Escape Reading. Terry Pratchett's Discworld.

I love re-reading Terry Pratchett as an escape from the Trump Reich and all the other problems of this world, but as this post from last year shows, some of those problems exist on Pratchett's Discworld, too.

This year I've been re-reading Pratchett's Tiffany Aching books.  They are meant for young adults, I think, but the Nac Mac Feegle (the wee free men) are funny enough at any age.

Gendered Coverage of American Politicians' Sins

I wrote about that in March, but the problems in coverage haven't since disappeared*.  It's always useful to make the thought experiment, when reading criticisms of some female politician, of asking if the criticisms would have been the same or of equal intensity had she been a male politician instead.

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* Much of this is caused by the right-wing press, because there are many more Democratic female politicians than there are Republican ones, and the right-wing press attacks Democrats and not Republicans.  But even so, I sense a difference in the intensity when the target of attack is female.

As an aside, the small numbers of Republican women in the Congress is probably caused by the same reasons as the tilted right-wing coverage against Democratic women.

On Combatting False Beliefs

"A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes."

The bottom section (after the embedded comment) of this post gives one example of the kind of research that is needed to even begin interpreting various Alt Right arguments or those that come from the manosphere.  I'm linking to it not because I would somehow be proud of the minimal research I did there, but because it's often the case that to refute lies (such as the ones Our Dear Leader spews out) takes digging time, digging energy and digging skills, and even then not every consumer of political news is willing to read through long explanations.

In other words, truth must button every single one of those small buttons in its hobnailed boots before it can start running after the lie.

Another example of the kind of painstaking work that is required in taking apart fake news can be found in the Harvard study about the impact of the media in the 2016 presidential elections.  It includes a detailed case study covering the media's treatment of the Clinton Foundation (from page 104 onward).  If you read it you will learn how the Clinton Foundation scandal was baked out of nothing but some slightly stale air, but still satisfied the appetites of many on the right.  Interestingly enough, the scandals about the Trump Foundation never achieved similar prominence.

Do 20% of Men "Get" 80% Of All Heterosexual Sex?

That's the kind of belief incel online sites spread:

“OK, we’ve all seen the statistic that in a competitive dating environment 20% of the guys are having 80% of the sex,” reads one post on r/TheRedPill, which goes on to claim, (emphasis theirs):

For every ten girls who are getting laid this week, eight of them are fucking just two guys.

If you’re not one of those two guys, there’s a 75% chance that you’re not getting laid at all. Only 20% of men fall into the category of “not alpha but still getting some”.

The haves and have-nots live in two different worlds. This is not a sliding scale situation where incremental improvement yields incremental returns. You either have more pussy than you know what to do with or you’re incel. There’s very little middle ground.

That’s what the 80/20 rule means. You really, really want to be one of the 20%.

That whole quote is so weird*.  Why does the second principle of the incel sites seem to always be this spreading of doom and gloom "statistics" which prove that nothing can be done, that no woman will ever fuck them, whatever they do?

The first principle, of course, is that the state of involuntary celibacy (being a male incel**) is caused by the disgusting shallowness, lookism and general perfidy of the whole womankind, all billions of us.

And that is the truly dangerous principle, but the second one also produces a lot of grief and suffering among men who probably wouldn't have to be incels if they realized that pussies are attached to real human beings who like to be viewed as people before pussies.  Instead, they are told that Everything  Is Hopeless.

So where did that 80/20 rule come from?  The linked article suggests that it applies the Pareto principle to sex:

One of the most repeated ideas on incel forums is a particular interpretation of the Pareto principle, which theorizes that in many cases, 80 percent of effects come from 20 percent of the causes. In economics, it’s often used to predict power structures (e.g., the richest 20 percent control 80 percent of the income). Replace money with sex, and you’ve essentially got the incel rallying cry.

But I have found no evidence that the Pareto distribution would fit human heterosexual behavior of the kind incels fret about.

And existing evidence on sexual behavior suggests that the reality is much less cruel toward the imaginary 80% of "non-alpha" males in the sexual supermarkets the incels also imagine to exist:

As Rebecca Goldin, a professor of mathematics at George Mason University and the director of STATS, noted, there really isn’t all that much data about who’s having sex with whom and how often. But, she said, “There is some limited data that refutes the poster’s claims, depending on interpretation.”

First off, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 56 percent of women and 59 percent of men have had sex by the time they finish high school. And, as Goldin pointed out, “If the sexually active teen women were choosing a largely overlapping set of young men to have sex with (eight women going with two guys), one would expect many fewer guys to have had sex than women.”

And if roughly the same number of heterosexual women and men are sexually active and you apply the Pareto principle, it would work out to eight women having sex with two men, yet also two women having sex with the other eight men. If it were true that most women were choosing just a few partners, the remaining women would need to have many partners.

“In other words, the statement, ‘If you’re not one of those two guys, there’s a 75 percent chance that you’re not getting laid at all. Only 20 percent of men fall into the category of ‘not alpha but still getting some,’ is not correct,” she said.

Bolds are mine.

Goldin goes on to note that men and women in long-term relationships, such as marriage, might well have more sex (when counted as times per week, say) than those men and women who are not in long-term relationships, partly, because it's much easier to arrange.  But in the incel world sex is sold in some weird supermarkets, not enjoyed in loving relationships.

And that is very sad.  The incels don't need the online sites where they gather***.  They need some real therapy which would allow them to see women as human beings.

That would be the win-win outcome, because it would enable the incels to find loving partners and because it would reduce the amount of online misogyny.


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* First is the question where that statistics comes from which the rest of this post addresses.

Second is the question of definitions:

 Two men (out of ten) are assumed to fuck eight women (out of ten) in one week, but the remaining two women are not assumed to fuck the remaining eight men in one week, but only one man each.  This is an asymmetry, probably because it's assumed that the 80/20 rule applies.  But it's unclear if sex is counted in numbers of partners or in numbers of intercourse (or whatever stands in its place)

Third, is the nutty idea that there are only two kinds of heterosexual men:  Those who have more pussy than you know what to do with (freeze and can, of course) and those who have zero pussy for the rest of their miserable lives.  This assumption clearly clashes with any kind of reality I have visited.

Fourth is the question what a "competitive" dating environment might be.  Some sort of a boxing ring? 

Fifth, and most importantly, the whole quote reeks of the view that women are not people but things, like slabs of beef, for sale in the dating supermarkets, and that those slabs of beef should be distributed more fairly among the consumers.

**  The online incels do not care about women, probably because they hate women, so they spend no time worrying about female incels.  As I have written before, women are probably much more likely to be involuntarily celibate than men, because women live longer and are more likely to outlive their partners.

***  As I have written before, the incel online sites resemble those anorexia sites where anorexics met to encourage each other not to eat.  In other words, visiting the incel sites will make the visitors more miserable and less mentally healthy.

Corporations As Luggage

This piece was written for a different purpose, but was never used.  So it wants to have its fifteen minutes of fame here:



Fans of Terry Pratchett's Discworld fantasies  know all about the magical suitcase with many small legs, the Luggage:

 It is a large chest made of sapient pearwood (a magical, intelligent plant which is nearly extinct, impervious to magic..). It can produce hundreds of little legs protruding from its underside and can move very fast if the need arises. It has been described as "half suitcase, half homicidal maniac" (Sourcery paperback p22).

The Luggage will follow its owner, even through brick walls.

This doesn't differ from today's large and mobile corporations.  The more legs governments have legally given them, the faster they can leave any given locality (town, city and even country) and the less they care about the mayhem caused.

Consider the death of a commercial light fixture plant in Sparta, Tennessee.  Esther Kaplan's prize-winning 2014 article  "Losing Sparta" tells us what happened when an old and  profitable plant, essential for the economic and cultural well-being of a small town, was taken over by Phillips, the multinational behemoth:

Then, one morning in November 2010, a Philips executive no one recognized drove up and walked into the plant, accompanied by a security guard wearing sunglasses and a sidearm. He summoned all the employees back to the shipping department and abruptly announced that the plant would be shut down. Though the workers didn’t know it at the time, most of their jobs would be offshored to Monterrey, Mexico. The two of them then walked out the door and drove off. “It was a shock, I’ll tell you,” Ricky Lack said more than two years later. Still brawny in his late fifties, he’d hired on at the plant in 1977, when he was nineteen years old. “My dad worked there,” he said. “Half the plant’s mom or dad or brother worked there. We still don’t know why they left.”

The consequences for Sparta were dire:  Older workers faced  long-term unemployed or part-time or minimum wage jobs.  Marriages failed, ill health increased, and the various levels of government earned less tax revenue and paid out more in unemployment benefits.  But none of this touched Phillips, the suitcase with many little legs. Off it went to Mexico.  Sparta could hardly follow.

In the past, corporations were more bound to a locality.  If they behaved badly, local reputations suffered. If they laid off too many workers, their local sales declined. If their management lived in nearby areas, the public services their families enjoyed would diminish.  If nothing else, the goodwill the firm possessed would diminish. 

Today, these ties are fraying, as we can see in Sparta, Tennessee. In international trade agreements multinational corporations now demand veto rights over the decisions of future national governments.

The  losses to others from what may be gains to multinational corporations don't affect only the workers when plants close or only the towns that join the American Rust Belt.

The 2007-2010 burst of the US housing bubble had many causes, among them the strengthened ability of firms to ignore local knowledge.  If a firm sold many mortgages, ground them up like sausage meat with the good and the bad risks  all mixed, and then sold the  new product in giant new sausage skins to far-distant places, who would ever be able to find the original culprits to the mortgage crisis?  They would not be the ones who ultimately bore the costs of granting too many bad mortgages. 

Compare that to past practices where the mortgage remained with the awarding institutions.  Still in the mid-199s mortgage negotiations with a bank resembled the Spanish inquisition in their thoroughness.  Yet soon after that date I heard of large mortgages given to people I knew couldn't pay them back.  The almost nonexistent regulation of financial markets, the general exuberance of investors, and many other factors played a role in creating the housing bubble,  but the firms' mobility mattered:

On Wall Street, where many of these loans were packaged into securities and sold to investors around the globe, a new term was coined: IBGYBG, “I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone.”

It referred to deals that brought in big fees up front while risking much
larger losses in the future. And, for a long time, IBGYBG worked at every level.

Terry Pratchett's half-homicidal "Luggage" with many little feet is fantasy, but the scope for corporations to leave a place in ruins while following their owners is not.

What next?  Legal personhood for corporations?  Hmm.

Art For The Weekend

In 2011 I wrote a series of posts on four 19th to 20th century female Finnish painters.  I found it still interesting*.  Another Finnish painter of the olden times I like is Hugo Simberg, a symbolist painter.  Here is his Garden of Death, to set a happy tone for the weekend:

Doesn't that remind you of Death in Terry Pratchett's Discworld fantasies?

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*  The Finnish proverb goes:  Who would raise the dog's tail if not the dog himself?
Meaning that one must show self-confidence.  I think I will keep the male terminology in that proverb...

Trump's White Evangelical Base

A WaPo article (from last June) about the politics of various evangelical groups in the US points out something fascinating about the 2016 presidential elections:

...according to Election Day exit polls, 80 percent of white evangelicals supported Donald Trump. Among all other – nonevangelical — whites, 59 percent voted for Hillary Clinton.

I had not seen that difference put so clearly elsewhere.  What it means is that the white evangelicals are an important part of Trump's base. This should be hilarious, given that Trump is anything but a religious man, and because religious people are supposed to walk their talk.  But it could be the case that religion in this context is a tribal marker rather than as a confession of faith.

The linked article suggests that white evangelicals' vote for Trump was driven by their fear of losing racial and religious status.  This may also explain why rank-and-file white evangelicals approve of Trump's refugee policies and dislike immigration in general.

For my take on how that vote might also link to anxiety about gender, see this post.

The Gross Gender Earnings Gap Revisited

I have written about the gross and net earnings gaps* many, many times.  It's the latter which we want to use when looking for possible sex- or race-based (or both) discrimination in the labor market.

That's because the net earnings gap gets as close as observational data can to the ideal where we would compare two individuals, identical in all other characteristics except the one or the ones we study (say, sex, race, age etc.).

It's not exactly the same as that theoretical ideal, but it's loads better than the gross earnings gap which does not take into account differences in education, experience, and other things which affect how much people earn, on average.  In some forms it doesn't even take into account differences in hours, days or weeks worked.

But the net earnings gap does that.  More about it in this post and here.   And that's why the feminist left should not use the gross gap in earnings as the measure of labor market discrimination.

But the anti-feminist right does something worse when it argues that studies have conclusively shown that there is no gender gap in earnings after women's own free-and-voluntary choices are taken into account.   Good studies have shown no such thing, if they sample a proper cross-section of workers.

The studies the right decides to focus on are only about very young workers, just beginning their working lives or careers. Given that the Equal Pay Act of 1963 makes it illegal to pay men and women different wages for exactly the same work, and given that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act makes discrimination in hiring illegal, it's hard** for employers to discriminate against any particular group among brand-new workers.

It's the passage of time*** which allows any possible discriminatory motives to be satisfied.  For example, men and women can be promoted at different rates, irrespective of their productivity and other characteristics, or on-the-job training can be offered to one group but not to the other group etc.

This post discusses one study that has been very popular among the anti-feminists.  You probably notice by now that because it fails to standardize for education it's comparing apples to oranges, even if the results were only applied to the group of young, single, metropolitan workers.  But they have been applied much more widely than that.

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* The gross gap between, say, women and men would be calculated by dividing the earnings of an average woman by the earnings of an average man, preferably both expressed in earnings per hour, week and so on.

The net gap corrects the gross gap for hours worked, education, experience and other relevant factors which affect how much someone works and are mostly viewed as non-discriminatory.  The net gap is what still remains after those calculations are carried out.

**  Not impossible, given that earnings information is usually kept hidden in the US, but harder than it would be without those laws. As an aside, the UK right spreads the same propaganda about the wage gap not existing after women's "voluntary" choices are taken into account.


***   The right-wing argument is that the earnings differences accruing over time are due to women's choices to focus more on their children and less on their careers.  But note that we cannot conclude anything of the sort from the data, because discriminatory effects also accrue over time.

Paper Ballots. The Best Answer For Secure Voting Systems.

First, these hilarious news about hacking voting machines:

This weekend saw the 26th annual DEFCON gathering. It was the second time the convention had featured a Voting Village, where organizers set up decommissioned election equipment and watch hackers find creative and alarming ways to break in.  

...

In a room set aside for kid hackers, an 11-year-old girl hacked a replica of the Florida secretary of state’s website within 10 minutes — and changed the results.

Caitlin Flanagan Loves Jordan Peterson. As Is To Be Expected.

Remember Caitlin Flanagan?  If not, I wrote about her anti-feminism a long time ago, more than once.

Now she has come out in praise of Jordan Peterson, the new prophet which many conservative men follow.  If you are not familiar with Peterson's work, you can get a crash course right on this blog*!

Her ode to Peterson makes for hilarious reading.  She tells us that her teenage son and other young men suddenly had someone to listen to who argued against identity politics:

That might seem like a small thing, but it’s not. With identity politics off the table, it was possible to talk about all kinds of things—religion, philosophy, history, myth—in a different way. They could have a direct experience with ideas, not one mediated by ideology.

Bolds are mine.

I have read (and reviewed) Peterson's little book, and one thing it is certainly mediated by is ideology:  The name of the book is 12 Rules For Life.  An Antidote to Chaos, and Peterson tells us, repeatedly, that chaos is the eternally feminine.  He also tells us that patriarchy has existed for the good of us weak, feeble and leaky women, and he has a whole chapter in his book about masculinity in peril.

Professor Peterson has also wondered, in 2017, if feminists avoid criticizing Islam because they unconsciously long for masculine dominance:

And more recently he has asked:

“Is it possible that young women are so outraged because they are craving infant contact in a society that makes that very difficult?”

 No, Caitlin.  No.  Prophet Peterson is not a non-ideological source ideas (if such a thing even were possible).  His ideology is anti-feminist, based on societal hierarchies** and the belief in natural male supremacy.  His sources are often based on the nuttier kind of evolutionary psychology, and he is a biological essentialist who believes that women would be much better off at home.

In that he shares Flanagan's views, of course, though those views do not apply to Flanagan herself.  And that sharing-of-views explains why she likes Peterson's ideas.***

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*  A few useful posts, in order:  This one introduces you to Peterson and his debating technique, this one talks about chaos as eternally feminine and order as eternallly masculine, and this one is the first post in my book review of Peterson's book.  More right-wing ideas about Peterson are discussed in this post.

** He has become famous for arguing that lobsters have hierarchies, which means that hierarchies are very old and humans also have them.  And the dominant guy lobster gets to mate with all the female lobsters.  What this means about humans he never says out loud,  but you can figure it out!  Peterson's acolytes can now buy t-shirts which say "Top Lobster!"  There's also one which says "White Lobster"...

Of course evolution is much more complicated than just putting some quick equal-sign between lobsters and humans, as this marine biologist points out.

And, as an side, this is a good review of Peterson's book, with a title about lobsters.

***  Peterson's other views are firmly right-wing, too, with a few small variations.  The Alt Right loves him, by the way.   Scott's take on other aspects of the Flanagan piece also covers some of this.
   

 

Short Posts About Women's Issues, 8/10/18.

1.  A Japanese medical school has employed a unique solution to the female dominance in higher education:

A Japanese medical school deliberately cut women’s entrance test scores for at least a decade, an investigation panel said on Tuesday, calling it a “very serious” instance of discrimination, but school officials denied having known of the manipulations.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has made a priority of creating a society “where women can shine”, but women in Japan still face an uphill battle in employment and face hurdles returning to work after childbirth, a factor behind a falling birthrate.
The alterations were uncovered in an internal investigation of a graft accusation this spring regarding the entrance exam for Tokyo Medical University, sparking protests and anger.
Lawyers investigating bribery accusations in the admission of the son of a senior education ministry official said they concluded that his score, and those of several other men, were boosted “unfairly” - by as much as 49 points, in one case.

They also concluded that scores were manipulated to give men more points than women and thus hold down the number of women admitted, since school officials felt they were more likely to quit the profession after having children, or for other reasons.

Note that last sentence.  I have just been reading all those right-wing MRAs and Jordan Peterson types who argue that women really prefer to stay at home with the children.

And if they don't, well, Japan has a second solution  (other than altering test scores) to that one, too:  Make working after having children very difficult for women, due to discrimination against mothers.  

Some Finnish Fun

This cartoon rings such a bell with me.

Why has a socially awkward stick figure from Finland caught on with young people in China's crowded cities? https://t.co/UyQ6lw2zNP

— The New York Times (@nytimes) August 3, 2018

The hat the cartoon stick figure Matti wears is a traditional men's beanie, with associations to Kalevala.  Well, I associate it with that and the playing of kantele.

Brothers Under The Skin. On ISIS And US Alt Right Movements.

 (Sarah Wasko, Media Matters)



The Proud Boys participated in Saturday's fascist demonstration in Portland Oregon, which made me have another look at the principles of such Alt Right movements as the Proud Boys:  Their contempt for women, their adulation of white nationalism/supremacy and their  love of physical violence.

If I replace the "white nationalism/supremacy" bit in the above sentence with "extremist Islam", that amended sentence would also neatly summarize the principles of ISIS.

Both types of movements have strong hate policies and rankings against "outsiders", both movements are willing to use violence, and both movements want to limit women's activity to reproduction, childcare and housekeeping*.  The Proud Boys, for example, say that they adulate housewives**.

Essentialist or religious arguments about women's proper roles as limited to the home are used in all such movements. The sexes tend to be segregated and men rank higher than women.

There are differences, too.  ISIS is a much larger movement and one explicitly based on religious tenets, while the various Alt Right movements are either right-wing Christian or secular,  and much smaller. Estimates about the number of, say,  active Proud Boys hover around six thousand.

ISIS has also been far more violent and far more misogynistic in its actions than, say,  the Proud Boys movement (perhaps because the latter has not had the power to act out its principles).  And in the imaginary global religious warfare the two movements would be on opposite sides.

Today's Bad Poem

Here it is:

The stifling heat
it has me beat
I wish I weren't
made out of meat

Who is Q? Or The Latest Right-Wing Fringe Conspiracy Revisited.

Remember Pizzagate?  That was just a prelude in the genre of truly nutty right-wing conspiracy theories.  Now meet the Storm*, the perfect storm, the conspiracy theory to rule over all right-wing conspiracy theories!

It explains the whole world!  The Las Vegas massacre was an inside job.  The Mueller investigation is just a cover for an actual investigation of Hillary Clinton and other similar vampire bitches and godless commies, and will end with most of the liberal-left in American politics in prisons.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy is alive, leading the conspiracy (and probably cohabiting with Elvis), and any day now Trump will institute a coup which ends the power of the deep state in American politics.  He is protected by the military, because the FBI and the CIA are part of the deep state, and it's the military which will launch the coup on his behalf and on the behalf of all those who believe in the Storm.

MS-13 murdered Seth Rich.  The people ruling the world through deep state in the US  might be the Rothschilds or the Illuminati, depending on the specific nuttiness and bigotry among the hoax creators.  And don't worry, pedophilia, as speculated in the Pizzagate is still part of this vast intertwined explanation and it is still run by the political left and the Hollywood left.

We hear about this wonderfully inane conspiracy theory now, because several people in the audiences of Trump's election campaign rallies (they never end as his need for adulation is a bottomless well) wore t-shirts with a large Q in the front or held up signs saying "We Are Q."

To understand both the roots of this conspiracy theory and to see why it's rubbish, to begin with, we need to understand what Q is.  And for that we need to go back to last October:

And Yet More Tax Relief For The Very Rich?

It still shocks me (though it shouldn't) how blatantly the Republican Party caters for the very wealthiest among us.  The Trump Reich has already lowered taxes for the super-wealthy (and thereby further increased the income inequality in this country).  Now the administration is trying to relieve that terrible tax burden* of the very rich even more:

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) this week introduced legislation that would reduce the amount people pay in capital gains taxes, as conservatives press the Treasury Department to take action on the topic.
The bill from Nunes, a senior member of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, would index capital gains to inflation. He argues that the measure would build off the tax-cut law President Trump signed last year and incentivize investment.
“This bill will continue the tax-cutting trend that began with the tax relief bill last year,” Nunes said in a statement Friday. “This is a common-sense reform that will remove an unjust tax, contribute to economic growth, and help both large and small investors keep more of their own money.”

The bolds are mine.

Note the word "relief" and "tax-cutting" and that silly reference to "small investors."  The truth is that capital gains almost completely accrue to the wealthy:

By dollars, more than 75% of capital gains tax are paid by taxpayers reporting income over $1,000,000. Just over 1% of capital gains taxes are paid by taxpayers reporting income of $100,000 or less. “Therefore,” writes Burman, “the most well-off would reap the largest benefits from a policy change to index the basis of capital assets.”

So what is the "common sense" Nunes sees in this reform?  Probably the idea that people shouldn't be taxed on that part of their capital gains which are due to nothing but inflation.  His bill would index capital gains to inflation.

That's common sense, right.  So how about doing the same when taxing interest income, dividends, earned income and so on?  All those, after all, can also be affected by inflation.

Likewise, if we want coherent government policies about taking inflation into account, why don't we index-link the countable assets thresholds** for those seeking Supplementary Security Income (SSI)?  This was suggested in a letter to the editor in the New York Times. 

And, indeed, my own check of the letter-writer's information showed that the countable asset thresholds were the same in 1989 as they are in 2018 ($2000 for an individual and $3000 for a couple).  Clearly, those thresholds should be index-linked, too, if capital gains are.

What about the contribution to economic growth Nunes sees in his proposal to index-link capital gains?  Well, at least one study suggests that the effects would be at most minor.

Sigh. All this is happening behind the curtain while on the stage capers the clown prince of this country, one Donald Trump.

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*  It's as if the Republican Party is a nurse doing triage at a hospital Emergency Room, and that nurse always prioritizes rich people's slight colds or zits over poorer people's strokes or heart attacks or broken bones.  Real nurses don't do that, but then they are not paid by the Koch and Mercer families for services rendered.

If you want to get why I am angry at all the tax-relief jargon, well, this is why.

** This site explains what these assets are.  For someone to qualify for SSI, that person's countable assets must not exceed the threshold value.

Sharing the Limelight? Women in the Film Industry

The USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative's newest annual study is out.  That study examines diversity of various types in the film industry.  This year's study analyzed both 1,100 films from 2007 to 2017 and one hundred films from 2017 (1).

The main findings of the study are that women's share of speaking roles  has barely budged in the last ten years.  It still hovers around 30%.  But women do far worse behind the cameras than in front of them:  In 2017 only 10.1% of writers and 7.3% of directors were female.  And though women were 18.2% of producers in that year, they were less than one percent of composers.

Scott Pruitt's Resignation Letter And Career As Signs of Non-Normality

Scott Pruitt's resignation letter from the Trump administration was published several weeks ago, but it's preposterous enough to analyze even later.

It's an adoring love letter, one that an abject and fearful underling would send to a dictator who has the power of life and death over that underling.

Here are some snippets:

Truly, your confidence in me has blessed me personally

Your courage, steadfastness and resolute commitment  

I count it a blessing to be serving you in any capacity

 I believe you are serving as President today because of God’s providence. 

Your Faithful Friend,

Scott Pruitt

This, of course, was written by a guy who was looting the EPA while pretending to administer to it.  It's not customary practice to appoint looters to run the government, and it's not normal practice to write resignation letters of the above type.  We should all remember what was normal in the past, because if we forget that, democracy will wither away.

Under a normal administration Pruitt would have been a major scandal.  Under this administration he is just the scandal of one day, and another scandal will turn up the following day.  But do remember that this should not be normal.




 

Greetings From Your Average Opportunist Parasite

That opportunistic parasite, my dear readers, would be me, and probably quite a few of you.

The international Men's Rights conference was held this year in London, England, with some two hundred participants from twenty-four countries.  Paul Elam, the founder of the website Voice for Men, greeted the conference via a video link:

After a speech in which he described women as “opportunistic parasites in the lives of men”, he was greeted to rapturous applause.
“Society piles complete and total responsibility on men for its existence” he said. “Almost all the sacrifice, of blood and sweat and of life that is required to keep the world turning, to keep us living in relative comfort and safety, is male sacrifice. Women won’t do it. Women can’t do it.”

This would be so utterly hilarious* if Elam's woman-hating words weren't aimed at half the humanity, that half which actually reproduces the society, with a lot of sacrifice, blood and sweat, and then also plays as many other roles as it is allowed in keeping that world turning.

But it's not hilarious.  Here is a man spouting an extreme form of misogyny, and the overarching reaction from others is a yawn, a shoulder shrug, or someone muttering that this is just a small group of weirdos so better ignore them. 

No other form of bigotry gets such an out, and no article describing other forms of bigotry would then branch into asking if those forms of bigotry might actually be justified by some unfairness done to the bigots.**

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*  I'm seeing myself as a large snake-like leech, swimming in the societal waters, ready to attach my suction cups to any male who happens to pass by.  Then I'm set for life and no longer need to work for money or beg for pittances by blogging.  And when I have sucked one guy dry I will just move to the next one, with bank accounts full of alimony money and my chocolate reserves high.  

** I don't mean that men wouldn't have any just causes they should work for (though, in fact, feminism works for many of those, too).

I mean that no other group claiming to work for social justice is treated the way these particular men's rights activists are in writing:  The mainstream (first wrote mainsteam) articles usually begin by describing  the activists' red-hot hatred of women but then segue into trying to understand that rage as maybe just a little justified.  An article on, say, anti-semitism would never ever do that. 

On Evidence and US Politics. The M&M Theory

My many flaws do not include irrationality.  If anything, I'm too boringly granola-conscious, brain-addicted and robotic in my writing, and too conscientious not to double-check sources when I write about something*.

So it has been a hard lesson for me to finally understand that rational arguments and proper interpretation of evidence have almost no role to play in American politics which is as tribal as the rooting for a football, basketball or baseball team.

1.  Here's a parable of what I found yesterday while surfing some Trump supporters' Facebook pages:

Think of opening a bag of M&Ms (or Smarties, for some of you) and spreading them out on a saucer.  This is what you would see: