On Domestic Violence and Muslims in Holland

An article well worth reading on honor killings in Holland is this one. It begins:

--With Dutch Muslim extremists threatening her life, Somali-born Dutch parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali dove into hiding last November.

Days earlier, Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh had been ritually slaughtered in Amsterdam by extremists angered by his film, "Submission," about the abuse of Muslim women. Hirsi Ali, who wrote the film, the killer declared, would be next.

Now, two months later, she has returned to work, resuming her role as a beacon of hope for thousands of Dutch Muslim women. For in the shadows of the famously tolerant and peaceful Netherlands has long lurked a secret it took Hirsi Ali's courage to lay bare: Honor killings.

Because these killings long were kept hidden and unspoken in the Muslim community, the actual number of such murders that occur in Holland every year is unknown, though Hirsi Ali believes it could be as many as 50, possibly more. While Muslims account for less than 6 percent of the Dutch population, Muslim women are 60 percent of those in battered women's shelters. The government was reluctant to talk about the situation, Hirsi Ali says, because they believed tolerance required respecting different cultures and traditions.

Things are not quite as uncomplicated as they might seem from these beginning paragraphs. But the article brings to light the many problems that Holland faces in trying to negotiate multiculturalism on the one hand and women's rights on the other. The common feminist response to these problems is to empower the women within a specific subculture and to let them decide what equal rights they wish to achieve first, rather than have such rights determined from above or from outside. But in practice the empowerment of women who are isolated from the mainstream culture and sometimes even physically isolated is not an easy matter. And then there is the whole problem of how to persuade individuals who equate women's rights with Western imperialism and the gaining of such rights with the loss of cultural traditions.

For me human rights come first, and women's rights to be free of honor killings are part of human rights. Those parts of any tradition that dishonor humans should go.

Ted Turner on Hitler

Ted Turner has never heard of Godwin's law:

CNN founder Ted Turner, never shy about speaking his mind, has compared the ascent of Rupert Murdoch's Fox News to the rise of Adolf Hitler before the second world war.

"Adolf Hitler was more popular in Germany than the people who ran against him," he told a conference of programming executives in Las Vegas.

"Just because you are bigger doesn't mean to say you are right," he added. In a typically pugnacious speech, the 67-year-old billionaire also told the audience at the Natpe programme sales market that Fox had become a propaganda tool for the Bush administration.

"There's nothing wrong with that," he said. "It's certainly legal. But it does pose problems for our democracy. Particularly when the news is dumbed down, leaving voters without critical information on politics and world events and overloaded with fluff. We need to know what's going on in the world. A little less Hollywood and a little more hard news would probably be good for our society."

Fox hit back in equally confrontational style. "Ted is understandably bitter having lost his ratings, his network, and now his mind," a Fox News spokesman said.

That's it in a nutshell, the level of debate in this country. Sadly, Turner is right on several counts. Popularity does not necessarily equal truth, Fox News indeed does biased reporting and sloppy analysis, and it produces misinformed viewers as shown by a recent study. Then there is the whole story about the lemmings to keep in mind here.

Mentioning Hitler exacerbates the communication problems, though, because Hitler is regarded as evil personified. Ted would have been more successful if he had moderated his comments somewhat. Maybe Mussolini? Just kidding.

How It Is Done

The way changes are crammed down our throats in this country is done by repetition and by the refusal to hear any other alternatives. President Bush showed this today in his answers to questions from the press many times. Just one example is enough (and won't harm you as much as reading through the whole thing). This is about the coming destruction of Social Security and the role of Bill Thomas in it. Thomas has been musing on cutting the benefits on solely the basis of sex or race, but I'm not sure if Bush was talking about that when he praised Thomas:

The threshold question is, will Congress -- is Congress willing to say we have a problem. We do have a problem. The math shows we have a problem. And now is the time to act on the problem. And once people realize there's a problem, then I believe there's an obligation for all sides to bring forth ideas. And that's what you're seeing with Chairman Thomas. And I appreciate that. I'm looking forward to my visit with him this afternoon.
(Bolds mine.)

Never mind that the math shows nothing of the sort of problem that would make it necessary to do something along the lines the president advocates. Never mind what other people say, what experts might say. If the president says we have a problem then we have one. Right?

The wingnuts do have a problem, of course, and it is the fact that they don't want to have a Social Security system to begin with. If they had been around in the 1930's they would have voted against the program. Republicans did, in those days, too. The fact is that the abolition of the Social Security has been on the conservative long-term agenda for decades, and now seems to be the time to act on that. First, lets privatize some accounts (oops! should be "let's personalize some accounts"), next, lets get rid of guaranteed benefits, and voila!, the next step will be the death of any insurance aspect in the Social Security system and the return to the times when the poorhouses were full of the elderly.

I'm exaggerating for the benefit of style, but not by much. The wingnuts really do want to erase most of governmental functions. This will bring in anarchy, which is interesting as I have never heard the wingnuts called anarchists before.

Maggie Gallagher

Maggie Gallagher is a smiling marriage expert (well, she grins widely in the pictures I've seen). She writes a lot about the importance for all children to have two parents of different genders, and she is adamantly behind Bush's marriage initiative (the idea that marriage fixes all the ills of the poor). She also appears to have been paid by the government for her expertise in these matters:

In 2002, syndicated columnist Maggie Gallagher repeatedly defended President Bush's push for a $300 million initiative encouraging marriage as a way of strengthening families.

"The Bush marriage initiative would emphasize the importance of marriage to poor couples" and "educate teens on the value of delaying childbearing until marriage," she wrote in National Review Online, for example, adding that this could "carry big payoffs down the road for taxpayers and children."

But Gallagher failed to mention that she had a $21,500 contract with the Department of Health and Human Services to help promote the president's proposal. Her work under the contract, which ran from January through October 2002, included drafting a magazine article for the HHS official overseeing the initiative, writing brochures for the program and conducting a briefing for department officials.

"Did I violate journalistic ethics by not disclosing it?" Gallagher said yesterday. "I don't know. You tell me." She said she would have "been happy to tell anyone who called me" about the contract but that "frankly, it never occurred to me" to disclose it.

Later in the day, Gallagher filed a column in which she said that "I should have disclosed a government contract when I later wrote about the Bush marriage initiative. I would have, if I had remembered it. My apologies to my readers."

She received another $20,000 later

for writing a report, titled "Can Government Strengthen Marriage?", for a private organization called the National Fatherhood Initiative. That report, published last year, was funded by a Justice Department grant, said NFI spokesman Vincent DiCaro. Gallagher said she was "aware vaguely" that her work was federally funded.

In columns, television appearances and interviews with such newspapers as The Washington Post, Gallagher last year defended Bush's proposal for a constitutional amendment barring same-sex marriage.

Wade Horn, HHS assistant secretary for children and families, said his division hired Gallagher as "a well-known national expert," along with other specialists in the field, to help devise the president's healthy marriage initiative. "It's not unusual in the federal government to do that," he said.

Wade Horn is the wingnut who said that the foundation of the family is the father. Without a father, there is no family. These opinions are the reason why Horn is now an assistant secretary for children and families, of course. He's part of the payback to the fundamentalists.

Gallagher's case may not be similar to Armstrong Williams' case. Gallagher was paid to write reports, not to go on talkshows and spout propaganda. But she was spouting the propaganda already, of course, so it's not clear if the payment really was intended to cover nothing but the reports. I have more trouble with the assertion that Gallagher is a well-known national expert in the field of marriage, and therefore deserves to be hired with our tax money. She's a well-known partisan in the discussion of marriage, and that doesn't exactly guarantee objective expert statements from her.

But I have a lot more trouble with her writing style. Here's Maggie waxing poetical about fathers' rights in adoption cases:

Why has social work, as a profession, been so uniquely deaf to the cries of children hungering for absent fathers, or to the social science evidence that generally support intact marriages as important for child well-being?

Blood

In Iraq, life is cheap. This is a day of death for the U.S. troops and for the Iraqis, too:

Thirty-one U.S. troops died in a helicopter crash in Iraq and five more were killed in insurgent attacks Wednesday, the deadliest day for American forces since they invaded the country 22 months ago.

Rebels waging a campaign to wreck Sunday's landmark elections, a cornerstone of U.S. policy, also killed 25 Iraqis in a string of suicide bombings and raids.

A group led by al Qaeda's leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, which has been behind most of the worst attacks in the run-up to the ballot, warned voters to stay away from the "infidel election centers."

It said they would have only themselves to blame for the consequences if they voted. President Bush urged Iraqis to "defy the terrorists" and go to the polls in large numbers.

Bush also said, as expected, that the terrorists are afraid of a free society and that's why they try to stop people from voting. Actually, the terrorists appear to have almost total freedom to do whatever they wish right now.

And what will the new "free society of Iraq" look like after the elections? I think that it will look a lot like Iran:

Iraq's Shi'ites strongly support the elections. A list of candidates dominated by Shi'ite Islamists and drawn up with the guidance of revered cleric Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani is expected to win the most votes, cementing their newfound political power.

A society where women will have very little say over anything. This is of course the problem with democracy in general: without the institutions and the education that are needed and without the safeguards that protect minorities democracy is no miracle solution to anything. - I foresaw the rise of a theocracy in Iraq, and that was one of the reasons why I was so strongly opposed to the war in the first place. Iraq was one of the few places in the region where women had fairly good legal rights. But all that will soon be history, and it will take several generations before the situation can be corrected. Much unnecessary suffering, and we are at least partly to blame for that.

Isn't it sad how we get used to this dying? Day after day the news tell us how many died in Iraq, and after a while one just notes and goes on.

An Empress For Japan?

Not just as a consort, I mean. There are some rumors that this may be in the works:

Women could be allowed to ascend Japan's imperial throne under plans discussed yesterday by a commission set up to consider the succession crisis bedevilling one of the world's oldest monarchies.

The government-appointed team will report to the prime minister by autumn.

No boys have been born into the imperial family for 39 years and Princess Masako, the 41-year-old wife of Prince Naruhito, the heir to the chrysanthemum throne, is ill after a year-long battle with depression. If the succession laws change, the couple's only child, Princess Aiko, three, could become Japan's first reigning empress for more than 200 years.

But, as this article points out, the conservatives are likely to fight any changes in this. It would break an unbroken male lineage of 2,600 years. Which is interesting in itself, as the Japanese royal family is said to descend from Amaterasu, goddess of the sun. There might be a more ancient tradition here that could be tapped now.

Honoring Rush Limbaugh

According to the Media Matters for America, Brian Williams, the replacement for Tom Brokaw as the anchor of NBC's "Nightly News", thinks that Rush Limbaugh is yet to get the credit he is due:

WILLIAMS: I do listen to Rush. I listen to it from a radio in my office, or depending on my day, if I'm in the car, I will listen to Rush. And he will tell you I've been listening for years. I think it's my duty to listen to Rush. I think Rush has actually yet to get the credit he is due, because his audience for so many years felt they were in the wilderness of this country. No one was talking to them.

[...]

Rush said to millions of Americans, you have a home. Come with me. For three hours a day you can listen and hear the like-minded calling in from across the country, and I'll read to you things perhaps you didn't see that are out there. I think Rush gave birth to the FOX News Channel. I think Rush helped to give birth to a movement. I think he played his part in the Contract with America. So I hope he gets his due as a broadcaster.

Media Matters goes on to tell us that the sorts of things Limbaugh told his pining audience include these. That Limbaugh:

* compared U.S. guards' torture of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison to a fraternity prank, saying the guards were "having a good time," "blow[ing] some steam off" [May 5, 2004];
* claimed that women "actually wish" for sexual harassment, and said he "laughed [him]self to tears" when Media Matters for America documented that remark and other sexist remarks he has made [April 26, 2004; May 5, 2004];
* said: "Hugo, Cesar -- whatever. A Chavez is a Chavez. We've always had problems with them." [March 26, 2004];
* stated, when African American Reverend Jesse Jackson joined Senator John Kerry's presidential campaign: "The Kerry campaign has finally gotten a chocolate chip"; University of Maryland political science professor Ronald Walters described Limbaugh's comment as a "backhanded racist remark" [September 29, 2004];
* said: "John Kerry really doesn't think 3,000 Americans dead in one day is that big a deal" [October 11, 2004]; and
* said Democrats believe "the more deaths in Iraq the better" [December 9, 2004].

Yes. But we don't really know what Williams meant when he said that Limbaugh hasn't yet gotten his due recognition. Maybe Williams had rotten eggs expertly thrown at the Rush mug in his mind? Or public spitting? Or maybe not. Maybe Williams adores Limbaugh and is going to give him kisses and stuff in his news program.

Limbaugh has not yet received his dues, I agree. He is personally responsible for a lot of lying, a lot of hatred and a lot of fear in this country. He has deliberately taken the anger he found there and he has made it more vicious, he has deliberately misdirected the anger towards a group of people who cannot fight back very well, and he is still deliberately stoking more anger, anger that may one day result in a civil war in this country and the death of people who have nothing to do with the issues that Limbaugh foams about.

He has made hatreds of all kinds politically correct again. That's what he will be recognized for in the history books one day, and that's when he will get his dues.

On Logic and Feelings

An interesting opinion piece in the Salon talks about the way the wingnuts employ feelings to get their message accepted all across the country. The writer, Jennifer Buckendorff, points out that the liberals don't do this very well; we tend to rely too much on logic and facts and they lose in the competition against a really tear-producing piece about how some poor Christian has been oppressed once again:

On right-wing media outlets like Fox News, personal tales of victimization -- by "liberal elites," professional academics and Hollywood libertines -- abound. Witness the many network news segments that have profiled Christian teens "shut out" of their high schools, unable to conduct public prayer meetings. Consider also the inevitable framing of stories about the pagans who tried to cut Christmas out of the holidays. The right spins these stories, making big agenda issues absolutely personal, and garnering empathy for presumed victims. It does this even though -- as Jon Stewart pointed out on his talk show recently -- the right already controls all wings of government and is powerful in the most classic sense. The right uses these stories because they are effective.

I agree with Buckendorff. Human beings are not just thinking creatures, but also feeling creatures and the way our feelings are manipulated can often outpower the meager "yes, but" whisperings of our logical parts. Liberals and progressives should learn to use emotions better. After all, most true victimization stories are on our side. The wingnuts control everything nowadays, yet they still screech about how poorly they are treated in the media and how oppressed Christmas and Easter are.

Buckendorff singles out Oprah as someone who knows how to do the emotional persuading:

One public figure understands the power of a sympathetic story. And while many lefties reading this are likely to roll their eyes at the mention of Oprah Winfrey, there's no question that she gets results -- she changes minds, skillfully encouraging her viewers to root for the underdog. In one recent example, a charismatic, eminently likable gay man had just experienced unfathomable loss. In relating his ongoing story, Winfrey made gay relationships understandable to the kinds of Middle Americans who voted against gay marriage initiatives.

The show was about Nate Berkus. (For blue-staters unfamiliar with Berkus, he's a telegenic designer with all-American good looks who appears regularly on Winfrey's home design segments. Her viewers love him -- and his window treatments.) Berkus had been vacationing in Sri Lanka when the tsunami struck, and his partner, Fernando Bengoechea, has been missing since the event and is presumed dead.

Winfrey introduced Berkus, speaking directly to the camera. "For the millions of you at home who've come to know Nate as the sweet, talented cutie-pie with the great big heart," she said, "you should know that he and I have read your letters ... You will never know the depth of comfort those prayers and letters have brought to him and his partner Fernando, who is still missing. [They] are literally lifting Nate up."

As the show went on, Winfrey talked with Berkus about the couple's last minutes together and about how Berkus had managed to survive. She brought others onstage who had met him in the disaster's immediate aftermath, and interviewed his mother and his partner's brother and sister-in-law. Winfrey then urged viewers to give to her Angel Network on behalf of tsunami relief organizations.

Stories like this can convince red-state America that gay and lesbian relationships are equal to straight ones -- the central concept in the argument for gay marriage. Such stories do cause people, in Diamond's words, to replace their previously held values with new ones. Consider these sympathetic responses posted on Oprah's message board regarding Berkus:

Sharon C. of Carrollton, Texas, wrote, "Nate, may God be with you at this hard time. I pray that you will find your friend." Another post said, "You are in my thoughts daily and I pray for the return of Fernando."

DeJane Stephenson, from Kansas City, Mo., wrote, "I know there is no room for joyfulness now, and I pray deeply that God will give you his grace and return Fernando to you. I pray for you and all with you. I pray for your parents and family, and for the Bengoechea family as well. I am so very sorry for your suffering and waiting. God bless to you Nate. God bless to all the children who have lost all of those they love. May angels wait beside you."

Logic and emotion shouldn't be seen as enemies in the first place. Martha Nussbaum has written an interesting book about the interconnections between them, and though emotions can be used to counter facts they can also be helpful in unearthing facts and reinforcing logical arguments.

We should learn to understand emotions in politics and we should learn to use them better. Maybe hiring someone like Oprah wouldn't be a bad way to start.

Today's Action Alert

Today's Action comes from el, a commenter at Eschaton. The vote on Gonzales' appointment for Attorney General is coming up. Let the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee know that we don't want a torturer and a perjurer for Attorney General.

********



Clips from moveon:

Contact the Senate Judiciary Committee to Voice Your Opposition to the
confirmation of Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General:

United States Senate
Committee on the Judiciary

Phone: (202) 224-5225
Fax: (202) 224-9102

Contacts:

Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee:

Arlen Specter - chair
202-224-4254
Fax: 202-228-1229
mailto:arlen_specter@specter.senate.gov

Patrick J. Leahy
202-234-4242
mailto:senator_leahy@leahy.senate.gov

Charles E. Grassley
202.224.3744
Fax: 515-288-5097
http://www.grassley.senate.gov/webform.htm

Edward M. Kennedy
202-224-4543
http://www.kennedy.senate.gov/contact.html

Joseph R. Biden, Jr.
202-224-5042
mailto:senator@biden.senate.gov

Jon Kyl
202-224-4521
http://www.kyl.senate.gov/contact.cfm

Herbert Kohl
202-224-5653
http://www.kohl.senate.gov/gen_contact.html

Mike DeWine
202-224-2315
http://www.dewine.senate.gov

Dianne Feinstein
202-224-3841
http://www.feinstein.senate.gov/email.html

Jeff Sessions
202-224-4124
http://www.sessions.senate.gov/contact.htm#form

Russell D. Feingold
202-224-5323
mailto:russell_feingold@feingold.senate.gov

Lindsey Graham
202-224-5972
http://www.lgraham.senate.gov/index.cfm?mode=contact

Charles E. Schumer
202-224-6542
http://www.schumer.senate.gov/webform.html

Larry Craig
202- 224-2752
http://www.craig.senate.gov/webform.html

Richard J. Durbin
202-224-2152
http://www.durbin.senate.gov/sitepages/contact.htm

Saxby Chambliss
202-224-3521
http://www.chambliss.senate.gov/Contact/default.cfm?pagemode=1

John Cornyn
202-224-2934
http://www.cornyn.senate.gov/contact/index.html

Thanks for taking Today's Action.

Some News on the Goddess Front

I'm guest blogging today on Alas, a Blog. The topic is the popularization of the results from gender science and how they are received. Thanks to Ampersand of Alas, a Blog for giving me this valuable opportunity to rant wider.

Thank you also for the interesting and intelligent comments in my comments sections. I always look forward to reading them. It's a great (and free) education!

Otherwise life is a little bit annoying. I'm low on chocolate due to being snowed in. But I'm going to make a pear galette instead. It will be perfect after tonight's martial arts practice.

The Goddess with the Long Ring Fingers

That's me, and thanks to two keen-eyed people in my comments I now know that this makes me almost as good at parking cars and map-reading as men!

January has been a dreadful month for women in the field of studying gender difference. First we were told that men will not marry uppity women because uppity women are more likely to be unfaithful. This has something to do with prehistoric men's fertility fears. Then we were subjected to a week-long shouting match about why women are not equally represented in the hard sciences, with ideas ranging from girls liking dolls better than trucks to autistic children possessing the extreme male brain to goddess rants on everything inbetween ending with Charles Murray in the New York Times pontificating on yet one more topic he knows nothing about. And soon there will be another article about why female and male brains would look completely different if they were viewed as light lanterns when in use.

It is a flood, my friends, and it is going to drown us all. The nice thing about this newest study is naturally that it reinforces all the common stereotypes very nicely and that you can tell everything you need to know just by looking at a woman's fingers! If you are a woman and have forefingers and ring fingers of approximately the same length, well, then you are doomed to never learn parallel parking or mapreading:

Map reading and parking may prove difficult for some women because they were exposed to too little testosterone in the womb, researchers suggest.

The study, in the journal Intelligence, fuels the age-old male myth that women are deficient in these skills.

Scientists from the University of Giessen, Germany, found a lack of the hormone affects spatial ability.

Low testosterone levels are also linked to shorter wedding ring fingers, they say.

The research looked at the spatial, numerical and verbal skills of 40 student volunteers.

Spatial skill is the ability to assess and orientate shapes and spaces. Map reading and parking are spatial skills which men often say women lack. Women tend to disagree.

The researchers also looked at the length of the students' wedding and index fingers.

In women, the two fingers are usually almost equal in length, as measured from the crease nearest the palm to the fingertip. In men, the ring finger tends to be much longer than the index.

For one of the spatial tests, volunteers had to tell which of five drawings could not be rotated so it looked like the other four.

The other test involved the ability to think in 3D by mentally "unfolding" a complex shape.

Overall, men achieved higher scores in the tests than women.

But women with the male pattern of finger length did better than those whose wedding finger was shorter.

With the exception of the finger stuff, there is nothing new about this research.
It's the same old thing about the mental rotation of three-dimensional figures that all the tests always talk about. Do you spot something very interesting about the study methods as described in the above quote?

Nowhere did they actually check how well the women and the men in the study could read maps or park cars.
----
I know that I promised another post on Steven Pinker, but I'm overdozed on this shit.
Sorry.

Bill Thomas Again

Via Atrios and Josh Marshall, I learned that Representative Bill Thomas is still putting more ideas on the table about how to destroy fix the Social Security system. Here he is telling us about some of them:

MR. RUSSERT: Let me show you something else you said at the National Journal Forum that raised some eyebrows: "Women are living longer relative to men today than they were in 1940. Yet, we never ever have debated gender-adjusting Social Security. ...But, at some point if the age difference continues to separate and more women are in the workforce and you have more of an equality of pay structure in the workforce, at some point somebody might want to suggest that we need to take a look at the question of whether or not actuarially we ought to adjust who gets what, when, and how."

A gender adjustment--what does that mean?

REP. THOMAS: Well, it was one of my ways of getting people to focus on the issue of age. To move from 65 to 68, which we did in 1983, was a benefit cut. But it also creates hardships based upon the occupation that you have, and it creates inequities on who you are and how long you live. You could just as easily have a discussion about occupations as to when would be a fair or an unfair time to require. We also need to examine, frankly, Tim, the question of race in terms of how many years of retirement do you get based upon your race? And you ought not to just leave gender off the table because that would be a factor.

What this means is that if four people: a black woman, a black man, a white woman and a white man were all to contribute exactly the same total amount towards Social Security, the black man would get the largest annual payment back and the white woman the smallest. The longer your group lives, on average, the less you will get. No particular person may live just the average number of years for his or her group, of course, so in reality many would still receive more than the amount they paid in and others would receive less than they paid in. But as groups black women and white men, for example, would be getting the same benefits if they paid in the same amounts.

I mentioned in an earlier post that deciding on the proper annuity payment by race and sex is one of those problems where someone always gets treated unfairly. In Thomas' idea it is the individuals who are going to benefit or suffer from discrimination, in the present system it is the groups as defined above (for example, black men as a group would not recoup the total they have paid in because they die younger, on average). The Supreme Court has ruled in the past that discrimination against individuals is worse than discrimination against groups. If this ruling stands, Thomas will not be successful in pushing his proposal.

What is probably behind this and other similar proposals is not so much the aim to cut benefits to save money, but to cut redistribution of income. Wingnuts hate that in a system. Some aspects of the current redistribution should be in their interest, though. For example, major beneficiaries from Social Security are the women who have spent much of their lives out of the labor force, caring for children. Wingnuts like that in women, yet Thomas' proposal would severely harm this very group who has behaved so morally.

There is one proposal for changing the Social Security system that Thomas doesn't want to have on the table, and that is changing the way payroll taxes are funded. Payroll taxes are regressive. If we made them at least income-neutral we'd collect more money for Social Security and we would also alleviate its unintended income redistribution effects. But for Thomas this proposal is too dangerous; it might cut back on employment. Of course, it would also make the very rich pay more.

The Greatest American of All Times

Discovery Channel and America Online have a contest to name "The Greatest American" ever. You can nominate up to five individuals online through February 1. What happens then is this:

The top nominees will be listed in March, with Discovery planning a seven-hour, four-night series in the spring about the leading vote-getters and the winner.

The first episode will air in May and will profile a selection from the top 100 nominees. The list will be pared down by further online voting, with the No. 1 choice profiled on the final episode in June.

There is a gimmicky quality to all this, of course, but it's interesting to think about what it means to be "The Greatest American" ever. According to the ad from which I quoted, the definition of greatness would be somemone who most influenced how we work, think and live. So the person doesn't have to be "good"; someone really evil might well qualify if that person had great impact on everything. Of course future generations might have very different ideas about who the greatest American ever was, even if their selection was limited to the same time periods that we consider, for sometimes a person's impact can only be seen clearly from a distance.

One is not a leader if nobody follows. So "The Greatest American" can't be too much ahead of the pack or too different. Probably someone who is just one step ahead of everyone else and who can be easily made into the myth of One Person Doing Great Things. This competition, and others like it, are really about the symbolic meaning of individuals. What we might vote for are the develoments for which they stand, not really what the individuals did themselves. And even Rosa Parks was a culmination of a long period of agitating and work by a large group of individuals. In this sense probably "The Greatest American" is the community of like-minded individuals who got something done.

But this goes against the rugged individualism thing.

It will be interesting to see who gets nominated. My predictions are that we are going to have George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan nominated from presidents, Martin Luther King and possibly Rosa Parks from the Civil Rights Movement, and lots of athletes and movie stars. Thomas Alva Edison, Henry Ford and some other inventors and industrialists might also be nominated. Then writers like Walt Whitman and Mark Twain and so on. Jonas Salk and other medical inventors who changed lives in concrete ways. Painters, musicians, the list goes on.

But it won't have very many women on it. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan Anthony deserve to be included, and I hope that they will be. Surely the fact that women can vote has made a big difference in the way we live. On the whole, though competitions like this seek for people who had power to influence things on a large scale and only few women have been in that position.

The winner should probably be the unknown American, of unknown sex, race and ethnicity, who worked so hard and strived so earnestly to produce something better, and who has, for most of American history, opened his or her arms to those who needed shelter and food. You know, the one who cares about the huddled masses.

Talking to Steven Pinker

Not really. I'm just pretending to talk to him. Pinker is this linguist who wrote a famous book called The Blank Slate, and lots of people think that he is the bees knees in genetic research into various group differences, such as the difference between men and women. In fact, he's a linguist. Quite a few of the other men who study gender sciences have their training in fields such as political science or law, I've noticed. Which makes it perfectly fine for a goddess to comment on these things, too.

Anyway, Pinker's book is really well written. It is so astonishingly well written that I suspect he was born a woman. Or I would suspect that if I was Pinker. It is so well-written that it takes very careful reading to see how very little he actually has as the proof of his various arguments. But notice that though he has a specific chapter on gender differences, he puts violence elsewhere. Pinker seems to view "gender" as synonymous with "female", and this is not unusual in the field in general. I'd say that if any form of human behavior shows strong gender differences in our current society, it's the way we express aggression, and yet violence is not in the gender chapter. Little things like this often help me to see what a person is really after. And I suspect that Pinker is after putting women in the proper place.

Which is not in the kitchen for him, but as a sort of an assitant manager.

His use of economic evidence in The Blank Slate is something I'm admirably able to criticize. Here's what I say about his discussion on the gender wage gap in another context:

Pinker appear to imply that economists haven't studied the gender gap or sex discrimination using proper econometric techniques such as multiple regression analysis. But in fact there is an extensive field of research of just this kind, easily accessible in peer-reviewed journals such as The Journal of Labor Economics and The Journal of Human Resources. I am a little surprised that he didn't place more reliance on this source material, but rather chose to focus on research done by right-wing think tanks. Politically motivated research, both from the left and the right, has an advocacy role and is rarely subject to the same quality guarantees as peer-reviewed research.

A good basic summary of the actual economic research done on some of the issues he addresses is in Joyce Jacobsen's text The Economics of Gender or alternatively in selected chapters of almost any textbook on labor economics, for example Bruce Kaufman's The Economics of Labor Markets.


I'd like to discuss three examples in Pinker's chapter on gender which are problematically interpreted due to insufficient economic sources. The first concerns the IWF study it refers to which found the salaries of men and women in one age group to be practically equal, the second concerns the question why more male than female physicians are independent entrepreneurs and the third the use of the term 'choice' in the context of women's occupational choices.

The IWF stands for the Independent Women's Forum, a conservative group. The IWF study is an empirical study of the wage gap which found that women and men at the beginning of their careers earned essentially the same salaries in the same jobs, and that differences in salary appeared later in the career paths of the individuals. The IWF interprets these findings to mean that the firms in the study do not discriminate on the basis of sex, for they appear not to be doing so with their new hires. That women's earnings lag later in this career the IWF sees as proof that these differences are caused by women's different choices, especially that of choosing to take time from work to have children.

This is one possible interpretation, and Pinker whole-heartedly accepts it. But economists have known for a long time that entry level salaries (which the salaries in the IWF study are) rarely show much difference between women and men or workers of different races, partly because the Equal Pay Act makes paying different amounts for the same work illegal. It is later in the workers' careers that the differences appear. What this means in theory is not always clear. One possibility is that workers reveal true productivity differences over time and are rewarded accordingly. Another for male-female comparisons is that women's greater domestic responsibilities make their labor market participation more sporadic which, in turn, affects their long-term earnings prospects negatively due to, for example, lower probabilities of promotion. Yet another one is that employers who want to discriminate are able to do it only through promotion and other placement decisions (because of the Equal Pay Act and other legislation hampering differential treatment of workers in the same jobs). (The combination of near equal starting salaries and later discrimination is called the Lazear effect.) Empirical research has tried to disentangle these effects from each other in a long list of studies. Some support has been found for all of them.

Pinker uses the statistical fact that male physicians are more likely to be entrepreneurs as evidence of a (possibly innate?) sex difference in risk-taking behavior. This should be interpreted much more carefully, given that recent changes in the US health care sector have made entrepreneurship very unattractive for most physicians. The majority of physicians who are entrepreneurs began their practise some time ago, at a time when few women entered medicine. Both women and men graduating today are much more likely to become salaried workers than entrepreneurs, simply because of the way health care is now financed.

Even more generally, differences in women's and men's entrepreneurship rates can't be assumed to reflect only sex differences in risk-taking behavior without first controlling for other factors which are relevant. These include women's traditionally much more limited access to the financial capital that is needed for starting a firm and women's greater responsibility for caring for children. The latter factor might make women more likely to be salaried workers in order to benefit from shorter and regular working hours, or it might make them more likely to be entrepreneurs in order to benefit from the flexibility of the owner's power in setting hours of work.

In fact, women's general rates of entrepreneurialism are rapidly rising in the United States.

As Pinker points out, it is indeed true that women might choose the traditionally female occupations which also traditionally pay less. It is equally true that women might not do so, but instead are constrained from choosing alternative better paying occupations due to various barriers to entry (such as potential for sexual harassment in traditionally male blue-collar occupations). It is incorrect to assume that the first possibility is true without first presenting the empirical evidence that is supposed to support it.

Moreover, Pinker's (and the IWF's) meaning of the term 'choice' needs to be clarified. Most economists assume that if women indeed do choose such jobs they do it at least partially because traditionally female occupations tend to provide the flexibility required to combine caring for children with paid work. So the 'choice' here is not a societally unimportant one (say, like choosing chocolate ice cream over vanilla) and benefits not only the woman's family but the wider society. The costs, however, tend to fall squarely on her and her family alone.

Pinker argues that the reason why so few women choose, say, engineering may be in women's lesser desire for such a career. It is not clear to me why this desire can't be affected by environment as well as genes. During the Afghanistan war, several interviews with young Afghan schoolgirls were broadcast and the interviewees were routinely asked about their career dreams. I was surprised to find that engineering was mentioned almost as often as medicine by these girls. It is unlikely that Afghan girls would have different innate desires from those held by American girls. What is different is probably the cultural emphasis, i.e. we all learn what is expected from us by our culture or religion.

It is not the existence of the gender gap which makes women uncomfortable with the discussion of innate sexual differences, but the fact that such differences, whether real or imaginary, have often been used to restrict women's opportunities on an apriori basis. The history of psychology and medicine are full of examples of this. Because of the possible dire consequences of biased research in this area it seems to me especially important that the source materials one uses are not selected to represent just one point of view.

I'm going to talk to him a little more in my next post.

Snow

It is snowing today in large parts of the U.S.. Snow is lovely stuff, especially if you have proper snow tires for your car and someone else to shovel the driveway. Then you can concentrate on enjoying snow.

I like to put on my cross-country skis and go and harass the neighborhood. One year I got a group of drunks running after me, but of course I was on skis so they never had a chance. Skating is fun, too, if there is a frozen lake nearby, though you want to let someone else go first to test how hard the ice is. Or you need to learn the rules about how to drag yourself back onto hard ice. An icepick is a good implement for this, or a long rope tied to a tree on the shore before you venture out.

You can also give all your rugs a wonderful cleaning by putting them on freshly fallen snow with the good side down. After ten minutes or so, you can gently beat the back of the rug. When you pick it up you will find, to your great astonishment, a horribly black rugshaped patch on the snow. Or at least I do. This works even with hand-made oriental rugs, and it saves you lots of money in cleaning fees.

And then you can make snow lanterns. I have already given instructions for these on the Eschaton threads and maybe even here last year, but they are so beautiful that the instructions are worth repeating. They only work if the snow balls up, though.

Make about nine snowballs and arrange them in a circle (outside!) so that the balls touch each other. Make the second layer above the first with seven snowballs so that they make a slightly smaller circle, then use five snowballs and so on. The idea is to make a pyramid out of snow. Before you close it off with one snowball on top, insert a lit candle, one of the sturdy fat ones preferably. When it gets dark you have this magical little lantern by your doorway. Better still, make a row of them along your front path.

Then you can run into the house and have a large hot drink with a very clear conscience!

Daniel Schorr

I like NPR's Daniel Schorr's gravely voice and his carefully expressed but blunt opinions. He's an old-time journalist, which means that he actually studies the topics on which he speaks, and that is so refreshing. So far he's said pretty much everything according to my dictates, so he must be a very competent guy!

Here is Schorr on the U.S. media:

Washington these days feels a little like Moscow in Soviet times when the government routinely dispensed information to the public and the public routinely didn't believe it. The two main newspapers were the Communist Party organ, Pravda, (Truth) and the Soviet government organ, Izvestiya (News). People used to say, "There is no Izvestiya in Pravda and no Pravda in Izvestiya."
...
...who can believe TV news reports when they may turn out to be government-financed videos? Have you ever seen the report on the drug benefits of the Bush Medicare act that ran on 40 local TV stations, complete with the "out-cue": "In Washington, I'm Karen Ryan reporting"? The Department of Health and Human Services paid her to play the role of reporter. Or, did you see the report on the antidrug campaign produced by the Office of National Drug Control Policy, narrated by nonjournalist Mike Morris?

He also mentions the nonexistent WMDs and the Armstrong Williams scandal which isn't a scandal because he is on the side of the Washington Pravda and Izvestiya. And that is the real scandal.

I know, I was supposed to blog only cheerful stuff today. Well, Schorr is a small source of cheerfulness in this post.

Some Good News From Iran (or Not)

My new promise is to try to blog on positive developments on the weekends, if at all possible. That way my dear readers don't have to take antacids nonstop. Here is a positive development: Women in Iran have been judged as capable of running for the president of the country:

"If they posses the necessary qualifications, women can also run for president," the television quoted Guardian Council spokesman Gholamhossein Elham as saying.

The announcement clears up ambiguities within the constitution about whether only men can hold the post. Under Iran's constitution, the president must be elected from among political "rijal." Rijal is an Arabic word that can be interpreted as men or simply political personalities regardless of their gender.

For the last quarter century, "rijal" has been interpreted to mean a man. Of course what this will mean in practise is not so clear. The "necessary qualifications" could be manipulated in various ways, but at least this is a step forwards. This is good.

Or is it? Thanks to Kait in the comments of this post for alerting me to this:

Iran has denied allowing women to take part in this year's presidential elections.
...
However Elham told a state-run news agency, ISNA, "I have not changed the meaning of the word rejal".

"I never had an interview on such a subject on television, and the article published is not correct", he said.

Hmmm. Someone must have given Elham a phone call.

Friday's Gingerbread Blogging

Gingerbread Castle 

Here it is! My wonderful gingerbread castle. You can't see the details very well here, but it's properly crenellated. I'm going to feed it to the squirrels tomorrow as it's getting a little bit dusty. The trees add a nice realistic dimension, don't they? I wanted to put a snake banner on top, but I broke one of the walls like five times and gave up on any attempt to touch the damned thing again.

Theocracy Beginning?

At the National Prayer Service today Bill Graham, the man who is said to have converted Bush to fervent Christianity, said this:

Offering one prayer, the Rev. Billy Graham said he believed God had a hand in Bush's re-election.

"Their next four years are hidden from us, but they are not hidden from you," said the 86-year-old evangelist, whom Bush credits with inspiring him to reaffirm his faith and give up drinking at age 40. "You know the challenges and opportunities they will face. Give them a clear mind, a warm heart, calmness in the midst of turmoil, reassurance in times of discouragement and your presence always."

So God had a hand in Bush's re-election! I wonder what form that took. Perhaps meddling with the voting machines? But that's blasphemy! Naughty me.

But apparently not naughty Bill Graham.

I feel like we are all sitting in a train driven by some lunatic who doesn't know how to stop the damn thing.

Whose Voice Is It That Bush Heard From Beyond the Stars?

The Norwegians have been aghast at the behavior of the U.S. First Family:

You see, the sign shown in this picture is the way to greet Satan in Norway and maybe even more widely:

President Bush's "Hook 'em, 'horns" salute got lost in translation in Norway, where shocked people interpreted his hand gesture during his inauguration as a salute to Satan.

That's what it means in the Nordics when you throw up the right hand with the index and pinky fingers raised, a gesture popular among heavy metal groups and their fans in the region.

Which just goes to show that religion is hard to interpret literally. Or...?

Today's Action Alert

Today's Action comes from MoveOn:

The New York Times disclosed on Sunday that the Bush administration is using the Social Security Administration to mislead the American public and sell Social Security privatization. Documents obtained by The New York Times show that Bush's plan is to insert "propaganda" into Social Security publications -- using the apparatus of this huge government agency -- and the trust millions place in it -- to sell their privatization scheme that would cut Social Security benefits.

We need your help to make it clear that the Social Security Administration is not another propaganda tool of the White House. Please take one minute to send a message. Call the Social Security Administration at the number below. Tell them you oppose Social Security privatization and you expect them to deliver straight facts -- not White House spin -- to the American people.

Call: 1-800-772-1213

After the greeting, dial 1 for English or 2 for Spanish.
Then press 3.
Then press 0 to speak to a representative.

Thanks for taking today's action.

The Other Side of the Nine Balls

---
Original link from here.

We Are All Republicans Now

Or so it appears:

For an occasion draped in historical fanfare, and for television talking heads who have filled the programming day discussing history again and again, there's been glaringly little attention paid to one momentous fact: President Bush's historically low approval ratings. Bush is struggling to hit even the 50 percent mark. The latest New York Times/CBS poll out today puts Bush's rating at 49 percent, marking his standing the flimsiest for any president on Inauguration Day, at least since modern presidential polling began nearly 80 years ago. But shhhh, don't tell the Beltway talking heads.

Forced to fill up hour after hour of dead air leading up to Bush's actual swearing in, anchors, reporters, guests and analysts on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox and MSNBC all politely shied away from the topic of Bush's dismal ratings. Over the course of four hours of continuous inauguration coverage from 8 a.m. to noon (collectively, that's 24 hours among the six outlets), the topic of the president's (historically poor) approval ratings came up exactly four times, according to TVEyes.com, the continuous television monitoring service.

It's like a wedding, isn't it? Nobody ever says that the happy couple is probably going to be divorced in a year or that the groom had a big red pimple smack at the tip of his nose or that the bride was flat-footed. Or maybe like a funeral: only good things are said when someone dies. I hope the next four years doesn't finish this country off. Then we would have a real funeral.

What Neutrality in the Media Means

It means that the Fox News used seventeen conservative/Republican commentators and six Democratic/progressive commentators in its inaugural coverage today between the hours of 7 a.m. and 5 p.m., EST. It means that during the same time period CNN used ten conservative/Republican commentators to exactly ONE Democratic/progressive commentator. It means that MSNBC used thirteen conservative/Republican commentators to two Democratic/progressive commentators during the same time. Could this biased distribution be because the president who is being inaugurated is a wingnut, so that mostly only wingnuts are allowed to comment? But isn't he supposed to be the president of everyone? He said so, himself, quite recently.

About 81% of all commentators were wingnuts today. Even some of the so-called Democrats/progressives are nothing but wingnuts. And still we hear that this not enough, that this is the liberal media! Gag me with a spoon.

----
Via Atrios.

Flirting Instructions from the Religious Right

This is from a teenage magazine intended for girls, and it tells them how to snare a good Godly man:

Be Genuine . . . Be You!
Guys don't like a tease. They hate to be led on. But they do like a good game of chase. Knowing how to be pursued, protected by personal convictions, centered in an awesome relationship with Jesus Christ, will provide the energy and motivation for you to keep living a life that pleases God.

So when that guy from across the room sets his sights on you, be sure that you're a moving target. And always be moving in a spirit of love and concern, ever closer to God

Who needs feminism?
----
Link courtesy of Biblio

Having Fun in Washington, D.C.

From Roxanne:

Check the top link for more pictures.

Mine! All Mine!

---
Link courtesy of watertiger

What To Do on a Boring Day

A thread on the Eschaton was full of wonderful sayings by Dorothy Parker, the woman with a sandpaper tongue. She's one of mine, of course, as are all viper tongues. You could read her and other vinegary writers. Here's something to get you started:


Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song.
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong;
and I am Marie of Roumania.

(from Enough Rope (1926))


Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

(from Enough Rope (1926))


If you prefer something more thoughtful from Ms. Parker, think about these:


Ridicule may be a shield, but it is not a weapon.

(from John Keats' You Might As Well Live (1970))


The nowadays ruling that no word is unprintable has, I think, done nothing whatever for beautiful letters....Obscenity is too valuable a commodity to chuck around all over the place; it should be taken out of the safe on special occasions only.

(from Esquire (1957))


Then you could look for other writers that suit the tenor of the day.

Or you could take up knitting. It was hugely successful among those who watched the guillotine executions in the French Revolution, or so we are told by most likely biased sources. Good knitters can easily knit and watch executions at the same time. It's one of those fine motor skills that work independently of the brain. I am a sporadic knitter myself, though a very advanced one. I knit about once a decade, but then I equip all the snakes with sweaters which have roughly two hundred colors in each. I have lots of wool in storage for knitting, but writing the blog uses similar fine motor skills (you should see my fingers run!) so I haven't done anything interesting for a long time.

Woodworking is another nice thing to do when you are bored. Just make sure you have plenty of insurance and learn to think of three fingers per hand as a sign of pride.
I'm making some shelves to put up behind my computer. They have been in the same state of half-readiness for months now, because I can't decide how to fix them to the wall. I want something fancy.

You could begin by building a miniature gallows. You could then knit the rope for it and make little stuffed figures of any particular person you want to see hanged.

Or you could just drown your boredom in fancy lovemaking and nectar-sipping.

Here We Go

I was wondering when all this would start:

The woman once known as "Jane Roe" has asked the supreme court to overturn its landmark decision that legalised abortion 32 years ago.

Norma McCorvey, whose protest against the abortion ban in Texas led to the 1973 ruling, now contends in a petition to the court that the case should be heard again in light of evidence that the procedure may harm women.

"Now we know so much more, and I plead with the court to listen for witnesses and re-evaluate Roe v Wade," said McCorvey, who says she regrets her role in the case.

The procedure may indeed harm women. So does giving birth, and, unfortunately for the argument "Jane Roe" presents here, the potential harm of giving birth is much greater than that involved in medically performed abortions.

This has nothing to do with worries about harming women, of course. If anything, the reverse is the intention. Listen to this:

...in a strongly worded concurrence, the 5th US circuit court of appeals judge Edith Jones criticised the abortion ruling and said new medical evidence may well show undue harm to a mother and her foetus.

Bolds mine.

Do you think that she was trying to be funny? This judge is a religious wingnut, unless I'm conflating two different Edith Joneses here. But I don't think so. Here is an excerpt from a speech an Edith Jones gave last year:

Jones criticized the United States Supreme Court during the Chief Justice Earl Warren era for its lack of prudence, citing cases that created, what Bickel called, a "web of subjectivity" and led to a "national litigation explosion." Jones added that, while America is still the most religious society in the western world, it has been forced to deal with the unrepresentative secularity of the Supreme Court over the years. Still, the Supreme Court has acted prudently in certain cases, and the struggle to maintain judicial prudence is an ongoing fight where victory is elusive, Jones allowed.

Bolds mine.

I'm sure that judge Jones would just love to balance out all that unrepresentative secularity with some proper Bible-thumping. Too bad about the Constitution.

How to Commemorate the Coronation Tomorrow

This is really fertile ground. There are so many good ideas all across the sane blogosphere, and lots of are absolutely perfect. The most popular one is the not-one-dime-day: don't spend any money tomorrow, don't buy groceries, don't buy gas, don't buy anything whatsoever. Just a little reminder of the economic power of us unwashed masses, a nudge in the well-padded side of the corporate America and a reminder that we won't help them if they spit on us. Also, for certain types of people only money speaks.

This wouldn't conflict with the idea I posted earlier on the blog: that of donating money to an organization which funds abortions for poor women. You could always donate tonight or first thing Friday morning if you feel that you must remain pure on Thursday.

Then you could always go to Washington, D.C., and cast a gloomy pall over all the festivities, but if that's what you're doing you don't need me to tell you anything about it. Though think about a man who has nine balls! Sounds like some sort of compensation to me, and, yes, I know that this joke is in very bad taste but then I have a bad taste in my mouth all the time nowadays.

Another affirmative idea is to get together with others who feel the same way about the coronation and to arrange your own alternative orgies. Check your local listings; there might be something fun going on. Some bloggers cover their blogs in black tomorrow, as a sign of acknowledging the importance of the day, but I'm not going to do that, though I probably won't obsessively describe the dresses of the party-goers either.

Whatever you do, remember that you are not alone and that you are sane.

Women in Bush's Social Security Plan

Bill Thomas, the Republican chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, has ideas about women. Specifically, he airs the idea that women's Social Security benefits should be altered:

The Ways and Means chairman said the entry of more women into the workforce and the narrowing of the gap between men's and women's salaries — at a time when the gap between women's and men's longevity is increasing — meant that Congress should consider whether men and women should get equal Social Security benefits. He did not say whether women's benefits should be adjusted up or down.

"At some point, somebody might want to suggest that we need to take a look at the question of whether or not actuarially we ought to adjust who gets what, when, and how," Thomas said

This is one of those cases which causes statistical discrimination whatever one does. The problem is that men, on average, die earlier than women. If men and women are paid the same benefits per person per year, then women will collect more money as a group because more women will live to older ages. If, on the other hand, we changed the system in the way Thomas suggests, women would get less money each year than men, and as groups women and men would collect equal amounts. But then all the men who live longer than the average man would be getting "extra" benefits, whereas the women who die earlier than the average woman would never get their "fair" share.

I'm pretty sure that the Supreme Court has ruled against Thomas' plan as discriminatory in the past. The justification was that individual discrimination is worse than unequal group outcomes. But this is a new era with a new Supreme Court so one never knows. Or, rather, one does know, of course; even if one would rather not. If you get my meaning. I'm very glad that I'm a goddess right now so that I don't have to try to eke a meager survival on my reduced Social Security checks in extreme old age.

And, as someone suggested on Eschaton, why not use the same argument to cut the annual benefits of whites? Whites also have a longer life expectancy than blacks.

This is Fun

Sara sent me an e-mail about a little rewriting she had done on a post about feminists that she found on a misogynistic website. She altered the word "feminist" to "conservative" and so on, and this is what she produced:

"Cult of Victimization"

Echidne of the Snakes states in her book, /Conservatives and Domination:
Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression/, that "Conservative
consciousness is the consciousness of victimization...to come to see
oneself as a victim" (pg 15). Nowhere is this assumption of ideological
victimization stronger than on college campuses. The self-definition of
victimhood, in all of its myriad forms, is a foundation in the majority
of College Republican chapters -- where it is actively encouraged and
nurtured.

We feel that the "victim" mindset has no place in your college
education.

Simply stated, victimhood -- in any manifestation-- is dysfunctional.
Remember "dysfunctional" literally means: It doesn't work. When it
comes
to finding a strategy, you want something that works to prevent you from
having a poor college education. Victimhood justifies your actions after
you have failed this first task.

By starting out with the assumption that a conservative student is a
victim, right-wing activists create a self-fulfilling prophecy. Instead
of encouraging healthy change, (e.g. assertiveness as opposed to
critical thought, social skills instead of anger, personal
responsibility as opposed to blame and empathy instead of emphasis on
self) such claptrap often enable the tenets of victimhood and combines
them with anger, self-righteousness and an intellectually vapid learning
experience. Complaining about “liberal bias” encourages existing
dysfunctional, uncritical and selfish behaviors in conservative students
by giving them confidence that their intellectual skills will protect
them from the backlash of said behaviors. We will go so far to say that
these programs seek to create a "super-victim" who is seeking revenge
--
not prevention.

What you get is /not an effective or functional way to obtain a sound
education./

In fact, the resulting over-confidence, absence of critical thought and
lack of social skills put the conservative students more at risk. Not
only will they be stigmatized by the majority of thinking people, but
they are now risking infuriating a truly intelligent and hostile
liberal. Such a liberal might not just stop at critiquing their
arguments. He or she is, in fact, more likely to engage in mocking them
and subverting their language. Unfortunately, conservative students’
banishment from the mainstream of society will more than likely put them
into a "fringe social area" -- where this kind of predators lurks!

In our minds, the ideology of victimization is a dead end street. It is
predicated on the assumption that you have already lost and have no
power. You the reader must make a decision right now, and that is: Are
you willing to take responsibility for your actions and, by
acknowledging that you do have a degree of power and control over what
happens to you, prevent yourself from receiving a poor education?

Believe us when we say this is not the kind of question you will hear in
most chapters of the College Republicans.

I think it's nice!

Today's Action Alert

Today's Action:

Write a letter to your Senators and ask them not to confirm Condalezza Rice as Secretary of State. As demonstrated by Rice's unresponsive answers to Barbara Boxer's questions, Rice is not qualified to be Secretary of State. Tell your Senators that we can do better.

Thanks for taking today's action.

Why There are So Few Women in the Hard Sciences: Part III

In this post the story of disecting the provoking thoughts of Lawrence Summers continues. As you may remember, he offered three hypotheses for the reasons why there are few women in hard sciences:

1. The eighty-hour workweek expected
2. That women might be biologically less able to do hard sciences than men
and
3. Discrimination against women.

I have discussed the second one quite extensively in my previous post in this series, and here I wish to tackle the first and second suggestions of our Lawrence.

First, why would the eighty-hour workweek in hard sciences keep women back? What is the average workweek in the soft sciences or in the humanities, where there are more women, relatively speaking (though not by the amounts that the so-called biological studies of female superiority in writing skills would suggest...)? As far as I can tell, the average expected workweek is pretty long for all Ivy League professors and scholars, but this appears to have less effect on women outside the hard sciences.

Second, why would women react differently to a long workweek than men? This is the hidden agenda in this suggestion: it has to do with who is going to take care of the children. So it's very simple, really: according to this hypothesis, women are not in the hard sciences because they need to have more time for family life. Men appear not to want to have a family life to the same extent. Why would this be the case? Here, once again, opinions differ. Some argue that women have a biological imperative to spend more time chauffeuring their children to hockey meets than men do. Others argue that the upbringing we are all subjected to convinces both girls and boys of the necessity for such tasks to belong to women. Or perhaps both of these reasons apply at the same time.

Third, given this sexual division of labor in many families, why are eighty-hour workweeks so necessary? Here the answer appears to be that the quality of research would diminish if the scientists could go home, once in a while, or even take the white coat off for a day every week. I disagree with this. There is no evidence proving that this long workweeks would be good for creativity and productivity in general. In fact, there is a pretty good counterargument, based on the likelihood that we get less productive the longer the time we have already worked. Besides, eighty-hour weeks translate to zero hours with children except during the weekends, and I don't care what sex you are; if you are a parent this is crap.

Talking about the "eighty-hour week" is a shorthand way of pointing out that so many things in the academia assume that the scholars have a well-equipped home base to which they return only to sleep. The scholars are certainly not expected to give birth to children, for example, though change in this has taken place in the last few decades. But hard sciences may not look like very hospitable places to a lot of women for reasons of this sort.

Then consider being the only woman in a department, or one of very few. Consider a lab where people talk about what internet pornsites they visit and so on. And consider that some of your colleagues might very well be thinking all the time that women are by nature less able to do science. It takes a very specific type of person to wade through all this towards the great enjoyment that hard sciences can offer.

Things are not this bad or bad at all in every department, but these departments-from-hell still exist. Most of us don't want to be the symbolic pathbreakers who get beaten to a pulp in the process, and it's not difficult to see why hard sciences might not look that attractive to a woman perfectly capable of practising them.

And this brings me to Dr. Summers' third hypothesis, the one about discrimination against women. Here is the place where Dr. Summers reveals his true beliefs:

Summers' third point was about discrimination. Referencing a well-known concept in economics, he said that if discrimination was the main factor limiting the advancement of women in science and engineering, then a school that does not discriminate would gain an advantage by hiring away the top women who were discriminated against elsewhere.

Because that doesn't seem to be a widespread phenomenon, Summers said, ''the real issue is the overall size of the pool, and it's less clear how much the size of the pool was held down by discrimination."

This little conclusion is from a very early book on discrimination by Gary Becker. If you think about what is being said here for a while, you realize that if Dr. Summers is correct, then there has never been any discrimination at all! All those blacks and women who sued Wal-Mart for discrimination were wrong!

Sadly, this is not the correct conclusion. Becker derived this result in a simple model of the world where he assumed that only employers wanted to discriminate. Both coworkers (colleagues) and consumers were assumed to be totally fair and unbiased. But in reality we cannot assume that neither coworkers nor consumers would be totally fair and unbiased. In fact, when Becker introduced the possibility that discrimination might not be something that only bosses do his conclusion no longer applied.

Also, the conclusion is derived from a model which assumes that there is no ignorance about workers' true abilities, that everybody knows everything relevant. Once we allow for the actual amount of uncertainty and ignorance in the real world, the result would fail to follow even if only bosses were bigots. In fact, some alternative models show just the opposite in this case: that even actually unbiased bosses might discriminate if they expect that this strategy is, on average, rewarded by the overall market.

That Summers served one of the earliest and very partial conclusion from the whole rich field of the economics of discrimination shows what he really thinks. For this is the one piece that is always trotted out by those who never believed in any of that discrimination bullshit in the first place. He could have at least mentioned the many alternative theories of discrimination and the fact that they lead to very different conclusions. Or he could have mentioned the many empirical studies that show gender discrimination exists.

Instead of giving you a long lecture on these theories or evidence, I'm going to assume that you trust me enough to believe that they exist. Thus, Summers' argument fails to say anything very useful about the possible extent of discrimination against women in the hard sciences, even if we define discrimination as only taking place on the level of the relevant university. Then there is the whole issue of steering by teachers and career counselors on school level and the general societal expectations... Really, there is a lot of material here, and Summers' statement is a little bit inane.

Which brings me to my conclusions. Whether women and men have the same average ability to do hard sciences or not, shouldn't we clear out all the other obstacles women in the hard sciences meet before we decide to throw up our hands and agree that it's-just-the-way-things-are? Especially as it might not be the way things are, after all.
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If you are interested in real-world descriptions of sex discrimination, you might want to read through this thread in the Democratic Underground.

Hi There

My third post on the Lawrence Summers speech won't be up until tomorrow, because I haven't written it yet. Instead, I have read a discussion thread (courtesy of emjaybee in my comments) about the meaning of this speech, and I remembered just why I hate it when the topic of innate gender differences crops up. I had forgotten how all sorts of quite nasty people crawl out of the woodwork and state categorically that things are as they are for a good reason, that all is predestined and that the current sexual division of labor is the optimal one.

Funny how these debates never surface when a study claims that women do something better than men. Let me tell you an anecdote (which, as I described in my previous post, has no generalizability): I once taught a university course which started with some discussions of the I.Q. measure. This wasn't in psychology, so the treatment was relatively short, but for some reason I mentioned to the class that Binet's initial attempts to create such a measure caused one sex to have a higher average, so he adjusted the test until both girls and boys tested the same on average. There was some whispering and rustling in the audience, and this was among the male students. A couple of them got somewhat upset and wanted to know if the test still could have been seen as valid. I then explained that it was the girls who tested higher on the original test before Binet modified it, and somehow the adjustment was not longer causing either whispers or upsets.

I'm not sure what was going on, but the impression I received was that at least some of the male students had a prior idea about which sex should have scored higher. - Anyway, it was interesting.

The question of gender difference is not something one can discuss in unregulated arenas without invoking the idea of gender inferiority, and especially the inferiority of women. Misogynists, in particular, always believe in great and immutable gender differences, and such differences are the rationalization of their feelings. More generally, anti-feminists base their arguments on inherent gender differences, for without such differences there would be no logical reason to be an anti-feminist.

This makes a feminist approach often seem as if one is advocating the thesis that men and women are exactly the same from a biological point of view, even if one is saying no such thing. A feminist who believes in innate differences between the sexes has the extra burden of seeming as if she or he is agreeing with the misogynist or anti-feminist first, before going to argue that difference does not mean inferiority. In my experience this seldom works. But I'm not sure what would work.

Note also, that those who argue most heatedly for the case of innate gender differences appear never to suggest that such differences should be ameliorated by education or other environmental modifications. We do this with congenital problems all the time, and it might make sense to do with other characteristics, too. But this part is not in the political agenda of this group. The political agenda being that status quo is perfectly swell.

And, finally, it is odd how many commentators are willing to let go of their rigorous standard with respect to evidence and science when it comes to this issue. In the comments thread I linked to, at least two people advocated Stephen Pinker as an expert with respect to this question. His work is in linguistics, but what he says about sex differences appeals to the innate-and-immutable-nothing-can-be-done-about-it school.
Gah.
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I almost forgot: An interesting new argument seems to have cropped up (at least it is new to me),and that is the beautiful and harmonious complementarity between the biologically innately different sexes. While such complementarity may be very beautiful in some cases, it seems to assume that all women are like the average woman and all men like the average man, and it says nothing about the not-so-beautiful "complementary" relationships that have large power differences in them. Not to mention very different financial rewards.

You're Not Playing in My Yard

That's intended to be a line from a really old song about the rivalries of children, and how children try to exclude those they dislike. Our administration does the same thing, or so it looks:

A senior State Department official has notified the Taipei Times that he will no longer speak to the newspaper's Washington correspondent in retaliation for a Times editorial on Monday which called Powell a "sorry wreck of a once principled man."

This reporter received a call on Monday from Randall Schriver, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in charge of China, Taiwan and Hong Kong affairs, complaining about the editorial and saying that he would no longer speak to the newspaper because of it.

Schriver said that the administration does not take issue with newspapers that disagree with the administration's policy, but he said the description of Powell went too far.

It was not clear whether Schriver was speaking for himself or for the administration.

This would be an interesting way to control the press without explicitly having any kind of governmental censure.
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Link courtesy of Tom Daai Tou Laam on the Eschaton threads.

Why There Are So Few Women in the Hard Sciences: Part II

Time to dive in deeper. Lawrence Summmers' little speech suggested three different explanations for the scarcity of women in hard sciences: the eighty-hour weeks one is assumed to work, possible biological differences in talent between the sexes and discrimination against women. I wish to look at each of these, and I'm going to begin with Summers' second hypothesis, the one about biological differences between the sexes. The other two questions will be addressed in my next post if I ever get there.

It is useful to note at the very beginning that all these causes are likely to be extremely intertwined. For example, if people like Dr. Summers believe that women are less able to do hard sciences, and if people like Dr. Summers happen to become the presidents of major Ivy League universities, well, then there is quite likely to be discrimination against women in these places even if there was no innate sex difference in scientific talent. Likewise, if many employers accept the idea that women shy away from an eighty-hour week then they are going to be less likely to look at female applicants for such jobs seriously which can cause discrimination. And so on.

Also, it is interesting to ponder on the reason why hard sciences are called hard. What is it that is hard about them? Most seem to think that this label serves to distinguish them from soft sciences, but then, once again, what is so soft about some sciences? In reality, the hard sciences are in many ways easier than the soft sciences (which tend to deal with human data) because the empirical evidence has so much less static in it. It might be interesting to ask whether this hardness has anything to do with the idea of hardness in penis comparisons. I have no opinion on this!

Ok. Onwards and upwards. Are women less talented in hard sciences for purely biological reasons? The correct answer to this question is that we don't know. I can imagine many readers turning red here and starting to spew liquid on the keyboard, but bear with me for a while.

How would we find about such innate differences? The obvious answer would be by using genetic study for it, but as far as I know genetic study is currently not in a position to answer such complicated questions. If anything, we are learning that the interplay between inherited tendencies and the environment is much more complicated than we previously thought. It is even possible that the environment turns genes on and off, and in that sense there might not even be any such thing as purely genetic influence.

We don't have data on purely genetic influences in this field, or at least we don't have data that could be guaranteed to contain nothing else but the influence of our genes. What we have instead are three types of evidence which have been widely used to argue that differences in the numbers of women and men in hard sciences is biologically based: studies of differences in cognition between groups of girls and boys or women and men, studies which analyze the impact of some known change in the fetal stage or the impact of some known medical condition (such as autism) on cognition, and teleological studies which really use these same data but pedal backwards from them to various interesting stories about the division of labor between prehistoric housewives and brave map-reading warrior-hunters. I'm not going to say anything about the third group because discussing pseudoscience doesn't add anything (except hilarity) to what I'm trying to convey here.

The first type of evidence is the most important one of the three, because it uses large samples of relatively randomly picked individuals from all types of societies. The problem it has is that the measures of cognition elicited by asking children, teenagers and adults are unavoidably not going to be pure measures of genetic differences. The environment and the general culture have had time to work on the study subjects beforehand, and factors such as the quality of schooling the person has had, the family income and the general societal norms all can be shown to influence the findings.

Keeping this in mind, it's possible to note that most cognitive tests show some average gender differences in mathematics. Boys are, on average, better at certain types of mathematics problems than girls, especially in word problems, and this is true from a very early age and across various cultures. As Virginia Valian points out in her book Why So Slow, this might paradoxically be caused by the girls understanding words better in communication: most word problems require the solver to decide which parts of the statement are important for the solution, which parts are not and whether there is enough information for the solution. In the actual understanding of speech all parts have a function, even if some of the functions are half-hidden. Not knowing this may make a solver better at using the words mathematically.

Such gender differences are unlikely to be purely biological. This is because the differences between children in different countries are far greater and because the gender differences within countries have been declining for some time. But some part of these differences could be purely biological. What their significance for the hard sciences participation rates might be is more complicated. Consider the one test which shows the greatest sex difference of all: the mental rotation of three-dimensional figures, in which boys outperform girls pretty much everywhere. Most studies suggest that ability to do well on this test and other mathematical ability are not correlated. Thus, it's not possible to explain women's scarcity in mathematics in general by using this single test as the explanation.

The tests we develop and apply in cognitive studies are not necessarily neutrally selected. Every researcher has a gender identitity, after all. This is important to remember. For example, there are tests in which girls outperform boys by the same large and consistent margins as boys outperform girls in the mental rotation of three-dimensional figures, such as the one on perceptual speed, but these tests are not studied as intensively as the more familiar ones are. Even more generally, the tests we use are spot measures, may not reflect all important skills and tend to be overapplied to the young and then ignored for the rest of the individuals' lives. There is evidence suggesting that women have different lifetime patterns of mathematical abilities from men, and very little research exists on this and its possible meaning. For example, women outperform men in old age.

Many who argue for the biological explanation for the sex-skew in hard science practitioners say that what is really important to analyze is not the average scores on all these tests but the proportion of boys and girls who score exceptionally well. Because these tests have greater variability for boys, there are many more boys than girls with exceptionally high scores, and this fact alone could explain why most mathematical geniuses appear to have been men.

This is an interesting argument. Consider a different test, that of writing skills. Girls outperform boys on this test, and the variability is much greater for girls (see Dianne Hales: Just Like A Woman for references on the evidence). This means that there are many more girls in the high-scoring part of the test and therefore we should expect the geniuses of great literature to be overwhelmingly of the female denomination.

The reality is very different. Either we have been excellent in compensating boys for their "innate" deficiencies in writing talents or something else has affected the outcome, too. Or perhaps we should stop taking all this so terribly seriously.

A different avenue towards trying to find innate sex differences in mathematical ability uses subjects who are known to differ from the average in some pre-birth induced way. One such case is the genetic disorder of congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) which leads to an overproduction of androgens in the fetus' adrenal glands. Both boys and girls with this condition have very high levels of circulating androgens, and girls with CAH show many forms of behavior which are regarded as traditionally male (boys are harder to diagnose so there is less data on them).

Girls in CAH score very high on the mental rotation of three-dimensional figures, as might be surmised, but they don't score any better in general quantitative tests than other girls.

Simon Baron-Cohen has proposed a similar approach to testing gender differences in cognition by using children with autism as the study sample. He believes that autism is a form of an "extreme male brain" and that the greater mathematical abilities of many autistic children are evidence of the biological nature of gender differences in mathematics. The problems with his arguments become evident if you read his book on the topic (The Essential Difference: Men, Women and the Extreme Male Brain), which I have done. He presents no new evidence for his arguments and he even goes on for some pages about the hypothetical "extreme female brain" which doesn't exist, but if it did exist, Baron-Cohen believes that it would be favored over the "extreme male brain". Which sort of shows where he biases lie.

And if you weren't convinced about them yet, you could always take the very objective test in the Appendix of his book which will tell you how biologically male your brain is by answers to questions such as:"Can you fix your own electrical problems?" "When you look at a piece of furniture, do you wonder about how the joins were made?" (What about when you look at a beautiful dress?) "Do you like to chitchat more than you like to collect coins?" Or you could take it here.

Ok. Enough for one post. I'm not an expert in this area, though I'm a sort of a Renaissance goddess, so the usual caveats apply.