The Examined Life Is A Necessity But It Isn’t The Entire Story.

Remembering Arthur Berger The Week of His Birthday.
for Tristero
There is a certain slant of light, springtime afternoons, flooding through the large, open window with a fresh, cold wind that brings Arthur Berger’s Duo for Cello and Piano(1) to mind. Arthur Berger was sometimes described as an “intellectual composer”. Whatever that means. He was a composer, writer, analyst, critic, and a part of any intellectual scene wherever he happened to be. Perhaps closer to the point, Virgil Thomson, a fellow composer, critic and one of his friends, talked about his “sidewalks of New York charm”. So, here we already have a dichotomy, or at least two things usually considered as opposites. Maybe the strong sun light and cold spring wind should count as a third point of view. What’s the truth? Having played some of his pieces and studied more of them, I am happy to testify to the intellectual brilliance and the charm, he had both in abundance. Beauty of sound, the ability he shared with Luigi Dallapiccola(2) to find exactly the right note, tone color and expression, and to put it in exactly the right context, might stand in for the primary witness above.

Someone asked me why I don’t write more about music, since that’s clearly something I know more about than evolutionary psychology or cognitive science , about which I’ve spent enormous numbers of skeptical words. While music is what I got my formal training in, I don’t know if that’s true. I don’t think anything more is known about music than the technical aspects of how to produce it. Music is an order of sounds (3), it is possible to learn how to produce musical orders intentionally to attempt an effect. On that level music is a skill instead of a collection of theories, observations, measurements and speculations. That I could talk about easily, though it makes for rough reading and it really doesn’t contain any information useful to non-musicians. It’s only in the sense that it is a skill to be practiced that someone can “know” something about music. In that sense, it is entirely like speculations about the mind, only with a practical component.

I could tell you that roughly measures 25 through 31 of the first movement of Berger’s Duo move me to an all encompassing state of ecstacy every single time I hear it or play through the piano part. Just remembering how that passage sounds can take me out of myself. I could try to think of further metaphors or write a formal technical description, to give a partial explanation of what happens at that time in the music and then guess why it produces that effect. All of that might be entirely true, in part, and entirely useless in total. Any elucidation that someone reading that description might think they’ve received would be deceptive. It would tell you nothing useful, it might endanger your own experience of the music. I would have to motivate you to experience the music, to listen to it, complete and in its entirety, to have any hope that you could know what I was talking about. No one who had not heard the music would know the first thing about it.

The culture of scholarship, text and reflection, is all well and good but it carries danger when it is placed in supremacy over actual life. Life, the whole stream of experience and action as lived, not arbitrarily cut into segments to be digested and published. Scholars dwell on their publishable and teachable work, the materials of their careers, jealously guarding its repute, hardly ever admitting to their intentional selection out of the entire body of possible information. Actual, direct experience is not susceptible to scholarship. It is by its most basic nature, personal, the experience of a single person, invisible and variable, in its deepest essence indescribable. That is something that the aforementioned behavioral scientists(4) should keep in mind, something that a composer could tell them, something such a musician should never forget.

The very selective, partial view of life, which makes up the work of a scholar, can be very useful, it can produce things and objects that enhance health and increase life-span, it can enrich experience. But when those things are ideas about real life, their entire effects, good and bad are often not able to be apprehended. Sometimes the added component of history proves that ideas thought good or innocuous in the abstract are deadly. Far from just being the plaything of a dreamer or a brick in a scholar’s career, an idea can’t be viewed as an end in itself, it has to be seen in as full a context as possible. Unconsidered in the full context, ideas can carry the danger of overtaking the whole of life.(5)


1. Also Hear: An Arthur Berger Retrospective New World Records NW 360-2
Joel Kroskick, cello Gilbert Kalish, piano and others.

Almost all of Berger’s works are or have recently been available on CDs. I have heard and would recommend all of them. If you can find it I would also recommend the old CRI recording of Berger’s music in the American Masters collection. The recording of his Chamber Music for 13 Players, conducted by Gunther Schuller, is particularly wonderful. I've seen three dates in different places of when his birthday was but they were all in this coming week. This week would have been his 95th birthday. I loved Arthur Berger and his music very much.

2. Talking about your neglected composers. John Harbison made this observation about Dallapiccola’s ability as a composer.

3. Susan K. Langer: An Introduction To Symbolic Logic. Langer’s several simple observations about music in this book stand as the most insightful general statements I’ve ever read by someone outside of the profession.

4. It is exactly this selective feature of these reductionist schools practice that makes me very suspicious of them and alarmed about the resulting conclusions they seem to demand. Those who insist that only one mechanism of evolution, the crudest part of natural selection, is the supreme guide for understanding practically everything , strikes me as too likely to produce a superficially appealing mannerism (6.) instead of a view of reality. It closes off too many possibilities of real life from consideration, even, at times, substituting fables with no known real life evidence as possible explanations.

5. If music was an area of life that could produce life and death consequences, a danger to freedom, it would be dangerous. Hearing, quite involuntarily, Les Preludes by Liszt the other day, the story of its association with the invasion of Poland and the suspected motivating force of Wagner’s work might be noted here. I do so without prejudice, as a suggested supplement to the observation.

6. I’m fully aware of the irony, I read Perspectives in Music Theory too.

HAWT!

Garance tells us that the Republicans are most chuffed that Mitt is sexy and hot and will make women all over America swoon in the voting booths:

"In this media-driven age, Romney begins with a decisive advantage. First, he has sensational good looks. People magazine named him one of the 50 most beautiful people in America. Standing 6 feet, 2 inches tall, Romney has jet-black hair, graying naturally at the temples. Women -- who will play a critical role in this coming election -- have a word for him: hot."

According to Garance this is from official Mitt Romney campaign literature. It wouldn't surprise me as I've read that I shouldn't vote for John Edwards because he spends too much on haircuts and that I shouldn't vote for Hillary Clinton because she doesn't smile enough. But HAWT! Now, that is something a girl can get behind.

If she was picking a bedroom partner, that is. Now, if she was picking a dentist or a president, perhaps questions of professional competence and policies might be more interesting to her.
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Addendum: Garance's original post is updated to tell us that the material doesn't come from Romney campaign material but from this article.

Happy Mothers' Day

I hope all the little burnt offerings on Sunday morning will remain in your memory for ever.

To keep this post political, put some pressure on the U.S. government to ratify CEDAW, The Treaty for the Rights of Women. The U.S. laws are all already in accordance with the treaty, so why refuse the ratification? There are only eight countries that have not ratified the treaty: Sudan, Somalia, Qatar, Iran, Nauru, Palau and Tonga and the United States. We are known for the company we keep.

Outsourcing The Mainstream Media?

That is probably the next step. The signs are in the air:

The job posting was a head-scratcher: "We seek a newspaper journalist based in India to report on the city government and political scene of Pasadena, California, USA."

A reporter half a world away covering local street-light contracts and sewer repairs? A reporter who has never gotten closer to Pasadena than the telecast of the Rose Bowl parade?

Outsourcing first claimed manufacturing jobs, then hit services such as technical support, airline reservations and tax preparation. Now comes the next frontier: local journalism.

It is all about money. Journalists in India come cheaper than journalists in Pasadena, California. But the savings would be even bigger if the city government could be run from Mumbay, too. Come to think of it, a newspaper owned and run by Indians for the benefit of the citizens of Pasadena would save a lot of money, too. The funny thing about outsourcing is that it doesn't usually work in that direction.
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Cross-posted on TAPPED in a slightly modified form.

Friday Pet Blogging

This is FeraLiberal's Pippin and some stone friends. A fantastic picture, with all sorts of captions one might invent.

Henrietta the Hound is very frisky, these days. And still an excellent barker. I will have to take a picture of Her Highness for next week.

An Odd Item For Your Information

I was reading about some new books on women's issues when I came across this little tidbit of information:

Caitlin Flanagan's 2006 "To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife," has sold 9,000 copies in the past year, according to Neilsen BookScan in White Plains, N.Y., which calculates weekly sales data for the book industry.

Now, the low sales numbers may be par for the field. But I remember Flanagan being on all the important television shows flogging her book. She got enormous amounts of publicity. Enormous.

Perhaps I should cancel my book-writing plans. If someone beloved by the patriarchy can't make it...

Happy Anniversary To olvlzl

His blog turns one today.

One of Those Days

Edited to add that Haloscan seems to be working now, at 9:01 pm EST.

I click on my Sitemeter page (to gloat over my humongous readership numbers) and they have changed the aesthetics of the page so that I have to look for the place to log in and so on. There is no familiarity, nothing that my body memory can use to go through the tasks quickly. But it is new and improved!

That's how you know you are getting old. When things being changed immediately makes you suspect that nothing good will come from it.

Well, at least Haloscan (my comments program) is as schizoid it always was, sometimes working and sometimes not. First it refuses to post my comment altogether, then when I resubmit it I'm told that I already said so, which I didn't, given that the original posting failed. Then I change one word in the comment and resubmit, only to be told that I must wait at least twenty seconds between posts. And all this before I managed to post anything at all. Sometimes it is cookies that it craves. Sometimes it wonders if I really don't know my name. Dear old Haloscan: something unchanging in this ever-changing world.

Oh well.

Meanwhile, in Oklahoma

Something happened in Oklahoma that was seen as a pro-choice victory. A bill that would have barred abortions in state hospitals except when the woman's life is threatened was vetoed by the governor and so far the veto has not been overridden. But attempts to override it can continue:

An ardent anti-abortion senator lost a second bid on Wednesday to override Gov. Brad Henry's veto of a bill to bar abortions at state hospitals except to save the life of the mother.

Henry vetoed the measure on April 18, saying he feared it would add to the suffering of poor women with problem pregnancies. The Democratic governor also was critical of the bill because it did not include exceptions for rape and incest.

The vote on Sen. James Williamson's second override attempt was 31-16. It takes 32 votes, or a two-thirds majority of the 48-member Senate, to override a gubernatorial veto.

The bill was opposed by the Oklahoma State Medical Association and other medical groups, who said it could endanger the future health of some women.

Note that the Irish 17-year old girl carrying an anencephalic fetus wouldn't get an abortion in an Oklahoma state hospital under this proposed bill.

And this is a pro-choice victory? To temporarily bar a bill like this?

Matters are much worse than I could ever have imagined.

Cogito, Ergo Sum?

A sinus infection offers a perfect perch for ruminations about the existence of a permanent self, because the infection seems to have taken over most of the brainpan where the permanent self is supposed to reside, and it has also made the permanent self act as if it has early-onset Altzheimers. I have a strong urge to write lists today, beginning with such things as the arm with the scar belongs to the right side of the body and continuing with reminders about a particular door swinging INWARDS, dammit.

But none of this is about the "self", of course. It is about the many little machines that empower the self, and in particular about the thinking and monitoring part of the mind. The emotional part of the mind seems to be asleep right now, as it usually is when I am sick, only to wake up disgruntled and very depressed during convalescence, leading to a few days of "vanity, all is vanity" kind of thinking and a much greater empathy with long-term depressives.

What is quite clear to me, though, is that none of these changes are ultimately affecting that part of my mind that feels to me like the "self". The part that somehow observes everything else, the part that can decide that "we" are a little down today, and can also decide that this, too, will pass. And as well as I can remember, that observing part has been pretty unchanging all through my life.

Perhaps that is not the "self" that buddhism discusses, say. But it is the part of me that feels like "home", or at least the part of me that appears somewhat able to climb out of any turmoil caused by high emotions or an outside emergency and even illness. Yet at the same time it is an integral part of the whole body-mind meld and not something that I can imagine floating alone somewhere above the clouds.

To Be Like Animals

A New York Times article on Pope Benedict's visit to Brazil focuses on his resistance to abortion and his defense of the family. It is interesting how "family" is code for "no women's rights". This makes me wonder what sort of a creature the "family" is and why its needs never appear to conflict with men's rights.

The same article had an interesting quote:

In another, related statement, the Brazilian church's senior cleric, Cardinal Geraldo Majella Agnello, condemned government policies on reproductive health, which have won praise from international public health groups. The cardinal singled out sexual education and condom distribution programs, which have helped cut AIDS transmission rates in Brazil, and attacked them by saying they promoted immorality.

"This is inducing everyone into promiscuity," Cardinal Majella said in an interview with the Portuguese-language service of the B.B.C. "This is not respect for life or for real love. It's like turning man into an animal."

So all animals put on a condom and review their sex-education booklets before engaging in a little bit of wild sex? Animals act much more in accordance with what Cardinal Majella would like to see from humans, actually.

Home-Grown Terrorists

An idea repeated several times in the reports about the New Jersey Six, a very amateurish plot which consisted of a handful of men planning to attack a military base, is that domestic terrorism in the United States is somehow caused by the Internet sites where AlQaeda resides. An example of this:

B. WILLIAMS: A lot of government officials from the president on down have hinted over the years that if we ever really knew about all the unsubstantiated national security threats that are out there, we'd never leave our homes in the morning. Of course, most of those threats pass without us ever knowing about them. But this morning, as millions of Americans were leaving home for work, they heard about this story, what the feds say is a busted plot by six young men in their 20s accused of planning to shoot up a U.S. Army post, Fort Dix in New Jersey. The FBI says this was an example of home-grown terrorism, inspired by the Internet and thankfully foiled.

I seem to remember something one would call home-grown terrorism, concerning Oklahoma City. Somehow terrorism has become equated with Islamic terrorism, these days. But the world has all sorts of terrorists and the U.S. has always had home-grown terrorists. Just ask the people who work at abortion clinics.

Nothing Can Be Done

This tends to be the conservative reaction to most any injustice or unfairness in this world, at least as long as it is not seen as caused by the government. Take the idea of a minimum wage: The conservatives will point out that raising the minimum wage will just hurt those it is intended to help by making firms employ fewer people than before, because they now cost more to employ. Or the jobs, which now cost the firms more, can attract a different, more skilled slice of the labor force and the original holders of those jobs will be unemployed in that theory, too.

These arguments seldom point out that even within the limited models used those employees who remain employed at the higher wage rate do benefit directly and that giving these workers more money to spend will help the local consumption levels to rise and that this, in turn, will cause more openings for fairly low-skilled workers in that community. Neither is it explained where the different and more skilled workers come from, the ones who are supposed to snap up the jobs with the higher minimum wage rate, or what happens to the jobs they presumably leave open elsewhere in the community.

I was reminded of these rhetorical tricks while reading Greg Mankiw's response to the Harvard students' living-wage-protest (via Max Speak). Then I read the comments to Mankiw's post and found a few more rhetorical tricks:

One is the argument that when two people enter a voluntary contract, nobody else should interfere with that purely voluntary agreement. If Carmen and Megapower International, say, agree that she will clean floors for one dollar a day, who are we to say that this contract shouldn't be legal? Nobody is forcing Carmen to enter into it, after all, and if she doesn't like the contract she can always starve. Was I clear enough about the fact that such contracts are not the same in consequences for the two contracting parties in some cases?

The other one has to do with the odd idea some commenters had that Harvard is a profit-maximizing firm and therefore must obey the market-set wage levels. But Harvard is explicitly and legally NOT a profit-maximizing firm. It is a nonprofit entity, and economists debate quite fiercely about the possible goals that such entities have and what those goals would predict about cost minimization. In short, it is not at all obvious that Harvard would have to try to minimize its labor costs to thrive.

Picture Blogging

From freewayblogger. You can find out from him how to participate in this outdoor arts form.

Some More Bad Poetry

Both because I still have a head cold and the alternative posts would all be about the odd colors that appear to now exist inside my nose and because I wrote earlier about women in academia. So here is the Professor's Prayer:


In the hallowed halls
the chalkdust sleeps.
Old bones dance in bounds and leaps.
The light has died
but the power keeps.

Ach mein Vater, hold me tight,
brand my forehead with thy sign.
Symbols whisper Latin stories,
algorithms and allegories.
Computers and rats in cages,
pages upon untouched pages.
Let them think that I am right.
Let my circles meet thy line.

Knowledge is a cruel fetus
sucking, sucking air.
Fed on academic blood that soaks
through the academic cloaks
that hang suspended.
Yet logic rules though mended.
No Alma Mater dare
to enter there.

My One Good Daily Addiction

Is to go and check on the two kittens fourlegs blogs about.

Do you have places on the Internet where you go just for something totally different?

Women in Academia

France A. Cordova, an astrophysicist, will become Purdue University's next president and the first woman in that role. In general, gender equality seems attainable in academia, given that half of the Ivy League presidents now are women. But a new article in Ms. Magazine warns us of premature congratulations about this:

Similarly, between 1986 and 2006, the percentage of women presidents has risen from 10 percent to 23 percent. Yet women continue to advance more slowly up faculty ranks and earn less salary than their male colleagues. Even though more women are tenured today, the tenure gender gap has not narrowed in the last 25 years.

Furthermore, despite high-profile appointees such as Faust, women are still disproportionately represented in lower ranks and at less prestigious institutions. Although nearly 29 percent of associate-degree-granting colleges were headed by women, less than 14 percent of doctorate-granting institutions have women presidents. And while there has been progress in closing the salary gap between men and women when new academic appointments are made, within five years of hire the equity begins to evaporate.

There have also been recent external and internal policy changes in academia that have not served women well. According to Martin Finkelstein, professor of education at Seton Hall University, only one out of four new faculty appointments in 2001 was to a full-time tenure-track position. White women, and men and women of color, are now over-represented in the new category of non-tenure-line positions and, as before, in part-time faculty positions. The constant assault on affirmative action has also erased or crippled one of the single most effective policies that increased women's access to equal opportunities.

Then there is the baby gap: The time for the most desperate struggles for getting tenured and the time for having your babies overlap almost completely. This hurts women who have "early" babies:

One of the explanations for the gender differential in academic careers may be the "Baby Gap," according to researchers Mary Ann Mason and Marc Goulden at the University of California, Berkeley. Their investigations have shown that having children, especially "early babies," is a disadvantage for women's professional careers—but an advantage for men's. Women with babies are 29 percent less likely than women without to enter a tenure- track position, and married women are 20 percent less likely than single women to do so.

I once read an assessment about the second wave of feminism as having been fairly successful in opening the public sector to some women, at least, but having been totally unsuccessful in affecting the gendered division of labor at home. This quote is another piece of evidence supporting that assessment.

Bill Moyers Interviews Jon Stewart

This is an old program, but if you didn't watch it you might wish to. The conversation between Moyers and Stewart is fascinating, because it is a real conversation in the sense that the participants just follow the ideas and respond to each other with a minimum of hedging or guarding or propagandizing. One can actually get somewhere with such a conversation, and that I feel so strongly about this all goes to tell how rare real conversations on television are. For one thing, they take time and that is not usually given to the participants.

Cable News Programs And Diversity

Media Matters for America has an interesting little survey of the gender and race balance on various cable news programs:

During the recent controversy over former radio and television host Don Imus' remarks about the Rutgers women's basketball team, some cable-news viewers may have noticed something unusual: the presence of significantly more African-Americans. The nature of the controversy led the cable networks to seek comment from a far more diverse group of people than they ordinarily do, which begs the question: To the extent these cable programs included a more diverse guest lineup during the Imus controversy, why do they provide such diversity only when issues of race are in the news cycle? Do cable-news producers view the guests added to the lineup during the Imus controversy as qualified to talk only about issues of race, and not other issues of national and political significance?

And did these guests have any lasting effect on the networks' booking practices, or did they return to their old ways as soon as the Imus issue disappeared? To begin to answer these questions, Media Matters for America analyzed the race/ethnicity and gender of the hosts and guests on the major prime-time cable-news programs. This study looks at the guests who appeared on CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC during the weeknights before the Imus controversy (Monday, April 2, through Friday, April 6), the weeknights of the Imus controversy (Monday, April 9, through Friday, April 13), and the weeknights following the Imus controversy (Monday, April 23, through Friday, April 27). (We omitted the week immediately after the Imus controversy because it was consumed almost entirely by a single issue -- the Virginia Tech shootings -- and thus was atypical). Each guest appearing on the prime-time shows of the top three cable-news networks was recorded and categorized by race/ethnicity and gender.

I'm sure you can predict most of the findings of the survey, though there were some surprises, too, at least for me:

CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC did not fare particularly well when it came to gender diversity in any of the three weeks. Among the individual programs, there was more variation. The most gender-diverse program was The O'Reilly Factor, with a nearly even split between male and female guests during all three weeks, increasing Fox News' overall proportion of female guests. Despite the fact that the remarks that touched off the controversy were not only racist but misogynistic, only Paula Zahn Now and The Situation Room increased their proportion of female guests substantially from the first week to the second. And three others, all of which air on MSNBC -- Scarborough Country, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, and Hardball -- all hosted fewer women during the week of the Imus controversy than the week before.

The surprises are the O'Reilly Factor and the overall obliviousness of the MSNBC shows.

Writing about diversity is not fun. "Diversity" in itself is one of those euphemisms which were selected because fairness and equality didn't test well in a world where the Rush Limbaughs have been allowed to get away with defining those concepts as thought control and political correctness. But diversity is too vague a concept for practical purposes. One can have "diversity" by hiring one woman or one black man, for example. A better concept would be representativeness, although defining it properly would require a whole post.

As I was saying, I don't like to write about diversity. It isn't clear-cut and it is still vulnerable to all the same counterarguments as the more rigorous measures of inclusiveness. In particular, it has been tainted with the smell of diversity-for-its-own-sake; as if nothing is lost by not having diversity but diversity itself. That is of course exactly the wingnut argument: that the cream rises to the top and if it happens to be white, Christian and male, well, that's how it is. Of course scum also rises to the top, but that, too, is another post.

The Imus case is a good example of a treatment of news where something pretty obvious is lost if the people discussing Imus's slurs are all white guys. That the MSNBC shows didn't try to have more women talking about the slurs means that their coverage was weakened. As a minimum, when the debate is about something having to do with racial minorities or with women it would be just good manners to have a few from those groups participating in the pontificating.

But in a wider sense this is pitifully inadequate. It says that the only things women and blacks, say, can be experts in are being women and/or blacks. That is pretty insulting, isn't it?

Girls Gone Wild Reconsidered

Garance Franke-Ruta's article in the Wall Street Journal about Girls Gone Wild and similar recordings of young women doing sexual or pornographic things has provoked an interesting blog conversation. Garance recommends raising the minimum age at which one can engage in acts of pornography from eighteen to twenty-one. Her argument is this:

It is true that teenagers become legal adults at the age of 18, right around the time they graduate from high school. The age of consent to serve in the armed forces is also 18 (17 with parental consent), as is the minimum voting age since 1971, when an amendment to the Constitution lowered it from 21. But the federal government is already happy to bar legal adults from engaging in certain activities. Most notably, the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984 raised the drinking age to 21 (by threatening to withhold highway funds from states that did not go along). In practice, the age limit is flouted on college campuses and in private homes. But it has still had a positive effect, not least by driving down fatalities from drunk driving.

A new legal age for participating in the making of erotic imagery--that is, for participating in pornography--would most likely operate in the same way, sometimes honored in the breach more than the observance. But a 21-year-old barrier would save a lot of young women from being manipulated into an indelible error, while burdening the world's next Joe Francis with an aptly limited supply of "talent." And it would surely have a tonic cultural effect. We are so numb to the coarse imagery around us that we have come to accept not just pornography itself--long since routinized--but its "barely legal" category. "Girls Gone Wild"--like its counterparts on the Web--is treated as a kind of joke. It isn't. There ought to be a law.

Garance points out that youthful indiscretions of this kind can follow a woman for the rest of her life, now that the Internet provides a handy place for storing videos and pictures, and given the way the world views women who have bared themselves in public (or even in private), the consequences could be severe.

Avedon of Sideshow disagrees with Garance's proposal:

I was once setting up for an interview about porn with a few other women, including one who had been a Playboy centerfold. (And also with Alice Nutter, which was very cool.) The ex-Playmate had said something about how she wouldn't want her daughter to do it, and I asked her why. She said something about how she'd rather her daughter finished college and did all sorts of respectable things. "I never posed for Playboy," I said. "I have my degree. And you're the one who has a column in a daily newspaper, and I'm not." She allowed as how I might have had a point. Her posing for Playboy when she was young had gained her all sorts of entry into a better life that none of her working-class friends had managed, and neither, with all my middle-class advantages, had I. So maybe baring your knockers for the camera isn't necessarily the life-ruining event Garance thinks it is.

Being indentured for the rest of your life by student loans or foolish credit card decisions could just end up being a life-ruining thing, though. But we don't seem to get nearly as upset about that.

But I wish Garance would rethink her whole approach. The problem isn't that girls get drunk and flash for the camera. The problem is that we still raise kids to think there is something dirty about sex, and we never quite get over it.

And Amanda of Pandagon partly disagrees with both Garance and Avedon, though she agrees with Avedon on this:

I agree with her that even if Garance, like me, is mostly interested in giving young people the space to experiment sexually without a bunch of punitive cameras coming in to stubbornly insist that 18-year-old women's experimentation belongs to slut-bashing 40-year-old wankers, there's exactly no way that a law like the one Garance is proposing would be used in good faith. Instead, it would be used to slut-bash, just as "Girls Gone Wild" is about punishing young women for sexual experimentation. Our culture is so stuck on the idea that the people in the wrong are Girls Who Do It, not the guys who rape them, not the creepy old fucks who want to punish them by taking away their contraception and plastering their faces all over advertisements on cable TV so you know that they're subhuman sex toys who don't deserve respect—there's no way that such a law wouldn't just turn into more witch-burning of Girls Who Do It.

Where she agrees with Garance is this:

I do take some issue with Avedon bringing up a Playboy model she spoke with, who was far from being punished for posing naked. While it's true that some women do very well from youthful porn displays, Playboy modeling is often the exception that proves the rule. The wink-and-nod "girl next door" thing is similiar to the Jessica Simpson "I'm a sex object virgin" thing, where the price you pay to be a respectable sex object is a lot of kow-towing to the idea that those other sex objects, they're the horrible sluts. You know, those stupid bitches who shook their tits at a camera for a T-shirt, the ones who are asking for it.

(Cut-and-paste is an excellent way of writing a blog post. See how far down the page I am already, and I haven't said one single thing yet? If I didn't have a head cold I might go back and rewrite this all. But I have a head cold and the clips will stay.)

And what will I say on all this? I think it pays to step one step back and ask what it is exactly that is going on with the Girls Gone Wild videos and what it is that might make a woman who posed for Playboy do well in certain cases. The answer has very little to do with women's sexual needs and a lot to do with who has more money and power in the society.

The Girls Gone Wild videos exist not because young women are experimenting sexually (that can happen in bedrooms and cars all over the place) but because someone with a camera arranged the situation to happen. The setup is a commercial one and the audience for it does not consist of young women. If we regard this as sexual experimentation then it is a commercial sexual experimentation.

The ex-Playmate may be successful in her later career, true, but only if she picks that career very, very carefully. Being a bishop is out, so is being a politician or a teacher, and probably a lawyer. I'm not sure how many columnists one might have out of the Girls Gone Wild participants, but I doubt there would be enough good jobs for all of them. For most participants the participation will not be a thing to add to the old resume.

The reason for that is partly in Avedon's statement about sex being viewed as dirty, but perhaps even more in who it is that is assumed to have been dirtied by sex. It is still usually the woman whose reputation is smeared or whose "purity" is lost.

Would raising the minimum age of legal participation in erotic imagery be a good idea? I'm not sure. I have some problems with the fact that an eighteen-year old can go and fight in a war in Iraq, come home and then not get served a beer in an American bar. This seems illogical and patronizing. It seems that the age of maturity should be the same for all purposes.

Mitt Romney's Wingnut Hour

This is the time in the presidential campaign when the candidates cozy up to the bases of their respective parties. Hence the spectacle of three hands rising up when the Republican candidates were asked if they don't believe in evolution in the televised debate last week. Mitt Romney continued the wingnut courting by visiting Pat Robertson's Regent University (where God rules and where the students will be His regents on earth) and by giving evidence of his impeccable wingnut characteristics. He said, among other things, that Europe is like Sodom:

"It seems that Europe leads Americans in this way of thinking," Romney told the crowd of more than 5,000. "In France, for instance, I'm told that marriage is now frequently contracted in seven-year terms where either party may move on when their term is up. How shallow and how different from the Europe of the past."

It's also well known that all Europeans must sign up for two years of obligatory homosexuality first. Sort of like the preaching young Mormon men must perform.

But an even odder statement from Romney is this one:

But, publicly, he has emphasized that he is a "person of faith" and said that Americans are electing a commander in chief, not a pastor in chief. To be sure, Mormons are major Romney backers; data from his campaign finance records in his three months as a presidential candidate show that a Zip code area in Provo, Utah, led all others in donations to his campaign. Provo is the home of Brigham Young University, his alma mater.

Are Americans electing a commander in chief? I thought the president is the commander in chief of the armed forces, not of the country. Does Romney see his role as a tribal war leader?

Honor?

A seventeen-year old girl was stoned to death in Iraq. Her death was required by the family honor, because she had a boyfriend with a different religion:

Reports from Iraq said a local security force witnessed the incident, but did nothing to try to stop it. Now her boyfriend is in hiding in fear for his life.

Aswad, a member of a minority Kurdish religious group called Yezidi, was condemned to death as an ?honour killing? by other men in her family and hardline religious leaders because of her relationship with the Sunni Muslim boy.

They said she had shamed herself and her family when she failed to return home one night. Some reports suggested she had converted to Islam to be closer to her boyfriend.

Aswad had taken shelter in the house of a Yezidi tribal leader in Bashika, a predominantly Kurdish town near the northern capital, Mosul.

A large crowd watched as eight or nine men stormed the house and dragged Aswad into the street. There they hurled stones at her for half an hour until she was dead. The stoning happened last month, but only came to light on Wednesday with the release of the Internet video. It is feared her death has triggered a retaliatory attack. Last week 23 Yezidi workmen were forced off a bus travelling from Mosulto Bashika by a group of Sunni gunmen and summarily shot dead.

Women's vaginas as the place where family honor is kept. This is an old concept around the Mediterranean region, probably older than the idea of stoning adulteresses in the Bible and the Koran.

I feel sick in the stomach. More death followed the killing for honor, too.

Twisty has more. I don't recommend watching the video.

How Death Is Reported

These days you have to search to find the news about the deaths in Iraq. They don't make the top-ten list of news unless a very impressive number has been killed. Today's major deaths have the Kenyan airplane accident as the most important one.

What determines when deaths make news? And why are deaths so important as news, even in cases where there is nothing that can be done about the deaths and where there is no obvious way to prevent similar future deaths? And why are all airplane crashes reported but not the car accidents which actually kill a lot more people every year?

The Iraq deaths are "old hat". We are used to hearing about them now, and that is partly why they no longer make the front page. It may also be that the government discourages these types of news, although I have no idea if that happens. But getting used to deaths does seem to make a big difference to what is reported as "new" news. Hence, we are not being told how many people car accidents kill or how many people die each year of the common influenza, because we are used to those deaths. They don't look frightening any longer. But a new killer virus! Now, that is news, even if it might never come about or even if it might not kill any more people than the current influenza strains.

The reasons for reporting airplane crashes are somewhat different. I would have thought that people are by now used to the idea that planes can crash. But those crashes probably remain newsworthy because so many of us have an almost primitive fear of flying and a deeply held belief that we are not supposed to find ourselves in a little tin can up in the air. And each crash kills multiple people in a short amount of time.

Some deaths are reported because of the horror about a particular way of dying rather than about the deaths themselves. Pedophiles killing children is a prime example of this, even if car accidents actually kill many more children each year. The problem with reporting for reasons such as novelty or primal fears or horror is that news are also seen as giving relevant information at the same time. Hence many people decide that pedophiles are riskier than cars or that flying is less safe than driving. Or that the deaths in Iraq are not that many.

Jonathan Chait on Netroots

Jonathan Chait has written a long and interesting piece on the meaning of the "netroots", that part of the liberal/progressive blogosphere which focuses explicitly on electoral politics and the support of Democratic candidates. The piece came out in the New Republic some time ago and many bloggers and journalists have responded to it already. This means that I am, as usual, either too early or too late. But I didn't feel like writing about it until I knew what my thoughts were.

Chait's article has several different themes, all intertwined with each other, but his basic assertion is that the progressive netroots are the equivalent of the wingnut media machinery: an attempt to create political propaganda and to make the left walk in step, the same way the wingnuts do. Hut, hut.

This was a necessary development, according to Chait:

It has taken an abnormally long time for this message machine to come into existence. In the decades after World War II, the news media evolved a strong professional standard of nonpartisanship. Network news broadcasts faced little financial pressure, and newspapers--fattened up by advertising monopolies--followed the dictates of their professional values rather than the demands of the market. They maintained costly bureaus in Washington and abroad, and their ideology was mostly high-minded establishment centrism.

The first outlets to break away from this news oligarchy all sprang up on the right--talk radio, Fox News, the Drudge Report. Such partisan outlets did a brilliant job of injecting pro-Republican stories and ideas into the mainstream public discourse, using classic propaganda techniques, endlessly repeating ideas, phrases, and images that helped their side with little regard for truth or intellectual consistency. During the '90s and the outset of the Bush years, this was the landscape: a large mainstream media, with a social liberal bias mostly buried beneath studious nonpartisanship, and a wildly partisan conservative media. All the pressure on the mainstream media came from the right. Even liberal opinion journalists, in this unbalanced world, felt obliged to demonstrate their nonpartisanship.

That is it, pretty much. If you were a journalist who got attacked all the time for being a liberal and never attacked for being a conservative, how would you write? Whom would you fear? And which readers and citizens do you think might start getting a little bit angry as a consequence? Which stories would be put on page eighteen in the newspaper and which ones on the front page?

There are two subplots Chait weaves into his analysis with which I disagree. The first one has to do with his ideas of the political center, the moderate middle. The mushy middle, if you like, and it can be called mushy in the kind of world the previous quote outlined. What happens to the political center when the right pulls and pulls and yells and yells and the liberal pundits say "On the one hand...yet on the other hand...and on the third hand..."? It moves to the right, inch by inch, day by day until Attila the Hun is the human rights secretary.

It isn't that Chait doesn't see this. He does, and writes as much. But he doesn't appear to notice that the way this center is defined leaves only a few "nonpartisan" liberal commentators in it. The task of the netroots is to tug the rope from the other end when the wingnuts pull it from the other end. A country which uses "liberal" as equal to "Maoist" needs such an adjustment. A country which engages in just writing down what the wingnuts say and then reporting it without any other evidence needs such an adjustment.

The second subplot with which I disagree has to do with Chait's views on netroots as not caring about truth:

The notion that political punditry ought to, or even can, be constrained by intellectual honesty is deeply alien to the netroots. They have absorbed essentially the same critique of the intelligentsia that the right has been making for decades. In the conservative imagination, journalists, academics, and technocrats are liberal ideologues masquerading as dispassionate professionals. Those who claim to be detached from the political struggle are unaware of their biases, or hiding them.

Norquist once said something to me that gave perfect expression to this view. During the 2000 campaign, the two of us were making small talk before we were set to debate, and he offered that the event would be clarifying for his team as well as for my team. I replied that, while I certainly have strong opinions, I wasn't working for any "team." Norquist smiled at me in a slightly condescending way and said, "Sometimes, we're on a team and we don't realize it."

This is more or less the same view of the netroots. They attack liberals who, in their fervor to be seen as fair-minded, bend over backward so far that they do violence to truth. And they are quite right to do so. But the netroots critique is not that the liberal intelligentsia has stretched the conception of fairness too far; it is that the conception of fairness itself is folly. Any sense of detachment from the partisan fray is impossible.

...

This ethos helps explain the enormous distrust between the netroots and the traditional liberal intelligentsia. (Or, as Black put it, the "incredible gap between those who see the debate as a kind of game and those who, you know, actually give a shit about stuff.") Part of it is the slight whiff of anti-intellectualism in some quarters of the netroots. (Moulitsas, echoing Black's thoughts, suggested that "intellectuals' who'd rather read books and measure purity are next-to-useless. I prefer people of action, not of [sic] elitist academics.") The prevailing sentiment here, however, is not a distrust of pointy heads. Rather, it's a belief that political discourse ought to be judged solely by its real-world effects. The netroots consider the notion of pursuing truth for its own sake nonsensical. Their interest in ideas, and facts, is purely instrumental.

I could write a very long post on "truth" and its various meanings and whether one can be a detached observer of politics without also coming from some other planet. Then I could write another very long post on why it would be, nevertheless, important to try to be as objective as one can. But instead of all that let me just point out that I cannot see how a political idea could ever be judged without including its real-world consequences as an essential part of the whole idea. Chait isn't arguing against that, of course. What he argues is that the consequences are all the netroots care about. I don't think this is actually true, but if it were would it be any worse than the alternative he appears to recommend which is "to hell with the consequences"?

There are millions of blogs and many of them might be regarded as a part of the netroots. It's not possible to say that all of them are propaganda or that all of them are earnest hunters of truth or any such thing. But an important aspect of many liberal and progressive blogs is a certain type of hunt for truths: They pick up stories and interpretations of stories that the mainstream press ignores and they then frontpage them. That these stories are buried in the traditional media may be unintended or it may be purposeful. If the latter, the blogs would appear to be biased in promoting these stories, but the initial bias might in fact be in the way they were buried.

I kept feeling that I wasn't getting Chait's point about the nonpartisan truth completely. Reading a follow-up story of his made all much clearer. In this quote he responds to Matthew Yglesias:

There are three possible stances to take. One is that you should go out of your way to highlight your disagreements with the left, to show your independence. Another is that you should go out of your way to minimize your disagreements with the left, in order to avoid adverse political effects. The third is that you try to ignore the political effects and just say what you think. He explicitly renounces options number one and number three.

Put this into a wider perspective in which the pundits of the right never criticize the right. If liberal pundits are expected to "highlight" their disagreements with the extreme left (is there such a thing?), say, what will the overall impression be? What will the readers of opinion columns come away with?

This doesn't mean that I advocate avoiding the criticism of the left. I'm all for it, especially as soon as the left is in power and can actually affect our lives. But given the current setup of the media with its openly partisan conservative wing all criticisms of the left will have a ready-made echo chamber. Criticisms of the right do not. Something to take into account before one "just says what one thinks."

Meet Your Daemon

I have a head cold. But I also have a daemon now, an ocelot (found via Hecate). You can find yours at a website which advertises a new movie based on His Dark Materials. Click on "Daemons" and then on "Meet your Daemon".

If you have read the books you know what daemons are all about. If you have not read the books the site gives quite a nice little summary.

Pamela Martin and Associates

This is the escort service operated by Deborah Jeane Palfrey in Washington, D.C.. Palfrey gave her client phone numbers to ABC and tonight ABC's newsmagazine "20/20" told us about the clients on Palfrey's list:

In what had become a highly anticipated story about an escort service operating in the capital for the last 13 years, ABC News reported Friday night that the business catered to many men throughout the federal government.

The network also disclosed that some customers were prosperous businessmen from out of town and that the women worked for the service to earn extra money.

If none of that seemed surprising — or even mildly interesting — what about the names of the men who supposedly sought respite from their high-pressure duties by paying $300 to have the women attend to them in 90-minute sessions?

Friday's broadcast of the program "20/20" did not disclose any names beyond those of the two men who have already been identified as customers of the escort service.

"Our decision at the end was not to name any names," said Brian Ross, the news correspondent who presented the segment. Mr. Ross said that the network went with a "conservative approach," and that "based on our reporting it turned out not to be as newsworthy as we thought in terms of the names."

Nothing to look at here. Please move along.

I have very complicated thoughts on whether I should even write about any of this (over and above pointing out the Tobias case because of its relevance in judging his professional opinions). But I'm not happy with what looks like a deliberate attempt to out as many escorts as clients, if not more. The escorts are unlikely to be as wealthy or powerful as the clients and this makes them less able to survive the outing with few scars. Add to that the fact that many people view being an escort as worse than using the services of one, and you have something quite unsavory here.

Housekeeping and Such

Olvlzl has a well-earned rest from blogging this weekend. I found some 1930's House and Garden magazines, and I may just scan some of the ads for your entertainment. The one in this post (click on it to make it bigger) is about bathrooms and how a nasty bathroom reflects badly on the woman. There are also ads about how bad breath will keep a woman from getting married, but a feminist twist takes place when the readers get angry at the concept that only women's breath can stink.

Still the selling of anxiety to women has been going on for a very long time.

Friday Pet Blogging

This is John JS's snake, or at least a snake that has decided to live near him.

More on A Man's Field

The title is a reference to yesterday's post on this topic. The Los Angeles Times has an opinion piece with much the same thesis as mine: that much of the discussion about haircuts and wind-surfing (Edwards and Kerry, respectively) has to do with the fear and loathing of femininity which is seen as weakness. Coincidentally, I read a comment somewhere last night where the writer accused the Democrats of pussyism and said that they might as well just spread their legs.

Back to the LA Times opinion piece:

George W. Bush learned an unforgettable lesson about the anxious nature of American masculinity when Newsweek branded his father a "wimp," a perception Bush 41 never really overcame. The resolve never to look like a wimp is the key to Dubya's psychology: the you-talkin'-to-me pugnacity at news conferences; the Top Gun posturing on the aircraft carrier, in a crotch-gripping flight suit that moved G. Gordon Liddy to swoon — on "Hardball," for Freud's sake — "what a stud."

Doesn't all this machismo and locker-room homophobia protest a little too much? What can we say about a country so anxiously hypermasculine that it produces Godmen, a muscular-Christianity movement that seeks to lure Real Men back to church with services that feature guys bending metal wrenches with their bare hands and leaders exulting, "Thank you, Lord, for our testosterone!"

The trouble with manhood, American-style, is that it's maintained by frantically repressing every man's feminine side and demonizing the feminine and the gay wherever we see them. In his book, "The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars, and the Politics of Anxious Masculinity," clinical psychologist Stephen Ducat calls this state of mind "femiphobia" — a pathological masculinity founded on the subconscious belief that "the most important thing about being a man is not being a woman."

Praising the Lord for testosterone is so old hat. The Orthodox Jews have had a prayer about that for a long time. But I agree with the argument that being a "man" is often defined as not being a "woman". In the usual flow of events this ends up meaning that every good attribute will be assigned to the male category and every not-so-good attribute will be assigned to the female category by those who worry about their own masculinity. Nothing is left over for the "human being" category.

This a false duality. It is as if we take the sexual organs of men and women, see that they have opposite uses and then decide that everything about men and women should have opposite uses. Hence "the opposite sex" term can annoy me, too. If it was used logically a man walking upright would require a woman crawling only horizontally and so on.

The emotional costs of this false duality are obvious for women. We can witness a public struggle among politicians to prove that they are not at all like us and therefore worthy to lead.

Huffington Post Headline Today

Is
Ten Middle-Aged White Men

Heh. This is in reference to the debate tonight between the Republican presidential candidates. It seems that Ronald Reagan was the last Republican president, based on what I'm hearing...

Added later: Check this out to see which Republican presidential candidates do not believe in evolution.

Meanwhile, in Ireland

A seventeen-year old Irish girl is stopped from traveling to the U.K. to get an abortion:

A 17-year-old pregnant Irish girl is appearing in the High Court in Dublin to press for the right to travel to Britain for an abortion.

Doctors have told the girl that her four-month foetus will not live more than a few days beyond birth.

She is in the care of Ireland's health service which has issued an order stopping her from going to Britain.

But a lawyer for the girl argued that the health authority had no right to stop her travelling.

Eoghan Fitzsimons told the court that police had responded to a request by the Health Service Executive (HSE) to prevent her leaving the country, saying they could not and would not do so without a court order.

Abortion is illegal in Ireland except where the mother's life is threatened by a medical condition or suicide.

It has been decided that the girl is not suicidal. The fetus suffers from

anencephaly, a condition which means that a large part of the brain and skull is missing.

Babies with anencephaly live a maximum of just three days after birth.

This is, of course, an extreme example of what might happen in the world of the pro-lifers (or forced birth brigade). The rights of an anencephalic fetus to survive for a few more months in the uterus are more than the rights of the teenager not to have to carry it to term and then to speedy death, with all the extra medical risks this causes her.

A Man's Field

What do the following things have in common? "I'm the commander." "It is the haircut that will not die." "The need for one-man rule."

The first is a comment by George Bush, the president of the United States. The second is a comment by Roger Simon at the Politico about the hair of John Edwards, a Democratic candidate for the presidency of the United States. The third is what Harvey Mansfield believes this country needs at this time of war: the setting-aside of all laws except for the primal testosterone-based right of the strongest male to run the pack.

Glenn Greenwald has written two valuable critiques about the last two of the sentences I chose at the Salon. He points out that while Politico discusses the price of Edwards' haircut, news happen:

This week, the Bush administration sought vastly increased powers to spy on the telephone conversations of Americans, and then threatened to begin spying again illegally and without warrants. It was revealed that Condoleezza Rice would meet with Syrian officials, a significant shift in Middle East policy.

Yesterday, it was disclosed that Iraq's government is actually purging itself of anyone who seeks to impede lawless Shiite militias. And one of the right-wing's most influential academicians published an article on The Wall St. Journal Op-Ed page explicitly advocating "one-man rule" in America whereby the President can ignore the "rule of law" in order to fight The Terrorists.

None of that -- or virtually anything else of even marginal significance -- was reported by The Politico, an online political magazine founded by some of the nation's most prestigious and admired (in Beltway terms) political journalists. But yesterday, The Politico's so-called "chief political columnist," Roger Simon, published a 674-word article -- prominently touted on The Politico's front page -- exclusively about John Edwards' haircuts, cleverly headlined "Hair today, gone tomorrow."

Greenwald's other piece is about an article Harvey Mansfield wrote for the online edition of Wall Street Journal, an article which wants the rule of law to be replaced by a chest-thumping silverback among the chimpanzees. Mansfield has written a lot about masculinity in the past, and his use of the term "one-man rule" is not a slip of the tongue:

The article bears this headline: The Case for the Strong Executive -- Under some circumstances, the Rule of Law must yield to the need for Energy. And it is the most explicit argument I have seen yet for vesting in the President the power to override and ignore the rule of law in order to recieve the glories of what Mansfield calls "one-man rule."

That such an argument comes from Mansfield is unsurprising. He has long been a folk hero to the what used to be the most extremist right-wing fringe but is now the core of the Republican Party. He devoted earlier parts of his career to warning of the dangers of homosexuality, particularly its effeminizing effect on our culture.

He has a career-long obsession with the glories of tyrannical power as embodied by Machiavelli's Prince, which is his model for how America ought to be governed. And last year, he wrote a book called Manliness in which "he urges men, and especially women, to understand and accept manliness" -- which means that "women are the weaker sex," "women's bodies are made to attract and to please men" and "now that women are equal, they should be able to accept being told that they aren't, quite." Publisher's Weekly called it a "juvenile screed."

Greenwald bemoans a media which pays more attention to the haircut diaries than to Mansfield's proposal of setting aside the rule of law (or to the recent news that senior officials in the administration believe the president still has the right to order wiretapping without first seeking court approval):

They write about John Edwards' haircut and John Kerry's windsurfing and which political consultant has whispered what gossip to them about some painfully petty matter, but the extraordinary fact that our nation's dominant political movement is openly advocating the most radical theories of tyranny -- that "liberties are dangerous and law does not apply" -- is barely noticed by our most prestigious and self-loving national journalists. Merely to take note of that failure is to demonstrate how profoundly dysfunctional our political press is.

But in another sense the haircut diaries are simply the other side of the same masculinity coin Mansfield polishes with his sleeve: The story of politics as a manly man's game, to be powered with testosterone and to be judged with those emotions which make one wonder if a man caring about his hair could really tear off someone else's throat with nothing but his teeth. That all this appeared at the same time as George Bush's hopeful comment about being the commander may be purely accidental, of course.
---
Cross-posted at the TAPPED.

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles

The police seems to have gotten "a little heavy-handed" at an immigration rally. You can read about the event and various explanations here. And then you can watch this video of the event.
---
Via John Gillnitz.

He Said, She Said

Dana Goldstein has an interesting post about a site which calculates the percentages of "he" and "she" on various websites. I ran my archives through the calculator and came up with 49% of "he" to 51% of "she".

What does it mean? Perhaps not very much, given the examples of various websites the calculator page gives. It's true that most of the "deciders" are men and that "he" is probably more common on political sites for that reason.

The more interesting question might in some ways be why we need two (or more) separate terms for the third person singular. Why is it so important to know the sex of the person? I grew up speaking a language which has only one word for the third person singular and it also worked just fine.

From the "It-Should-Be-Onion" Files of Political Discourse

First there is the comment of our president that Thers picked upat Eschaton:

We put in more troops to get to a position where we can be in some other place. The question is, who ought to make that decision? The Congress or the commanders? And as you know, my position is clear -- I'm the commander guy.

Then there is this interchange between Tucker Carlson and Bruce Bartlett:

BARTLETT: Well, I'm just not very happy about any of the Republicans running. I think Giuliani has -- seems like an -- has an authoritarian personality. [Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt] Romney seems --

CARLSON: And Hillary Clint -- wait, wait. And Hillary Clinton doesn't? You're saying he has a more authoritarian personality than Hillary Clinton?

BARTLETT: Well, that --

CARLSON: If both of them had absolute power -- let's just say, a mind experiment -- if they had absolute power, if they were stuck, who would kill more?

BARTLETT: Gee, that's a tough question. I think Giuliani would kill more. I think he's a tougher guy, and I don't mean that in a positive way, really.

Then there was the heated discussion about Hillary Clinton's name.

And if all else fails there are always the haircut diaries....

My Troll Post Is Up

My apologies for posting about it earlier. But now you can read it here.

Note the other great posts there, too. These are all part-and-parcel of the newest number of Scholar&Feminist Online. You can read the academic articles here.

A Deep Thought For The Day

Ursula le Guin writes like a paradox. Her words are so simple, so calm, so obvious, and yet what she says is complicated and often ambiguous. The more she hones her writing down the stronger it bites on all the deep levels. Reading her is like having a glass of cool water from some immensely deep spring.

I am not sure why her EarthSea series isn't more famous. She presents an alternative to the stark good-and-evil ethical structure of most of fantasy, and she does it very well.

More Haircuts

Eric Boehlert has a good post up on the media's interest in John Edwards' expensive haircut. He points out, among other things, that it is only the Democrats' haircut prices that are criticized, and that getting cheap haircuts, even if your house costs millions, is a sign of being connected to your blue-collar roots, whether imaginary or real.

The haircut test is an odd one for the media to use. But its point is a subtle and wingnutty one: An expensive haircut is supposed to disqualify a Democrat from being concerned about the poor. As the conservatives are explicitly not concerned about the poor it is quite acceptable for them to have expensive haircuts. So acceptable that we never find out how much those haircuts cost. But someone who speaks about poverty, such as John Edwards, is viewed as a hypocrite if he is rich himself. The same arguments were used about John Kerry and wind-surfing and the money his wife has.

There is a Catch-22 in all this. A poor person doesn't have the money to run for the presidency. If only poor people are genuine advocates for the poor, this means that no president could ever advocate for the poor without being seen as two-faced. Not at least until we change the way elections are financed. Which will be right after we get a new Zamboni for the ice-rink in hell.

Something For You To Read

On the more militant aspects of the pro-life movement and on the consequences of abortion clinic bombings. Warning: Pictures can be upsetting.

Or you could go and read me on the toothless FDA on TAPPED.

What Is In A Name?

This story is one of those which make me think that if there is a god he is a sadistic journalist:

As you may know by now, the non-story of the day surrounding Hillary Clinton is that she apparently uses the name "Hillary Clinton" on Presidential campaign material while sticking with "Hillary Rodham Clinton" on her Senate-related stuff.

This alleged "gotcha" story was first pushed by Hearst newspapers in a piece linked (natch) on Drudge, Newsmax, Free Republic and a few other far-flung outposts in the wingnuttia hinterlands. It's now the subject of an Associated Press story -- carried by ABC, CBS, Fox, CNN and others -- that actually says in its lede that Hillary has an "identity crisis." Both the Hearst and AP stories strongly imply that Hillary's people are calculatingly using "Rodham" to speak to the New York audience while sticking with "Hillary Clinton" to appeal to the national audience. Says Hearst:

Clinton identifies herself as "Hillary Clinton" in her campaign press releases and on her campaign website. The lone mention of her maiden name is in a campaign biography that says "Hillary's father, Hugh Rodham, was the son of a factory worker from Scranton."

She continues to use "Hillary Rodham Clinton" in her New York-focused press releases and in the Senate.

You must be burning to learn now that this isn't actually true as Horse's Mouth explains.

But what is the point of talking about Hillary Clinton's name? There are two wingnut points: First, the idea is to show her as a chameleon who never stays the same and therefore has no inner core. A flimflam woman. Second, the idea is to show that she is a feminazi-in-hiding, only coming out with her true colors where it is safe. Why feminazi-in-hiding? A real traditional woman discards her maiden name altogether. All anxious conservative men know this.

Me And The Trolls

The post is up now.
Sorry, all. The blog I linked to isn't supposed to start until Wednesday, so my post has been hidden for the time being.

That would be a good name for a band. I actually like the Scandinavian kind of trolls, the ones which turn into stone if they stay out after sunrise. The other kind of troll, the cyberspace one, is more of a nuisance. If you are interested in that topic, check out what I scribbled today.

Cutting the Cake Again

Paul Krugman (behind the firewall) talks about the high profits today:

Last fall Edward Lazear, the Bush administration's top economist, explained that what's good for corporations is good for America. "Profits," he declared, "provide the incentive for physical capital investment, and physical capital growth contributes to productivity growth. Thus profits are important not only for investors but also for the workers who benefit from the growth in productivity."

In other words, ask not for whom the closing bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Unfortunately, these days none of what Mr. Lazear said seems to be true. In the Bush years high profits haven't led to high investment, and rising productivity hasn't led to rising wages.

The second of those two disconnects has gotten a lot of attention because of its political consequences. The administration and its allies whine that they aren't getting credit for a great economy, but because wages have been stagnant — the median worker's earnings, adjusted for inflation, haven't gone up at all since the current economic expansion began in 2001 — the economy feels anything but great to most Americans.

Less attention, however, has been given to the first disconnect: the failure of high profits to produce an investment boom.

Since President Bush took office, the combination of rising productivity and stagnant wages — workers are producing more, but they aren't getting paid more — has led to a veritable profit gusher, with corporate profits more than doubling since 2000. Last year, profits as a share of national income were at the highest level ever recorded.

Krugman then asks what happened to these profits, the ones which were supposed to be invested to give all those workers new jobs and higher wages. It could be just lack of confidence in the economy in general, given what is happening to the housing bubble of the recent years (it is bursting). But he also suggests another theory:

But as Floyd Norris recently reported in The Times, there is a more disturbing possibility. Instead of investing in physical capital, many companies are using profits to buy back their own stock. And cynics suggest that the purpose of these buybacks is to produce a temporary rise in stock prices that increases the value of executives' stock options, even if it's against the long-term interests of investors.

It's not a far-fetched idea. Researchers at the Federal Reserve have found evidence that company decisions about stock buybacks are strongly influenced by "agency conflicts," a genteel term for self-dealing by corporate insiders. In the 1990s that kind of self-dealing often led to excessive investment, which at least left a tangible legacy behind. But today the self-interest of management may be standing in the way of productive investment.

Interesting. Then there is the possibility that the demand sides of various markets are not very strong, given the unchanging earnings of the workers who also happen to make up most of the consumers in the economy.

Peeking Into The Aquarium

William Saletan is an abortion expert and a centrist one, too. This means that what he writes on the issue will be taken seriously. More seriously than the rantings and ravings of feminists who are also women, I suspect.

Today Saletan has written about the idea that women contemplating getting an abortion should be made to watch an ultrasound of the fetus. This is something pro-lifers advocate because it is intended to make the women suddenly realize that it is a fetus they have in their wombs, not an aquarium fish! Wow. Saletan likes the idea, because it opens up the aquarium to the general public. He begins by noting that the recent SCOTUS ban on the so-called partial birth abortion relied partly on the method having part of the fetus outside the uterus, and he points out that this distinction is immaterial:

In other words, it's rational and constitutional to ban abortions based on how they look, not what they are. Inside the womb, a fetus bears just as much similarity to an infant as it does outside. But killing the fetus inside is OK, because the public won't perceive and be "coarsened" by what's being done.

That's a pretty cynical distinction. It's hard to accept if you see abortion as a woman's right. But it's even harder to accept if you see abortion as the taking of a human life. That's one reason why pro-lifers are turning their attention from partial-birth abortion to ultrasound, from the fetus outside the body to the fetus within. They're trying to open, in their words, a "window to the womb."

Pro-lifers are often caricatured as stupid creationists who just want to put women back in their place. Science and free inquiry are supposed to help them get over their "love affair with the fetus." But science hasn't cooperated. Ultrasound has exposed the life in the womb to those of us who didn't want to see what abortion kills. The fetus is squirming, and so are we.

Actually, what the ultrasound would show in the case of the most common early abortions is a minute dot, I suspect. But that is not what is odd about Saletan's piece. The oddness comes from the way he writes as a spectator of these horrid events, but a spectator who demands even more access to his viewing experiences and some respect for his expert knowledge of the sport he is watching. William doesn't have an aquarium but he knows a lot about its upkeep.

More Melamine

It's not just for your countertops. It can be for the belly of your pets and even for your belly! The reason is that melamine is cheaper to add to animal fodder than real protein and that it registers as protein. The fodder then looks like it is rich in protein and sells at a higher price. The manufacturer makes more and everybody is happy. Medears, this is how the free market of the conservative daydreams sometimes works.

Or so it seems to work in China, the source of that contaminated pet food you may have read about. Too bad that many cats and dogs had to die for us to find out about the melamine. Though of course nobody knows just exactly how many pets have died, because nobody is keeping those burdensome bureaucratic books on all this stuff. Isn't it fun to get a glimpse into the operation of a totally unregulated (free!) market? You see, melamine isn't poisonous, so who cares if it isn't exactly food. All those dead pets? Well, perhaps they didn't stir the melamine hard enough this time. But the market would self-correct over time, I'm sure, and stir harder in the future. Or find something else that registers as protein but doesn't cost as much as protein.

Is this only about the pet food market? Read the following quote:

The Food and Drug Administration has already banned imports of wheat gluten from China after it received more than 14,000 reports of pets believed to have been sickened by packaged food. And last week, the agency opened a criminal investigation in the case and searched the offices of at least one pet food supplier.

The Department of Agriculture has also stepped in. On Thursday, the agency ordered more than 6,000 hogs to be quarantined or slaughtered after some of the pet food ingredients laced with melamine were accidentally sent to hog farms in eight states, including California.

The pet food case is also putting China's agricultural exports under greater scrutiny because the country has had a terrible food safety record.

In recent years, for instance, China's food safety scandals have involved everything from fake baby milk formulas and soy sauce made from human hair to instances where cuttlefish were soaked in calligraphy ink to improve their color and eels were fed contraceptive pills to make them grow long and slim.

For their part, Chinese officials dispute any suggestion that melamine from the country could have killed pets. But regulators here on Friday banned the use of melamine in vegetable proteins made for export or for use in domestic food supplies.

Yet what is clear from visiting this region of northeast China is that for years melamine has been quietly mixed into Chinese animal feed and then sold to unsuspecting farmers as protein-rich pig, poultry and fish feed.

Accidentally? Perhaps. On the other hand, has anybody tested the fodder intended for the animals humans eat? And what is the Food And Drug Administration doing? Well, they have blocked the imports of certain types of gluten from certain sources which is like closing the door after the horse bolted (scared of melamine in the oats), and they have also given a press conference on the safety of eating pork-with-melamine:

But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Through the salvaging practice, melamine-tainted pet food has likely contaminated America's livestock for as long as it has been killing and sickening America's pets — as far back as August of 2006, or even earlier. And while it may seem alarmist to suggest without absolute proof that Americans have been eating melamine-tainted pork, chicken and farm-raised fish for the better part of a year, the FDA and USDA seem to be preparing to brace Americans for the worst. In an unusual, Saturday afternoon joint press release, the regulators tasked with protecting the safety of our nation's food supply go to convoluted lengths to reassure the public that eating melamine-tainted pork is perfectly safe.

In a fit of reverse-homeopathy the press release steps us through the dilution process, tracing the path of melamine-tainted rice protein through the food system. The rice protein is a partial ingredient in pet food, we are told, which is itself only a partial ingredient in the feed given to hogs, who then "excrete" some of the melamine in their urine. And, "even if present in pork," they reassure us, "pork is only a small part of the average American diet."

All this makes me very angry. See how "free markets" can work:

The origin within China of the wheat gluten and rice protein concentrate remains murky. For example, ChemNutra's source for the two vegetable proteins, Suzhou Textile Import and Export Co., told The AP that food ingredients aren't part of its business _ but that employees often take on side deals. Stern said ChemNutra dealt with the company's president.

The FDA has blocked wheat gluten imports from a second Chinese company, Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Co. That company has told AP it bought the ingredient from other undisclosed firms and then sold it to Suzhou Textile.

It appears that a textile firm has been selling gluten to American pet food manufacturers. Or perhaps an employee of the textile firm has been selling it? And the FDA sternly blocked any further sales from that company and others already caught! So decisive, so exhaustive! Don't you feel safe now?

Of course the Republican administration doesn't like to regulate firms that much:

The link to China has set off concerns among critics of the Food and Drug Administration that ingredients in pet food as well as human food, which are increasingly coming from abroad, are not being adequately screened.

"They have fewer people inspecting product at the ports than ever before," says Caroline Smith DeWaal, the director of food safety for the Center for Science in the Public Interest in Washington. "Until China gets programs in place to verify the safety of their products, they need to be inspected by U.S. inspectors. This open-door policy on food ingredients is an open invitation for an attack on the food supply, either intentional or unintentional."

Inspecting imports would just waste taxpayers' hard-earned money, you see. Let the markets decide.

Ya Wanna See An Irony?

Posted by olvlzl
Wanting to try to figure out what the poem means when it talks about “Scots” I looked up “Nixon” to see it’s derivation. Here’s what I found.

NIXON - Name Meaning & Origin
Last Name Meaning & Related Resources for the Surname NIXON

Definition: Patronymic surname meaning "son of Nicholas." From the Greek name Nikolaos, meaning "victory of the people" from the Greek element 'nike,' meaning "victory" and 'laos,' meaning "people". (!!!)

Surname Origin: English

Jacob Bronowski's Christmas Card

Watergate
- an act of voiding urine:
Jamieson's Dictionary of the Scottish Language, 1808

"I'll watch your watergate": that is, "I'll watch for an advantage over you." - Kelly's Collection of Scottish Proverbs, 1721

With what contempt the Scot's defined
The sly betrayal of their kind,
Blasting with prophetic rage
The desecration of the age.

Some elective Pharisee
Having bugged the Christmas tree
Or muzzled them with privilege
Gave their tongue an acid edge.

To fix a synonym for rage
Without benefit of tape,
And assure posterity
No mincing prince will go scot-free.





Source: Listener, 23 December 1973.

Two Things

Posted by olvlzl.
As if you haven’t seen enough of this kind of thing here already, all I’m going to say is no comment. Ok, I lied. Plato makes me break out in a rash.

Here is a wonderful essay in memory of Kurt Vonnegut. I particularly like the ending.

And now, I’ve got an obligatory birthday party to attend. I’ll post later.

A Surprise Birthday Present April 29, 2007

Posted by olvlzl.
One aim of the physical sciences has been to give an exact picture of the natural world. One achievement of physics in the twentieth century has been to prove that that aim is unattainable.
Knowledge or Certainty, [The Ascent of Man; Jacob Bronowski 1973]

I hadn’t intended to address the excellent stream of responses to the proposition posed yesterday in a post this morning. Last night I thought of posting the entire response on my own blog tomorrow, without objection by the participants.

Then this morning, reading the response of MKK Mary Kay to the part of the debating point that really interested me, the political implications of the end of belief in free will, I knew it couldn’t go without emphasis. Her response, after expressing her skepticism in free will based in her personal experience, is:

including an explanation of how democracy and personal rights can survive this belief.

We have to make sure they do because I might be wrong.

It shattered me, for both intensely personal reasons* and because in one sentence it makes an argument that has cost me tens of thousands of words over the past year.

In Chapter Eleven of the companion book to his great BBC TV series “The Ascent of Man”, the physicist, writer, artist and poet Jacob Brownoski addresses just about every conceivable point relevant to the political uses of science, both good and very bad science. Since his exploration covers the uses to which science has been put in the 19th and 20th centuries, the intersection of science and politics has to be presented in the dark shadow of the resulting moral decisions made by human beings, including scientists, and their societies.

History has many ironies. The time-bomb in Gauss’ curve is that after his death we discovered that there is no God’s eye view. The errors are inextricably bound up with the nature of human knowledge. And the irony is that the discovery was made in Gottengen.

... The University is a Mecca to which students come with something less than perfect faith. It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies, they are not here to worship what is known but to question it. [Bronowski p. 360]

Bronowski, with his miraculous knowledge of science, culture and history had an ability to find coincidences that are extraordinarily enlightening. The coincidences in this essay show what happens when that questioning stops short of honesty to assert that something “has been proven”.

He was able to compellingly link Gauss, the uncertainty of knowledge, the railroad linking Goettengen to Berlin, the anthropometrically analyzed skull collection at Gottengen , the use the science derived from that collection by the Nazis and Different Trains** that resulted. I couldn’t pretend to address his work of genius without quoting the entire essay. If you can get your hands on it, I beg you to read it and consider what it has to teach us about the unintended implications of scientific folly blended with professional arrogance.

Some, if not many, scientists find it convenient to pretend that their work exists in a bubble of intellectual purity. Some of that convenience is professional, some just the results of having to publish and not being able to point out all the necessary ambiguities. But some of the most dangerous uses of “certainty” are the results of ego and arrogance. If they took history more seriously, the scientists who enjoy the Olympian view would know that they are being watched and that any possible idea, enjoying the prestige and glamor that the label “science” carries, has an irresistible appeal to people outside of their own, smaller world. As they write their papers, build their careers and squabble internally, they won’t notice that both their intended conclusions and their unintentional lapses will be pounced on by people smart enough to understand their implications for uses the scientists would find horrifying.***

Brownowski ends his essay after looking at the issues surrounding the Manhattan project, which he knew from his personal experience.

I owe it as a scientist to my friend Leo Szilard. I owe it as a human being to the many members of my family who died at Auschwitz, to stand here by the pond as a survivor and a witness. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people.


* Re-reading the book this morning, in response to Mary Kay’s sentence it strikes me as maybe the best popular science series ever made. Of all of the excellent essays, this is the one I find the most compelling, the one that has changed my thinking after reading it.

Today is my mother’s birthday. After searching for her copy of the book, which Mary Kay’s response made me remember, I notice that the inscription says that it is an early Birthday present which I gave her thirty years ago today. Please indulge me by saying how proud I’ve always been that my mother, the first person in her family to attend college and a feminist of her generation, has a degree in Zoology. I owe any knowledge I might have about science, as well as just about everything else, to her.

** Steve Reich’s great composition of that name makes different connections.

*** I will post a short piece about this on my blog Tuesday.