment. Has it improved in three years? No. They haven’t built the road. They haven’t helped the people. They haven’t done anything. (APPLAUSE) So… (APPLAUSE)

 BAIER: Finish your thought, Mr. Speaker.

  GINGRICH: One last thing. 

BAIER: Yes, sir.

 GINGRICH: So here’s my point. I believe every American of every background has been endowed by their creator with the right to pursue happiness. And if that makes liberals unhappy, I’m going to continue to find ways to help poor people learn how to get a job, learn how to get a better job and learn some day to own the job. (APPLAUSE)

Got it? Here's what Newt Gingrich said in yesterday's speech:

GINGRICH: I had a very interesting dialogue Monday night in Myrtle Beach with Juan Williams about the idea of work, which seemed to Juan Williams to be a strange, distant concept.

Astonishing stuff. Note that there was nothing in the exchange that would support the reading that work for Juan Williams is a "strange, distant concept." Note, also that Juan Williams is a well-known and hard-working journalist:

Williams is the author of Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965 (1988),[1] a companion to the documentary series of the same name about the African-American Civil Rights Movement;Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary (2000), a biography of Thurgood Marshall, the first black American to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States; and Enough (2006), which was inspired by Bill Cosby's speech at the NAACP gala, and deals with Williams' critique of black leaders in America, and as he puts it the "culture of failure."[2] Williams has received an Emmy Award and critical praise for his television documentary work and he has won several awards for investigative journalism and his opinion columns.

So why did Newt imply that work is a strange and distant concept for Juan Williams?

Most likely because Williams is black. I cannot think of any other explanation.

Saturday Sillies: Voters Are Like Newt's Happy Wives!

2012-01-21T18:39:00.000-05:00

One of the really big gag jokes in American politics is the Republican Party as the Values Party. You know, Hitler had values. Everyone has values. Whether other people like those values is a very different question.

But somehow we have been fed the odd message that Republican voters have good values and everyone else is just a slobbering satisfy-me-now beast.

Sexual morality is the linchpin around which the Republican value structure is created. Sexual morality, in turn, is a euphemism for controlling women's behavior. That's the way the actual contradictions in Republican politics can best be understood.

Such as this stupid post by the Fox News' tame psychiatrist which argues that Newt would be a good president because he managed to attract three different wives:

I want to be coldly analytical, not moralize, here. I want to tell you what Mr. Gingrich’s behavior could mean for the country, not for the future of his current marriage. So, here’s what one interested in making America stronger can reasonably conclude—psychologically—from Mr. Gingrich’s behavior during his three marriages:
1) Three women have met Mr. Gingrich and been so moved by his emotional energy and intellect that they decided they wanted to spend the rest of their lives with him.
2) Two of these women felt this way even though Mr. Gingrich was already married.
3 ) One of them felt this way even though Mr. Gingrich was already married for the second time, was not exactly her equal in the looks department and had a wife (Marianne) who wanted to make his life without her as painful as possible.
Conclusion: When three women want to sign on for life with a man who is now running for president, I worry more about whether we’ll be clamoring for a third Gingrich term, not whether we’ll want to let him go after one.

This is silly on too many different levels* to tackle in a short post, so I shall limit myself to just asking you to do a gender reversal on that quote. Put some female politician in Newt's place, let her have Newt's marital history and then ask if anyone would ever write a post like that to defend her. Even a sorta Frankensteiny Fox psychiatrist.

She'd be called an unreliable slut. Of course she would never have managed to stay in the public eye as long as Newt did, with that sexual history, so even starting with that reversal is tough.

The Republican values are always bendable. They apply to some people and not to others, and voters use them as whitewash to defend certain votes, even when the real reasons are something far back in their reptile brains.
----
*A quick summary of a few of those: 1. A candidate's private life may not be the best predictor how they do in politics though it does matter if it conflicts with their political message. 2. The post is there because it looks like Newt will win South Carolina, Fox News is a Republican megaphone and must therefore write positive things about him just in case he becomes the candidate. If Newt was a Democrat, the post would crucify him. 3. We are asked to identify with Newt's many wives, but only at the point when they become his wives, not at the point when he leaves them and why. 4. We are not asked to remember that losing interest in a wife would also apply to losing interest in presidenting if the initial argument that there's something to learn from Newt's amorous history applies. And so on.

Possibly Good News About Contraception Coverage

2012-01-20T17:34:00.000-05:00

Lindsey Beyerstein sums up the issues well:

The Obama administration has rebuffed the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and other religious lobby groups seeking greater leeway for religiously-affiliated insurers to deny birth control coverage.

The existing exemption for churches will stand, but the feds will not expand the exemption to cover church-affilitated schools, hospitals, or universities.

Lindsey also points out that the fight is nowhere near over.

As I have written before, it makes little sense to define religious rights based on how someone with a certain religion may treat those of other religions or no religion at all, and that's what the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops essentially demands when it wants to have a say over what the employees of Catholic schools, hospitals or universities get in their coverage.

A much more logical way of doing this would be for the Conference of Catholic Bishops to demand that no person who has put her or his religion down as Catholic can qualify for contraceptive coverage, irrespective of their employer's religious views. I'm not supporting that reading at all. Just pointing out that if we base all this on religious affiliation, it should be the religious affiliation of the insured person which matters.

Fixing Those Predatory Sluts!

2012-01-20T16:57:00.000-05:00

This is a peach! A story about a UK Member of the Parliament wanting teenaged girls, and only girls, to have extra sex education over and above what all teenagers get, and that on the desirability of abstinence!

MPs will debate a controversial bill on Friday calling for teenage girls to be given lessons in sexual abstinence.
The bill, proposed by Nadine Dorries, the Conservative MP for Mid Bedfordshire, would require schools to offer extra sex education classes to girls aged 13 to 16 and for these lessons to include advice on "the benefits of abstinence".
In May, MPs voted 67 to 61, majority six, in favour of allowing Dorries to bring forward her bill. It is listed to receive its second reading on Friday morning, though it is unlikely to become law without government support.
The bill has angered feminists, humanists and pro-abortionists, hundreds of whom will be demonstrating outside parliament while the debate takes place.
Beth Granter, a socialist and feminist who has organised the demonstration, predicts that at least 300 will join it. Some 750 have shown their support on Facebook.
The bill has elicited considerable criticism from politicians in all three of the main political parties.

It's not gonna pass, of course. But it's a good reminder of that distorted mirror world view of the extreme social conservatives everywhere!

And Dorries is refreshingly honest in her views. If they were presented to my imaginary alien friend from outer space, it/he/she/they would conclude that teenage girls are the sex predators of this planet, always pestering everyone for sex. Why else single them out for more abstinence exhortations than the boys?

Today's Cartoon

2012-01-20T16:21:00.002-05:00

HERE. It's dedicated to me! Thank you so much, Spay.

On This Reality Show. Or Yet Another Republican Debate.

2012-01-19T20:25:00.000-05:00

That Republican presidential primaries are now on almost every night makes them into a television program. And the closest equivalent are Reality Shows.

Who will be voted off the island next? Who blurted out the most disgusting statement imaginable? And so on.

Watching the order in which candidates leave (or "suspend" their campaigns) is a fun exercise for social commentary. But it's somewhat scary that the finalists consist of these guys: Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul and Rick Santorum.

Why scary? Because the United States of America is still a pretty powerful country, and we are watching something close to a reality show on who is going to challenge Barack Obama for the leadership of a sizable chunk of this world.

Things To Read

2012-01-19T18:59:00.000-05:00

This Guttmacher report on global abortion trends.

The budget rumors. Liberals and progressives are forewarned that they won't like the budget.

This article from a week ago on breast implants. (If you happened to read the odd Slate piece on the return of the perky breasts, you need that for vaccination purposes. Or you could just read Kate Harding's funny take on it.)

Caitlin Flanagan's No-Boys Land

2012-01-19T18:37:00.001-05:00

I have written quite a bit about Caitlin Flanagan and her opinions in the past, perhaps too much. But to understand her most recent arguments about "girlhood", it really is salutary to know what other things she advocates. Thus, here's a very old post by me on Flanagan's writings at the Atlantic Monthly, and here are a few other posts that might be of interest in this context: The Womanly Art of Self-Defense and Maggot Lace.

She has now written a new book, Girl Land, this time not about how housewifery is the only proper occupation for all women (save her), but on how to bring up girls in this corrupt culture (presumably to prepare them for proper housewifery). Emma Gilbey Keller reviews the book in the New York Times, and concludes:

I wish Flanagan had read less and listened more. Because real girls are absent from “Girl Land.” And so is their energy. Stereotypes don’t exactly bring a book to life. Nor do celebrities from the last century. Notwithstanding Flanagan’s stream of forceful assertions, “Girl Land” is a dusty, empty place, bearing little resemblance to your 21st-century daughter’s colorful, noisy, vibrant life.

Amanda at Pandagon has this to say:

Caitlin Flanagan gets a lot of attention because she's able to write in these elliptical, obtuse ways that seem really profound, which is why it's useful to listen to her on the radio, where she's forced to be more concise, revealing that she's just the same old culture warrior whose veneer of sophistication falls off at a sneeze, revealing the cranky (prematurely) old church lady underneath. That's why I recommend skipping her strange-sounding new book and listening instead to this interview on WBUR, which has the added bonus of Irin Carmon's presence as a sanity check. Listening to it, you realize that for all the puffery about girlhood fascinations and diaries, Flanagan is really only making one argument, one we know really well, that goes like this:
*Boys and men only care about sex, and mainly see girls and women as these tedious obstacles between them and pussy.
*Girls and women only care about romance---the more princessy, the better---and see sex as this filthy ritual they have to perform in order to get it.
*Therefore, women should use sex as a bartering chip to get men to pretend to like us. Actual affection from men is clearly impossible to get, but in Flanagan's view, women can get a semblance of self-respect by refusing to have sex with men until they play-act affection by taking us on some dates and letting us call them our boyfriends. According to Flanagan, not having a man hanging around pretending to like you in order to get his dick wet is a major tragedy, probably the worst thing that could happen to a woman.
And that's about it.

I took Amanda's advice and listened to the radio interview. Flanagan attacks Carmon personally, in a weird interchange which amounts to Flanagan arguing that the measure of a good adolescence for girls is to have a boyfriend. If you didn't have one, then your adolescence was wasted.

She also argues that adolescent boys only want sex and will do whatever it takes to get it. Hence the idea that adolescent girls should require to be taken out to a date a couple of times first, instead of just "servicing" boys with blowjobs. Because the price of sex has just increased, the girls will be happier? They now had a boyfriend? Who only wanted to have sex?

It's hard for me to address Flanagan's theories as they are based on such an odd concept of what adolescent boys and adult men are all about. At the same time, she refuses to even look at the question what the culture might be teaching adolescent boys (this is very evident in the interview, the way she slithers away from any attempt to move the question to both boys and girls).

It is girls she wants to protect from Internet p*rnography, not boys. Presumably boys can learn any weird concept of sex from pron and then go out to the world Flanagan wants for dating, equipped with what ideas about girls? And Flanagan wants girls to base their expectations on the idea of romance only. Imagine the clashes! In what sense is not knowing about p*rnography protective for the girls?

The most interesting part of Flanagan's argument has to do with the absence of boys from it. They don't need protecting at all! It's natural for them to just want sex and to do whatever it takes! And it looks like that definition of sex can even come from pron, as far as Flanagan is concerned.

A Tall Latte. Double Shot of Semen, Please.

2012-01-18T15:31:00.000-05:00

Apropos of my post concerning what opposing abortion (and even contraception) and opposing same-sex marriage have in common:

I argued that both of those serve to prop up the rigid gender roles of the traditional marriage. And here we get (via Eschaton) a glimpse into that world!

A high-level Corbett administration adviser resigned his $104,470 position Tuesday after questions were raised about his outside role as editor of a conservative faith-based journal.
Along with disclosing welfare adviser Robert W. Patterson's departure, the administration swiftly distanced itself from the views expressed in the journal he edits.
Patterson was hired in October by Welfare Secretary Gary Alexander as a special assistant to help set policy for services provided to millions of Pennsylvanians through the Department of Public Welfare (DPW).
Last week, The Inquirer began asking about Patterson's side job as editor of The Family in America, published by an Illinois-based research center that advocates for the "natural human family . . . established by the Creator."
In the journal, Patterson has weighed in on everything from what he called "misguided" programs that grew out of the 1960s War on Poverty - programs now administered by DPW - to what he described as a woman's ideal role in society: married and at home raising children.
For instance, he wrote about research that he said showed that if women wanted to find "Mr. Right," they should shun birth control pills; and if they wanted to improve their mood, they should not insist that their men wear condoms lest they miss out on beneficial chemicals found in semen.
Carey Miller, spokeswoman for DPW, said Patterson submitted his letter of resignation Tuesday.

Love that idea of the beneficial chemicals found in semen! All coffee bars should sell a semen cappuccino! Hold the cream, double-shot of semen on bad-hair days! Even men could order it, to take advantage of those beneficial chemicals. And think of the jobs we'd create!

More seriously, of course, there you have it, the conservative religious gender agenda in all three Abrahamic religions. Women belong in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant. Which is pretty odd, given that the Bible, for instance, says nothing about that.

Go Read Charles P. Pierce On Health Care

2012-01-18T14:14:00.000-05:00

He is telling his own story about what it is like to have good health insurance in the US. Or one tiny aspect of that experience, but I bet it is an aspect many of you have also experienced. I certainly have.

A snippet or two:

Ultimately, after the nice pharmacist lady enters the proper launch codes, I wind up getting one of the two prescriptions I came for. ($600 co-pay, my arse, pal.). Today's scoreboard totals: almost four hours total, an hour or so on hold, four different companies, four different phone trees, 16-20 buttons pushed (I lost count), four different automated voices with which to chat, eight very polite but ultimately unhelpful purportedly live persons. One of two prescriptions filled.

And I'm one of the lucky ones. I can marginally afford to go through all this. I can just imagine what people on the low end of what is laughingly called a "system" must go through.

I mention all of this because, tomorrow night, the five remaining Republican candidates will get up on stage and they will promise to repeal even the tepid, insurance-friendly reform of the way we do health-care in this country.

....

Every single one of these Republicans will make the argument that, because of the entire morning I spent dealing with the preposterous way we do health-care in this country, that I am a "freer" person than are the people in Canada, or New Zealand, or Germany, or Finland. That I had to spend an entire morning mired in bureaucratic absurdity means I have retained my "freedom" as an American.

And of course Pierce's whole post is, as he writes, written by someone lucky. He can afford health insurance and he has the time, health and ability to fight the system though perhaps not to win that fight.

As I have written until boredom tears flow from my eyes, the market model is extremely problematic in health care. It simply does not work very well, and no country on this earth, not even the Wild West US of conservative dreams, can run a truly market-based health care system without very stringent regulations.

One very simple example of the ways health care markets fail is in the description Pierce gave us: The bureaucracy. Conservatives argue that it's the government which creates bureaucracy but nothing is as good at creating duplication and confusion and impossible-to-interpret clauses than the US private health insurance industry.

There are several reasons for that, but they ultimately boil down to two: The giant information problems which are inextricably tied to many forms health care services and the absence of economies to scale in the administration of the claims.

Though I must admit that Pierce's story also reminded me of the bank mergers in the 1990s when there were days I didn't know what my bank was currently called, and also the mortgage markets where the day's puzzle used to be "Who in the World Owns My Mortgage Today?" I'm not saying that these phenomena are the same in what caused them, though perhaps they are.

But they share in that feeling of increasing consumer powerlessness. You don't know who you are dealing with, you don't know whom to call, and the identity of the firm you signed your initial contract with has become utterly meaningless.

The Nazgûl Rule in Wisconsin May Be In Trouble

2012-01-17T16:29:00.000-05:00

The petition to recall Governor Scott Walker is going pretty well:

Organizers of the petition drive to recall Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker submitted what appeared to be more than enough signatures on Tuesday to force the first-term Republican to defend his seat in a special election.

The group United Wisconsin, which opposes the collective bargaining changes and other measures Walker pushed into law last year, said it gathered more than 1 million signatures to recall the governor by the January 17 deadline -- roughly double the 540,208 signatures required.

If you are not familiar with this particular Ringwraith, you can read more about him in my archives.

The Ron-Paul-And-Progressives Brouhaha. Yves Smith Joins In.

2012-01-17T16:07:00.001-05:00

The brouhaha over recent articles on Ron Paul and his possible progressive values has intensified. As I wrote below in a comment, the brouhaha is not created because several writers argued that we should take Ron Paul's anti-war agenda seriously and ask why other politicians, including the Democratic president, are not running on that part of Paul's agenda.

No. The brouhaha is based on something much sneakier, something akin to the Oppression Olympics debacle we went through during the 2008 Democratic Primaries. Those articles don't just talk about Paul's anti-war agenda. They also ask us to put those in one cup of the justice scales and to fill the other with Paul's views on race, women, the environment, health care, education and so on.

The implication is, as I wrote before, that we are asked to do deals with the devil. Those deals will reveal how much we really care about dead Iraqi children or dead Afghani women! Or conversely, how much we really care about whether Americans can be freely discriminated against, paid less, denied access and so on, as long as it's not the government which does it, although the federal government will ban abortion and stop regulating the environment.

So show me your real values! Let's do the ten kilometer hurdles in the Oppression Olympics! The fun thing about those hurdles is that the writers, in general, are not expected to run. They/we can just sit in the audience and cheer for the runners they have selected.

The outcome of all this is to create rifts among the liberals and progressives. That the question of wars is very important and well worth debating has receded into the background. And so has the apparently forgotten fact that Obama was touted as the anti-war candidate in 2008, even getting the Nobel Peace Prize for pretty much just his pre-election agenda. Noticing that he turned out to be something quite different should make any writer on this topic take Ron Paul's arguments with a biiig pinch of salt. Or snuff.

Add to that the very high likelihood that Ron Paul will NOT be the Republican candidate for the president of the United States of America. Then ask yourself what the real point of these debates is.

If it is to get an anti-war movement going again, great. If it is to point out that the Democratic Party is almost exactly as bound to corporate interests as the Republican Party, great.

If it is something like this*, not so great:

It should not be controversial to point out that the Democratic party uses identity politics as a cover for its policy of selling out the middle class to banks and big corporate interests, just on a slower and stealthier basis than the right. And we’ve seen the identity card used in a remarkably dishonest manner in this Ron Paul contretemps.

...

Ah, the gender baiting card! No women or non whites have anything nice to say about Ron Paul! That’s patently untrue, but identity bigots like Pollitt apparently can’t wrap their minds around the notion that many people see themselves as citizens first and their demography second, and can and do have nuanced views based on how they weigh multiple political considerations: class, concentration of power, rule of law, civil liberties, and gender/race/sexual orientation. I’m not a Paul booster, yet I applaud his effort to curb the Fed, which has circumvented Constitutional budgetary processes to support a predatory financial services industry, as well as his criticism of Iran war-mongering. The fact that I ran a piece on how Paul is inconvenient to liberals meant I support this view, but Pollitt omits anything that undermines her tidy Obama-defending narrative.
But most important, I object to the presumption of the Pollitt position, that right-thinking women of the left-leaning persuasion must of course agree with her. I find myself appalled by the culture, such that it is, of soi-disant progressives in DC. That isn’t to say that there aren’t many talented individuals laboring to make things better. But from what I can tell, their efforts are too often at odds with and deliberately undermined by a puerile, often vicious style of discourse that values petty conformity over substantive contributions. And the sacred cow of petty conformity is political correctness (well, unless you are a “progressive” woman, that makes is OK to yell “white male oppressor” when you run out of arguments).

Strong, eh? Yves Smith is a woman who writes under a male pseudonym. That information is necessary to understand that she tells us she doesn't have identity politics herself, that she is not an identity bigot.

I find the term "identity politics" an interesting one. It's a euphemism, of course, intended to label certain individuals' views as based on nothing but selfishness. That all politics is based on one's identity, to some extent, at least, is ignored. Think of the "We Are The 99%" slogan. That's about identity. Belonging to the middle class or not defines part of one's identity. Being a pacifist or not defines part of one's identity. But it's only certain types of identity that the term "identity bigot" could possibly apply to.

Then of course the Republican Party uses identity politics (defined in the sense Yves uses it) All The Time to disguise the robbing of everyone but the 1%. It's just identity politics with a very different smell or reek, focusing on Them (the east coast elitists, the commies in the White House, the illegal immigrants, the terrorists, the abortionists, the atheists, the uppity women).

It is impossible NOT to do identity politics. If we are to remove any demands for fair treatment of women and minorities from the political arena, the outcome will not be some kind of neutrality. The outcome will be that the other side's identity politics will prevail. And I very much doubt that what we could buy with those concessions would be a world without war.
-----
*Yves is responding to this article by Katha Pollitt. Pollitt and Greenwald discuss the issues at Blogginheads. The discussion is well worth watching. Pollitt apologizes for getting Greenwald's stance wrong in her article and the two hash out the issues in a friendly debate.

Connect The Dots: On Opposition to Abortion and the Defense of Traditional Marriage

2012-01-17T00:41:00.000-05:00

Atrios wrote this on Monday (in reference to this Pandagon post):

As I've [stated] before, I get why people oppose abortion but really don't get see any semi-rational reason for spending your time trying to ruin the lives of gay and lesbian people. And, no, the religion reason is no reason, as 'ruining the lives of gay and lesbian people' really isn't too near the top of the Jesus agenda.

I know what he means by that comment, of course. It has to do with the beliefs one has about when independent and separate human life begins. (I myself believe that it begins smack at the moment sperm is created! This is the little homunculus argument well known from history, and should be given the same consideration other beliefs get.)

On the other hand, the literalist Biblical case against abortion is extremely weak.

But instead of further discussing the ways anti-choice and anti-GLBT views might differ, I prefer to discuss what these two have in common.

And that is the way they serve to bolster traditional gender roles inside families.

Think of the shape the ideal marriage takes in the mind of, say, Rick Santorum: The married couple have separate and unequal roles. The husband is the head of the household, the breadwinner and the priest of the family congregation. The wife is the helpmate of the husband, under his dominion. Her task is to have children and to take care of them, possibly including home schooling them. Her own place is at home unless the husband otherwise decrees.

What threatens this traditional marriage? Clearly both reproductive choice for women and same-sex marriage do.

The more control women have over their own bodies, the less they need to depend on the patriarchal arrangements for the sake of survival. The more control women have over the spacing of their pregnancies, the more control women will have over their own education and their own working lives. This gives women more options than the traditional patriarchal marriage arrangement.

Given this, the traditionalists would be predicted to be opposed to not only abortion but also to any contraception that is not in the hands of men. And lo and behold!, that's exactly what the traditionalists are opposed to: The plan B, the contraceptive pill and the intrauterine devices!

Likewise, same-sex marriage threatens the stability of the patriarchal marriage. If men are supposed to be the heads of the families and women the obedient helpmates, the existence of gay and lesbian couples is deeply problematic. It's as if some of these new families have two heads and some have no heads at all!

When these same-sex partnerships are successful and bring up happy and healthy children, the argument for the necessity of the traditional gendered division of labor within the patriarchal families is severely weakened.

No wonder that those who support male supremacy would be as frightened by the movement for GLBT rights as by reproductive rights. Both types of rights threaten something the traditionalists hold dear, something they wish to defend. It's just not marriage itself but a patriarchal marriage.

A Guest Post by Anna: A Literary Canon of Women Writers, Part Fifteen: The Twenty-First Century

2012-01-15T02:16:00.002-05:00

Echidne's note: Earlier parts of this series can be found here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 ,Part 5, Part 6, Part 7,Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12,Part 13 and Part 14

Indira Goswami (14 November 1942 – 29 November 2011), known by her pen name Mamoni Raisom Goswami and popularly as Mamoni Baideo, was an Assamese editor, poet, professor, scholar and writer. She was the winner of the Jnanpith Award (2001) and Principal Prince Claus Laureate (2008).

A celebrated writer of contemporary Indian literature, her works include include Pages Stained With Blood (2001, a novel that depicts the Sikh massacre in Delhi in the aftermath of the assassination of the Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in June 1984) , The Moth Eaten Howdah of the Tusker (2004, a novel about the beginning of independence for India), and The Man from Chinnamasta (2005, a novel opposing animal sacrifice.)

These are widely available in English.

Zadie Smith (born on 25 October 1975) is a British novelist. To date she has written three novels. In 2003, she was included on Granta's list of 20 best young authors.

Her most famous novel is White Teeth (2000), which focuses on the later lives of two wartime friends - the Bangladeshi Samad Iqbal and the Englishman Archie Jones - and their families in London. The book won multiple honors, including the 2000 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction, the 2000 Whitbread Book Award in category best first novel, the Guardian First Book Award, the Commonwealth Writers First Book Prize, and the Betty Trask Award. Time magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. It is widely available in English.

Téa Obreht (born Tea Bajraktarević on September 30, 1985) is an American novelist of Bosniak/Slovene descent, born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, now Serbia.

Her debut novel, The Tiger's Wife (2011), won the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction, making her the youngest novelist ever to win the prize. The novel features a young doctor's relationship with her grandfather and the stories he tells her. These stories concern a "deathless man" who meets him several times in different places and never grows old, and a deaf-mute girl from his childhood village who befriends a tiger that escaped from a zoo. This novel is widely available in English.

**********

So that concludes my literary canon of women writers. However, there are undoubtedly many worthy women I didn't have the time or knowledge to cover. Please feel free to add your suggestions in the comments. I hope you have enjoyed this series.

The hermeneutics of Glenn Greenwald (by Suzie)

2012-01-13T17:49:00.000-05:00

I view Salon lawyer/blogger Glenn Greenwald the way I do Ron Paul: They have some interesting views, but I don't want to enhance their credibility in any way.

On Jan. 2, Echidne dissected what Greenwald wrote in praise of Paul. Oh, wait, I wonder if I'm misinterpreting him by using the word "praise." Perhaps I should say that his column mentioned Paul in a way that a reasonable person would construe as positive. I want to be really careful, lest he refer to me as using "grotesque accusatory innuendo," as he did Katha Pollitt and others.

We can get a glimpse of how Greenwald argues from this exchange on Twitter about Obama signing a military-spending bill (NDAA) that allows the use of indefinite military detention of terrorist suspects.

Greenwald quotes an ACLU headline: "President Obama Signs Indefinite Detention Bill Into Law." Imani Gandy, a k a Angry Black Lady, a Grio blogger/lawyer, raises the issue of civil custody. Seems like a good point since the law refers to military detention, and Obama promised not to apply it to U.S. citizens. (Nevertheless, I oppose this law, just fyi.) The conversation quickly turns ugly, with Greenwald and supporters disparaging Gandy.

DrDawg: ABL, Obama could rape a nun live on NBC and you'd say we weren't seeing what we were seeing.
Greenwald: No - she'd say it was justified & noble- that he only did it to teach us about the evils of rape.

ABL and others tell him rape jokes aren't funny. (This also is debated among liberals. See this interesting post by the Funny Feminist.)

"Learn how to use Twitter - I didn't offer that example - just replied to it," Greenwald snaps. (This is disingenuous. His reply made the example more extreme.) DrDawg says, "I assure you, I wasn't making a joke, but a point."

It's not like those two things are mutually exclusive. People often use humor to make serious points. Twitterers also say that using rape to make a point is offensive because it trivializes rape. They say that talking about a black male president raping someone can be seen as racist. Jennifer Pozner, founder of Women in Media & News, tweets:

"Turns out I have to start 2012 by explaining to a respected progressive political journalist why cheap rape metaphors are bogus. #neverends"

Finally, Greenwald switches arguments. He no longer says he simply replied to someone else. Instead, he acknowledges that he talked about rape, but assures readers that it wasn't a joke or a metaphor. "It's a statement" that "blind defenders" of Obama would "defend ANY evil: assassinations, child-killings: EVEN rape."

I have criticized Obama many times, but I'm outraged by the idea that he's a killer capable of rape, supported by people who don't care. Talk about "grotesque accusatory innuendo."

Zerlina Maxwell, who writes at Feministing, Loop21 and the Grio, has an excellent post about Greenwald, noting:

... an irony of the infusion of rape into a debate in which it doesn't belong, is that the NDAA that Greenwald finds so offensive, also includes a provision which finally addresses the serious problem of rape, abuse and sexual harassment in the military.

I didn't know that much about Greenwald last week when I mistakenly suggested he was another white-male blogger who supported Obama, only to get disenchanted. The more I read about him, the more convinced I am that I'll need a second part to this post to address why Greenwald is regarded as a "respected progressive."

This Is Awesome

2012-01-13T16:57:00.002-05:00

A video of a women's volleyball game in China. Do watch it, even if you don't like volleyball.

Possibly Good News From Saudi Arabia

2012-01-13T16:48:00.000-05:00

About the morality police:

Saudi Arabia's king replaced the hard-line chief of the country's morality police with a more liberal cleric who has encouraged greater women's rights, a change welcomed by activists as a sign that the monarchy would continue to pursue cautious social reforms in the face of political upheaval in the Middle East.

Should the Times Be A Truth Vigilante?

2012-01-12T19:59:00.000-05:00

That's the question Arthur Brisbane, the New York Times public editor posed today. It has to do with the responsibilities reporters might or might not have to correct statements that they know to be untrue.

Brisbane puts it like this:

I’m looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge “facts” that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.

One example mentioned recently by a reader: As cited in an Adam Liptak article on the Supreme Court, a court spokeswoman said Clarence Thomas had “misunderstood” a financial disclosure form when he failed to report his wife’s earnings from the Heritage Foundation. The reader thought it not likely that Mr. Thomas “misunderstood,” and instead that he simply chose not to report the information.

Another example: on the campaign trail, Mitt Romney often says President Obama has made speeches “apologizing for America,” a phrase to which Paul Krugman objected in a December 23 column arguing that politics has advanced to the “post-truth” stage.

As an Op-Ed columnist, Mr. Krugman clearly has the freedom to call out what he thinks is a lie. My question for readers is: should news reporters do the same?

Nah. Just insert a disclaimer in cat-sized letters on top of any article you publish. My suggestion:

Dear Reader,

Nothing you read here has been checked for truthfulness.

Love&kisses,
NYT

That should get you off the hook. If some things have actually been checked, then you can add a list of them in the disclaimer, together with their truth-or-false values.

I'm not completely joking when I make that proposal. The reason is simple:

Many readers clearly still believe that something published in the NYT that looks like a fact indeed is a fact. A disclaimer would take care of that belief.

But if we wish to do something more complicated, how about using the old [sic] to denote a presumably factual statement that is well known to be false? That could be inserted into quotes and such.

When Right to Religious Freedom Clashes With Other Rights

2012-01-12T17:20:00.000-05:00

The rights to religious freedom often clash with various types of human rights. The most obvious example of this in the United States is Wisconsin v. Yoder, about whether compulsory education should be applied to the children of the Amish, a religious sect which did not desire such an education to their children:

Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205 (1972), is the case in which the United States Supreme Court found that Amish children could not be placed under compulsory education past 8th grade, as it violated their parents' fundamental right to freedom of religion.

The partly dissenting opinion in this case notes the potential clash in rights though does not frame it quite in those terms:

On this important and vital matter of education, I think the children should be entitled to be heard. While the parents, absent dissent, normally speak for the entire family, the education of the child is a matter on which the child will often have decided views. He may want to be a pianist or an astronaut or an oceanographer. To do so he will have to break from the Amish tradition. It is the future of the students, not the future of the parents, that is imperiled by today's decision. If a parent keeps his child out of school beyond the grade school, then the child will be forever barred from entry into the new and amazing world of diversity that we have today.

More recent examples of religious and other rights clashing include the cases (in Brooklyn, US but mostly in Israel) where certain religious sects demand the segregation of sexes inside buses and trains, even if not all the passengers in those vehicles follow the same religious interpretations. In practice this means that women are asked to move to the back of the bus.

The back-of-the-bus cases differ from the Amish court case in a very important respect, however. The latter happen at the fringes, in those places where members of a religious group and outsiders are bound to meet, and thus the disputes apply to the question whether outsiders should change their behavior in order to satisfy the religious norms of a particular group. Including their views about women.

In Israel these clashes are with the ultra-Orthodox community. Examples:

But there were no female speakers at the Puah Institute for Fertility and Medicine According to Halacha’s 12th-annual “Innovations in Gynecology, Obstetrics and Jewish Law”conference Wednesday in Jerusalem – there were only 13 rabbis and eight male physicians or PhDs on the podium during the daylong gathering.

Despite the brouhaha raised during the past week in the general media over its “exclusion of women,” and the counterattacks by the haredi world, there were no secular or haredi journalists. But I (who am neither) was there to listen and cover the sessions, as I have been for the past decade.

The discussions, as always, included terminology such as ejaculation and male orgasm, as well as other subjects that would have caused haredi men to blush even without the presence of women, and which are routinely censored in the haredi media. And as with the previous conferences, there was an equal number of women and men (more than 1,000 in all) – separated by cloth-covered dividers – in attendance, and closed-circuit TV screens showing the speakers.

Although nothing had really changed, the audience had more haredim in black kippot, and fewer national religious men in crocheted kippot. And there was tension in the air – resulting from Kadima MK (and gynecologist) Rachel Adatto’s objection last week to Puah’s policy of not allowing women experts to address the crowd.

And the case about ultra-Orthodox taunting and spitting at merely Orthodox schoolgirls:

The spectacle of haredi -- that is, ultra-Orthodox -- thugs spitting on Naama Margolis, an 8-year-old schoolgirl in the Israeli town of Beit Shemesh has exacerbated the already frayed relations between the fundamentalist religious sector of the Jewish community, in Israel and elsewhere, and the rest of us, that is, Conservative, Reform, Modern Orthodox and secular Jews.

The Beit Shemesh incident was triggered not only by the zealots' belief that the child, a religious girl from an observant family, was immodestly dressed -- she was wearing a regulation school uniform -- but by their conviction that they have the right to physically and verbally abuse women and girls of whose attire, demeanor or behavior they disapprove.

Another haredi paragon, one Shlomo Fuchs, recently called Doron Matalon, a female Israeli soldier returning to her base, a "slut" on a public bus in Jerusalem. When the soldier pointed out accurately that she protects him and his way of life, Fuchs responded by saying, "She protects me? I sit at shul from eight in the morning till midnight and study, and she's protecting me? I protect her."

Isn't it interesting how very similar the views about women are among all the extremist groups within the three large Abrahamic religions? They amount to an almost-eradication of women. That is done to keep men pure, though the onus for that is completely on women.

But when it comes to how women dress or behave, no amount of modesty will ultimately keep some men from having sexual thoughts. If all women cover their arms and upper legs, then it is the women's ankles which are seen as arousing. If the ankles are covered, it will be the hands or wrists. If those are covered, it will be the faces. Finally, even just the eyes showing may be too much for some men.

That conference example, with the women sitting behind a screen, also reminded me of one of the experiences of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, an American suffragist:

The seed for the first Woman's Rights Convention was planted in 1840, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton met Lucretia Mott at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, the conference that refused to seat Mott and other women delegates from America because of their sex. Stanton, the young bride of an antislavery agent, and Mott, a Quaker preacher and veteran of reform, talked then of calling a convention to address the condition of women. Eight years later, it came about as a spontaneous event.

I predict that we will see more clashes between the right to religious freedom and women's rights in the future, but also clashes which involve other types of human rights and religious rights. Now might be a good time to think about what is at stake.

A Final Note on the Mars/Venus Study

2012-01-12T16:01:00.000-05:00

I asked the awesome stats wizard Andrew Gelman to comment on the Mars/Venus study and he was kind enough to do so. His post gives answers to the questions I posed earlier.

Translating Mitt Romney's New Hampshire Remarks

2012-01-11T14:09:00.000-05:00

Athenae did it so well that I probably should not. But it looks like a really fun game!

And you can try it at home! Here's the original text. Have a go.

My translation of the important points in the speech:

The speech:

Today, we are faced with the disappointing record of a failed President. The last three years have held a lot of change, but they haven’t offered much hope.

The middle class has been crushed. Nearly 24 million of our fellow Americans are still out of work, struggling to find work, or have just stopped looking. The median income has dropped 10% in four years. Soldiers returning from the front lines are waiting in unemployment lines. Our debt is too high and our opportunities too few.

And this President wakes up every morning, looks out across America and is proud to announce, “It could be worse.”

My translation:

There was no president called George Walker Bush! He did not exist. And because he did not exist, he had nothing to do with this recession. Nothing! It was all Obama!

The speech:

It could be worse? Is that what it means to be an American? It could be worse?

Of course not.

What defines us as Americans is our unwavering conviction that we know it must be better.
That conviction guides our campaign. It has rallied millions of Americans in every corner of this country to our cause.
Over the last six months, I’ve listened to anxious voices in town meetings and visited with students and soldiers. In break rooms and living rooms, I’ve heard stories of families getting by on less, of carefully planned retirements now replaced by jobs at minimum wage. But even now, amidst the worst economy since the Great Depression, I’ve rarely heard a refrain of hopelessness.
Americans know that our future is brighter and better than these troubled times. We still believe in the hope, the promise, and the dream of America. We still believe in that shining city on a hill.

My translation:

Forget George Walker but never, ever forget Ronald Reagan! That "shining city on a hill" is code for that as well as code for the Bible! Just talking bubblegum stuff about hope worked for him (and for Obama), so it better work for me, too.

The speech:

President Obama wants to put free enterprise on trial. In the last few days, we have seen some desperate Republicans join forces with him. This is such a mistake for our Party and for our nation. This country already has a leader who divides us with the bitter politics of envy. We must offer an alternative vision. I stand ready to lead us down a different path, where we are lifted up by our desire to succeed, not dragged down by a resentment of success. In these difficult times, we cannot abandon the core values that define us as unique -- We are One Nation, Under God.

My translation:

Banksters should remain banksters and in charge of the markets they ruined. This is called free enterprise. The 1% were successful (never mind how or why), and the 99% should shut up because envy is unbecoming. Also, I will pretend that the poor schmucks have a chance to become successful, too. If that's not enough, I believe in God.

The speech:

Make no mistake, in this campaign, I will offer the American ideals of economic freedom a clear and unapologetic defense.

Our campaign is about more than replacing a President; it is about saving the soul of America. This election is a choice between two very different destinies.

President Obama wants to “fundamentally transform” America. We want to restore America to the founding principles that made this country great.

He wants to turn America into a European-style entitlement society. We want to ensure that we remain a free and prosperous land of opportunity.

My translation:

Everyone in this country will have the right to live under the bridges. The European surrender-monkeys have bad things such as vacations. I call them entitlements to show how bad those things are, and because Americans still have some entitlements, too, I hint here that I will get rid of them. This is what a free land of opportunity means! You, too, can live under a bridge if you wish.

The speech:

This President puts his faith in government. We put our faith in the American people.

He is making the federal government bigger, burdensome, and bloated. I will make it simpler, smaller, and smarter.

He raised the national debt. I will cut, cap, and balance the budget.

He enacted job-killing regulations; I’ll eliminate them.

He lost our AAA credit rating; I’ll restore it.

He passed Obamacare; I’ll repeal it.

My translation:

I will snip and snip at the safety net until there is nothing left of it. I will adopt austerity as my best friend because it won't touch me or my people. I will let your job make you sick and when it does that I will let the health insurers deny you coverage.

The speech:

Internationally, President Obama has adopted an appeasement strategy. He believes America’s role as leader in the world is a thing of the past. I believe a strong America must – and will – lead the future.

He doesn’t see the need for overwhelming American military superiority. I will insist on a military so powerful no one would think of challenging it.

He chastises friends like Israel; I’ll stand with our friends.

My translation:

I promise you at least one new war. And because you are unthinking dolts, I don't mention the fact that the US already spends more on the military than the next fourteen biggest spenders put together.

The speech:

He apologizes for America; I will never apologize for the greatest nation in the history of the Earth.

My translation:

USA! USA! USA! Like they chant in the Olympics

Today's Quote

2012-01-11T10:35:00.000-05:00

It is by Dahlia Lithwick:

Imagine a Democratic presidential nominee running on promises to reshape, remake, make over, hog-tie, or even just refinish the federal bench. It doesn’t happen. And so, even though the most conservative Supreme Court in decades sits poised to decide cases ranging from the constitutionality of President Obama’s health care legislation to the future of affirmative action in schools, the rights to gay marriage, and the fate of the voting rights act, Republicans portray both the Supreme Court and the lower courts as a collective of lefty hippies. And Democrats mainly just look at their fingernails.

Read the whole article.

What Is Austerity Good For?

2012-01-11T10:27:00.000-05:00

Read this article about Greece and weep:

Deeply indebted and nearly bankrupt, this Mediterranean nation was forced to adopt tough austerity measures to slash its deficit and secure an international bailout. But as Greece’s economy slides into free fall, critics are scanning the devastated landscape here and asking a probing question: Does austerity really work?

Unemployment has surged to 18.8 percent from 13.3 percent only a year ago. Overburdened public hospitals are facing acute shortages of everything from syringes to bandages because of budget cuts, with hiring freezes forcing the mothballing of operating rooms even as more unemployed are relying on the public health system. Rates of homelessness, suicide, crime and HIV cases from intravenous drug use are jumping.

Greece has been forced to cut spending and raise taxes in the middle of a severe downturn, slashing pensions as well as state salaries, jobs and services. As public confidence has evaporated, consumer spending — the biggest driver of the economy — has plunged, generating cascading losses at private firms. The result is a dizzying economic plummet and social crisis that is bringing the cradle of Western civilization to its knees.

That quote asks whether austerity really works! But of course! A country is almost demolished in a few years! Those who were living high on the hog are whipped and put on low rations if peasants, left alone if feudal lords and ladies. The value of thrift is drilled into the Greek skulls. A moral lesson is being taught. And doors open for the Shock Doctrine.

But that's probably not the politically correct answer to the question. (Note that I'm using the dated p.c. term here in the correct form.) That has to do with something called expansionary austerity, the idea that cutting government spending could result in the expansion of economic activity.

Dean Baker explains the theory of expansionary austerity and also the reasons why it's mostly a mythical beast and Paul Krugman links to another study with similar results.

More from Krugman on that linked Washington Post story about Greece:

Most of that is right — but not the bit about regaining the confidence of investors — or at any rate, that’s not what it’s about these days. For it’s quite clear that at this point investor confidence is unregainable. Greek borrowing costs aren’t coming down to affordable levels for a very long time.

So now the austerity isn’t market-driven — it’s political, the pound of flesh official lenders are demanding for maintaining the trickle of cash. And it really is in large part about punishment; we’ve now seen a fairly impressive demonstration that big budget cuts in a depressed economy hardly even reduce the deficit, because they drive the economy down and tax receipts with it.

Visiting David Brooks

2012-01-11T01:50:00.000-05:00

I try to do this very rarely, for obvious reasons, the most important of them being this:

When you want a truly vile opinion dressed up to sound innocuous, Brooks is your guy.

Last Friday his column was about Santorum and his values:

Santorum doesn’t yet see that once you start thinking about how to foster an economic system that would nurture our virtues, you wind up with an agenda far more drastic and transformational.
If you believe in the dignity of labor, it makes sense to support an infrastructure program that allows more people to practice the habits of industry. If you believe in personal responsibility, you have to force Americans to receive only as much government as they are willing to pay for. If you believe in the centrality of family, you have to have a government that both encourages marriage and also supplies wage subsidies to men to make them marriageable.

Bolds are mine. Does Brooks really propose to pay men extra for just being men?

James Taranto thinks so. He doesn't think this would fly, for pretty obvious reasons, but he notes that other proposals could have the same effect albeit under disguise, and only for men with low earnings:

The problem is evident immediately. As the Supreme Court held in Mississippi University for Women v. Hogan (1982), sex discrimination by the government is unconstitutional absent an "exceedingly persuasive justification." It strains credulity to think that the goal of making men "marriageable" would meet this standard of scrutiny.
The way around this problem would be to structure the Brooks subsidy so that it predominately benefits men but is also available to women. In a 2009 piece for The American Prospect, a left-liberal magazine (hat tip: Ira Stoll), writer Dick Mendel proposed doubling the Earned Income Tax Credit for "low-wage workers without children [in their care], primarily noncustodial fathers and men without children."

It's an upside-down world, the one these guys inhabit. Why not propose an extra tax on all single women? That way they stay relatively poorer and will have to marry someone to survive. -- I'm not proposing that. Just pointing out that it's really the same thing these guys discuss above.

In his most recent column Brooks asks where all the Liberals have gone:

Why aren’t there more liberals in America?
It’s not because liberalism lacks cultural power. Many polls suggest that a majority of college professors and national journalists vote Democratic. The movie, TV, music and publishing industries are dominated by liberals*.
It’s not because recent events have disproved the liberal worldview. On the contrary, we’re still recovering from a financial crisis caused, in large measure, by Wall Street excess. Corporate profits are zooming while worker salaries are flat.
It’s not because liberalism’s opponents are going from strength to strength. The Republican Party is unpopular and sometimes embarrassing.
Given the circumstances, this should be a golden age of liberalism. Yet the percentage of Americans who call themselves liberals is either flat or in decline. There are now two conservatives in this country for every liberal. Over the past 40 years, liberalism has been astonishingly incapable at expanding its market share.

Brooks then presents his answer to this conundrum. A better one can be found in one of the comments to his column:

The most brilliant thing the conservatives ever did was brand democrats as tax and spend liberals. The media loved it then and loves it now. Then, they - the conservatives - ran up the deficit under Reagan. But still the democrats are the tax and spend liberals. Then, they did it under the first Bush. But still, it's the tax and spend liberals. Then Clinton erased the deficit, delivered a projected surplus and began paying down the debt. But still, it's the tax and spend liberals. Then Bush II took the deficit to levels unimaginable and brought the economy to the brink. LIBERAL IS A FOUR LETTER WORD.

Yes, pretty much. It's a cuss word.

This does not mean that liberal stances on issues wouldn't be liked by many more Americans. They just hesitate to adopt the liberal label or assume that "liberal" means the conservative framing of the word. Many call themselves progressives, instead of liberals, too.
----
*This argument about the cultural elite consisting of liberals is much more complicated than Brooks allows. What he argues is that the workers in certain "cultural" industries tend have liberal values. This does not mean that they use liberal bias in their work. Sometimes they seem to bend over backwards in an attempt to not show any such bias, resulting in the reverse bias.

Neither does this tell us what the political values of those are who own the media companies. Rupert Murdoch is unlikely to be the only conservative media mogul out there. It is the owners who have the final say when it comes to the contents of what the company produces.

And Even More On The Men-Are-From-Mars-Women-Are-From-Venus Study

2012-01-10T17:27:00.000-05:00

The Huffington Post has an article about this study which interviews one of the study authors, Paul Irwing and also Janet Hyde who authored the earlier study that this one essentially attacks.

I am still trying to find the answer to the following question about the basic study: If another set of researchers took the same data and applied the same method, would they unavoidably get the same overall results?

So far I have not been able to find an answer to that question. It matters greatly, because of this:

In past studies on this topic, researchers would simply add up all the survey responses, according to Del Giudice. This led to imperfect results because of careless responses and misreadings. Through a sophisticated method called "structure equation modeling," the researchers claim they were able to remove this random error. When asked if he could translate this concept for a lay person, Irwing replied: "I teach courses on this and it takes me approximately 20 hours."

Thus, the method which produces the new results (from old data, by the way) cannot be explained. Which makes it pretty nigh impossible to join in the conversation about what the new findings mean.

For example, think of possible interpretations for this:

"If you translate it into the simplest terms," said Irwing, "only 18 percent of men and women match in terms of personality profiles, and that's staggeringly different from the consensus view."

What does this mean? That 18% of the respondents in the study scored on the same points on all the various scales? And if they did not, how different were their "personality profiles?" Completely different? A bit different on one or two dimensions?

It is this opaqueness that makes it so hard to talk about the findings.

The other bit in that interview I want to talk about is this:

Irwing thinks that some researchers in the past may have been biased in their methods, in order to reduce any gender difference. "It's for totally laudable reasons," he said. "People are very concerned, or were very concerned, that women didn't get equal opportunities, and that there was a lot of bias in selection processes."
"People are afraid that studies like ours will turn the clock back," Irwing added.
Hyde is one of those people. "This huge difference is not only scientifically false," she said, "it has unfortunate consequences for places like the workplace and education and heterosexual romantic relationships."
But the authors stand by their results, and are currently drafting a lengthy response to Hyde's objections. "I think distorting science because of what you would like to believe, or because of what you think the political consequences are, is very dangerous," said Irwing.

This sets Irwing and Del Giudice as the objective scientists and Hyde as the person who distorted her results because of political consequences. Hmm.

The problem is that all researchers would like to believe something. It's not necessarily only feminists who have those beliefs.

For instance, if your study frame is evolutionary psychology, then you initially have accepted the idea that gender differences in personality are something that was caused by sexual selection a long time ago and is now retained in our stone age brains. So you like results that support that and dislike results that don't support that.

I'm not going to use a word as strong as "distorting" when I mention that studies can be written up in ways which support one view rather than the other. For instance, the Del Giudice-Irwing study uses US data which seems to over-sample both white Americans and educated Americans. The study write-up does not address the fact that the data is drawn that way. It simply applies the findings to all men and women, never mind the culture the self-reported results are drawn from.

Then there is this quote by Irwing, on women and men:

They're almost like "different species," Paul Irwing, one of the researchers, told The Huffington Post.

This may be a subtle thing, but I don't think objective scientists describe their results that way. People who have an axe to grind might, perhaps.

Blogger's Block and Nakke, the Finnish-Speaking Parrot

2012-01-09T20:03:00.000-05:00

Say "blogger's block" several times in a row. Mine will pass soon, I hope.

Here's yet another video of Nakke, the parrot who speaks Finnish. This time he explores the bathroom:

Rough translation, with a few guesses:

At the beginning he mutters "no" when deciding to attack the toilet brush. It tips over and he seems to say "Did it hit?"

The owner's voice can be heard to say "Nakke does
NOT break" and "What have you done?"

Nakke then gives what sounds to me like a shitty laugh. He then says "nooh" and "I'm going to get/prepare some water." He says "nooh" again.

When he steps onto the stool next to the toilet and nearly loses his balance he says "Oh dear"/"oh damn." He then repeats "I'm going to get/prepare some water." speaks some Dutch, copies a dog barking and starts pecking away at the back of the toilet while saying "Where..do you break?" and "Do NOT break."

For more Nakke vidoes with rough translations, go here and here.

Body Image And Men

2012-01-09T15:39:00.000-05:00

The UK Guardian summarizes a study about men and body image problems with this fascinating headline: "Body image concerns more men than women, research finds."

But I couldn't find the study (about 394 British men) or the other study which must have produced the numbers for women that are used in that comparison. I suspect that the participants in this study were not drawn randomly from the general population of British men because of this:

Respondents, of whom about a quarter were gay men, blamed the media and celebrities for unhelpfully reinforcing unrealistic ideals of physical perfection.

I don't think a quarter of British men are gay, so the sample is not representative of the population the overall conclusions are applied to.

If I had to guess, I'd plunge for self-selection as the way the study got its subjects. You put up advertisements in various places and see who signs up to be in your study. The problem, of course, is that this approach will attract more people who are concerned about the topic of the study than those who are not. That, in turn, means that the percentages you get in the study cannot be assumed to apply to all men or even all British men.

Ani DiFranco & the ERA (by Suzie)

2012-01-08T19:30:00.001-05:00

I've been reveling in Ani DiFranco's new CD, "Which Side Are You On?" which can be pre-ordered at her label, Righteous Babe Records. It will be released in stores Jan. 17. In an interview in No Depression, Kim Ruehl calls "Amendment" "the most explicit feminist song you’ve ever recorded." That's saying a lot, considering this is DiFranco, for goddess' sake. It's wonderful to hear her call for the ERA, but it's also saddening/maddening that civil rights for women are "pushing the envelope" in 2012. Here are the opening lines:

Wouldn't it be nice if we had an amendment to give civil rights to women, to once and for all just really lay it down from the point of view of women?

Meanwhile*, in Egypt

2012-01-08T18:56:00.000-05:00

Islamists have done exceedingly well in the Egyptian elections:

The Brotherhood’s party said on its website that it has won 41 percent of seats in the new parliament.

The Salafi Al-Nour party trailed second, winning nearly 27 percent of seats.

The two Islamist parties together chalked up nearly 65 percent of seats in the new parliament.

The liberal Egyptian Bloc and Al-Wafd party won 9 percent of seats each, while Mubarak loyalists took nearly 4 percent, according to results published on the FJP’s website.

The Revolution Continues, a coalition of youth activists, took only 2 percent of seats and the moderate Islamist Al Wasat won 2 percent, while the rest were taken by independents.

Not sure why the numbers for the two Islamic parties getting the most votes don't add up to the total given above. But in any case they are the clear winners.

What does this mean for the women of Egypt? This is difficult to predict in detail but the odds are reduced freedoms:

The role of religion in defining the relationship between citizens and the state has for some time been mainly limited issues of personal status. Many Egyptians are religious, and yet the impact of religion on people's daily lives tends to be independent to a large degree of any kind of state interference.
Perhaps this is why, with the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) and the Salafi-orinted Nour Party picking up more than half the seats in recent parliamentary elections, Cairo residents, and others across the country, are voicing their concern.
The FJP has said there will be no major changes in the relationship between society, the state and religion, and that there is nothing to worry about. However, some Nour Party candidates and Salafi politicians have been speaking as though the extremist Islamification of Egyptian society is just around the corner. Although the newly elected parliament has yet to make any laws, the statements of Salafis have had many moderate and secular Egyptians up in arms.

...

Mohamed Emara, a member of the Nour Party and its victorious candidate in the South Cairo constituency, declared on 3 December that stricter regulations would be applied to alcohol sales, bank lending, and beach attire.
The future MP noted in an interview with state-run daily Akhbar al-Youm that the phrase “civil state” is ambiguous. He added that the imposition of Islamic banking is the key to a flourishing Egyptian economy. The application of Islamic banking rules would only entail changing so-called "profit" structures, without fundamental changes to the conventional banking system now in place — except for a ban on investments in alcohol, gambling or anything else that is seen as forbidden by Islam.
"There is very little political awareness among the majority of Egyptians," claims Sanaa Abdel Rahman, a hairdresser who lives in a neighborhood around the pyramids. "When people voted for Salafi and Brotherhood candidates, they were supporting what they thought were religious elders and were unaware that these people would destroy their livelihood. Almost everyone in our neighborhood works in tourism, but they all voted for the Nour Party."
While bankers and tour guides spend sleepless nights over the financial implications of an Islamist state, women worry about being forced to cover their hair and stay out of restaurants and cafes where they would mix with men.
Perhaps the most controversial declarations have to do with the veil. A recent Nour Party advertisement claims that it would "never force women to wear the niqab," which covers the face as well as the hair. However, no mention is made of the headscarf, a fact which leaves open the possibility that the latter could be imposed by law. Other Salafi rulings have forbidden neck ties for men, as well as trousers for women, unless in the company of a husband, brothers or father.

Then there are those rumors about vigilante gangs who pretend to be something like the Saudi morality police:

Vigilante gangs of ultra-conservative Salafi men have been harassing shop owners and female customers in rural towns around Egypt for “indecent behavior,” according to reports in the Egyptian news media. But when they burst into a beauty salon in the Nile delta town of Benha this week and ordered the women inside to stop what they were doing or face physical punishment, the women struck back, whipping them with their own canes before kicking them out to the street in front of an astonished crowd of onlookers.
Modeling themselves after Saudi Arabia’s morality police as a “Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice,” the young men raided clothing and other retail shops around the Qalubiya province over New Year’s weekend declaring they were there to enforce Islamic law, according to the Tahrir News.
Shop owners were told they could no longer sell “indecent” clothing, barbers could no longer shave men’s beards, and that all retail businesses should expect regular and surprise inspections to check for compliance. Frightened customers were ordered to cover up and threatened with severe punishment if they did not abide by “God’s law on earth.”
But when the women in a Benha beauty salon stood up to the young Salafi enforcers, they found support on the streets as well as online, with one amused reader suggesting that women should be deputized to protect the revolution’s democratic values.

A wonderful ending to that story! Of course a government-sanctioned morality police could not be fought that way.

I cannot forecast the future, and much depends on how coalitions are going to be built within the new government. But the future is not rosy for those Egyptians who want equality between men and women.

A different aspect of the changes that the Nour party would support has to do with Egyptian tourism. As I have written before, tourism is an important industry in Egypt. If alcohol were to be completely banned and beach attire severely regulated, the number of tourists to Egypt would drop by a very large percentage. Introducing something like morality police or sex segregation in general would have an even stronger impact. Large problems in the tourism industry would increase unemployment and poverty in several areas of Egypt.

--------
*The "meanwhile" denotes that the post will be about something nasty happening to women somewhere in the world.

Turning The Tables. Still Digging In The Sewers.

2012-01-07T16:40:00.000-05:00

You may have noticed that I like using reversals to make a point about sexism. Here's a comment from the Telegraph thread:
Once I told an elderly woman who had been a flaming women's libber, sort of half jokingly, that given a choice I'd prefer to be in airplane piloted by a man instead of a woman who just might be suffering from hormone induced mood swings, stomach cramps and hot flushes. I was quite surprised when she agreed with me.

Just a silly sexist comment on one level, just a joke really! But even a flaming women's libber agreed!

It's an attempt to persuade by subterfuge, I guess.

This is where reversals are very useful because they show the sexist underpinnings more clearly. So let's play the reversal game here.

Why would you not want to be in an airplane piloted by a man?

The justifications must be like those above but in reverse, i.e., you need to base your argument on some general gender stereotype or some difference in gender averages.

The original comment argues that menstrual cycles and menopause make women too unreliable as pilots. How about arguing that men show higher rates of aggression than women, and, at least in the US and the UK are more likely to commit suicide than women? An airplane can be used to commit suicide. You could add to this the evo-psycho argument that men take more risks than women.

A reversal of this kind is quite nasty and stupid and ill-informed, right? But so is the original comment.

Why write about this? Perhaps because the conversation following the kind of studies I discussed below is not about gender but ultimately about what is wrong with women and how that wrongness justifies traditional gender roles and patriarchal arrangements. We should be aware of this and avoid getting drawn into a debate about women's worth with misogynists.

The second, and related, reason for writing about this is that doing the reversals in your head, if nothing else, clarifies what is really being said.

This is good for the reader's mental health! It also tends to show when an argument is based on the worst possible gender stereotypes about women (or men) and the best possible gender stereotypes about men (or women). This is a common trick, by the way. It is also applied to racial and ethnic stereotypes with the same intentions: To prove the superiority of one group over another group.

Reversals are not the only useful trick in these kinds of debates. Another one is simply asking some penetrating questions, such as "compared to what?"

I think it was Gloria Steinem who wrote about this in the context of the possible dysfunctional impact of divorce on children. What is it that we compare the children of divorced families to? To the children of perfectly happy married partners? Or to the children of unhappy married partners? The answer to that question matters greatly, because happy couples do not divorce.

The penetrating question about that mood-swing comment is to ask: If women can't be pilots because of their mood swings and stomach cramps, what can they do without worrying this particular commentator?

My guess is that his answer would be something about staying at home and taking care of babies and children. The most vulnerable and helpless of all human beings!

But of course the extent of the potential damage in that case is limited to just the children in one family, so perhaps the commentator is worried about the greater scope of harm piloting allows: A woman steering a passenger airplane could kill hundreds!

Hmm. Mass killings are not exactly something women have specialized in.

Digging In The Sewers of Comments to the Mars/Venus Study

2012-01-07T08:07:00.001-05:00

Just to demonstrate the audience for the kind of Mars/Venus study I discussed below I read the UK Telegraph's (somewhat erroneous) summary of the study with a once-again truncated response from Janet Hyde:

Prof Janet Hyde of the University of Wisconsin – Madison, who proposed the theory that men and women have largely similar characteristics, said the method used by the researchers led to "uninterpretable" results.

She said: "The scientific evidence still shows that, contrary to stereotypes, men and women are quite similar on a wide array of psychological qualities."

Now that sounds pretty weak. Did professor Hyde really say something so weak?

The commentators to the Telegraph article assumed so, given that she is a flaming feminist (their assumption):

"Prof Janet Hyde of the University of Wisconsin – Madison, who proposed the theory that men and women have largely similar characteristics, said the method used by the researchers led to "uninterpretable" results.

She said: "The scientific evidence still shows that, contrary to stereotypes, men and women are quite similar on a wide array of psychological qualities."

She would say that wouldn't she.

And:

Only feminists , like Ms Hyde, say that there few differences between men and women. There is BIG public money for feminists in "equality", mostly paid for with male taxes of course.

You can be sure that she has never worked in a dirty, difficult, dangerous job though, like many men have to. Feminists like her usually work in cushy office jobs

What professor Hyde wrote about the study is this:

In their article, The Distance Between Mars and Venus: Measuring Global Sex Differences in Personality, Del Giudice, Booth, and Irwing challenge my Gender Similarities Hypothesis in the case of personality. Below I show that their methods lead to uninterpretible findings that fly in the face of contemporary personality theory. The Gender Similarities Hypothesis is still accurate and supported by massive amounts of data.
The main innovation in the Del Giudice paper is to introduce the use of Mahalanobis D to the measurement of the magnitude of gender differences. A staple of multivariate statistics for decades, D in this application measures the distance between 2 centroids in multivariate space [1]. It is a multivariate generalization of the d statistic used in many meta-analyses. What is not apparent from the Del Giudice paper, however, is that D is computed by taking the linear combination of the original variables that maximizes the difference between groups. What they have shown is that, if one takes a large enough set of personality measures and then takes a linear combination to maximize gender differences, one can get a pretty big gender difference. That is all they have shown – no more, no less.
An assumption of multivariate normality is crucial to Mahalanobis D if it is to be accurate [2]. The authors provide no statistical verification that their variables are distributed multivariate normally. In other research, apparent findings of large gender differences have crumbled when appropriate statistical methods were used for the non-normal, skewed distributions [3].
The gender difference that Del Giudice and colleagues have found is along a dimension in multivariate space that is a linear combination of the original variables transformed into latent variables. A point that is not mentioned in the Del Giudice article is that this dimension is the first discriminant function. Aside from the fact that the linear combination introduces bias by maximizing differences, the resulting dimension here is uninterpretible. What does it mean to say that there are large gender differences on this undefined dimension in 15-dimensional space created from latent variables? The authors call it global personality, but what does that mean? They promise to measure personality with greater “resolution,” yet in the end they have a single, undefined dimension of personality. They have blurred the question rather than offering higher resolution.

Did the author of the popularization have access to this article? Perhaps not.

And yes, I know that I should not read comments to anything about women or gender (which are seen the same thing by most readers, it seems), because then I get told that it is only men who work in dirty, dangerous or difficult occupations (and that feminism is financed by some weird creature called "male taxes").

Of course prostitution might just be the job with the highest risk of death and of course wiping the bottoms of the bed-bound elderly or small babies is pretty dirty (and traditionally female work).

So why did I go there? Because studies Have Consequences. When they are popularized in a biased manner, the comments might include things like this:

Vast amounts of money wasted to prove the obvious!
The feminist lie has ruined the lives of millions worldwide, all because people would not be themselves and attempted to be what they were told by others to be.
Be yourself and don't follow the crowd!

It is a scandal what feminism has done to society, one example is the normalisation of 2 working parent households. At one time prices, and salaries, were geared to one person working, but when feminism raised that to 2 the extra money was not used as extra - treats, but gobbled up into the normal monthly spend, and prices, houses especially, grew to accomodate the more funding available.

-----

Exactly what I have been saying for the past thirty years!
(I do hope these comments remain here intact. About a month ago I criticised the feminist movement of the 1980s and was moderated out of existence! Obviously touched a nerve on whosoever was on duty that day!)
The damage done to society by feminism and 'equality' is incalculable. Traditional roles were there because that was what suited the majority of people. Once again it was the strident, loud minority that spoiled it for the rest of us.

And like this:

There is a reason why male & female have different characteristics: true of many animals (lions, elephants ..) so hardly surprising that this applies to us. Now we have scientifically proved the obvious the question is what do we make of this in society? Is it a reason for discrimination in education? Next when we get past the PC brigade someone will be brave enough to prove racial differences are real and so explaining why for example one race might excel in a particular discipline (say long distance running) and the again the question is what do we do with this information? We are all different and best we celebrate our differences at an individual rather than a group level.

Sure, these are inane comments. And almost all the comments in that thread are meaningless because they do not discuss the study itself or appear to be based on actual understanding of the study. But that's what biased popularizations elicit.

To repeat: Studies Have Consequences. Even if we later find that many, many other studies fail to replicate those stunning types of findings, who cares? We had a nice time woman-bashing (essentially)! And someone gave us the license for that.

Men ARE From Mars, After All! And Women From Venus, Duh

2012-01-06T20:25:00.003-05:00

So tells a new study about gendered personality differences:

Men and women have large differences in personality, according to a new study published Jan. 4 in the online journal PLoS ONE.

The researchers used personality measurements from more than 10,000 people, approximately half men and half women. The personality test included 15 personality scales, including such traits as warmth, sensitivity, and perfectionism. When comparing men's and women's overall personality profiles, which take multiple traits into account, very large differences between the sexes became apparent, even though differences look much smaller when each trait is considered separately.
However, the study indicates that previous methods to measure such differences have been inadequate, both because they focused on one trait at a time and because they failed to correct for measurement error.
The authors conclude that the true extent of sex differences in human personality has therefore been consistently underestimated.

Indeed, the study (available here) finds that men's and women's personalities might overlap by as little as ten percent! Depending on what statistical manipulation the researchers used.

I have read the study, but the particular method the authors used to get from pretty small average differences on the individual character traits to a humongous overall difference is not one that I know well. But others have criticized the method:

But the findings counter the prevailing view among psychologists that, on the whole, men and women are more similar than they are different, in a number of ways, including personality traits.
Janet Shibley Hyde, a professor of psychology and women's studies at the University of Wisconsin who published a paper in 2005 that was influential in contributing to this hypothesis, said the new study does not overturn this view.
For starters, the men and women in the study assessed their own personality traits. People may be inclined to rate themselves in a way that conforms with gender stereotypes, Hyde said. "It's not very manly to say that you're sensitive," she said.
Hyde also said using the 15 personality facets to compute a "global difference" gives you a value that doesn't have any actual meaning.
"It's really uninterpretable, it doesn't mean anything," Hyde said.
In addition, the way the researchers crunched their numbers biases their results, because their method maximizes the differences between males and females, Hyde said.
Patrick Ian Armstrong, a professor of psychology at Iowa State University, agreed with Hyde's assessment. Armstrong pointed out that the "global difference" value will actually get bigger the more personality factors the researchers consider (so analyzing 15 factors will show a greater difference than analyzing five factors.)
Given the issues with the study's methods, "it's not as open and shut a case as they make it out to be," Armstrong said. "The questions they're trying to answer are probably still worth asking," Armstrong said.

I hope that other researchers in the field explain these "novel" methods better for the general audience. Right now all I get is that the authors argue other people manipulate survey data on gender differences in character traits wrong whereas they manipulate it right. Right!

And what might the implications of this study be? One of the authors, Paul Irving:

"Psychologically, men and women are almost a different species," said study researcher Paul Irwing, of the University of Manchester, in the United Kingdom.
The new findings may explain why some careers are dominated by men (such as engineering) and others by women (such as psychological sciences), Irwing said.
"People self-select in terms of their personality… and what they think is going to be suitable in terms of the fit," for their career, Irwing said.

I LIKE that different species argument! The radical feminist segregationists are right, after all.

More seriously, note how we get from small average differences on fifteen scales to humongous statistically created overall differences. Even more seriously, note the political use to which the results are intended. Finally, and not at all seriously, note that Paul Irwing must have a female personality, to work in psychology.

The lead researcher of the study, Marco Del Giudice, describes his research interests as follows:

My main research area is the evolutionary study of human development across the life span. This is an exciting and rapidly growing field, rife with opportunities for theoretical synthesis and interdisciplinary integration. My research interests cover a wide range of topics, from attachment and parent-child relations to personality and psychopathology; indeed, the evolutionary paradigm cuts through the traditional disciplinary boundaries, revealing psychology as a unified scientific endeavor and the human life course as an integrated whole. A common thread underlying much of my current work is the application of life history theory and sexual selection theory to the study of individual and sex differences in attachment, mating, social competition, and personality. A related topic is the evolution of developmental stages and transitions.

So that's the theoretical background for the study (which seems to have had a test-run in Evolutionary Psychology, 2009). It's based on evolutionary psychology. Nothing wrong with that, of course, as long as the readers remember that biologically determined sex differences are one of the core pillars of one particular kind of evolutionary psychology.

From that comes the idea that women are inherently suited for certain occupations and not others, that cultural norms are irrelevant and environmental effects ignored.

All that is worth thinking about, as is the fact that this study is reported all over the place with that "Mars/Venus" argument and often pictures of a man and a woman arguing*. This stuff really sells. Sadly, corrections to this stuff do not sell.

But ultimately my reaction to the study is really based on something completely amateurish: No way are men's and women's personalities so different that they only overlap in ten or eighteen percent of the cases! If that really was the case we would all know it**. So there is something odd about the methods and the numbers they produced.
----
*For one example, check out this one. It crops the criticism of the study, too.
**Think of the height difference among men and women. Not sure what the percentage overlap in the height distributions is but it's unlikely to be anywhere near as small as the created measures in this study. My point is that something so humongous would be common knowledge.

Added later: Here is Janet Hyde's response to the article.

Strong National Defense

2012-01-06T17:28:00.000-05:00

It's a slogan I hear again in these presidential campaigns. But there are also plans to reduce the military budget:

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta is set this week to reveal his strategy that will guide the Pentagon in cutting hundreds of billions of dollars from its budget, and with it the Obama administration’s vision of the military that the United States needs to meet 21st-century threats, according to senior officials.

Sounds like a good idea, given this picture:

The question is of course what to cut. This is the most troubling of the suggestions:

Many who are more worried about cuts, including Mr. Panetta, acknowledge that Pentagon personnel costs are unsustainable and that generous retirement benefits may have to be scaled back to save crucial weapons programs.
“If we allow the current trend to continue,” said Arnold L. Punaro, a consultant on a Pentagon advisory group, the Defense Business Board, who has pushed for changes in the military retirement system, “we’re going to turn the Department of Defense into a benefits company that occasionally kills a terrorist.”

And:

Military benefits and salaries, although politically difficult to cut, are first in the line of sight of many defense budget analysts. Scaling back the Pentagon’s health care and retirement systems and capping raises would yield hundreds of billions of dollars in projected savings over the next decade.

As it stands now, the Pentagon spends $181 billion each year, nearly a third of its base budget, on military personnel costs: $107 billion for salaries and allowances, $50 billion for health care and $24 billion in retirement pay.

These arguments ignore two important considerations:

First, the implicit contract that was in force when those currently serving and retired from the military enlisted. I guess that is what the article means when stating that cutting benefits is politically difficult. Those who enlisted understood that they would be taken care of, in exchange for the risks they took.

But the second problem may have somehow slipped past the notice of those who support this plan: If the pay and retirement benefits for the military will be cut, how will this affect those who might plan to enlist in the future? Fewer people would be willing to serve in the military, because it would pay less well and presumably the dangers would remain the same.

That may, of course, be the intended effect. Still, those who would be willing to enlist at lower total benefits are more and more likely to consist of those who have few alternatives.

Dependency, Santorum And Blank People

2012-01-05T17:04:00.000-05:00

The story about Santorum's comments (here) gets more interesting. My summary of what he seems to be saying is this:
"..bottom line is I don't want to make bla?k people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money..
Now what could that missing letter be? I'll go for "n", given that I'm the polite goddess. But you draw your own conclusions.

Santorum says:

I’ve looked at that quote, in fact I looked at the video. In fact, I’m pretty confident I didn’t say black. I started to say is a word and then sort of changed and it sort of — blah — mumbled it and sort of changed my thought.

The whole point might be trivial except that Santorum seems especially concerned about the blank people getting someone else's money, as opposed to the not-blank people.

That's not what I wanted to write about. Dependency! That's what I wanted to write about. Here's Santorum:

When the AP asked Santorum about the statement, he replied, “If you look at what I’ve been saying, I’ve been pretty clear about my concern for dependency in this country and concern for people not being more dependent on our government, whatever their race or ethnicity is.”

Dependency is a term that should be defined carefully. Santorum pretty wants wives to be financially dependent on their husbands and doesn't appear to have any opinions about dependency and those who are born with trust funds. What he has trouble with is dependency on the government, except perhaps when it is firms which are subsidized or bailed out repeatedly.

Writing about dependency in real terms might be useful. What's not useful is this tradition of seeing any governmental safety net as equal to life-long dependency.

Pinkified

2012-01-04T17:14:00.001-05:00

A short summary of the history of pink as the color for girls:

The use of pink as distinctive of girls can be dated back at least to 1868, in Louisa Mae Alcott's Little Women, when after being shown boy and girl twins, Laurie asks:

Most remarkable children I ever saw. Which is which?...Amy put a blue ribbon on the boy and a pink on the girl, French fashion, so you can always tell.[13]

University of Maryland Professor Jo B. Paoletti, author of book Pink and Blue: Telling the Girls From the Boys in America considers this was common usage in France orphanages during the 18th century [14], but this was not the case everywhere. In the United States there was no established rule:

In 1855 the New York Times reported on a "baby show" put on by P.T. Barnum, exhibiting "one hundred and odd babies" dressed in pinks, blues, and other colors seemingly without regard to gender. ... A Times fashion report from 1880 has boys and girls dressed alike in white, pink, blue, or violet, and another from 1892 says young girls were wearing a variety of colors that spring, including several shades of blue[15]

There are theories indicating an origin of this costume in the 20th century. Zucker and Bradly say that it began in the 1920s[16] and other authors suggest the 1910s.[17] An article in the trade publication Earnshaw's Infants' Department in June 1918 said: "The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl."[18] From then until the 1940s, pink was considered appropriate for boys because being related to red it was the more masculine and decided color, while blue was considered appropriate for girls because it was the more delicate and dainty color, or related to the Virgin Mary.[19][20][21] Since the 1940s, the societal norm was inverted; pink became considered appropriate for girls and blue appropriate for boys, a practice that has continued into the 21st century.[22]

This looks like pretty good evidence of the social/cultural origins for the gendered colors.

The alternative view argues that a preference for pink is hard-wired in women and therefore in girls. But that view is not really supported by the evidence usually presented, as I have also written on this blog.

It is, however, possible that something built-in operates in these types of choices. It's something more complicated than the idea that our foremothers were keen on picking raw fruit:

But a new study purports to show that girls only acquire their preference for pink, and boys their aversion to it, at around the age of two to three, just as they’re beginning to talk about and become aware of gender.

...

LoBue and DeLoache presented 192 boys and girls aged between seven months and five years with pairs of small objects (e.g. coasters and plastic clips) and invited them to reach for one. Each item in a pair was identical to the other except for its colour: one was always pink, the other either green, blue, yellow or orange. The key test was whether boys and girls would show a preference for choosing pink objects and at what age such a bias might arise.

At the age of two, but not before, girls chose pink objects more often than boys did, and by age two and a half they demonstrated a clear preference for pink, picking the pink-coloured object more often than you’d expect based on random choice. By the age of four, this was just under 80 per cent of the time – however there was evidence of this bias falling away at age five.

Boys showed the opposite pattern to girls. At the ages of two, four and five, they chose pink less often than you’d expect based on random choices. In fact, their selection of the pink object became progressively more rare, reaching about 20 per cent at age five.

The crucial point is, of course, that the color choices become gendered at the age when children start understanding gender as something they have and look for signs of what it entails. And one sign they are offered everywhere in Western countries has to do with color choices. Pink Means Girl. If you are a girl then you pick pink. If you are a boy you don't pick pink.

I think that's what is going on with the current horrible pinkifying of everything having to do with girls' clothes and toys. Children of a certain age police gender more stringently than a Talibani does.

The alternative explanation would be that those hard-wired pink genes in girls just happen to kick in at the same time as gender awareness begins in general. That seems very unlikely, given the actual history of how pink became associated with girls.

Put in other terms, if green was the color used in little girls' nurseries, birth announcement cards, clothes and toys, then we would find an odd preference for green among little girls.

As I have written earlier, all this pinkification would not matter much (except for the impoverished color experiences it offers children) if it wasn't associated with other markers of gender for children, the kind which offer little girls so many passive and beauty-related role images of what their gender means, the kind which now argue that building blocks are for boys, even though playing with them has clear learning benefits for all children.

Given this, it may come as good news that Lego is trying to re-introduce its original idea of Legos being gender-neutral toys! Except not really. Instead, Lego will run a separate campaign to market their blocks to girls:

Then there are the lady figures. Twenty-nine mini-doll figures will be introduced in 2012, all 5 millimeters taller and curvier than the standard dwarf minifig. There are five main characters. Like American Girl Dolls, which are sold with their own book-length biographies, these five come with names and backstories. Their adventures have a backdrop: Heartlake City, which has a salon, a horse academy, a veterinary clinic, and a café. “We had nine nationalities on the team to make certain the underlying experience would work in many cultures,” says Nanna Ulrich Gudum, senior creative director.
The key difference between girls and the ladyfig and boys and the minifig was that many more girls projected themselves onto the ladyfig—she became an avatar. Boys tend to play with minifigs in the third person. “The girls needed a figure they could identify with, that looks like them,” says Rosario Costa, a Lego design director. The Lego team knew they were on to something when girls told them, “I want to shrink down and be there.”
The Lego Friends team is aware of the paradox at the heart of its work: To break down old stereotypes about how girls play, it risks reinforcing others. “If it takes color-coding or ponies and hairdressers to get girls playing with Lego, I’ll put up with it, at least for now, because it’s just so good for little girls’ brains,” says Lise Eliot. A neuroscientist at the Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science in Chicago, Eliot is the author of Pink Brain Blue Brain, a 2009 survey of hundreds of scientific papers on gender differences in children. “Especially on television, the advertising explicitly shows who should be playing with a toy, and kids pick up on those cues,” Eliot says. “There is no reason to think Lego is more intrinsically appealing to boys.”
Maybe not, but even Knudstorp acknowledges that Lego’s girl problem will be hard to conquer. Lego sponsors a series of clubs called First Lego League to get kids interested in science. Recently, Knudstorp attended a Lego robotics contest and spoke to a Berkeley (Calif.) professor whose daughter excelled. “We’re seeing lots of girls perform extremely well, but her mother said to me, she won’t say that she’s a ‘Lego kid’ because that’s a boy thing,” Knudstorp says. “I don’t have any illusions that the girls business will be bigger than the boys business, but at least for those who are looking for it, we have something to offer.”

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This post partly summarizes my previous writings on gendered color preferences. It's a response to the YouTube video where a young girl complains about the ubiquity of the color pink and also to Peggy Orenstein's article on the topic in the New York Times. The picture Orenstein wanted to find from the 1980s is this one:

I should note that the girls' toys of the 1980s were not free of pinkification. But there were more choices than pink-and-sparkly or pale-purple-and-sparkly.

Today's Shallow Echidne Thought

2012-01-04T15:00:00.000-05:00

You know how people say that someone in the Republican Party is running or speaking just to pull the conversation more to the right? Or move the party itself to the right?

What would a move to the right for the current American conservatives mean? They already want what essentially amounts to no government except for a large military force and prisons (privatized ones, preferably). They already want public education demolished, civil rights removed, firms not to be taxed at all and so on.

So what would the next step be? A theocracy somewhat like Saudi Arabia, though in the fundamentalist Christian mold? Or an explicitly corporate state? (Yes, I know that has another name, too.)

My point is that the Republican Party is so different from its fairly recent past that Richard Nixon comes across as a liberal now. To speak about pulling the conversation to the right makes no sense.

You Are Lots Of Fun And The Commenting System

2012-01-03T21:14:00.000-05:00

Thanks for all the great conversations and debates and so on. I was thinking today (while shopping for groceries) how much less interesting my life would be without this blog and the comments it gets.

Speaking of the difficulty some of you have had with access to the comments system: I tried to get the problem to replicate for me by using various browsers and by making sure that I entered as a guest. But I could not replicate the access problem. Neither could the person I asked for help at Echo.

So for more information, if you can't access the comments and would like to, please toss me an e-mail. State when the problem began, if possible, and what computer and browser you use. This could help the Echo people figure out what might be going on.

Thanks

Santorum: From The Weirdness Files

2012-01-03T15:30:00.001-05:00

Rick Santorum last October:

As he told CaffeinatedThoughts.com editor Shane Vander Hart in October, “One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country,” the former Pennsylvania senator explained. “It’s not okay. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”

His election song is this one, I guess:

I have a lot of fun thinking about the possible Oval Office speeches president Santorum would deliver. About the evil rain hood invented by Satan, perhaps?

So I'm not being properly respectful. Mea culpa. But here is a man who argues against contraception and against women working for money. Not hard to see what is weird about his values.

If you don't get it, do a gender reversal:

Assume that a politician is against all contraception but also wants every man who becomes a father to stay at home and home-school the children. While doing that job for life (remember, no contraception!) his spouse must earn enough to somehow get health insurance for all those kiddies, to support him and to save enough money for numerous college tuition bills.
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To make my case about his weirdness: Here's a look at his beliefs. More on his beliefs. And more.

And for his views on race, check out this recent story.

Thank You

2012-01-02T23:31:00.000-05:00

Thank you for your company during the last year. Thank you for your donations in the last week. They came as wonderful surprises as my begging was heavily disguised! And thank you also for the Kindle book.

Making Deals With The Devil. Should Liberals and Progressives Vote For Ron Paul?

2012-01-02T16:58:00.001-05:00

Matt Stoller has written a piece called "Why Ron Paul Challenges Liberals." The beginning and also the summary of Stoller's argument:

The most perplexing character in Congress, ideologically speaking, is Ron Paul. This is a guy who exists in the Republican Party as a staunch opponent of American empire and big finance. His ideas on the Federal Reserve have taken some hold recently, and he has taken powerful runs at the Presidency on the obscure topic of monetary policy. He doesn’t play by standard political rules, so while old newsletters bearing his name showcase obvious white supremacy, he is also the only prominent politician, let alone Presidential candidate, saying that the drug war has racist origins. You cannot honestly look at this figure without acknowledging both elements, as well as his opposition to war, the Federal government, and the Federal Reserve. And as I’ve drilled into Paul’s ideas, his ideas forced me to acknowledge some deep contradictions in American liberalism (pointed out years ago by Christopher Laesch) and what is a long-standing, disturbing, and unacknowledged affinity liberals have with centralized war financing. So while I have my views of Ron Paul, I believe that the anger he inspires comes not from his positions, but from the tensions that modern American liberals bear within their own worldview.

So here's a guy who is opposed to the never-ending wars and also opposed to corporate kleptocracy. He would fit right in with the Occupy Wall Street movement! Why don't liberals and progressives flock to him?

That was my interpretation. The quoted article doesn't say that. It also doesn't say one single word about Ron Paul's views on women. That is a pretty interesting omission.

Instead, Stoller's major message to liberals and progressives seems to be this:

This is why Ron Paul can critique the Federal Reserve and American empire, and why liberals have essentially no answer to his ideas, arguing instead over Paul having character defects. Ron Paul’s stance should be seen as a challenge to better create a coherent structural critique of the American political order. It’s quite obvious that there isn’t one coming from the left, otherwise the figure challenging the war on drugs and American empire wouldn’t be in the Republican primary as the libertarian candidate. To get there, liberals must grapple with big finance and war, two topics that are difficult to handle in any but a glib manner that separates us from our actual traditional and problematic affinity for both. War financing has a specific tradition in American culture, but there is no guarantee war financing must continue the way it has. And there’s no reason to assume that centralized power will act in a more just manner these days, that we will see continuity with the historical experience of the New Deal and Civil Rights Era. The liberal alliance with the mechanics of mass mobilizing warfare, which should be pretty obvious when seen in this light, is deep-rooted.

Bolds are mine.

What can we learn from all this? Other than the fact that Stoller doesn't mention Ron Paul's views on abortion or that Paul wants sexual harassment to be legal unless it's attempted rape or assault? As examples of the flavors his reign would bring to one half of all voters?

That both parties are in bed with the military-industrial complex and the banksters, and that liberals and progressives who plan to vote for Obama in the coming presidential elections are just enabling more war and more corporate power? That perhaps centralized power will not hand us any goodies at all in the future, no fairness, no justice, so why vote for more centralized power? That liberals and progressives must choose between those who would kill people abroad on the one hand and those who would oppress some Americans (of the wrong color or gender) on the other hand?

If those are Stoller's points, they are good ones to discuss. I have written (and written) about the problems of corporate power earlier, including the non-existent choices the two parties offer us.

But if we are going to pick the fixed Ron Paul combo from that cafeteria menu we must be very careful about who is affected by that. That's why I called this post "Making Deals With The Devil".

Stoller is not writing about the things that he himself would be willing to give up, to save the world from American military and corporate assaults. He is writing mostly about what other people might have to give up to get to that goal. In a real and concrete sense.

This is not an unnatural stance, as such, to see the world from one's own eyes only. But it should be made clear what the negotiations with the devil will involve, and we should be told why Ron Paul's pre-election anti-war agenda should be any more credible than Obama's was in 2008. After all, Obama was touted as the anti-war candidate by many.

Glenn Greenwald makes Stoller's point more strongly:

It’s perfectly rational and reasonable for progressives to decide that the evils of their candidate are outweighed by the evils of the GOP candidate, whether Ron Paul or anyone else. An honest line of reasoning in this regard would go as follows:
Yes, I’m willing to continue to have Muslim children slaughtered by covert drones and cluster bombs, and America’s minorities imprisoned by the hundreds of thousands for no good reason, and the CIA able to run rampant with no checks or transparency, and privacy eroded further by the unchecked Surveillance State, and American citizens targeted by the President for assassination with no due process, and whistleblowers threatened with life imprisonment for “espionage,” and the Fed able to dole out trillions to bankers in secret, and a substantially higher risk of war with Iran (fought by the U.S. or by Israel with U.S. support) in exchange for less severe cuts to Social Security, Medicare and other entitlement programs, the preservation of the Education and Energy Departments, more stringent environmental regulations, broader health care coverage, defense of reproductive rights for women, stronger enforcement of civil rights for America’s minorities, a President with no associations with racist views in a newsletter, and a more progressive Supreme Court.
Without my adopting it, that is at least an honest, candid, and rational way to defend one’s choice. It is the classic lesser-of-two-evils rationale, the key being that it explicitly recognizes that both sides are “evil”: meaning it is not a Good v. Evil contest but a More Evil v. Less Evil contest. But that is not the discussion that takes place because few progressives want to acknowledge that the candidate they are supporting — again — is someone who will continue to do these evil things with their blessing. Instead, we hear only a dishonest one-sided argument that emphasizes Paul’s evils while ignoring Obama’s (progressives frequently ask: how can any progressive consider an anti-choice candidate but don’t ask themselves: how can any progressive support a child-killing, secrecy-obsessed, whistleblower-persecuting Drug Warrior?).

Strong stuff, especially as the first list of things is written with emotion (children being slaughtered) and the second one not. How could any ethical person not choose to save the lives of innocent children when offered those two lists?

But what if the environmental degradations or cutbacks in health care spending mentioned in the alternative dry list also kill children? Don't we have to know how many children would die under the various scenarios to make up our minds if it is based on the killing of children?

I am not arguing against the inherent dilemmas in how one chooses a presidential candidate to vote for. They are real. But it is important to note that we are making deals with the devil, partly because of the way the two-party system operates (you get the fixed menus) and partly because both the quoted articles set the possible loss of rights for someone else in one cup of the scales and the deaths in wars in the other cup of the scales. And also because it is highly unlikely that the Powers That Be would let Ron Paul run the kind of foreign policy he promises to run.

All this reminded me of Ursula le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas". Who is it that we should keep in the basement, mistreated, for the happiness of the rest of us? That is the real question Stoller and Greenwald seem to ask.

A Guest Post by Anna: A Literary Canon of Women Writers, Part Fourteen: Into The Twentieth Century

2012-01-01T01:05:00.000-05:00

Echidne's note: Earlier parts of this series can be found here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 ,Part 5, Part 6, Part 7,Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12 and Part 13

Edith Wharton (1862-1937) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, short story writer, and designer. Although wealthy and female, she was also one of the few American civilians who traveled to the front lines in France during World War I. She wrote a series of articles about that experience, and in 1916 was named a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor.

Wharton was divorced from her husband in 1913, but rather than view a divorce as scandalous she saw it as a “diploma of virtue.” For her novel The Age of Innocence (1921), Edith Wharton became the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for literature. She remained in France until her death in 1937, but she did return to the United States on one occasion to get an honorary doctorate degree from Yale. Despite the time she spent away from the United States, Edith Wharton is celebrated for her novels that perfectly captured (and gently criticized) the upper class in America.Her works are widely available in English.

Willa Cather (1873-1947) was an American author who achieved recognition for her novels of frontier life on the Great Plains, in works such as her “prairie trilogy” of O Pioneers! (a 1913 novel about a family of Swedish immigrants), The Song of the Lark (a 1915 novel about an ambitious young heroine, Thea Kronborg, who leaves her hometown to go to the big city to fulfill her dream of becoming a famous opera star), and My Ántonia (a 1918 novel about Ántonia Shimerda, as told by her friend Jim to another friend). In 1923 Cather was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours (1922), a novel set during World War I.She is considered one of the leading figures of American literary Modernism.

Pearl Buck (1892-1973) was an American writer who spent most of her time until 1934 in China. Her novel The Good Earth was the best-selling fiction book in the U.S. in 1931 and 1932, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932; it caused considerable popular sympathy for China. It concerns family life in a Chinese village before World War II. In 1938, she became the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her works are widely available in English.

Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was an American writer, poet, and art collector who spent most of her life in France. Her Paris home became a legendary salon after World War I, attracting artists including Picasso, Braque, and Matisse. Stein’s most famous work, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), purports to be the memoirs of Stein’s partner (she was a lesbian) but is actually a history of Stein’s own life. Her works are widely available in English.

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century. During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group.

Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929), with its famous saying, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

Woolf is considered one of the greatest innovators in the English language. In her works she experimented with stream-of-consciousness and the underlying psychological as well as emotional motives of characters.

Woolf's reputation declined sharply after World War II, but her eminence was re-established with the surge of feminist criticism in the 1970s.

Mrs Dalloway (1925) centres on the efforts of Clarissa Dalloway, a middle-aged society woman, to organize a party, even as her life is paralleled with that of Septimus Warren Smith, a working-class veteran who has returned from the First World War bearing deep psychological scars.

To the Lighthouse (1927) is set on two days ten years apart. The plot centers around the Ramsay family's anticipation of and reflection upon a visit to a lighthouse and the connected familial tensions. One of the primary themes of the novel is the struggle in the creative process that painter Lily Briscoe suffers from while she struggles to paint in the midst of the family drama. The novel is also a meditation upon the lives of a nation's inhabitants in the midst of war, and of the people left behind. It also explores the passage of time, and how women are forced by society to allow men to take emotional strength from them.

Orlando (1928) is one of Virginia Woolf's lightest novels. A parodic biography of a young nobleman who lives for three centuries without aging much past thirty (but who does abruptly turn into a woman), the book is in part a portrait of Woolf's lover Vita Sackville-West. It was meant to console Vita for the loss of her ancestral home, though it is also a satirical treatment of Vita and her work. In Orlando the techniques of historical biographers are being ridiculed; the character of a pompous biographer is being assumed in order for it to be mocked.

Virginia Woolf had a lesbian relationship with Vita, but she also married, and she is usually considered bisexual. She suffered from depression and eventually killed herself. Her works are widely available in English.

Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist. Her 1962 novel Ship of Fools (which concerns people sailing from Mexico to Europe aboard a German freighter and passenger ship) is an allegory that traces the rise of Nazism and looks metaphorically at the progress of the world on its "voyage to eternity."

It was the best-selling novel in America that year, but her short stories received much more critical acclaim. She is known for her penetrating insight; her work deals with dark themes such as betrayal, death and the origin of human evil. Her works are widely available in English.

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) was an American folklorist, anthropologist, and author during the time of the Harlem Renaissance, which she was a part of. Of Hurston's four novels and more than 50 published short stories, plays, and essays, she is best known for her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, a novel about the life of an African-American woman in her forties named Janie Crawford.

Set in central and southern Florida in the early 20th century, the novel garnered attention and controversy at the time of its publication, and has come to be regarded as a seminal work in both African American literature and women's literature. Her works are widely available in English.

Anais Nin (1903-1977) was born in Paris and aspired at an early age to be a writer. An influential artist and thinker, she wrote primarily fiction until 1964, when her last novel, Collages, was published. She wrote "The House of Incest", a prose-poem (1936), three novellas collected in The Winter of Artifice (1939), short stories collected in Under a Glass Bell (1944), and a five-volume continuous novel consisting of Ladders to Fire (1946), Children of the Albatross (1947), The Four-Chambered Heart (1950), A Spy in the House of Love (1954), and Seduction of the Minotaur (1961). These novels were collected as Cities of the Interior (1974).

She gained commercial and critical success with the publication of the first volume of her diary (1966); to date, fifteen diary volumes have been published. Besides shedding light on her own life, as a female author describing a primarily masculine constellation of celebrities, Nin's journals have acquired importance as a counterbalancing perspective.

Her most commercially successful books were her erotica published as Delta of Venus (1977) and Little Birds (1979). She was the first woman to explore fully the realm of erotic writing, and certainly the first prominent woman in the modern West to write erotica. Before her, erotica written by women was rare, with a few notable exceptions, such as the work of Kate Chopin.

The explosion of the feminist movement in the 1960s gave feminist perspectives on Nin's writings of the past twenty years, which made Nin a popular lecturer at various universities; however, Nin disassociated herself from the political activism of the movement. Her works are widely available in English.

Fumiko Enchi (Enchi Fumiko, 2 October 1905 – 12 November 1986) was the pen-name of Fumi Ueda, one of the most prominent Japanese women writers in the Shōwa period of Japan. In 1945 Enchi's home and all her possessions burned during an air raid towards the end of the Pacific War, and for several years immediately after the war she struggled with uterine cancer and surgical complications. She had two major operations, a mastectomy in 1938 and a hysterectomy in 1946.

In 1953, her novel Himojii Tsukihi ("Days of Hunger") was received favorably and the following year she won an award from the Society of Women Writers. Her novel is a violent, harrowing tale of family misfortune and physical and emotional deprivation. Her next novel was also highly praised: Onna zaka ("The Waiting Years", 1949–1957) won the Noma Literary Prize. It analyzes the plight of women who have no alternative but to accept the demeaning role assigned to them in the concubine system.

From the 1950s onward, she became quite successful, and wrote numerous novels and short stories exploring female psychology and sexuality. She was awarded the Order of Culture by the Japanese government in 1985. Some of her works are widely available in English.

Eudora Welty (1909-2001) was an American author of short stories and novels about the American South. Her novel The Optimist's Daughter (about a woman named Laurel Hand who travels to New Orleans from her home in Chicago to assist her aging father) won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. Welty was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, among numerous awards. She was the first living author to have her works published by the Library of America. Her works are widely available in English.

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) was an American poet and short-story writer. She was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1949 to 1950, a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1956 and a National Book Award Winner for Poetry in 1970. Elizabeth Bishop House is an artists' retreat in Great Village, Nova Scotia dedicated to her memory.

She is considered one of the most important and distinguished American poets of the 20th century. She was a lesbian and considered herself to be a “strong feminist.” Her works are widely available in English.

Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964) was an American novelist, short-story writer and essayist. An important voice in American literature, O'Connor wrote two novels and 32 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries.

She was a Southern writer who often wrote in a Southern Gothic style and relied heavily on regional settings and grotesque characters. O'Connor's writing also reflected her own Roman Catholic faith, and frequently examined questions of morality and ethics.

Her two novels were Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960). She also published two books of short stories: A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (published posthumously in 1965). She had lupus throughout her life and eventually died of it. Her works are widely available in English.

Anne Sexton (1928-1974) was an American poet, known for her highly personal, confessional verse. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967 for her book Live or Die. The book’s poems, written between 1962 and 1966, are arranged in the book in chronological order. Their subjects are Sexton's troubled relationships with her mother and her daughters, and her treatment for mental illness. Themes of her poetry in general include her suicidal tendencies, long battle against depression and various intimate details from her private life, including her relationships with her husband and children.

Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. Born in Massachusetts, she studied at Smith College and Newnham College, Cambridge before receiving acclaim as a professional poet and writer. She married fellow poet Ted Hughes in 1956 and they lived together first in the United States and then England, having two children together: Frieda and Nicholas. Following a long struggle with depression and a marital separation, Plath committed suicide in 1963.

Plath is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for her two published collections: The Colossus and Other Poems and Ariel. In the 1965 edition of Ariel, Ted Hughes changed Plath's chosen selection and arrangement by dropping twelve poems, adding twelve composed a few months later, and shifting the poems' ordering, in addition to including an introduction by Robert Lowell.In 2004 a new edition of Ariel was published which for the first time restored the selection and arrangement of the poems as Plath had left them; the 2004 edition also features a foreword by Plath and Hughes' daughter Frieda Hughes.

In 1982, Plath became the first poet to win a Pulitzer Prize posthumously, for The Collected Poems. She also wrote The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her death. Her works are widely available in English.

Toni Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford in 1931. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970, about a year in the life of a young black girl, named Pecola, in Lorain, Ohio, against the backdrop of America's Midwest as well as in the years following the Great Depression), received mixed reviews, didn't sell well, and was out of print by 1974. Critical recognition and praise for Toni Morrison grew, however, with each novel.

She received the National Book Critics Circle Award for her third novel Song of Solomon (1977) and the Pulitzer prize for Beloved (1987, about Sethe, a runaway slave who kills her daughter and tries to kill her other three children when a posse arrives in Ohio to return them to Sweet Home, the plantation in Kentucky from which Sethe had recently fled. The daughter, Beloved, returns years later to haunt the house in which she was killed, Sethe's home.) Morrison received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 for, in the words of the Swedish Academy, her "visionary force and poetic import" which give "life to an essential aspect of American reality." Her works are widely available in English.

Alice Munro (born 1931) is a Canadian short-story writer, the winner of the 2009 Man Booker International Prize for her lifetime body of work, a three-time winner of Canada's Governor General's Award for fiction, and a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize. Generally regarded as one of the world's foremost writers of fiction, Munro writes about the human condition and relationships seen through the lens of daily life. She won the Governor’s General Award for Dance of the Happy Shades, Who Do You Think You Are? (1978), and The Progress of Love (1986). Her works are widely available in English.

Diane DiPrima (born 1934) is an American poet of the Beat Generation. Her major work is the long poem Loba (meaning She-wolf in Spanish), first published in 1978, with an enlarged edition in 1998.The poem is a quest for the reintegration of the feminine, and is considered by some critics as the female counterpart to Allen Ginsberg’s famous Beat poem Howl.

For other women of the Beat Generation (sadly it was rather patriarchal) see A Different Beat: Writing by Women of the Beat Generation, edited by Richard Peabody. DiPrima herself was one of the few women in the Beat inner circle. Her works are widely available in English.

Bessie Emery Head (July 6, 1937 - April 17, 1986) is usually considered Botswana's most influential writer. She was born in South Africa, the child of a wealthy white South African woman and a black servant when interracial relationships were illegal in South Africa. It was claimed that her mother was mentally ill so that she could be sent to a quiet location to then give birth to Bessie without the neighbors knowing. However, the exact circumstances are disputed. In any case, she moved to Botswana in 1964.

One of her best works is When Rain Clouds Gather,where she writes about a troubled young man called Makhaya who runs away from his birth place, South Africa, to become a refugee in a little village called Golema Mmidi, in the heart of Botswana. Her work emphasises the value of ordinary life and humble people. It is widely available in English.

Margaret Atwood (born 1939) is a critic, essayist, and environmental activist. She is among the most-honored authors of fiction in recent history; she is a winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and Prince of Asturias award for Literature, has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times, winning once, and has been a finalist for the Governor General's Award seven times, winning twice. Atwood portrays female characters dominated by patriarchy in her novels, particularly in The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) , a novel about a patriarchal future; she is often considered a seminal feminist writer. Her works are widely available in English.

Happy New Year!

2011-12-31T19:52:00.000-05:00

May good things precede you, follow you and walk beside you.

Just made that one up. It's like my sometimes-wish for people who give me money (such erudite and fantastic individuals!) to be protected by snakes in that it might not be what the recipient actually wants.

What I tried to say there is that you should be able to enter a world which is fair, sustainable and at peace (precedes you), you should be able to leave it even better with your own deeds (follow you) and you should have the most astonishingly wonderful time while doing it all (walk beside you).

What Mitt Pays in Taxes

2011-12-31T14:14:00.001-05:00

Mitt Romney is the Republican presidential contender whom the Powers-That-Be want. They want him to win the primaries because the other Republican candidates are mostly weird (so weird that I haven't had much heart to write about their weirdness) and have little chance of beating Obama. Then, of course, both Romney and Obama would be good corporation boyz.

A website supposedly tells us how much less Mitt Romney pays in taxes. I say "supposedly" because I have not checked if Romney indeed gets most of his income from sources which are taxed at as little as 15%. Still, it's quite correct that income from capital is taxed at lower rates, in general, than income from labor. Put that in your Marxist pipe and smoke it!

Childhood Obesity? Partly The Fault of Bad Mothering, Of Course

2011-12-30T07:43:00.004-05:00

A new study found this to be the case. Honest! But more about that later in this post. First, let's look at a few summaries of the findings:

Raw Story reported* it like this:

According to a new study in the January issue of Pediatrics, children who struggle to connect happily with their mothers are more likely to be obese by their teen years.
Ohio State University conducted the research, using almost a thousand kids born in 1991 to measure how mothers interacted with their children during various stages of childhood. Researchers studied whether children felt safe with and attached to their families.
The study found that 26.1 percent of children who reported troubled relationships with their mothers were also obese at age 15, a rate double that of children who reported close relationships to their mothers.

CNN blogs reported it like this:

The mother-child relationship has always carried a lot of weight. Now researchers say some obese teens might be in essence, carrying the weight of their relationship with their mothers when they were younger.
A new study published in this week's edition of Pediatrics finds the type of relationship a mother has with her young child could affect that little one's chances of becoming obese as a teen.

And the New York Daily News like this:

A bad relationship with your mother can do more than leave emotional scars — it can also increase your waistline.
A new study in the January issue of Pediatrics found that children who did not have close emotional bonds with their mothers during childhood were significantly more likely to be obese as teenagers.

After those three summaries I'm sure you are ready for the necessary corollary. This one:

Anderson was quick to note that the findings should not be used to blame mothers, but should be seen as an opportunity to intervene in mother-child relationships while children are still young.

The findings should not be used to blame mothers! What a relief! For a while there I thought that this is exactly what is happening.

For something this important I had to get hold of the actual study. Which I now have read**. But before commenting on it, let's ask what the starting point of a study like this might be.

Did the researchers go out to test both fathers and mothers, for instance, to find out what the impact of both fathers and mothers might be on a child's obesity?

Can you guess the answer to that one? Yup, they only tested mothers, not fathers. So we know nothing about any possible impact the father's bad parenting skills might have on a child's later obesity, simply because fathers were not studied.

And why were fathers not studied? Because the researchers wanted to study the behavior of the main caregiver to the child! But notice the way those summaries of the study were about mothers, not about the major caregivers? That's because the study used the term "mother," not the term "caregiver."

That's a minor slippage, you might argue, because mothers usually are the major intimate caregivers to their children. But it is slippage, nevertheless, because using the term "mothers" makes us think of the family relationship between a woman and her children, not about the care-giving situation.

One final comment before I dive into the study itself: Note how negatively those summaries are framed. They essentially tell us that bad mothering produces fat children. Why not re-frame those findings by saying that good mothering protects against childhood obesity?

I think the reason for that comes from the assumption that all mothers should be perfect. If they are not, their children suffer and the mothers should shape up. Or have suitable interventions, as one of the study authors proposed.

Now to the study itself: The first question I wanted to have answered is an obvious one:

Did the findings control for socio-economic factors, especially income? This is an important variable to control for because poverty could explain both problems within the mother-child relationship AND childhood obesity. Note that this theory does not require the causality to go from bad mothering to obesity, necessarily, but argues that both could be due to the stress and limitations that low family income create.

It turns out that the results mentioned in those summaries are based on data without any control for income and other relevant factors. They are raw comparisons, if you wish. For proper comparisons, I quote from the study itself:

The prevalence of obesity in adolescence was 26.1% among children who experienced poor early maternal–child relationships (score: greater than or equal to 3) and was 15.5%, 12.1%, and 13.0% for children with better relationships (scores of 2, 1, and 0, respectively) (upper section of Table 4). After adjustment for gender and birth weight (model 2), the odds (95% CI) of adolescent obesity were 2.45 (1.49–4.04) times higher for those with the poorest relationships (score: greater than or equal to 3) compared with those with the best relationships (score: 0). With additional adjustment for race/ethnicity, maternal education, and household income-to-poverty line ratio, the OR (95% CI) was attenuated to 1.56 (0.90– 2.73), and with inclusion of maternal obesity to 1.42 (0.76–2.63). Low maternal sensitivity was more strongly related to adolescent obesity than was insecure attachment (lower section of Table 4).

That's the statistical gobbledegook. Note that those numbers are created to compare the "worst" group with the "best" group, in terms of mothering. Which is pretty much the expected thing, given that the standard for mothering is perfection.

Then note that the numbers discussed in that quote are essentially how many times more likely obesity is among the children of the "worst" mothers as opposed to among the children of the "best" mothers in the sample the researchers used. If the likelihood of obesity for the child of a "good" mother is the number x, then the quoted material tells us that the child of a "bad" mother (in that sample) has the likelihood of obesity 2.45x, or more than twice as much, assuming that only the child's sex and birth weight are held constant in the comparisons.

But if we also control for the socio-economic and demographic factors, the likelihood of obesity for the "bad" mother's child drops to 1.56x, and if we also control for the mother's own obesity, that number drops to 1.42x. Remember that 1x would mean equal odds of obesity for the children of the "best" and "worst" mothers.

If you have read my statistic series (available on the site listed at the top of this blog's front page) or are otherwise familiar with statistics, you may already have gotten an AHAH! experience from looking at those confidence intervals in the quoted material.

A confidence interval is an interval estimate, a range of values within which we believe the true value in the population to lie, with some confidence. The study values come from a sample. How well the findings of that sample apply to the general population is reflected in that interval estimate.

Let's take the income-controlled results for closer scrutiny here: The sample finding, the value that I have already cited, states that after controlling for the socio-economic variables the child of a "bad" mother is 1.56 times more likely to become obese than the child of a "good" mother. But the interval estimate on that same figure ranges from 0.90 to 2.73. Note something funny about that interval?

It covers the value one which would be the point at which the children of "bad" and "good" mothers would have an equal chance of producing an obese child. In other words, the results do not rule out the possibility that after controlling for the socio-economic factors the likelihood of obesity might not, in fact, be higher among the children of the so-called "bad mothers."

Indeed, one table in the study (Table 4) shows something quite interesting:

It compares all the ranked classes of mothering skills with the "best" skills used as the reference point. When the other three classes are compared to the "best" class, the confidence intervals for all three comparisons cover the value one if the research controls for the child's gender, birth weight, the socio-economic factors and the mother's own obesity. Remember that the value one is the referent value, applied to the "best" mothering class.

What does all this mean? Suppose that you read a poll result where Jane Smith is predicted to win some election by 5%, with a margin of error of plus/minus 7%. If those numbers use the 95% confidence interval, then the poll tells us that Jane Smith might win by as much as 5%+7%, or 12%. Or she might lose by as much as 5%-7% or -2%. The confidence interval overlaps the point where victory turns into loss.

Which isn't extremely comforting if you root for Jane Smith. Well, the findings of this study are like that, with proper controls. Nowhere near as strong as the popularized summaries suggest.
----
*This summary has an error. The children did not do any reporting themselves. The measures the study used were collected when the children were quite small and were based not on reporting but on observations of mothers with their children either at home or in a laboratory.
**It cost me twelve dollars to acquire. The donation button is in the right upper corner of my blog. Mmm.

Thanks to NTodd for the initial link to this study.

Today's Embroidery Repost

2011-12-29T15:29:00.000-05:00

I really like this one:

It's called The Monster, but whether you are the monster or the fairy/angel depends on the day, as does the question whether the fairy/angel is being sucked in or manages to get away.

For the technique-minded, the work is a combination of embroidery, reverse applique and applique.

Ruminations on Merit

2011-12-29T14:29:00.000-05:00

This dark week at the brink of time is for rumination. So I have decided. I don't have to put in hooks on my fishing rod to catch you, my sweet readers. I can just write about anything I wish! Mostly because people are busy doing other stuff, sigh.

So it's going to be about the concept of "merit," the way the conservatives use it to argue that the rich deserve their wealth because they have a) unusual talents of the super-star kind and b) because they work, whereas the rest of us just suck on the many teats of the evil government sow.

It is an appealing philosophy of life. A comforting one, if you count among the winners. Because you have earned it, both by being special, and also for having worked so hard. You Have Merit. Life Rewards Merit. God Rewards Merit.

The backside of that philosophy is the troubling kind. It means that if you are not rich you do not have special talents and you did not work hard. So that rules out Jesus, for instance, from the group of the deserving few. But it also means that the successful people don't have to feel empathy towards the losers in this life. The losers deserved to lose. The winners deserved to win.

Now take this basic framework to the conservative policies. How does one use this to justify no "death taxes?" The demand that large inheritances should not be taxed at all? The recipients don't have to prove that they have special rare talents and neither do they have to prove many years of hard toil. They get the money even if they are total slobs with one brain molecule.

And of course one can get quite rich by winning the lottery or by marrying someone with money or by robbing, oh, say, the financial market. Are we going to redefine "merit" to include the ability to do those kinds of things, too?

Which brings me to the question of how one does define "merit." It's not always an easy thing to spot, because many define it pretty subjectively, as in "I have merit, you do not." But more seriously, "merit" is meaningless if it is determined by a hundred-meter dash where some people have their legs cuffed together, some people arrive at the starting line after a ten mile run to get there and some people are told to run in the opposite direction from the finish line.

That was a parable about the many unfairnesses the society brings to us. They serve to stifle potential merit in many and to nurture even small merit in others.

It's still true that the society does reward merit, sometimes, and that trying to work hard and to use your talents is a very good thing. But not being among the "winners" does not mean that you don't have merit, that you did not work hard, and being among the "winners" does not mean that you have merit or that you worked hard.

The mythology of "Merit Always Gets Its Rewards" is strengthened by those stories of individuals who started out poor and destitute, then worked very hard and now are billionaires or famous dead presidents or whatever. The problem with this mythology is that it begins from one end (the billionaire or the dead president end) and then works backwards. It doesn't begin from the other end. If it did, we might hear of all the millions of people who had great talent and worked hard and got exactly nowhere.

Ladies, Meet The Republican Presidential Candidates

2011-12-28T14:52:00.001-05:00

Michelle Goldberg introduces four of them to you:

Last night, four GOP candidates—Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry—took part in a “tele-town hall” sponsored by Personhood USA, which was broadcast on the radio program of Steve Deace, an influential Iowa evangelical. The event demonstrated that a commitment to banning all abortion, even in cases of rape, incest, and threats to a woman’s health, is now the normative position among the party’s presidential contenders.

It's like the rapist's fatherhood rights initiative!

Most attention was paid to Rick Perry's recent change of opinion. He's now ready to ban abortion for pregnant rape victims because of this:

Perry told the crowd at his campaign stop that the decision came after watching a documentary on abortion produced by former Arkansas governor and 2008 presidential candidate Mike Huckabee.
“That transformation was after watching the DVD, ‘The Gift of Life,’” Perry said. “And I really started giving some thought about the issue of rape and incest. And some powerful, some powerful stories in that DVD.”
Perry said a woman who appeared in the movie who said she was a product of rape moved him to change his mind about abortion.
“She said, ‘My life has worth.’ It was a powerful moment for me,” Perry said.

And of course her life has worth. But the mistake Perry makes here is the common one of confusing actual real people with potential people.

To give you an extreme example, suppose that we could ask a disembodied spirit waiting for reincarnation how it feels about not finding a suitable merging of an egg and a sperm, about having to hover and wait in that emptiness, perhaps right next to you when you had sex with a condom. What do you think it would argue?

Probably that everyone should have unprotected sex as much as possible so that it could reincarnate and get started with a life that has worth.

If you think that example has all sorts of problems, then you are in good company, because I find the forced-birthers' definition of when human personhood begins equally full of problems. Yet I must take their arguments seriously, whereas my arguments nobody takes seriously. So it goes.

Riley on Marketing The Pink

2011-12-28T13:53:00.000-05:00

This video talks about the pink toys for girls. I can't quite get everything the little girl says but her overall point is extremely valid.

I spent some time recently in places where young children congregate. The girls, in particular, look like a uniformed army, from distance, because they all wear pink and faded purple. The boys have a little more variety, as long as they avoid those two colors. And these are three-year old children!

The whole pink thing has become a monster. It wasn't this bad earlier. But walk into a toy store and you can tell where the girls are supposed to go by the Pepto-Bismol color.

I've written about the color pink and gender earlier, about the strong need children have to determine their gender group at a certain age, about how the advertisers ultimately decide what determines it and so on. But right now I'm just flabbergasted by the ubiquity of One Single Color in the girls' toys. It's sickening. Put "girls' toys" into Google images search and look at the page. Then grab the Pepto-Bismol.

A Rose By Any Other Name Would Smell As Sweet

2011-12-27T17:22:00.000-05:00

Now here's an interesting take on the question whether a divorced woman should be allowed to keep her ex-husband's last name. It's not her name but his name! He only lent it out for the duration of the marriage!

Set this against the background of the still-dominant tradition that women should relinquish their last names at marriage and you come to a very odd conclusion where a woman's last name is something that should change back and forth, depending on what man defines her family membership. When a marriage ends she goes back to her father's name. When she re-marries she takes the name of the new husband. Should she get divorced again, back to the father's name! A yo-yo name!

Come to think of it, the conclusion isn't at all odd, given what happens in reality. But it's nice to see all that about the name being "his" spelled out. Because now a woman considering "taking his name" at marriage might realize that at least one man thinks the name is only out on loan.

You Gotta Have Skin In The Game

2011-12-27T16:47:00.001-05:00

I was going to write about this article where some in the 1% make an empire-strikes-back statement but Matt Taibbi did the work for me.

Here is the initial "you gotta have skin in the game" statement:

Asked if he were willing to pay more taxes in a Nov. 30 interview with Bloomberg Television, Blackstone Group LP (BX) CEO Stephen Schwarzman spoke about lower-income U.S. families who pay no income tax.
“You have to have skin in the game,” said Schwarzman, 64. “I’m not saying how much people should do. But we should all be part of the system.”
Some of Schwarzman’s capital gains at Blackstone, the world’s largest private-equity firm, are taxed at 15 percent, not the 35 percent top marginal income-tax rate. Attacking the banking system is a mistake because it contributes to “a healthier economy,” he said in the interview.

Mmm. I have come across that "skin in the game" thingy all over the net, recently, and it annoys me greatly, for the reasons Taibbi gives:

But it seems to me that if you’re broke enough that you’re not paying any income tax, you’ve got nothing but skin in the game. You've got it all riding on how well America works.
You can’t afford private security: you need to depend on the police. You can’t afford private health care: Medicare is all you have. You get arrested, you’re not hiring Davis, Polk to get you out of jail: you rely on a public defender to negotiate a court system you'd better pray deals with everyone from the same deck. And you can’t hire landscapers to manicure your lawn and trim your trees: you need the garbage man to come on time and you need the city to patch the potholes in your street.
And in the bigger picture, of course, you need the state and the private sector both to be functioning well enough to provide you with regular work, and a safe place to raise your children, and clean water and clean air.

Taibbi then goes on to point out that people like Schwartzman are not really part of the same system. If you are rich enough you don't need Medicare, the police (you hire your own security) and you certainly don't need Medicaid. Ideally, the very rich don't need a government, except as military protection and a legal system which keeps their wealth safe.

You Reap What You Sow

2011-12-26T19:53:00.000-05:00

Remember that we must all now tighten our belts? That austerity policies are the new panacea for an economic depression? Why a further suppression of consumer demand is seen as a cure for a problem of insufficient consumer demand beats me. But whatever the advisability of austerity in this already-austere climate, its effects will fall most painfully on the frailest among us.

When state governments cut, cut and cut their budgets, someone will bleed, as this example demonstrates:
The National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors (NASMHPD), an organization of state mental health directors, estimates that in the last three years states have cut $3.4 billion in mental health services, while an additional 400,000 people sought help at public mental health facilities.
In that same time frame, demand for community-based services climbed 56 percent, and demand for emergency room, state hospital and emergency psychiatric care climbed 18 percent, the organization said.
"This wasn't one round of cuts," says Ted Lutterman, director of research analysis at NASMHPD Research Institute. "It was three or four for many states, and multiple cuts during the year."
If the economy doesn't improve, next year could be worse because many community mental health agencies are cutting programs and using up reserve funds, says Linda Rosenberg, president of the National Council for Community Behavioral Healthcare.
"It's been horrible," she said. "Those that need it the most - the unemployed, those with tremendous family stress - have no insurance."
In the emergency room, this increased demand has meant doctors and social workers are spending hours and sometimes days trying to arrange care for psychiatric patients languishing in the emergency department, taking up beds that could be used for traditional types of trauma.
More than 70 percent of emergency department administrators said they have kept patients waiting in the emergency department for 24 hours, according to a 2010 survey of 600 hospital emergency department administrators by the Schumacher Group, which manages emergency departments across the country.

The title of this post is all wrong. It's not the people who sow the austerity politics who do the hardest reaping. And that's the reason why they keep advocating such policies.

New York Times. I'm Pointing The Finger At You.

2011-12-26T14:22:00.000-05:00

I'm very annoyed by the kind of articles, quite common in the so-called women's sections, where the writing seems to have gone like this:

1. I have a plot idea! We are going to say that all women now wear false eye-lashes.
2. I'm going to find some data that seems to back up my argument that this is a trend. Anything will suffice! If the sale of false eye-lashes has doubled in Dinkytown (from two pairs to four pairs, say), then I have data for a trend!
3. But most of the piece will be interviews with women who wear false eye-lashes now and how that is a statement of feminist intention and something that they really want to do. (These are real women, probably, telling their stories. The crime is that the stories are used as evidence to prop up the idea of a trend, even though anecdotes can be found on almost any behavior if one searches.)

What's wrong with this? Other than turning the whole idea of how one does research upside-down? Other than selectively finding ONLY those people who agree with your views and not the ones who disagree with your views? Other than being bad with data games?

The frequency of these pseudo-trends is often about women's behavior. As if it doesn't really matter whether one get something like that right or not. Who cares if women are misinformed and pressured into silly choices?

I have never quite understood why the New York Times loves this particular kind of bad journalism when it comes to women. They don't do it with health reporting which is quite excellent. They don't do it with most of science reporting (unless it is about gender), and at least some of their stories on general politics are not like that.

This is the piece which provoked my rant. But the Times has published several similar pseudo-trend pieces in the past and I have written about them. And let's not forget the horrible piece on the rape of an eleven-year-old girl.

On Christmas Day

2011-12-25T14:14:00.000-05:00

This is a translation (one of many) of a fragment from a Gnostic prayer or poem found at Nag Hammadi in 1945. It may depict the divine feminine. I like it because it reaches past the thinking part of the brain.

Posting it today seems appropriate, in that scales-balancing sense.

The Thunder, Perfect Mind

I was sent forth from the power,
and I have come to those who reflect upon me,
and I have been found among those who seek
after me.
Look upon me, you who reflect upon me,
and you hearers, hear me.
You who are waiting for me, take me to yourselves.
And do not banish me from your sight.
And do not make your voice hate me, not your
hearing.
Do not be ignorant of me anywhere or any time.
Be on your guard!
Do not be ignorant of me.

For I am the first and the last.
I am the honored one and the scorned one.
I am the whore and the holy one.

I am the wife and the virgin.
I am the mother and the daughter.
I am the members of my mother.
I am the barren one
and many are her sons.
I am she whose wedding is great,
and I have not taken a husband.
I am the midwife and she who does not bear.
I am the solace of my labor pains.
I am the bride and the bridegroom,
and it is my husband who begot me.
I am the mother of my father
and the sister of my husband,
and he is my offspring.
I am the slave of him who prepared me.

I am the ruler of my offspring.
But he is the one who begot me before the time
on a birthday.
And he is my offspring in due time,
and my power is from him.
I am the staff of his power in his youth,
and he is the rod of my old age.
And whatever he wills happens to me.
I am the silence that is incomprehensible
and the idea whose remembrance is frequent.
I am the voice whose sound is manifold
and the word whose appearance is multiple.
I am the utterance of my name.

I am the knowledge of my inquiry,
and the finding of those who seek after me,
and the command of those who ask of me,
and the power of the powers in my knowledge
of the angels, who have been sent at my word,
and of gods in their seasons by my counsel,
and of spirits of every man who exists with me,
and of women who dwell within me.
I am the one who is honored, and who is praised,
and who is despised scornfully.
I am peace,
and war has come because of me.
And I am an alien and a citizen.
I am the substance and the one who has no substance.

Marketing Bradley Manning (by Suzie)

2011-12-24T13:24:00.001-05:00

Bradley Manning needs to be a hero so that Julian Assange can be a hero.

Assange and his supporters have marketed Manning as a courageous man with deep political convictions who acted on his own to expose government wrongdoing. They have brushed aside stories of his troubled life as irrelevant distractions.

If Manning more closely resembles guys who shoot up their schools or workplaces, and Assange gave him the weapons to do so, Assange might not seem so heroic.

That was the impression I got from lead defense attorney David Coombs during this week's hearing to see if the charges against Manning merit a court martial.

Manning was described as impulsive, angry and alienated from his work and workmates. He worried about his manhood, and he had joined the Army in hopes it would make him more masculine. (I wonder if he would pass Assange's "masculinity test.") Instead, he envisioned himself as a woman, Breanna, online. He told a superior that he had gender identity disorder, and fellow soldiers knew he was gay. He had a few violent outbursts. His superiors considered him mentally unstable, but neither helped nor discharged him, even though he worked in a facility with lax security.

Manning didn't kill anyone, of course. But he did release thousands of government documents without knowing whether they would harm innocents or not. Horrified by how the U.S. wages war, he did little to bolster diplomacy. I'm glad for whatever good has come from his actions, but he's no hero to me.

Assange, under investigation by a U.S. grand jury, has claimed no known contact with or influence over Manning. But prosecutors presented evidence, hoping to prove Assange encouraged and helped Manning. At the time, the WikiLeaks site emphasized that leakers would be protected.

The Guardian has a good summary of the hearing.

Why I like spoilers (by Suzie)

2011-12-22T23:14:00.003-05:00

I never read "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" or saw the Swedish film, nor do I plan to see the remake, which opened Tuesday. I have spoilers to thank for that. Stop now if you know nothing about the movie and want to keep it that way, or if reading about rape triggers PTSD.

I may see a movie in which viewers know that horrible violence has occurred off screen. But I'm not interested in extended scenes of men torturing and raping girls or women. The problem is, most movie critics are men, and the female critics often play by the same rules. They don't want to spoil the surprise for moviegoers by describing how stomach-turning the violence is. But that is a surprise I do not want.

Sometimes critics mention that a movie contains violence. But is it a guy getting shot and fake blood splattering everywhere or is it a sex crime? Some violence bothers me more than others. Sometimes critics use words like sex, explicit, sordid, lurid, etc. But does that mean two people have consensual sex in some way that others would frown upon? Or, is it rape?

I've written before about "Last Tango in Paris," which I always thought involved consensual sex until I read how the rape traumatized actress Maria Schneider. I've also discussed torture in movies before.

Now I look for reviews or plot summaries that spell out what's going to happen so that I can make an informed choice. After plowing through reviews, I discovered that "Dragon Tattoo" has an extended scene of anal rape. A.O. Scott in the NYT writes:

Sexual violence is a lurid thread running through “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” and [director David] Fincher approaches it with queasy, teasing sensationalism. Lisbeth’s dealings with Bjurman include a vicious rape and a correspondingly brutal act of revenge, and there is something prurient and salacious about the way the initial assault is filmed. The vengeance, while graphic, is visually more circumspect.

And when Mikael and Lisbeth interrupt their sleuthing for a bit of nonviolent sex, we see all of [Rooney] Mara and quite a bit less of [Daniel] Craig ... This disparity is perfectly conventional — the exploitation of female nudity is an axiom of modern cinema — but it also represents a failure of nerve and a betrayal of the sexual egalitarianism Lisbeth Salander argues for and represents.

We can always count on Andrew O'Hehir of Salon writing as if women never saw movies. He was the only critic I could find who seemed more disturbed by the revenge.

I've come to the conclusion that the graphic torture, rape and murder of women does not improve movies, even when acclaimed filmmakers swear the scenes are indispensable. Because hurting women has become such an enormous part of the billion-dollar porn industry, I have no desire to give money to anyone who adds to the repertoire.

Is the message of "Dragon Tattoo" so profound that it's worth sitting through torture porn? I don't think so, judging from Dana Stevens' review in Slate.

The moral outrage at the center of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo—the systematic rape and slaughter of pretty young girls? We’re agin it!—feels facile and inessential.

Like Maria Schneider in "Last Tango," Mara was a little-known actress before being cast by an acclaimed director, who wanted a woman who looked younger, weaker and more vulnerable than the one in the Swedish film. Like Schneider, Mara has described herself as looking like a child, and she starved herself to look anorexic. Like Schneider in her initial interviews, Mara hasn't indicated the rape scene bothered her in any way other than the physical. I hope she proves stronger than Schneider. She also may want to talk to Jodie Foster about what it's like to know that countless men are getting off to scenes of you being raped.

Mara says she doesn't identify as a feminist. From a Daily Beast interview with Mara and Fincher that I linked above:

She almost sputters when I ask her whether this is a feminist book.

“I think maybe the feminists see it that way,” she says. “I don’t know what Larsson’s intentions were. But I don’t think Salander does anything in the name of any group or cause or belief. She is certainly not a feminist. That’s like ... that’s just ... almost ...”

“Too easy,” Fincher offers.

“Yeah,” she agrees.

They seem unaware that feminists don't always work in covens. Some are solitary practitioners. Is imagining Lisbeth as a feminist too easy because feminists regularly take violent revenge on men?

Too bad Ellen Page didn't get the role.

Author Stieg Larsson, now deceased, considered himself a feminist and the book to be feminist. Its Swedish title translates into "Men Who Hate Women." Eva Gabrielsson, his longtime partner and, possibly, his uncredited coauthor, responded to Mara's statement on feminism.

“Does she know what film she has been in? Has she read the books?" ... Lisbeth doesn’t fit neatly into any category, “but she is still part of a movement,” Gabrielsson said. “Her entire being represents a resistance, an active resistance to the mechanisms that mean women don’t advance in this world and in worst case scenarios are abused like she was.”

Larsson's friend Kurdo Baksi wrote a memoir on him, and explained why Larsson felt compelled to write his book:

Three of his friends assaulted a 15-year-old girl as Larsson, also 15, watched.

"Her screams were heartrending, but he didn't intervene," writes Baksi in his book. "His loyalty to his friends was too strong. He was too young, too insecure. It was inevitable that he would realize afterwards that he could have acted and possibly prevented the rape."

The girl's name was Lisbeth. Afterward, Larsson called, but she wouldn't accept his apology. The rape haunted him, and Baksi said he's trying to find the identities of the rapists so that he can avenge his friend. (And get justice for the original Lisbeth, I hope.)

ETA: Mikael, the investigative journalist in the book and movies, is assumed to be based on Larsson. Mikael ends up having a sexual relationship with the character Lisbeth. Mental-health professionals, start your engines.

Grooming (by Suzie)

2011-12-21T22:42:00.002-05:00

No, this post won't have tips on how to style your hair for holiday parties. Instead, I want to examine how "grooming" describes the behavior of sexual predators.

Last week, the St. Pete Times headlined a story: "Like Jerry Sandusky, Pinellas doctor accused of 'grooming' boy for sex." The story explains how sexual predators often groom their victims in a similar way: They look for vulnerable youth. They shower them with gifts. They take them to places where they can be alone. Touching starts out benign but becomes sexual over time. They assure the kids that what they're doing is OK.

Basically, these men are treating boys like women. The difference is that, with women, it's called seduction and is generally seen as normal and often romantic.

Some men look for a woman who is drunk, sad, lonely or vulnerable in some other way. Many others consider themselves good guys who would never take advantage of a woman, but nevertheless, find vulnerable women attractive. In professional photography, for example, women are often posed in vulnerable positions that would be laughable for a man. Some movie critics have praised the actress in the remake of "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" for exuding more vulnerability. Women can be strong -- as long as they also are vulnerable.

I look forward to January, when there will be fewer TV ads suggesting that men buy women's affections with jewelry. Some men gripe that they are expected to spend money on women with whom they want sex, but women didn't invent this tradition. This stems from the days when women had to choose a good provider since society greatly limited their own ability to make money, and even earlier, when fathers married off their daughters for money, status, another cow, whatever.

If a boy drives a girl to a deserted area, she may acquiesce to physical pressure, lest she get dumped there. A woman taken on a fancy trip may feel pressured to put out even if she finds she isn't as interested as she thought.

Some men keep pushing physical boundaries to see what the woman will allow. Some men persuade women to do certain sex acts, even if the woman doesn't seem to want or enjoy them. Women may do this, too, but the difference is that many men see this as their normal and natural role.

Men having sex with underage boys is rape, and the general public assumes boys don't want to have sex with men, especially older ones. In comment sections, you rarely see the boys described as ... oh, wait, there is no male equivalent for "Lolita," "slut," "trash," etc. Among their peers, however, they may be accused of being gay. After all, it's a great insult for a male to be put in the position of a female.

When men use the same grooming tactics on underage girls, people don't seem to see it as so perverse. In comment sections, you can expect readers to insist the sex was consensual. After all, if the girl were only a few years older, the behavior would be normal.

Pedophiles don't need to make up a playbook for grooming children. They just need to use the same tactics that some men have used on women for years. Sexual predation exists on a spectrum, and it starts with what society considers normal behavior.

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P.S. The publicity around the Sandusky case seems to be encouraging more victims of childhood sexual abuse to go public.

On the Nevada Prenatal People Initiative

2011-12-21T15:25:00.007-05:00

A judge in Nevada rewrote an "egg-as-a-person" initiative to make clear what it means. Here is the rewritten initiative:

Instead of the original, Judge Wilson ordered ProLife Nevada to substitute the following text:
“All persons are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights including the right to life. This initiative proposes to add a new section to the Nevada Constitution to protect a prenatal person’s right to life. The new section would make it unlawful to intentionally kill a prenatal person by any means. The term “prenatal person” includes every human being form the moment an egg is fertilized by a sperm and at all stages of development from that time until birth. The initiative would protect a prenatal person regardless of whether or not the prenatal person would live, grow, or develop in the womb or survive birth; prevent all abortions even in the case of rape, incest, or serious threats to the woman’s health or life, or when a woman is suffering from a miscarriage, or as an emergency treatment for an ectopic pregnancy. The initiative will impact some rights Nevada women currently have to access certain fertility treatments such as in vitro fertilization. The initiative will impact some rights Nevada women currently have to utilize some forms of birth control, including the “pill;” and to access certain fertility treatments such as in vitro fertilization. The initiative will affect embryonic stem cell research, which offers potential for treating diseases such as diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, heart disease, and others.”

This is the first case I've come across where an initiative is required to be clear on all its possible effects. For all I know it could be quite common. A good idea, on the whole.

Life Is Too Short To Stuff A Mushroom

2011-12-21T10:23:00.001-05:00

And to fold a fitted sheet. But if you disagree, here's how to do the latter.

My approach is to wad it into a ball. It will straighten when forced to go over the mattress.
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Link by Deacon

Blog Announcement

2011-12-20T23:19:00.000-05:00

Posting will be sparse for the next three days. Because of that thing called life.

You're Doing It Wrong. On The Reverse Gender Gap.

2011-12-20T16:13:00.001-05:00

A new round of the reverse gender gap arguments! What fun! And just in time for the holidays.

This time it's the Old Gray Lady doing the opinionating:

As the year ends, much of the talk around women — at least in the United States — has moved from empowerment and global gender gaps to the trend of young single women out-earning men and the rise of female breadwinners.
There are so many views and theories out there, some of them driven by independent research and others by personal experience and still others by a chatty blend of both, that we are getting a sometimes confounding, always provocative and occasionally contradictory picture.
For starters, young women today — and not just in the United States — are moving quickly to close the pay gap, or in some cases have closed it already.
They are marrying later and later, or not marrying at all. They no longer need husbands to have children, or want no children (40 percent of births in the United States each year are now to single women).
Women are ahead of men in education (last year, 55 percent of U.S. college graduates were female). And a study shows that in most U.S. cities, single, childless women under 30 are making an average of 8 percent more money than their male counterparts, with Atlanta and Miami in the lead at 20 percent.
Although that study of 2,000 communities was done only in the United States, it points to a global trend.
The emergence of this cohort of high-earning young women and the increasing number of female breadwinners are transforming gender relationships, upending patterns of matchmaking, marriage and motherhood, creating a new conflict between the sexes, redefining the word “breadwinner” and inspiring tracts on the leveling of men’s roles.
It is being called the reverse gender gap.

And then the article quickly goes to the "Oh my god, if women do the work and women do the child rearing, what's left for men to do?" stuff. Which tends to assume that a) women have never done any other work but child rearing in the past and that b) men have never parented at all. Until now. And parenting is yucky and demeaning for men.

But that's not what I want to write about. I want to write about the concepts the "gender gap" and the "reverse gender gap." Because the way that article was set up at the very beginning contains an error of interpretation.

It is this: The proper way to compare the earnings of men and women, to find out if any gender gap (or reverse gender gap) exists, is by trying to compare like with like. This means that good studies hold constant the education level of the individuals, their years of experience, their age, ethnicity, race, marital status and number of small children, the geographic area in which they work (because economic conditions may differ) and so on.

The aim is to compare individuals who are the same in all other relevant characteristics than the one a researcher is looking at. In this case it would be purely gender and nothing else.

So given that background, what are those studies of young men and young women in urban centers failing to do properly? The most important factor is that They. Do. Not. Control. For. Education.

To give you an example of why that matters greatly: Suppose that the average young woman in some imaginary urban center (The Big Banana) has a college degree, and suppose that the average young man in that same imaginary center has a high school diploma. Suppose, finally, that we are able to control for all other differences between that average man and that average woman, except for their gender and their education levels.

If we then find out that the average young woman earns, say, 20% more than the average young man, have we established what the author of the NYT piece calls "a reverse gender gap?"

NO. And the reason is that we don't know how much more a young woman with a college degree earns in the Big Banana than a young woman with just a high school diploma. We also don't know how much more a young man with a college degree earns in the Big Banana than a young man with just a high school diploma. Perhaps that whole 20% is because a college degree pays 20% more than a high school degree?

In that case there would be no reverse gender gap in the properly standardized sense. What those studies would have established is nothing deeper than the fact that education pays. And, of course, that more young women (in urban centers) have college degrees than is the case with young men.

Bear with me because this is important. That the gender gap, not standardized for education, benefits young women does not have to mean that there is no residual gender gap in earnings, the kind of gap which benefits men.

Let's go back the Big Banana and let's properly standardize for everything but gender, including education. Let's THEN compare an average young man with an average young woman, both with, say, college degrees or both with, say, high school diplomas.

What will we learn about the gender gap or the reverse gender gap in this situation?

The studies do not tell us. But here is what I would predict, based on all the other studies I have read in this field: The women with college degrees are likely to earn less than the men with college degrees and the women with high school diplomas are likely to earn less than the men with high school diplomas.

This is what I mean by the gender gap in wages: An actual gap not explained by the other characteristics of the workers, only by gender, and this standardized gender gap is to the detriment of women. You can read more about it in the series found on my website.

The wider problem with the approach the NYT article takes is this:

Looking at what very new workers do gives us a fairly poor prediction of what will happen later. Check out this quote about the study of 2,000 communities:

Here's the slightly deflating caveat: this reverse gender gap, as it's known, applies only to unmarried, childless women under 30 who live in cities. The rest of working women — even those of the same age, but who are married or don't live in a major metropolitan area — are still on the less scenic side of the wage divide.

Bolds are mine.

Now that I read that bit again, I get flabbergasted by the bias in these stories. So we have the majority of women earning less than men, even in that study, and what we discuss is the "reverse gender gap?" Why don't those other women (the majority of women) matter at all?

Is the assumption that the educated young women in urban centers are the harbingers of the future petticoat government?

But men and women don't stay young and single. They get older. Most of them get married and have children. People move from initial positions without much scope to wage differentiation (or discrimination), some are promoted, some are not, some get raises, some do not, some take time off for family reasons, some do not.

And as the above study shows, the old-fashioned raw gender gap emerges then. I see no reason why that would not happen to the current young workers in the future.

There's a strong The-Sky-Is-Falling flavor to these stories about the end of men or the reverse gender gap or the horror of educated women ending up as spinsters with just a cat for company. I have gotten so used to it that I actually had to look at the real numbers to see how biased the debate has become. Take this:

For starters, young women today — and not just in the United States — are moving quickly to close the pay gap, or in some cases have closed it already.

Where is the evidence on that? Sure, the raw wage gap has been very slowly diminishing in several countries but I don't know of any drastic and quick recent reductions in it.

I think the linked comment is intended to provoke that sky-is-falling fear: The upside-down world where women are the rulers and men the ruled. And that's how this piece of news can provoke fear:

Women are ahead of men in education (last year, 55 percent of U.S. college graduates were female).

Perhaps the fear would be less if we were reminded of the fact that 58% of college students in Saudi Arabia are women? And that the percentage of female students in Iran exceeded that of male students until the government there decided to limit women with quotas?

Here's the general point of the Sky-Is-Falling aspect of the end of men and the supposedly coming petticoat regime: It misinforms the readers. It obfuscates rather than clarifies. And it bases its arguments on that hidden idea of the world as a seesaw: They are going to do to you the same thing that was done to them! Be very afraid! Even if you are female, you should be very afraid because your achievements mean that you will never find a partner.

That means the only alternatives are the jockstrap regime or the petticoat regime. So choose carefully.

Which is of course utter crap.
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For more on the NYT piece, check out here and here. I especially liked this bit in the latter:

Maybe the dissonance between the mostly grim headlines about American women’s progress and the mild hand-wringing of the women-on-top school is more than just which indicators you think matter (or which statistics you cherry-pick). It’s also about the supposition that what women have managed to gain in the last 40 years adds up to a wild feminist hegemony, which now requires a sober-eyed reassessment. Meanwhile, it’s less fun to point out the many things that are still lagging — but it’s even more frustrating that it’s still necessary.

Katha Pollitt and Christopher Hitchens' Writing on Women

2011-12-19T14:30:00.001-05:00

Katha's review of Christopher Hitchens' work, when it came to his writing on the topic of women* is excellent:

So far, most of the eulogies of Christopher have come from men, and there’s a reason for that. He moved in a masculine world, and for someone who prided himself on his wide-ranging interests, he had virtually no interest in women’s writing or women’s lives or perspectives. I never got the impression from anything he wrote about women that he had bothered to do the most basic kinds of reading and thinking, let alone interviewing or reporting—the sort of workup he would do before writing about, say, G.K. Chesterton, or Scientology or Kurdistan. It all came off the top of his head, or the depths of his id. Women aren’t funny. Women shouldn’t need to/want to/get to have a job. The Dixie Chicks were “fucking fat slags” (not “sluts,” as he misremembered later). And then of course there was his 1989 column in which he attacked legal abortion and his cartoon version of feminism as “possessive individualism.” I don’t suppose I ever really forgave Christopher for that.
It wasn’t just the position itself, it was his lordly condescending assumption that he could sort this whole thing out for the ladies in 1,000 words that probably took him twenty minutes to write. “Anyone who has ever seen a sonogram or has spent even an hour with a textbook on embryology knows” that pro-life women are on to something when they recoil at the idea of the “disposable fetus.” Hmmmm… that must be why most OB-GYNs are pro-choice and why most women who have abortions are mothers. Those doctors just need to spend an hour with a medical textbook; those mothers must never have seen a sonogram. Interestingly, although he promised to address the counterarguments made by the many women who wrote in to the magazine, including those on the staff, he never did. For a man with a reputation for courage, it certainly failed him then. (Years later, when he took up the question of abortion again in Vanity Fair, he said basically the exact same things, using the same straw-women arguments. Time taught him nothing, because he didn’t want to learn.)

I doubt that it was a lack of courage that explains why Hitchens never addressed those counterarguments. He just didn't think women mattered that much as intellectuals.

During the last week I have read many accolades to Christopher Hitchens, of his elegant writing, of his courage and his genius, of how he picked his enemies and how he used his formidable debating talents in attacking them. And all through this I can nod my head and accept that he was a brilliant man, a man of even flawed genius, someone who filled a useful role in the public debates about politics and religion and war.

And yet however hard I try, I cannot get over the fact that he was not writing to me, I cannot get to the point where I could feel comfortable and relaxed writing about his other points, agreeing with them or disagreeing with them.

Because I had learned that I was a baby factory to him, someone who could never be funny, someone whose job it was to fellate brilliant and eloquent men, whose whole existence was defined as the ancillary sexual and reproductive role he had decreed for women. He mythologized women and placed them where he felt they were of use to him in that mythology. And there is no escape from that.

This is something an aware female reader must face. So God Is Not Great? Well, you think women aren't great, either, except when sucking you. Get over that hump before you can join in the general repartee. Get over that point or you will be attacked for not getting the brilliance of the writer. It's like a one-winged bird trying to soar.

And then there is that contempt, so well described by Katha, when she writes about the Question of Women and Hitchens:

It all came off the top of his head, or the depths of his id.

This is sometimes called "mansplaining*." A "mansplainer" gives firm lectures on scant information, seeing nothing wrong with this combination. A "mansplainer" never listens to counterarguments.

When feminism is debated, "mansplainers" regard just existing an adequate preparation for any theoretical discussion and see nothing odd in teaching feminism to individuals who have decades of study in the field, even if the "mansplainer's" own views were permanently formed over a quick chat with some friends while having a few beers the other night. Thus, the gist of "mansplaining" is a contempt towards those one is debating.

And that contempt is what I sensed from Christopher Hitchens.
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*I have written about Hitchens on why women are not funny and also on his blow jobs piece. Note that this post is not about his writing on other topics, just on the topic of generic women.
**Women can "mansplain", too, though it is less common (in feminism) and differently flavored.

A Short History of Our Current "Free" Markets

2011-12-19T13:19:00.001-05:00

The 1980s wasn't just the decade of enormous shoulder pads. It was also the decade of Reagan, the new dawn in conservative America and the great flowering of the mythical religion of free markets.

The concept of "free markets" is mythical because it is unreal but mostly because is a paradoxical one: Conservatives call near-monopolies free markets. This should make every economist laugh until their heads explode. That this does not happen tells you we are talking religion.

The concept of "free markets" is also hilarious. It is based on the explicit demand that nobody meddles with markets so that the markets can have just a few people doing all the meddling.

It is not based on economic theory. That, my friends, does define something that sounds similar: the concept of competitive markets under the heading of perfect competition. The requirements for perfect competition to exist in reality are strict, and most economists agree that few real markets satisfy those requirements. If markets do satisfy them, we have A Very Good Thing!

Here's the sleight of hand. The good things economists can say about perfectly competitive markets have been corrupted into the religion of free markets. Somehow ANY market that is not regulated has become a saintly market! And the only reason, ultimately, has to do with that faint name resemblance to competitive markets. Conservatives equate the terms free and competitive. This is a big logical fallacy.

It took root in the 1980s, during that glaringly bright plastic-tinged conservative morning in America. But the acolytes at the altar of free markets were not all conservatives. Indeed, Bill Clinton paid homage to both markets and globalization. Free markets turned out to be the best selling concept of that decade.

And the next one. The 1990s was when the real work undermining anti-trust regulation and the end of monitoring the markets was carried out. The best known examples come from financial and housing markets but "free markets" were cropping up everywhere.

There was a time when I had to keep a list of the possible names of my bank, even though I had not changed banks. The banks were selling and buying me, and this happened so fast that I couldn't remember the current name of my owner. But the trend was to ever larger banks and fewer and fewer of them.

In the malls department store after department store disappeared. They did not go bankrupt. They were bought by larger department stores, until at one point one large shopping mall had all its anchor department stores owned by the same store. Competing against each other for a moment in history.

Meanwhile, in the housing markets suddenly friends who I knew had no money got mortgages for large houses. These were balloon mortgages, with the only hope of ever paying them off in some continual and very strong rise in housing prices. Elsewhere, the financial markets were inventing new and frightening instruments of self-destruction. Government regulation was actively fought.

I'm asking myself now why I didn't pay more attention to my internal monitors. They were beep-beeping almost every day, telling me that the sermons of globalization were used to hide increasing market concentration, that nobody was regulating the desire of markets to turn into monopolies, that even the media who should have explained all this to us was itself being monopolized (think of Rupert Murdoch).

Economists know that ultimately it is small which is beautiful, that with just a handful of large markets comes price-fixing and less choice for consumers, that regulation has a purpose in keeping markets well-behaved. When did economists get bought by the system so that the protesting voices could no longer be heard?

Everyone understands that once a few large conglomerates own the globe (and the globalism) democracy will die, by definition. Everyone understands that a system of elections where one family (the Koch family, say) could fund the whole election campaign is destructive for democracy. Yet this is what we have ultimately allowed. Even the Supreme Court of the United States has decided that the Koch brothers or Rupert Murdoch must be allowed to have extreme monetary influence on the outcome of elections. The new form of equality gives every dollar the same voice.

Once we had company towns where those who lived in them had to work for one firms and buy their food from the same firm. Soon we may have company countries if we don't stop this process.

The process is driven by many factors but it is certainly hiding behind that altar of "free markets." Because of this conservative framing, we get all the worst that bad markets can offer us: The concentration of power and money in few hands, the lack of choice (check the commercial music stations on radio), adulterated products (melamine in pet foods), the destruction of the environment (which has no direct say in profits) and very bad incentives for those who work in the various industries (if the mortgages you sell pay you by number of mortgages sold, why would you care if the buyers can never afford that specific house?).

It's time to become literal in interpreting what competitive markets require, to point out that those requirements are far-from-filled in almost all real-world markets. But even more importantly, it is time to point out that the term "free markets" is empty of any real meaning and that it often hides something truly vile, something truly frightening, something that we need to fix if we want our civilizations to continue: The very reverse of the benign perfectly competitive markets of economic textbooks.

A Short Sunday Sermon

2011-12-18T13:04:00.000-05:00

Much of the extreme opposition abortion is not about the zygotes or about the embryos or even about the unborn babies.

It is about the control of that machine inside women which can gestate babies. It is about its ownership, about the right to punch the button and have babies come out. Or not. It is about the right to determine not only which women will have children and when but also the way in which pregnancies will proceed.

It is about ownership.

Music for Saturday Night

2011-12-17T23:11:00.002-05:00

Today's Quote

2011-12-16T14:37:00.000-05:00

It's actually a few days old:

Chief executive pay has roared back after two years of stagnation and decline. America's top bosses enjoyed pay hikes of between 27 and 40% last year, according to the largest survey of US CEO pay. The dramatic bounceback comes as the latest government figures show wages for the majority of Americans are failing to keep up with inflation.
America's highest paid executive took home more than $145.2m, and as stock prices recovered across the board, the median value of bosses' profits on stock options rose 70% in 2010, from $950,400 to $1.3m. The news comes against the backdrop of an Occupy Wall Street movement that has focused Washington's attention on the pay packages of America's highest paid.

This is probably because those CEOs are the only Americans willing to work very very hard. Or perhaps they are such rare geniuses that they can command any price they wish in that mythical free market for executive talents?

What other wingnut explanations could one find? That these are the job-providers and deserve to be paid for it, whether jobs are forthcoming or not?

Being A Dude Is Hard

2011-12-16T13:26:00.000-05:00

Are you familiar with the Good Men Project? I wasn't until one particular post on the website got some publicity. Its title is "Being A Dude Is A Good Thing." That made my hair crawl a bit because its obvious corollary would be "Being A Non-Dude Is Not A Good Thing." Though of course I know that it is not intended to be that way. But still: I never go around muttering to myself "Being A Goddess Is A Good Thing."

The real reason for that title seems to be that the writer of the post believes men are blamed for everything (and, as an obvious corollary, women are blamed for nothing):

As the founder of the Good Men Project, I am the butt of my share of jokes. Guys in high places love to take pot shots at me, laughing at my silly little obsession.

...

I’ve been doing my own soul-searching during this last week as a series of articles broke out on our site about the end of men, gender war, and whether or not men have made enough progress collectively to be considered “good” (that’s not exactly how others defined it but that’s how I think about the issue underneath it all).
Amidst all this comes the question of blame.
Why do men get blamed for everything?

Emphasis mine.

It's hard to continue the analysis after that bolded bit, because men, as a class, are not actually blamed for everything.* In some parts of the world men, as a class, are blamed for very little.

Now, I could go on writing about the things women, as a class, are blamed for. But that's not for everything! And still I think it's for many more things than men, as a class, are blamed for, especially if we limit the blame to the class of uppity women**.

The reason for all those italics is that you gotta be careful about generalizing. The writer generalizes to an extreme extent. He also implies that everyone blames men for everything.

Then there's that reference to the end of men. I wrote about that silly article earlier (first post here, second here), but men are not ending so you can stop worrying about that possibility. Even male dominance is not ending. It's very healthy on the global level (Egypt and so on) and even in the US the number of female presidents is still a perfectly round number.

Onwards and downwards. In the blog post, I mean. Here's what has happened and what caused it:

One close friend jokes, “When speaking to my wife I always make sure to look at the ground in deference. And I make sure not to make any sudden movements.” I’ve watched him. He loves his wife.
He’s a very competent human being. But with her he’s decided the only way to survive is to submit. The female view is the right view. The male view just gets you into trouble.
So where does the blame come from?
My unscientific theory is from a fundamental disconnect between men and women at the micro level. Men know women are different. They think differently, they express emotion differently, they are motivated by different things, they think about sex differently, and they use a very different vocabulary.
Why can’t women accept men for who they really are? Is a good man more like a woman or more truly masculine?

There is "the female view" and then "the male view". The individuals are no longer individuals. They are randomly drawn from two boxes, one pink and one blue, and they can't speak the same language! So they speak the female language and the man submits. There is no human language.

Let's see. Individual differences are unimportant and the idea that people do, in fact, communicate across that chasm of gender is unimportant. The ultimate explanation is biological, of the men-are-from-Mars-and-women-from-Venus type. Sadly, the writer never tells us how men really are. Does masculinity mean dominance over women, for instance? I would really like to know.

I'm not criticizing the kind of angst this post reflects. It must be hard to know what the dude rules are, these days. But there's a tremendous problem whenever "masculinity" is defined as "what women are not" because the next stage often means embellishing it with adjectives such as brave, honest, assertive and so on. Then those adjectives become part of "what women are not."

Having said all that, I quite agree that the popular culture representations of men as beer-guzzling idiots are nasty and I also agree that both boys and girls should be encouraged to get as good an education as they can. I have never met a feminist who wouldn't agree with me on these issues.

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* The real danger of the Internet sites where like-minded people gather is that shared concerns become validated and reinforced, even when they might not be realistic concerns. This may not matter in many cases, but it does matter when it comes to some hate sites (not referring to the site I link to here).

**Off the top of my hat, women are blamed (by some or by many) for bad mothering outcomes, bad parenting outcomes, working for pay when they should be at home, wasting their human resources if they stay at home with their children, having children just to get on welfare, not being able to negotiate a good salary, not having the drive to succeed, not having the skills needed to do mathematical or technical work, not having enough testosterone to succeed in financial jobs. Some groups blame women (though not usually men) for having sex outside marriage and for not being a strict enough gatekeeper when it comes to sex. Women are also still argued to be ruled by emotions rather than intellect, while men are assumed to be ruled by cold logic only. Feminists have been blamed, by some, for the end of the Western culture, for the death of the white race, for the end of men, for the end of family, for latchkey children, juvenile delinquency, alcoholism among women, the unhappiness of women and on and on and on.

A Thursday Fluff Post

2011-12-15T15:34:00.001-05:00

Yesterday was all about vulvas and today is all about income inequality. Which just proves that goddesses can multi-task (though there is an ultimate societal belief connection between those topics, oh yes).

I'm thinking of starting a "mean gifts" list for public persons. Just as a joke.

For instance, Martial Arts for Dummies might fit into the president's Christmas stocking, and Mr. Gingrich might consider a chastity belt or two.

This was the custom in my school when I was but a tiny goddess. Each teacher got a book recommendation from us students. It taught us the value of literature and the difficulty of irony and sarcasm as forms of writing.

Income Inequality Revisited

2011-12-15T13:36:00.001-05:00

There are days when I'm strongly in the tar-and-pitchforks group of thinkers. Note the word thinkers there. Like all benevolent divinities, I refrain from directing thunder storms and painful boils of the bottom to those who deserve them.

But still. Here is the reaction of one economist to the news that the income share of the top one percent fell from 23% in 2007 to 17% in 2009, largely because so much of the income in that group comes from stock market investments which haven't been doing well during the recession:

“It’s very interesting that this has become such a big topic now when the numbers are back to where they were in the 1990s,” said Steven Kaplan, an economist at the University of Chicago’s business school. “People didn’t seem to be complaining about it then.”

What's the message in that last sentence? If you let us rob you poor in the past, why complain now? Just kidding.

But picking a particular non-recession year to compare with a recession year is not terribly meaningful, as the linked article points out:

In 2009 the average income of the top 1 percent, adjusted for inflation, fell below its 1998 level, but remained well above where it was in 1990: $662,000. While the protests follow the worst downturn since the Great Depression, inequality has been growing for three decades, driven by economic and political forces. Globalization created larger markets for those with scarce talents but hurt less educated workers by pitting them against cheap foreign labor. New technology also hurt unskilled workers, by replacing many with machines.
Unions declined, eroding blue-collar bargaining power. The financial industry grew, with paydays heavily weighted toward the top. Corporate culture accepted the growing gap between the executive suite and the factory floor.
Falling tax rates on the highest earners added to the net income divide, by allowing top earners to keep more of their pay and increasing their incentive to maximize it.
In the decades after World War II, by contrast, the average income of the top 1 percent grew only marginally faster than inflation and significantly slower than middle-class incomes. That combination caused inequality to decline throughout much of the 1950, ’60s and early ’70s.
As recently as 1980, only about one-tenth of the nation’s pretax income went to the top 1 percent. By 2000, that share had grown to about 22 percent. It slumped to about 18 percent in 2003, after a market crash, only to rebound by 2007 to levels not achieved since the Roaring ’20s.

And what the share of the top one percent is of today's income is not known.

But here's the bit that made me grind my fangs:

Pointing to the recent declines at the top, Mr. Kaplan argues the Occupy protesters have accused the wrong villain by focusing on inequality, which he called an inevitable byproduct of growth. “If you want to reduce inequality, all you need to do is put the economy in a recession,” he said. “If you want the economy to do well, as all of us do, then you’ll get more inequality.”

What does it mean for the "economy to do well" in that statement? Something like this?

About 97.3 million Americans fall into a low-income category, commonly defined as those earning between 100 and 199 percent of the poverty level, based on a new supplemental measure by the Census Bureau that is designed to provide a fuller picture of poverty. Together with the 49.1 million who fall below the poverty line and are counted as poor, they number 146.4 million, or 48 percent of the U.S. population. That's up by 4 million from 2009, the earliest numbers for the newly developed poverty measure.
The new measure of poverty takes into account medical, commuting and other living costs. Doing that helped push the number of people below 200 percent of the poverty level up from 104 million, or 1 in 3 Americans, that was officially reported in September.
Broken down by age, children were most likely to be poor or low-income — about 57 percent — followed by seniors over 65. By race and ethnicity, Hispanics topped the list at 73 percent, followed by blacks, Asians and non-Hispanic whites.
Even by traditional measures, many working families are hurting.

The point is, of course, that the economy is NOT doing well if the majority of people are not doing well. It's quite possible for an economy to grow and for all that growth to fall into the laps of a tiny minority. Besides, to argue that inequality is an inevitable byproduct of growth does not explain how the United States managed such impressive growth rates with reduced inequality in the past.

Public Sector Layoffs and Unemployment: The Case of Black Women

2011-12-15T12:57:00.000-05:00

This is a useful article on public sector layoffs and their disproportionate impact not only on all women but especially on black women. And note that when jobs are outsourced in this way it is pretty likely that the employee who will then work that job will have lower pay and might not have health insurance or retirement benefits at all.

From the piece:

Women, meanwhile, have suffered a disproportionate majority--nearly 66 percent--of the public sector job losses. For black women--who have higher overall levels of unemployment and rely on public sector jobs as their second-biggest source of employment--outsourcing is particularly harmful, according to Steven Pitts, a labor policy specialist at University of California, Berkeley.
From 2008 through 2010, a black woman was 22 percent more likely to be employed in the public sector than a non-black woman, Pitts found in an April 2011 research brief on black workers and the public sector.
Pitts says questions of race and gender haven't factored into the national dialogue of public sector cuts and who they are most likely to affect.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics provides data on unemployment by gender, race/ethnicity, age and marital status. Following the numbers over time can be instructive. I don't think the public sector layoffs are yet completely visible in those numbers.

Newt on Economic Liberty: It Means No Annual Vacations For American Workers

2011-12-14T14:46:00.000-05:00

My eyes bulged when I read what Newt Gingrich just wrote:

I opened the chapter on “Work” in my book A Nation Like No Other with this anecdote because I believe it cuts to the core of what makes America exceptional. While other countries have enshrined 35-hour work weeks and 60 days’ paid vacation in their laws, America remains one of the few developed nations that have declined to restrict these economic liberties. Here, we value hard work and free enterprise as the substance of opportunity.

I don't know which country Newt has in mind in that quote (probably France), but it is indeed true that the United States is about the only industrialized country which does not legislate annual vacation time for its workforce.

But to turn that into an economic liberty! Whose liberty, exactly? And how can Europe ever compete with this country, given that it not only regulates overtime and offers annual paid (!) vacations but also provides paid parental leave?

No, it's not the economic liberty of the workers Newt has in mind here; it's the economic liberty of the capitalists. American workers are not loudly protesting at Occupy Vacation Time sites, scornfully flinging off the presumption that they might ever want to have some time off to get acquainted with those other people who share the same address. Neither are they demanding that they should be allowed to work Thanksgiving, Independence Day and Christmas Day, without any extra pay! They are not marching against the idea of family leave.

What's so nasty about this drivel is that Newt equates not being a robot with laziness, that only those who are willing to work and work and work are somehow looking towards a better future! What will they do in that better future? Finally take some time off if they haven't dropped from a heart attack first?

Newt then goes on to tell us again about the advisability of child labor, though mostly for poor children:

Eleven or twelve year old children, and especially those in the poorest areas, should have the chance to learn the value of hard work, part time and in the safe environment of their schools. Strong evidence suggests the benefits of starting to work at an early age, and there are dozens of tasks they could be paid real money to do: working in the cafeteria, clerking in the front office, straightening up classrooms, and cleaning bathrooms. Not strenuous labor. Not dangerous work. Exactly the type of things that many parents ask their children to contribute at home.   It won’t solve the whole problem, but it would go a little way towards helping America’s poorest children learn the habits that can make them successful.

Mmm. And do the children of the richer parents just watch all this work happening? What are the lessons they would learn from that? That work is for the peons?

Newt is an asshat. The government is supposed to be for the benefit of the people who live in it. It is not supposed to be a tool to increase the productivity of the labor input for the firms. People are not robots, and there are better ways to teach work ethics than turning the children of the poor into the servants of the school system and possibly other children.

The hilarious ending to Newt's piece warns us about the ominous shadow of France. That, my friends, might be the alternative if Newt's advice is not followed. Like good food and wine and such. And summer vacations to the beach with the whole family! For weeks and weeks!

The Bald Vulva

2011-12-14T12:57:00.001-05:00

It sounds like the national bird (of the US, that is), doesn't it?

The Atlantic has an article about women shaving off all their pubic hair or getting Brazilian waxes down there or even having the pubic hair permanently zapped with laser treatment. I recommend reading the whole piece from the beginning to the end to note how the actual reasons for this trend are subsumed in all sorts of dead-end theories about why young women, quite suddenly as history goes, have decided that a bald vulva is a necessary fashion or health accessory. Nothing replaces that reading as an exercise in learning how smoke is blown into our eyes when it comes to political issues about women. And this IS a political issue.

I'm not really blaming the writer who does do the necessary work of discussing the real reasons. But all the fluff around that real reason, about low-slung pants requiring the shaving of pubic hair (what about men?) to the age-old argument that women are smelly by nature are trotted out, and so is the idea that femininity means hairlessness (even if biology disagrees).

And this bit is really hilarious:

So what does it all mean? Is pubic hair removal a symbol of feminine pride, something that Gloria Steinem might be proud of? Or does it signify submission to a domineering male agenda?
"It's all in how people deal with it," Herbenick says. As she's seen in her lecture-hall encounters, the hairless vulva isn't always analogous to the clenched fist of female solidarity; just as often, it's a telltale sign of oppression or forced conformity.
But, she says, uncovered, demystified genitalia can just as easily be a symbol of empowerment. "Many women have started to feel a sense of ownership over their bodies -- an autonomy," she says. "If they want to take it off, they take it off. If they want to grow it back, they grow it back. If they want to shave it into a heart, they shave it into a heart. But they're doing it because they want to."

They are doing it because they want to? No wider societal influences there? Why don't we have lots of women completely shaving off their eyebrows? They are hair, after all, and unfeminine, and they might smell when you are sweaty after a workout or sex.

The reason, of course is in p*rnography (which so far isn't that interested in eyebrows). It became widely available, in forms which did not require a man to walk into a crummy shop to buy a magazine, about twenty years ago. We now may have a generation of heterosexual men who formed their first ideas about how naked women look by watching p*rn. And women in those depictions do not have pubic hair. This is so that one can see all the dangly bits and the jingly bits better, of course.

Imagine such a man having first-time sex with a woman who actually has pubic hair! Might he not express shock or disgust at this horror? Might she not then feel that she, too, must shave her vulva bald?

That explanation suffices. All the other stories told in the article are either dead-ends or tales about the roads this influence took to get into the popular culture in general. But the direct route works really well, too:

Herbenick recalls one encounter in which a popular, well-liked college student in a class she taught openly professed that he had never hooked up with a girl who had pubic hair, and would frankly be disgusted to undress a woman and discover a veil of genital fur.
"Some girls talked to me and wrote in their papers that they had always had pubic hair, and in a couple cases never did anything to their pubic hair," she said. "They never thought it was a problem. But when he said that, they went home and changed it. They really started to feel ashamed about their bodies."
Fitzpatrick, similarly, finds himself in a collegiate scene full of young women far too obsessed with the hair down there. "It becomes a compulsion," he says.
Fitzpatrick's female friends, especially those who confess to not having waxed in a while, have added a distinct new routine to their social calendars: weekend-evening freak-outs. "When they go out on a Friday night to the bar, if they think they might be having sex with somebody later, they're like, 'Is he gonna judge me? What is he gonna think?'" Fitzpatrick says. Other non-waxed coeds simply skip the bar altogether.
Pinto, too, admits that she gets nervous about having sex toward the third or fourth week after getting a wax. "If I haven't waxed and I suddenly end up hooking up with someone, I'm like, Oh, God. No, no!" she says.
And it's true, says Fitzpatrick: Guys can be, and often are, "absolutely brutal." It's not uncommon for a college-aged man to "go out of his way" to make fun of a girl's pubic grooming habits with his buddies after he's hooked up with her -- even if he's never expressed a preference one way or the other, he says. "Then all of a sudden, instead of just being a girl who's had a fun night with her respective guy, she becomes that girl who has weird pubic hair. And nobody wants that label."

"Weird pubic hair." There you have it!

Two important points about this post: First, do a gender reversal on the arguments. All the arguments for a bald vulva seem to me to equally apply to men's pubic hair. The skin would be softer, the experience of intercourse would be more powerful, with less hairy padding, and so on. But do women shame men into shaving down there? And of course the real point about this first point is the absence of articles like this about men's pubic hair.

Second, and this is very important for any reader I have angered by downplaying "choice" here. We obviously have a choice about how much hair we want on our vulvas or around our penises. But those kinds of choices are never made in a vacuum. As I wrote in an earlier post, the women in this picture look very much alike, because their clothing was influenced by the culture they lived in:

Yet I'm pretty sure if we could have asked them about their choice of hairdo (the "Gibson Girl" of the early 20th century) or the dresses they would have given us individual choice explanations.

We are all affected by the culture we live in, and different choices carry different societal benefits and sanctions. This post is to point out why one particular "choice" has become more common and what drives its popularity.

Softer Than A Baby's Bottom: Vagisoft

2011-12-14T11:51:00.000-05:00

This is a hilarious name for a blanket: Vagisoft. According to the softometer in the advertising picture, the only thing softer would be the womb of a marshmallow mermaid!

Marshmallow mermaids would melt in the ocean. And the texture of vaginas is not exactly what most of us have in mind when wanting a soft blanket. You don't want the blanket to sorta slide off you, right? Or feel slightly moist?

If we lived in a reality-based advertising world, the kind where it would have been men who ride side-saddle, this blanket would have been named penisoft. The skin of the penis is extremely soft. That's all I meant. Err.

Von Spakovsky On Home Schooling

2011-12-13T15:36:00.001-05:00

He writes in the National Review, a conservative publication. While home schooling is done by people with all sorts of political opinions or none, a sizable chunk of home-schoolers are religious conservatives.

Von Spakovsky:

Educators and liberals always seem surprised when faced with evidence of the high quality of the education that home-schoolers get, particularly when compared with the politically correct assembly-line instruction that passes for an education in so many public schools these days.
Both my brothers and their wives home-school their children (and my wife is now home-schooling our youngest daughter). All of their children are well-read, disciplined, polite, creative, and full of information that I find lacking in many children their age. One of my 15-year-old nephews was recently assigned to read Lives by Plutarch, about Greece and Rome, and to write a short essay summarizing their society, identifying what they valued most highly and arguing whether or not each was a good and virtuous society. Can anyone imagine a 15-year-old getting a similar assignment in a public school in today’s America?

The whole post makes the mistake of comparing children from Spakovsky's extended family to some imaginary grungy public school outcome in general. If, as is likely, Spakovsky's brothers and sisters-in-law are educated and affluent, the proper comparison is to the children of equally educated and affluent parents who go to a public school.

Likewise, any real comparison would require knowing how many home-schooling parents assign Lives by Plutarch to their children and whether the concept of a "good and virtuous" society is at least challenged in that teaching.

Not that reading Plutarch has any greater value than reading many much more recent books. It just has the sniff of High Educamation to those who envy the nineteenth century British upper class for their governesses and stern fathers with excellent libraries.

As a purely personal aside, Plutarch compares only the lives of famous men, not women, because women did not easily become famous in those days.

As a purely personal second aside, I wonder how many conservative men would be such strong advocates of home schooling if the consensus was that it had to be done by fathers. They might suddenly note that one parent's income has dried out and that one parent's future career prospects have been severely limited. These are the major costs of the home-schooling option, not the acquisition of books and teaching materials and so on.
----
This post is not intended as an attack against the concept of home-schooling which has both obvious advantages and disadvantages, just as public schooling does. Much depends on the specific circumstances and so on.

What I criticize is von Spakovsky's one-sided treatment of the topic and his implicit assumption (or so it seems to me) that there should be no publicly funded schools or any improvement in those schools because people obviously can just educate their children at home. And that is simply not practical for the vast majority of American families.

Today's Political Lesson: The Pennsylvania Shale-Gas Industry and Conservative Beliefs

2011-12-13T12:01:00.001-05:00

A YouTube comment attached to this video about millionaires who would like to pay more taxes gives such a good example of the vast problems when one tries to communicate across the political aisle (more of a chasm than aisle):

The reason we're in the crapper is because of a century of socialist government policies, government involvement in the free markets and cancerous relationships that involvement spawns. Due to unconstitutional "subsidies" paid with money stolen through taxes, we don't know the real price of anything.

Yeah, it's YouTube comments, the place one goes to find the very worst stupidity and misogyny and so on on this planet. But the statement is not that different from others I have read on the net. It has the magico-religious term "free markets" and the usual argument that what the US government has done in the last hundred years is "socialist" and it argues that taxes are theft.

The best way to interpret that quote is as something do with a religion. It does not lend itself to any kind of logical arguments, because the term "free markets" is not an economic one and because the term "socialist" is clearly used in quite a different sense than its dictionary definitions. But once one sees this as a religious assertion, the conversation stops right there as I well know. One cannot debate religion with facts.

This came to mind when I read the article about the Pennsylvania shale-gas industry that Atrios linked to. The quote he gives is worth giving here, too:

In what is shaping up as a key victory for the shale-gas industry, Gov. Corbett and the legislature appear close to stripping municipalities of the power to impose tough local restrictions on wells and pipelines. Under a pending measure, wells and pipelines would be permitted in every zoning district - even residential ones - statewide.
And the industry isn't stopping there.
Two pipeline companies are seeking the clout of eminent domain. While the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission has yet to rule, it signaled this year that it was leaning toward giving firms condemnation power to gain rights-of-way for their pipelines.

The saga of the shale-gas industry in Pennsylvania is about much more than the pipelines. It is about jobs, about profits, about possible environmental degradation and possible polluted waters. But this particular quote is an odd reversal of the argument made in that YouTube quote:

Here are the markets! They appear to be damn free to do whatever they wish! But they still have that cancerous relationship with the state government! Talk about subsidies! The government is simply giving in to them, so we will never know "the real price" of the gas. Theft? Did anyone mention theft and the government?

I bet that is not what the YouTube commentator meant, however. And note that the so-called "free markets" here are ONE FIRM negotiating (or extorting) one state government. That is not the definition of a competitive industry.

The Pennsylvania problem is an interesting one from a conservative angle. What should the state of Pennsylvania do? If it courts only the firm (and the jobs) it will do what it seems to be doing.

But by doing that it takes away property from voters who just might vote Republican. A house someone bought in an expensive residential area with good schools some years ago will now have a humongous pipeline under the backyard where children play. The house will sell for less. Will every house owner get an exactly calculated sum of money from the firm to compensate for the financial and other losses?

In the actual fracking areas the landscape might look like shit. The water might be polluted. Those rich enough can move, of course, or at least buy clean water to drink, and I guess that most of the really nasty stuff will ultimately be located in the poorer communities, because that's how power works.

My point here is not to analyze the Pennsylvania events in any great detail. I haven't followed them well enough to do that. Instead, I wanted to bring a realistic example of how an industry and a government can get into a "cancerous relationship," and this with Republicans in power. I also wanted to point out that there is no such thing in reality as the magico-religious free market. In this particular case there is one very powerful firm fighting municipalities. Finally, all large projects of this type have winners and losers. If power is allowed to prevail, the winners will decide all the rules and nobody will compensate the losers.

Hollaback

2011-12-12T20:31:00.000-05:00

If you are not familiar with this organization, you should be. It's all about fighting sexual harassment on the streets and elsewhere, and it is spreading to many countries across the world. Which is great, because of that "the right to go out" thing.

More Laura Nyro

2011-12-12T19:48:00.001-05:00

To celebrate her induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.