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OPINIONS OF ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES, A MINOR GREEK GODDESS. She can be reached at: ECHIDNE-OF-THE-SNAKES.COM
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
On Biased Polls
I wrote about this particular poll for TAPPED last week. It is a biased poll, intended to produce biased answers. Glenn Beck has used it and now Fox News is using it, too:
The danger I see in all this is a total corruption of polls as at least partly useful strategies for learning about voters' preferences. If the right-wing is going to start praising biased polls on purpose it will not be very long when the left-wing must do the same or lose the game. And the overall result is that nobody will trust any polls at all. Part of the return to the faith-based times? Actually, this trend has existed for a while. The conservative think tanks have been spewing out biased research (research without the proper anonymous refereeing of academic papers or the tournament of seminars where it is ripped apart if it is bad) for a long time, and this research has been given the same respect as research that came out of the peer-review system. I'm sure similar examples can be given from the left if one digs deep enough. This is dangerous, because it removes another leg from the stool of reasoned arguments on which we all try to sit. (And yes, I did have the mental image of all people jostling to try to sit on the same stool. My sense of humor is quite sick.) |
Mr.Ms. Stanton
Steve Stanton is the City Manager of Largo. He plans to become Susan Stanton, and Largo just might fire him:
What the commissioners appear to plan would be illegal if being transgendered was protected under Civil Rights legislation, because it satisfies the economic definition of labor market discrimination. After all, nobody is arguing that Mr. Stanton wouldn't be able to do the same job equally well just because of sex change operation. The reason why so many want him out of the job has nothing to do with the concrete details of his job performance and everything to do with the frightened feelings about transgendered individuals. Would the reaction be the same if a City Manager called Susan Stanton announced that she is going to become Steve Stanton? What do you think? --- The link from a commenter on Eschaton threads. |
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
And In The Rooms The Women Come And Go
Talking of Michelangelo. So said T.S. Eliot. But what do we talk about in the public media? What are the things that make women and men interested enough to turn on the television or open a newspaper or click on a website? Anna Nicole Smith's corpse? What are the really crucial questions that should be talked about, should somehow be made into as interesting as the corpse of that poor woman, should be made sexy if need be, because they are important to talk about? Important, do you hear me! That the earth is ailing, ready to shrug off some of the fleas on her surface, and, as a byproduct of that (because we are the fleas), all of us might be dying, too? Before our time, dead of hunger or pollution? Not sexy, I fear. The honey bees no longer buzz enough. Who is going to pollinate our food plants? - Do most people understand the importance of the humble bee to our continued existence? That we are not doing very much to prevent a third world war, right now? Indeed, we are slipping and sliding and skipping towards the abyss, as I speak. But that is scary, too, smelling of corpses and death. Why all the interest in one single corpse and so little in the possibility that we may all be corpses sooner than we hoped. Do you think it would help to tag labels on people's chests? This 22-year old man, newly engaged, is going to die a horrible death in the war. This 45-year old woman, mother of three children, is going to burn to death in an attack. Would that make a difference in our interest levels? That epidemics are killing millions and millions of people each year, and more epidemics are being predicted? Would duct tape help? More stocked antibiotics in the medicine cupboards? At least that way my family won't die though yours will. This is horrible to read, the words of a gloomy seeress, a goddess exaggerating the dark cloud inside the golden lining. No wonder nobody wants to talk about any of this. No wonder, at all. And do you know what? I don't think we should have to talk about this to get change. Proper political leaders would carry the heavy burdens for us, would arrange meetings for peace and would arrange funds for medical research and environmental protection, would make laws which keep the planet going for a while longer, would ask the difficult and horrible questions and would demand some real answers. That is what leaders are for, in my idealistic world. Now that was a pessimistic post. |
Cheney Escaped, Blogger Was Down, So Was the Stock Market
Blogger still is, if I use Firefox. What a weird world this cyberspace is. Not as weird as the stock market:
That is from the U.K. Guardian. Here in the U.S. I read a different explanation of the events, mostly centering on the Chinese market alone. I also hear a lot of soothing talk about an overdue-correction and a glitch and how the automatic trading programs caused the sudden strong drop. Nobody suggests that there is any connection between the stock market plunge and Cheney's hair-thin escape from the bombing in Afghanistan which took the lives of many other people. I'm not suggesting this, either, but need to put the Cheney thing somewhere on the blog today, because it occurred to me that if the flytrap theory about terrorism (that we need to keep them busy abroad so they don't find us here) is correct, it would seem that having Cheney abroad permanently would keep the rest of us safe. - Just kidding. |
On Winter
I took the dog for a walk last night, all wrapped up in my to-do-list and my worries and the future and the past. She trotted happily in the freshly fallen snow, stopping every few yards to read those mysterious messages only dogs can interpret, and slowly my mental wrappings came undone and I lived in the present for a while. So beautiful, the present can be. It would be a pity to forget that with all the ugliness of this world. The night was dark but the lights from the buildings and the cars shone upwards, coloring the sky that odd silvery gray which is not really gray and not really silver, but somehow the color of blueness in the dark. Against that background the trees shone black, lit from behind as if from some inner tree-lights. The dark branches stretched across the sky, the white lace of snow dressing the bare branches into something new, something different. Winter having a party. This is not like the parties of summer, full of scents and song and the soft petals of flowers. It is an austere affair, held in rooms of enormous size, with music of ice flutes and cymbals and silence. And all through it the Wife of Winter dances, creating spirals in the snow, making the black trees hum, throwing a cold kiss on the faces of passers-by. Or so it seemed to me, for a few minutes. |
A Government Small Enough To Drown In A Bathtub
Will also let us die of tainted spinach or of peanut butter with salmonella in it or possibly even of a terrorist strike through the food chain. Not to mention Mad Cow Disease. Did I mention Mad Cow Disease? Hmmm. Did I eat beef recently? No, as I'm a plant-devouring goddess. But the concerns about the safety of food are real and important:
I would never have expected to see Tommy Thompson on the side of angels. It shows how bad things have become. To return back to that saying by Grover Norquist, about getting the government small enough to drown in a bathtub: There are very good reasons why we need a government bigger than a bathtub and those reasons are sometimes lives saved. The private food industry firms do not have the same incentives to test food for safety as the consumers of those foods would wish them to have. The firms will compare the benefits to them from such testing to its costs to them and will test less than an independent government office would, if such a government bases its testing frequency on the benefits and costs of testing to everybody concerned, including especially the consumers. Also, there will always be fly-by-night firms who don't care about the safety of the food at all, as well as owners of firms too greedy or too ignorant or too strapped for cash to practice proper health and sanitation measures. In fact, the firms owned by people who are not greedy or ignorant will want government inspections, because one bad case of tainted spinach can kill the whole market for all the spinach producers, even the ones whose spinach would have been fine to eat. So much for the economist chat. What do I say about a government which cuts back on the safety inspections of the food we eat while every day telling us what great dangers we face from terrorists? Oh dear. I've promised not to use vile blogger language anymore, so I can't answer my own questions. |
Monday, February 26, 2007
Me: Careful and Thought-Provoking. You: Tarzan
And which do you think Washington Post would love best? Tarzan, of course. I've been reading Eric Boehlert's piece in Media Matters for America, about the love-hate affair the Post has with wingnut bloggers. The Post loves them, the bloggers hate the post. That's how it sometimes goes in love:
Boehlert then goes out to explain the astonishing fact that lefty/liberal/progressive bloggers don't get no love from the Washington Post. That must be because it's a masochistic newspaper and only likes the steel stiletto heel of Michelle Malkin on its throat. This is the last paragraph of the piece and the source of the title I chose:
Sigh. It's because us careful and thought-provoking bloggers are a) boring, b) too obtruse and c) deficient in talk about anal sex, breast sizes, the desirability of a genocide of all darker skinned people or the best ways of lynching the members of the Supreme Court. So yes, I do know how to become mean-spirited and partisan (and the sweetheart of the Washington Post?), and I might even do that one day if I lose my dayjob. Oops. Goddesses don't have dayjobs. |
Idle Feminist (?) Thoughts
Not even quite thoughts but the first inklings of thoughts. Embryos of thoughts? Probably not worth writing down. But I will write them down, as usual. You know all the smear-stuff about Barack Obama? About his background and his second name being Hussein and about his father who was born in Africa and about whether he actually attended a madrassa or not in Indonesia? Do you think that all this is just because it helps the conservatives to paint Obama in ways which make him look as scary prospect for presidency to certain types of people? Could be. But I wonder why we never hear about his mother, except that she is white. What influence did she have on her son? How did she affect what he became? It's both what Obama himself says and what others say about him that largely excludes her. An almost Biblical way of looking at which man begat which man and nary a woman in sight. |
Socially Awkward
A sorority at DePauw University solved the problem of declining enrollment in an interesting fashion: They got rid of all the sorority sisters who didn't show proper commitment to recruiting:
Now that is some spring cleaning! It is also very depressing and a good reminder why there is no such thing as post-feminism, unless the term is intended to be sarcastic. |
Ann Althouse And Me
We have a lot in common. We are both female bloggers (though they don't really exist) and we are both experts in the obvious. But Ann is winning, because she is doing obvious in the New York Times and I'm still stuck on this crummy blog. That she is obviously so much better at all this made me first try to beat her:
But I could not, alas, alas. That led me to studying her recent opinion piece in the NYT for more hints. The piece is about the fluctuating and weather-vanish abortion views of conservative presidential candidates Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, both guys who are now trying to please the fundamentalist base of the Republican party and who therefore desperately paddle away from their previous pro-choice positions with various two-faced statements. You know, "strict constructionist" judges will be appointed, a codeword for what the wingnuts want: Both Giuliani and Romney are promising the base the return of coathangers in at least some states of the union. Or that is my understanding of the issue. But Althouse shows us why it is she who is at the New York Times, because the real message in all this is as follows:
Damn! I never realized that humanity bit! I get it now! To write like Althouse I must pretend that I'm not one of those women who will be affected by the overturning of Roe v. Wade in the next wingnut presidency! I must pretend that I'm some kind of an abstract spirit of judicial wisdom instead. |
The Poor Are Getting Poorer
So suggests a new McClatchy Newspapers analysis of the 2005 Census:
A deeply ironic use of the term "unusual economic expansion"? An expansion which increases the number of the very poor, hardly budges the earnings of most of the remaining workers, but allows the profits to skyrocket deserves a funnier name. Perhaps something honoring the tax cuts to the wealthy would do. Taxcutpansion? The topic is anything but funny, and though economists can argue about how well the Census figures measure poverty it is clear that deep poverty has risen and that many more are falling through the cracks in the floorboards of our welfare system:
That is one international competition the U.S. probably doesn't want to win. |
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Fudging or Meta-Fudging. What’s The Right Word For It?
| Posted by olvlzl. Yesterday, discussing the local recycling program with a former town official we both cited the necessity of taking into account that a lot of people won’t sort or clean or limit things thrown into the recycling bin. I was trying to figure out a word for the act of taking that kind of sloppiness into account, “fudging” or even “meta-fudging” don’t seem to work just right. Using them would be an act of whatever it should be called. Just about everything in life, even those things supposedly of great precision involve some kind of ignoring the less than pristine compliance with what should be. Most of the mewling I’ve been doing here about lapses in science would fall into that category. IQ, the fact that no one can define what it is or prove that it exists as something other than the product of reification doesn’t stop even relatively serious people from making believe that they can build science and, more dangerously, educational systems on the, perhaps, illusory stuff. As it is, there is a professional conspiracy to sweep the sullied pedigree of it under the rug. We need a formal term for this kind of fudging and a science to identify and study it. Maybe one exists already and I’m just ignorant of it. Anyone know? If this kind of stuff, accepted only because it is either necessary or professionally desirable, could be studied, papers published and, most essential to any of the behavioral sciences, paying jobs produced at universities, tenure and endowed chairs, then maybe the possible negative effects could be controlled. As it is, that kind of junk is rampant. |
Erratum
| Posted by olvlzl. Yes, I did misspell “Steven Pinker”. I plead exhaustion. When you have a leaky pipe keeping you awake at night, attention suffers. It will be fixed this week. I’d once thought of starting a Steven Pinker watch blog. I toyed with calling it “Peven Stinker Watch” and writing it in pig Latin. Thought it would mix appropriate symbolism with a bit of fun. Then I thought it was probably too puerile. Then I lost interest. But I could change my mind some day. |
Bush Crossed The Rubicon A Long Time Ago.
| Posted by olvlzl. Even the weak, first effort of Democrats in the Senate to advise against escalation of war in Iraq has been met with a stonewall of Republican resistance. Their effective majority of the Republican Royalists and phony “moderates”, with the help of the de facto Republican, Lieberman, will ensure that the United States will follow Bush and Cheney into an expanded folly. When the Constitution was first taught to us the “balance of powers” was given as the proof that the “founders” were geniuses. We were taught that the powers of congress would eternally be enough to ensure that, among other monarchal catastrophes, one man couldn’t take the country into a disastrous war of conquest. By that time a line of presidents from Truman on had shown that to be a lie. We don’t live in a Republic in so far as our foreign policy goes, certainly not in matters of war. Any president can conduct a minor war at will. And with this war on top of the Vietnam war they can honestly claim absolute power to get us into wars longer than both of the World Wars. War is different. It is the most serious thing that a country can do. It is a guarantee that large numbers of people will be killed by the state, both on the other side and on “our” side. War always brings with it every evil imaginable as order and morality give way to the war itself. Our constitution as it really is, not as the liars teach it, gives the power to start war to the executive branch with no real limit. Our media tried to use the war Clinton conducted against Serbia to hurt him politically but they didn’t really try to stop him. Other than that little has been done to discourage participation in a war since Republican isolationists, delayed the entry of the United States into the developing World War. I will point out, because I will never forget, that more than a few of the isolationists were great fans of Hitler and Mussolini. The Bush war in Iraq, following on his father’s war on Iraq, is the most incompetent of the dishonest and illegal wars brought by American presidents. The inability of the congress, specifically the Senate, to pull us out of it is absolute proof that the Constitution as it really is endangers all of us. The consensus that there is no way to prevent the insane junta from getting us involved in what anyone with a brain would know will be an even greater disaster, war with Iran, should make us rise up as a body and yell at the top of our voices. But, now as it is beginning, an effective majority of seem to either be on the take or more interested in trivia. The American People can do the right thing if they know what is really happening. The presidential horse-race, the Oscars, the rotting corpse of what passes these days as a sex goddess and a thousand other distractions are presented by the media to keep them from doing the right thing. By the time the People can’t avoid dealing with it, Bush’s attempted use of a larger disaster to save his crime family from the garbage heap of history, the world could be a much different place than it is today. Blair’s pre-Iran bugging out might indicate that even he knows what’s coming. He is a known rat, the ship is taking on water fast. |
Since Someone Asked
| The incompetence in the poem was all my own, not a plumber's. Being working class when a pipe leaks the first impulse isn't to blow a week's wages on a plumber. The point of the poem is I might know what a clepsydra is and I might be able to get at least one 'p' in each line but I'm too incompetent to stop the damned leak myself. I'll bet the plumber I know who is an expert in Bela Bartok's music ( no, he's not Hungarian) just might know what a clepsydra is. He'd certainly know enough to look it up. And HE could fix the pipe too. |
OK, Shoot The Piano Player But There’s More To It Than That
| Posted by olvlzl. Listening to Liane Hansen and talking with Nathaniel Kahn the director of the movie “Two Hands” about the physical problems of the pianist and conductor Leon Fleisher several things were striking. First, the number of times NPR alone has done stories about Fleisher would qualify as enough, already. He’s a great musician with an interesting story but there are many thousands of pianists, not to mention players of less glamourous instruments, who could be the subject of interesting stories. Why not do something that hasn’t already been done to death on NPR? And why not do stories about classical music that aren’t centered on the movies? Second, the stories and pieces about Fleisher have all been the same and superficial. They aren’t about music. Our media has just about a blanket boycott on actually covering classical music as music. With the exception of a few pieces done by classical music critics they’ve all been about his disability. The really important thing about that wouldn’t make very interesting radio for non-musicians. If Fleisher really wanted to say the most useful thing he could about his disability, it would be to document the aspects of his technique that could have lead to his problems. Fingering, in short. How was he using his hands when he got into trouble and what could that tell us about how to avoid those problems? Maybe a comparison with fingerings of pianists who worked for many decades without problems would tell something interesting. The piano being my instrument, I’ll tell you that it was when I used other peoples’ fingerings without thinking of what they did to my hand that I got into trouble. This first came to my notice when I tried practicing with my eyes closed, concentrating on how my hands position in relation to the keyboard changed as they moved up and down. The keyboard is a very large object and the hands position has to change as they move from the middle of it. Fingerings that work perfectly in the middle don’t work nearly as well as they move up and down octaves. The use of the weaker small and ring fingers are especially difficult in the right hand. Having been taught the standard fingerings and using them well past the positions they really worked in for years it was necessary to really think about how to use them in a way that worked. And I did find out that what was physically most comfortable tended to work better musically. I also got into trouble when I studied classical guitar in college. The very unnatural right hand position insisted on by the teacher lead to really bad problems in the ring and pinky fingers. After two semesters I dumped it and switched my minor instrument to one with a teacher who cared more about their students hands than their own teacher’s orthodoxy. That was what got me started on looking at my piano problems. If NPR wanted to do a useful story about this kind of thing, they might look at the work of Dorothy Taubman. Or they could actually do something about classical music that wasn’t related to the movies or the Pulitzers. They could actually do some reporting on music that hasn’t been done to death already. |
Saturday, February 24, 2007
Mouth Forged Manacles
| Posted by olvlzl. Talking and thinking about the use of identifying words for different groups of people takes up way too much time, it seems to me. It’s too complex to really be able to understand just what the ever shifting implications about them are. And by the time you’ve figured something out, someone has changed it. The worst, though, is that too many people tend to use labels as limits past which people aren’t supposed to go. Call yourself one thing and express an opinion outside of the prescribed role and you’ll get your head handed to you. That’s as big a danger as it ever was. Interesting piece by Joel Bleifuss about the current use of identifiers among various people who may or may not belong to various groups. I tend to use the terminology that became current in the early 1970s, maybe because of my age. It’s funny to think back at how I didn’t like the word “gay” because it seemed to imply that gay men didn’t take themselves seriously. It seemed to me to be an adoption of the stereotype of what gay men were supposed to be. Now it’s just a word. “Feminist” seems to me to be useful because calling yourself a feminist is a sign that you didn’t retreat in the backlash of the last three decades but just kept going. I think it’s entirely wise to steer clear of using terms of invective, no matter how fashionable those become. Most importantly because they can still hurt people but, also, by the time you’ve found out, they’ll have reverted back to their original connotation. This is especially true of the use of reclaimed invective by people not in the group. Besides, there are few things more tempting than calling up someone on their use of one. Actually, it’s best to avoid using all of them unless it’s impossible. |
Call It The Lieberman Rule
| What anyone asking for the nomination of the Democratic Party must be forced to promise Democratic voters. Reposted by olvlzl. The Democratic Party is owned by the members of the party, not by the leaders of it, not by the connected beltway bright things looking for their next press opportunity and handout. The election and the seat won through it are owned by the voters, not by the candidates. While the party has no right to require a guarantee of ideological conformity, especially since there is no Democratic ideology, there are things which a Democratic candidate owes to the members of the party. 1. Democratic candidates must make a binding promise that they will not leave the party for another one while holding an office gained as the candidate of the party. 2. If a Democrat leaves the party while holding office they must agree to vacate the office. 3. A Democratic candidate will accept the results of the nominating process. 4. A Democratic candidate will fight a crooked election. A person who holds office has an obligation to represent all of their constiuents, they cannot be bound by the party to a given position on an issue. That is a matter of trust between the office holder and their consituents. But a person who holds office through the Democratic Party takes on additional obligations to the party. Through their own actions they have asked for our support and so have made it a matter of honor that they will not betray us. No candidate who asks the support of the members of the party should be allowed to flim-flam us. If they don't gain the nomination through the rules of the Democratic Party they have to accept that. They should be required to promise at the beginning of the nomination process not to act as a spoiler in the general election by being a candidate outside the party or by campaigning for a rival of the party. No office holder who has gained a seat through the Democratic party should be able to leave the party while holding that seat. All candidates should be required to make these promises to members of the Democratic Party from the start as a pledge of trust. If they refuse? Democrats will know what to expect of them and can vote accordingly. I am sure someone will ask about Jeffords. Much as I respect him, that's not out problem. His party left him and he had an R after his name. #4. NEVER FORGET THE STOLEN ELECTION OF 2000 OR THE DISASTER OF A GOVERNMENT IT CREATED! Employees of the Democratic Party in any of its branches and people employed by Democratic politicians should sign a contract stating that they will not go on the cabloids or other news and alleged news outlets to slam the party, its members, its candidates or its motives for three presidential election cycles after their employment ends. Russert, Matthews and the guy with the hair are stinking quislings who would be nobodies without the patronage of fools who trusted them. If the party doesn't learn from their example and institute contractual remedies to prevent the production of more of these it can expect more of the same. Any Democrat who has anything to do with the likes of Dick Morris should be put up against the wall. |
Arguing About A Total Waste Of Time While People Defer Healthcare Because They Don’t Have Insurance Now.
| Posted by olvlzl. Note: I was going to hold this till later but a piece of junk mail came today, from “Skeptical Inquirer” magazine published by what I consider to be the pseudo-skeptical group, CSICOP*. You can imagine the effect it had on me. I might post a piece on that group someday about why I am very skeptical of its skepticism. Maybe it was the praise of Stephen Pinker in the come on that really got me going. I assume that there are any number of feminists who will understand why that might be. This is also posted as motivation to skeptical evaluation of claims of the kind of science he and many others toute. Until then, hope you find this fun. I did. Query: What did you mean when you said the “prayer studies both pro and con are bogus”? Now, you will remember, before we begin, that no claims are made here as to the effectiveness of prayer. This is about why the studies are bogus, nothing else. It is also about why both the believers and skeptics are being dishonest about these widely reported “scientific studies”. The real point is, spend the money and effort on getting a universal health care system, that would really save lives and improve health. In order to study something you have to be able to observe it, to define what you are observing within some limits and to be able to verify that it is present in your study. “Prayer” is not definable and it can’t be known to be one thing or to exist at any particular time. Any possible mechanism of its operation or the results of it are also undefinable or prone to ambiguity. The widely reported “prayer studies” don’t even get past the first hurdle of logic, never mind science. “Prayer” is an undefined activity, it is also an activity that can’t be observed. It seems that the only verification of the presence of “prayer” in these studies were the reports of those doing the “praying”. Self-reporting, one assumes by people who “believe in the effectiveness of prayer”, is hardly objective verification. It isn’t even knowable if they had the same idea of what they were supposed to be doing. One person might have been trying to appeal to a god to effect healing, one may have been trying to send out healing “energy” from themself, someone might have been trying to do both at once or at different times. Another might have been doing something else. It could be that two people who used exactly the same words to describe what they were doing were actually doing different things. It is quite possible that the mental activities of two such people were quite distinctly different. How would the researchers have controlled for that? If imaging or other techniques were used to monitor brain activity during prayer, there isn’t any way to know if that would have an effect on the outcome. It could be that any single person was actually doing different things on different occasions, even if they thought they were consistent. We have it on the authority of people who pray that they don’t always “get it right”. So, there is no defined activity that can even be tested for its presence. It gets worse. It is possible that a subset of the group studied would have actually shown a result different than that of the whole group. It is possible that those were the only ones “doing it the right way”. There is no way of knowing which of the results, positive or negative, might have been right or if neither of them were valid. Given the very nature of what was allegedly being studied, there is a possible participant in the study whose participation didn’t even seem to enter into consideration. What could be a rather important “other”. If every single person who was “praying” was praying in exactly the same way for the intercession of a god or other spiritual consciousness there is no way to know, 1. If they exist, 2. If they would cooperate with the sloppy study, 3. If they found the entire thing too insulting and so sabotaged it. Maybe the “agent of healing” had entirely different motives and chose to act in an entirely mysterious way without informing the participants. There are precedents reported in the literature of prayer that are consistent with that kind of thing. And now for one of my pet peeves in this kind of “science”, the control group. It is entirely possible that such an agent of healing had motives entirely separate from those of the study and who chose to effect healing within the people in the “control” group. Maybe God took pity on people who were set aside by the protocols set up for the convenience of the researchers. You think a God who is willing to heal people on the basis of abject, desperate, requests wouldn’t have thought of that? There isn’t any way to know that either a member of the control group or prayed over group was praying for themselves or if other people, unknown to those doing the study, were praying for them. There isn’t any way to know if such prayer would be more of less effective than that prayer sanctioned by those conducting an official “scientific” study. There is no way to know if the effects of prayer might not be cumulative. Maybe the number of people praying has no effect whatsoever, that is if there is any effect. Even if all of the participants in the “control group”, both non-pray-ers and prayed not-overs were self-declared atheists there isn’t any way to know if some of them might have cheated and snuck in some prayer just to cover all the bases. I suspect Balzac would have suspected that as a possibility*. Why any scientist, skeptic or religious believer would give a “study” that begins so badly the time of day is probably the most interesting question that could come from this kind of thing. With a lack of validity being so clear, questions of motives must arise. Why the media would is clear, it takes up air time and pushes agendas. These “studies” are a waste of resources that could be better spent in other ways. It’s quite shocking that religious believers, particularly Christians, would put God to a test like this. Even if its being literally against the word of Jesus didn’t bother them, the literature of religion tells us over and over that doing this kind of thing is just asking for trouble. The motives of “scientific skeptics” who take their side of this thing seriously are even more suspect. If they are willing to accept such sloppy science their skepticism is of a very low order. As long as no one is being charged for services or delaying treatment, let people pray as much as they want to. While it might offend the tender sensibilities of the pseudo-skeptics, it’s really none of their business how people in despair try to alleviate their distress. They certainly haven’t come up with something any more guaranteed to do that. If skeptics want to go after charlatans who bilk the vulnerable and who endanger people by encouraging them to stop or delay treatment, that would be an entirely worthy use of their time. Otherwise, it’s not only none of their business, it’s cruel. Spend the money and effort on getting a universal health care system, there is an enormous amount of evidence that a universal healthcare system would really save lives and improve health. So important, it needed repeating. * Marcello Truzzi was a co-founder and later somewhat a hertitic of CSICOP. He is often cited as the author of the slogan, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof," so beloved of Carl Sagan. Apparently he broke with a number of avocational ‘skeptics’ over the fact that much of not most of the activity and writing surrounding most of the well publicized “skeptics” isn’t skeptical at all but is a promotion of their fixed opinion. The term “pseudo-skeptics” is a good word to describe the intellectual conceit that is currently fashionable with so many of the fans of the cult of materialism. By the way, the slogan itself is scientifically problematic. Who gets to decide what claims are extraordinary to start with? Presumably the same people get to decide what evidence is extraordinary enough to fulfill their requirements. And isn’t demanding anything above what would be the normal level of verification be a bald faced violation of the foundation that scienctific inquiry has to be controlled, that no one gets to choose standards of rigor for one area of study that other areas aren't subjected to? The danger of that is clear, it would be an open door for allowing prejudice into what must be as objective as possible. Why would the designation of a claim as extraordinary require more than the, presumably, sufficiently rigorous level of evidence that makes ideas in science accepted? Is there something wrong with the normal level of scrutiny that science practices? I kind of think it works, when it’s actually practiced. That is, that’s the level of verification necessary in science. What it takes to convince people in normal, everyday life is an entirely different matter. That’s too variable to get a handle on. People have a right to be skeptical for their own reasons that might have nothing to do with what can be demonstrated with the very limited and specialized tools of science. And they should be free to believe on that same basis. Tha's what we call freedom. ** See his short story, The Atheist’s Mass. |
A Question
| Posted by olvlzl. Last week, discussing a report of a violent attack on a woman, one of my relatives told me that he had advised his daughter to fight back with everything they could if they were attacked. He told her that she should assume that she was fighting for her life. What do you think? I have had no luck getting posts up on the blog I began last October on this subject. I’ll start up again soon in a different form. |
Posted With Annotation
| by olvlzl. “Can the reader now understand the importance of an opinion, of a sarcastic word, a letter, a jest, a smile, or, with still greater reason, of a book in the eyes of a government thus favored by the credulity of its people, and by the complaisance of all foreigners? A word of truth dropped in Russia is a spark that may fall on a barrel of gunpowder. What do the men who govern the empire care for the want, the pallid visages of the soldiers of the emperor? Those living specters have the most beautiful uniforms in Europe; what matters, then, the filthy smocks in which the gilded phantoms are concealed in the interior of their barracks? Provided they are only shabby and becdirty in secret, and that they shine when they show themselves, nothing is asked from them, nothing is given them. With the Russians, appearance is everything, and among them appearance deceives more than it does among others. It follows that whoever lifts a corner of the curtain loses his reputation in Petersburg beyond the chance of retrieving it. Social life in that country is a permanent conspiracy against the truth. There, whoever is not a dupe, is viewed as a traitor, – there, to laugh at a gasconade, to refute a falsehood, to contradict a political boast, to find a reason for obedience, is to be guilty of an attempt at the safety of the state and the prince*; it is to incur the fate of a revolutionist, a conspirator, an enemy of order, a Pole: and we all know whether this fate is a merciful one. It must be owned the SUSCEPTIBILITY which thus manifests itself is more formidable than laughable; the minute surveillance of such a government, in accord with the enlightened vanity of such a people, beomes fearful; it is no longer ludicrous.” Marquis de Custine c.1839: Empire of the Czar * Dedicated to Helen Thomas. Molly Ivins once pointed out how craven the Washington Press Corps is for not backing her up in the face of the Bush Junta's attempts to turn her into a joke, and then a non-person. |
Late Night Lament
Friday, February 23, 2007
What Is Out, What Is In
You know those articles where you are told why those 900-dollar shoes with the 20 inch cork heels you bought last year are totally OUT now, because the IN shoes this year are made of lucite with little razor blades as buckles? And how eating the mustache hairs of Brazilian goats is the IN thing in restaurant dining now, whereas nobody, but nobody, eats the eyeballs of Ukrainian mollusks anymore? Likewise, I've started seeing political articles with the same idea, the idea of the author deciding what is in and what is out this year. No need to have a reason for it. Just a declaration from high above and that's it. So I decided to do one of those articles, the INS and OUTS of politics. I'm a goddess, after all. Here it goes: OUT: Joe Lieberman. Any mention of him, all pictures of him. OUT, dratted spot, OUT. IN: The total absence of Joe Lieberman. OUT: The 2008 presidential campaign, beginning in 2006 and lasting forever. IN: Real articles about real political problems of today. (Yes, I know I'm a naif.) OUT: Any descriptions of the buffness of Mitt Romney and other homoerotic rants about male politicians. (Do you hear me, Tweety? Bush will never leave Laura for you.) IN: Articles which explore the question why Chris Matthews (aka Tweety) fears Hillary Clinton so very much and why he thinks women are those slightly ridiculous things that someone forgot to provide with a silence-button. You can probably suggest better ins and outs. Of course, the serious OUT should be all pre-emptive warmongering for domestic political purposes. |
The Army Marches On Its Stomachs
An old saying stressing the importance of the supply and maintenance aspects in any military operation, and the reason why those who engage in direct battle operations are a small percentage of the total military strength in Iraq. I learned all this from science fiction or fantasy, by the way. Elizabeth Moon's The Deed of Paksenarrion, probably. Just to explain why a female divine would say anything about this stern and manly bidness of war. Now the hook, as they call it in writing, meaning the reasoning for my babble above:
My bolds. Now I'm feeling hungry, again. |
The Koufax Awards
Some clever and discerning person has gotten me into the first round of the Koufax awards this year for "Best Writing". How very nice! I won the "Deserves More Hits" award last year, and my greatest fear is that I win it this year, too. And next year. And the one after that. The Koufax Awards are a good way of finding more interesting liberal/progressive blogs to read. I encourage you to surf the candidates. |
Friday Feminist Funnies
Feministing.com often posts on interesting consumer products based on the bodies of women. Here is one recent example. When I saw it I remembered my file of things I see when I log on to my e-mail address. This is one of them: ![]() The ad offers something for everyone, don't you think? If you don't like cute puppies, surely you want a woman with hanging tits as your wallpaper? What other choices could there possibly be? Heh. To balance things out a bit, there is this image I copied from an e-mail offer, first thinking that it might be a chastity ring... Can you guess what it really is? |
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Free Kareem
A young Egyptian blogger, Abdel Kareem Nabil Soliman, has been sentenced to four years in prison for "for contempt of religion, insulting the president and spreading false information." To learn more, go to the Free Kareem website. |
Come Shower With Me, Michael
Michael Medved, a shining star in the tiara of wingnuttism, explains to us why we shouldn't allow gay men to join professional sports teams:
What Michael objects to is the idea of someone else perhaps hunting him as a sex object. That's what makes him feel so very uncomfortable, I think. He never asks whether the heterosexual men in the shower look attractive to the young hottie women he imagines, with some enjoyment. He simply assumes that the attraction would be mutual. Or rather, that the guys would do the hunting, so that's ok, too. And not one sentence about lesbians in the women's showers. Maybe Michael is like Queen Victoria and doesn't believe that women could be so perfidious. Then there is the whole "ill-favored, grossly overweight female" schtick. Remind me again how men don't really want women to go on diets and how it is the other women who force dieting on their sisters. The whole column is rather vomit-worthy, if you like that sort of thing. Medved builds his arguments into a crescendo, ending in the to-him-obvious conclusion that mixing genders or mixing heterosexuals with gays and lesbians will not work in any professional setting where sex might rear its ugly head. Well, you can guess which groups would be excluded in this scenario. Besides, he thinks that gay sex is disgusting. I think all sex looks pretty hilarious and certainly would seem incomprehensible to a Martian or some other alien species which propagates by division. --- Thanks to spocko. |
Tap Dancing
Don't forget that I'm in the chorus on the American Prospect blog TAPPED. You can find some of my more tech-nerdy posts there and also some other stuff. Not to mention the great posts by other writers there. |
A "Larry Summers Moment"
Ann on the TAPPED blog has a nice post on the reasons why so few reviewers of the New York Times Book Review are women:
Note the perfect circle of self-referrals or referrals to People Just Like Me. Note also how odd it is that an intelligent and experienced editor would give such an extremely weak excuse for the dearth of women among the reviewers. I wonder if anyone asked what percentage of the books to be reviewed are on military history and why this percentage (probably not an enormous one) dictated the gender of the reviewers so totally, or if anyone asked what evidence Gewen has to assume that women don't write on military history. Could women at least review cook books, then? Please, pretty please? Gewen also stated, according to the Harvard Crimson, that he feels squeamish about the idea of seeking reviewers who are not white just for the sake of them not being white. Presumably this is because he has not yet scraped the bottom of the white-guy barrel and only then would someone not white be an equally talented reviewer. All this is exasperating, because the underpinnings of Gewen's thoughts are made so very bare. It's like spotting someone naked in an embarrassing way. Now we know how Gewen thinks and now we can see how no woman reviewer could ever be hired by him just on her own merits. The next one who gets hired will always be seen as an affirmative action hire, even if she writes on war books better than the angels of death. |
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
A Nonpolitical Post, Yet Again
I have a migraine through my right eye. I hope this garden post doesn't make you feel the same way: Flower Beds This last week two visitors to the house complimented me on the bed of flowers in the sun I have in my back yard. One called it pretty, the other lush. Although it is, to me at least, both of those, "lush" comes closer to its actual meaning than "pretty". If I asked you to come and see my plants copulate, would you call this pretty? Yet copulation is what flowering most closely resembles in the animal world; a drawn-out (I hope!) foreplay or sexual display, the finding of a suitable partner, and the deed itself. The buds swell and mature, then slowly, slowly they open pushing, pushing into the sun's hot fingers. "I am here, ready and open" they whisper in alluring colors and mind-altering perfumes. "Come" they croon to the bumblebees, who obey all day long with their silky brown fur smeared yellow with pollen. What exstacy! Even deadheading is not dissimilar from cleaning up the dishevelment after a careless night on the town: the pink dress, now torn, wrinkled and smeared, needs to be gotten rid of, the hangover needs to be treated. This view of flowering casts a new light on the old debate between people who like structured, orderly gardens with no flowers - just green trees, water and stone - and those who want flowers. I always felt that the structuralists had the higher moral or aesthetic ground, but now I am beginning to wonder if they are just prudish. I bet they would call flower beds pretty. |
Where Do You Get Your News?
Dick Cheney, the Vice-President of the United States of America, gets his from friends. Or so it seems, given his reaction to the news that the British troops are going to start withdrawing from Basra and the surrounding area in southern Iraq:
I feel very comforted by this. So comforted that I'm not quite sure what to make of the almost simultaneous comment by Iraq's vice-president, Tariq al-Hashemi, about how insurgents and militia members might be leaving Baghdad for?... you guessed it, Basra:
For some odd reason I want to walk away after this post while singing "Singing In The Rain". |
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
The British Are Going!
They are going home from Iraq:
I can imagine what the British will now be called by our neoconservative leaders... Glenn Greenwald proposes a frightening explanation for Blair's apparent flipflopping on this matter of troop withdrawal:
I'm going to pull a pillow on my head. Tell me when the next war is over. |
How To Troll A Feminist Blog
Let's see if this one doesn't make me calm and cheerful again. Worth a try, though I could have given the post some other name, such as "fuck off, you plague-chewed asshole". I'm beginning to sound like a real bigoted feminist blogger here! Hee! Here are the rules for being a Proper Troll on a feminist blog, or the rules as to the available types of trolling: 1. Just call the blogger an evil bitch or a stoopid bitch. Ask her how she would feel if she had a son born and the son wouldn't be allowed to lord over all women. 2. Then you could point out that the blogger is only a feminist because she is too ugly, too fat, too shrill, too old, too stoopid to be something else. You might sign her up for the support group of big-assed women or big-nosed women. 3. If you are a religious sort of troll, you can quote a lot of Bible or Koran verses. Now that will shut her up. You can also tell her that she is going to Hell. And you can arrange for prayer circles to pray for her. 4. All these too crude for you, but you still want to be a troll on feminist blogs? Worry not! You can always argue that any woman wanting equality really, really hates men. That's it! 5. Now, if you happen to be really stupid yourself, don't hesitate to troll feminist blogs. Your pseudoevidence is always the valid one, and you can say so in many different forms without budging an inch. That'll show them. No, you don't have to read the responses or to check out any other evidence that might be presented. No, you don't have to know how to spell, either. 6. Now we are getting to the higher levels of trolling, the insidious ones. You are getting a graduate degree in trolling here! On this level you will act like a concern troll (Phila's term), which means that you pretend to be on the blogger's side. But alas, the stoopid blogger is writing about something unimportant! Something trivial! Something that will make feminism the laughing-stock of every upstanding anti-feminist out there. Had she only selected the Correct Topic! But she failed, alas, and feminism will be ruined for all times. Just too bad that almost all topics are trivial and unimportant, isn't it? 7. An advanced variation of this is to point out that yes, sometimes women do indeed have it rough, but so do all sorts of other people. What about carpenters? What about carpenter ants? People with crooked front teeth? Those who ride mopeds? People who live in wooded areas? This works very well, as long as you don't remind everyone that being a woman doesn't save you from any of those other problems. 8. The PhD level of trolling on feminist blogs requires quite a few years of work first, so I'm only putting it out there as a goal towards which to strive. The idea is to tell the blogger how very smart and intelligent she is, how really wonderful a blogger she is. What a pity, then, that she squanders her enormous brilliance on such an unimportant and dead topic as feminism. What a great pity, indeed. Imagine what she could do if she was writing on whether Barack Obama is handsome or awkward! Imagine what she could do by writing on the very interesting questions concerning Important Political Topics, topics which reek of testosterone and ballistic integrity. Like what size of an airplane Nancy Pelosi is allowed to have. |
More On The Unattainable Perfection
Having to do with the next post below this one, and the further thoughts I had on the topic, the topic being the view of eating and exercise as a moral or religious enterprise or a competition as to who can get closest to an almost nonexistent thinness without dying, without dying EVER! These are two very different ideas and putting them together looks like an oxymoron. But it is not, or if it is, then life is full of oxymorons (oxymora?). The first idea is the Puritanical one, still quite common in this country, the idea of life as a moral struggle against temptations, a religious walk through nonreligious sins. Everything, I have noticed, can be twisted into a moral failure by some people, often by experts. Who was it who said that only in the United States it is the fault of the elderly that they die? Because clearly, if you try hard enough, if you are earnest enough, pure enough, you will live forever. And your body will look like that of a twenty-year old, forever, too. If it does not you have sinned, and perhaps the health insurance shouldn't cover your sinning. Why does this anger me so? Partly because I'm using my red-hot anger as a source of energy, but mostly because such sermons make life really horrible for those most vulnerable to its seductions. For note that the people who read articles on good eating and good exercise and how to take care of your health are not those sedentary and overweight Americans who might benefit from the advice the most. They are also, and perhaps most likely, those Americans who are already too thin and who already overexercise. I've thought similar thoughts on the many articles on "good mothering" and the awful consequences of neglectful mothering. I'm willing to bet quite a lot that the wrong people are affected by these articles, people who already try too hard and feel too much guilt, and that the people who actually might learn something useful from them (and this does not only mean mothers) will not read the articles or if they do are not affected by them. What is it about pleasure and enjoyment of life that is so very bad? Think about it. If your daily meals can't give you enough pleasure, because they have become part of the Puritan "religion" of striving, where are you going to get your good feelings from? And if all you see when you look at your children are the many ways you might fail in bringing them up correctly (did you play enough Beethoven? did you eat a pickle while pregnant?), how are you going to enjoy them and the time you spend with them? And if moving and exercising and dancing are not making you feel a little like one of God's little acrobats, because you are busy writing down your pulse rate and your calorie consumption, when are you ever going to feel that divine breath on your nostrils? Or take sex. If sex is all about counting weekly frequencies and how good your orgasms are, when are you going to have fun? All this confuses the trip with its destination, and as none of us knows the destination, why not enjoy the trip? My plea is for moderation, of course, not for becoming a morbidly ill couch potato. But I don't really see the urgings of the fitness and health industries as pleas for moderation, most of the time. There is a slippage towards one extreme or another, all the time. And come to think about it, "moderation" isn't the right word, either, because it conveys the idea of temptations successfully avoided. We need a better word for what I think of as living life as a human being, eating wonderful and healthy (and sometimes not-so healthy) food, moving enough for your body to stay limber, enjoying the gifts this can give you in pure enjoyment of life. We need a word that makes it quite clear being alive is not just a time given to you so that you can leave the stringiest body possible when you die. And die you will. So much for the first paradoxical idea. The second one has to do with the role of all this in the lives of women, in particular, rather than in the lives of people, in general. There is a whole subgenre of writings and programs aimed at making women feel in the need of improvement. This subgenre serves firms very well, as a worried woman is more likely to buy that expensive face-cream or that educational toy for her child or that Victoria's Secret bra for her husband's ogling enjoyment. The guilt industry, I sometimes think it should be called. The guilt industry works especially well in affecting women, because the subgenre is not that novel. You read the Bible and find Eve at fault. You watch movies such as "Educating Rita" and you find women in need of improvement. You read fashion magazines and find your body needs fixing. You read articles on child psychology and find that you are walking across a mine-field where every wrong step will cause your child to become a drug abuser who will hate you, the mother in later life. You read anti-feminist writings and find that some argue that women shouldn't have been given the vote. You read other anti-feminist articles and find that women are already ruling the whole world and that this is destroying EVERYTHING. You read articles about women in Afghanistan getting killed by their families for the crime of having been raped by some strangers first. You read articles about how the selfish and uppity women in Europe refuse to have enough children to perpetuate the White Uberrace (and you wonder how much damage they would have done to those nonexistent children by forgetting to play Beethoven while pregnant). And so on. It's one way of making a person into a pretzel. (And don't come in here giving me counterexamples or scolding me for my intemperance. I'm on a roll.) Even a woman can become a pretzel, and that is a painful process. So what's a girl to do? It's not that hard to see that on some subconscious level many women think that they can somehow prove that they are not so bad, that at least they, if not other women, can be good and upright and ordinary citizens. Maybe working on the body will help. Or committing to Motherhood. Or saying that YOU agree about how terrible other women are, but that YOU are one of the women with a mental penis. YOU are ok. You are not Anna Nicole Smith or Hillary Clinton or Condie Rice or any of those other nasty uppity women who for some reason are seen as a stand-in for all women. I'm running out of steam and I have to go out to chisel off the ice on the front steps as the postman is complaining about the hazards caused by my refusing to be nice to anyone at all. |
Must Do Better
I'm currently in the throes of one of my extremely rare bouts of anger and thus you are going to get lots of wrathful posts until it passes. Now aren't you blessed? The current angry post was provoked by an article in the Bazaar, a fashion magazine for women. The article, called The Eating Diaries (which I kept misreading as The Eating Disorders), chronicles the eating and exercise habits of three women who are given to the reader as examples of women in a fantastic shape (they certainly are very slim). ("We asked three toned and trim women of different ages to reveal the details of their diet and exercise habits. Read on to discover how they stay so slim.") As you might expect, each of the women lists an extremely healthy diet (no fats, really, no chocolate, no cakes, mostly no caffeine): some sawdust in the morning, a perfume of steamed fish at night, lots of water from a secret and holy well on Mars. And the exercise schedule is equally fantastic. All these women work out harder than people in training for the olympics. Nice. But guess what happens next? A nutritionist and an exercise guru are asked to comment on what these women do wrong. Perhaps a leaf of spinach could be removed from the plate? How about another five hours of weight lifting? And some cheese, for calcium. But not just any old cheese: cheese without any fat whatsoever. So I read this and laugh. But then I got angry again, and thought about how the messages of unattainable perfection just keep coming. And coming. And coming. And yes, this take on the article is sarcastic. Do you have a problem with that? |
Monday, February 19, 2007
Read This
Zenobia: A Book Review
I have just finished reading The Chronicle of Zenobia: The Rebel Queen, by Judith Weingarten. First, a revelation: I know that Ms. Weingarten reads this blog sometimes, and she had the book sent to me for review, but I never got it so I bought a copy instead. Where does this leave me? Heh. You figure it out. Judith Weingarten is an archeologist and an expert in depicting the place (Palmyra) and the time (269-272 AD) of Zenobia, and if you like historical novels in general you will like this one. The book (first in a planned trilogy, I think) made it easy for me to step into the world of Simon, a teacher and friend of the young Zenobia. Simon is the narrator in most of the book. Other reviews I've read say that the depiction is historically correct. It feels like reality, and that is a nice thing in a book. Perhaps the reason for the very real atmosphere of the book is in this quote by Weingarten:
Why would Zenobia's story be of interest to a present-day reader? There are at least three good reasons, in addition to the intrinsic interest of tales like this (and yes, there is sex, too), and I started thinking about them even before I finished the book. First, the book describes the beginning of what is often described as the fall of the Roman empire, a time when the Persian forces became a major threat to the Eastern parts of the empire, a time when the Roman ability to defend Zenobia's homeland was waning. The cracks are showing in the physical and the intellectual ramparts of the Roman empire, and Zenobia sees those cracks and acts. Compare all this with the time we are living in today. I doubt it is ever easy for contemporaries to see historical changes happening, but clearly we have stepped into a new and different era of politics and warfare. Old empires, whether real or ideological, are crumbling, and it is not at all clear what will take their place. Reading about that time and place reminded me about this time and place. A second similarity between Zenobia's time and ours, and a second good reason to read the book, is in the importance of understanding and coping with different religions. The book looks at this through the eyes of a Jewish interpreter, for Simon belongs to the Jewish diaspora in Palmyra. But Christianity, a new and troublesome cult, has entered the picture, too, though the old local and Roman gods still rule strongest. Zenobia herself worships Allat, a goddess about whom I've read elsewhere as a possible precursor of Allah. How to cope with the many different religions? The responses Simon describes us vary from benign tolerance to being burnt on the stake, and the political reasons for these responses are made clear to us. The third good reason for the book is in that rare story of a woman rising up in a male-dominated society and becoming a ruler. How on earth did Zenobia ever manage to come into power in a society where women were not expected to leave the women's quarters very much? Was she truly so exceptional? What made her exceptional? How did she manage to gather the power she later wielded? Why did the men around her follow her? Weingarten tells us one story about all this, but I can imagine other explanations. It's all interesting, though. I do have one complaint about the book: its title. This first book in the series is mostly about Simon, not about Zenobia, and the book ends before the real reign of Zenobia, the queen, has started. I eagerly await the second installment, to learn more about Zenobia. But the book might have been given a better title. |
Pre-Pregnancy, Again
An interesting post on Eschaton asks the following question:
In any case, this is not really what the "pre-pregnancy" concept for women refers to. Women have always been asked questions about whether they are pregnant before dental x-rays or before getting prescribed certain medications. No, the new "pre-pregnancy" is something much longer term, like from twelve to fifty years of age for women, pretty much whether the woman ever plans to get pregnant or not. This is the walking-womb version, in my mind. Here is how it came about: In the late 1980's or early 1990's a report about birth defects came out. It reviewed available evidence on any that were known to be preventable, and most of these focused on what the woman should do. Not the pregnant woman, but the woman before pregnancy, because certain birth defects happen very early in pregnancy. The recommendation for increasing folic acid consumption came from this study as lack of folic acid has been shown to be a cause of birth defects. Now, I had a little trouble with the part of the report which said that it is actually impossible to get sufficient amounts of folic acid from just food so that women should take supplements, because this sounds very odd to me. As if the birth defects are "natural" in some ways, or as if the research might have been wrong. But that wasn't what angered me about this early report. It was the part where the writers argued that as roughly one half of all pregnancies are unplanned, the prevention of birth defects requires that we must treat all women as potentially pregnant. They might be, given that unplanned bit. The only safe thing is to make all women between menarche and menopause take folic acid supplements and whatever else the medical establishment decides might prevent birth defects. ALL WOMEN. Nuns, those with hysterectomies and so on. All women. Not perhaps such an unprecedented conclusion if your objective is to reduce birth defects. It's very much like saying that if my objective was to reduce rapes a good way of doing that would be to put all men under house-arrest. It would work. And we can't tell, FROM OUTSIDE, which men might be rapists, so why not just lock them all up. And yes, I know that this is an extreme comparison, but it brings out the fact that the recommendations for women put zero value on what she might want to do with her life, and the rape example shows why such a recommendation wouldn't be made if we put value on the other people's rights and freedoms. I had a lot of trouble with the values that this recommendation showed, especially as it might turn out one day that what is good for the potential pregnancy some day in a woman's future might be bad for her health right now and then a similar rule might be applied. Hence the walking wombs fears. This was over ten years ago. The newest version has dressed the very same recommendations in empowering clothes. Now the health care for women is supposed to have pre-pregnancy care as a routine part, because it empowers the woman! Yeah. Except that I know the backstory. And except that we are likely to be in the state of pre-pregnancy or pre-conception for decades. I'm going to get flack for this. To see what kind, I'm going to reproduce a few comments from that Eschaton thread (hope it's kosher to do)
Note how women "cause" birth defects? And how it isn't too much to ask for you to take a vitamin so that no child, anywhere, will be born without a brain? But what if the next recommendation is to avoid certain jobs, just in case you might be pregnant? Or not to run for the president of the United States, what with all the stresses of that job which might harm the fetus? Where do we draw the line between fetal concerns and the rights of women to be full human beings? Some other comments in that discussion thread also seemed interesting. First this one:
Note that a woman with cancer is not given this treatment. But there is hair loss treatment for men with dire warnings on the package, warnings, which are aimed not at him but at any woman who might happen to touch the product:
So we might ban cancer treatment for pregnant women but allow hair growth products for men? Or this comment:
I see a difference here in how responsibility is viewed and in who gets freedoms to have better hair and who gets to have pain instead. |
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Bite My Scrotum
Except that I don't have one of those handy just now. But billions of people and animals do as scrotum is a fairly usual part of the male body. But not in children's books, it seems:
The book has been banned in some libraries, just as other books for children have been:
I thought it was a dog's genitalia? --- Thanks to GDF for the tip. |
Honeysuckle. A nonpolitical post.
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Being For The Troops
The article on Walter Reed hospital and its "outpatients" in today's Washington Post is necessary though sad reading. The beginning tells the rest of the tone:
I talked to some Vietnam veterans and they all argued that it has always been so, that the government has always sucked the juice and the life out of its military and then has thrown the broken ones into the garbage, that the bureaucracy has always made life almost impossible for the wounded veterans, that hope has slowly suffocated. But the situation now looks worse to me, and this is the reason:
Did you interpret this the same way I did: That these soldiers with no limbs or severe mental problems are held in storage so that they can be sent back to Iraq or Iran or wherever the government decides to attack next? I hope I got that wrong. The whole article tells a story about the real answers to the question: Who cares for the military? |
Boxwoods. A nonpolitical post
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Saturday, February 17, 2007
Glass Houses and Rocks and Other Silliness
My martial arts bash was cancelled. So you get more of me than you dreamt! Matthew Yglesias links to an interesting review of a new book on young women and sex. The book is called UNHOOKED. How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose at Both, by Laura Sessions Step. Here are some choice quotes from the review:
"How will these girls learn how to be loving couples in this hook-up culture? Where will they practice the behavior needed to sustain deep and long-term relationships? If they commit to a lack of commitment, how will they ever learn to be intimate?" It was so good I just had to repeat it. Well, Laura, why don't you ask the young men for the answers? Unless I have gotten this quite wrong the hooking-up has been one of the great ideals of the young-guy-talk for centuries, the idea of attachment-free sex, the idea of scoring, the idea of sex as a form of physical release alone. The idea of fleeing any sign of commitment as fast as one can. How did these young men learn to commit themselves to a deep relationship? I was being sarcastic there. Session Step's point is naturally that it is the women who are supposed to do the relationship-work. Men can just do whatever they always have done in the past, and if that happens to be exactly what the author worries about, well, who cares. It's not a guy thing. Have you noticed, by the way, how all these books about the sex and the young people are aimed at women and have to do with trying to change women's behavior? It does take two to tango, but for some reason the assumption is that, unlike in tango, it is the women alone who can preserve romance and marriage in this world. And lest we forget the crucial difference between the sexes, Session Steps reminds that women's sexuality is fragile, can be dirtied, can be invaded. It's a property, in fact. Like virginity:
At least she suggests that the girl or the woman is the rightful owner of her acres. But that is the only difference between these quotes and the abstinence folks' attempt to make sex into something that dirties a woman, uses her up. This is all very tiresome. Session Step does have a point in worrying about the increasingly early sexualization of girls, a sexualization that comes from outside and has very little to do with what ten-year old girls, say, actually think about or want to do, and much more to do with the popular culture and the porn world. I also think that it is hard for women to understand their own sexual needs in a world which blasts them with messages about how best to service men for the pleasure of the men, and I think that the real sexual liberation of women is a very unfinished business. But returning to that old idea of the woman as the asexual gatekeeper to all sex, the keeper of the fires of the home and romance, and in all manners the one whom to blame when things go wrong is not the way to approach these issues. |
Worth Watching
The Viking Invasion
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Friday, February 16, 2007
The Anti-Contraception Chocolate Bars
I'm on the e-mail list of the anti-contraception people, for some reason, and today they sent me something that got smoke streaming out of my ears and fire flaring out of my nose. The e-mail is about a counter-campaign for the campaign which hands out condoms and Hershey's kisses near Valentine's Day on college campuses, to spread information on contraception. Well, the counter-campaign spreads information about anti-contraception. Like this:
"I don't want to share every part of myself with you." Ok, anti-contraceptionists, hand me your lungs and liver and your eyeballs. I'm hungry. This is a very feminist topic, by the way. Not just because of the disgusting use of my divine food, chocolate, but because what women are asked to share is so much more than what men are asked to share. Not at all even-Steven, these anti-contraceptionists. |
Housekeeping
Olvlzl is having a well-deserved break from blogging this weekend. I'm going to go out to do some martial arts, most of the weekend, but I might write a book review tomorrow night, assuming nobody punches me in the nose. If that happens it will have to wait until Monday. So you could go out into the meatspace and have fun. Under no circumstances must you read any other blogs, of course... I could also put up some garden stories if you would like that, but not if you wouldn't like that. I'm very nice that way. |
The Anna Nicole Smith Case
Are you surprised by the topic of this post? I am, a little, but while doing chores last night I got thinking about the whole debacle, what it tells about human beings that her death (or rather its aftermath) is the big news item; the inheritance she leaves and the many father candidates is what the media talks about and not about global warming or the horrible situation in Iraq or any of the other truly serious issues. And it seemed useful to try to understand why people or at least the media are so very much wrapped up in this case. I don't understand it well, but I'm going to throw a few ideas here. The first one has to do with fairy tales, the kind which tell about someone really stupid doing really stupid things and how poorly it all goes. In a sense this story is like one of those fairy tales. It teaches a lesson to the innocent. Of course it is not always very clear who the "really stupid" person might be in these stories and perhaps it is the American public, for agreeing to focus on something which has no actual relevance in our lives. But there is a psychological benefit to these sorts of fairy tales, not only in the education one gets but also in the way these stories, when about rich people, let us pretend that they are not ultimately worth envying, that our own lives are at least a little more ordered than what we see, hear and read about poor Ms. Smith. This explanation comes pretty close to why I believe so many people follow the doings of the famous or the royal, too, and the worse the doings are the better for the audience. Then there is the smell of sex in the story, beginning with Ms. Smith's early career and continuing with her marriage to a much older but wealthy man and ending with all these father candidates cropping up from the woodwork for her baby daughter. Sex always sells, and if there is anything at all kinky about it, it sells even better, because both those who salivate over teh kinky and those who disapprove of it will read the stories and watch the programs. Turn the case a little, and a different explanation for the interest pops up: A morality tale. A woman trading on her looks and sexuality climbs up the ladder made out of men and look what happens to her? -- I also see, darkly, another morality tale about an old man buying young wives but that one isn't as interesting.-- Moralizing is very comforting, very comforting indeed, because it allows the moralizer to feel righteous and excited at the same time. On the whole, I'd go with the "stupid" story as the explanation, as it also seems to cover all these new eager father candidates and their bizarre behavior. But it's a most tasteless "stupid" story, and the reactions I've seen are so lacking in empathy or even any respect for the dead that I wonder if this can be the same country as the one which is all about family values and morality. The baby. I can't stop thinking about the poor child. Which of those father candidates would change her diapers? Which would hold her head when she pukes with a stomach flu? Which would go and cheer at her soccer game or play recital. That's the one I'd pick, whatever the DNA samples might say. But it's all about money, of course. Most things seem to be. |
Thursday, February 15, 2007
Today's Action Alert
It comes from NARAL Pro-Choice America and has to do with getting Wal-Mart to improve its policies with respect to Plan B availability and what to do when a pharmacist refuses to dispense it. Go here. |
The Iraq Iran War
My desire to write about the new campaign with respect to Iran is minimal. It's a very painful topic and I have little expertise in war politics. But not writing about it conveys the image that I don't care and so I need to put in the occasional doom-and-gloom post, for the sake of my conscience. A good way to begin is with this quote:
I agree, based on my far-distant and humble point of observations. But such an intentional policy also has a name. It's called the Game of Chicken, and the success in such a game depends very much on how crazy the opponent is. This should make you sweat a little, given what we know about the current Iran leadership. Or put another way, you don't poke at the wasps' nest unless you have a good plan for a retreat. |
Pronounciation is Hard Work
The missing -ic strikes again. From Dan Froomkin's blog:
You may have heard Anthony Weiner's response to this, a long speech in which he dropped the -an from the Republican party about a dozen times. (If you missed that, I'm appending the YouTube video of it below.) Childish games, perhaps. But the right to name things has always gone to the powerful. |
Some Dolls
This is an odd site on dolls. Click on the Fab Faces to find out what a doll is supposed to look like these days and what she might represent. Or click on the Mall Maniacs to find out how girls are taught to care about shopping. |
Amok
The horrible mass shootings on Monday. Like the Amok runners. These massacres occur from time to time, and the news covers them always the same way, with focus on the horror of the victims and the eye-witnesses and then later with a short piece on how the murderer was mentally ill for some time or how nobody could have predicted that anything like this would happen. The coverage is of a natural catastrophe. Awkward questions crop up in my head. For instance, these massacres wouldn't exist without the easy availability of guns, but we don't talk about it because it's a pointless topic. Then there is the observation that the culprits are white men, almost always. But we don't talk about that, either, not, because it would be a forbidden topic but because it is an invisible topic, given that a white man is still viewed as the normal condition to be. And we don't talk about the fact that these kinds of mass murders are pretty rare in Europe, though the English seem to have more serial killers of women than the rest of that continent. |
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Will You Be My Valentine?
![]() Happy Valentine's Day to all of you! Perhaps we will one day look fondly back to this Valentine's Day as the last one before the Iran war... I can't do anything positive, can I? |
Two Anti-Catholic Vulgar Trash-Talking Bigots
That is how William Donohue of the Catholic League described Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan, two bloggers who were hired by the John Edwards campaign. Donohue then demanded that they be fired. This did not happen, though both bloggers have recently resigned from the campaign. That the New York Times found Donohue worth quoting on this topic made me interested in learning more about what Mr. Donohue regards as anti-Catholic. What might he find so shocking that he would demand people to be fired? What IS "anti-Catholic" in Mr. Donohue's faith-based reality? What is bigoted? And why is Mr. Donohue such a welcome guest in many political talk shows? A few hours of Googling gave me some answers, and I want to share them with you. Come and meet the anti-Catholics Mr. Donohue has accused by name. Some of them he has also called bigots: Frances Kissling (head of Catholics for a Free Choice), Mara Vanderslice (John Kerry 2004 campaign's director of religious outreach), Joan Osborne (singer), Bill O'Reilly (a Fox News talk show host), Christopher Hitchens (writer),Jessica Delfino (singer/comedian), Dario Fo (1997 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature), Michael Friedman (artist), Daniel Goldhagen (writer), Renee Cox (artist), Jane Pauley (television talk show host), Bill Press (radio talk show host), Liz Langley (journalist), Ann Landers (columnist), Joycelyn Elders (Surgeon General during the Clinton administration), Ted Turner (prior owner of a television network), Robert Gober (artist) and Howard Stern (television talk host show). Sometimes anti-Catholics can be a wider community of people or organizations. Mr. Donohue has singled out some of these groups or organizations and even some firms: Catholics for Free Choice, "secular Jewish community" (based on Donohue's own words), "well-educated elites" (also in his own words), The House GOP leadership of the previous Congress, the DNC (The Democratic National Committee), the Clinton administration, the Population Institute and ACT-UP. It is not just people themselves who are labeled anti-Catholic by Mr. Donohue. Their books, plays, sculptures, paintings, movies and television shows can all be anti-Catholic. Here is a short sample of the culprits: Editorials, cartoons and news stories in the following newspapers or their net equivalents: the Forward, the Boston Globe, Newsday (a Long Island newspaper)and Salon. Movies, plays, books and television shows: Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You, Corpus Christi, The Magdalene Sisters, The Da Vinci Code, the Left Behind series of fundamental Christian novels, "That's Life" (an episode on this ABC show). I'm sure you are wondering about artwork. Surely Mr. Donohue finds a lot of art anti-Catholic and bigoted. Indeed. Note the artists already listed above. But in addition to their work, Mr. Donohue has had his feelings hurt by art shown by the following places: Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Museum of International Folk Art, Art Center of Corpus Christi, Broward Art Guild and Museum of Contemporary Art. But wait! There is more. Advertising and products can be anti-Catholic, too: Abercrombie&Fitch's catalogs (though only occasionally), Lipton's ad for onion dip and items sold on eBay. This might be sufficient material to draw a few conclusions about Mr. Donohue and his views on what makes something bigoted and anti-Catholic. First, Mr. Donohue is a very busy man and one who sees an awfully large amount of anti-Catholicism everywhere. Second, Mr. Donohue's definitions of "anti-Catholic bigotry" is a little different from how we usually understand the term "bigotry". Bigotry to our Bill is anyone voicing any criticism of his personal creed of Catholicism or the Catholic church's hierarchy. But I never did find my answer to the last question I posed: Why is Mr. Donohue such a welcome guest in so many political talk shows? |
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
And Then There Were Two...
Melissa McEwan (Shakespeare's Sister) also resigns from the John Edwards campaign. Her announcement is here and she makes an excellent point at the end of it:
She is quite correct, in the moral sense. But in the nasty, narrow-minded and hateful sense of certain extremists it is indeed a win for them. They got their way. They affected the political campaign staff of a presidential candidate whom they would never ever vote for. And this is something that must change. |
At Last! Political Eye Candy For Women
It's too hard for journalists to give up on the description of what Nancy Pelosi wears and whether she looks her age or not or if Hillary Clinton's haircut suits her (and what deep truths it might tell us about her true womanliness or lack of the same). But there is a second avenue to equal coverage and that is to make men into eye candy, too. I see a beginning of this trend, "trend" used in the New York Times sense of me right now manufacturing it:
Rrrrrowwh! How do we know what a president should look like? Other than that he has always been a white guy? |
Pandagon...
You may already have read the page that comes up if you want to read Pandagon. It starts like this:
Then Amanda gives the very religious wingnuts a little Bible lesson, including that "let the one who is sinless cast the first stone" bit. The lessons of Jesus are very different from the common forms of radical fundamentalist Christianism which takes almost everything from the Old Testament. Bill Donohue might secretly think that the Bible could be greatly improved by just cutting out all the stuff Jesus said or did, though naturally not the stuff that was done to him... Anyway, the reason for those musings has to do with the sample of e-mails Amanda also posts for our education. They are the sort that most feminist bloggers will get from time to time, though intensifed from the usual level of hatred. Here is a good example.
I get told fairly often that my problem is inadequate sex and that this inadequacy is caused by my ugliness/fatness/hairiness. The real reason is of course the snake tail. Would you like to fuck someone who has cold scales for a butt? But I digress. What I wanted to say that a very common cure for feminism seems to be to get fucked. As if the world isn't fucking women in a lot of places already. And rather nastily, too. Remember the girls at school in Afghanistan? Well, it's still about the worst place in the whole world to be a woman, though Iraq is going down pretty rapidly, too. But perhaps I shouldn't say "fucked". Such an unladylike word to say! Women can't say it but they can get "fucked". A lot. Amanda points out that these nasty e-mails she gets are attacking her as a woman, as an uppity woman, a woman who isn't totally calmed down by a little vigorous sexual activity. A woman with a foul mouth:
Blow jobs do something to certain types of men. Humiliating others appears to be what they need to feel good about themselves. What these posts share is the idea of sex as a weapon. Sword? This goes all over the place, and I apologize for it. My general thoughts on this topic are questions about whether responding to nutters directly is the best strategy or not, whether ignoring them might not work better. And then I think how silence never gave anyone power. Or as Donald Rumsfeld might say, we don't go to a fight with the enemies we'd like to have, we go to a fight with the enemies we have. |
A Non-Political Post in Anticipation of Valentine's Day
This is part of my manuscript on gardening stories. I hope you like it. It's too early in the morning (or late at night, depending on your angle) for me to write anything for you early birds. Hmm. Perhaps the story should have been about worms. Affairs of Heart Never marry another gardener. Nongardening spouses and lovers may fail to appreciate the centrality of gardening to all existence, but at least they don't covet your rose beds, trim your topiaries or give you advice on the best treatment for fungal diseases in lilacs. They may not approve of your gardening budget, especially if, as is likely, it approaches your household's food bills in size, but neither do they fight you over their share of that budget. And as nongardeners think of all garden tasks as chores anyway, you need feel no guilt over asking them to help by taking charge of all the jobs you hate. If you are still unattached, avoid dating those nongardener types who think of the yard as a likely place for some other task or hobby, such as laundry drying, car repair or survival games, for these people make poor mates for gardeners and have to be continuously shooed away from the flower beds. The ideal mate is someone who likes indoors pursuits, listening to the recital of Latin names and admiring gardens through windows only. If you find one, don't mention it to any of your gardening friends. Under no circumstances should you date another gardener. This advice is most difficult to follow, for these people seem destined for you from the beginning of all time; they hear the same distant music, pursue the same magical paths, hold the same view of life as a garden. But they will also want the same beds in the garden, the same tools in the shed and the same dollars in the plant budget. Nothing but trouble will come from such an alliance. Much better to stay single and in command of your garden. |
Monday, February 12, 2007
Amanda Resigns from The Edwards Campaign
An Important Post To Read
Ezra Klein writes about prison rape and quotes a horrible, horrible story. The whole concept of punishment in the legal system has similar problems. "Locking them all up" does not mean that this would be the extent of the punishment, and it sounds like prisons are a place where some crimes (such as rape) are now considered a legal part of the punishment and not crimes at all. What is it that the inmates are stripped of? What rights do we think they should no longer have? Note how many states have decided that ex-felons should never be allowed to vote again or not for a long time at least. Perhaps we should list all the different types of punishments in a legal form so that everybody knows what it means to go to prison. It's not just the restraints on a person's freedom of movement. |
What is "Uppity"?
A daily Kos diary caught the Salon front-space promoting an article about Barack Obama with these words:
The term has now been switched to "smug", the same diary reports. But "smug" is not "uppity". This is what I found out about uppityness:
Now smug is something quite different. "Uppity" is one of those loaded terms, terms which carry a different meaning when applied to blacks or women. That "getting a little uppity and needed to be slapped down" quote explains the difference pretty well. This is one of those posts where I will be accused of writing about trivialities and of bringing the whole feminist movement down to sterility with me. But I find the trivialities fascinating for what they reveal about the way we function as a society. And the way we function as a society means that calling a black politician or a woman politician uppity means something else from calling just a randomly selected person uppity. |
Harvard's New President
Historian Drew Gilpin Faust has been named Harvard's new president and the first woman in that role. Poor president Faust. I truly sympathize with any woman having to do one of those "firstwomanevah!" jobs. It's absolutely the pits. She will be asked "the woman's" opinion on everything, with the assumption that all billions of women think exactly the same, and her decisions will be screened for any microdot-sized indications that she might favor women over men. If she does well she will be given credit. If she does poorly, women will be blamed. That's how it goes. Grumpy writing, that. It was caused by this article on president Faust. I will extract the relevant bits for your benefit:
All this might be quite true and part of good reporting on the issue. But my inner grump noticed that the story first implies that Faust was selected because of the Summers controversy and the little bit about sciences being neglected looked to me like a jab in the same direction. Then the end of the story appears to tell us that they had to spoon up the dregs at the bottom of the pot to appoint her. You know, like an affirmative action hire in the anti-feminists' fevered imagination. Which is quite ridiculous, naturally. Faust is eminently qualified and deserves the job. If we dug in a similar manner in the background of every hiring committee's work, what would we find? Much nastier things to report. But we don't usually do that. Usually the person's appointment is written up in nice and laudatory terms. |
Have Faith
What is the role of religion in the public life? Should the government marry religion? And if so, which one? And what do voters think about, say, Barack Obama's religion? Atrios points out in a recent post on Eschaton that though the current right-wing framing tries to distinguish the religious ("people of faith") from the nonreligious ("the dregs of society?") the truth is that few religions agree on what to believe and that there is no such voting bloc as the "people of faith". It is largely the conservative Christians and Jews who argue that religion should play a larger role in the public sector, the government and the judiciary, and when they say "religion" they mean "my religion". They also appear to desire this influence without any reciprocal opening of those religions to nonbelievers' criticisms. Just consider the recent brouhaha started by William Donohue of the Catholic League on whether the Catholics are denigrated or oppressed by having their dogmas and customs and their wider influence questioned by bloggers. But this one-sidedness is an unfair demand. Think of this silly example: Suppose that the Muslims and the Jews joined forces to have pork banned as a human comestible in this country. Given the multi-religious nature of the United States, how should they justify such a proposal? Something having to do with the health benefits or environmental benefits of reduced pork consumption might work, or something which appeals to statistical evidence open to members of all religions or none. But if the justification was based on what the Holy Books of these religions say on the matter, wouldn't this mean that nonbelievers would have to be allowed to publicly discuss and debate the dogma of those religions? I see no way around this: If religion is to enter government decision-making in this manner then government is going to enter religion in a manner very different from anything seen yet in the history of this country. Those who now complain about religious oppression, even in cases where there is none, are often the same people who advocate a more political role for religions. I'm not sure if they have thought this through. |
Some Bad Poetry
I haven't done one of these for ages! Time to correct the mistake is now. Here is a religious poem, suitable for the current arguments about the anti-religious and blasphemous bloggers and so on. Sundays In this country Sundays are ironed glaring white. Prayer books and promises and the searing, searing light. God, we have dropped by to tell the deal is on. But tell us. Tell us why you lost your only son. Never mind. On weekdays we run the business right. We climb the human ladder, we bare our teeth. They're white. God, you do not understand the modern world. It's tough. This land you gave us. This land has made us hard and rough. Heh. |
Sunday, February 11, 2007
La Bande Dessinee
| or The Commix artist as auteur. Posted by olvlzl. Arlo and Janis today is just about perfect, a mix of gender politics media criticism and the uses and limits of history. And it casts a light on why the only thing I really miss about cable are Pops a Dent and Pasta Pot commercials. I love those commercials. There is a great movie to be made about the world of the cable commercial and the people who act in them. |
Female Genital Mutilation, Here Today.
| Posted by olvlzl. In the Boston Globe today, an article about the persistence of female genital mutilation in the Unites states brings up some basic questions. Pat Schroeder, remembering one of the problems faced by the effort to outlaw this most basic violation of the most basic of women’s rights, recalled some people said that “you can’t be a cultural Nazi and tell people they can’t bring their culture here,”. Where to start? Does this practice of trying to enforce women’s virginity by destroying a part of her anatomy and inflicting lasting pain and health problems constitute “a culture”? What is “a culture” anyway? Isn’t it an anthropological concept that is at best ill-defined at best, and at times sentimental yearning of a rather sordid variety And does “a culture” have rights? If it does, do its “rights” trump those of the rights of half of the population to their right to bodily autonomy and integrity? I’m very skeptical of “a culture” having rights outside of the rights held individually by those who are at times rather artificially classified as possessors of “the culture”. Actually, it’s more common for people to talk as if a culture claims rights on individuals. I am certain that the individuals have the right to not be forced or coerced into letting someone mutilate their genitals no matter what their families or wider communities want. It can be added that the age group on which female genital mutilation is most commonly practiced is not sufficiently mature to withstand family and societal pressure. Their foremost right is to the protection of society and its help in attaining the maturity and autonomy to make such a potentially destructive and irreversible decision on her own, when she is an adult. And even for adults, I’m not sure it should be allowed, it should certainly be discouraged. Remembering well the arguments over this issue when it was first brought to the attention of people in the west, the ability of liberals here to ignore the individuals’ rights in favor of “the culture” seemed bizarre. It was like the attention paid to the destruction of the Mostar bridge or the Afghanistan Buddhas* while ignoring that people were being killed and enslaved in the same places. It combined sentimental condescension and inconsistency in a dangerous way. Even this strange effort to perverse an entirely odious cultural practice had the same feel as the habit of our corporate media to pay attention to objects instead of even entire groups of people. People are alive. Their bodies and their minds make them a very concrete though quite intangible “locus of rights”. They have some rights that are absolute, that to bodily autonomy being the most basic and absolute. It is when an individual acts in ways that impinge on other peoples’ rights that their rights have gone beyond their limits. Why should “a culture” have this right when individuals don’t? “Cultural Nazi”, wasn’t it really nuts to apply this phrase to an effort to give women the ownership of their own bodies? Do these people even think about what they’re saying? * Impermanence is one of the most important part of Buddhist teachings, some say the most important. I’ve always thought it was enormously ironic that the Taliban, in an attempt to destroy any trace of Buddhism, was actually demonstrating the truth of one of its central teachings. Just goes to show how not thinking something through to the end can have unintended consequences. |
Saturday, February 10, 2007
Topical Poem of the Day
| If This Isn’t The Dread Noro Virus and there’s something worse to look forward to, just take me now, Lord. Going to bed, see you tomorrow. |
THE UNSAID THE UNHEARD
| Posted by olvlzl. Some ideas are so common that they are only mentioned in passing as an obvious truth or they go without saying altogether. One of these conventionalized truths is that someone who opposes the death penalty is disqualified from the discussion of it. "Of course x is opposed to the death penalty," is often treated as the last that needs to be heard of x on the subject. It often goes unsaid but its assumption has fundamentally distorted the discussion of the imposition of capital punishment. I belive that this attitude was consciously adopted by politicians and prosecuting attorneys becuase it effectively eliminates oppontents of the death penalty from being heard. It is inconvenient for them to have this vehicle for career advancement alwys coming into quesion by people with a moral or eithical opposition to it. And, let's say it, in most places for politicians and prosecutors, an association with the death penalty is a career builder. Having opponents excluded from the discussion removes a potential factor that could lessen the value of their past work. It is also adopted by the media for reasons of profit. Our media love the death penalty. It adds drama to their coverage of trials, it becomes a most easily reported story within itself. Even anticipation of the failure to impose it can provide an occasion for a show of dramtic outrage in the reliable clack of cable conservatives. And it is as much of a boon for the entertainment division of our media conglomerates as it is for their loss leader, the "news". I don't for a second believe that any of these people actually cares if someone is put to death or not. The issue is entirely one of utility for them. They hardly want to risk dissipating dramatic tension with rational discussion of the issue. In the courts, themselves, the exclusion of death penatly opponents from juries is an obvious injustice. The population contains large numbers of people who oppose the death penalty. To exclude them from the jury pool on that basis is to stack the jury. It excludes a large segment of the population, perhaps even entire religons. The reason given, that death penalty opponents will not be impartial is exactly the reason used to exclude black people and others from juries. And in allowing the exclusion the allegedly impartial judicial system promotes the increased liklihood of a given outcome. It unquestionably guarantees a less than representative jury pool even in the guilt phase of the trial. A prosecutor doesn't have a right to a jury biased in favor of a given outcome. Most death penalty opponents come to that position after careful consideration of it. To exclude opponents of the death penalty from juries could result inless careful, less thoughtful juries. There should have to be a compelling, overriding public interest stated with factual support to allow this kind of exclusion. But I don't believe that has ever been done. It is possible that the prosecution could benefit from more thoughtful juries as well as the defense. Maybe it is that judges love the death penalty too. In the Rumpole stories it is said that judges used to order muffins in their club after imposing death. Who can doubt that some of our Supreme Court members would be quite capable of that. Scalia, apparently one of those who got the giggles in the discussion of whether condemned prisoners in Florida have equal rights to about-to-be-put-down pets, said that there is no right to a painless death at the hands of the state. Muffins at his club would be less depraved than that, certainly among the foulest things said by someone sitting on that bench in its history. I regret that no one could have asked him if that would include death by dismemberment. No doubt his answer would have allowed the hilarity to continue. |
Variation 1.
| Posted by olvlzl. Woman With Girdle Your midriff sags toward you knees; your breasts lie down in air, their nipples as uninvolved as warm starfish. You stand in your elastic case, still not giving up the new-born and the old-born cycle. Moving, you roll down the garment, down that pink snapper and hoarder, as your belly, soft as pudding, slops into the empty space; down, over the surgeon’s careful mark, down over hips, those head cushions and mouth cushions, slow motion like a rolling pin, over crisp hairs, that amazing field that hides your genius from your patron; over thighs, thick as young pigs, over knees like saucers, over calves, polished as leather, down toward the feet. You pause for a moment, tying your ankles into knots. Now you rise, a city from the sea, born long before Alexandria was, straightway from God you have come into your redeeming skin. Anne Sexton: All My Pretty Ones I don’t remember which feminist it was, probably in the late 1960s or early 1970s, who said that she dreamed of a day when girls and young women would never have the experience to know what it was like to wear a girdle. Given the power of backlash and marketing has that dream come true or is it unfulfilled? I’m more secure in thinking it was Maggie Letvin, one of the few physiologically based exercise experts of the time, who said, in roughly the same period, that you could take a perfectly healthy woman, put her into a girdle and ruin her health. As a someone who has never had that experience, reading this poem was painful in more ways than one. Anne Sexton noticed things. |
Well It’s Official, Shame Is Dead
| Posted by olvlzl. Checking the e-mail just now, this spam subject heading, “Remembering Anna Nichole Smith”. Since there was a .com on the address and the filter sent it to Junk, they weren’t remembering her tragically shallow story. |
Hey Echidne, You Stole My Thunder
| With your excellent post below on the MyDD article, what's left for me to add? Well, doesn't "market" imply some kind of money changing hands? I haven't seen any. Why, just this week in the heat of battle on a thread at one of the big name blogs you mentioned, I said that if I was wrong on a major point that I'd give every cent I'd made blogging to the RNC. It was an offer much easier to make than the other side seemed to realize but they had no homepage listed. I've always figured most blogging as volunteer work, either by choice or by default. |
Why It’s Just Wrong When Pop Begets Pop Culture.
| Posted by olvlzl. In my recent squabbles over pop culture a lot of people couldn’t seem to understand why people, like me, in their late middle age wouldn’t be up to date. So you might understand this phenomenon, it all begins like this. Fads and pop culture begin with older teenagers and very young adults. At least they did when those used to be home made. Sadly, it now seems that a lot of them are content to just adopt whatever stupid junk corporations tell them to. But assuming that it at least has to pass through this age cohort to be a fad, I’ll continue with this entirely unscientific line based on observation. After the fad has been adopted by it’s “originators” it is then taken up by those insecure conformists, young teenager kulture vultures, and their even more uncertain and insecure fellow second-tier adopters the thirty somethings. After them come tweens and pre- geezers. With the tweens and even younger people, parents might notice that something is happening. I’d say they notice that something new is happening but by this stage the fad is quickly passing from the ‘originator’ cohort. The spectacle of 40-year-olds...., it’s often not pretty. They didn’t learn about the fad from the originators because of the natural stealth of people that age. It starts getting fuzzy from here but what is almost certain is that the last people to know about the dying fad are geezers, with males in their fifties and up being, almost certainly, the end of the line. This is roughly the same age group which has authority in important areas of life, having come up through the ranks or, having been pushed up, if you believe in some vaguely amusing theories of business hierarchies. This could explain why people with the authority to make decisions aren’t up on the latest fads. The theory is based on my seeing a man in his fifties with one of those stupid tiny braids down the back of his head well after even I knew it had ceased being a fad. He asked me if I was looking forward to The Stones tour. As they say, lightening struck. I wish young people would start smashing corporate culture instead of adopting it. It’s geezers who decide what corporations are going to promote as cool. How do you expect these business types to come up with something new? This explains the blandness and stupidity of so much pop culture these days. That’s just wrong. Geezers trying to originate and follow pop culture robs young people of one of the greatest pleasures of youth, theirs by nature and by right, condescending to their elders in matters of coolness. Give it up, Dad. |
Friday, February 09, 2007
The Blog Market
MyDD recently had a good post on the way political blogs are changing as the market for their product matures. Forgive me for the econobabble. Sometimes it is needed, especially as it describes something which actually happens and which constrains the way bloggers operate. That MyDD post noted that almost all the much-read or highly-ranked political blogs on the left are now team blogs, and that many of them offer other services in addition to blog posts. They are like little news offices, a one-click-service to all your daily needs on the net! The only exceptions to this are Atrios and Digby, and even these two divines have some extra help. In short, it's impossible to run a newsroom on the energy of one person writing all alone, and it's twice as impossible to run a newsroom on the energy of that one person which remains after a dayjob has been done. This is just a fact of life. But where does it leave the kinds of blogs I have, the kinds which are mostly about one or two people writing down their thoughts? It leaves them in a different league. That isn't necessarily bad. Just as many more people read the New York Times daily than read Shakespeare daily, a small blog can have interesting and important things to say and thus retain a niche in the market. What makes it all more difficult is that the monetary rewards from blogging are in the advertising income and that income, mostly, accrues to those with most readers. Not that blogging makes anybody rich, but having advertising income pays for broadband and subscriptions and perhaps a conference trip or two, and all that makes it easier to explain this blogging hobby to the Stern Internal Accountant in the blogger's head. What am I trying to say here? That the future of political blogging seems to me to lie in the corporate form or at least in the form of team blogs. There might be exceptions to that rule, but it will become increasingly difficult for the Lone Blogger to break into the market. Not impossible, but increasingly difficult. Of course most bloggers aren't interested in the idea of "market penetration". But what is the sound of one blogger typing if nobody reads? Now that's a koan for you. |
On Blogrolls and Cinnamon Buns
I really, really want a cinnamon bun, right now. It's cold here and a bright sunny day and the one thing that keeps me from perfect bliss is the lack of a cinnamon bun. Blogrolls just won't work. But blogrolls are the topic of the day because Marcos (the guy who is supposed to be our hivebrain in the anthill of the rabid lefty blogger lambs) has cleaned out his blogroll (thereby deleting memememesobme!). This diary has more on it. Do you know what? I don't mind me being deleted at all, because I don't blog on electoral politics and that is what Marcos is interested in. Though of course I agree with the diarist on my extreme excellence and such. In any case, I'm much more a cinnamon-bun-kind-of-girl. Or goddess. I have a lot of trouble with the marketing aspect of blogging, mostly because I can't do it. And I'm lazy. And I'm a dying breed of the one-person-blog type (plus olvlzl on the weekends but then he is all alone, too). And so on. It's all very boring for someone who is interested in the writing and thinking aspect of blogging, though naturally I want to dominate the whole world and make everything work perfectly. Naturally. But only if it somehow happens without me needing to send e-mails or buy ads. So it is not going to happen. Life is like that. You have to decide between cinnamon buns and blogrolls. And you have to decide on what you want to write and that limits the number of people who want to read you, too. So. --- Added later: Different bloggers have different rules on deciding what to blogroll. Mine is an attempt to offer a selection of blogs which cover politics from the lefty-liberal angle or which address feminism or which offer good writing and funny stuff or a combination of all of these. I also have some sites in the blogroll which are not blogs as such but action sites that might be of interest to my readers. I don't read all the sites I link to daily, but I do read all of them once in a while. So this is not my personal reading list as much as a list to open up blogs for my readers in general. Other bloggers base their blogrolls on their own daily reads or something different from that or my rules. So be warned. |
Dispatches from the Uterus Wars
This is from f-words on the new proposal in Idaho to make it a crime to coerce a woman into having an abortion:
As f-words points out, this is oddly one-sided as there are laws which make it quite legal for some people to coerce a woman or a girl into having either an abortion or a birth:
Indeed. The proposal is not intended to benefit women, in any case. |
Friday Cat Blogging
Savage Defines Rights
This is quite hilariously funny:
A wonderful concoction from Savage's fevered brain. First Rice is called a schoolmarm, the kind of epithet people use about women in power who don't like women in power. Then comes the whole affirmative action complaint. Social engineering, yanno. (No, you silly libural. Social engineering is NOT forcing people to be abstinent until they're thirty. That's just traditionalism.) And then, if that is not enough, Savage resorts to the D'Souza argument that we shouldn't let women be in power because our enemies don't let them be in power. I love the paragraph, because it shows so neatly what we face when we try to talk about these things. On the Savage-side the argument doesn't have to be based on anything logical and the basis can change from general slurs to reverse discrimination to accepting the gender roles of radical Islamists as the correct ones. All in one paragraph. The use of the affirmative action argument deserves extra scrutiny. Have you noticed how all the wingnuts assume that every single hire of women or minorities is an affirmative action hire, and that they also assume every single affirmative action hire means that someone less capable was hired. Less capable than who? A white Christian man, presumably. But if you think of this a little more what do you realize? That these people assume that all women and all minorities are less capable or that at least the percentage of capable women or minorities is much smaller than the percentage of capable white guy persons. It's interesting. |
Thursday, February 08, 2007
Snow in the U.K.
The radio tells me that London has a lot of trouble with the few inches of snow they have right now. Understandable, given how rare snowstorms are there. But it reminds me of something that happened to me while I lived in England and was to give a seminar paper. I was very worried and uptight beforehand, and spent the previous day rehearsing in the privacy of my room, out of contact with the world in general. When the time set for the seminar arrived, I went into the assigned classroom with all my handouts and papers, sat down and waited for the rest of the people to turn up. And waited and waited. Finally I went to look for the cause of my solitude and found out that the university had been closed down due to snow. True, there was some behind one of the doors. About a pint or so. Did you find that funny? I bet it depends on what kind of a weather you are used to. Perhaps you prefer to hear about my first summer in the U.S., a hot summer. I walked around in my black turtleneck sweaters and jeans for quite a while and spent some nights sleeping on the cool tiles of my bathroom (learned that from my puppy). Then I caught heatrash and finally learned how one handles hot weather. Though I still prefer snow. ---- If you want to read something more political, how about this one? |
John Edwards Writes
John Edwards has made a statement about Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan:
Not too bad, on the whole, given that Edwards must speak politician. I'm glad that he didn't cave in to the wingnut campaign, because caving in just causes Swift-Boating and because those voters who care about the issues William Donohue and Michelle Malkin care about are going to vote for Edwards on the same day that skating rinks in hell open. |
The President Went To War
And all I got was this crummy wad of bank notes. If you have followed the news about the mysterious billions that vanished in Iraq, mysterious billions paid by the U.S. taxpayers, you may have heard about this:
And you may have heard about this:
And you surely must have read this:
It is more interesting to argue whether Nancy Pelosi should have a bigger airplane, though. |
Wednesday, February 07, 2007
New Blogger
This blog is now on the new blogger. I was sure that everything would be ruined with the move (all my lovely add-ons dropped out, my blogroll decimated) that I stuck fingers in my ears and went nananah-can't-hear-you whenever the Blogger gently suggested that I move. Then they started playing hardball and told me that I'd have only one more chance before they kicked me and my puny blog across the threshold by force. So last night it happened. And to my great frustration I can't find anything that has gone wrong after the move. Which might mean that I could have done the move much earlier. Or perhaps that it was a good thing to wait until all the bugs I read about were fixed. See how I can contort everything to my own liking? It's the snake genes. |
On Naughty Words And Blogging
The filthy language of many bloggers causes tut-tutting all over the Beltway and leads into campaigns such as the one I discuss below (in that post where I blew my stack which a blogger is never allowed to do because now we know that bloggers blow their stacks!). I get very angry at this horror of the naughty words but not because I would like filthy language. I hardly ever use it in my private life and I use it in blogging only when no other word quite says what I want to say. The value of a naughty word in an unexpected place is that it can shock someone into reading or listening in a different way, and sometimes filthy words are all one can choose to describe something much filthier. The killing of civilians at war, for example. So I get angry at those who find naughty words horrible but who don't mind death and violence, as long as we talk about it in euphemisms. It is the two-facedness of this which is filthy, much filthier than any word I can think of. And this is what so much of the discussion about the horrible bloggers amounts to: If you only talked about beheading and hanging people nicely, with flowery descriptions of the ruby-red blood and the quivering intestines, well, that would be acceptable. It's also fine to crow over the death and destruction of your enemies or people who look like your enemies. But if you describe these violent scenes and swear, then you are doomed to the outer peripheries of all civilized worlds. It is the feelings, feelings of outrage and sadness and anger, which are seen as uncivilized. And not only uncivilized but illogical. Because bloggers often write with feeling they are assumed to be illogical, not thinking at all. This is odd. There is no law against thinking and feeling at the same time, rather the opposite. That's how human beings mostly live. Then there is the whole question of the literary style of blogs. Blogging is not the same as writing a long article for publication. It is an almost-instant form of communication, intended to be less edited and less distanced, and the rules of this new genre are different. A naughty word doesn't have the same power to shock as it might have smack in the middle of the front page of a newspaper, because it doesn't carry the same connotations. Its power to shock is closer to the power it would have to shock someone around the corporate water-fountain or during a lunch with friends. Blogs are somewhere inbetween conversations like that and published articles, and blog critics should learn the rules of this new genre. |
Falling Flat
Wanna read about flat taxes? I wrote a piece for the American Prospect here. And not one naughty word in the whole piece! |
The Fuckity-Fuck Post
That title is intended to make absolutely sure that I will never be hired to blog for Sam Brownback's presidential campaign. Sniff. The sacrifices a goddess must make. I'm pretty sure Sam was almost ready to ask me. But he can't ask me if I say bad words like "fuck" or if I have ever criticized Christianist fundamentalists for anything. Also it's very bad form not to have advocated genocide of all nonbelievers or not to have told the gays and lesbians that they're going to hell. Good form would be to write like Michelle Malkin and to advocate putting people into concentration camps. Now you know. I learned all this from the ongoing right-wing campaign (led by such luminaries as Michelle Malkin and Bill Donohue) to get Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan, better known as the bloggers of Pandagon and Shakespeare's Sister, respectively, off the John Edwards campaign payroll. Now the very boil on the liberal butt, the New York Times, has joined in this witchhunt:
The Salon has published a rumor stating that Amanda and Melissa have already been fired, but the Edwards campaign denies the rumor. Fun and games for all, huh? So Bill Donohue of the conservative Catholic League called Amanda and Melissa "anti-Catholic vulgar trash-talking bigots". And we should take his arguments seriously? Some other things Bill Donohue has said:
This is not even the pot calling the kettle black, because neither Amanda nor Melissa has one speck of that general hatred-of-the-other in them. Neither Amanda nor Melissa have called for people to be put into concentration camps as a preventive measure. And I can't imagine neither Amanda nor Melissa doing something like this Malkin parody of Amanda as part of an attempt to bring Malkin down. Not that Malkin succeeds. All I could think of how good Amanda's prose sounded when spoken aloud, even by someone who tried to make it sound bad. But watch and decide (via Sadly, No): Let's see if I get this right: Your career is destroyed if you ever used naughty words, but your career will soar if you advocate violence. And the only bloggers acceptable for political campaigns to hire are the non-controversial ones. But there is no such thing as a non-controversial blogger, not in the minds of the wingnuts and not if the person ever wrote more than a word or two, because ANYTHING can be made into a controversial issue. I hope John Edwards understands this and that he also understands that any blogger he hires will be attacked by the wingnut phalanx. That's how they act. |
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
Today's Action Alert
| Never mind. The program is not about Plan B but about RU-486 which indeed does cause abortions. Sorry about the confusion. Though the website for the program does call RU-486 the "morning after pill". Which it is not. Concerns the popular show Veronica Mars:
Go here to find out what to do. |
The Two -Year- Long Presidential Campaign
This is where I fail miserably as a political blogger. I can't get excited about 2008 yet, just can't. Do we really have to talk about the candidates for the next two years while ignoring everything else that happens in the political arena? Can't someone make a law that the campaign period can't run for more than a few months? |
My Final MRA Post
Are you sick of these? A couple of commenters in the earlier posts wanted to know why I'd go on the MRA sites and suspected that I just want to bathe in misogyny. Now, misogyny is of course one of my very favorite things in this world, but that is not the reason why I went there. This time I ended there quite accidentally, but then I remembered an earlier commenter accusing me of not looking at what the opposition is saying, and this seemed a good opportunity to do so. Also, if I go there you, my sweet readers, don't have to. Unless you want to check on my impressions. My two earlier posts on this topic have discussed emotions and misconceptions, respectively. This one addresses the topics which I found contained at least a gist of truth in them, in the sense that what is being described can cause anger, pain and frustration in some men, and their roots are in the arrangements of patriarchy. But in some cases it is the intermediate stage in which we live, neither patriarchy nor something egalitarian, that causes the grief. Before I discuss the topics I picked for closer analysis, I want to dispense with one more topic which is very common in the MRA sites and which doesn't have anything to do with gender roles as such. This is that individual people can be really horrible and that it is quite possible that a particular man's ex-wife or current wife or colleague is a pretty vile person. That this is true, of both women and men, does not tell us anything at all about women or men in general or about feminism. In a similar manner, the court system can fail and produce results which are unfair towards one of the people involved in it. This could happen in the most heavenly of societies, as long as information is partial and humans prone to error. In short, anecdotal evidence is anecdotal. Now let's attack the meat of the story. The first concern of some relevance on MRA sites has to do with male military conscription. In most countries where conscription is used it is only men who have to physically go to war and to risk death as a consequence. I think this is a legal unfairness to men. But note that it is not feminists who had anything to do with this arrangement; it is pure patriarchy (in the sense of the old men in power sending the young men off to fight), and based on the past where most able-bodied women where too often pregnant or breast-feeding to be of much use on long war-campaigns and where fighting was based on physical body power much more than it is today. Also, the maternal mortality rates were very high in those days (and still are in Afghanistan, say), so that women usually died at earlier ages than men, even with all the warmaking. The feminist writings on this topic I am familiar with apply to the United States. They tend to take one of two possible stances: either women and men should be treated the same and conscripted at the same terms or neither women nor men should be forced to wage wars at all. I don't know of any feminist writings that argue that men should be conscripted and women not, though such writings may well exist. But the usual argument is for equal treatment, though some feminists point out that war is a particularly male business and that perhaps women shouldn't be forced to fight in wars unless they have more of a say on when to start a war in the first place. The military conscription argument is currently not terribly valid in the U.S., given the professional military forces and no draft, but the argument has validity in general, I think. What should be remembered here, too, is that it is the anti-feminists who fight against women in direct combat roles, not feminists. I don't think I got the whole flavor of the MRA arguments about war here, because many on those sites also believe that women can't do war and so don't really want equality in this sphere but special rights to counteract the need for men to die in wars. An excuse for patriarchy, perhaps. The second general MRA argument that has some validity has to do with men's reproductive rights. As I have mentioned in an earlier post, I'm not sure if anyone has the right to become a parent as such, but we usually argue that people should have the right not to become parents if they so wish. For both men and women contraception is what one uses in that case (or should use), but what happens if contraception fails? It is then quite possible for a man to be in a situation where he can no longer refuse parenthood even though the woman still can, through abortion. If she decides not to abort the pregnancy, he is going to be a dad whether he wants it or not. And this means child maintenance payments for two decades, even if he decides not to have anything else to do with the child. I think this is an unfairness, of a sort. Of a sort, because it is caused by avoiding an even greater unfairness: having someone outside the woman's body dictate its uses. The unfairness is created by the fact that pregnancy takes place inside a woman's body. If we had uterine replicators I could easily see the rules being different. But we don't have uterine replicators, and I can't see another solution to this unfairness that wouldn't bring in something even more horrible. Many MRA sites argue that a man in this situation shouldn't have to pay child maintenance. He didn't want to be a parent in the first place. I actually have sympathy with this view. Where things get complicated is when the baby is born, because from that point onwards we have three people to consider in the equation, and the child maintenance is not because of some victory points for the woman but because the child needs food, clothing and so on. It is a mess, though. The obvious lesson from all this to learn is that nobody should trust another person to take care of the contraception, and that it might be a good idea not to go to bed with people whose motivations you don't know. But I can see the MRA point in this case. The third general complaint on the MRA sites has to do with divorce, the awarding of custody and the treatment of fathers in divorce courts. This is linked to the previous topic in that many of the comments argue that once a man is divorced he should no longer have to pay anything towards his children. This viewpoint is present as often as the viewpoint that men should have custody more often than they do. Other versions of the anger divorced fathers feel have to do with ex-wives stopping them from seeing their children often enough and with the question of how the child maintenance payments are used. It's useful here to take a step back from these arguments and to look at what is going on in these cases from a more neutral seat. Note, first, that these cases are not just about a man and a woman getting divorced. There are children involved, too, and the courts usually consider the children first in deciding on custody and child maintenance. If one parent gets custody, that parent then becomes the custodial parent and has different rights and responsibilities than the non-custodial parent. And this is the crux of the complaints which are all from non-custodial parents. It is not that these people are fathers that matters here: it is that they are non-custodial parents. A mother without custody rights to her children is in the very same position. So what makes this a Men's Right topic? The fact that custody is usually awarded to the mother. In most cases this is done without any challenge from the father, but in the cases where the father challenges the mother for custody his odds of winning it are quite good. Still, most non-custodial parents are fathers, and what they are angry and hurt by are the opportunities that this system offers for exploiting the non-custodial parent. As I mentioned earlier, it is the custodial parent who decides how the child maintenance money is used. Assume a nasty divorce and a lot of grudges on both sides, and you can see how this can be an unpleasant situation for the non-custodial parent. Games could be played to turn the children against you and your hard-earned money might go towards buying fancy clothes for your ex. Or your ex might make it hard for you to see the children. And so on. Of course very similar stories can be told by the custodial parent: child maintenance not being paid for years, the non-custodial parent badmouthing you when he or she meets the children, the children not being picked up when agreed, and even worse stuff, stuff about abuse and the custodial parent's inability to stop visitation rights by an abusive non-custodial parent. And so on. How does this all relate to feminism? The usual argument is that feminism made divorce easier and that feminism gave women more rights in the case of a divorce. But note that the problems these men discuss are not related to their sex directly but to the patriarchy-based tradition that it is the women who have more to do with children and the court rule that custody is usually awarded to the parent who did more hands-on care of the children, to keep the children's lives as constant as possible. A stay-at-home father would get custody under these rules, and feminists have certainly advocated for a greater role for fathers in the day-to-day care of their children. It is painful, divorce and losing daily contact with your children, or divorce and ending up a single parent. Painful and horribly hard in many cases. But the causes and remedies are not in some return to patriarchy where children are automatically the father's property. Imagine a very bad marriage that you can't escape at all and then imagine what that does to the children and to the fighting parents. The final point on which I found the MRA arguments to have some merit has to do with the possibility that a man might meet a woman who is not a feminist or a woman who is a feminist, and that these two might have quite different ideas of the man's proper gender roles. How should he behave then? What if he thinks he married a feminist and ends up with a wife who expects him to work two jobs so that she can stay at home with the children? Or what if it is the reverse? Confusing. Of course, the very same confusion faces women meeting men who run the gamut of Rush Limbaugh types to radical feminists. The point I'm making is that when societal norms are changing it can be hard to know what is expected of you, and I sympathize with the frustrations. Communication might help to make things clearer, too. A related and perhaps more important point was made by one commenter who stated that the public sector is increasingly open for women but that the private sphere of the family and the children may not be equally open for men. Not only are traditional norms still pretty much focused on men as breadwinners but there are women who don't want to share direct parenting with their partners. And there are, I might point out, many men who want nothing to do with childcare or household chores. This commenter has a point, I think. The feminist wave of the 1960s and 1970s addressed mostly the problem of how to let women access to the labor markets and societal decision-making positions in general. Many of the feminists also wanted to tackle the reverse problem of how to get men access to wider household roles in general, but the revolution slowed down before much progress there took place. This is the job for the next wave, a wave which must consist of both men and women. |
Monday, February 05, 2007
More On the Anti-Feminist List of Complaints
Those of you who read my earlier post about Mired in MRA Land are probably eagerly awaiting the post in which I talk more about the substance of the anti-feminist complaints, expecting me to shed tears and to repent and to find a common ground to build a better society with those friendly folk. And you will not be disappointed! Just kidding... But you will get not just one post but two! This is the first one of the two. What I want to do in this post is to look at some of the most common talking points on the MRA sites, points, which are presented as evidence that either patriarchy hurts men more than it hurts women (and that this makes patriarchy just fine) or that feminism hurts men so much that we must return to patriarchy or that being a man is a crappy thing to be and so women shouldn't aspire to have the same rights or that what women mistakenly see as extra rights for men are indeed just extra burdens or responsibilities. Often all these arguments are mixed together in one paragraph, and often essentialist arguments about women's inferiority dance polka with the argument that men are inherently more fragile. It is a tangled weave I try to unravel here, so tangled that I found myself going around in circles, chasing my logic which ended up all dizzy and wanted to have a nap. But here are some of my semi-logical observations: Some of the most common talking points on MRA sites are illogical or based on some odd view of how the world works. For example, it is very common on these sites to argue that feminism gave women choices, that women can choose to work or choose to stay at home, choose to divorce, choose to act like feminist women or choose to act like traditional (i.e. nonfeminist) women, whereas men have no choices at all. Now why would this be the case? It doesn't make sense at all. I saw several people arguing that men have no choice but to work dangerous jobs (and possibly get killed young) because they have to support a woman who has chosen to stay at home. Yet if we use this "choice" framework, the decision to accept a dangerous job is every bit as much a choice as the decision to stay at home with children, say. Both have some negative and some positive consequences and neither is necessarily a "free" choice but constrained by money, other resources such as education, and the society's norms and expectations. And there are no laws which ban men from staying at home with their children, no laws which say that men can't initiate divorce or refuse to work dangerous jobs. What is it that looks to these men as lack of choice in their own lives? All I can think of is that perhaps the norms of patriarchy no longer work that well and that an unthinking acceptance of those norms might feel like not having any choice. Another common fallacy on these sites is the argument that any attention or remedies intended to help women are by their very existence evidence of a bias against men. Thus, university Women's Studies Programs discriminate against men because there are no Men's Studies Programs and the Violence Against Women Act (WAVA) discriminates against men because it is about women. What is this based on? I can think of two explanations. One is that these men really believe that there was no inequality between the sexes to begin with, no need to address any unfairness towards women, and that therefore all these extra programs are like giving more ice-cream to your siblings than to you. The other one is a zero-sum game view of life: If women get something it must be off the men's plates. Either way, some of these arguments look to me like someone demanding that healthy people should have the same hospital facilities as sick people do. Consider the case of the Women's Studies Programs. The traditional feminist answer to the question why there are no Men's Studies Programs at universities is that all the rest of the curriculum is one large Men's Study Program. A third common mistake on the MRA agenda is to assume that various types of problems men might have are caused by feminism even when the evidence contradicts this or when there is no evidence on it at all. Examples are the problems boys have at school and the high U.S. divorce rate. Both of these are frequently attributed to feminism. This ignores a whole lot of evidence from countries which have hardly any feminism at all and still suffer from the very same problems. It is highly unlikely that all these other countries would just happen to have the same social trends but for totally different reasons. It is much more likely that the reasons are the same in all these countries, and if that is the case feminism can't play a large causative role. |
Thank God
Do you think that God is interested in who wins the Super Bowl?* Do you think that God roots for one side and gives extra help for the players on that side? Do you think that God does the same for people who win other sports events? Some athletes seem to think that God takes sides like this, given the myriad times I've heard them thank their coaches and their teams and then God for some victory. Logically this implies that the losers of the same match should shake their fists at God. It's an odd and interesting God these people believe in. A details guy who can be made to work for some people and against others, perhaps by suitable rituals and prayers. Like a personal coach in the clouds. --- *I didn't watch the Super Bowl and have no idea if anyone thanked God this year. But it happens a lot. |
The Momtini Wars
Mothers: Have you ever thought about what might happen to your children while you are asleep during the night? Or when you are in the bathroom (unless you bring the kids in with you, every time)? Perhaps you should not sleep. One of your children might have a heart attack or develop a sudden fever and succumb to it before you wake up. Do you have a car? A driver's license? A home resuscitation team handy? If you don't, you are a very bad mother. What will happen if your child suddenly gets sick? What are you gonna do? Get a cab? Bad mother! You may be thinking that I've gone crazy, but I'm just reporting on the momtini wars: the Today Show (in late January) which decided to do a story about stay-at-home mothers drinking during playdates. "Decided to do a story" is exactly how they went about it, and it was specifically "mothers" who were to be evaluated as to how good caretakers of their children they might be after a glass of wine:
That there was a subtext to the program is supported by this statement from one of the mothers who were contacted by its producer:
Sheesh. Another one of those fake trends. Fathers would "taint" the story, because either fathers are allowed to drink or fathers are assumed to keep the mothers' drinking under control or, most likely, fathers are not seen as responsible for the children 24/7 so it doesn't matter what they do. But mothers are on duty 24/7, and everybody can have an opinion on how they should act. This opinion is almost always that mothers should be perfect. Nothing less falls short and can be criticized. A good mother should lie in bed at night worrying about the possibility that an airplane might crash on the nursery. A good mother should imagine every possible if ever-so-unlikely risk her children might have, and a good mother should sacrifice everything, including all personal life, to prevent such risks. I find it ironic in a very unpleasant way that now it is the stay-at-home mothers who are being criticized by the mother-the-madonna-or-the-whore school. We already know that this school finds all employed mothers to be heartless egomaniacs who have abandoned their children somewhere along the road to careers and to a paycheck, but it used to work as a defensive shield to stay at home. This is no longer true. Now the binoculars of the critics are aimed straight into the living-rooms and bedrooms and nurseries of all mothers. I will now take a deep breath and say all the expected and moderate things I'm expected to say. Of course getting drunk while taking care of children is bad. Of course alcoholism is a terrible thing and having alcoholic parents is not good for the children at all. And of course it is a good thing to talk about how drinking and driving or being in charge of small children doesn't mix. But to then imply that there is no safe limit to the number of drinks a woman at a playdate can have? And to say nothing about the drinking that both parents might do after the father gets back from work (who's going to drive to the hospital?)? Or the father's drinking when he is in charge of the children? Or those similar risks caused by sleeping I mentioned at the beginning of this post? No, the story is not about alcoholism per se. It is about women without a male supervisor possibly drinking and having fun while the Puritan ethic says that they should be suffering or at least feeling like they are performing some boring duties. The story is about the Mommy Wars, and the only new twist it has added to these wars is that now there are hardly any good mothers left at all and that everybody and their uncle Bob can criticize mothers while doing none of the duties themselves. |
Sunday, February 04, 2007
And how shall I deck my song for the large sweet soul that has gone?
| Walt Whitman, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed In all of the tributes to Molly Ivins, all of the notice of her humor, her brilliance, her integrity and her great writing, not enough has been said about what lay behind it all. Molly Ivins was an extraordinarily decent human being. She never lost sight that there were people, both as groups and as individuals, behind it all. She always took them into consideration, sometimes to the exasperation of those of us impatient to ignore individuals and to look at their crimes. Decency, it would seem, is an embarrassing thing for some people. That’s understandable considering what conventional culture presents as decency. It’s cloying and often dishonest. Sometimes what’s pointed to as decency is only a facade over a pile of rotten garbage. But I’d recommend it. I’d recommend it because in Molly Ivins we saw what decency stripped of convention really looks like. It’s funny and brilliant and sometimes rather raunchy and funny. It can also be fierce and exacting, a blade to cut right through the crap and to get to the bone of the matter. Decency is one of the strongest tools that we have, in the right hands it will get us a lot farther than craftiness. Cynicism, the opposite of decency, is a road to egomaniacal dishonesty. It’s cowardly and it will always turn on us. And cynicism is the best of a host of poses and attitudes that are a danger to the left. There are worse ones. I can’t prove it to you. I can’t know it objectively, it’s too complicated. I’ve only seen it from examples in people, in their lives. Decency, plain and undiluted with sentimentality, is a good plan. I can’t get her off my mind and I hope I never do. Olvlzl. |
A Bowl of Meat
| Posted by olvlzl. It would be good if some of the ink and outrage spent last month over the rather odd looking deal between the Disney and Pop Warner corporations would be spent on what the playing itself does to the children who may have been shaken down by these big businesses. The case or the retired football player, Ted Johnson*, is a disturbing story of the possible results of the cult of toughness and the callous indifference to athletes’ personal welfare that is known as “team work”. The story shouldn’t stop with him. He dates the decisive incident of brain damage, they’re using the milder term, “concussion”, in 2002. He was an adult. If an adult was unable to resist the peer and corporate pressure that led him to go back to practice instead of retiring which would probably have saved him and his family a lot of confusion and pain, how can children be expected to? As has been mentioned here before, children who are encouraged to play football** and risk the only brain they are ever going to have are not adults. They don’t have the maturity or sufficiently developed personalities to resist the pressures to conform. They are at the beginning of the regime of conforming to the entirely artificial and unnecessary devotion to “the team”. They are at the age when it is instilled. They are at the beginning of the process that can end in catastrophic and permanent brain injury. Which is the more important thing that needs the protection of adults and the media, children’s brains or their money? In one of the stories about Ted Johnson deciding to break the wall of silence on brain damage in football, one of his former team mates, who asked to remain anonymous, had this to say: “I’m not saying what the team did was right. But if Ted thought his health was in danger, he never should have put on that blue jersey, You have to be your own advocate.” His coach, Bill Belichick, said: “If Ted felt so strongly that he didn’t feel he was ready to practice with us, he should have told me,”. Let’s start with the fact that while he was supposed to be making these decisions he was, in fact, already suffering injuries that impeded his thinking. He was also being subjected to the direct peer pressure of his team mates, including in a massively ironic twist, one Tedy Bruschi, who very famously suffered a stroke. During the period when he was supposed to resist the pressure to put the team before his damaged brain he was also threatened with the suspension of his contract if he didn’t return. I’d say that his union did more than just let him down. So, a man schooled in the culture of football, suffering confusion and fuzzy thinking, perhaps expecting to end up entirely incapacitated and perhaps broke, was expected to “be his own advocate,” in face of what can only be called an onslaught of pressure to risk more damage. Be his own advocate. It’s always interesting to see the power of a cliche to entirely eclipse reality even for those living through it. There seems to be some resentment of Ted Johnson for making this story public. The stories and reports about him keep mentioning how beloved Ted Johnson was with the fans and his team mates during his playing days. Where did the love go? And what does “love” mean in this context? Football players aren’t dead meat to be consumed by the football industry. They shouldn’t be pressured into treating themselves that way. I hope that Ted Johnson makes a recovery. I wish other athletes would talk about what they’ve lost due to their participation in the sports industry. I wish more would show his courage and break through the wall of silence. I wonder what this tells about us as a country. I’d planned on doing a humorous post about the homoerotic language of football but reading this story this week sort of put me out of the mood. * I couldn’t get a link but this is based on the reporting in the Boston Globe beginning with the story “I don’t want anyone to end up like me” on Friday, February 2. Not being a sports fan I probably wouldn’t have read it if it wasn’t for the look of anxiety in his picture. Some of the comments are from TV and radio. Yes, in fulfillment of my duties here I went so far as to listen to sports reports. ** Brain injury is also a feature of other sports, soccer, hockey... As someone pointed out the last time I posted on this subject. |
Do You Really Want To Live Beyond Freedom And Dignity?
| Posted by olvlzl. You’ll be glad to know I’m not going to go into detail today. If you’ve read enough of what I’ve posted you'll know I don’t buy large swaths of the social and behavioral sciences. Among other things that make me a heretic is that they come up with entirely new systems just slightly less often than Microsoft. And in between new systems, theirs don’t even work that well. Thus the title. They patch together a gamma version and try to sail it into a grand unified theory of the mind. At the end of the first discussion thread begun last Saturday, a very reasonable skeptic of what I had said mentioned that Susan Blackmore, in her book about “the meme”, claimed that they potentially negated free will. I haven’t read the book myself but it doesn’t surprise me, having read Blackmore on other topics. Since the beginning social and behavioral scientists have tried to fix their sights on freedom of thought. They’ve gotten off some shots but they never even fixed a bead on it. Since free will is free, if it exists, why would scientists of any kind expect to be able to pin it down for study and classification? To do that “free will” would have to be one stable thing like a species or the member of an element family. It would have to be or its presence within either an experiment or model could never be reliably known.* It would have to be bounded tightly enough for it to not be free. It is possible for the large majority, or, concievably, every last person, to freely will the same thing and something like that might show up in some experiment or study. If that was the case then the free will nature of it might be entirely invisible. Sometimes free will could be expressed in the outlyers that get pitched. If it exists there is every reason to expect that it would entirely elude even the most exact and careful science. I am confident that free will, by definition, could not enter into scientific study. Being too arrogant to acknowledge this limit, these less than rigorous people just declare that it can’t exist. I don’t know if free will exists but either way, there’s not much that can be done about it. I think that the assumption that it doesn’t exist carries the danger of the kind of tyranny that some have always seen as a glint in the eyes of some mad psychiatrists, social scientists, and psychoanalysts as well as despots of every flavor. It’s not that I fear a dictatorship of social scientists. The picture that I have of most of them is more like John Water’s deprogrammer in Hair Spray than Brave New World. Outside of an insufficiently regulated state hospital, it’s a wonder that some of them can run even a lab.** What I really fear is that the general public will buy their line and decide that freedom is a myth, just as too many have bought the one that we are all selfish swine. A public which doesn’t have any faith in freedom won’t exert themselves to keep it and will go spend their time on trivial pursuits. Looking at our over indoctrinated educated class, that could already be one of the real life influences of these so-called scientists. They’ve already given up dignity in too many cases. That’s why I really don’t like the present regime in the social and behavioral sciences. It’s not just because they claim to know as fact what they, in fact, only believe and want to believe. * The reason that both the pro and con of those “prayer studies” were bogus. **I’m told that students of biology are often disgusted with the way that psych departments take care of their lab animals. It’s students of biology who have told me this, though, just to keep this honest. Coda: In Which olvlzl bows to a preponderance of the evidence. I’ve been going back through various comment threads I’ve participated in, counting the times that someone has asked me, “Do you know how stupid you sound when you....”. Just counting, clearly not. Update: Reification and conflation are the two original sins of the social sciences, they haven't yet had a savior who was able to expunge them of it. I think those sins, like the more traditional ones in real life, are based in personal ambition, pride and the kind of career building dishonesty that pervades our 'life of the mind'. And when it comes to areas like this, it's dangerous. Ask a woman who has to make a career in the real sciences if it isn't. |
Saturday, February 03, 2007
Ok, Try This One.
| Posted by olvlzl. A man was walking down the sidewalk and heard a sound . Thump, thump, thump... He turned and saw a coffin bouncing behind him, coming closer. He crossed the street and the coffin followed him, thump, thump.... He ran and the coffin came faster. He got to his house, ran in and slammed the door. The coffin started pounding against the door, it began to give way. The man ran up the stairs as the coffin broke through and, not missing a beat it followed him. He ran to the room with the strongest lock, the bathroom. He locked the door but the coffin started pounding against it, the door gave way. The man reached for the nearest thing, a huge bottle of Robitussin, threw it at the coffin and the coffin stopped. |
Religion Corner
| Posted by olvlzl. I’m sure you’re ready for a little religion to round out your week. So I’m going to tell you about an Irish miracle. A young woman named Dymphna was married for a year yet no baby was conceived. She went to the priest to ask his advice. He heard her story and said, “Lourdes, Dymphna, you must go to the Shrine at Lourdes and take the blessed water." So she went to Lourdes and, sure enough, she became pregnant and had a fine daughter. After two more years went by she came to the priest and said, “Father I’d love to give my daughter a sister or a brother but it’s the same as before.” “Well,” The priest said, “You went to Lourdes once and conceived, you must go again.” “Oh, sure, Father,” she said, “That fellow’s gone home years ago.” |
Culture In The News
| Posted by olvlzl. Years ago, think it was in Mother Jones magazine, there was a cartoon. A nude, fat and out of shape, aging man, standing on a chair, his equally nude and out of shape wife on his shoulders, ready to dive into bed. The woman said “So this is it, Harold. This is as kinky as we’re going to get.” There was a major disappointment in the Boston Cartoon scare, dealt with below and a minor one. The other one was seeing clips of Aqua Teen and the two dorks who pulled the stunt. I was in shock. This was it? This was what passes as edgy and risky in today’s pop culture? Oh, dear. A Turner Corporation cartoon as counter culture. I’m sorry to have to break this to anyone but there ain’t no counter in a culture like that one. If that’s what young people are settling for in the way of the edgy and the cutting edge, you’re settling for way too little. You deserve more. Let me put it this way. Instead of those two - I don’t even know what the word for them is these days- idiots, let me suggest Jack Levine and Ed Sorel. One painting by Levine, one cartoon by Sorel has more edge and cuts a lot sharper than anything you’re going to get on TV. TV isn’t cool. The Cool won’t appear on TV. It’s an odd position to be in. For probably the first time in history someone can be old fogey on the basis that youth culture is way too tame for them. It’s bland and commercial and stupid. That state of being is a counter-culture phenomenon of a totally unexpected variety. It’s a lot more surreal than a talking meatball and a white ditz in dreadlocks. Old people on the edge, young people grasping commercial security. It’s not right. It's against nature. |
On the Boston Cartoon Scare
| Would you like to be the first responder at the next incident, wondering if it's some dumb kid pulling a copy cat stunt or if it's a psychopath with access to explosives making believe it's a copy cat stunt? |
Just Can’t Get Molly Off My Mind...
| Posted by olvlzl. The obituaries of Molly Ivins were all interested in what made her into such a great journalist. Luckily we don’t really have to wonder, great journalist that she was, she reported it. She said that for her, as for so many other Southern liberals, the question that sparked her off was race. Once you figure out that they’re lying to you about race you wonder what else they’re lying to you about. Honest people are really the best source to find out what makes them tick, you don’t need to filter it through some dumb theory. Molly Ivins noted in that passage that children are notoriously honest before they are socialized out of looking for the truth. That reminded me of how much I love impertinent children. Just love them. Not the button pushing brats who say things and bring up topics just to make their elders squirm. As if that’s possible now that everyone spills their guts everywhere at the drop of a hat. What I really like are children who ask questions and draw conclusions about things that get swept under the rug. Sometimes, like with race, those things are done for the filthiest and most apparent reasons. But sometimes it’s just out of convenience or habit. I’ve got the strongest hunch that any system that is devised, even one that tries to stay honest, will build up a crust of junk out of the exigencies of meeting deadlines, publishing papers and not offending colleagues. It’s been that way in just about anything I’m familiar with. Career building rewards you for ignoring the muck that you know is there, if just in the back of your mind. If a kid looks at it, someone without any career or social status to protect, they can cut through the crap and find the rot underneath. A child like that gets told that they’re asking an impertinent question, every step of the way. Of course, being inquisitive, they will eventually ask why people insist on calling a question impertinent when it’s really the most pertinent question you can ask. But by the time they’ve learned those words they know that no one is going to answer their questions and they’re going to have to figure it out for themself. It’s not every kid who does this, a lot of them show certain signs of being socialized in the most unfortunate way. Of course, they’re the cool kids, the ones who are at the top of one or more of the highschool elites and the ones who aspire to that. They don’t ask questions that will lose them status, usually not with their elders, certainly not with their peers. For them it’s the peers who are the bigger danger to curiosity and honesty. The elites of youth are just future conformists of the world, even if they like to strike the pose of being counter culture. I don’t usually worry about elites figuring they are in a position to take care of themselves, but I do worry about the horrors of that kind of anxious, painful maintenance of status in young people, the burden of the facade of cool confidence. If only they could give it up and breathe some really fresh air. After they grow up I’ve got less time to worry about them. Though I lose sleep over wondering what the world is coming to now that adults have extended the culture of highschool well past middle age. I think I might be drifting, but then so could Molly Ivins. Not within a piece, she was a great worker who wrote about as tight a piece as could be imagined. But she was telling the truth, she never stopped poking around no matter where it led her. What can we do to keep any part of her with us, now that she’s gone on? We do what she did. Ask an impertinent question about something important every day. Ask it without worrying about the consequences from the elites or from your peers. Ask it for Molly. Ask it with heart. ... oh Lord, I hope I never do. |
An Apology
| Posted by olvlzl In the movie The Sorrow and the Pity, Marcel Ophuls shows the case of a merchant named Klein who, under the Vichy occupation, took out ads in the papers to announce that, despite his name, he wasn’t Jewish. The scene dealing with Klein is painful to watch, his squirming explanations and the awful moral conditions under Nazi occupation it demonstrates are devastating and unforgettable. What I did while arguing here last week was to correct the mistaken impression that I was a Christian. I’d done this several times in the past and it never really sat well with me. I didn’t realize why until I remembered the movie. What I should have said was that any religious affiliation I had was irrelevant, that only the truth or reasoning of what I had said was relevant. What if I had been a Christian? Would that have changed anything that had been said? Would it have changed any of the meaning of it? No, no more than if I’d been of any other religion or a member of any other group. Mr. Klein might well have been in danger of his life, which strikes me as at least an excuse. I’m not. What people say, if it’s true and if it makes sense, should be the only consideration. I’m sorry I ignored that fact. |
Friday, February 02, 2007
Orange Snowmen?
I wanted to post a picture of the mousetrap someone in my family made in the 18th century but I can't find it now, and I haven't completed my self-imposed quota for today's blog posts. All this means that you are given even more nasty news:
One day we will have songs about the orange snowmen... The mousetrap, by the way, is wonderful. It consists of a large wooden weight hanging precariously balanced over the area where the mouse will be served a dainty piece of cheese. When the mouse enters, BANG! |
Mired in MRA-Land
I couldn't sleep last night, so I surfed the net and ended up reading all sorts of posts which led me to the Men's Rights Activist sites. This is never a good idea for a feminist but especially not in the middle of the night. Lots of anger and hatred blaring into my house from the screen, and the night-time brain is eerily open to begin with. So as a form of self-defense I decided to start trying to find what it is exactly that these activists are saying. What it is that feminists have destroyed so badly in this country, and what it is that makes men the truly oppressed gender. But to do that I had to try to clean out the other stuff, the stuff that whirls around in the very air of those places,the stuff which is dangerous to inhale because it makes you stupid and slow. This post is an attempt to report on that cleaning process. I will write about the more substantive stuff on Monday. This is the first of the odd wriggling creatures I caught by the neck: According to many if not most MRA-guys, the whole world is ruled by a small cabal of radical feminists. George Bush doesn't run this country; the ghosts of radical feminists do, and what these ghosts want is not equality but female supremacy. They are driven by their deep hatred of men and every feminist proposal ever made has been intended to destroy men. Even more surprisingly, proposals and laws which feminists opposed and have fought are still attributed to them. As an example, I read that it is the feminists who don't want women in the military to be in combat roles and that it is the feminists who keep women out of firefighting so that they don't get killed as often as men do. Now this is clearly delusional thinking. A cabal of radical feminists with such powers these men believe they have would surely have gotten rid of men altogether by now. Instead of that, we don't even have paid maternity leave in this country. So why is it that so many men seem to firmly believe in this fantastic scenario? Perhaps for similar reasons as the ones that make people believe in black helicopters hovering over the United Nations building. But there is an additional reason, and that became evident when I managed to isolate and cage the next weird creature messing my brain up: The hermetically sealed and distorted set of "evidence" used in the MRA circles. The same incidents crop up again and again, quoted as final proof of the perfidy of feminists. A famous rape accusation that may turn out not to be rape at all: Proof that almost all rape accusations are false. The case where terrible state laws put a young teenager to prison for ten years just because he received a blowjob from a minor: Proof positive that all sentences for sexual crimes are wrong and somehow proof positive also that feminists were behind this particular (and very old) law. Only certain cases are quoted and no attempt is being made to look at the actual numbers of different types of examples. The more statistical evidence cited in these circles is also fascinating: The same few studies are mentioned over and over again, usually in a context where it is clear the person mentioning them didn't understand the study. And what studies these are! They come from the famous conservative gals of the Independent Women's Forum! Did you know that there is no gender gap in wages at all and that schools are run by feminists to destroy boys? They come from the guy who wrote the book Why Men Rule! Did you know that men earn more than women because they do all the dangerous work in this world? These are mostly really poorly made studies or perhaps not studies at all, in some cases, but they have been turned into the eternal truth in the MRA circles. I'm not sure how one could calmly debate anything with these guys. Their whole world view is set. I finally caught the most slippery of the nasty creatures, and despite the many colors and forms it took, I think it's called just plain old-fashioned misogyny. It is intertwined with everything that is said on those sites. Everything. Misogyny makes it very hard to know what some of those men are saying. For one thing, the word "feminist" is often used as an euphemism for "woman that I can hate openly" and so what is being said about feminists really applies to women. Most men I read seem to think that equality of the sexes means going back to male supremacy and that this is necessary because feminism is destroying families and men and because women are quite stupid and weak and can't be garbage collectors and don't even want to be garbage collectors even though they try to usurp men's roles in life! But many men also complain about what one might not call feminism-created women: Women who stay at home and who don't earn enough money to support themselves and the children that the man didn't want in the first place but was forced to bear. Indeed, both uppity women and downity (?) women are bad women. It also occurred to me that some of these sites are guilty of blaming others for what is in fact in themselves. Thus, the idea of feminists as all man-haters sounds hollow when it comes from the head of a misogynist, and someone calling women illogical in a sentence that contains five major logical errors is disconcerting, to say the least. More about this topic on Monday. |
Global Warming
A new report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has just been obtained by the press:
Nice that we are mostly all agreed on that caused by humans bit. Too bad it looks like too late to do anything much about it. I hope I'm wrong in understanding the conclusions of the report that pessimistically. The politics of all this is quite interesting:
I don't know what to say about that all. |
Thursday, February 01, 2007
This Sunday's Action Alert
The Grey Lady does not like women very much, if the kinds of columnists she regularly hires is any indication. Though getting rid of John Tierney's sermons about us ladies and our insignificance was a blessing, the truth is that the New York Times does not have very many female columnists at all. Maureen Dowd and Lisa Belkin come to mind. Now Lisa Belkin's column on balancing work and family has been moved to the Business section of the paper, and some women readers don't like this at all. From an e-mail I got*:
Not a bad idea for something to do on a Sunday morning or afternoon. ----- *I'm not sure if the original sender wants her name made public or not so I omitted it here. |
Congratulate Shakes
First Amanda and now Shakespeare's Sister. She, too, has joined the Edwards blog. This is wonderful news for women bloggers and suggests that our voices are beginning to be heard! Now I will just sit back and wait for Sam Brownback to hire me for his net campaign... |
Tweety Hates Girls
"Tweety" is Chris Matthews, the man who hosts Hardball, a political talk-show and "girls" is how Tweety sees women. He really is uncomfortable (imagine tugging at the collar and wiping off sweat from the noble forehead) with women in any kind of power. Other than sexual power. Some examples:
So now you know about Tweety and his secrets. |



