An Oldie But Goodie: Why Would Walmart Hire Any Men If Women Are Cheaper And Equally Productive?

This is the "aha! got you there!" argument I often hear from those who believe that firms couldn't possibly discriminate AND remain profitable.  After all, a firm which could save on its labor costs by not discriminating would make higher profits, right?

The shadow side of that argument is naturally the assumption that women are worse workers and deserve lower pay.

A response to all this can be found in this post.

It's worth reading if you often engage with people making the above argument.

First Convict the Perpetrator. On True And False Rape Accusations

Anti-feminists and MRAs frequently write about the fear of false rape accusations, the idea that a man's life can be ruined just on some woman's say-so.

Those  stories and Twitter messages see false rape accusations as a giant problem, perhaps amounting to half of all accusations!  That the best studies suggest rates much, much lower* doesn't make the smallest dent to the edifice of "known knowns" created in that alternative reality of manosphere,** because outside information is ignored there.

Given all that, I found this story about a sexual assault conviction fascinating:

Baltimore jury convicted a man Friday who had been acquitted in four previous sexual assault trials, a win for prosecutors who revived the discarded case in a bid to secure an elusive conviction.

Nelson Bernard Clifford, a convicted sex offender, was found guilty of two counts of third-degree sex offense. While the counts individually carry a maximum sentence of 10 years, prosecutors say Clifford faces an enhanced penalty — up to life in prison — because of prior convictions.

Prosecutors said that on Sept. 30, 2007, Clifford broke into a woman's home in the Barclay neighborhood, tied her hands with a belt and sexually assaulted her. Clifford also was found guilty of theft for stealing the victim's laptop and $45, prosecutors said.

Bolds are mine.  Get it?  This is the gist:

Clifford had gone to trial four times since 2010. In each case, the women said he broke into their homes and bound and attacked them. Each time, he took the stand and claimed that the encounters were consensual, and was acquitted of the most serious charges.

If this "perfect" type of sexual assault by a stranger  has such a hard time getting convictions,  what are the chances in cases where the victim knew the perpetrator? 

The specific reason why the legal system favored Clifford seems to be the inadmissibility of prior evidence in Maryland:

Prosecutors were dealt a setback before the most recent case, after trying to enjoin it with another to show a pattern. Clifford allegedly attacked a woman and stole her phone, which was left behind at the scene of a second attack four days later. But Chief Judge Alfred J. Nance ruled the cases be tried separately. On the witness stand, Clifford acknowledged leaving the phone behind, but jurors had no idea it was stolen from another alleged victim.

What makes this example crucial in the false-accusations context is this: Based on the way MRAs use the concept the three women who lost their cases against Clifford would have been counted among those falsely accusing someone of sexual assault.  After all, the court found for Clifford in each case.

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*  The best estimates are between 2% and 8% of all rape accusations. 

**  And fascinating theories about the reasons why men should be the revered bosses of women, both viewed as classes.  For instance, I recently read that women should make sandwiches to men, because men built the cities (and presumably gave them freely to those women who made them sandwiches), and it takes a lot of sandwiches to build a city.

That's a good example of the nuttier manosphere arguments.  Note the view of all men as builders of cities, the view of women's contributions to civilizations as zero, the omission of who built the men themselves and so on.

It's in the same family as arguments that all women should make all men sandwiches because certain men died in the wars.  It's not the dead warriors who deserve the sandwiches, but anyone with the same y-chromosome.

Then never mind that women have been banned from the military, in the past had little say over whether countries would go to war or not,  and still face sexual harassment in construction jobs.

But none of that matters, because the point of those arguments is not gender equality but the perpetuation of male supremacy.

  

The Conservative War Against Teachers. Or How To Shoot At Your Own Foot.

US conservatives have an odd schizophrenic angle to the power of markets:  They are all-important (godlike, even), and must not be meddled with in finance, for instance, but when it comes to teaching professions those same markets can be totally ignored.  Indeed, the conservatives like a command economy there, as in "We command, teachers obey."

The point I've made before is that conservatives shouldn't completely ignore markets in their attempts to behead the political power of all teachers' unions.

To give you an example, cutting back on teachers' retirement benefits means cutting back on their total compensation packages.  In Chicago, for instance:

The district, which says it is wrestling with a $1.1 billion deficit weighted with pension payments, wants to save millions of dollars by having teachers pay more into their pension fund. The district wants to end a long-standing agreement that limits teacher paycheck deductions for pensions, the union said.

That CTU said the result would be a 7 percent cut in take-home pay for members. The union also says health care premiums could take another 3 percent under a district proposal.

What do you think a seven-percent compensation cut would mean for the supply of new teachers?  Remember that they must invest in a college degree which is not getting cheaper, even as the financial pay in the occupation declines.

Here's the answer:

The number of students interested in becoming educators continues to drop significantly—From 2010 to 2014, the number of ACT-tested high school graduates interested in education majors or professions decreased by more than 16%, while the number of all graduates who took the ACT increased by nearly 18%.

Those who express interest in teaching tend to score lower in all areas except English than those who express no such interest.

This is another case of short-sighted politically motivated dinners where the politicians happily eat the seed corn to make sure that the Democrats don't get today's bread.

The topic matters for women's employment.  Traditionally*, teaching has been one of the few areas which has allowed an easier combination of childcare duties with paid work (getting home at the same time as the kids, being at home during their vacations).  The lower pay, compared to other jobs which have similar college investment requirements, has been acceptable because of that flexibility.  But if the pay keeps going down further we will see a drop in the supply of teachers and the quality of the incoming teachers.

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*In the bad-old days US women had three somewhat wide job paths into middle class earnings.  They were teaching, social work and being a secretary.  See what is happening to teaching, then read what is happening to secretarial jobs, and the importance of opening the IT jobs to more women looks pretty clear.

Mothers' Day Political Thoughts

1.  The political respect for motherhood is a bit like buying one of those "I Support The Troops" bumper stickers (made in China and very cheap) and then voting against any veterans' benefits.

2.  That's why the myth of the all-sacrificing female parent as the sole caregiver of children is so popular!   A special day once every year and no need for paid parental leave!  Because mothers are intended to self-sacrifice, so nobody else will have to.  This is an extreme example of how a proper mother should spend her life.  Note the guilt, note the need to erase all other parts of one's personality, and then note that all this is internalized:  The job of parenting belongs solely to mothers and its cost is pretty much everything else.

3.  That's the shadow side of basic libertarian* thinking, too, which stinks of Nietzsche.  If the Übermensch is to be mostly free (free!), then the Untermensch cannot be.  Someone must wipe the butts and wash the diapers, but having done so will always count against the person in the labor market.  You must take time off to be a Good Mother but you will be punished for taking that time off.

4.  None of this means that fathers of children wouldn't be expected to take responsibility for their children.  But traditionally that responsibility coincides much better with a person's other goals in life:  You can advance in your career, get promoted, satisfy some of your ambitions, and nobody asks who is minding your children or how they cope with your absences.  Granted, the monetary consequences are not good for either mothers or fathers who take time off from the labor force.  Still, we expect less hands-on care or presence from fathers and guilt them much less for the choice to continue working hard.

5.  The problems of the mythologically decreed Supermom, working mostly on her own, are much exacerbated for some groups of women of color and for poorer women.  Staying at home is not an option if you are the breadwinner of the family or if the earnings of two adults are necessary, good quality daycare may be unaffordable. Those single mothers who  qualify for government assistance are often viewed as parasites sucking the blood of upstanding taxpayers.

This provocative story is by a black woman who chose not to have children because she knew she was expected to do it all on her own.

6.  The bumper sticker view of motherhood in this country means that the US is one of the few countries where maternal mortality rates are rising, and also one of the few industrialized countries where there is no nationwide policy for paid maternity leave, not to speak of paid paternity leave.  

Though the reasons for the former are complex, they clearly intersect with poverty and race.  The latter we may thank the conservatives and corporations for.  You may have heard that paid parental leave would handicap American corporations which have to compete against foreign firms.  Possibly even firms located in countries which already have paid (and long!) parental leave.  Gasp.

7.  These points are about political thoughts about motherhood, not general or philosophical thoughts.  Thus, they are not intended to negate the wonders of parenthood or to imply that the respect for individual mothers wouldn't be real.  But politicians are not meant to focus on the latter.  They are meant to create the support systems which parenting requires.  And in that sense this country gets a failing grade.

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* This libertarian angle crops up in the onus put on individuals rather than the wider society:

Rather than making the environment safer and healthier for children, the onus is put on the parents, and especially on mothers, beginning from pregnancy:  Mercury in tuna?  It's your responsibility not to eat it while pregnant.  No sidewalks for school children to use to walk to school?  It's your responsibility to drive them, and when they get fat from lack of exercise, that, too, is your responsibility.  And we won't even ask the question what a parent without a car should do.

The counterargument is that people shouldn't have kids if they cannot do all that.  But children are the next generation and will become the future caregivers, doctors, dentists, farmers and so on;  the people who will one day take care of the old people that even today's young and childless libertarians turn into.  This shared aspect of the value of children is one reason why the society should support good parenting. 

Deep Thoughts for Today

Especially for online debates:

Never quitting an argument does not equal having won.

On learning Dragon Dictate (a speech recognition system I bought to get around that broken humerus):

Text that I read:

Testing Dragon Dictate by Echidne.  This is unedited.

How Dragon heard it first time:

Testing Dragon dictate by A Kidman. These is on anything

And second time:

Testing Dragon Dictate by a kidney. Base is on 18

And third time:

Testing Dragon Dictate by ECH I D and E. Base is on NDT


I'm enjoying chatting to the Dragon!

On the Jade Helm 15 conspiracy theories which are wild in Texas:

Remember that this is the state which has exorbitant influence on the textbooks for US schools.

If I were located in another galaxy I'd have lots of fun with this juxtaposition.

Get Some Male Co-Authors To Improve Your Paper. That's One Reviewer's Advice For Two Female Biologists.

Here's a fun story (from a week ago)  about the lives of female academics.  Well, not all their lives and perhaps nowadays even only small snippets of their lives, but this stuff is still part  of the musty smell of academic gowns:

Fiona Ingleby [and Megan Head] wrote a paper on the difficulties of making the transition from graduate school to post-doctoral position for women. She submitted it for review. A review is kind of an invited comment, you know, so given Lewis’ Law, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised at what followed — she got a negative review that actually justified the contents of her paper.

Get it?  Men can run faster and therefore men must be better researchers!  But women are, on average, more flexible than men.  Maybe women write more complicated papers?

Duh.  Both comparisons are idiotic.  Which means the review is idiotic, too.

But wait!  It gets better:

Would those men have to be very fast runners, too?  The reviewer believes that men are superior thinkers, runners and -- probably -- reviewers.  If we employ those pesky 'ideologically biased assumptions.'  By the way, I'd really like to see the empirical evidence that demonstrates better health and stamina among the men in the relevant age group.

The journal whose editor passed these anonymous comments to Ingleby reacted promptly:

PLOS ONE has strict policies for how we expect peer review to be performed and we strive to ensure that the process is fair and civil. We have taken a number of steps to remedy the situation. We have formally removed the review from the record, and have sent the manuscript out to a new editor for re-review. We have also asked the Academic Editor who handled the manuscript to step down from the Editorial Board and we have removed the referee from our reviewer database.

Which is the correct thing to do.  Not because the reviewer suggested that the authors should consider average gender differences in the quality of the papers as one possible hypothesis to be examined*, but because he/she didn't say that.

Instead, he/she assumed that the poor little ladies need burly shoulders to lean on and masculine brains to borrow to get anything done.

I can't now get rid of the imagery of male biology graduate students sprinting around campus fountains, clad as ancient Greek Olympians were, the winner of the race getting the laurel wreath and the best publication placements, while the feeble and sickly female graduate students sit on the lawn under pink parasols and applaud.

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*Or rather, the authors should try to hold the quality of papers constant while studying, say, any differential treatment of male and female researchers.

Added later:  The importance of this case is in the way anonymous reviews are used to decide which article gets published in which journal.  So they have power.

On the other hand, the final acceptance rates by gender could be used in later research  to determine how good men and women are in research.  Cases like the one above are unlikely to be common, but they point out that something which is supposed to be a somewhat objective assessment of the quality of the work (a peer review) may not be that at all. 

   

A Blog-Keeping Post

When is the best time for my annual fund-drive (aka begging)?  That is really asking when you (sweet, erudite and generous readers) have the most money I can wheedle off you.

Without a better answer, I'm going to declare next week for that unpleasant (for you) but necessary (for me) task.  Or you can give now or later.  If affording it is hard, do not worry.  I value all my readers.  But this blog doesn't come completely free, even if I assigned my own labor zero value.

I'd also like to remind you all of my ISIS-and-women series, what with this argument I just heard on Twitter about how Western feminazis want jazz hands but are silent about the Yazidi women.  The series still lacks the final post, but the others are linked to at the bottom of this introductory post.  Including the one about  the Yazidi girls and women.

The Venus de Milo, a Spinster?

What might the statue we call the Venus de Milo depict?  What is she doing?

Given her missing arms it's hard to know.  The most recent attempt to reconstruct her arms and figure out her possible task uses 3D-printing and the theory that she was spinning thread, a very common task for women all over the world in the past and still in some places.

Virginia Postrel's piece in Slate also mentions several other theories, and clearly we cannot just conclude that the statue depicts a spinster (initially a term for a woman who spins and here used by me as a bad pun, because of the treatment of the statue in more glorified ways as the epitome of female beauty).*

But it's a good hypothesis.  She writes:

Barber, a professor emeritus at Occidental College and the doyenne of textile archeology, proffers a thesis the 19^th-century critics never debated. She imagines Venus doing something that occupied endless hours of women’s time before the Industrial Revolution: spinning thread. She suggests that the statue held a distaff of fluffy fibers in her upraised left arm, while with her right she guided the thread toward a weighted drop spindle hanging in front of her. “This was a pose painfully familiar to women in ancient Greek society,” Barber notes.

Hence the 3D-print testing.

What struck me a bit weird about the whole approach is that it doesn't use the expertise of those women who still spin in the same manner.  From Peru:

They would know if the reconstruction looks feasible** and what the odd twist in the statue's back might mean to them, if anything.
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* Wonder what her waist-to-hip ratio might be?  That's for evolutionary psychologists who believe that men have always preferred the same ratio and humongous breasts on women.
**Other than the apparently falling fabric around her hips.  Perhaps she is twisting to stop it falling further?  Just kidding.

Meanwhile. in Paraguay

A ten-year-old girl was raped, allegedly by her stepfather, and cannot get an abortion because of the Catholic church, ultimately.  Abortion is only available when the pregnant person's life is at risk.

This quote angered me:

The 10-year-old is one of three children who share a rented room in the city of Luque with her mother and stepfather.
The mother, who works in a school cafeteria, reported in January 2014 that her husband was sexual abusing her daughter, but the authorities took no action. When the girl’s stomach started to swell and ache last month, the mother took her to hospital fearing she may have a tumour.
After doctors revealed the girl was pregnant, her mother asked them to perform an abortion, but this is forbidden in Paraguay unless the pregnancy has life-threatening complications.
The girl was taken to a shelter and her mother was imprisoned on 27 April and accused of failing in her duty of care. A judge is considering a further charge of being an accomplice in the rape. The stepfather is on the run.

Bolds are mine.

Note the poverty of the girl's mother.  Note that she went to the authorities and was ignored.  Note that she is now imprisoned for failing in her duty of care.

What may be demanded of mothers is very different from what may be demanded of everyone else, including the authorities.

Limbaugh Being Limbaugh Again

He thinks the LGBT movement would be more understandable if there were more LGBT people.  Like how did a small minority take over our politics?  And no, he is not talking about the Koch brothers.

Hmm.  Let's see if our Rush then thinks that women's rights are a more understandable movement.  After all, around half of all humans are of the female persuasion.

Nope.

A Public Health Announcement

Don't fall down the stairs.  You can break your shoulder bone in the more sentient of your arms.  It's not only somewhat painful, but also leaves you with the pecking/typing ability of five fingers which are sinister.

In other words, my posts will be short until I learn single-hand typing superpowers.

The silver lining in this cloud is a chance to do real research on health care costs.  For example, the shoulder immobilizer the ER gave me will cost either me or the insurer between 63 and 110 dollars.  Identical (or better) are for sale online for less than 30 dollars.  This may reflect the markup pricing hospitals practice.

Girl Brains And Boy Brains, Take #456789. By Dr. Michael Mosley, Again!

I read this UK Daily Mail article with a very strong sense of déjà vu again.  Didn't I fairly recently write about it?  In last September, to be exact.

And indeed I did!  Most, if not all, of the piece is recycled from an earlier piece. 

Here's one of the glorious quotes from Dr. Mosley:

Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, an expert on the brain who I visited at Cambridge University, has done a lot of pioneering work on this. He believes, broadly, that people of whatever gender fall somewhere along a ‘systemiser’ to ‘empathiser’ spectrum.

Systemisters are people who enjoy breaking down and analysing systems. They are more likely to become train spotters or computer scientists.
They are what he has called ‘male brained’ — as these qualities occur most frequently, but far from exclusively, in men.
Empathisers, on the other hand, are more typically ‘female’ brained as they are more typically women.
Although there are exceptions, most men — when tested — come out as more ‘systemising’ than ‘empathising’, while for women it is the other way round.

And this is the picture we are given of systemisers!

I love it!  Lovelovelove it!  It's a beautiful example of biased thinking.  Examples of systemizing behavior are all picked from stuff guys do more and that means systemizing is a male brain thing.  But of course many traditionally female hobbies and chores also require good systemizing skills.  If you omit all of those and put in a picture of train spotting guys, well, you have made your case.

There's so much wrong with this repeat article.  Read my prior post for some of my criticisms and this 2010 post on the digit length comparisons.

Short Posts, 4/28/2015: Fear of the Other Party, Why Reproductive Rights Might Be Losing, the Power of Koch Brothers And Older Actresses

1.  This study on the fear of the other political party in the US sounds interesting.  I have not read the study itself, so I can't say anything about its methods and such.  But thinking about the "fear of the other" in the context of political parties could be fruitful.

2.  Katha Pollitt writes about the reasons why same-sex marriage is winning and reproductive rights are losing in the US.  I'm not sure if I agree with every one of her points but the list is another good starting place for thinking.  In general, women's rights on the global level don't get the support they should because the change required is so large.  After all, women are roughly half of all human beings.  That's my positive interpretation of people having to be dragged kicking and screaming into the modern era.  The sadder interpretations is, well, sad, and has to do with the question who controls this resource called "women."

3.  Après moi, le déluge"  Or Koch-backed think tank is sending scientists to the Vatican, to school the Pope:

“The Holy Father is being misled by ‘experts’ at the United Nations who have proven unworthy of his trust,” said Joseph Bast, president of the Heartland Institute. “Humans are not causing a climate crisis on God’s Green Earth – in fact, they are fulfilling their Biblical duty to protect and use it for the benefit of humanity. Though Pope Francis’s heart is surely in the right place, he would do his flock and the world a disservice by putting his moral authority behind the United Nations’ unscientific agenda on the climate.”
He called on anyone with “open ears” to fulfill their moral duty to seek the truth on climate change – which 97 percent of scientists agree is likely the result of human activities.
“The science is not settled, and global warming is not a crisis,” Bast said. “The world’s poor will suffer horribly if reliable energy – the engine of prosperity and a better life – is made more expensive and less reliable by the decree of global planners.”

The French reference is to show you how erudite I am, even though Louis XV might never had said that as his last words.  Also, I don't speak French.

It's also because I smell that in the thinking of many Koch-type conservatives:  Give us our profits and the heck with the future generations.

But it's also because the brothers Koch are wielding exorbitant power in American politics, much, much more than most voters.  That power reminds me of the power of ancient French kings.  And mostly the argument is that they can wield that power legally (funding political campaigns etc.) because of the freedom of expression.  Something of the sort where each dollar note has the same right to express itself.  That's bad news for any semblance of democracy.

4.  This video is hilarious.  It's about when older actresses are no longer f**kable.  The language is not work-safe.

On Baltimore

The city of Baltimore is recovering after demonstrations and rioting this weekend.  The cause of them was the death of Freddie Gray: 

Authorities can't say if there was a particularly good reason why police arrested Gray. According to the city, an officer made eye contact with Gray, and he took off running, so they pursued him. Though he'd had scrapes with the law before, there's no indication he was wanted at the time. And though he was found with a switchblade, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said, “We know that having a knife is not necessarily a crime.”
The police say Gray didn't resist arrest and that officers didn't use force, which seems to be mostly corroborated by video shot by bystanders. Gray seems to shout in pain, and his leg seems injured as officers drag him to a police van. (Someone off camera shouts, "His leg broke and y'all dragging him like that!") Gray also had asthma and requested his inhaler, but didn't get it. Yet it's not the leg or the asthma that killed him. Instead, it was a grave injury to his spinal cord. Gray's family said he was treated for three fractured vertebrae and a crushed voice box, the sorts of injuries that doctors say are usually caused by serious car accidents. The van made at least two stops before reaching the police station, but there's no footage to say what happened during the journey or at those stops.
It's a baffling conundrum. "None of the officers describe any use of force," Deputy Police Commissioner Jerry Rodriguez said. "None of the officers describe using any force against Mr. Gray." And yet somehow Gray was fatally hurt while in police custody.

This case has similarities to other recent and not so recent cases, where an unarmed (or allegedly unarmed) person dies either when arrested or in police custody.  The majority of these cases are about the deaths of black men and the usual way to package the issue is as one of police brutality and racism.

That may be convenient shorthand, as long as we remember that the racism might not necessarily be personal but institutional  and that the brutality might be at least partly defined as the increasing militarization of the police (where the population to be policed then becomes the enemy).

Freddie Gray died.  His funeral resulted in demonstrations which then resulted in riots.  The Maryland National Guard was called in, a state of emergency was declared.

How to interpret all that?

That depends on the interpreter's perch.  The conservative Rand Paul thinks the rioting is caused by lack of morals and fathers:*

As far as root causes, Paul listed some ideas of his own.
"There are so many things we can talk about," the senator said, "the breakdown of the family structure, the lack of fathers, the lack of a moral code in our society."

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes:

When nonviolence is preached as an attempt to evade the repercussions of political brutality, it betrays itself. When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse. When nonviolence is preached by the representatives of the state, while the state doles out heaps of violence to its citizens, it reveals itself to be a con. And none of this can mean that rioting or violence is "correct" or "wise," any more than a forest fire can be "correct" or "wise." Wisdom isn't the point tonight. Disrespect is. In this case, disrespect for the hollow law and failed order that so regularly disrespects the community.

John Angelos, Chief Operating Officer of the Orioles, Baltimore’s major-league baseball franchise, notes the economic inequality and suffering:

That said, my greater source of personal concern, outrage, and sympathy beyond this particular case is focused neither upon one night’s property damage nor upon the acts, but is focused rather upon the past four-decade period during which an American political elite have shipped middle-class and working-class jobs away from Baltimore and cities and towns around the US to third-world dictatorships, like China and others; plunged tens of millions of good, hardworking Americans into economic devastation, and then followed that action around the nation by diminishing every American’s civil-rights protections in order to control an unfairly impoverished population living under an ever-declining standard of living and suffering at the butt end of an ever-more militarized and aggressive surveillance state.  

Here's where the links to economic inequality and poverty matter.  Consider the area of the city of Baltimore which Freddie Gray called home.  These are the statistics applying to that area:

To understand why the demonstrations in Baltimore got out of hand we need to first understand what living in an area with those numbers means, what it does to you over time, and next relate all this to the history of the interactions between the Baltimore police and its black citizens.

None of that means that the riots would have been a "correct" response, as Coates observed in the above quote.  They are a bad response, like shooting at your own leg because the real target is far too high to reach. But so were the riots after the Joe Paterno resignation at Penn State.

The difference is that many others don't now regard all Penn State students as possible rioters whereas they make just that generalization when it comes to certain residents of Baltimore.


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*In this context Rand Paul's own parenting skills do matter.
 

To Help Nepal

You can send funds.  The New York Times gives a list of aid organizations.

I was told that the Lutheran World Federation of Churches is also a good organization to give to.  They have a lot of experience in crisis management, they do not try to convert people to Lutheranism and they seem to work on issues of gender justice, too.

I cannot personally vouch for any of the above, but they are avenues to get your pennies to make a difference.

As an aside, I really want to find a way to give help to the Yazidis in Iraq.  If you know of a way, leave it in the comments, with my thanks.

The Apocalypse And Its Miscreants

So I start this post with the title and have to Google "miscreant!"  That's how directly my posts are channeled from that goddess of snakes who takes me over.

Just joking.  But also linking to the religious arguments about us living in end times.  The valiant butchers of IS (ISIS/ISIL) believe that we are living in end times, and so do many American religious conservatives.  To give you a slightly humorous take, here's Michele Bachmann on that topic:

Former Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) expressed a mixture of condemnation and appreciation toward President Barack Obama for, in her words, bringing the world to end times.
...
“Barack Obama is intent, it is his number one goal, to ensure that Iran has a nuclear weapon," she said. "Why? Why would you put the nuclear weapon in the hands of madmen who are Islamic radicals?"
Bachmann, however, then seemed to approve of the President moving mankind into "the midnight hour."
"We get to be living in the most exciting time in history," she said, urging fellow Christians to "rejoice."
"Jesus Christ is coming back. We, in our lifetimes potentially, could see Jesus Christ returning to Earth, the Rapture of the Church."

What a relief!  I can stop flossing!

The point of this post is that something like "end times" is not an exogenous variable from the point of view of politicians and those active in trying to make them come about.  "End times" can be achieved.  A nuclear war could do it nicely, but so could many other things, such as irreversible changes in the climate.

The reverse of that is that we can delay the "end times" by our behavior.  Sadly, people with certain religious views don't have any incentive to do so, because they have packed their suitcases and have their travel tickets for paradise tightly in one hand while they use the guns with the other.

I haven't read enough on the history of apocalyptic thoughts, but my guess is that there have always been many people who believed that they themselves were living in the "end times."  But I doubt they had quite the same power to push this planet closer to them than some people today have.  While rejoicing over it.

The Preference For Sons in India And China. Look What We got For it!

The Economist has a long and pretty fact-filled article on the consequences of the missing girls in India and China (sex-selective abortions and female infanticide), combined with a few other marriage rules.  Worth reading it.  You can also then read the comments if you wish.

I did.  And then I got a sore stomach, as usual.  The reasons are subtle, a bit like a giant hippo only showing its nose above the surface of the river.  Everyone else writes about the nose, whereas I see the rest of that hippo, the ignored part.

Note that the article very quickly hints at the reason for all this sex imbalance:  It's "preference for sons."  Then it skates off to study how all those abortions and infant killings will soon leave many young men eternal spinsters (why not call them that?) and how that is very bad for the society and men, with more crime and violence and the need for more prostitutes.

The solutions offered both in the article and in the comments are not about that "preference for sons."  If we realize that the same thing could be called "a dislike of daughters" or something much stronger, given that some parents even resort to killing the infant daughter, the disconnect between the problem (women are not valued) and the solutions offered (somehow get more women from elsewhere, say)  becomes as clear as a hippo rising from the river.

The article has other interesting stuff, such as women "marrying upwards" in those countries.  That's the same as men marrying downwards.  Terms matter, my friends.  Because if men marry downwards, it's better that there aren't too many women on the top of the societal ladders.  They will become "leftovers" as they are called in China.

Now, the eternal spinster guys are also given pejorative names, such as "bare branches."  But isn't it fascinating how something which has its roots in the fact that women are not valued results in an article where part of the problem of too many men is that educated women cannot find husbands?  When you would have thought that more women with education (and thus more opportunities to help their families financially) would have been one of the solutions which could raise the valuation of women in general?

I may be nitpicking.  But I have written about this particular slant in the media takes about the missing girls for many, many years.  The problem really boils down, in those articles, to the question of how we can now get those men wives.

That the real problem is in the underlying assumption that all women are good for is being the providers of sex and sons just sorta sleeps under the surface of the debating river.

And  yes, as I have written before, there are reasons for the dislike of daughters.  In a system without good pensions it is the sons who are supposed to take care of their parents, while daughters must be provided with dowries and then they work for a totally different family.  And it is the sons who are seen as continuing the family genes, only the sons.  But all this, based on patrilocal marriage customs, is ultimately and circularly based on women not valued as much.

The Ethics of Journalism 101: Is it OK for NYT and WaPo to use Pre-Publication Opposition Research on Hillary Clinton?

This is an interesting question, even if I write so myself.  The case for your consideration:

The New York Times, The Washington Post and Fox News have made exclusive agreements with a conservative author for early access to his opposition research on Hillary Clinton, a move that has confounded members of the Clinton campaign and some reporters, the On Media blog has confirmed.
"Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich" will debut on May 5. But the Times, the Post and Fox have already made arrangements with author Peter Schweizer to pursue some of the material included in his book, which seeks to draw connections between Clinton Foundation donations and speaking fees and Hillary Clinton's actions as secretary of state. Schweizer is the president of the Government Accountability Institute, a conservative research group, and previously served as an adviser to Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin.

 I see three potentially serious problems with these exclusive arrangements.

First, depending on what newspapers are supposed to have as their objective*, getting opposition research on only one candidate can bias the reporting in the papers.  If conservative muckrakers are more diligent than liberal ones, the American people (how I love to be able to write that!) will be mislead, assuming that the Republican candidates might also have all sorts of skeletons in their mahogany cupboards.

Second, assuming that those at the newspapers know how to judge the research of Schweizer's book may be a form of hubris.  Or at least we should not just be told that there will be experts looking at all the stuff.

Third, and this links to my second point, using a book BEFORE it is published means that the newspapers won't have access to the expert criticisms which follow the publication of a book.  It's as if the book is allowed to hold the stage all alone, when the correct approach would be to wait to see what experts in the field might have to say about it.

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*The naive me thinks that the newspapers should try to be objective, search for as much truth as people can agree on and provide voters with factual information that will help their votes.  Psst, Maureen Dowd, writing about Hillary Clinton with all sorts of sexist terms isn't helpful for voters.

But other objectives are possible.  For instance, to make the most money possible out of gullible readers.

Sam Brownback Likes Some Government Handouts And Hates Others

Don't you just adore governor Brownback?  He's such an extreme believer in his own little right-wing religious fundamentalist reality.  Even though it's Christianist, it's not very charitable.  Or rather, the charity goes to the haves and is removed from the have-nots.  I wonder what Jesus would say about that, hmh?

A few years ago Brownback cut taxes in Kansas something fierce.  Indeed, certain kinds of firms don't pay any tax on their profits!  That's giving the owners of those firms government handouts, in my divine and correct opinion.

But other types of handouts Brownback doesn't like.  His most recent move consists of making absolutely sure that welfare recipients don't spend that grudgingly-offered money on strippers or tattoos but on useful things such as baby diapers:

The measure bars spending relief funds on movies, at swimming pools, or on "cruise ships," as well as at any "jewelry store, tattoo parlor, massage parlor, body piercing parlor ... psychic or fortune telling business, bail bond company, video arcade ... or any retail establishment which provides adult-oriented entertainment in which performers disrobe or perform in an unclothed state."


It also places a $25 daily limit on ATM withdrawals using the debit cards issued to recipients under the state/federal Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program, which is what's left of America's welfare program. That renders the cards useless for major spending, such as paying the rent, but it does mean that users will pile up ATM fees at $1 per withdrawal, plus bank fees.

Note that there is no evidence Kansas welfare recipients are desperately trying to use their welfare checks in the manner described here.  I'd be pretty surprised if such misuse is at all common, given that most recipients are single mothers with young children.

The point of this bill, Brownback tells us, is to get people to go to work!  I haven't checked if Kansas funds daycare for single mothers on welfare so that they can go to work in one of the minimum wage jobs many of them would end up with.  But whatever.  At least they can't get tattoos and massages while taking cruises.

Emily Badger in Washington Post writes about all this with great lucidity.  She points out that the treatment of one group of handout recipients differs from the treatment of all other groups of handout recipients:  They are held to higher moral and ethical standards:

The second issue with these laws is a moral one: We rarely make similar demands of other recipients of government aid. We don't drug-test farmers who receive agriculture subsidies (lest they think about plowing while high!). We don't require Pell Grant recipients to prove that they're pursuing a degree that will get them a real job one day (sorry, no poetry!). We don't require wealthy families who cash in on the home mortgage interest deduction to prove that they don't use their homes as brothels (because surely someone out there does this). The strings that we attach to government aid are attached uniquely for the poor.

And that is because we don't view other forms of government transfers as undeserved handouts.

It's not necessarily bad to limit what welfare payments can be used for.  But when you combine this particular move with Brownback's earlier handouts to much wealthier groups of taxpayers you wonder what type of Jesus his reality has.  If this man is supposedly following in his footsteps.

Terry Pratchett Thoughts. On the Role of the Media and On Citizens as Consumers.

I've been re-reading many of Terry Pratchett's books, in his memory.  I often come across little jewels (or chocolate truffles) of ideas.  For example:

"the public is not interested in public interest."

Which is true.  The reasons for that are many and varied, but it's almost impossible to try to write about topics of public interest on a commercial basis (so send money).

My most recent re-read is The Truth, about the first newspapers in Ankh-Morpork.  Mr. William de Worde starts the very first one, with actual news in it (though also stories about funny-shaped vegetables).  A competitor soon catches on with scandalous stories such as "a woman gives birth to a cobra."

de Worde gets a statement from the king of the area where this miracle-birth was supposed to have happened, at some cost for himself.  The king denied any cobra-human births to have happened.

The response of the readers was that of course the king would deny everything, of course.  In any case, stories about women giving birth to cobras are a lot more fun than stories about politics, say.

All that reminds me of American politics, in a gently ridiculous sense. Weird people writing or nattering about Hillary Clinton's cankles (a term for fat ankles) as if it matters what size ankles a president has and as if we ever otherwise measure the ankles of presidential contenders.  Presidents being judged on the basis of whether we'd like to have a beer with them.

Imagine using that way of judging for picking your neurosurgeon.

All this links in a vague way to a Finnish article I recently came across, on the new approach to citizens as consumers.  This is the part I wish to translate:

Kun on riittävän monta vuotta toisteltu, että kansa tietää parhaiten kaiken, ovat sivistysinstituutiot alkaneet nöyrtyä.
Korkeakoulujen oletetaan palvelevan paitsi liike-elämää ja politiikkaa, myös oppilaitaan, joista on tullut asiakkaita.
Lehdet ovat luopuneet vanhanaikaisesta valistajan roolista ja kyselevät yleisöltä, mikä on tärkeää. Nettiäänestyksissä media tenttaa lukijan mielipidettä asioihin, jotka eivät ole mielipiteestä kiinni: tuliko lama, lämpeneekö ilmasto, tappavatko rokotteet, mitä mieltä jengi.
Asiakkaan rooli voi imarrella meitä hetken, mutta demokratian ja sivistyksen osalta se on tylsä loukku: olemme aina oikeassa, ja siksi meidän ei tarvitse omaksua uutta.

My approximate translation:

When we have repeated for many years that the people (here meant as the audience) know best all the cultural institutions have begun to agree.  Universities are assumed to serve both business and politics but also the students who are now customers.  Newspapers have given up their old-fashioned role as educators and enlighteners.  Instead, they ask the public what is important.  In online polls the media wants the reader's opinions on matters which are not based on opinions:  did we have an economic recession, is the climate warming, do vaccinations kill.  What do you guys think?

The role of a customer can momentarily flatter, but it's a boring trap from the point of view of democracy and culture:  we are always right and that's why we don't have to learn anything new.