Friday Silliness

This picture is a fun gender-reversal:

Very few other male politicians could get away with what Trump has been allowed to get away with.  Still, that sentence  "...had five kids by 3 men, was a repeat adulterer" might not hurt a man too much (coughGingrichcough), but it would torpedo the chances of any female candidate.  That, my erudite and wonderful readers, is because of that double-standard about sexuality most cultures in this world still maintain.

Short Posts 9/28/16: The Shimmy Song, Fashion Magazines And What Online Writing Is

1.  This is the Hillary shimmy song.  

Mind you, that shimmying could always be an early sign of leprosy or hoof-and-mouth disease or some other menacing malady.  At least if we believe right-wing long-distance diagnosticians.

2.  An interesting video showing what's left when two women's magazines are denuded of their ad pages.  And of course fashion and beauty advice and even health advice is sold to women on the wider platform of You Are Not Good/Pretty/Healthy Enough, because that is the platform which works.  The industry needs to keep women insecure* but not so insecure that we just go "what-the-f**k, I'm not perfectible, so I'd rather go and enjoy life as I am."

I'm more curious about the poses the models must take in the ads, because those poses are oddly passive, oddly similar to a broken doll tossed across the floor by an enraged (but rich) child, while at the same time the eyes of the models are often half-shut, empty of life, and the lips of the models are slightly open, swollen, as if after some fairly strenuous sex.  Or the few cases where the model appears to be leaping or running or turning pirouettes; all that while walking on stilts.

What are the subtexts in all that?

3.  I have stumbled into some financial insecurity, so I have Googled various types of extra jobs, including online writing (which I'm doing here, essentially for nothing, because I'm a very stupid goddess).  The sites specializing in free lance writing jobs are wonderful places!

Minimum wages are an unheard concept, people should want to write a 6000-word article for the grand total of thirty dollars, and expect someone else's name to be attached to the piece once it is finished, after a month's work.  One job would have required ten blog posts a day, at five dollars per post, with pictures and all!**

Then there's the site where the home page, intended to lure both clients and writers to the site, has truly awful clunky and grammatically incorrect writing.

Now that is a truly bizarre labor market, though it's true that many, many people today write for nothing, and are glad to get into print.  So why would the clients pay for the milk when the cow itself jumps into the oven and turns it on?

That can make a goddess gloomy.  But then I cheered up immediately, because I Googled economic writing jobs, thinking that the extra expertise would up the pay a little.

And it does.  But, my friends, I found that the quickest way to make money in that sub-market is to solve college students' economics homework problems for them or to write their term papers.  Somewhat unethical, wouldn't you say?

Still.  I think I will become a ghost-writer, hovering ominously in the background of the articles while going "BOO!"

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*  Insecurity is also used in marketing products for men, but the role of insecurity in the marketing for women is much more central.

**  The clients or customers appear to have absolutely no idea how long writing takes or how much research is required for it to be any good.  To rely on a market where many on the supply side are willing to work for zero pay doesn't correct this problem, because ultimately those who give it away for nothing will die of overwork and hunger.  And what you get when pay five dollars per post is a post worth less than five dollars.  That's just basic economics.

The First Bigly, Good and Beautiful Presidential Debate

I love Donald Trump's presidential language:

The United States is a mess, the Middle East is a mess, NATO is a mess, and the Americans lose on everything.

But Mr. Trump, he has the great temperament, the winning temperament, and the stamina to steer this country out of all those messes!  He can give us witness testimonials about what a wonderful guy he is, what beautiful businesses he has built (and bankrupted).  Indeed, he is just the greatest.

Now that was important to include in a presidential debate, in case someone in the audience hadn't already learned that Donald thinks he's the greatest thing since grated cheese.

Ms. Clinton, on the other hand, doesn't have the right temperament, doesn't have any business ability, doesn't have judgment.

And luring the wealthy corporations to bring back their money to the United States would be beautiful, beautiful.

Now parse all that for me.  Then ask yourselves if the media wouldn't have found such a language inappropriately fuzzy and inappropriately emotional had it come from the mouth of some other politician. Say, Hillary Clinton.

The whole debate was a hoot, a bit like the sound Hillary Clinton made when Donald Trump told us that she doesn't have the temperament, the judgment or the stamina to be the president of the United States.  Perhaps that attack was based on the Republican code-book of always attacking your opponents at what their strengths are?  Even if they are your own weaknesses?

So who won the debate?  The general agreement is that Hillary Clinton did.  I'm not quite sure what the basis of that judgment is, whether it is that she was better on facts* or future policies, or just the better debater, though I think that she won in all of those categories.

Two parts of the debate stuck to my mind:

First, Trump's insistence that Hillary Clinton, together with Barack Obama, created ISIS.  That, by the way, caused some coffee to be spewed on my screen.

George Walker Bush would be the name that comes to mind if a particular American would be accused of enabling ISIS**, not Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton.   It was our Georgie Porgie who poked a sleeping beehive with a stick and then ran away when the bees woke up.  It was our Georgie Porgie  who sent young Tea Party personnel over to Iraq to create a free market, it was our Georgie Porgie who destroyed the Iraqi army, without apparently knowing anything about the Shia-Sunni quarrels,   and it was our Georgie Porgie who did all that without any understanding of what he got into.

To be quite honest, my research into ISIS, which I used for an earlier three-post series, taught me that the roots of ISIS are complicated, hard to eradicate and that it's quite possible that very few Western politicians really understand the size of the problem.  But surely Trump's utterance serves as the most idiotic one ever.

Second, Trump's inability to properly counter Clinton's references to the way he had treated Alicia Machado, the Miss Universe of 1996.  Trump loves judging women's bodies so much that he's been in the beauty pageant business for years.

The case of Ms. Machado was about her gaining weight during the year she was the ruling Miss Universe.  According to Hillary Clinton, Trump's concern with that weight gain made him call Ms. Machado names:

"And one of the worst things he said was about a woman in a beauty contest -- he loves beauty contests, supporting them and hanging around them -- and he called this woman 'Miss Piggy,' then he called her 'Miss Housekeeping' because she was Latina," Clinton had said.

The point I want to make about all that is this:  Trump knows that Clinton is accusing him of sexism and misogyny (with good evidence, I might add).  So why didn't he prepare for something of this sort to come up in the debates?  Is it because he didn't prepare for the debates at all, what with already being the greatest?  Or is it because wimminfolk really do not matter in his mind?

To be completely fair, I should note that Trump did better in the first fifteen minutes or so, before his ramblings began.  He also brought up one important issue, and that is the way the costs and benefits of globalization fall differently:

The costs of globalization have hit the American working classes much more than they have hit the middle classes or, goddess bless, the very rich (who largely benefit from globalization).  Yet neither party has proposed anything that would truly work to compensate those workers who have lost their jobs in this country (especially in middle age, say), while others are enjoying cheaper foreign goods and services and firms increase their profits by locating abroad.

I credit Trump for stating the problem.  His solutions to it are, however, gobbledygook.  As are his solutions to most everything.

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* Different sites check somewhat different assertions.  Here are a few more fact check sites for you to peruse:  CNN, USA Today,  Politifact.

** The Syrian civil war might have happened even in the absence of the Iraq invasion, and regional and religious politics also pay the role.  But it's also true that some within ISIS are fighting a grudge war against the West, with roots in the early crusades, and that those same theologians see both sides only in terms of religions.  This does not negate the crucial and harmful role Western imperialism and greed for oil have had in creating the current situation.  But no one person, not even Hillary Clinton!, can be seen as the architect of ISIS.

More on the False Equivalence in The 2016 Presidential Elections

Paul Krugman writes about the false equivalence phenomenon in how the media has handled the two presidential candidates:

If Donald Trump becomes president, the news media will bear a large share of the blame. I know some (many) journalists are busy denying responsibility, but this is absurd, and I think they know it. As Nick Kristof says, polls showing that the public considers Hillary Clinton, a minor fibber at most, less trustworthy than a pathological liar is prima facie evidence of massive media failure.

Or put it this way:  We have a spelling bee in the final round of questions. The winner will run the world.  One candidate is asked to spell "huge", the other candidate is asked to spell "prospicience."

Or put it this way:  One candidate's 'errors and flaws' are subjected to a microscope, the other candidate's 'errors and flaws' are viewed through the kind of veil that was used to film romantic moments and happy endings in old movies*.  At the same time, one candidate's expertise and experience are ignored, the other candidate's lack of expertise and lack of experience are also ignored.  That, my friends is not equivalent treatment.

Or put it this way:  One candidate is a racist, sexist turnip-head with no real qualifications for the job he wants, unless one believes that playing a bully in reality television is such a qualification**.

The other is a career politician.

Yet the false equivalency approach means that "Trump being Trump" is accepted as an excuse for the misogyny and the racism, whereas there is no such equivalence of "Hillary Clinton being Hillary Clinton" for anything she does or is accused of doing.

I see some change in the false equivalence approach, to give some in the media credit where credit is due.  But the damage is probably already done.

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* These "errors and flaws" are not intended to be read as being of the same size and/or nature.

**  With apologies to upstanding turnips everywhere.