On My Blog Anniversary. Take Four: Or Where In The Political World Is Echidne Now?

This is a rant about American politics in 2017 and my place in it.  Let me begin by noting that I have never liked politics as a horse race or a ballet performance, except when it's about something I regard trivial, I have never liked arguing for just the sake of arguing or for the sake of the type of winning where being right doesn't matter, but crushing the opponent does (1).  I have never enjoyed debates where ad hominem or ad feminem slurs are used or where some people are closed out of a debate due to lack of proper tribal credentials.

So it's a miracle that I have kept this blog going for fourteen years, right?  Or possibly not a miracle but a side effect of the hallucination that makes me swear that I am an avatar of a snake goddess?

The following list is about my pet hatreds in American politics.  It tilts toward the liberal and progressive end of the political dimension, despite my belief that our end is much better on almost all counts.  The reason for that choice is that so many of my posts on this blog already are about the heinous acts of the Trump administration, the Republican Party, the Breitbart.com fake information factories, and so on, but very few address the issues I write about below.

Happy Centenary of the Finnish Independence!

 Here's a flag for you:

The next picture is just because the gentleman in the picture is a Finnish cat, enjoying the scarce and precious winter sun:

And some music:




Added later:

Two interesting articles to read:  First, the short history of Finland as a social democracy, and, second, some interesting facts about Finnish dads.

What Did Women Ever Do?

You may have come across this recent tweet exchange:

Dr. James Kent's argument is common in the manosphere, almost part of its basic bible:

That men are viewed as superior to women is because men are superior to women.  It is, after all, men who created everything, and have done so  all through history*.  The usual examples on the manosphere sites are buildings, roads and bridges, and that's probably what Kent meant when he asked people to look out of their windows and list five things that women have made.

Mel Condon's answer to the tweet is of course the most important one:  Women, indeed, do produce all human beings by gestating them and by giving them birth, and in most cases by caring for them in their childhoods.

That is a very time-intensive job, and before reliable contraception it kept most women from building bridges or buildings or roads, though women were also traditionally kept away from all building sites and from the kind of education which teaches how to build such things.

But wait, there's more!  If we open our mental eyes a bit wider and accept not only directly seeing something but also deducing its presence as evidence,  lots of things made by women can be discerned by looking through our windows in any place where the view includes humans.

Most of the clothes on those humans women made were also made by women, for one example, and many of those humans have food in their stomachs that was cooked by women.  More generally, if we can see into other domestic buildings or hotels from our windows**,  the dirt and disarray we do not see is because of the work of mostly women.  That the drivers on the streets outside can read the traffic signs might be because of the work of elementary school teachers, a female-dominated profession.  And so on.

Still, one aspect of the bigoted comment by our dear Dr. Kent made me note that the traditional gendered division of labor has, indeed, resulted in a situation where the things women make or have traditionally made seem more ephemeral:

People die and disappear before bridges do, meals are digested and new meals must be cooked, clean rooms will become messy again.  Even the few arts traditionally viewed as women's arts (or crafts!), such as textile arts, are by their very nature less permanent than granite statues, most of which were sculpted by men until very recently.

Or consider archeological finds:  The early tools we find tend to be made out of stone or bronze or iron, and most of them apply to hunting, agriculture or warfare.  Those, together with pottery shards, are among the most common finds, not because women didn't make anything but perhaps pottery***:  Rather, those tools are simply much more durable than clothing or woven baskets or other similar artifacts.

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*  The more academic argument on that is discussed in this old post of mine and also in this series of earlier posts.  Still well worth reading.

Note also, that many books explain in great detail the kinds of obstacles women faced if they tried to enter arts or sciences in the past.  Women were formally excluded from universities and arts until the nineteenth century, the medieval guild systems in Europe limited women's access to many professions, to give just a few examples.

To this day girls are steered into different occupations than boys.  Such steering is ubiquitous but hard to spot and almost everywhere in our cultures, but it also happens in explicit career counseling and the same effect can be created by hostile environments in traditionally male occupations or during the education for them.

My point is that more has been going on with respect to this assertion than Dr. Kent seems to know.

**  In many countries women also clean administrative buildings, offices and so on.  This is less the case in the United States where those fairly low-wage jobs are often done by men who are recent immigrants.  I haven't found the reason that difference, though it may reflect the greater fear of crime here (a lot of that work happens at night).

***  And we don't really know who made the tools or the pottery.  We infer the likely answers from how later societies were arranged.





  

No Booze, Women Or Movies. Chuck Grassley on the High Morals of Rich People As A Reason To Repeal the Federal Estate Tax.

Remember the estate tax demolition plan*?  It's in the House tax "reform" bill, but not in the Senate tax "reform" bill.  Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) favors repealing it.  This is what he told the Des Moines Register:

“I think not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing, as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies," Grassley told the newspaper.

And there we go again!  See how the three things "people" are spending every darn penny on are booze (a commodity), movies (a commodity) and women (not a commodity, but turned into one here).  See how "people" exclude the category of "women," or at least heterosexual "women."  See how what the list of items that all the money is spent on also excludes gay men from the group "people."

This is a lot like the joke about someone spending all their moneys on hookers and blow.  Doing that is pretty hard for women, especially hard for heterosexual women, given that there are very few hookers willing to service them. Rather, heterosexual women are the largest percentage of hookers.

So old Chuck objectifies women in that comment.  I don't particularly mind that bit, because I do mind this so much more:

Grassley's comment tells us that he has an image of "people" which equals the image of "heterosexual men."  Grassley is a politician supposed to care for our common concerns.  How can he do it if his image of the "people" does not include the vast majority of women?  Does he ever even consider how his policies affect half of his constituency?

There Echidne goes again, nattering on about something utterly trivial, you might mutter.  After all, listing things one is supposed to consume, such as entertainment, alcohol and sex, is just a traditional way to make a point.  Write about real problems, will you!

It is trivial on one level, sure.  But it's not trivial to realize that powerful people have a certain view of the world and that you are not a default human being in that view.  I get the benefit of belonging to the racial default in this country, but not getting the benefit of belonging to the biological sex default in this country has made me more aware of when the former kind of treatment happens, too.

Then those kinds of statements simply are something that the not-in-the-default-category people would never make, because they see the world as it really is.  Being in the default category blinds one from the fact that there IS one (or several, really).  Just imagine a female politician saying something about "people" spending all their money on Jimmy Choo shoes, movies and booze.  That signals something quite different.

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This post  didn't even get to criticizing the common conservative assumption that rich people, every single one of them, deserve their wealth, because they work hard for it while poor people, every single one of them,  lie drunk and lazy next to the government's teats.  But then that view cannot explain why someone deserves to inherit the wealth they did not work for.

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*  As an aside, the Hill article is dreadful in the way it defines the estate tax:

The estate tax, often derided as the “death tax,” is a 40-percent tax on the wealth of a person after he or she dies. The future of the estate tax is one of the key differences between the House and Senate bills that will need to be reconciled in a joint committee.

The true definition is something very different, because the first $5.49 million left are exempt from any tax.  The tax is only collected on the dollars in excess of that exemption in the estate:

For 2017, the estate and gift tax exemption is $5.49 million per individual, up from $5.45 million in 2016. That means an individual can leave $5.49 million to heirs and pay no federal estate or gift tax. A married couple will be able to shield just shy of $11 million ($10.98 million) from federal estate and gift taxes.