The First Monarch Butterfly of This Summer

Arrived today.  Monarch butterflies visit my garden every summer, possibly because I have plants from the milkweed family, many suitable weeds and lots of flowers with nectar.  Well, the weeds have flowers.

So I thought that I'd get the certificate for being an innkeeper for the Monarchs.  But that's not what the certificate is for; it's for making the inn and then trying to lure the travelers in.  In any case I love them.

But when I saw the first Monarch caterpillar some years ago

(Picture credit)


I thought I had accidentally eaten magical mushrooms.

It was a rainy summer morning, I had been up late the previous night, and I really needed that first cup of coffee I was sipping when I went outside, only to come face to face with a tiger-snake!  The caterpillar was huge.  And striped black and yellow.

In other news, I have been under the weather, which explains the not-writing business.   Something should be finished by tomorrow.  I'm sure you are happy to hear that.  Heh.

PS:  I ran after the butterfly with my cell phone, trying to catch its selfie, but to no avail. 

Short News Items On Women, 7/7/16; Bricklaying Competitions, Fox News Sexual Harassment And So On.

1.  Shania Clifford, 17, won a gold medal in the SkillsUSA Ohio masonry competition in late April, but she found in May (via Facebook!) that she would not be representing her area in the next stage of the competition, a national level leadership and skills competition.  Instead,  the young man who initially came third in the competition would:

Judges in the masonry program, a field usually dominated by men, originally awarded Clifford first place by a whopping 72 points.
Larry Moore, her instructor, said the scores of the top performers usually vary by only a couple of points, but Clifford’s column for the state competition was exceptional.
“She had the best plumb there,” Moore said. “Two or three corners were perfect.” Plumb refers to how straight a vertical edge is.
Stan Jennings, superintendent of the Scioto County Career Technical Center, was notified by SkillsUSA Ohio that Clifford would no longer be competing. A vague explanation was given: “The scores were inappropriately put in.”
Mike Cowles, director of Ohio’s SkillsUSA, did not return calls seeking comment.
Brittany Halpin, a spokeswoman for the Ohio Department of Education, which sponsors the competition, said in an email, “An error was made during the entry of scores into the final score spreadsheet.”
“This error affected results for several students,” Halpin said in the email, “and resulted in the rankings showing an incorrect winner of the competition.” Halpin added that no errors were made on the judges’ scoring sheets.

The Mason Contractors Association of America, after hearing about this mess, offered Clifford a chance to compete in its national competition next year:

"I figured it'd be a great opportunity to right a wrong," said Tim O'Toole, association spokesman.

Hmm.  I'd dearly love to know more about that error made in entering the scores, especially if there were no errors in the judges' scoring sheets.

My point is this:  It's not impossible that a weird kind of scoring mistake would occur at the same time as another rather unusual event:  A girl wins the masonry competition.  But because I can easily see other reasons than a scoring error which would explain that sudden reversal in the rankings, a more precise explanation about the type of error, how it happened, and which competitors it affected is necessary.

In the absence of such an explanation I'd temporarily go for the sexism explanation: 

Instead of viewing Shania Clifford as just an individual who has studied and worked hard in her chosen field, someone in power may have seen her as a symbol of all womanhood stomping into an area carefully colored male for all times.  And not only that, she beat the guys in their game!  This, my friends, is simply not acceptable.  It is humiliating.

I can imagine someone feeling an existential threat of that type, a threat which must be snuffed in the bud.  Then we get scoring errors to reach the right conclusion, and the day is saved.

Note, also that this is an example of what works to keep women away from the traditionally male blue-collar occupations, so that the Men's Rights Activists can keep telling us that women don't want to do the nasty menz jobs but just want all the nice menz benefits.  What could be more humiliating than to win the competition and then to hear, via Facebook (!), that the victory has been canceled?

On the other hand, the nice gesture of the Mason Contractors Association of America makes me feel more optimistic about the future.  Clifford is a person, not a symbol of any of that wider stuff, and she should be treated with the respect any other competitor receives.

My General Malaise Explained

...while reading John Gray's analysis of the Brexit and related issues (1).

It's this bit in his arguments which gave me that ah-all-is-made-clear moment concerning that niggling dissatisfaction I've felt for a long time when thinking about global political developments:

Larger and longer changes are at work. The course of events over the past decades has not followed any progressive narrative. There is no detectable movement in the direction of internationalism or liberal freedoms. The Soviet Union collapsed only to be followed by an imperial hybrid: a mix of old-fashioned tyranny and illiberal democracy that can command more popular legitimacy than many Western governments. Post-Mao China embraced turbo-charged capitalism, but the long-awaited move to political reform did not arrive and Xi Jinping is reasserting party control. The EU responded to the close of the Cold War with a project of simultaneous expansion and greater integration, a hubristic ambition that has left European institutions weaker than they have ever been. Like the financial elites shown to be so pitifully short-sighted in the early hours of Friday morning, politicians and pundits who bang on about adapting to change have been confounded by changes that they believed could not happen.

Remember Martin Luther King's famous statement about the arc of the moral universe?  This one:  “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” 

Well, he was wrong.

Or rather, he was right, but only to the extent people keep pushing towards justice.  The minute that pressure is removed entropy wins.

I paint with a broad brush there, because not everything in global politics is getting worse.  But the powers which appear to be the strongest are economic ones, having to do with globalization, the rights of capital to cross borders to maximize profits and the rights of workers to do the same so that the capital can enjoy the cheapest possible labor force (2).  

Just consider how capitalism won in China but democracy so far has not and how the rulers of the European Union most resemble a gang of accountants, financiers and economists who view the people of Europe as economic pawns in some giant global chess game, mere economic factors of production (widgets) without cultures or histories.

Indeed, unbridled capitalism appears to be winning.  Even the austerity politics so popular among world's rulers today are a way of re-dividing the economic cake:  

The slices that go to the workers get thinner and thinner, because "we" can no longer afford all those fat social benefits, while the  slabs on the plates of the corporations get bigger and bigger, to tempt them to settle in this  country rather than in some other country, possibly a country where workers never got any social benefits to begin with.

No, I do not like the business-centered flavor of this cake.

The resurgence of religious fundamentalism is another development I dislike.  It may be no accident that we see it rising hand-in-hand with capitalism, what with that "opiate of the masses" aspect of religions (3).  Vladimir Putin in Russia uses the Orthodox Church to prop up his earthly power,  Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey opens a new mosque almost every day, the violence and wars in Iraq and Syria (with many underlying causes) are now explicitly about religious divisions.  Even the US conservatives court religious fundamentalism to prop up their  voting base.

Unbridled capitalism and religious fundamentalism have one thing in common:  They are both hierarchical structures, and both justify those hierarchies as necessary and unavoidable, appealing to either divine or economic "laws".  At the same time, they can live in symbiosis with each other, enabling each other, even enabling the global paralysis when it comes to fighting climate change.

But it's not just the apparent dominance of those developments that have caused my malaise:  It's also the apparent weakness of any opposition movements against them, the lack of any solutions which would tug that arc of moral universe towards justice, even the lack of agreement on how such an opposition movement would look and what it would promote.

I may be overly pessimistic about that.  Still, it's time to start building that opposition movement and on a global level.


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(1)  I'm not addressing Gray's other points in this post though they are interesting (and debatable), too.

(2)  This doesn't mean that people wouldn't voluntarily migrate for the economic benefits.  That's probably the most important long-term reason for all migrations.  Neither does this mean that globalization wouldn't have benefited some of the poorer countries on this earth.

Instead, what I argue here is that the powers-that-be view this migration from the corporate point of view, given the common focus on people as factors of production with no other discernible characteristics.  That, my friends, is the corporate angle.

 (3)  That was Karl Marx. He also wrote:

The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world.

I think that Marx oversimplified the appeal of religion, unlikely to die off even in some communist paradise.

But it's certainly true that many of the dictators in, say, the Middle East and the Gulf have allowed the frustrations of their people to be steered into a religious framework, because it was viewed as less threatening for the dictators themselves and because religion provided an alternative web of social cohesion, one which allowed the economic exploitation to continue.

And so we come to the present time where  ISIL or Daesh can argue that the nations of the West are the "crusader nations," when most of the West these days is secular rather than Christian.  Daesh also re-frames the past evil deeds of  colonial Western nations in that region as something that was  motivated by religious hatred rather than by what actually motivated those deeds:  economic greed and the desire for global political power.






 

On Ursula le Guin

Ursula le Guin is a wonder-ful and wonderful writer.  If you are not familiar with her sci-fi-cum-fantasy work you are in for a real treat.  Her most famous books are The Left Hand of Darkness,  which is about a planet whose inhabitants are otherwise like humans except that they lack permanent sexual differentiation, and The Dispossessed, which asks questions about what is possible in the political and economic arrangements of our lives.

See how great she is?  She's giving you two science-fiction books with weird technology, even higher mathematics and physics, and also a  treatise  on how our societies might look if we didn't have to spend so much time and agony over gender questions, plus a treatise on capitalism, anarchism and communism.

But she might just be most famous for her short story "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas."  If you weren't assigned that in an ethics college course I recommend it for this Fourth of July long weekend*.  In one sense it's a very short short story, in another sense you never get to its end.

My favorites among her books are still the EarthSea series.  If you like Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings you might like Earth Sea.   The latter describes a simpler world, the writing is more elegant and condensed, and its basic ethical frameworks different:  Tolkien applied Catholic ethics to his world, le Guin applied Taoism.

But Earth Sea also has wizardry and dragons and all sorts of fun stuff.

The very latest books and story collections in the series are the best, with writing so honed that it's crystal-clear and sharp enough to cut, each word carefully picked to bear the largest possible meaning, everything superfluous abandoned, to allow the simple stories to be about truly large questions: death, freedom, love, our proper places in the plans of the universe.

I leave you with this quote from le Guin, useful when we try to understand why people often defend their own oppression:

“We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom. We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable.”

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* Wiser voices note that it might not be appropriate for a holiday weekend, being a bit depressing.

Global Confidence in Donald Trump? Hillary Clinton? Vladimir Putin? Recent Pew Research Center Findings.

This table from a recent Pew Research Center survey of global attitudes is a fun one to explore:

Or a frightening one, should Donald Trump become the next president of the United States.  Note that the specific political and economic histories of the surveyed countries matters.  For example, that Greece has very little confidence in Angela Merkel is easily explained.

Another fascinating nugget of information in the survey concerns the difference in the confidence men and women have in Vladimir Putin as a foreign leader:

Men are more likely to have confidence in Putin.  My instant reaction was that this is easily explained by the patriarchal opinions Putin frequently spouts.*

Those will tend to put more women off, because they are bad omens about how he is likely to act when it comes to women's rights and stuff.  On the other hand, his "he-man-rules" demeanor might please some men.** 

A more rigorous exploration of that difference would require studying if belonging to a more right-wing party correlates with greater confidence in Putin and if men are a larger fraction among the members of such parties, but even if the answers to those questions were positive we couldn't rule out my instant reaction as one of the underlying reasons for both right-wing views and the love of one Vladimir Putin.  So.

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*  Not that he is at all alone among powerful politicians in being a sexist asshat.  This 2014 article reminds us of that.

** The stance is shown here:

I love that picture.  It's the most hilarious thing ever.

The SCOTUS On Abortion And Scientific Evidence

A long-standing strategy of the forced-birthers has been to impose more and more regulations on abortion clinics.  These regulations pretend to be about preserving the health of the women who have abortions by stipulating that abortion clinics should be equipped like ambulatory surgical centers, that the doctors working there should have admitting rights to the local hospitals and so on.  The real intent, naturally, is to force abortion clinics to close.  That makes getting an abortion more difficult, at least for the poorer women who can't afford the costs of long travel.

One of the more unsavory aspects of this forced-birth strategy have been the bogus health risk arguments its proponents keep advancing, such as the idea that abortion causes breast cancer (not true) and also the general fear-mongering which tries to destroy the mental health of women who have had abortions, while pretending to care about that very health. 

To put that fear-mongering into a wider context, note that giving birth is much more dangerous, on average, than having a legal abortion in the United States:

A key study published in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology estimated that the risk of a woman dying after childbirth was 10 times greater than after an abortion. The study estimated that between 1998 and 2005, one woman died in childbirth for every 11,000 babies born. That compares with one in 167,000 women who died of abortion complications. Doctors who perform abortions say the most common complications are not bladder issues or problems with reproductive organs -- as some abortion opponents like to emphasize -- but mild infection that can be easily treated.

Now the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) has addressed the question whether strict health regulations of the above type, as used by the state of Texas, constitute an "undue burden" for Texas women seeking abortion.  The 5-3 decision answers that question affirmatively:

The Supreme Court on Monday ruled resoundingly for abortion rights advocates in the court’s most important decision on the controversial issue in 25 years, striking down abortion-clinic restrictions in Texas that are similar to those enacted across the country.

...


The Texas provisions required doctors who perform abortions at clinics to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital and ordered clinics to meet hospital-like standards of surgical centers.

“The surgical center requirement, like the admitting-privileges requirement, provides few, if any, health benefits for women, poses a substantial obstacle to women seeking abortions, and constitutes an ‘undue burden’ on their constitutional right to do so,” Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote for the majority.

The missing scientific evidence about the actual (rather than imaginary) risks of legal abortions mattered in the decision:

Among the evidence undermining the surgical-center requirement, Breyer said, is a finding that early-term abortions have a lower mortality rate — five deaths in a decade in Texas — than childbirth, which the state allows to take place at home, or procedures such as a colonoscopy or liposuction, which do not carry the surgical-center requirement.

Texas could also not show why doctors needed an admitting privilege to a local hospital, Breyer said.

“When directly asked at oral argument whether Texas knew of a single instance in which the new requirement would have helped even one woman obtain better treatment, Texas admitted that there was no evidence in the record of such a case,” Breyer wrote.

In short, why fix something when it's not broken, as the old saying goes.

That's not to argue that abortions has no health risks.  But other similar or larger health risks of various procedures do not provoke the same concern from the Republican politicians of Texas.

One ethicist who is fervently opposed to legal abortions has argued that this SCOTUS decision is just a temporary setback, that all the forced-birth side needs to regain the right to turn abortion clinics into centers of nuclear medicine is to collect stories of harm to women who have had an abortion.

But that wouldn't work, in my opinion,  because nobody argues that abortion has no health risks.  Rather, the question is whether these risks are so large that they require especially stringent regulations, compared to, say, colonoscopy, liposuction or home births.  Those procedures do not  provoke the same urgency  for more stringent regulations, despite having higher mortality risks.





 

Brexit Dreams And Nightmares

Introduction

The option "Leave" beat the option "Remain" in Britain's vote about whether it should stay in the European Union  (EU) or leave it.  And the floodgates opened.

If I were a wiser writer I'd stop right there, because so far I've uttered no opinions unsupported by any evidence:  the kind of analysis I've far too often read about the nightmare or the dream that is Brexit. 

Sure, there are factual articles, too, telling us how Cameron got into this political mess in the first place, what Britain pays to the EU and what Britain receives in return,  and what the various options Britain now has might be. But one reason why so many articles about the Brexit are opinion pieces is that the kind of data we would need for strong conclusions about the vote are very hard to find.

Take the information we might get from exit polls:  To find out the demographics of those who voted Leave and those who voted Remain.  But the Brexit vote didn't have official exit polls.  The ones which exist are private polls.

The private poll I saw was on the Lord Ashcroft site.  Google Lord Ashcroft and you will find that he is a British conservative, domiciled in Belize (to avoid paying UK taxes?), with rather Trumpian characteristics, though without the financial inheritance Trump has.  He also tells us on his site that he was for Leave himself.

This doesn't necessarily make the polls biased or inaccurate, because I doubt that it is Lord Ashcroft himself who carries out the polling.   In any case, his site offers the most comprehensive demographic data on voting patterns that I have been able to find and it is that data I wish to discuss here, with some fairly serious criticisms.

Are Millennial Men More Sexist Than Their Forebears?

Are millennial men (in the US) as sexist as their dads?  That's what Andrea S. Kramer and Alton B. Harris ask in the June Harvard Business Review (HBR).  They begin by setting up the needed tension in the article by proposing that this is not so at all:

Millennials, those Americans now between 16 and 36 years old, are often spoken of as if they’re ushering in a new era of enlightened interpersonal relations. For example, in 2013 Time predicted Millennials would “save us all” because they are “more accepting of differences…in everyone.” That same year, The Atlantic stated that Millennials hold the “historically unprecedented belief that there are no inherently male or female roles in society.” And in 2015 the Huffington Post wrote that Millennial men are “likely to see women as equals.”

They then give us the evidence that the millennial men might  be every bit as sexist as their dads and granddads, maybe even more sexist.

The main bits of evidence are two:

The first is a study published last February which looked at how biology students ranked other students in their class in terms of intelligence and the grasp of the taught material.  The study found that female students ranked other students the way objective measures would rank them, but male students showed a bias which favored other male students as being particularly intelligent and well prepared in the material, even when, say, a female student had the highest grades in that class.  I have written about that study on this blog.

The second bit of evidence is the truly interesting one.  Kramer and Harris:

Millennial men’s views of women’s intelligence and ability even extend to women in senior leadership positions. In a 2014 survey of more than 2,000 U.S. adults, Harris Poll found that young men were less open to accepting women leaders than older men were. Only 41% of Millennial men were comfortable with women engineers, compared to 65% of men 65 or older. Likewise, only 43% of Millennial men were comfortable with women being U.S. senators, compared to 64% of Americans overall. (The numbers were 39% versus 61% for women being CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, and 35% versus 57% for president of the United States.) 

Now that made my hair stand up and my mood plummet!  Back to the patriarchy we go.  Hmm.

I downloaded that 2014 survey, to find out more about it:   How many subjects were interviewed in each age-and-sex category?   Did the survey standardize for other possible demographic differences between the older and the younger men?  How did the millennial and older women compare to each other and the men in their answers those questions?   And exactly what is it the questions asked and exactly how were those questions framed?*

The survey report gives an e-mail address for anyone who wishes to know more about the research methodology, so I gave it a try.  But my e-mail was returned to me with one of those "recipient unknown" messages.  Bitter despair followed, of course, because I couldn't get any answers to those very important questions, so important that they determine how much our hairs should rise and our moods plummet after reading the findings.

But what I did find was this:

Respondents for this survey were selected from among those who have agreed to participate in online surveys. the data have been weighted to reflect the composition of the adult population. Because the sample is based on those who agreed to participate in the panel, no estimates of theoretical sampling error can be calculated. For complete survey methodology, including weighting variables, please contact ..

In ordinary speech, the participants were people who had agreed to participate in online surveys.  That means they were not picked as numbers are in a lottery, which means that they are not a random sample from the general population.   That, in turn, means that we can't use the results to draw statistical conclusions about that general population. All this is hiding behind that 'theoretical sampling error' talk.

Isn't that fun?  Because those who are keen to take online surveys could differ from those who are not keen in other ways, too, we cannot tell if the 2014 Harris poll says something about the millennial men in the US.  All we can tell is that some unknown number of young men in that specific poll answered certain questions, the exact specification of which we are not told, in a certain way.

The two numbers the survey summary gives us is the total sample size, 2047, and the number of full-time or self-employed among those 2047:  889. Both of those apply to people over the age of eighteen.

We could go and look up the statistics for full-time and self-employed people as percentages of all people eighteen and over in the US in the Bureau of Labor Statistics tables, to see if at least the two numbers we are given in the survey seem to match what is going on out there in the bigger population.

I did that for ten minutes.  The data I found was only for full-time employed people and for the groups of those aged sixteen and over or twenty and over.   But even that rough research suggests that the Harris poll people tilt strongly towards those not employed.  It's likely, therefore, that the sample wouldn't look like the population in other ways, too.

None of that means the results can be proved not to apply to the population of young millennial men in the US, just that they cannot be proved to apply to it. 
So where does that leave us?  Asking for a better study, my erudite and sweet readers (all willing to work with female engineers), and restraining ourselves from reading too much into this particular one.


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*  Those questions would matter more if the sample had been a statistically random one, but they still matter for the understanding of the answers.

To address my questions one by one:

-  How many subjects were interviewed in each age-and-sex category?  

This clearly matters.  If the number of young men in the sample was, say, 25 or 50, we would judge the results differently than if it was 250 or 500.  Note that we cannot guess that sub-sample sized from the overall sample size (which is told to us) by using our knowledge about how many people, in general, are of different ages, because the sample is not a random drawing from the population.

 -  Did the survey standardize for other possible demographic differences between the older and the younger men?

This matters, because the HBR article implicitly compares young men to their fathers, thus assuming that the sample of young men in the Harris poll would differ from the sample of old men in the poll only in age, not in the percentages of, say, different ethnic groups in the sub-samples.

To see why these other demographics matter, suppose that in some country immigration has changed the average makeup of the citizens a lot in the last thirty years or so.  Then any apparent change in values we might see might not be a change over time in the same population, but a reflection of the different values new immigrants have brought with them from their source countries.  Those values could be more progressive or less progressive than the 'native' values, depending on the values of the source countries, but we cannot interpret the apparent change in values as meaning that the long-time citizens of that country have changed their values over time.

-  How did the millennial and older women compare to each other and the men in their answers those questions?

This question matters for checking purposes and for the purposes of interpretation:  The HBR article looks at the more sexist attitudes of young men, compared to older men.  That case would be made stronger if we found that young women are less sexist than older women, and it would be made different, and weaker in one sense, if we found that sexism has apparently increased in the youngest population for both men and women.

It's always good to check what the reported percentages might be in the implicit comparison group in any social science study.  If I tell you a made-up finding that 90% of Italian-origin people eat pasta you are unlikely to assume that 0% of other groups eat pasta, because you know about pasta-eating customs.  But in other contexts it's easy to slip into the alternative assumption that some percentages are 0% in the implicit comparison group.  Think of crime rates by race or ethnicity or literacy rates for girls and boys in some developing countries.

- And exactly what is it the questions asked and exactly how were those questions framed?

The importance of this is fairly obvious.  If I asked you when you stopped flossing your teeth you would find that questions enraging.  The way a question is formulated is crucial for the proper interpretation of the answers.  Were the people asked if they would be comfortable working with a female engineer, say, or were they asked if they thought female engineers were less capable, or if the occupation was less gender-apppropriate?  The exact formulation of the question may carry one or more of these types of associations.

Note, also, that Kramer and Harris suggest that the findings might be because young men haven't had exposure to female engineers, CEOs and presidents (hmm).  A question asking about that would have not cost very much and would have made the survey results more useful.  Pilot studies (tiny pre-studies for methodological and question-setting purposes) are useful for making improvements of these types.