The Year Of The Political Troll?

Evan Osnos writes about the year of the political troll in a recent issue of New Yorker.  He postulates that the trolls have finally come out of the keyboard closet:

The ur-troll himself, one Donald Trump,  now trolls openly on the Republican platform.  But the Democrats aren't blameless, either, given the recent events in Nevada where  Roberta Lange,  the Chairwoman of Nevada's Democratic Party,  received many trolling phone calls and texts (including indirect death threats) from some enraged supporters of Senator Sanders.

Anna Merlan, writing for Jezebel, contacted three of those enraged Sanders supporters who had texted Ms. Lange.  I find these quotes by the trolls in her piece fascinating:

Atlanta Man declined to give his name when I reached him. He sounded weary and embarrassed. He said he’d been getting phone calls all day.
“Most of them are just hangups,” he said. “I’ve gotten threats on Twitter, too. But I don’t make a big deal out of that stuff. All I can say is that I’ve apologized to her and I’m sorry. I said one thing I guess that somebody took as a threat.”

Atlanta Man called Ms. Lange a corrupt bitch and noted that someone will hurt her.  To clarify what somebody might have taken as a threat.  Mmm.

Then there is Ethan, who saw menacing threats as a good way to represent the anger of the people and who also seems to think that Internet threats are exactly like a computer game:

“We know where you live, where you work, where you eat,” another text to Lange read. “Where your kids go to school/grandkids. We have everything on you. We are your neighbors, friends, family, etc.”
The person who sent that one is a 26-year-old named Ethan with a Wisconsin area code, although he assured me the number was fake (and, I assume, the name was as well).
“Do you know what the concept of Anonymous is?” he asked me, immediately.
I said that I did. Ethan explained he’d been undertaking an Anonymous-esque action, but also, that he was trying to play a threatening character deliberately, to send a message.

Ethan then explains that Ms. Lange is "very much a top person" and stands for the "establishment." 

Ms. Lange works in a restaurant.  Here she asks Senator Sanders to be more forceful in condemning the verbal violence she has suffered from some Sanders' supporters:

“I think he should acknowledge that there were death threats to me, that there [were] death threats to my husband, that there [were] death threats to my 5-year-old grandson, that they called my work and tried to ruin … like I said, this is my volunteer job being chair,” she said.
“I have a full-time job where single mothers and people trying to pay off their school loans work, and it hurt our business,” she said. “People were calling our business so much that they had to unplug the phone.

Bolds are mine.

The take-home lesson from those quotes is this:  Some trolls don't see what they do as hurting real people, or argue that real people shouldn't have felt hurt.*

 Some trolls judge their own pain and suffering (which can be very, very real) as a sufficient reason to lash out at individuals whom they don't even know, to spread the misery around. 

Some trolls, perhaps pupa-stage ones, view the breathing, living people on the net as mere characters in computer games, and such characters can't feel pain or fear. 

And some trolls create an imaginary powerful monster in their minds, where an individual is the establishment, with enormous scope to do evil.  Then it is the troll's responsibility to attack that monster.**

Today's Feeble Thought On Communicating

Have you ever had the experience of trying to explain an abstract concept* which you, deep inside your head,  understand completely, but for which no particular set of words seems to be quite right?  I don't mean a scientific concept or a political definition or anything which you received as words in the first place.  I mean those nebulous concepts which are partly thoughts, partly emotions, yet taste utterly true to you.

I have that experience when I try to write about some new Echidne theory if the thoughts are still unripe.  What readers receive is not what I intended to send.  This can cause real misunderstanding and sometimes makes me discard the half-baked theory as half-baked when it perhaps should just go back in the oven.

It's a bit like trying to tell someone who has never eaten a strawberry how a strawberry tastes.  You can compare it to banana or to kiwi fruit (the flavor is somewhere in-between those) or to, say, raspberries by adding that strawberries are more acid. But none of that is as efficient, or as true, as just offering the person a strawberry to taste.

We can't do that with our intellectual-cum-emotional truths.**
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* That's not quite right.  See?  I don't even have words for what I'm trying to describe here!  It's not a concept as much as a mixture of concepts, the attached emotions and something else.  A bundle of possibilities?

** Including how it feels to be the target of repeated sexist and/or racist harassment or how it feels to be suddenly invisible and/or inaudible the way women often are at meetings or when dealing with, say, contractors.  Or how it feels to be very poor or how it feels to live with disability and so on.

Meanwhile, in Nevada. Or Anger At Female Politicians.

When the Democratic primary fights on the net began I decided not to follow them intimately (imagine candle light, red wine, soft music, and then people shaking their fists and yelling with saliva flying),  because I get annoyed with advocacy (push the evidence that supports your opinion, cover up the evidence that doesn't) presented as analysis (look at all evidence, weigh it and then conclude).  Even when it is "my people" who are doing the advocating.

I also felt that any Democrat, even, say, a suitcase with lots of little feet, would be better and safer for us than the kind of Republican whom the fundies and money-men would put up as the Republican candidate.  It seemed rational to save my gun powder for the general election, right?

But all that conflicts with my inner stern dominatrix.  She wants me to write down every sexist insult that is tossed around during these campaigns, because sexist insults don't insult just Hillary Clinton*, but all women.  She has some very odd ideas about the reason I'm still on this earth.**

The problem with policing the sexist campaign crap is that there's only one female candidate left in the race.  This means that anything I would write about sexism is automatically seen as advocacy for Hillary Clinton.  And that means that those primary fights become very intimate indeed.  As I'm a cowardly goddess, I have mostly avoided discussing those supporters of Bernie Sanders whom the Internet calls Bernie Bros.

This left me in a real bind when things got ugly in Nevada:

The public outpouring of anger began last weekend at the Nevada Democratic Party convention, where Sanders supporters who said Hillary Clinton's backers had subverted party rules shouted down pro-Clinton speakers and sent threatening messages to state party Chairwoman Roberta Lange after posting her phone number and address on social media.

The bind is that I haven't followed the fights over party rules or the growing frustration of some Sanders supporters or even the way Sanders has reacted to that frustration. 

But the point of this post isn't really about the disagreements or the frustration.  It's about the way some of those frustrated people*** harass women, as opposed to men.  The voicemail Roberta Lange received show some of those sex-linked messages:

You cowardless [sic] bitch, running off the stage! I hope people find you.
..
You fucking stupid bitch! What the hell are you doing? You’re a fucking corrupt bitch!
..
Fuck you, bitch!
..
You’re a cunt. Fuck you!

All those messages do is express anger.  But note that this expression of anger is linked to Lange's being female.  There are specific words some of us use to rage at women, words we don't use to rage at men, at least not without changing their meaning to something different, such as being compared to the more despicable sex.

But are those kinds of words even worth analyzing?  Why not just ignore them?  After all,   "sticks and stones may break my back but words will never hurt me," and Lange would probably have gotten nasty messages even if she had been a he.

I believe that the analysis is useful, for two reasons. 

First, we don't have a comparable set of slur words, of the same severity, which would only apply to men. So expressing anger at women becomes sex-linked, expressing anger at men does not.

Second, and this is only my suspicion:  It's possible that the anger behind the words "a bitch" or "a cunt" is very strong, stronger than it would be had Lange been a man committing the same perceived crimes.  I base this suspicion on my belief that we expect women to be nicer than men.  Thus, if a woman is seen as not acting nicely, a greater role violation has taken place, and that creates more rage.

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* In theory sexism could have also been directed against Sanders but I haven't seen any.

**  She is bloody annoying, I tell you.  I wish she packed her bags and went to pester someone else.

*** All the examples I give here come from men, but it's possible that similar examples also came from women and weren't reported in the sources I consulted.

 

Thanks For All The FIsh. The End Of The Funding Week.

My sincere thanks to all who have sent me money.  There's still time, and there's still need!  Though don't if your own finances are stretched.  The official fund-raising posts are now concluded.

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Added later:  The reference to fish in the title is about Douglas Adams' book:

Its title is the message left by the dolphins when they departed Planet Earth just before it was demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass.

I have no idea why that seemed relevant for my blog post title.  I'm not a dolphin.

Trump And The Ladies

1.  The Gray Lady, i.e., New York Times has published the results of its own extensive survey (fifty interviews with wimminz and such!) about the  private and public relationships between one Donald Trump, a not-self-made braggard and billionaire, and various female persons that have crossed his path through life.* 

Some of those female persons he grabbed for a girlfriend or a wife, some of them he rated in the meat markets which we call beauty pageants, and some of them he promoted at work and supported in all sorts of feminist-y endeavors.  But he always had a keen eye on the breasts and butts. 

In a bizarre way the NYT article might be the seeds of the process which I see beginning:  The Normalization Of Donald Trump.**  That's because it paints a picture of the kind of an asshat that many women have met at school, in college or in the labor markets, and if those asshats are so common, well, why not have one as our president?

I've seen similar normalization take place in real life.  Certain men (and more rarely, women) are allowed to act very badly, because "that's how they are and deep down they have a kind heart."   Though it might take open heart surgery to establish anything about the kindness of their hearts, while some other individuals (say, Greek goddesses) are NOT allowed to behave like asshats even though they clearly have enormously large and kind hearts, carried on their sleeves.

Reince Priebus, one of the Republican bosses,  is willing to hold the watering can over the tiny sprout of the plant that will be the normalization of Donald Trump.  When he was asked if that NYT story about Trump and the ladies bothered him he answered:

“Well, you know, a lot of things bother me, Chris,” he replied, “and obviously I’m the wrong person to be asking that particular question.” When Wallace pointed out that he was the chairman of the party and this was the nominee, Priebus continued, “What I would say is we’ve been working on this primary for over a year, Chris, and I’ve got to tell you. I think that all these stories that come out — and they come out every couple weeks — people just don’t care.
“I don’t think Donald Trump — and his personal life — is something that people are looking at and saying, ‘Well, I’m surprised that he’s had girlfriends in the past.’ It’s not what people look at Donald Trump for, so I think the traditional playbook and analysis really don’t apply.”

Mmm.  The sentence I bolded in the quote is exactly what I meant by that real-life normalization of asshats.  The traditional playbook just doesn't apply to them, even though it will continue to apply to the rest of us.

2.  I'm not going to help in this normalization process of Donald Trump.  Remember that the man wants to rule the most powerful country in the world.  Remember that roughly half of the people in that country, and in the rest of the world, are female persons.

Then ask yourself if those female persons (and, of course, the ones who love them!) will profit from having a leader who cannot tear his eyes or his mind off their breasts and butts.  It's that mind part which really matters here, because those who are carrying out the normalization work  are all about normalizing only his roving eyes.

Thus, we cannot take our eyes off the real question here:  Is Donald Trump qualified to be the president of the United States which has lots of female persons?

A part of the answer can be found in the long NYT article.  I give you two quotes which do matter for the Trump-and-the-ladies question:

First:

Mr. Trump still holds up his parents as models, praising his stay-at-home mother for understanding and accommodating a husband who worked almost nonstop.
“My mother was always fine with it,” he said, recalling her “brilliant” management of the situation. “If something got interrupted because he was going to inspect a housing site or something, she would handle that so beautifully.”
“She was an ideal woman,” he said.

And second:

When Mr. Trump hired Ms. Res to oversee the construction of Trump Tower, he invited her to his apartment on Fifth Avenue and explained that he wanted her to be his “Donna Trump” on the project, she said. Few women had reached such stature in the industry.

He said: “I know you’re a woman in a man’s world. And while men tend to be better than women, a good woman is better than 10 good men.” … He thought he was really complimenting me.

Those quotes are weak tea, you might protest.  But they tell us about two beliefs he has held in the past and may still hold today:  That the ideal woman is one who is utterly subservient to her husband's needs, and that, in general, men tend to be better than women.  

I get that Donald Trump is not unique in those beliefs.  He might even represent a majority belief on a global level.  I also get that this country has probably elected more sexist presidents in the past, only those men kept their mouths zipped about their beliefs. 

Still, it might matter to us that this particular candidate is open about all that.  How many women would the Trump administration appoint to positions of power?  Would those women have to be single so that no husband is inconvenienced by their long working days?  Would he openly discuss the breasts of foreign female leaders? 

Even more importantly,  the Trump those above beliefs describes would not try to promote legislation which would make it easier for women to both hold their jobs and care for their children.  And we have already been told that he would appoint forced-birthers to the Supreme Court.

3.  I'm trying to imagine how the more politically innocent "me" of twenty years ago would react to being told about the presidential race of 2016.  Would that "me" jump off the ledge in despair?  Or would she get a really good laugh over this surreal period of American politics?  Hard to say.

And that applies to most of us, I guess, that feeling of not knowing whether to laugh or to cry.

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*My analysis is about what we publicly know now and doesn't necessarily apply to any future revelations.

** There's an aspect to this normalization which is too big to be covered inside this post, and that is the attempt to re-normalize views of women as cupcakes, age-rated for spoilage, disposable and so on.  I'm fairly sure that some Trump voters love exactly this aspect of Trump's utterances, because it supports them in their own work to re-normalize the lighter kind of misogyny and male entitlement.




  

Funding Week: Sunday

It's still that time of the year when I ask you, my erudite and perceptive readers (hi mom!), for money to cover the expenses of my blogging.  I only pester you once a year, because I am kind and considerate.  So if you can possibly afford it, send me your spare pennies in exchange for the thoughts I may have seeded in your mind.  Not all of them are nasty.

And my heart-felt thanks to all who have contributed!

On High Heels And Other Clothing Coded As Female

Richard Stainthorp's  wire sculpture (hat tip to Rabih Alameddine) makes the pain of very high heels visceral:  Ouch!

High heels are almost compulsory in fashion photographs, even so high heels that nobody could run in them should a saber-tooth tiger attack.  The reason is that they make women's legs look longer and tilt their butts to an inviting angle (for saber-tooth tigers?).

Many items of clothing which are intended to signal female gender hurt*.  Think of girdles which American women wore until fairly recently, think of Victorian corsets, think of those high-heeled shoes, think of dresses as tight as fish skin or belts pulled so small that the stomach commits suicide.  All those are intended to showcase female beauty.

From the other end, modesty clothes (to hide female beauty),  long dresses, niqabs or face veils, abayas or long cloaks,  hurt in a different way.  Abayas are stifling in hot climates, their bagginess means that they can catch on things which can result in accidents, and burqas, say, make women likely to stumble because they restrict vision .  Hearing is harder through several layers of fabric, too.  And in the colonial America women's long dresses could catch fire in the kitchens.

What both the "revealing" and the "covering" female-coded clothing share is that they make it much harder for someone to be physically active.   A woman or a girl cannot run in them, she cannot play soccer in them, she cannot climb a tree in them.  Even knee-length dresses make that tree climbing impossible, if anyone can look up that dress. 

Is it female passivity that these gender-coded clothes are intended to promote**?

Never mind.  No laws currently require American women and girls to wear girdles or high-heeled shoes or abayas, and it can be fun to take a little bit of pain when dressing up for a wild party.

But not all women on this earth are in an equally free position when it comes to their clothing.  Both Iran and Saudi Arabia have laws which stipulate that all women inside their country's borders must wear the government's approved version of Islamic dress, including women who are not Muslims.

And then there's this recent British case:

A receptionist claims she was sent home from work at a corporate finance company after refusing to wear high heels.
Nicola Thorp, 27, from Hackney in east London, arrived on her first day at PwC in December in flat shoes but says she was told she had to wear shoes with a “2in to 4in heel”.

Thorp, who was employed as a temporary worker by PwC’s outsourced reception firm Portico, said she was laughed at when she said the demand was discriminatory and sent home without pay after refusing to go out and buy a pair of heels.

Thorp found out that nothing in the British laws stops firms from requiring that their female workers wear high heels***.  I wonder if a British firm could demand that its male workers wear, say,  codpieces?  They don't seem to have the health risks  that high heels do, after all.  And I think they would look great!

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Please support this blog.  It's the fund-raising week and I promise I won't spend the money on clothing.


*  This tends not to be the case for clothing intended to show that someone is male, though men's business uniform (suit, tie, clunky dark shoes etc.) might be more restricting today than the equivalent women's business uniform (unless high heels are required).

That is an exception to the rule.  In my opinion the reason is that the male business suit has not changed for roughly a century.  When it was first created it was considerably more comfortable than female clothing of the era.  But in the West women's clothes have changed a lot during those hundred years, while men's business suits have not.

**  And if so, was it always the case?  In the medieval era European women and men dressed more alike than they did for several centuries afterwards, with both sexes wearing tunic-type outfits.  Women's tunics were longer than men's tunics, but close enough in style so that medieval wills sometimes leave clothing to individuals who are not the same sex as the person who made the will.  I believe that it was the available technology and the great expense of cloth that caused this similarity.  Gender was signaled by head-dresses and jewelry, not by most clothing. 

It is only recently that the everyday clothing of the sexes has once again become pretty similar.

*** She launched a petition to change this.

Funding Week: Thursday

This is the week I ask for money to pay the piper.  Please donate!  The button is on the left and you will feel so good afterwards!

I serve a unique niche in the blog marketplace:  The super-smart and super-nice individuals!  That's the honey to attract you.  The vinegar would be that I can't go on doing this without the expenses being paid.


Thank you!  Here's a bleeding heart for you:

This is the white form of Dicentra spectabilis, from my garden.  If you pick one of the flowers, turn it upside down and pull outwards from the little wings, you will see a little lady sitting in a bathtub!

Time To Prune Those Hedges. Not A Gardening Post.

The UK Guardian tells us that

The world’s top 25 hedge fund managers earned $13bn last year – more than the entire economies of Namibia, the Bahamas or Nicaragua.

And last year was a bad year for hedge funds!  What miraculous skills those 25 men (no women in the top 25 list)  must have to be worth more than whole countries!  And what on earth can you do with so much money?  Buy political influence?

Hedge fund managers are indeed blessed.  In the US they even get to pay income tax  at a lower rate:

Many hedge funds are structured to take advantage of carried interest. Under this structure, a fund is treated as a partnership. The founders and fund managers are the general partners, while the investors are the limited partners. The founders also own the management company that runs the hedge fund. The managers earn the 20% performance fee of the carried interest as the general partner of the fund. 

Hedge fund managers are compensated with this carried interest; their income from the fund is taxed as a return on investments as opposed to a salary or compensation for services rendered. The incentive fee is taxed at the long-term capital gains rate of 20% as opposed to ordinary income tax rates, where the top rate is 39.6%. This represents significant tax savings for hedge fund managers.

It also represents a significant hole in the government's tax revenue, compared to what those revenues would be if ordinary income tax rates were used, and that hole is patched up by taxing others more and/or by slashing various government projects.

This is wrong.

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But donating money to this blog is not wrong!  





  

Funding Week: Tuesday. On the Monster Spirea.

This is the week to fill my coffers with money.  You would smirk if you knew how little the total amount is that I need, how easily you could afford to help me reach it.

It is to you, my erudite and kind readers, that I turn to when I need my blogging expenses covered:  the need for a large-screen computer and an ergonomic keyboard, the fees I pay to get access to various data sources and the chocolate that fuels the work.

So please pay the piper.  If you are really low in money send praise instead.  Us divines like praise and prayer, right?  The PayPal button is in the left column.  My thanks!

In other news, I have been cleaning out the "gardens" I used to have before I became addicted to running this blog.  Here's a picture of how they once looked, with the bonus of two very loving dogs (Henrietta the Hound and Hank the Chocolate Lab, both now spirit dogs):

But this story is not about the dead gardens (for dead they are). 

It is a story about a small shrub, called Spirea japonica 'Shirobana'.  The shrub came with the house, so I didn't choose it.  But it never grew taller than three feet, never suffered from any pests of diseases, always bravely produced the ghastly combination of its flowers and in general behaved so well that I let it be despite those ghastly flowers.

And my reward for that?  Finding last summer that the shrub had sent suckers everywhere.  I had over one hundred baby Spireas (counted them while pulling them out) in what some might euphemistically call my lawn, and several fairly large teenager Spireas in the areas of the yard where the soil is good.

The time for a Spirea death sentence had arrived.  It shouldn't be too hard to dig up a shrub never reaching more than three feet in height, right?  Just get your spades and shovels and axes and root cutters all together and prepare for half an hour of arduous work.

Wrong.  The killing of the Spirea took almost a week and lots of helpers contributed.  That's because what was under the ground matched that sucker spread above the ground, not the size of the original parent bush. 

Some of the roots were thicker than my wrists, and however deep I dug I always found another layer of roots.   (You should have seen me work on it a few days ago, by the way, in a drizzling rain.  I had dirt smears all over my face and mud everywhere else because the shrub fought back so hard, making me fall on my butt several times.)

I still feel guilty about killing a perfectly healthy plant, indeed an energetic plant.  Maybe I should offer it to someone I dislike so that it can continue living?

Is this a metaphor about politics, you might ask, bored to the gills by this gardening lady story. 

Yup.  By the time you see some innocent-looking, well-groomed politician saying the most awful, ghastly things, the network supporting that person is already everywhere (school boards, local governments, think tanks).

 

This Is Quite Wonderful: Aristotle on Trolling

In the Journal of the American Philosophical Association Rachel Barney of the University of Toronto writes about Internet trolls.  You can download the whole short article on the linked page.

A few snippets:

That

That trolling is a shameful thing, and that no one of sense would accept to be called ‘troll’, all are agreed; but what trolling is, and how many its species are, and whether there is an excellence of the troll, is unclear.
...

And this is how the troll generates strife. For what he indicates is known to be false or harmful or ignorant; but he does not say that thing, but rather something close. In this way he retains the possibility of denial, and the skilled troll is always surprised and hurt, or seems to be, when the others take his comments up. And so he sets the community apart from each other, and introduces strife where before there was scarcely disagreement.

So lovely!   I haven't met many trolls of such excellence, though maybe the ones who do circular debating* qualify as examples.  Still, wouldn't it be quite wonderful if all trolls were so skilled, assuming that they, like death and taxes, are unavoidable.

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*  I used to get my exercise from circular debating with trolls.  The nature of those is of a perfect circle, starting and ending at the same place, and that place is the troll's first assertion (A) which pops right back after some minor Greek goddess has spent hours bringing up evidence first against A, then its mutated form B, then a sidestep argument (C) etc., all the way to assertion Z.

It took me a while to realize that this exercise was not a debate but just a bizarre form of trollish entertainment.

The picture is of a Scandinavian troll doll, probably having nothing to do with the etymology of Internet trolling.  But the hair is good, almost Trumpian!

PS:  Don't forget that it's my fund-raising week...

Funding Week: Monday

I traditionally extort money from my readers in May, and this is the week.  If you would like to support my research and writing costs (and provide me with chocolate, one of the necessary nutrients), you can click on the PayPal Donate-button in the left column.  The lump-sum donations give me a better net yield, but the monthly donations might be gentler with you.  As always, do not feel that you have to give if you are poor.  My sincere thanks go to all of you who read this blog and to all of you who help me run it.

About the book project*, because you deserve to know: 

I finished the first draft of the book two years ago.  Then I sat on it.  Well, not the book but the project, largely because life and several family deaths and illnesses intervened, but also because I was very very stupid and simply assumed that the rules for non-fiction books are the same as for fiction books, i.e., write the book first and then flog it. 

It turns out that this is not the case, that I should pretend I haven't yet written anything but a proposal. 

This proposal, together with about 10,000 pages of other stuff (how wonderful I am, how many readers I could provide with the flick of my fingers, why this particular book would beat all other books in a wild boxing match, why any thinking reader would ever wish to pay to read it,  what my great-great-grandmother's favorite dish was and so on and so on), should be sent to various university-linked** publishers, but only to one at a time.

The selected publisher would then sit on the package from several months to a year.  Should that publisher not like the proposal, it could be sent to a different publisher, only the different publisher wants a different set of those 10,000 pages (perhaps something about the great-uncle Ilmari's second name being Donatus and how often I floss my fangs), but the same several-months-to-a-year of musing time.  And so it goes.

Because this particular book will never provide me with retirement income and because I already have read it, the incentives to work on all that self-marketing just weren't there***.  But now I have printed out the first draft chapters and might update and polish them and perhaps make them available to those who are interested in the topic.

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* The topic is how psychological, sociological and some medical research about women, in particular,  and gender, in general,  is popularized, what biases are visible in those popularizations and how they affect what gets dragged out into the limelight and what gets hidden, as well as what we ultimately "learn." 

**  I began this search by looking for an agent (those individualized 10,000 page-long packages were required for that, too), and I was told by two of them that although they liked my proposal it would be better suited to a university press than the commercial marketplace.  Which was a lovely way of rejecting the proposal.

***  And also because I am weird.

Happy Mothers' Day. Echidne Thoughts.

1.  This video (in Finnish, but simple enough to follow without knowing the language) shows how one folds a bed sheet before putting it in a mangle.  The attached story notes that the tradition of the M-fold of the sheets is found only in some countries in Northern Europe.  The Finns have it, the Germans have it, but the Swedes do not have it.  I doubt that the custom is especially Lutheran, even though the article suggests that theory, because then the Swedes should have it, too.

My maternal grandmother taught me the M-fold.  When I moved abroad I assumed that any helper (the second person needed for the tugging) would know how to fold a sheet properly!  And none of them did. 

Cultural customs are odd.  People seem to believe that their cultural customs are the only natural way to do something!  Country-hopping of the kind I have done should kill that belief very quickly, and I thought it had done this for me.  But my assumptions about the M-fold tells me that I'm better at noticing some culture-dependent customs (about sexism, say) faster than other customs.

The point of this story is about knowledge, the way it is informally passed on by our parents, often by our mothers, and how we forget who passed the knowledge on.   Who taught you to cook?  Who taught you how to use the washing machine?  Who taught you to brush your teeth?

A Disqus Dilemma

That would be the comments section. I changed a Blogger setting yesterday to redirect all visitors to the HTTPS version of the blog address.  It is supposed to be safer.

That change messed up the Disqus comments.  They disappeared, probably because the Disqus widget for Blogger uses HTTP and this creates mixed contents errors.   I tested the blog for those and Disqus was found guilty as charged.

The obvious solution seems to be here, but it's for the universal code, not for the Blogger plugin.  In any case, I don't see how I could get inside the plugin to mess with it.




 So I canceled the redirecting, but that can't be a long-term solution.  Any advice?  Anyone?  Bueller?  Assuming the comments work.

On Meat And Wolves. O How Women Dress!

Via Eschaton, this news about a poster found in the library of an Arizona school:

You can click on the picture to read the text, but it begins like this:

so you think you come to school looking pretty hot
but what the boys see is meat and it's distracting
so they make lousy grades

A senior at the school, Alissa Adams got the poster removed.  It seems that nobody took responsibility for making it, although it was a librarian who put it up.

I love the comparison of girls to meat and the boys to wolves.  But if girls really were meat and boys really were wolves, shouldn't the wolves be kept away from the school?  Instead, the poster then argues that the "meat" gets the "wolves" to fail at school and also in life and ultimately the "meat" will have to support the "wolves."

It's the old story:  Eve did it!  For almost any value of "it" among certain religious fundamentalists.

Note how insulting the above poster is to boys, too.  It assumes they are pulled around by nothing but their penises.  It assumes they have no will power, no self-control, no responsibility for their own grades, even.

The above is a very tiny example of the traditional belief that men cannot (or don't have to) control their libidos, so women must do that controlling for them by, essentially, covering up.

To see the same principle work in a much wider context, spring in Tehran means an increase in the size of the  morality police which patrols the streets looking for women who are not dressed properly:

As the mercury rises in Iran, winter coats are back in the closet, flowers are popping up — and so are the so-called morality police. Despite objections from Iran's president, Hassan Rouhani, Tehran's police have announced up to 7,000 undercover officers will be on the lookout for those who don't follow conservative Islamic modes of dress and behavior.
They're called the Gashte Ershad, the "guidance patrol," and they have broad powers to chastise and even arrest people for failing to meet what might be called the modesty test.
Men are occasionally stopped — perhaps if their beards are too long, making them resemble jihadists — but usually, it's women who attract the attention of the Gashte Ershad.

A 2014 campaign by the conservatives in Iran compared improperly clad women not to meat but to

unwrapped candy bars preyed on by flies 

The similarity to the Arizona school library example is clear:  Women and girls are food (meat or candy bars), men and boys are animals (wolves or flies).

But that these two cases resemble each other at all is puzzling from a different angle:

Iranian women are already dressed in ways which would count as extremely modest, even the ones who show a little bit of hair under their head scarves.  So why is that not sufficient?

Is any amount of modesty ever sufficient?   If a woman wears a niqab leaving only her eyes visible, she might still be scolded for immodesty in Saudi Arabia.

Sigh.  It's an impossible task, that getting rid of tempting females.

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A post-script:  I'm not opposed to rules concerning appropriate dress in various circumstances (school, work, funerals, swimming pools etc), but such rules should be as gender-neutral as possible, and the rules shouldn't be made up by a few authoritarians but by some sort of a democratic process.

As an aside, it's fun to imagine what would happen if rules were, in fact, made gender-neutral in, say, Saudi Arabia, and men had to wear the abaya, too.  Right now men in Iran and Saudi Arabia can wear the same kind of clothing as men in the West.  But women cannot.  Yet it is presumably the western cultural onslaught that the morality police in Iran try to stop by harassing only women.


  
 

Big, Swaggering , Rascally He-Men. Or A Few Presidential Election Thoughts.

Some Echidne thoughts about the 2016 US presidential primaries:

1.  Ted Cruz, the forced-birth fundamentalist has aborted his run, and Donald Trump is now the winner in the Republican field,  even in the eyes of others than himself.

His run reminds me of the time when my sainted pointer, Henrietta the Hound, was chasing a squirrel in the woods (yes, I yelled various commands at her to stop) and realized that she was actually going to catch the critter, which she didn't want to do.  So she started running in place, to give the squirrel time to climb up a tree.  It was one of the funniest things I've ever seen.

I don't see how Trump could run in place that way, which means that we are in for a very interesting and vicious election campaign season.

Trump's Use Of The Woman Card. Brilliant, Says Scott Adams.

James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal (yes, that James Taranto) loves Scott Adams, the cartoonist who created Dilbert.  That love is based on important values the two men share:  a general contempt for women, the belief that women are not that smart and that women are mostly just a very annoying necessity which should have been created with an off-switch*.  So it's natural that Taranto quotes Adams a lot.

Most recently he linked to Adams' brilliant explanation for why Trump was going to win not only the votes of most men** but also enough of those over-emotional and illogical women's votes (too bad about that female suffrage) to give him a good chance to be the new Lion King (president) of the United States. 

10. Trump rolled out the “woman card” attack on Clinton. Expect lots of backlash and hollering about sexism. Also expect that 100% of the voting public knows that the “woman card” accusation is a persuasion death blow to Clinton’s campaign. And Trump is the only candidate alive who would dare say it out loud.
Trump’s “woman card” strategy is weapons-grade persuasion. It is a “high ground” maneuver with an “identity” angle. Either one of those approaches can be a kill shot. But together?
Holy sh*t.
I’ve not seen anything like it. The engineering is superb.
Trump will probably win with men for all the obvious reasons. But winning with women has until lately seemed impossible. So the “woman card” kill shot is aimed at women voters, not men. And what it does is flip the framing, as Trump likes to do.
Clinton framing: It is time for a woman president.
Trump framing: Gender is not a job qualification
I remind you that this is the year 2016. Trump’s message recognizes that gender should not be a hiring criteria. That’s the high ground. You can’t get higher.

Wow!  That is sooo smart.  I would never have been able to create such an engineering miracle, being a girl goddess.

Whatever.  In this reality Hillary Clinton is still about a zillion times more qualified in actual political job experience and relevant knowledge than Donald Trump, who, I must admit, is a lot more experienced in bankrupting firms.  So if we leave gender (and Trump's sexism) out of this altogether, Clinton remains the more qualified candidate.

Why did these two gentlemen find Trump's "woman card" trick so awe-inspiring?  I have no idea, but if I had to make a guess it would be that they truly think female voters aren't that sharp.  So it goes.

Where was I?  Oh yes, more on Taranto's opinions:

Give Trump this: He is the one candidate you can count on to ignore feminist demands that he put Mrs. Clinton on a pedestal.

What rubbish!  Trump would put her up a pedestal in a minute, if he could then look up her skirt.***


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*  Want to learn more?  Check out these two posts (1) and (2) on Scott Adams' views on women, or that lions-are-men-zebras-are-women post.  This post has a bit more on James Taranto's views.

** Against Hillary Clinton.  She is assumed to be the Democratic candidate.    As Adams states, Trump is assumed to win enough men's votes "for all the obvious reasons."  That could be code for something very mysterious, having to do with men being lions and women being zebras.  Or he might just mean that white men tend to vote Republican.

I do love that lions-and-zebras story!  It's wonderful, even in the present setting:  Trump, the old lion with the bad mane, sets a trap at the watering hole (voting polls) for the almost equally old zebra, Clinton,  to gobble her up.

*** The bit about "feminist demands" is also mostly rubbish.  That is because the world of feminism is a dangerous jungle where boa constrictors hide behind every tree and where poisonous giant spiders glide down a vine and drill straight through insufficiently pure people's eyeballs, in order to lay eggs inside their cerebellums.

I made that last bit up, largely because a) manly men like Taranto always assume that feminists are like ladies in a church choir, all singing in harmony, but not really frightening at all,  and b) because many feminists are not Clinton-supporters and c) because there really is no central Kremlin office which coordinates Feminist Demands.  Rather the reverse, in fact. 

What Sells In Political Commentary. A Sarcastic Take.

1.  Giving political commentary while being famous for some totally different reason.  People will want to hear what you have to say, even if it makes very little sense:

Tim Robbins and his ex, Susan Sarandon, have certainly made news in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary, with Robbins going to bat for Bernie Sanders on Twitter and Sarandon speaking out against Hillary Clinton and even appearing to suggest she might vote for Donald Trump instead.

Sarandon wouldn't go quite that far in an interview with Stephen Colbert on Wednesday, but she did suggest why she might do such a thing.
"I'm more afraid actually of Hillary Clinton's war record and her hawkishness than I am of building a wall," Sarandon said. "But that doesn't mean that I would vote for Trump."

Sarandon can vote for whomever she wishes, of course.  But comparing Clinton's hawkishness in foreign policy to Trump's immigration policy is comparing apples to oranges.  In reality Trump is hawkier than Clinton and wants to build a giant wall.  Is "hawkier" a word?

This category is overflowing with celebrities who get the microphone even though they haven't done their homework (coughClintEastwoodcough).  Sarandon's comment is just the most recent one.

2.  Have your writing posted under a really shocking title!  Exaggerate!  Promise the moon!  Be very very partisan.

That always works, even when the article itself is milquetoast or interprets data wrong, and it works because many of us just look at the headline (tl;dr)*, but that counts as a click for the advertisers.  And it is clicks which matter.

3.   Keep it short and emotional.  Don't confuse people with too many facts (tl;dr)*  Note that the term "emotional" covers anger.  Anger is the default emotion in politics, but recently fear might sell better.  Be very very afraid!

Indeed, any hind-brain emotion (anger, fear, sexual arousal) will make an article popular.

4.  Avoid everything I do on this here blog.





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* too long, did not read

Donald Trump And The Gender Card

So it has begun, Donald Trump's election campaign against Hillary Clinton.   The first shot:

While celebrating sweeping victories in five primaries Tuesday night, Donald Trump mocked the qualifications of Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton and suggested she was playing "the women's card" to her advantage in the presidential race.
“Frankly, if Hillary Clinton were a man, I don't think she'd get 5 percent of the vote. The only thing she's got going is the women's card,” Trump said during a news conference at Trump Tower. “And the beautiful thing is, women don't like her."

Do women like the Donald, then?  Let's see.  A Gallup poll published on April 1, 2016 tells us this:

Donald Trump's image among U.S. women tilts strongly negative, with 70% of women holding an unfavorable opinion and 23% a favorable opinion of the Republican front-runner in March.

The percentage of men who held an unfavorable opinion on Trump in the same poll was 58%.  And what about the Hillary?  The same poll notes:

Hillary Clinton, like Trump and Cruz, is viewed more negatively than positively by both men and women, though of these two, women are far less negative. This likely reflects the basic female gender skew among Democrats and that Clinton is the only female candidate in the race. Clinton's stronger performance among women than among men has been a constant over the past nine months.

Bolds are mine.

Trump employs that old Republican tactic of attacking his opponent where her strength is. But he is abominably bad at that, and no wonder:  He seems to view women as walking racks for boobs, to be rated only for their looks.

To shift from that into seeing women as voters-with-some-power might be too big a leap for the Donald.  And the last thing he should do is what he did in that quote:  Played a gender card himself.

That's because he is a men's-locker-room type of guy when it comes to women.  He makes tits and butt jokes, he brags about being a playah, he even sexualizes his own daughters in his jokes as well as his wife:

A 1994 clip of Republican frontrunner Donald Trump describing his 1-year-old daughter left "Daily Show" host Trevor Noah speechless Tuesday night.

...

"Donald, what does Tiffany have of yours and what does she have of Marla's?" the show's host, Robin Leach, asked, referring to Trump's second wife Marla Maples.
Trump's answer to the "innocent question" left Noah speechless.
"I think she's got a lot of Marla, she's a beautiful baby. She's got beautiful legs. We don't know if she's got this part yet," Trump said, as he cupped his hands under his chest to signify breasts, "But time will tell."

And:
  

Stern once asked Trump what he would do if Melania were in a terrible car accident, God forbid, and lost the use of her left arm, developed an oozing red splotch near her eye, and mangled her left foot. Would Donald stay with her?
“How do the breasts look?” Trump asked.
“The breasts are okay,” Stern replied. Then, yeah, of course Trump stays. “Because that’s important.” 

I'm sure Trump was joking in those two (and other) examples, but the jokes were aimed at a particular locker-room audience (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) and that audience doesn't include women.  Women are the joke.

The link in that last quote is to a GQ interview with Melania Trump, Donald's current wife.  Check it out and see if you agree with the impression I got from it:  That marriage, to the Donald, is an employer-employee contract where the wife is the employee, the husband is the boss,  and all chores are strictly sex-segregated.

When we put all that together what do we get as one possible appeal of Trump among a certain group of Republican male voters? *

He objectifies women, and not in the men's locker-room but in a very public sphere.  That gives others the permission to do likewise (ah, the winds of freedom!).

He seems to wield the power in his own relationships with women, and that must appeal to those Republican men who pine for the power 1950s gender norms and roles gave middle-class men.

And it cannot hurt his attraction among that specific group of Republican male voters that his current wife is always beautiful and over time much younger than he is:  Like trading cars for a newer model!

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*  All Trump supporters, men and women, obviously have other reasons to vote for Trump than his open sexism.  Some of those supporters might not even like it, but still prefer a strong, bullying, protectionist,  pro-war and anti-immigration president who is clearly not part of the political establishment, even if he is equally clearly part of the ruling classes.



 

The Curious Case of The Dropping Life Expectancy At Birth For Non-Hispanic White Women. A Lesson in Interpretations.

I've been reading about the recent changes in life expectancy at birth* for various US demographic groups.  The main findings are summarized here:

Between 2013 and 2014, overall life expectancy at birth for the total US population held steady at 78.8 years, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC's) National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS).
For men, life expectancy was 76.4 years, and for women, it was 81.2 years, Elizabeth Arias, PhD, from the NCHS, Division of Vital Statistics, notes in a new NCHA data brief, published online April 20.
Life expectancy increased by 0.4 years for non-Hispanic black men (going from 71.8 to 72.2 years) and by 0.1 years for Hispanic men (going from 79.1 to 79.2 years). Life expectancy remained unchanged for non-Hispanic white men (76.5 years).
Among women, life expectancy increased by 0.2 years for Hispanic women (going from 83.8 to 84.0 years), remained unchanged for non-Hispanic black women (78.1 years), and declined by 0.1 years for non-Hispanic white women (going from 81.2 to 81.1 years).

I have bolded the sentences which describe changes in life expectancy at birth. Neither non-Hispanic black women nor non-Hispanic white men experienced a change in the life expectancy measures, but the other groups mentioned in that quote did. Life expectancy at birth rose for non-Hispanic black men and for both Hispanic men and women, but it fell for non-Hispanic white women.

When I started looking for the reasons behind that drop** (because this is the first recorded drop in a more general life expectancy measure in the US during a time period without major wars or epidemics)  I came across this, in the context of an interview with various experts:

WILLIAMS: It's important to realize that, although the life expectancy is declining for white women, that white women, nonetheless, are still living almost 10 years longer than African-American men. So there still is a large racial gap in health.
KODJAK: And that gap is even wider with Hispanic men and women. The CDC report shows they live longer than everyone else. Alison Kodjak, NPR News.

What these statements refer to is the following:  Arrange the life expectancy at birth figures for the six demographic groups mentioned in the above quote in an order from the longest life expectancy to the shortest and you get this list:

1.  Hispanic women (84)
2.  Non-Hispanic white women (81.1)
3.  Hispanic men (79.2)
4.  Non-Hispanic black women (78.1)
5.  Non-Hispanic white men (76.5)
6.  Non-Hispanic black men (72.2)

Williams' point is that non-Hispanic white women, as a group, still have a higher life expectancy at birth than non-Hispanic black men and most other groups mentioned in the quote.

Williams makes a mistake, however,  when he attributes the whole difference between the life expectancy figures of non-Hispanic white women and non-Hispanic black men to race, given that one group consists of women and the other group of men.  A more correct comparison would be to compare non-Hispanic white and black women to each other or non-Hispanic white and black men to each other.***

But never mind.  That's not the point I wish to make.

It's something more complicated, a reverse of the usual kind of statistical misunderstanding where people try to refute statistical information about the average, the most frequent or the modal value of some data by noting that it doesn't jive with their own personal experience or the personal experiences of those they know.  In short, personal anecdotes are used to argue against data about averages derived from large populations of people.

In this case even experts appear to interpret data about average life expectancy in some group as if it applied equally to all its sub-groups.  Thus, we get quotes like this:

Public health experts say the rising white death rate reflects a broader health crisis, one that has made the United States the least healthy affluent nation in the world over the past 20 years. The reason these early deaths are so conspicuous among white women, these experts say, is that in the past the members of this comparatively privileged group have been unlikely to die prematurely.

Well, if we go far back into the past we are going to find a lot of premature deaths among all women due to maternal deaths.  But it is indeed true that the life expectancy at birth in the US, on average, is high for  non-Hispanic white women, higher than for all other groups mentioned here except for Hispanic women.****

But not all non-Hispanic white women are equally "privileged" in having good physical and mental health.  Some are poor, lack education, are trapped (or see themselves trapped) in poor rural areas or small towns with few jobs.

It is that sub-group among the much larger category of non-Hispanic white women which is experiencing a rapidly shrinking life expectancy at birth.

The focus on the overall group of non-Hispanic white women in this example is like not seeing that some trees are stunted because much of the forest looks so healthy.

But it would be equally incorrect to use those stunted trees to demand more resources for the whole forest.  Some experts have expressed that fear:

Others have questioned the sudden focus on whites, pointing out that African Americans continue to have shorter life spans and face severe health challenges exacerbated by racial segregation and discrimination. Why, they ask, give so much attention to a group that remains statistically advantaged?

“The truth is that white death rates are still much, much lower than they are for African Americans,” said Bridget Catlin, senior scientist at the University of Wisconsin. “My concern is that people will think, ‘Oh, it’s whites that need to be helped.’ ”

It's the stunted trees which deserve attention.  Some forests have many more of them than others.  But they all deserve help.


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*  Life expectancy at birth in year x in a particular place refers to the number of years a child born in year x at that place can expect to live if current mortality patterns of year x prevail in the future.  When the measure is calculated for a demographic sub-group, the current mortality patterns that are assumed to prevail are those applying to that demographic sub-group in year x.

The bolded words are important.

Because of the way the measure is calculated it is more sensitive to deaths at younger ages than at older ages.


** Several hypotheses have been proposed to explain this change.  The more medical ones include increasing obesity and diabetes, increased misuse of opioids and heroin and the resulting overdoses, cigarette smoking among the poorer whites,  increased rates of suicide by middle-aged white women, increased rates of alcoholism by the same group and a rise in apparent accidents and accidental poisoning.

More sociological explanations suggest that economic expectations have changed for poorer whites, with more despair about the future.  Poor minorities are more accustomed not to expect a better economic future and so may not experience the same kind of loss of hope, having had little in the first place.

Some have proposed greater rates of divorce and single-parenthood among the poorer whites as one possible reason. Even the possibility that traditional gender roles, when combined with the new economic reality that most women need to work with money, might be at the root of the extra pressure poor white women experience in terms of the double shift.  On the other hand, one study found that employment seemed to have a protective effect on poorer white women's health.

Note that the crucial question all such explanations have to be able to answer is why they would explain a drop in white women's life expectancy but not in the life expectancy of otherwise identical (i.e., equally poor, equally likely not to have finished high school) white men or in the life expectancy of otherwise identical Hispanic women and men or of otherwise identical black men and women.  Some do better in that respect than others.

But what the data mostly agrees on is that this drop has its roots in the experience of one sub-group among white women:  Poor white women with little education who live in poor rural areas and small towns.  Poor white men in similar circumstances are also losing years of life expectancy, though not quite as many.  That the overall life expectancy for non-Hispanic white men has not declined could be because other improvements in men's longevity are large enough to have canceled out this particular effect.

All this is tentative.  I hope that future studies can tell us something more definitive not only about the life expectancy changes for poor white women but for all groups of the poor in the United States.


***  This article summarizes some of the issues which affect the life expectancy measures of black women and men in the US, compared to white women and men.  Some have a larger effect than others:  Neonatal deaths because of the years of life lost and the greater rates of violent deaths at early ages.  But note the general need for better access to medical care which the ACA might help to fix.

I couldn't find similar comparisons covering Hispanic men and women.

****  It is probably even higher for Asian-American women.  The available data doesn't address that question.