In The Year Of the Whistle-Blower. Or How The Game Is Played.

1. I've been glued to my seat in this imaginary movie theater/cinema, clutching my bag of imaginary popcorn,  mesmerized by the Story Of The Whistle-Blower which is the title of the film playing on the world screen. 

It's convenient to treat the whole story as a fictional tale, one written, produced and directed by Donald Trump.  Then we don't have to face reality, which, however,  will face us:

The still-most-powerful country on this planet is run by a narcissist who sees nothing wrong in asking Ukraine to get him information on Biden's son that might help him in the 2020 elections (should Biden be his opponent then), and to do that asking by at least implicitly holding back the military aid the US (i.e., we, the people) has promised Ukraine in case that help isn't forthcoming*.

A narcissist such as Trump sees nothing wrong in any of that.   To him the interests of the country and his own interests are  identical**, and that merging gives him the permission to openly (and legally!)  pursue his own interests in all aspects of the job.

It's not the case that Trump engages in all sorts of impeachable offenses fully aware of what might be wrong, or even criminal, in his acts. This is because inside his own head he cannot commit a wrong.  It's simply not possible.  Given that, all criticisms of him are fake news created by crooked people who are out to get him, as in "presidential harassment" or in "the single greatest witch-hunt in American history".

Trump's many weirdly petulant tweets can also be interpreted from the narcissism angle.  For instance, on September 24 he tweeted:

Such an important day at the United Nations, so much work and so much success, and the Democrats purposely had to ruin and demean it with more breaking news Witch Hunt garbage. So bad for our Country!

But those tweets are not really weird, coming from a narcissist.  Rather, they are quite logical.  That tweet, for instance, expresses the narcissistic injury Trump felt because he didn't get the public accolades for his UN speech he felt he deserved.  That is what hurt him, enough to go on Twitter about it.

You may by now be tired about all the posts I have written concerning Trump's narcissism.  I believe understanding it is crucial for anyone who wants to, say, predict what Trump might do next.  Still, I will pipe down on that topic in the future.  But I will never stop pointing out that millions of American voters decided that a narcissist running the country would be a great idea.

2.  The august New York Times has chosen to treat the identity of the whistle-blower as a crossword puzzle.  They give us the clues, we can try to figure out who that person is.  Such fun, and a great scoop for the Times, right?

I find that a serious breach of journalistic ethics.  It might take me a few hours to narrow down the list of possible subjects to a few names, but it won't take anywhere near that long for those inside the White House to nail the correct person.

3.  And what about the reactions from the Republicans in the Congress?

I was talking to a friend about the tribalism in American politics and made my usual comparison to the tribalism of the fans of various sports teams.  The fans of Red Sox, say,  hate the NY Yankees and want to see them suffer, and vice versa.  But I got confused and compared US politics to a game between the Red Sox (baseball) and the Patriots (American football)!

Which turned out to be one of those light bulb moments, because the two parties, indeed, play different political games, in my sincere opinion.  The current crop of Congressional Republicans play a game of win-at-any-cost and a game of ignore-the-rules-and-shoot-the-umpire, while many Congressional Democrats seem to be playing the game of can-I-find-the-stadium.












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*  "A nice little country you have there.  It would be too bad if something happened to it."

** He is not the first ruler to think so, of course.  Apres moi, le deluge.

Impeachment. Take #238.

I put that take #238 in the title, because in a more rational world Trump would have been impeached for umpteen times already.  Maybe not 238, but a lot. His apparent "unimpeachability" has been a thorn festering on the side of our ailing democracy*.

We shall see if this most recent revelation makes any difference:

President Trump told his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, to hold back almost $400 million in military aid for Ukraine at least a week before a phone call in which Trump is said to have pressured the Ukrainian president to investigate the son of former vice president Joe Biden, according to three senior administration officials.
...
Trump on Monday repeated his denial of doing anything improper and insisted that his July 25 conversation with Zelensky was “a perfect phone call.” He also hinted that he may release a transcript of it.

White House spokesman Hogan Gidley said late Monday that the allegations were false. “But because the media wants this story to be true so badly, they’ll once again manufacture a frenzy and drive ignorant, fake stories to attack this president,” Gidley said.

It appears the Ukrainian leader came away from the discussion with a different impression. Murphy, who spoke with Zelensky during an early September visit to Ukraine, said Monday that the Ukrainian president “directly” expressed concerns at their meeting that “the aid that was being cut off to Ukraine by the president was a consequence” of his unwillingness to launch an investigation into the Bidens.

The bolds are mine.

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* If this president (who is determined to piss on all the rules and principles of democracy and also on the laws he doesn't like) is not impeached, why would any future president ever fear impeachment?   If the evidence in the second part of the Mueller report (which showed many counts of Trump obstructing justice) was insufficient for acting, then what evidence ever will be sufficient? The precedent this would create gives a bad prognosis for that ailing patient, our puny democracy.

I get that the Republicans have the power to keep Trump in power, and I also get that when/if the impeachment effort fails, Trump will use that failure as proof of his innocence.  I even get that to predict the possible electoral consequences of the dreadful choices the Democrats in the Congress face is extremely hard, and for those reasons I'm glad that making that choice is not my job.

But democracy is worth preserving, and with great power should come great responsibilities.  Trump treats his job as if it's for his own benefit alone and tweets about it as if he was still a reality television star.

On The Dangers Of Inadvertent Plagiarism

I recently saw this 1569 portrait, painted by Antonis Mor, and immediately felt that it looked familiar in a very odd way.

Here's why:  It looks like the pattern of an embroidery I made more than ten years ago:

At the time I liked to relax by creating weird things out of fabric, thread, costume jewelry and so on.  My supplies came from yard sales and flea markets and the Salvation Army stores.

The above "portrait" is a companion to another one, both shown together below (apologies for the flash in the picture and the dirty glasses on the pictures):

The idea behind them was to provide "important ancestor pictures" for people who don't own castles or manor houses, but who would like to pretend that their ancestors belonged to European nobility or even some royal family.

It's an Echidne joke, and may not be that funny for others.  In any case, I hung them in my bathroom for a few years.

Now why I write about this is because my portraits are not direct copies of any paintings*, but were created based on my recollections of all the paintings I had seen, either in museums or in books or on television.  In particular, I did NOT copy that Antonis Mor picture when I created my gentleman.

But if you were shown just the first two pictures in this post, and you were on a jury tasked to decide whether Echidne is a plagiarist, you would conclude that the evidence condemns her.  Or me. 

Even I would agree that the prosecution would have proven their case, and I know that the embroidery was not a direct copy of Mor's painting, in the sense that plagiarism means.

I certainly must have seen that painting earlier, and stored it in the dusty attic of my memory, so that when I designed the embroidery the pattern came from that memory attic.  But without any awareness that it was the memory of one single painting!

This frightens me:  I realized how extremely easy it could be to plagiarize someone else's writings without at all intending to do so.  But it also makes me quite elated:  Somewhere, inside our memories, we may have exact pictures of everything we have ever seen.

Now to figure out how to get all of those into our awareness.

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*  The lady was, however, largely put together from various paintings of queen Elizabeth I and of some other royal queens and princesses.

In case you are interested in such things, all the fabric in the clothing of the pair comes from one silk scarf I bought at Sally Army, the other bits (faces, hair and the unfortunate beard) are from my old tops, and the jewelry is from yard sales.

Today's Political Thoughts: On Electability, The Use of Synecdoches in Politics And Harmless Fun

1.  Isn't it funny that Warren's DNA debacle left a giant scar on her* while Trump saying that his ancestors came from Sweden (when they did not) mattered not at all?

Trump's history is so full of all sorts of misdeeds that the smaller ones get ignored, while the one clear problem people have been able to unearth in Warren's history is repeatedly mentioned.  As repetition is the mother of learning, well, this works very well for Trump and his party.

Mirror, Mirror On The Wall

The only psychologically healthy way to interact with a narcissist is not to.  But when the president of a powerful country is a narcissist* we don't have that luxury of total disengagement.  We are all strapped into the seats of a roller-coaster built and controlled by one Donald Trump, his narcissistic injuries and the immature rages those create.

We live in a world where a mental two-year old with those famous Terrible Twos temper tantrums rules over us, if we let him.  So we can't let him, but that means we have to play his games because we can't put him on timeout.

This makes me so very tired**.  I imagine him going "mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the greatest of them all?" and if the answer displeases him, well, someone, somewhere, is going to get attacked, probably out of all proportion.

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*  This article from early August gives several examples of Trump's narcissistic behavior and puts it into the context of being the president of one of the most powerful countries on this planet.

** And probably others are tired of the need to cope with his narcissism, too.

It's particularly difficult for those of us who would like to do policy analyses, because it takes place within the usual right-wing political plots:  Cut taxes for the rich, kill Social Security and all transfers to the poor, give money to the oil industry and so on. 

Those plots also include that weird Republican yearning to invade certain Middle Eastern countries while kissing the asses of other Middle Eastern countries. 

How is Trump's concern with nothing but his own ego going to play in that context?

You tell me, because I have no idea.  So far the one good thing about Trump has been his reluctance to go to war for no good reason.  I hope nobody learns to manipulate his ego into wanting to invade Iran, the next country on the conservatives' to-invade list.

The Obliteration of Alpha Males. Or What Tucker Carlson Fears Might Happen In American Politics?

Tucker Carlson believes that a patriarchal system is required for any society to exist.

I know this, because he invited the anti-feminist Heather Mac Donald, one of the weirdest members of the gals' auxiliary to the white supremacist movement, to his show again, to talk about the terrible oppression of men in the US.  Especially about the dreadful plight of the alpha males:

HEATHER MAC DONALD: We're living in a culture that is trying to obliterate alpha males and create an alpha female.
...

We have to be very realistic that what we are creating here is a systemic culture of contempt towards male success and that's got to have an effect.
TUCKER CARLSON (HOST): How does this help women, in the end?

MAC DONALD: Well it only helps women if you believe the idiocy that strong women can do it all. It certainly doesn't help children because children need mothers and fathers. But it seems like most females are simply involved in this crusade based on anger and resentment that they have to not just be equal but to crush men and that is absurd. There are male virtues of chivalry, entrepreneurial drive, risk taking that have given us civilization and if we continue to disparage those Tucker, we're going to have no civilization left.

CARLSON: That's exactly right. Gender roles are the building blocks of any society and we've let a small group of unhappy people destroy ours and tamper with the formula.

I adore these kinds of rambling and hallucinatory exchanges (1), because they reveal the underlying beliefs of our Tucker.  

The "alpha male" terminology she uses in that quote is common on the various misogyny online sites where it was initially borrowed from wolf packs (2).  But wolf packs actually have both an "alpha male" AND an ""alpha female"!  Or rather, the leaders of the pack tend to be the parents or grandparents of the wolves in the pack.

What's she trying to achieve with that first assertion?  She is trying to frighten the conservative men (and their henchwomen) in Carlson's audience by suggesting that feminists are not interested in the equality of the sexes, but in turning the still-everywhere-common patriarchies upside-down.  This would mean that men might then be treated the way patriarchies, at their worst, have treated women!

Now that is stuff for nightmares!  In those men would be gelded, men would be locked inside their homes, men would be required to dress modestly, to keep their eyes lowered, and all gate-keeping about sex would be their responsibility.  The leadership, in all fields, would belong to women, and men would really have to prove their worth before they would be allowed to tiptoe in the corridors of power.

I had fun with that paragraph.  Rest assured, my sweet and erudite readers that none of the above has any realistic chance of happening.  Indeed, I don't know a single feminist who even desires such an outcome. 

The above exchanges between Carlson and Mac Donald are not really about gender roles (though those can be very problematic in themselves (3)), but about the desirability of patriarchal arrangements.

Both Carlson and Mac Donald equate civilizations with patriarchy, and then imply that we cannot have the former without the latter.   Carlson appears to argue that we can't even have a society without strict gender roles.

Mac Donald also believes that certain virtues belong to men alone. Those would be chivalry, entrepreneurial drive and risk-taking.  She then warns us away from disparaging those virtues, because that, my friends, will take us right back to the stone age.

That warning looks weird to me.  Do feminists routinely go out of their way to criticize entrepreneurial drive and risk-taking?  I have never seen that happen.

Besides, both entrepreneurial drive and risk-taking are human characteristics, not limited to the male sex, though often seen as such because of the gendered lens we see them through (4), and I see no reason why they would somehow disappear without patriarchal gender roles.  Chivalry, on the other hand, might vanish because it would transmute itself to plain common courtesy toward all (5).

Sigh.  I shouldn't have this Pavlov's dog reaction of needing to correct all the shitty stuff Tucker Carlson spews into the world.  My work changes nothing.

He and his guests are not talking about facts or looking for evidence but simply pushing the fear buttons of the right-wingers who watch that show.  Those people don't read here and in any case the very topic appears impervious to intellectual arguments. 

So initially I was planning not to write on any of this (I still have duty-free chocolate left, as an alternative way to pass time).

But then I asked myself if the timing of this topic on Carlson's show has anything at all to do with the rise of Elizabeth Warren's approval ratings among the Democratic presidential contenders for 2020 elections, because she sure qualifies as an "alpha female" to people like Carlson and Mac Donald?  And it would make sense that our Tucker would start injecting lots of subconscious fear of uppity women into our political conversations right about now?

So I decided to write this post, just in case.

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(1)  It's not being concerned about the problems American men and boys might face today that I see hallucinatory here.  It's that both Mac Donald and Carlson blame feminism and attempts to increase gender equality for, pretty much, the end of civilization.  Those nightmarish monsters are not real.  And neither is happiness and success necessarily a zero-sum game between the sexes, the way both Carlson and Mac Donald see them. 

Besides, focusing on the feminist monsters  makes us not address the real reasons why working-class men are more hit by the loss of jobs than working-class women are,  or why men and boys, especially those belonging to ethnic and racial minorities, are dropping out of higher education.  Ironically, at least some of the reasons for these real problems probably lie in old patriarchal gender norms.  See my Jordan Peterson book review for more on some of those.

(2)  More on the roots of the conservative concept of the alpha male, here.

(3)  Because distinct, rigid and unequally valued gender roles are, of course, one of the main ways in which the subjugation of women was historically accomplished, and also the main way it can still be maintained.

(4)  To elaborate:

We tend to see risk-taking and competitiveness more easily in certain domains and not in others, and the ones where we see it most clearly are domains where men have traditionally been most active, such as finance and sports.

Risk-taking by women is common in some domains.  Women take more social risks than men, though we don't see those activities as risk-taking.  Neither do we see willingly accepting the risks involved in pregnancy and childbirth as risk-taking behavior the way we see such behavior in, say, sky-diving.  Cosmetic surgery and other body modifications are risky endeavors more common for women than for men, too.

And certain behaviors, such as engaging in one-night stands with strangers are objectively riskier for women than for men. This means that we cannot directly compare men's and women's willingness to take sexual risks without controlling for the fact that the real risk levels differ. 

Then people, in general, are more likely to take risks and to compete in fields they know well, probably because greater knowledge actually reduces the amount of real risk one is taking.

This is partly why studies in the field of finance often find that women are more risk-averse, on average, than men.  The willingness to take risks rises with one's knowledge of a field, and women are still less knowledgeable about the field of high finance than men, on average. 

Finally, to study gender differences in entrepreneurial traits we should control for the fact that getting outside financing and startup support is harder for female-run firms than it is for male-run firms, on average.  That fewer women are entrepreneurs might be because of such obstacles, not because they have less taste for entrepreneurship.

This long explanation doesn't mean that if we fixed all those problems in comparing men's and women's traits we would find no difference.  But we should first fix all those problems before making the kinds of statements Mac Donald makes in the quote I use in this post.

(5)  The misogyny sites talk about the end of chivalry as a veiled threat, something along the lines that if women refuse their inferior position in the society then the men on those sites see no reason to be nice to any woman.








  

The Opioid Epidemic. Beware Of The American Penchant For Over-Correction.

An initial over-correction of newly apparent social, economic and health problems is a particularly American cultural characteristic. (1)  It has been compared to the movements of a pendulum which swings from one extreme position (where the society completely ignores an important problem) to the opposite extreme position (where the society attacks that problem with all possible weaponry, not caring about the collateral damage this causes).

That first wild swing is ultimately followed by the pendulum moving back and, ideally,  settling somewhere in the middle where the problem,  as well as its cures and their costs,  are viewed through a more realistic lens. But that first wild swing should not happen.

A well-known example (2) of this pattern is the life cycle of the so-called crack baby epidemic of the 1980s:

For those of you who may not recall, the mid-1980s were rife with hysteria surrounding cocaine--in particular crack cocaine--and the huge social toll it was taking on the U.S. New and little-understood, crack was associated with all kinds of social ills, including rising crime rates, poverty, and (far more nebulously) the escalating HIV/AIDS crisis. But for a moment, the "crack baby" alarm sounded the loudest--the country and its social system was about to be completely overwhelmed with a generation of babies who, due to prenatal exposure to crack cocaine, would be born with all kinds of mental deficiencies and health problems.

That generation of "crack babies" never emerged. Crack, which was described by some medical doctors as being as devastating to an unborn fetus as heroin, turned out to be less damaging than alcohol (which is far more widely used and carries greater risks for long-term fetal damage). The symptoms early research associated with "crack babies" turned out to be the same as the symptoms for any prematurely born baby.

The false belief in a terrible epidemic was created by the interaction of early medical research which utterly exaggerated the damage crack caused in babies with an issue which appeared to wreak havoc among the most vulnerable among us: tiny infants.  It was exacerbated by sensationalist writing and by the ease with which the American society resorts to mother-blaming, and even more so when those mothers are black and poor (3).

Some Things Were Better in the Olden Days. Like Airplane Seats And US Presidents.

1.  Take commercial airplane seats.  They weren't always stacked against each other like crates for some cumbersome product in a warehouse.   The seats were wider and offered more legroom.

You have probably guessed that I whine about this because of a recent personal experience and you are correct.  I sat in the seventeen-inch-wide middle seat in a three-seat row a few days ago, for six long hours, while contemplating the strong shoulders and arms and the sturdy hips of the passengers on my immediate right and left.

I could contemplate them because the hips shared some of my seat, and because the arms completely possessed the (theoretically shared) armrests*.  Those armrests, by the way, could not be raised in that particular area of that particular plane.

So mild agony ensued.  I'm slim (snakes are) and have never much thought about airline seat comfort.  But there's something about sitting for hours, as if wrapped in invisible duct tape to create a narrow vertical bundle, that concentrates the mind on personal discomfort.  Trying to scratch my nose required elaborate squirming and apologies, and then I developed a terrible desire to spring up and do jumping jacks in the aisle.

Which I resisted.  But the experience made me read about airline seats once safely back at the Snakepit Inc., and I found this hilarious explanation why the shrunk seat space doesn't matter at all:

Boeing concedes that seat pitch has been reduced (by three inches, on average, for long-haul flights, it says). But it added: “Today’s seat pitch and seat design with composite materials provide similar, if not improved, comfort from the bulky metallic structure and foam-dense designs used in the past. In general, the new seat designs and materials provide two to three inches of ‘equivalent pitch’ over older seat designs.” 

That's about the legroom, not about the seat width.  What it really means is that now the seats are as thinly padded as church pews.  So we haven't really lost as much legroom as it seems, because we have also lost the padding in the seats**!

2.  Presidents were also better in the olden days (even when they were terrible presidents and carried out horrible policies), because their mental age wasn't somewhere around two-and-a-half years, and because if they were malignant narcissists they covered it up much better. 

We are now used to a president who spends most of his time golfing, watching Fox News and fighting personal and nasty Twitter wars with people who have little political power, such as popular entertainers, just because they have insulted his ego and so caused one of his narcissistic rages. 

But even in that context Trump's so-called Sharpie-gate should have shocked us:

Here, in case you missed it, is the original claim Trump made on Sunday and continues to defend: “In addition to Florida—South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, will most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated.” The Alabama part of this was untrue, and the Birmingham National Weather Service immediately corrected the record on Sunday, operating under the understandable assumption that Alabamians receiving accurate information about a looming natural disaster mattered more than the president’s pride. Trump, unaccustomed to correction, disagreed. Since then, it didn’t hit but it could have has become his mantra, as he tweeted about it for days before the Wednesday Sharpie incident that will live in infamy, when he presented an official NOAA map doctored with black ink to make the hurricane appear to be headed toward Alabama.

The sentence I have bolded in that quote is the important one, because for Trump nothing matters more than his pride and ego.  That is dangerous in the president of a country, not only because he is willing to cause harm to his own people should his pride require that, but because it's a characteristic foreign powers can easily exploit.

3.   There's one more thing which was better in the olden days, and that thing nicely connects the previous two segments having to do with overseas flights and US presidents:  It is discussing American politics while in Europe. 

That used to be quite fun.  Now it consists of people demanding to know how we (I) could ever have let Trump happen*** and what we (I) are going to do to get rid of him, because they themselves can't affect that, even though Trump affects their lives, too. 




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* I hasten to add that it wasn't their fault.  They had nowhere else to stow their arms.

**  I know, of course, why airlines do all of the above. Passengers are, on the whole, price sensitive, so cutting quality works better than price increases in the search for maximum airline profits.  Still, all the in-flight information videos about safety depict people happily relaxing in much more spacious seats.  That's false advertizing.

*** Of course only after they have carefully probed the possibility that I might be a Trump-weirdo myself.  When I assure them that I am not, the relief is always visible.

Online Pornography As The New Sex Education?

The possible relationship between misogynistic types of pornography and possible real world sexual violence is difficult to study for many reasons:

There's the-chicken-and-the-egg problem in trying to determine the direction of causality if a correlation between violent porn consumption and committing violent sexual acts is found.  Perhaps violent men consume violent pornography?  Or could it be that violent pornography creates violence in some men who wouldn't have been that way without it. 

There's also the more general problem of how to pin down the impact of one cause (here the consumption of misogynistic porn) on general societal trends when so many other possible causes are changing at the same time.*

That's a preamble to my views about Olga Khazan's June article in the Atlantic Monthly which asks if online pornography is now operating as an extremely warped form of sex education, one which teaches young people terrible ideas about what women like in sex.

On Buttermilk. A Re-Posting.

1.  My grandmother believed that buttermilk was the healthiest drink a child could have.  I hated the taste with the fire of a thousand suns.  Because she was a clever woman, one summer she served me the first strawberries from her garden in buttermilk.  Because I was a sneaky child, I waited until she left the kitchen for a moment and then rinsed the buttermilk off the strawberries.

2.  If you are so inclined, you can buy two different sorts of buttermilk in Finland.  One is the kind you can buy here, the other, called "long buttermilk" consists of strands which are cousins to snot.  If you upend the container, the strands dangle menacingly in front of your eyes.

3.  As you may have figured out, I would never date buttermilk.  But I love the buttermilk cake!  Go figure.

Here's the recipe, in metric units (sorry, American bakers).  If you have a measuring cup with both Imperial and metric units, you can use that one.  If you don't have one of those, my translations are in parentheses.*

Ingredients:

2.25 deciliters of buttermilk (0.95 cups)
a drop of cream (tablespoonful)
1.5 teaspoons of baking soda
1.5 deciliters of white sugar (0.63 cups)
1.5 deciliters of molasses (0.63 cups)
1 teaspoon of ground cloves
2 deciliters of raisins (0.85 cups)
1.5 deciliters of melted butter (0.63 cups)
4.5 deciliters of white flour (1.9 cups)

Butter and flour a bundt pan**.  If you have them, use bread crumbs instead of flour.  Heat the oven to 350F (175C).  Mix all ingredients in the order given***.  Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake about an hour or until a toothpick or a fork comes out clean.

Two important observations:  The first time I made this by grinding the cloves right at the point of adding them I found out that one teaspoon of freshly ground cloves will take the top of your palate off and release smoke from your ears.  If you like that effect, go ahead and follow the recipe with freshly ground cloves.  I tend to use only half a teaspoon of them now, but one teaspoon is probably correct for pre-ground cloves.

Second, I detest raisins even more than I detest drinking buttermilk****.  I have never added them and the cake turns out just fine without them.  It would be turned into the garbage with them at the Snakepit Inc..

The cake is not very sweet, it gets better over a few days, and it's very nice with coffee.

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* I'm imagining someone carefully trying to follow those measurements!  My guess is that you can round off without anything horrible happening.

**  You could probably use some other kind of pan, too, such as one of those oblong bread pans.

*** This is what makes the cake so easy!  No beating, no kneading, no nothing, just add everything and mix.

****  They really are rabbit droppings.  People pretend that they are food.

Originally from here.

Heroes And Housewives. The Desired Sex Roles in Right-Wing Authoritarian Movements?

I wrote about the views that all the new right-wing authoritarian movements share about women in a post last December, and also a year ago, in August 2018.  Neither post, sadly, is out of date today.

That last August post, in particular, delves into the question why very different types of authoritarian movements, from ISIS to US Proud Boys, share the same basic view of women's proper roles. One possible theory:*

The very definition of ideal masculinity in the right-wing movements can also cause this:
The ideal man is a virile, violent and fit patriarch, and that ideal can be magnified and made sharper only by denying women any roles which are seen to infringe on male prerogatives.  This is because masculinity in those movements is defined as subtractive: It is what women should not be or what women cannot be.
Thus, to increase the power and space for men, it's necessary to enlarge the sphere of masculinity and to shrink the sphere of femininity.  In the most extreme right-wing movements women are strictly limited to their reproductive roles and kept out of public spaces.
That prescription may sound particularly appealing during times when those men who already have right-wing values feel that their dominance is threatened, that they are slipping down the rungs of societal power ladders. This could explain the appeal of far right movements to some American white men with conservative views, given the changes that outsourcing,  globalization and recent immigration are causing in the society.

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* Go to the original link to read the footnotes those paragraphs have attached to them.  I removed the asterisks here to make the quote look cleaner.  

Talk Is Cheap. Especially in Politics.

I'm increasingly convinced that we have too many debates about, say, bigoted speech and too few debates about the institutional and economic underpinnings which make bigotry so harmful.  It's not that the former aren't useful, but that the latter are so rare is truly worrying.

I wrote on this topic in 2017 while criticizing David Brooks.  It made sense to pick on him, because Brooks is the foremost representative of the argument that cultural differences Are Everything, that economic differences do not matter at all in our understanding of Republicans vs. Democrats or of blacks vs.whites and so on.

But the problem of over-focusing on linguistic and cultural questions is now wider than just Mr. Brooks, and it has spread to the political online left.

To see why that concerns me, just try to think how we could eradicate institutional racism in this country without reallocating resources*. 

Then ask yourself why we don't talk much about the resources which are needed, where they would come from,  and how they could be allocated to their best uses:  To schools in segregated black areas, to poorer schools in general, to health care clinics which cater for the low-income populations, to antenatal clinics in areas where black maternal mortality rates are extremely high.  And so on.

The material infrastructure for the differences many of us lament does matter.  With few exceptions (Elizabeth Warren comes to mind here), politicians don't address those questions adequately, either.  We really need to change that, especially when the Trump administration is exacerbating the already terrible income inequality in this country.

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* The same question can be asked of other types of -isms.  For instance, without paid parental leave and access to good quality daycare women, especially poor women, are handicapped in the labor market, as long as childcare is gendered. Expressing feminist sentiments doesn't alter the need for resource reallocation to such uses. 

On Incels. A Summary.

This post puts together my earlier writings on that frightening online-fueled movement (which, by the way, does not seem to be getting the kind of police and legal attention it should). 

Most of my writings are about the truly weird theories which the online incels (involuntarily celibate young men who believe that they are entitled to sex) hold as truth. 

This one tells us one economists theory about the redistribution of sex to incels (but only to men). 

This one looks at several flaws in the beliefs most incel sites seem to support. 

And this addresses the fundamental incel idea that 20% of heterosexual men get 80% of all heterosexual sex and the rest of the men are fucked for life.  Or not fucked for life, I guess.

What Women Are. Tucker Carlson And Andrew Sullivan Tell Us Ladiez.

This post on Tucker Carlson, about women's primitive nature, is funny.  Or at least I think it is funny, but then I wrote it.

Carlson's views on women are no different from those of another right-wing anti-feminists, Andrew Sullivan.  I wrote about the latter, too, though the result is not as funny.  It's still important.

...

I have written so much that I often come across posts in my archives I don't remember writing when I have all the proof that I did write them.  It can be an interesting experience, because then I read them as a stranger would.  Sometimes I am in awe of my prior self, sometimes not so much.

Poetry in Translation. An Ancient Re-Posting

(The post is from 2006!  It's so old that I can't get to it via the Blogger archives.)



Poetry translates very poorly, which is sad, because I have a great urge to share with you my Finnish favorites, especially Eino Leino's Nocturne.

But it's hellish to translate. I haven't given up yet, though I decided to begin with another poem by Leino, his Jumalien Keinu, or the Swing of Gods. Leino wrote it in 1902. He was a great poet, an alcoholic and pretty much a mess otherwise, too, and all this matters in understanding the poem.

Here it is in Finnish:

Jumalien keinu


Kenen korkeat jumalat keinuunsa ottavat kerta,
eivät ne häntä yhdessä kohden pidä,
he heittävät häntä
välillä taivaan ja maan -
siksi kuin järjen valon häneltä ne vievät.

Ja kuka maailmoiden mahdin kuuluttaja on,
hän tänään pilvien ääriä kulkee,
ja huomenna makaa
maassa niin syvällä
kuin koski, mi vuorten
kuilussa kuohuu.

Kuka keinussa jumalien keinuu,
ei hällä elon aika pitkä ole.
Syyn, syyttömyyden
hän huiput nähköön -
sitten tulkohon tumma yö.

And this is my attempt at a translation:

The Swing Of Gods


Whom the High Gods harness to their swing,
he will not be held in one harbor safe.
He will be tossed
between heaven and earth -
until the very light of reason is extinguished.

And whoever wishes to sing of the might of the worlds
may today dance on the edge of the clouds
yet tomorrow sink deep
into the earth, as deep
as the foaming rapids
in mountain caverns.

Who dares to swing in the swing of the gods
will not survive for long in this life.
Let utmost guilt
and utmost innocence dawn -
then let come the darkening night.

I had to choose between "he" and "she" for the purposes of translation and the sound of the poem demanded the first option. The original poem doesn't imply a gender for the person (because Finnish uses one gender-neutral third person singular pronoun), so "she" would be equally valid.

Sigh. It's impossible to get what fascinates me about this poem. Maybe if you read it aloud in Finnish?

Hilma af Klint

( Svanen (The Swan), No. 17, Group 9, Series SUW, October 1914 – March 1915.)*

Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) was a Swedish painter whose place in art history as one of the very earliest modern abstract painters is only now being established:

Hilma af Klint^{[needs Swedish IPA]} (October 26, 1862 – October 21, 1944) was a Swedish artist and mystic whose paintings were among the first Western abstract art.^[1] A considerable body of her abstract work predates the first purely abstract compositions by Kandinsky.^[2] She belonged to a group called "The Five", a circle of women who shared her belief in the importance of trying to make contact with the so-called "High Masters"—often by way of séances.^[3] Her paintings, which sometimes resemble diagrams, were a visual representation of complex spiritual ideas.

Why wasn't her work known in the past?  Why is she only now getting the attention she deserves?

The simple reason is that she didn't show her paintings during her lifetime, and stipulated that they shouldn't be shown until twenty years after her death**.

The Guggenheim Museum in New York showed a large number of her works from the fall of 2018 to April of 2019.  The two reviews of the exhibition I read are full of praise: 

Ben Davis:

I can’t help but agree with all the praise being heaped on the Guggenheim’s big Hilma af Klint show. It’s great, great, beyond great.
Assembled in a chronological progression up the museum’s spiral, the show feels like both a transmission from an unmapped other world and a perfectly logical correction to the history of Modern art—an alternate mode of abstraction from the dawn of the 20th century that looks as fresh as if it were painted yesterday.
It’s hard to quibble with the sheer level of painterly pleasure of af Klint’s sui generis style. So instead I’ll take a moment to focus on why this show feels so right for right now.

Roberta Smith:

If you like to hallucinate but disdain the requisite stimulants, spend some time in the Guggenheim Museum’s staggering exhibition, “Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future.” The museum’s High Gallery — the name has added resonance in this context — displays the show’s rapturous overture, a series of 10 paintings by af Klint (1862-1944), a little-known Swedish painter, modernist pioneer and erstwhile spiritualist. Collectively titled “The Ten Largest,” they may induce disorientation, not the least for the way they blow open art history.

These game-changing works envelop you in hues from dusty orange to pale pinks and lavenders, tumbling compositions of circles, spirals and pinwheels, and unfurling ribbonlike lines that sometimes form mysterious letters and words. The scale of the motifs and the paintings’ sheer size (10 feet by nearly 9 feet) invite you to step in and float away to the music of the spheres. That they are rendered in tempera on paper, lighter than oil on canvas but still quite painterly, contributes to their levitating power. In their wit, ebullience, multiple references and palette, “The Ten Largest” seem utterly contemporary, made-yesterday fresh. But prepare for label shock: they were created in 1907.

Do look at some of the photographs in the above links, to get the idea of the scale of those ten large paintings.

What's of interest to me is, of course, the question why art made by women is largely missing in all the art canons, including the Western one.  Smith addresses af Klint's role from that angle:

Her reappearance finally settles the question raised in Linda Nochlin’s 1971 essay, “Why have there been no great women artists?” There have been, but their achievements reach us in circuitous ways because of the obstacles that plague artists generally, and women particularly. These reasons — so complex and individual — have to do with the nature of artistic ambition, the psychic and material needs that make fulfillment possible and the extent to which these needs are met by society. Some artists, in response, create their own citadels of rationales, systems and even delusions — especially when exploring abstraction, which society had not yet accepted in art.

 

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*  This is not one of the large ten pictures, but part of her swan series.  You can see more of the series at the Wikipedia af Klint page.

** Although that is a sufficient reason for her obscurity in art history, it's not certain that she would have been less obscure had she exhibited her work at the time she created it:

Had Hilma af Klint presented her abstracted paintings at a museum or gallery during her lifetime, it is almost guaranteed they would have been criticized heavily. That af Klint made them at all is a testament to her successful navigation of the sexist world in which she lived. She chose to retreat from the male-dominated art world, find support in an esoteric religion that embraced female leadership and was founded by a woman (Helena Blatavsky), and present her work as having come to her through spirits (and thus escape criticisms of radical ideas coming from a female mind).
Af Klint is often compared to the artist Vasily Kandinsky (1866–1944), an early progenitor of abstract painting. Like Kandinsky, af Klint wanted her work to communicate a spiritual dimension. Unlike Kandinsky, she believed she operated as a medium for spirits and did not position her work specifically as a way of reimagining art. Like other artists of the time who were interested in similar spiritual movements, af Klint used art to understand existence and make the invisible visible.

 

Remember that her earliest abstract works were painted before the abstract works of Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich, the three painters usually viewed as fathers of modern abstract art. 

On Femininity and Masculinity

Masculinity and femininity are tricky concepts to define: They include both the way we interpret biological sex differences and the impact of societal rules and norms* attached to proper behavior for men and women.

Those societal rules and norms and stereotypes about masculinity and femininity serve (whether intended to do so or not) to keep women from reaching equality, and that's why critiquing masculinity and femininity is an important feminist task. 

I tackled that task in this post from last January and  in this post from last summer.

The reason for re-posting them is that I have realized that what I thought were old-fashioned views about the proper behavior for women are not as rare today as I had hoped**.  Not performing femininity or masculinity properly even has a special name in psychological jargon:  It's gender nonconforming. 

Wouldn't it be nice it it was just seen as human?

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* Even though anti-feminists often assume that all observed sex differences in behavior are innate, they are clearly affected by social and religious norms. Thus, what is proper feminine behavior in Iceland would not qualify in Saudi Arabia and so on.

** That hope was for obvious reasons.  If femininity, say, is defined as including characters such as humility, while masculinity includes characters such as leadership, it's hard to see how women, if required to perform femininity,  could ever compete in the labor markets and in politics and so on.

I want to stress that I am not discounting the importance of humility, gentleness, empathy and other characteristics associated with femininity.  Rather, I argue that societies code them as exclusively female and often punish women for not demonstrating them. (Men can also be punished for not demonstrating the characteristics assigned to masculinity). 

I believe all those characteristics are mostly human ones, even if different individuals have them in varying combinations.  Societies, however, tend to divide them rigidly into two sets of characteristics, one for men and for women.  The resulting rigid gender roles are not good for anyone but they are particularly bad as obstacles against women's full equality with men.

The Anti-Vaxxers: Rational Or Irrational? And The Anti-Gun-Control Folks?

I wrote about the rationality or irrationality of the anti-vaccination movement last March, and concluded that the decision not to have one's children vaccinated may be rational from a purely selfish and narrow point, but that it's deeply irrational from a wider societal point of view:

But the decision not to have one's children vaccinated can also be a rational one, though only on a narrowly selfish basis, at least as long as herd-immunity prevails:

If almost all the other parents in the area have vaccinated their own children and if the custom of vaccination is old enough so that almost all adults in the community have immunity, too, then the benefits from vaccinating your own children become negligible.  Your child won't get infected!

But any kind of vaccination may have harmful, though rare side-effects.  The private (based only on one's immediate family) comparison of benefits from the vaccination to its costs, both financial and possible health risks, would strongly suggest that for one particular family the choice not to vaccinate can be rational*.

Given that you are smart and erudite, my dear readers, you have already spotted the logical flaw in the above calculations:  If not getting the shots is narrowly rational for the one family in the above example, then it is narrowly rational for all the other families, too!** 

But once a sufficient number of families chooses not to vaccinate, whoops!  The herd immunity is gone, the infectious diseases return to the communities, and there will be deaths and very high health care costs and unnecessary pain and suffering***.

Economic theory looks at dilemmas like this as signs (1) that a particular market (here the market for vaccinations) is not producing the socially optimal level of disease prevention and that government intervention in that market may improve the outcomes.  The German government, for instance, is planning to make childhood measles vaccinations mandatory.

The recent mass murders in Gilroy, El Paso and Dayton, all carried out with assault weapons, made me ask if there are similarities between those who oppose vaccinations and those who oppose gun control, and if those similarities suggest that some kind of regulation of the relevant markets (vaccinations and guns) might be beneficial.

I believe I found one similarity.  The choice to acquire or to keep guns, and to fight gun control attempts for that reason, is made on the basis of a similar narrow private calculus.  That calculus does not assign any weight on the great social harm easy access to guns causes to others (2).  This might (2) be a reason for controlling the gun market and the excessive number of guns in the US.


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(1)  This is because the private comparison of benefits and costs excludes the benefits accruing to other individuals in the community, even though those are the benefits which ultimately end up protecting any unvaccinated children via herd immunity.  Thus, the private calculus results in too few children getting the vaccinations.

(2) That's the similarity between anti-vaxxers and anti-gun-control folks.  But then the two cases diverge, because anti-gun-control people fear all those guns already out there and see owning guns themselves as a necessary defense.

In other words, they don't just exclude the harm to others in their private calculus concerning gun ownership and anti-gun-control stances, but include the general easy access to guns as one reason why they, too, need to be armed to the teeth.

Insulin And The Pharmaceutical Industry

There have been recent cases where young people have died from Type I diabetes because of a combination of rapidly rising insulin prices and health insurance policies which have bad coverage.  The latest one is typical of the other cases I have read about*.

Now why exactly a drug that has been available for a very long time would rise in price as much as insulin has done in the recent decades is a tricky question, and the answers to that question intertwine with the US health insurance system which still does not guarantee that all people have insurance to cover life-saving medications adequately.

A proper response to that question would take a book, but this 2016 article lays out many of the reasons for the current steep insulin prices in the US.  I would add the clearly oligopolistic nature of the pharmaceutical industry.  It gives the individual firms a lot of price setting ability and results in the kinds of outcomes where small improvements in quality can be used to defend giant price increases, and where this happens:

The modern age of insulin innovation kicked off with Eli Lilly’s introduction of Humulin, in 1982. Using genetic engineering, biologists figured out a way to modify bacteria into tiny, specialized factories that could create insulin that matches the kind the human body produces. Allergic reactions became rare as more people used the newer version.

...

Humulin could be created in vats instead of harvested from cows or pigs, and it relieved doctors’ worries that the looming diabetes epidemic would cause a shortage.

“These were an incredibly efficient way of making insulin. We’d never run out; it would keep the prices under control,” Nathan said. “How that has changed.”

The Danish company Novo Nordisk began making its own bioengineered human insulin in 1991. Rather than lower the price, however, competition had an unusual effect: The list prices began to rise.

Bolds are mine.

The industry argues that list prices may have gone up but that the final prices consumers are paying have not.  But this doesn't seem to be the case anymore, at least for those young people who age out of their parents' health insurance policies and who cannot afford an equally generous policy themselves.

The industry also argues that pharmaceutical prices cannot be set without considering the high costs of research and development, most of which doesn't result in any new profit-making drugs but must still be paid for.

And that's true, as far as it goes.  Still, how high those prices should be depends on many other factors.  Clearly, both the  low price elasticity of demand and the level of market concentration are among them.  

What the former means, in plain language, is that people needing insulin to survive are willing to pay almost anything for it rather than go without, should there only be one source selling it.  What the latter means is that if firms co-ordinate their prices (which can happen in an oligopoly), the market in practice is approaching the case of only one source selling insulin.

We need to enforce anti-trust laws better in this industry as in so many others industries.

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*  In some cases individuals try to make their expensive insulin go further by lengthening the interval between the doses.  In other cases, individuals shift to a different older type of insulin which is cheaper, but harder to administer correctly.

How To Write About Politics In The Trump Era

I struggle with it.  I wrote about my concerns last January, and also in 2018, in a post about how the selection of information we receive may be biased but doesn't look like it.

And what I have recently learned about the games Trump makes us all play hasn't exactly helped.  Perhaps the only effective way to influence political thought in this chaotic era is through emotions?

So have a cat picture!

 Just kidding...