The Beauty of The Female Back. Today's Evolutionary Psychology Study.

A couple of readers forwarded me summaries of an evolutionary psychology study about what angle of lower back men* view as the most beautiful in women.  Thanks for those summaries.

I wasn't going to write about the study, because it didn't beep loudly enough on my freakometer**. 

But then I Googled it and found something fascinating about who quoted it:  The first ten pages of Google gave me a large harvest of pickup artist sites, a few misogyny sites and, in general, lots of tough-prehistoric-guy sites.  Many of those sites summarized the study as being about large butts, which is incorrect, but then misunderstanding studies is more common than understanding them.  What was more interesting is that this study  seems particularly loved by those who do not particularly love women.

That's one fascinating fact.  The other fascinating fact is a comment in one study summary:

Short Funny/Not-so-Funny Posts for 4/10/15. Futurist Ideas of 1930, Labiafaces And Other Weirdness.

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

The Cats And The Dogs And Even The Birds

I had never heard of Saara Suvanto before yesterday.  That is a pity, because she had one of those voices which is an instrument (think of Billie Holiday whose centenary is today or of Odetta or of Janis Joplin).  She died at the age of forty from Type One diabetes and she was blind from her early twenties onwards.

What a voice!  This is an early 1980s song she created and performed.  It's called Kissat ja Koirat ja Linnutkin which means The Cats and the Dogs And Even the Birds.  I have given a rough translation of the words at the end of this post.



The topic of the song was the fear of a nuclear war.  But it applies equally well to global climate change, today's fear.

My translation of the lyrics:

Hey, dad, even the children
they want to blow up in air
All the cats and the dogs and even the birds
none of them will be left in peace.

Hey mom,  they slaughter the children, too
nothing will be left of them
all the cats and the dogs and even the birds
everything they destroy.

Listen to the voice of the child
when you still have time
stop being so  very busy
you restless nomad. 

In the noise the voice
of the innocent child drowns
At night when she/he sleeps
you can hear it clearly

Hey, dad, even the children
they want to blow up in air
All the cats and the dogs and even the birds
none of them will be left in peace.

Hey mom,  they slaughter the children, too
nothing will be left of them
all the cats and the dogs and even the birds
everything they destroy. 

Listen to the voice of the child
when you can still hear it
when the city quiets down
the frailest of voices sing
it is then the turn of the big ones
to join the song
and ? children’s choir
rings over all land

Hey, dad, even the children
they want to blow up in air
All the cats and the dogs and even the birds
none of them will be left in peace.

Hey mom,  they slaughter the children, too
nothing will be left of them
all the cats and the dogs and even the birds
everything they destroy.

Suitable Music For Today

The Fabled Hare

Cat For Friday

This is Iippa, decorating a party table.

She watches programs about squirrels and such on her very own laptop.

Meanwhile, in Indiana

Indiana has recently become famous for its particular version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act which  has been widely criticized as a barely camouflaged attempt to give religious fundamentalists (and the firms they own) more scope to refuse service to people who might try to  order  cakes or flowers for same-sex wedding parties or who might try to renew their contraceptive pill prescriptions and so on.

Others have written about that in great detail.  What struck me when looking at the Indiana law was how it defined the "person" that the new law would provide with restored (refreshed! renewed!) religious freedom:

Sec. 7. As used in this chapter, "person" includes the following: 
(1) An individual.

(2) An organization, a religious society, a church, a body of communicants, or a group organized and operated primarily for religious purposes.
(3) A partnership, a limited liability company, a corporation, a company, a firm, a society, a joint-stock company, an unincorporated association, or another entity that:
(A) may sue and be sued; and

(B) exercises practices that are compelled or limited by a system of religious belief held by:
(i) an individual; or
(ii) the individuals;

who have control and substantial ownership of the entity, regardless of whether the entity is organized and operated for profit or nonprofit purposes.

Remember Hobby Lobby and the "closely held" companies?  This sounds similar, perhaps a child of that decision.  So now companies can be persons, too!

That's the background in my mind for thinking about the case of Purvi Patel, an Indiana woman who has been convicted* of feticide (based on an Indiana law Ind. Code Ann. § 35-42-1-6) and also of felony  neglect of a dependent.

IS And Women. Part 3: The Western Female IS Militants

 Introduction

Meet Zahra and Salma Halane, seventeen-year-old twin sisters from Manchester, England who are not currently living the lives of typical British teenagers.  That's because they left England last June to follow their brother, Ahmed, in joining IS/ISIS/ISIL in Syria.  In the short time since then they have both been married to IS militants and they have also both been widowed.

Zahra's online communications suggest that the twins are members of one of the two women's brigades in Raqqa, Syria, possibly the al-Khansaa brigade, which has the task of policing other women's behavior according to the IS version of sharia.  Violations of the sharia code might mean not being adequately covered (say, missing the obligatory face veil) or being out without a mahram (husband, father, brother or adult son).  Some violations result in floggings.

Here Zahra Halane poses in front of the IS flag while holding an AK-47:

Meet Aqsa Mahmood, a twenty-year old student from a fairly affluent family in Glasgow, Scotland.  She is no longer attending to her studies, because she left Scotland for Syria in late 2013 to join IS:

Since then she has married an IS militant and commented online under the name of Umm Laytt.  Some see her as an online recruiter for IS.  Whether that is her official role or not,  her online site  contains suggestions of help for other women who might wish to join IS as well as explanations for her reasons for becoming a female jihadist.  She appears to live in the Syrian "capital" of IS, Raqqa.  Here she is with two other female jihadists (Umm Haritha and Umm Ubaydah)

These are three examples of the women and girls of IS who have independently joined the terrorist movement and cut their ties to their families and previous homelands.  All three come from the UK, but other women have traveled to Syria to  join IS from countries such as France, Germany, Austria, the US, Sweden, Canada and Indonesia.

Who are these foreign women of IS/ISIS/ISIL?  Why do women and girls voluntarily join a terrorist organization which plans for a caliphate where women's rights would be minimal and their freedom of movement nonexistent?  Why do women and girls voluntarily join a terrorist organization which openly practices rape and sexual slavery of "non-believing" women and children, not to mention the beheading of aid workers and journalists?

A Flu Thought

What does it say about me that the front of the Sudafed box seems to have a line saying Noam Chomsky?

That was Non-Drowsy for those of you who don't have a head full of snot.

This Is Weird. A Press Release from the House Judiciary Committee.

It's full of those moving GIFs which always make me feel as if I'm trying to follow table tennis played very fast by very small mice. 

But that's not what is weird about the communication.  The topic is president Obama and US immigration laws.  And the GIFs:

In a reflection of the racial demographics of House Republicans, all of the GIFs in Wednesday's Judiciary Committee press release depict white people, among them Jennifer Lawrence, Britney Spears and Steve Carell. The vast majority of the 245 House Republicans are white. Seven are Hispanic, and two are black.

Unlike House Republicans, however, the people seen in the GIFs are nearly all female. Only 23 House Republicans, or a little less than 10 percent, are women.
“The Little Mermaid” tells the story of a woman who is part fish and who longs to emigrate from sea to land. In the 1989 Disney film, the mermaid stays on land.

Who is the press release intended to reach?  I wonder and wonder.

And yes, this is old stuff.  My apologies for it.  I got the flu even though I got vaccinated.  

Monopoly. The Game.

Yesterday was the eightieth anniversary of the game called Monopoly.  There's an interesting subtext to the history of the game.  Or a sub-game, if you wish:

Legend has it that Charles Darrow, an unemployed salesman, invented the game in his kitchen in 1930. But the roots of Monopoly actually date back a few more decades, to a game called the Landlord's Game created by Elizabeth Magie in 1903.

The Landlord's Game was meant to be educational, illustrating economist Henry George's belief -- inspired by the Gilded Age -- that property ownership by individuals is inherently unfair. Magie's game was an underground success, leading to a number of offshoots, including the one that Darrow tweaked. Parker Brothers bought her patent for $500 in 1935, closing the loop.

The New York Times recently published an article about Elizabeth Magie and her Landlord's Game as the possible basic source for Monopoly.  I recommend reading the whole piece, because it's a fairly representative case study of the "disappearing women"  phenomenon:

Magie’s game featured a path that allowed players to circle the board, in contrast to the linear-path design used by many games at the time. In one corner were the Poor House and the Public Park, and across the board was the Jail. Another corner contained an image of the globe and a homage to Henry George: “Labor Upon Mother Earth Produces Wages.” Also included on the board were three words that have endured for more than a century after Lizzie scrawled them there: “Go to Jail.”
...

It was a version of this game that Charles Darrow was taught by a friend, played and eventually sold to Parker Brothers. The version of that game had the core of Magie’s game, but also modifications added by the Quakers to make the game easier to play. In addition to properties named after Atlantic City streets, fixed prices were added to the board. In its efforts to seize total control of Monopoly and other related games, the company struck a deal with Magie to purchase her Landlord’s Game patent and two more of her game ideas not long after it made its deal with Darrow.

Magie never really benefited financially from her game, whereas Darrow became very rich indeed.  The reasons why history ended up that way can be many, but Magie's gender certainly would not have helped. 

There's something about the way we (as humans) write history which downplays or erases the contributions of individuals which don't fit the subconscious patterns we have in our minds,* and women working in science or literature have frequently found their work  ignored or reinterpreted for that reason.  Sometimes the erasure is conscious, but often it is not. 

What fascinates me is that often the unconscious or conscious rewriting seems to take place a short time after** the events, not immediately, as if it's the slightly more distant observers who have erased, say, any women from stories of inventions or scientific discoveries or assigned them to the more "natural" helper roles.   That could be because the effect of the unconscious patterns becomes more powerful when the actual individuals are no longer known.

------
*The case of Rosalind Franklin is a well-known example of this.

For an example outside gender, consider the case of Sir Edmond Hillary and Tenzing Norgay as an example.  The early recognition went mostly to Hillary, perhaps because Norgay was seen as someone just doing his job whereas Hillary was the white adventurer.

**Time is a relative concept here, and I refer to such things as the evaluation of literary merit of various writers a generation after their work, rather than hundred years later.

And To War, To War We go? On Iran As The Next Target.

Joshua Muravchik has written an opinion piece in the Washington Post about what the United States should do with respect to Iran's plan to acquire nuclear weapons.  Muravchik would like some other people to sacrifice themselves in a war against Iran, because he believes that a war with Iran is the best possible answer to the disagreements. 

Even the title of the piece says that if you are in a hurry and can't read the rest of the column:  "War with Iran is probably our best option." 

The opinion piece is fun to read if you ignore what it's all about.  Muravchik worries about nuclear weapons in the hands of Iran's hard-liners and explains to us why it is imperative to avoid that situation:

What if force is the only way to block Iran from gaining nuclear weapons? That, in fact, is probably the reality. Ideology is the raison d’etre of Iran’s regime, legitimating its rule and inspiring its leaders and their supporters. In this sense, it is akin to communist, fascist and Nazi regimes that set out to transform the world. Iran aims to carry its Islamic revolution across the Middle East and beyond. A nuclear arsenal, even if it is only brandished, would vastly enhance Iran’s power to achieve that goal.

Hmm.  I think it's Saudi Arabia that is financing and spreading the Islamic revolution across the Middle East and beyond, in the form of Sunni Wahhabism.  And Pakistan, a major base for various Islamist terrorist groups, already has nuclear weapons.  Some suggest Pakistan has a deal with the Saudis to let them have those weapons if necessary. 

Indeed, though Iran has been an eager beaver at home in propping up the rules and restrictions concerning women*, those pesky critters which just won't stay inside their allotted little cages and therefore rattle the structure of the Islamic revolution, I don't see Shia Islam as a major aspect of today's international terrorism.

The whole opinion piece is probably one of those click-bait pieces.  But it's also a little like that time-honored Tarzan move:  You bang your hairy chest with your fist and ululate, to frighten everyone who happens to be within hearing range in the jungle. 

But that doesn't work when every country in the area is run by their own Tarzans, all banging their chests.  And then you have to do something more or you lose face.

Muravchek's piece made me wonder who the "we" in the title of this post might be.  But it also acutely reminded me of the types of opinion pieces we got after 911, all telling that Iraq is the place the US should invade to find bin Laden who was in Afghanistan etc. 

----
*You can download a whole report on the position of women in Iran at that link. 

And More Grumbling

Suppose, just for the sake of an idle example, that you have spent the whole weekend and most of Monday working on post #3 in your series about women and IS.  Suppose that you have twenty footnotes, all with extra links and comments, and that the total length of the post is beginning to approach a small book.

Suppose, then, that it's Tuesday, and you are ready to draw the finishing touches on that post.  You enter the edit mode on this ancient sewing machine called Blogger and start merrily typing away.

You make a mistake, and then use the undo-command to correct that mistake.

Instead of the expected reaction (i.e., mistake corrected), everything written into the draft disappears.  Texts, pictures, footnotes, links, all gone.

What would you do then?  Madly press the undo-command, perhaps?  But because you are a very very stupid goddess you have the auto-save on, and Blogger helpfully saves the empty pages for you.

Well, this happened.  I then spent hours trying to get the post back, but none of the tricks worked.

This is how life teaches you....something.   

Grumbling

Remind me NEVER again to promise a series of long-form posts on any topic whatsoever.  They take ages to write.  AGES!  And nobody probably reads long-form posts because they  now have that Public Service Announcement in their very name which warns potential readers that they are going to be loooong.

This is an explanation for my recent silence on the blog.

On the Death of Sir Terry Pratchett

Sir Terry Pratchett, an English fantasy writer of humorous and gently sarcastic works,  has died at the age of sixty-six.  He is the creator of Discworld, an imaginary planet which is a flat disc standing on the shoulders of four giant elephants which in their turn stand on the shell of an even more giant turtle.

The turtle is swimming through space towards an unknown destination, and with the turtle swim all creatures Pratchett has peopled his world with: gnomes, trolls, dwarfs, vampires, werewolves,  humans of various types, from powerful witches to funny wizards, melancholy policemen and even a benevolent dictator whose degree is in assassination studies.

While those creatures are carried on to nobody-knows-where, they live their lives, love, hate, steal, help, perform magic, fight wars, pollute their environment, educate their children and practice politics.

In short, they are very much like us here on earth, except for not being like us at all.  Even their politics has a familiar tone:  their gods bicker with each other and play dice games with the creatures, cultures clash, prejudices flare up and are sometimes resolved, wars begin for no good reason at all and are waged ineffectively and stupidly, and at the end of every life there is Death, an anthropomorphized figure with the dark cowl, the skull head and the scythe.

Pratchett's Death wishes to be human.  In one of the books he temporarily adopts a human son and ultimately ends up with a half-human granddaughter (one of my favorite figures in the books).  Death likes a good strong curry (does it just go through his ribcage?) and has strong opinions about the most humane way of harvesting his people.

Death is ultimately just.  That aspect of his personality can be seen in the battles against the auditors of the universe, an odd (infinite?) group of identical creatures without hearts but with an extremely strong urge for tidiness,  order and proper hierarchies.

The creatures of the Discworld are anything but orderly, and so sometimes face the wrath of the auditors who would prefer a silent and quiet planet.  Death refuses to be cowed by the auditors.  He takes the part of his people, his harvest, helped by various individuals of the planet and also the secret weapon which is chocolate.

You may see why I love Pratchett's books.  They have everything:  Political jokes, parables to our world's history and myths, and chocolate.  They even have empathy, compassion and realistic female characters, drawn with skill and often equipped with power.

But mostly I love the books because they are based on a deep thirst for justice and fairness.  Neil Gaiman has written about the anger of Terry Pratchett, the kind of cold and glorious rage which can fuel writing about injustices. 

In one of Pratchett's books a character states: "There is no justice.  There is just us."  I read that as telling us what our role in the collective sense should be:  To create that missing justice and fairness, to make it, so to speak,  the unknown destination of the giant turtle carrying our Discworld.

David Brooks' Moral Measles

How is that for a post title?

David Brooks, a conservative columnist for the New York Times, has recently gone on (and on) about values.  Values are things which Brooks believes conservatives have and liberals do not have.  It's not that everybody has values, nope.  Or, rather, some people have bad values and other people have good values.  Good values are about family and sacrificing oneself for the sake of order and hierarchy (though the sacrifices are mostly expected of women).  Good values are firmly conservative, bad values are firmly liberal.

That's the first thing you need to know about Brooks and his writings.  The second thing is the manner in which he appears to approach science:  He starts from the conclusions he wishes to draw, then goes backwards until he finds a study or a book which supports those conclusions, then he ignores all other evidence and writes his piece by beginning with the study he likes, implying that it's accepted wisdom by all and then writing how it results in his conclusions.

This pattern is visible in his latest column which is about the good values of rich people and the bad values of poor people.  If only poor people had better values, they, too, could be rich people!

Well, not quite.  But they'd be a lot less trouble to the rich people that way.

IS And Women. Part 2: Sexual Slavery And Rape of "Non-Believers"

It all began last summer.  In August,  news from Iraq noted that IS had attacked villages inhabited by Yazidis, an ethnically Kurdish group with a religion which combines elements of Zoroastrianism and ancient Mesopotamian religions (1):

The gunmen had surrounded the village for more than a week, refusing to let residents leave and saying they had limited time to save themselves by converting to Islam.
When that time ran out, fighters from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria stormed in, killing the men and rounding up the women and children, a survivor and Iraqi officials said Saturday.
The extent of the killings on Friday in Kocho, a tiny, isolated village in northern Iraq that is home to members of the Yazidi sect, remained unclear on Saturday night. Some officials said they believed that at least 80 people had died, although no one had been able to visit the site to assess the damage.

Later in the same article we learn that though most adult men were killed, the fate of most of the women and children remained unclear:

It remained unclear what had become of the village’s women and children. Mr. Khidr said he did not think they had been killed, but had been rounded up and taken somewhere else.
Mahma Khalil, a Yazidi leader and a former Parliament member, said he had received reports that they were taken as prisoners to the nearby town of Tal Afar.

Other news (impossible to independently verify) told of women who were found naked and tied after IS attacks, apparently repeatedly raped by the terrorists.

Soon, however, we learned what happened to all those captured Yazidis:

They were taken into slavery (2).  Their expected destiny differed by gender and age.  The young boys would be turned into IS jihadis (3) by religious education and brain-washing, the older women would perhaps become general household slaves and the young women and girls would be used to satisfy the sexual needs of the IS fighters.

At the time I'm writing this the total number of Yazidi women and children captured by IS is thought to be in several thousands, though precise numbers are difficult to get.  Some of the captured remain in Iraq, some have been taken to Syria (or even further, given the aspect of sexual trafficking in IS-created slave markets).

Some appear to have been given to individual IS fighters right after the killing of the Yazidi men in various villages, as war booty,  some have been assigned to the IS movement, to be further distributed among fighters, and some young women seem to have been placed into brothels near Mosul in Iraq.  Further trading of the slaves takes place in markets in both Syria and Iraq.

The rest of this post looks deeper into this particular hell.

Female Serial Killers And Evolutionary Psychology

Washington Post has a summary of a new study on American female serial killers.  Its headline is "The surprising but curiously logical differences between male and female serial killers." 

Astonishingly, those differences don't seem to include the vast difference in the numbers of male and female serial killers, at least the ones who are caught.  Well, the summary doesn't mention that.

The study uses evolutionary psychology to explain why female serial killers have apparently different motives for killing and different modi operandorum (m.o.s).

Thus:

Although female serial killers, like unhappy families, are each horrifying in their own way, Harrison found some striking similarities among her subjects. Most of them came from fairly mundane backgrounds, their primary weapon was poison, and nearly all of them killed people they knew, often their own family members. By comparison, most victims of male serial killers are unknown to their murderer.
“Female serial killers gather and male serial killers hunt,” Harrison said. “That was very interesting to me, as an evolutionary psychologist, that it reflects kind of ancestral tendencies.”

Harrison also saw evidence of evolutionary influences in what drove women to kill. While most murders by male serial killers tend to involve sex in some way — a 1995 study found that male serial killings are characterized by a desire for domination, control, humiliation and sadistic sexual violence — women are more likely to kill for money or power.
“It struck me that women would kill for resources, which was their primary drive in the ancestral environment, and men kill for sex,” she said.

 Bolds are mine.

That's really neat!  At first glance it's simple and somehow fitting.  But then I started thinking more about all that gathering vs. hunting and resources vs. sex business, and I realized that it's far too simple, even simplistic.

The reasons are pretty obvious, in my view. Take that gathering vs. hunting distinction:

First, we don't actually have information on the exact division of labor in some presumed ancestral era of evolutionary adaptation.  Did the men go out every single day to hunt, without fail?  Did the women never go?  When the berries were all ripening at the same time, did the men just hang out somewhere telling stories or where they out hunting? What if hunting was sporadic?  Who hunted small animals and fished?  What if men gathered, too?  One study of more recent gatherer-hunter societies found that most of the calories the tribe consumed came from gathering, and that suggests to me that men gathered, too.

Second, it's hard to see why one form of serial killing is like gathering and one form like hunting.  Gatherers probably had to walk long distances (and, indeed, the usual assumption is that the evolutionary adaptations happened in small nomadic family groups so everybody moved).  That the female serial killers were more likely to know their victims doesn't make their form of killing like gathering, or at least I cannot see why that would be the case. 

The only way I can imagine such a semblance is by thinking of the victims of the female serial killers as staying put in one place, so that the killer "harvests" them.  But the victims of male serial killers might also stay in one place where he goes to kill them?

I'm confused on that, especially given that I haven't read the original article (forty dollars).

Third, the differences between male and female serial killers in the US from 1821 to 2008 cover a lot of years when certain types of women, "respectable ones," just didn't go out alone that much and probably not at all late at night.  Couldn't it be equally likely that female serial killers selected their victims on the basis of access to victims or opportunity, as defined by the gender norms of the society?

What about the motives of resources vs. sex?  To remind you, this is the relevant quote:

Harrison also saw evidence of evolutionary influences in what drove women to kill. While most murders by male serial killers tend to involve sex in some way — a 1995 study found that male serial killings are characterized by a desire for domination, control, humiliation and sadistic sexual violence — women are more likely to kill for money or power.
“It struck me that women would kill for resources, which was their primary drive in the ancestral environment, and men kill for sex,” she said.

 Bolds are mine.

How do domination and control (assumed male traits) differ from power (assumed female trait)?

What Harrison probably refers to in those primary drives is the Evolutionary Psychology (EP*) argument that women look for resources in their male mating partners while men look for youth and health (fertility) in their female mating partners.  I've written about the problems with that simplified theory before.  If evolutionary adaptations indeed happened when our prehistoric ancestors lived in small family-based nomadic tribes, the form resources would take is quite different from a fat bank account or even from a barn full of grain.

Indeed, the resources a person "owned" were probably embodied.  Women would have looked for young, healthy, strong and skilled men to father their children.  When you define resources from that angle the choices of men and women begin to look more similar.

Even if we ignored that and the long history of women not having equal access to resources through inheritance and the labor market (which would increase the relative number of women who would take to crime to get them), there's a logical problem with the basic argument.  In the EP story it is men who are assumed to want to acquire resources so that women will then choose them to have sex with.  In other words, men, too, would want to have resources.

So why don't male serial killers have that goal, you might mutter?

But they do!  If we define a serial killer the way the WaPo summary suggests (anyone who kills three or more people with a “cooling-off period” of a week or more between each murder), the Chicago gangsters of the 1930s would qualify and so would today's Mexican drug lords.  In fact, many types of criminals kill serially for resources.

Perhaps the study defined a serial killer differently.  But if it did, it may have overestimated the types of murders based on desire for domination and sadistic sexual violence in the overall count of serial killings carried out by men.

Then there's the intricate question about the meaning of this evolutionary explanation:  Do the researchers argue that men kill for sex because that is an evolutionary adaptation?  It cannot be the case, because killing the woman you have just raped makes passing any genes to the next generation impossible.

Or is the idea that these patterns are distortions of evolutionary adaptations?  If so, why have they survived?

I am asking that question seriously, given that some Evolutionary Psychologists seem to look for an evolutionary advantage in suicides, say.

Granted, Harrison left the exact meaning of all that open in the interview WaPo quoted.  But she does argue (without proof as there can be no proof) that looking for resources was the primary drive for women** in the unspecified ancestral environment, and contrasts that with men's drive for sex.

It's not that those theories aren't interesting.  But there are alternative theories*** not based on simple evolutionary hypotheses and there are probably even more complicated (and realistic) evolutionary psychology hypotheses.

The topic of the study, horrendous as it is, is also thought-provoking.  Why are men so much more likely to be sexual serial killers than women?  Why are there many times more male serial killers than female serial killers?  Are there ethnic or racial differences in the total numbers of serial killers, in the percentages of male serial killers and of female serial killers?   And to what extent is it meaningful to apply evolutionary hypotheses to those types of serial killers who clearly should be discussed under the title abnormal psychology, psychopathy and so on?

Sigh.  My apologies for not spending money on the article itself.  Should anyone desire to donate the price to me I promise to read it and amend anything in this post that needs amending.
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*I use capital letters for the weird kind of evolutionary psychology which I most often criticize on this blog.  I should stress that I'm not criticizing Dr. Harrison's arguments themselves but the manner in which they are reported in the WaPo summary.

** In one sense the primary drive of everyone is for resources (necessary for survival), if we define those to include getting food and water as often as needed.  But I think Harrison means something different here.

***The impact of social norms on the opportunities for murder, the impact of body strength differences on the choice of the instruments of murder and on the types of victims selected.  The victims should be weaker than the killer which limits female serial killers more than male serial killers.

 

IS And Women. Part 1: The Rules For Sunni Muslim Women

What would life be like for a woman living in the imaginary caliphate IS* is creating or trying to create?  What rules would women have to follow?  What is life like for women who today live in the area under IS rule?

These are the questions I wish to tackle in the first and second posts of my series on IS and women.  This post, the first one, will address the terrorists' plans for Muslim women, or at least the kind of Muslim women (Sunni or perhaps only Salafi) that its clerics view as proper believers, as opposed to non-believers, a term which covers all non-Muslims and possibly even Shia Muslims.  The second post will cover the treatment of those female "non-believers."

I try to answer the three questions I posed above with three sets of available information:  First, the concept of sharia law the IS clerics advocate, second the evidence we have from the guidelines the women's wing of IS, the Al Khanssaa Brigade, has provided and, third, the news (1) about how women are treated by IS in the areas it occupies in Syria and Iraq.

Reading Suggestions for 3/3/15

I'm working on my ISIS and women series.  It's turning into a long epistle and won't have ready-baked parts to be served today, even though I have been writing for hours and hours and hours.  Perhaps you would like to read some of the pieces below instead?  While waiting, that is.

Katha Pollitt reviews the movie Fifty Shades of Gray and makes the necessary connections to such social values as are visible in many old-fashioned corset-ripper romance novels and so on.  I'd add the impact of the three Abrahamic religions into the pot and then stir.  And stir.

This piece has such a neat title: There are more men on corporate boards named John, Robert, William or James than there are women on boards altogether, that it's worth reading just for that reason. 

But ultimately that doesn't tell us anything except that men are a lot more likely to be found on corporate boards than women and John, Robert, William and James are common male names.



Public Policy Polling (PPP) has a new survey out on the opinions of Republicans.  The file has lots of interesting tables for the political geeks and nerds, and not only about possible presidential candidates.

Ferguson, Missouri is back in the news.  Its Police Department has been accused of using racially biased methods of law enforcement.

Finally, and just for the fun of it, this story about a near-death experience.  It may be made up, who knows, but so is much else online.

Caturday

I post cat pictures on Eschaton.  All the cats are stolen cats (posted with the permission of their humans) as I have none.  Here is the latest old and dignified lady cat enjoying some rest and warmth:

What I need to learn from cats is their ability to relax while being ready to pounce.  Anyone who is hooked to the Internet and its various battles and arguments needs to have that ability, the lissom cattiness of relaxed readiness.

Wouldn't it be wonderful to be able to jump on top of houses, too?

This about crows is also quite wonderful for inducing relaxation.