When The Petraeus Performance Is Given The Media Will Play Their Usual Supporting Role, They Already Are. Posted by olvlzl.

This look at the actual career of David Petraeus in The Independent is useful for reminding us of the glaring gap between his record in Iraq and the esteem he is held in by the American media. The gap in Petraeus’ record should be useful in evaluating the report he is going to give this week, but it won’t be used by our media. They have been ramping up the subtle and hardly subtle pro-war propaganda for weeks, doing their part in the Republican media campaign to continue Bush War II until Bush leaves office. They will then begin the “who lost Iraq” part of the scenario. That certain part of the campaign is already beginning and it will be everyone except for those who brought this disaster on us and the world who will be blamed.

It’s good to look at The Independent, The Guardian, etc. online and recall what it used to be like to have news in the United States. With a few exceptions of nugatory influence we don’t. We have pro-Republican, corporate propaganda which will march in lock step even in the face of years of evidence that the direction is straight into disaster. They do this because as long as their incomes aren’t negatively impacted, their dinner invitations don’t decline and their invitations to appear on TV and radio to sell their product continue, piles of rotting corpses in other places don’t bother them one little bit. If anyone has a candidate for a news operation in Washington D.C. which isn’t part of this corrupt insider system it would be good to hear about it.

When the “report” comes out it should be remembered that Petraeus and Crocker (sic.) will be reporting on their own work. As the article says, they’re smart enough to give the appearance of some self-criticism to create an official plausibility of verisimilitude but the results will be entirely political, most carefully calculated to achieve a political result in the United States. Everything Petraeus has done has been to create political effects here. But it won’t be an attempt by the Bush II regime to woo the media, one doesn’t have a need to woo their own concubine. The media won’t evaluate the “report” they will accept it. Well, perhaps they’ll do a bit to create their own illusion of verisimilitude also, but they can be counted on to not go farther than would risk reality breaking through. When things go farther into hell, which they will, the Petraeus Report show will not be mentioned again, though the man’s career in our media will probably be a total success.

Here is John Kerry’s view of the escalation’s accomplishments.

Saturday Hope Blogging

Which is naturally Phila's Friday Hope blogging. Chicken soup for the soul.

Women Who Won't Cover

Southwest Airlines decided that a female passenger was inadequately clad for a "family airline":

Her outfit aboard a Southwest Airlines plane two months ago first earned her a flight attendant's reprimand and now has sparked a decency debate that may result in a lawsuit.

Kyla Ebbert, a blond, shapely 23-year-old San Diego coed who also works shifts at a Hooters restaurant, boarded the flight to Tucson, Ariz., on a one-day round-trip visit to an Arizona doctor's appointment. She had settled into her seat when a flight attendant confronted her about what was later described by the airline as "revealing attire."

Ebbert's so-called objectionable attire included a white, tight-fitting shirt, a green cropped sweater, and a white denim skirt cut high on her thighs.

Ebbert appeared on NBC's "The Today Show" today wearing the same outfit and said that she was asked by a male flight attendant to come to the front of the plane by the door to the jetway. There, Ebbert said that she was told she would have to catch a later flight because she was showing too much skin and Southwest is a "family" airline.

Here is a picture of Ebbert in the offending outfit:





What should I say about this topic? So many different arguments jostle in my head. One of them has to do with the idea that Ebbert worked at a Hooters restaurant ("hooters" being a slang term for breasts), where she was probably expected to dress in a way which would cause sexual thoughts among the male customers and perhaps some female customers, too. Then, suddenly, a similar way of dress is regarded as unacceptable from a "family values" point of view. Are children not allowed into the Hooters restaurants?

Another argument of course has to do with our great need to regulate female clothing, from burqas to bikinis. I drove past a jogger last night. He was clad only in rather-too-short shorts, but I doubt anyone would go to him to complain about family values. (It's with great effort that I abstain from some additional comments about the jogger here.)

A somewhat less central argument has to do with whether we as a country have lost a general dress code for both sexes and whether there might be a need for one. This is a dangerous argument, of course, because dress codes can be used for cultural policing purposes, and countries which do have rigorous dress codes tend to care almost solely about how women dress.

Get This Gag Out Of My Mouth!

There are good news and bad news. Which do you want first? Here are the good news:

The Senate succeeded last night in passing, 53-41, a complete repeal of the Global Gag Rule, which bars American foreign aid from supporting organizations that provide contraceptives, abortion services, or teach a sexual ideology other than abstinence.

The bad news is that president Bush will veto it.

For more on all this and the reasons why Bush's veto reveals his great contempt of the majority of human beings (that would be us ladies), read this post at Rhealitycheck and watch the attached video. Also see Bushvchoice.

Friday Critter Blogging

The blue moth picture is by Doug. I don't remember the photographer of the deer but it might be Doug, too. No, it's FeraLiberal.

Who also took the third picture, and your task is to spot the cat in it.

Popularizing Research in the Conventional Media

Being a journalist with the task to write about research results for the general audience must be very hard. You are supposed to have the statistical skills to understand all kinds of methods, you are supposed to understand several fields of sciences and social sciences well enough to distil them into simpler sound bites, and you are supposed to write the popularization pieces in a few days' time.

Anyone who has done academic research in a field knows that the task is pretty much impossible. There are no Renaissance scholars with the whole toolkit hanging off their belts, no geniuses instantly aware of every single new study in every obscure academic journal, no Doctors of General Criticism out there. Certainly not with the job of popularizing social science research, say.

Add to that the usual restrictions journalists face. Where's the hook for this piece? Why would anyone want to read it? Where's the sex? How can you write the piece so that it presses all those emotional buttons which will guarantee maximal readership numbers? If you write a decent and careful analysis, won't the competing newspapers or websites steal the show from you?

I'm not envious of the jobs of popularizers. Still, I'm going to criticize the results of popularized versions of academic research. I see at least four major problems in what the media tells us about social science research.

The first one is that the need for a journalistic hook biases the studies which are given more publicity. A study which finds, say, that women and men are pretty much the same in some behavior will not be covering the front pages of any major magazines or newspapers. A study which finds, say, a 9% gender difference in something will not attract all those readers like a magnet. Much better to ignore the number and just talk about the chasm that separates men from women.

That the studies are selected for reasons which have little to do with how well they were constructed, how general the conclusions are that can be drawn from them or how much they are in agreement with the mainstream thoughts in an area of research is a serious problem. It makes the general audience draw faulty conclusions about what such studies in general find.

The second problem is also related to the journalistic need to find a hook, and that concerns the fact that issues become stale very fast. Hence, if a popularization of a bad study makes the headlines this week, the corrections and criticisms of that same study will not make the headlines next week. The story is old and stale, let's move on. Never mind that the story was also a false one, yet now remains in the memory banks of many in the audience.

The third problem has to do with the excessive reliance popularizations place on the authors of a study. Every single popularization I have read contains several direct quotes from the study authors. But the authors of a study are going to sell it. Their quotes are not going to be those of a neutral observer. The neutral observer is supposed to be the popularizer who, in general, does not have the expertise to actually provide the necessary counterweight.

This is assumed to be solved by the academic system which screens studies before they get into print. But the screening system has its problems. For instance, suppose that I started an academic journal called "Echidne Studies". To get published in it you must find good things about Echidne. I can gather together several like-minded people, people who appreciate the true essence of Echidne, and I can use those people as my anonymous referees, to make sure that all the articles published in the journal will be of interest to us Echidneites. Don't you think that some of those reviewers might let a few statistical problems slip through, assuming that the anonymous reviewers I picked contained any familar with statistics?

Then academic reviewers are busy people, in general, the number of journals that need reviewers is very large and some journals have a better reputation than others. All this means that anyone who really tries can find quite silly articles printed in some reviewed journal. Not all of those are equally worthy of public attention.

The fourth problem has to do with the way expert assessment is usually added to the popularizations, at least the better ones (the not-so-good popularizations skip this part altogether). This consists of asking someone else, presumably another researcher in the same field, for a quote about the study to be popularized. The problem in many of these quotes I've read is that they appear to be by someone who has not read the article at all. Whether this is actually true is impossible to state but mostly I learn nothing new from the additional expert statements. And these are always kept very, very short, certainly in comparison to the space the study authors are given.

I'm sure that there are more problems than these four. But even these four are serious problems, because the way most of us learn about new research findings is from those popularizations. As a result, we will end up distorted ideas about what research actually has found.
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I have written more on some of this in the context of gender research.

Beautiful People Revisited

This is yet another post on evolutionary psychology studies, this time on the subclass I call Evolutionary Psychology (EP), a political endeavor rather than a scientific one. Professor Satoshi Kanazawa is an ardent proponent of EP, with a large number of relevant studies under his belt. I earlier wrote a series of posts on his recent Psychology Today article (this link will take you to the last one which links to the earlier ones).

Now Kanazawa (with Alan S. Miller) has come out with a new book about, among other things, why beautiful people tend to have more daughters than sons. The reasons are naturally to do with evolutionary psychology.

The snag is that Professor Kanazawa's studies have not actually proven that beautiful people have more daughters. Never mind, that is no hindrance for writing a book about the theory, I guess. But it should be a hindrance for arguing that empirical evidence supports his theory. It should also be a hindrance for the general popularization of Kanazawa's ideas as something supported by evidence. Not that any of these hindrances seem to have mattered much so far.

Professor Andrew Gelman has written an article on what is wrong with Kanazawa's empirical research into various EP topics. A shorthand-way of understanding some of the problems can be gained from Professor Gelman's blog post on the "beautiful daughters" topic. The post is provoked by one of those popularizations which argues that Kanazawa has indeed found that beautiful parents have more daughters, by simply listing some celebrities who are good-looking and also have daughters. Gelman's answer:

Actually, we looked up a few years of People Magazine's 50 most beautiful people, and they were as likely as anyone else to have boys:

One way to calibrate our thinking about Kanazawa's results is to collect more data. Every year, People magazine publishes a list of the fifty most beautiful people, and, because they are celebrities, it is not difficult to track down the sexes of their children, which we did for the years 1995–2000.

As of 2007, the 50 most beautiful people of 1995 had 32 girls and 24 boys, or 57.1% girls, which is 8.6 percentage points higher than the population frequency of 48.5%. This sounds like good news for the hypothesis. But the standard error is 0.5/sqrt(56) = 6.7%, so the discrepancy is not statistically significant. Let's get more data.

The 50 most beautiful people of 1996 had 45 girls and 35 boys: 56.2% girls, or 7.8% more than in the general population. Good news! Combining with 1995 yields 56.6% girls—8.1% more than expected—with a standard error of 4.3%, tantalizingly close to statistical significance. Let's continue to get some confirming evidence.

The 50 most beautiful people of 1997 had 24 girls and 35 boys—no, this goes in the wrong direction, let's keep going . . . For 1998, we have 21 girls and 25 boys, for 1999 we have 23 girls and 30 boys, and the class of 2000 has had 29 girls and 25 boys.

Putting all the years together and removing the duplicates, such as Brad Pitt, People's most beautiful people from 1995 to 2000 have had 157 girls out of 329 children, or 47.7% girls (with standard error 2.8%), a statistically insignificant 0.8% percentage points lower than the population frequency. So nothing much seems to be going on here. But if statistically insignificant effects with a standard error of 4.3% were considered acceptable, we could publish a paper every two years with the data from the latest "most beautiful people."

You might want to re-read that quote, because it's a very good example why we are supposed to not pick data for studies by looking at it and selecting the bits that look good to us. Random sampling and large sample sizes are requirements which exist for a very good reason. In their absence it is very hard not to be guilty of data mining or data phishing, and once we start on that road we can "prove" an awfully large number of things.

A slightly different example might help in understanding some of these problems. Suppose that you want to prove how careful you are with money and how well you stay within your budget. You look at your old records for, say, ten years, and find that you have done much better during some years than other years. Wouldn't it be nifty if you could cut out some of those bad years from your study altogether? Yes, it probably would be nifty, but it would not be good statistics.

Now, Professor Gelman does not argue that anyone is doing this sort of stuff. His point is that a weak statistical analysis should make people stop and think before generalizing the results to wider populations.

Gelman's pdf article, well worth reading even if you are not statistically trained, mentions several other statistical problems which the "speculative studies" professor Kanazawa has carried out contain. A snippet from the end of the piece should whet your appetite (or wet it):

Why does this matter? Why are we wasting our time on a series of papers with statistical errors that happen not to have been noticed by reviewers for a fairly obscure journal? We have two reasons: first, as discussed in the next section, the statistical difficulties arise more generally with findings that are suggestive but not statistically significant. Second, as we discuss presently, the structure of scientific publication and media attention seem to have a biasing effect on social science research.

Before reaching Psychology Today and book publication, Kanazawa's findings received broad attention in the news media. For example, the popular Freakonomics blog (Dubner 2006) reported,

"a new study by Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics, suggests...there are more beautiful women in the world than there are handsome men. Why? Kanazawa argues its because good-looking parents are 36% more likely to have a baby daughter as their first child than a baby son - which suggests, evolutionarily speaking, that beauty is a trait more valuable for women than for men. The study was conducted with data from 3,000 Americans, derived from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, and was published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology."

ruling that such research is dangerous and out of bounds, an attitude deplored by Pinker (2007). The aforementioned Freakanomics article concluded, "It is good that Kanazawa is only a researcher and not, say, the president of Harvard. If he were, that last finding about scientists may have gotten him fired." It should be possible to criticize large unproven claims in biology and social science without dismissing the entire enterprise.

Gelman then points out that the "36% more likely" figure mentioned here isn't correct even if correctness is defined by the faulty findings of Kanazawa's actual study. But that's the figure the popularizations eagerly accepted.

Why am I writing about this particular topic again? Consider the facts: A new book by Kanazawa has just come out, a book with a title all about why beautiful people have more daughters. Yet all the time Kanazawa's own research cannot even prove the title he uses. What's more, the discussions about the book are likely to just start with the assumption that Kanazawa must have the empirical support on his side. After all, anonymous reviewers approved his papers for publication! Science cannot err! And so on.

Well, anonymous reviewers are human beings, and anonymous reviewers of a possibly EP journal may share the same underlying desires to find certain theories proved. Anonymous reviewers may also not be experts in statistics. More importantly (and as Professor Gelman also notes), no journal really wants to publish an article with the title "Beautiful People No More Likely To Have Daughters". I believe that the academic publishing process has an in-built bias against studies which appear to find no difference.

What they should have is an in-built bias against publishing iffy research.

From My "Rejected" Files

I found some old rejected articles tonight, written over a year ago. Poor little babies. Nobody loved them. At least I can post them here.

On Media Bias

The conservatives are right to worry about liberal media bias. I worry about it every day, because there just isn't enough of it. Political talk radio airs mostly right-wing anger and hatred, political debates on television match several fire-breathing Republican dragons against one centrist Democrat who had milquetoast for breakfast, and Fox News has taught us all that "Fair and Balanced" is just a trademark. A recent study by Media Matters for America confirmed my suspicion that "liberal" or "lefty" has a new meaning: centrist or neutral journalists are selected on panels to keep company with right-wingers just a tad to the left of Attila the Hun and this is viewed as balance. If you doubt this, tell me when someone from, say, the American Prospect last took part in these debates.

How did we get into this mess in the first place? It may have started when Ronald Reagan killed the Fairness Doctrine in electronic media. This paved the way for the Limbaugh revolution in talk radio and for the Fox News in television as fairness and balance were no longer important.. At the same time, the conservatives launched their successful campaign of painting the media liberal.

And what a curious campaign it has been. Illogical, even. For consider one of the lodestars of conservative thought: that unencumbered markets bring good things to life and that there should be minimal interference with market forces. After all, this is how Ronald Reagan justified the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine: its controversy-chilling effect would be gone and all voices would harmonize in the new vibrant market-based debates. But somehow this didn't rid us of the liberal bias in the media. Conservative ownership of most media couldn't do that, either.

The explanation for this is even curiouser: Conservatives blame the foot soldiers of the media for the bias they so deplore. More journalists define themselves as liberals than as conservatives, and this supposedly explains why markets have been unable to balance themselves. Never mind that most media outlets are owned by conservatives, never mind that journalists are trained professionals who might even be able to distance their own political views from the topic they are working on, and never mind that in no other firm do conservatives regard the floor-level labor force as responsible for the design and marketing of the firm's products. None of this matters as much as the party attachment of journalists.

This diagnosis is sometimes followed by an even less conservative recommendation for treatment: affirmative action based on the journalist's political views. The New York Times should make an effort to recruit religious conservatives from the red states, for example.

The horror of it all! Liberal media bias is such a problem for conservatives that they are willing to give up all their conservative free market and anti-affirmative-action principles if that is what is needed to get fair treatment of right-wing policies and views. Or what they regard as fair treatment.

And what is it that they demand, exactly? Well, according to the websites which criticize the left-wing slant of the media what is needed are more positive appraisals of George Bush's job-performance, more coverage of success in Iraq and more positive coverage on religious fundamentalists (though only of the Christian sort). On one randomly picked February day these sites also criticized newsreaders for not using the term "partial birth abortion" without the qualification that it is a conservative term, berated certain television presenters for not exhibiting the "correct" emotions when reporting on a story and even speculated on the possible hidden motives these presenters might harbor.

It's tough to weed out liberal media bias of such depth! The very facts themselves might be liberal and the innermost thoughts of journalists are fair game for spotting bias. The media can bend over backwards to appease these right-wing critics. It can even adopt the ultimate "neutral" stance of impartial commenting on the most inane assertions ("Some argue the moon is made of green cheese. Others disagree."). But this will not satisfy those who can see the wild liberal glint in the eye of the newsreader or those who can discern the real leftist thoughts of an apparently objective journalist or those who equate criticism of the government with treason.

No, the only solution to our current problems with media bias is to reintroduce the Fairness Doctrine. This will protect the conservatives against the dreaded liberal bias in the media and it will protect the liberals from the right-wing hate radio. Fair and balanced?



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Well, I also wrote it as this version, also rejected:

Three fire-breathing Republican dragons on one side of the conference table; one insipid centrist who had milquetoast for breakfast on the other side. This is not a plot for a bad science-fiction movie but a common occurrence on political talk shows such as Meet the Press, according to a new study by Media Matters for America. It is the new face of the liberal media bias.

Liberal media bias does worry me, a lot. For one thing, there isn't enough of it. For another, no amount of bias in the other direction will silence the conservative complaints. Rush Limbaugh and his clones rule in the world of political hate radio. Doesn't this point to a right-wing bias? Well, no, because what goes on in the world of radio is just the market forces working as they should. What goes on in the world of television is bias, unless we mean the Fox News and its "fairandbalanced" take on the world events. That, too, is market forces doing their job. But the mean print journalists are more likely to be Democrats than Republicans (we knew it!) and it is these foot soldiers of the media who decide what is published and disseminated, not the conservative owners of the highly centralized media industry. Strange, isn't it, how the markets only work in one direction?

Ronald Reagan probably predicted just such an outcome when he killed the Fairness Doctrine in electronic media, opening the doors and laying out the red carpet for the right-wing radio talk shows, Fox News and these novel political debate shows where we all watch the conservative boas being fed their daily neutral rabbit dinners.

We liberals and lefties are not even rabbits; we are rabid extremists, and also boring and predictable. Nobody wants to hear what we have to say. That is why we cannot sit on the talk show panels but must be represented by the muddy middle. But don't think for one moment that we are harmless! Far from it: We are rabbits full of unfocused anger and the danger of liberal media bias is ever present in our fangs.

I found this out from conservative media watchdogs and bloggers, people who spend their waking hours looking for the dreaded liberalism in the media. And boy do they find it. Any criticism of George Bush's job-performance is bias, paucity of good news from Iraq is bias and the media's inability to give more praise to the good fundamentalists (Christians) as opposed to the bad ones (Islamists) is bias, too. So is the media's refusal to unquestioningly accept right-wing framing, such as the term "partial birth abortion". Even the emotions newsreaders show or don't show matters. I never realized that there are correct and incorrect emotions, which only shows how blinded I have become by this liberal media of ours. Most worryingly, the invisible thoughts of television presenters are fair game for these media critics. After all, it's always possible that a seemingly neutral presenter is harboring deeply liberal, nay, treasonous thoughts about our administration.

Combating all this bias is a Herculean task. How can you cleanse the media from evil influences if even facts have liberal bias? How can you adequately monitor the brain waves of the people on the television? One interesting proposal for achieving this advocates affirmative action. Yes, affirmative action, but this time to benefit Republicans. For example, the New York Times should endeavor to hire journalists who just happen to be religious right-wingers from predominantly red states. I must admit that my jaw dropped when I read that. How fragile is the conservative ur-value of free markets if it can be dispensed with to promote the airing of this very value in the media! Bizarre.

There is only one real solution that offers a modicum of real balance in the media, and it is not to adopt the ridiculous stance of "neutral" journalism where the most inane comments are reported uncritically: " Some say the moon is made of green cheese. Others disagree." No, what we must do is to bring back the Fairness Doctrine. It will save our right-wing brothers and sisters from the need to microscopically scrutinize all media and it will save the rest of us from Rush Limbaugh and his ilk.

But don't expect this to silence the shrill voices blaming the media for liberal bias. That is politics and will continue until the day when all other voices have been shushed into permanent silence.


I'm sure the originals had links, too. The versions with the links are hiding from me, though.

This might turn into a series!

Keith Olbermann's Special Comment

Today's Talking Action Figure

Is Ann Coulter. Fascinating stuff one can buy on the net. Via emphyrio.

Today's Deep Thought

This is on evolutionary psychology (ep), given that it's ep week on this blog, and the deep thought or thoughts have to do with the great difficulty one faces when trying to criticize any study that resorts to an ep explanation. For example, I have been accused of being anti-science if I don't accept bad science or of being anti-evolution if I don't accept every iffy theory about some specific human characteristics and its possible evolution.

Well, I am not anti-science at all. Indeed, I respect it too much to sit quietly while it is being exploited for political purposes, including the validation of any unfairness in the current status quo as most likely just the way biology has made us.

Neither am I anti-evolution. But note that while physical evolution can be proven with fossil findings, for instance, we have no such evidence on the psychological evolution of human beings. The speculations ep uses are just that: speculations, and currently not testable. Vague references to genes are not the same thing as actual genetic findings and the general theorizing about how prehistoric humans might have lived and acted and what adaptations they might have undergone is not the same thing as "proof."

Chesterton put this best:

"It is necessary to say plainly that all this ignorance is simply covered by impudence. Statements are made so plainly and positively that men have hardly the moral courage to pause upon them and find that they are without support. The other day a scientific summary of the state of a prehistoric tribe began confidently with the words 'They wore no clothes!' Not one reader in a hundred probably stopped to ask himself how we should come to know whether clothes had once been worn by people of whom everything has perished except a few chips of bone and stone. It was doubtless hoped that we should find a stone hat as well as a stone hatchet." (G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man)

As an example, consider the study I discussed earlier on this page, about women developing good food-related navigational skills because of their gatherer-role in prehistoric tribes. Men are assumed to be better general navigators because as hunters in that prehistoric society they had to be able to learn to read movement and random directions. I'm paraphrasing here. But the bit that just slides past us in these explanations is that nobody living today can actually positively state that the prehistoric women did all the gathering and the prehistoric men all the hunting. That this is not something that can be proved is pretty much ignored. We all now "know" that women used to gather and still go shopping like mad, and that men used to spend all their time hunting and now miss it badly.

The evidence that exists on this division of labor is from recent nomadic tribes, and there is a fairly good possibility that our prehistoric ancestors might have done something similar in some areas and at some times. But always? Was there always enough game to hunt? Or could there have been seasons of the year when the game was plentiful and all the members of the tribe worked setting traps and hunting in various ways? What about times when all there was to eat were roots and berries? Did the men just lounge about, waiting to be fed? - We can't answer these questions but we should ask them, I believe, especially considering that the 1970s ep stories assumed that the women sat in caves cooking and minding children while the men were out killing mammoths. I'm not kidding.

It is this non-testable and hypothetical nature of the basic theories that is far too often given a pass. But more worryingly, many popularizations of ep research interpret the empirical findings, having to do with human behavior today, as proof of the underlying speculations. Even more worryingly, I have met some people who believe that the findings or "findings" of ep studies are from actual research into our genes. We have been "hard-wired" to act a certain way, they tell me. Never mind that the genetic research needed for backing ep theories does not yet exist, to my knowledge and never mind that genes may not actually "hard-wire" us to only a few rigid forms of behavior.

Hence, one reason I so often write about ep studies is because I am unhappy with the lack of proper scientific criticism in that field. A second reason is that many of the studies I have read demonstrate poor empirical work and often ignore the obvious alternative explanations, simply concluding that any empirical correlation in the right direction must support the researchers' initial ep thesis. I should note, though, that later ep studies often benefit from the criticism of the mistakes in the earlier studies. From that point of view my amateurish criticisms may in fact benefit the field.

The third reason for my critical stance has to do with the political uses of a certain type of evolutionary psychology, the type I call Evolutionary Psychology. The capital letters are to remind me that we are talking about an ideology in this case and not a science. A prime example of this type of work is Satoshi Kanazawa's Psychology Today paper. I quote from him:

The implications of some of the ideas in this article may seem immoral, contrary to our ideals, or offensive. We state them because they are true, supported by documented scientific evidence. Like it or not, human nature is simply not politically correct.

Note the conservative shorthand "politically correct" in that sentence. It sets the stage on a long litany of ways in which women are destined to always be the way they were in the 1950s United States. Note also how we are asked to accept the truth of his assertions because they are based on "documented scientific evidence".

But when the last part of his article discusses sexual harassment at work and argues that it is a natural consequence of the different mating strategies of men and women and of men's competitive nastiness no documented scientific evidence seems to be necessary.

It is this little school of EP, attached to the body of evolutionary science like a nasty canker sore that I mostly criticize. It has a very specific political agenda, a conservative one, and it demands acceptance solely because of its quasi-scientific dress. Not surprisingly, most of those who criticize my criticisms belong to this particular school of thought. Or ideology.

Now that was a long deep thought. Sorry about it.

Today's Second Evolutionary Psychology Critique

T
Well, the second critique of the way these studies get popularized in the mainstream media. This seems to turn out the evolutionary psychology week on my blog. Keep checking it for more posts on the topic.

You may have heard about this study, given that popularizations about it crop up among "the most e-mailed articles" lists on various newspaper websites. It's a study about instant dating in Germany:

Science is confirming what most women know: When given the choice for a mate, men go for good looks.

And guys won't be surprised to learn that women are much choosier about partners than they are.

"Just because people say they're looking for a particular set of characteristics in a mate, someone like themselves, doesn't mean that is what they'll end up choosing," Peter M. Todd, of the cognitive science program at Indiana University, Bloomington, said in a telephone interview.

Researchers led by Todd report in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that their study found humans were similar to most other mammals, "following Darwin's principle of choosy females and competitive males, even if humans say something different."

Isn't it comforting to know all this for sure! How wonderful science is!

Let's look at the science. The study consisted of 26 men and 20 women. The study subjects were asked to fill in a questionnaire about what they were seeking in a possible dating partner: wealth, status, physical attractiveness, family commitment.
They then went through speed-dating which consists of short meetings (three to seven minutes with one partner, then move on to the next one and so on). At the end of the session the researchers compared the study subjects' choices for those they'd like to date again with the list of desirables the original questionnaire, and -- surprise! -- they found that people didn't really act the way the questionnaire suggested that they would act:

Men's choices did not reflect their stated preferences, the researchers concluded. Instead, men appeared to base their decisions mostly on the women's physical attractiveness.

The men also appeared to be much less choosy. Men tended to select nearly every woman above a certain minimum attractiveness threshold, Todd said.

Women's actual choices, like men's, did not reflect their stated preferences, but they made more discriminating choices, the researchers found.

The scientists said women were aware of the importance of their own attractiveness to men, and adjusted their expectations to select the more desirable guys.

"Women made offers to men who had overall qualities that were on a par with the women's self-rated attractiveness. They didn't greatly overshoot their attractiveness," Todd said, "because part of the goal for women is to choose men who would stay with them"

Note that we are never told how women's choices deviated from what they wrote in those original questionnaire answers, only how men's choices deviated, so it's not clear how Todd "knows" that the women wanted the men they chose to stay with them.

This is one of those cases where I should read the original study. But even goddesses have 24 hour days and limited budgets for buying silly articles on the web.

But I'm concerned about the very small sample size and the fact that speed-dating strangers is not how humans have traditionally determined whom they might take to bed or to marry. I'm also not at all certain how one can find information on family commitment or status or wealth in a three-to-seven minute conversation, and I'm also wondering how "attractiveness" is measured here. How do the researchers decide that certain women were attractive or that certain men were? They must have used some sort of a ranking system to determine this, given that they argued the women were "more realistic" in their choices. But how does one devise such a ranking system? And let's not even mention cultural conditioning on the question of dating etiquette.

Whatever. There are hundreds of not-so-careful studies published every week in this world. It's only certain types of studies, though, that get pushed into our attention in bad popularizations. Go back and re-read the first quote again to see how bad this one is. Note the way women are interpreted as being "choosy". Usually the evolutionary psychologists interpret this as meaning that women would demand more from a mate in all the desirable characteristics, because these psychologists use the metaphor of the plentiful sperm and the relatively scarcer eggs to explain why mate selection would matter more for women: They don't get as many repeat chances to make more children than men do.

But in this case being "choosy" is something slightly different! It's not about being picky in that sense. It's about picking someone that might not leave!

Sigh.

The Rumors About the Iran Campaign

Sometimes reporting rumors is necessary. Indeed, it might even be irresponsible not to report them (can you place that quotation?). I believe this is true concerning the rumors that a marketing operation for a war against Iran is scheduled to begin this week. George Packer:

If there were a threat level on the possibility of war with Iran, it might have just gone up to orange. Barnett Rubin, the highly respected Afghanistan expert at New York University, has written an account of a conversation with a friend who has connections to someone at a neoconservative institution in Washington. Rubin can't confirm his friend's story; neither can I. But it's worth a heads-up:

They [the source's institution] have "instructions" (yes, that was the word used) from the Office of the Vice-President to roll out a campaign for war with Iran in the week after Labor Day; it will be coordinated with the American Enterprise Institute, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, Fox, and the usual suspects. It will be heavy sustained assault on the airwaves, designed to knock public sentiment into a position from which a war can be maintained. Evidently they don't think they'll ever get majority support for this—they want something like 35-40 percent support, which in their book is "plenty."

...

Postscript: Barnett Rubin just called me. His source spoke with a neocon think-tanker who corroborated the story of the propaganda campaign and had this to say about it: "I am a Republican. I am a conservative. But I'm not a raging lunatic. This is lunatic."

It sounds like a tinfoil theory to me, but as I wrote earlier on, this particular rumor cannot be ignored.

Today's First Evolutionary Psychology Critique

Now here is a fascinating popularization of a study about the gender difference in orienteering abilities:

MEN might be better at reading maps, but women have an in-built sense of direction for good food.

Research suggests that, contrary to the stereotype, women's navigation skills can be better than men's. But this ability comes to light only when there is food to be found — in particular, items laden with calories.

It is thought the gender differences may be a legacy of the ancient hunter-gatherer way of life on the African savanna.

Men, the hunters, honed their spatial skills as they chased their prey "over erratic and unpredictable courses". But women, the gatherers, had to remember the locations of stationary food resources, such as fruits and berries, more accurately than men.

Isn't that fascinating? Do you think that someone has actually tested women's navigational abilities with every possible non-food item? I don't.

I also love those last two paragraphs. The beginning "It is thought that" is all we have to remind us that none of what follows has any actual proof. It's a speculation about prehistoric sexual division of labor and could be off in all sorts of important ways.

Can you guess what the female navigational superiority in this study amounts to? Guess. Where the women 60% better than the men? Thirty percent better?

They were nine percent better in that study (consisting of 86 individuals). Put that into your pipe and smoke it.

I also wonder how exactly the research can control for the experience women have gained by being responsible for the bulk of food shopping. They supposedly did so, but it's difficult to see how that can be done in a way which would eradicate all the advantage practice conveys.

Further criticism of the study and the point that it is not actually based on genetic knowledge can be found here.
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For the sake of fairness I should notice that the popularization also contained this short sentence of criticism:

But Dr Monica Minnegal, a senior lecturer in anthropology at Melbourne University, is sceptical about suggestions humans have stopped evolving. "To reduce everything to what happened on the savanna way back then is, for me, problematic," she said.

See how strong and clear that was?

The Dialectics of Anti-Feminism

Probably not dialectics, but that makes for a good and ponderous title for this post which is about a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed piece about what the Republican Party can offer for women: In short, less government interference in their lives, more overtime and less taxes.

The op-ed piece, by Kimberley Strassel, is called "What Women Want. How the GOP can Woo the Ladies", and it employs many of the usual wingnut frames on feminist issues. Like this one:

The Democrats' own views of what counts for "women's issues" are stuck back in the disco days, about the time Ms. Clinton came of political age. Under the title "A Champion for Women," the New York senator's Web site promises the usual tired litany of "equal pay" and a "woman's right to choose." Mr. Richardson pitches a new government handout for women on "family leave" and waxes nostalgic for the Equal Rights Amendment. Give these Boomers some bell bottoms and "The Female Eunuch," and they'd feel right at home. Polls show Ms. Clinton today gets her best female support from women her age and up.

I have bolded some of the key terms in that quote. The terms are important, because they point out the gist of this polite form of anti-feminism: Ideas about equality of the sexes are stale, outmoded, not fashionable. They are like disco music or bell bottom trousers, something from the musty pages of history.

Hence Ms. Strassel can call married women the secondary workers in their family without asking why that would be the case, and hence she can also argue that what women really want is more flexibility in the labor market so that they can do the job of childrearing AND the job of working for money, though naturally only as the secondary worker. All women really want in Ms. Strassel's view is a kinder, gentler patriarchy, but somehow that turns into a more jungle-like labor market with fewer worker protections in general.

That's it. It's not necessary to discuss the deeper issues, because the deeper issues are "stale", overdiscussed, water under the bridge. In the present time we live post-feminism, we dress differently, we don't care about fairness or justice or any of those oh-so-stale fashions of the past. So come with me, ladies of the present, and demand that overtime protection be taken down. Us new women don't need it! Or equality, come to that.

Happy Labor Day!

In its honor I will give you -- voila! -- a bad poem!

Cinderella

Do not lean against the door
Do not hesitate to enter
Do not mind the sound of protest.

You, too, shall be seated at the table
You, too, have the right to ask for more
To gravitate towards the center
To partake of all the best

But it's only in a fable
That Cinderella gets the prince.
In the story we live here
She is still the servant maid
Scorned and scolded ever since
The well-off felt the faintest fear
When their table had been laid
For one more china setting
And the doors were opened, letting
In the wind and soot.

A Blog To Read

Via the U.K. Guardian:

She is billed as the world's oldest blogger. At 95 years old and with a worldwide following that has seen more than 340,000 hits on her blog, Spaniard María Amelia López has achieved the kind of status that millions of younger internet chroniclers can only dream of.

López, who was introduced to the world of blogging by one of her grandchildren just eight months ago, has become such a global hit that she receives posts in languages as strange and impossible for her to understand as Russian, Japanese and Arabic.

"My name is Amelia and I was born in Muxía (A Coruña - Spain) on December the 23rd of 1911," she wrote as her first post on amis95.blogspot.com. "Today it's my birthday and my grandson, who is very stingy, gave me a blog."

She may not be the oldest blogger in the world (I'm thousands of years old), but she is quite funny.

On Greed

Greed is one of the deadly vices in old-time Christianity. Not so much in some of the newer interpretations seen among the fundamentalists in the United States. I've read about churches where the sermons are all about how Jesus will give the faithful more stuff in this life, too. Does that remind you of the old Janis Joplin song about her asking God for a Mercedes Benz and a color tv?

When did greed turn into a virtue? Probably quite a long time ago, because capitalism does require it to be rehabilitated. But it's the combination of greed and ignorance that has fueled the housing markets crisis; greed mostly on the side of the sellers of loans and ignorance mostly on the side of the buyers of loans, though not completely.

What IS greed? I'm sure there are good definitions to be found by the click of the mouse, but I don't want to know what they are because then this post would end right here. It's more fun to try to figure a definition out of the pure air that floats inside my head.

The first aspect of my definition would be that greed doesn't really apply to, say, a starving person's dreams about fantastically excessive meals. That person is not being greedy; only starving. In a similar vein, a poor person wanting to buy a modest house he or she can't really afford is not greedy. Thus, wanting something very much is not in itself a sign of greediness. We all have dreams and desires and needs.

The second aspect then has to do with the inappropriateness of certain dreams or desires. If you already have enough food and enough shelter and so on but you still want more then you are probably greedy. Now, this is not a definition from traditional economics course where a consumer is always assumed to be on the road to ever higher levels of consumption and only held back by the inevitable constraints of money and time. But in reality people do sometimes sit down and say, in a quiet and zen-like voice: "I have enough material possessions."

Note that the question of what is "enough" is not something easily determined from the outside. But clearly one can have too many cheesecakes and even too many Rolls-Royces. The sad part of greed is that a genuinely greedy person will never be satisfied, by definition. Perhaps that is what made the early Christians view greed as a vice: it hurts.

How do greed and ignorance dance together, then? I pointed out those two as the culprits in the housing market collapse. Ignorance in that context has to do with three things: First, most mortgage-seekers have very little understanding of interest rates and defaults and so on. Those are hard topics to understand without some training. Second, humans tend not to take the long view in general, and even less so when times are hard right now, say. If you live in a crisis, you want to struggle your way through that crisis and then think of the rest of your life. But if life is nothing but a crisis after crisis, well, you will live in the short-term by necessity. Focusing on the near future makes things like balloon loans seem harmless, and an adjustable rate mortgage something really helpful. But today turns into tomorrow and so on, and suddenly you can't afford the new higher interest rates and bankruptcy beckons.

Third, the mortgage lenders also suffer from ignorance. They may be aware of their greed, at least some of them. But they may be ignorant of the overall effects of their individual acts. It wouldn't matter if one lender seduced borrowers into bad loans, but it does matter when many, many lenders do that at the same time. The outcome is a lot of people working in the lending industry losing their jobs.

If you watch commercials on television or ads on the net you know that greed is encouraged every day of our lives. There is always a solution to something that should bother you, and the solution is achievable by just paying some money. It was only a few days ago that I learned I could get a 500,000 dollar mortgage for less than a thousand a month! Honest. Of course I didn't read the small print on the offer, and by now the offer has disappeared into the Orwellian Memory Hole.

The short point of all these musings is that we have to decide how to deal with greed. Is it the engine that drives the society? Or is it a vice? And whose greed is it that matters here?

Stolen Hope Blogging And Some Saturday Echidne Musings

From Phila.

Did you ever see the Woody Allen movie called Zelig? It's a mockumentary about a man named Zelig in the 1920s America who supposedly had the ability to mirror the people he was with. Thus, when he was among gypsies he turned into a gypsy. When he was among psychiatrists, he started talking like one, and when he was next to a fat man he also became fat. Except that he didn't do any of these very convincingly.

I think my writing is like Zelig, always trying to bend itself to some rules but never quite making it. That's why I like this here blog. No writing rules, heh.

The deeper message of Zelig is valid for many of us, especially for many women. It's hard to know who you really are when the environment keeps demanding that you mirror something else altogether.

Friday Nature and Cat Blogging

The top two pictures are taken by Richard. The third picture is of Barry's cat eating some grass.

To Kill 3,000 Students

I know criticizing President Bush's language problems is boring and repetitive, but it still has to be done. Here he is answering questions in an interview with an Australian reporter:

Speers: So you need those Australian troops there?

Bush: Well we need... we need all our coalition partners, and I would hope that... And I understand, look, everybody's got their own internal politics, my only point is that, um, whether it be Afghanistan or Iraq, we've got more work to do. We the free world has got more work to do, and I believe those of us who live in liberty have a responsibility to promote forms of government that deal with what causes 19 kids to get on airplanes to kill 3,000 students.

It isn't the 3,000 students who were supposedly killed six years ago that is my point, but the way Bush draws a direct line from those events to the need to have Australian troops in Iraq, a country which sent none of the 19 "kids" to massacre people. It isn't Bush's difficulties with words that is the problem here but his difficulties with facts.

Not that he is stumbling here at all, in the deeper level. On that level he is pushing our fear buttons and associating that post-traumatic stress syndrome with his essentially unrelated war in Iraq.

The Bees Are Back!

Picture by Mr. French





My garden has had to fend for itself this year, and it has done it quite well. The phloxes have self-seeded and astonishingly the babies are not washed-out lavender in flower but the same harsh pink which wars with everything else in that bed. The lilies "Casablanca" have won over the lily beetles all on their own, have risen from what-I-thought-was-dead, and have, once again, opened those white chalices of pure sexuality, while resting them, tipsily, on the nearby branches of roses and peonies, causing me to almost faint when I go down the porch steps. The perfume! It should be made illegal by all those who hate sex. The ivy covers competently what used to be a wheelbarrow, I think, and even the weeds look healthy.

But as usual the daylilies have collapsed after flowering, their leaves decorating the ground like so many rusted swords. So goes the garden as does life: Ups and downs and unpredictable miracles or messes.

What I really wanted to write about was the Return of the Bees. They are back, bless their little furry pollen-smeared bottoms. I first noticed them on the sedums which look like pink broccoli right now. Then I saw them from the second floor windows on the Rudbeckia "Goldsturm" which reaches up to those windows. Lovely to see bees again. They are not back in force, but they are back.

On Larry Craig

This was not a topic I planned to address. The problems with discussing politicians' private lives are many, and those private lives are largely none of our business. I said "largely" which means that there are some exceptions. The ones I view as valid is when the politicians engage in illegal activities, especially if those activities intertwine with their jobs as politicians, and the cases where a politician's private choices directly clash with his or her stated political ideals or opinions. The latter incongruence is useful to analyze because it gives us more information on how truthfully the stated political beliefs are held, for instance.

Now, the Larry Craig case (a conservative, "pro-family", anti-gay Senator apparently caught soliticing for gay sex in a public toilet) does fit those exceptions, assuming that what Craig did was illegal. So does the earlier case of Senator Vitter (Louisiana, married) admitting to using prostitutes, a crime in the jurisdiction he was at the time of the events. Senator Vitter also promoted "pro-life" policies, such as abstinence and marital fidelity, yet his own life choices revealed the difficulty of walking his own talk.

Given that the Craig case fits my exceptions rule, why was I not going to write about it? Because it is being used for gay bashing, mostly.

But now Republicans are trying to make him go away altogether, to appeal to the homophobic part of their base. Note that his resignation is called for by conservatives who found no need to call for the resignation of Senator Vitter. That the Vitter case was about heterosexual sex (with no dead girls) and the Craig case is about homosexual sex may be one cause for the different treatment. But a more important one is the fact that Craig would be replaced by another Republican Senator, whereas Vitter's state has a Democratic governor who might nominate a Democrat to take his seat.

So I got annoyed by the political exploitation and decided finally to jump in and join the fray. Heh. In any case, the focus on the discussions on Craig I've followed have been on predatory behavior in public toilets. This, in turn, is associated with homosexuality. Senator Vitter's case is somehow less serious because he contacted for the "massage services" by phone.

Perhaps. But predatory behavior is something many women have experience with and not only in same-sex contexts. Come to think of it, mostly not in same-sex contexts. That's why the toilets are traditionally the place one uses to escape too ardent propositioners.

Still, is it really true that openly gay men would regard public restrooms as the place to find sexual partners? I'm not sure, but I suspect that this behavior has much to do with being in the closet and therefore being unable to go to the places where sexual partners are usually found. If I'm correct in this, then what happened to Larry Craig is partly a consequence of the policies that his party pursues, policies which try to keep gays in closets and ashamed of their sexuality.
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This post has no links because I'm very lazy today and because I have a niggling headache which gets stronger whenever I think of doing some research.

Talking the Surge

One of my major handicaps in writing about politics is that I get into screaming hair-tearing fits when people go on and on about itty bitty details to discuss whether the surge is working, and not only minor details but details which have pretty much nothing to do with the question whether the surge can ever work or not.

Why? Because a) the people in power refuse to give us a practical and precise definition of what "surge is working" would actually mean. The definition flows like melting ice-cream. And because b) we have no way of judging who has the correct information that is needed to answer the question or even if anyone has it. All we have are various bits of propaganda, really. And finally, c) because it is not kosher to discuss the possible motives Bush might have in this case or the motives the poor generals might have to now refuse to take the blame if the surge doesn't work, after all.

Kabuki theater. There are probably very good reasons to engage in it but my nerves are wired all wrong for that.

Remembering Katrina

Two years later, and we have still not helped those who were hurt by a storm. New Orleans is a travesty of what it once was, and the Bush administration is not blamed for the disappearance of an American landmark, not to mention the deaths and dislocations of so many. Where is the famous conservative patriotism when it is needed?

An Unborn Child Found In A Sewer

This news story is a very odd one. I have bolded the bits that are attention-worthy:

Police are searching for the mother of a small fetus found by utility workers at a sewage pump station Monday in Morgantown, W.Va.

The fetus will be sent to the state medical examiner's office in Charleston for an autopsy to determine race, sex and age.

Morgantown police said a worker whose job it is to check screens at the pump station found the fetus during his daily routine Monday morning.

The fetus was so small that police don't yet know if a crime was committed or if the mother had a miscarriage.

...

It's likely the fetus was flushed down a toilet, Green said.

Authorities were trying to locate the mother of the unborn child to learn what happened.

The story doesn't tell us the actual size of the fetus, only that it was bigger than three-quarters of an inch and therefore stopped by the screens.

But note the language of the story. I couldn't stop thinking how in some future dystopia all women must prove monthly that they are not pregnant, and when something of this sort happens there will probably be pelvic examinations for all women who were found pregnant in the previous month.
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Link via halfdan on Eschaton threads.

The Paradoxes of Women and Sexuality

It's a very odd thing: On the one hand it is women who are traditionally expected to gate-keep (heterosexual) sex. On the other hand, it is women who are regulated and controlled and managed in the field of sex. It's as if women own sex but someone else owns women and tells them how to deliver it or not to deliver it.

Men are argued to have a stronger sexual instinct, an instinct that somehow cannot be controlled or managed by men on their own, an instinct which instead causes large markets to crop up to further incite desire and lust. Women are argued not to be that keen on sex, but still most societies traditionally make rules about how to limit women from having sex and how to ostracize and otherwise punish "loose" women. Women are both devilishly sexual and insatiable, what with all those multiple orgasms, and almost totally without sexual interests. A round-heeled woman is - well - round-heeled. A round-heeled man is a stud, an object of envy.

That is the first paradox, though perhaps a paradox only if we start from the assumption of no power imbalance between the sexes. The second paradox concerns the private-public definition of sex. Traditionally the women who have public sex have been separated from the women who have private sex. The former are hookers, whores, sluts, prostitutes or sex-workers, depending on the level of sophistication one wants to assume. The latter are ideally first virgins and then wives. In the private sector, a woman's sex is the property of one man. In the public sector,traditionally, a woman's sex is the property of all men, even if she is also managed by a pimp.

In a similar vein, women's naked bodies are viewed as either public or private property, to be revealed indiscriminately or to be hidden completely. Thus we get female newsreaders who are expected to show legs and breasts while reading news and thus we also get countries where nothing of women's bodies except the face can be shown on television. Often the paradoxes of private vs. public sex and the private vs. public ownership of women's bodies get confused with each other, and then we get those cross-cultural cases where some men from the Middle East think that all Western women are whores, say. But note that there is no real confusion about who is supposed to own the women's bodies or their sexuality in either case. At least when viewed traditionally and without feminist understanding.

The third paradox is linked to the first paradox I described but slightly different. It is the answer to the question: "Who is responsible for sex?" The traditional answer is almost always: "Women". Even when the woman in question has no real power to influence the events. This may be one reason why the victims of rape often feel so much guilt, wonder so incessantly about what they could have done differently, feel partly to blame even if they are not.

The radical clerics of this world want to control sexuality. And the way they want to control it is by forcing "modesty" on women. The way women dress is regarded as responsible for the way men might react. The burden of managing sexuality is put on women's shoulders. Hence it is women who become the guilty parties when sex escapes the role the society has limited it to.

The idea that women are responsible for men's sexuality is not just common among many Islamic mullahs but also among American fundamentalists. A recent "Modesty Survey" posted on an American website tells Christian ladies that they shouldn't wear sleeveless tops, fix their bra straps in public, wear bathing suits and so on. All this to "help their brothers in Christ to control lust".

The focus on women's modesty is the other side of the coin from the focus on women's immodesty. Both are desirable, actually, but in different places and by different women. This is where the whore vs. Madonna mythology is so handy. Women can be either bad women, available for sexual consumption by all and sundry, or good women, essentially asexual and bent on nothing but motherhood. That way sex is available when men want it but men can also have their own private property for procreation. But note that a "whore" can never say no and a "Madonna" surely is powerful enough to be responsible for all sexuality. It's a win-win for the patriarchy.

Machiavellian Thoughts On Rove's Departure

(This is a post I didn't put up when it was current. It's nice to be ornery)

Several recent opinion columns about Karl Rove's departure from the Bush administration have compared him to Niccolò Machiavelli, the author of The Prince, a sixteenth century how-to book about ruthless political leadership. These quips most likely play on the assertion that Rove was the architect of Bush's rise to power. They also describe some of the near-mythical qualities some attribute to Rove as a secret master-mind working coldly and quietly behind the scenes.

Whatever the truth of that matter might be, it is interesting that the ruthless leader Machiavelli most admired, Cesare Borgia, did not fare well in actual life. He began promisingly enough to be thought of as the model of Machiavelli's Prince:

Cesare also seized (1502) Piombino, Elba, Camerino, and the duchy of Urbino, and he crowned his achievements by artfully luring his chief enemies to the castle of Senigallia, where he had some of them strangled. By killing his enemies, packing the college of cardinals, pushing his conquests as fast as possible, and buying the loyalty of the Roman gentry, he had hoped to make his position independent of the papacy, or at least to insure that the election of any future pope would be to his liking.

But the end of his life was nowhere nearly as successful:

Cesare was struck in 1503 by the same poison (or illness) that suddenly killed his father. Cesare recovered; however, his political power had suffered a fatal blow. Pius III, after a short reign, was succeeded by Julius II, an implacable enemy of Cesare Borgia. Louis XII then turned against him. Julius demanded the immediate return of what territory remained to Cesare and had him temporarily arrested. Returning to Naples, Cesare was soon arrested by the Spanish governor there as the result of collusion between Julius II and the Spanish rulers, Ferdinand and Isabella. Sent to prison in Spain, he escaped and finally found refuge (1506) at the court of the king of Navarre. He died fighting for him at Viana.

Cesare Borgia was all of thirty-one years old at his death in 1507. His was not the long and powerful rule that Machiavelli's writings suggest the imaginary Prince would gain from the strategies his book proposes. There is a lesson to be learned from that.

SAT Scores Down

The horror! I woke up to the news that the SAT scores this year are the lowest since 1999! What is happening here?

The simplest answer is that more students are taking the test. Given its intended objective: to predict college performance in the first few years, those who have traditionally taken the test have been the ones most likely to plan to go to college. When the pool of test-takers increases for various reasons a larger percentage of them will consist of those who have not done that well at school and are likely to score lower.

The SAT tests have always been controversial. For instance, they predict college performance better for some ethnic groups than others and the way the questions have been framed or adjusted over time has been argued to favor certain social classes or one of the genders. Given this background, it is interesting that the new writing section in the SAT is called controversial because it increases the length of the test and causes more student fatigue. It also happens to be the one part of the tests which showed a significant difference in favor of female test-takers in 2006, the first year the test was included.
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Cross-posted at TAPPED.

Gray Mugging

Is there a gray area in muggings, an area where a mugging isn't really a mugging? Perhaps someone offered to lend you that diamond ring but then withdrew the offer so you took it anyway, using your fists in the process? Or perhaps the victim went out decked with stuff like a Christmas tree. Mugging someone like that is almost understandable. Let's just call it gray mugging.

This is all in relation to a recent Cosmopolitan magazine article about something called gray rape. Or rather, in relation to a post about the article. Some snippets from that post:

True story that I wrote in three minutes because that's exactly how much time I felt like dwelling on it: this one time about nine years ago I got locked out of my house and went home with some vaguely smarmy hair-product using type from my ex-boyfriend's frat. I had slept with maybe two or three guys prior to that -- it was the summer between sophomore and junior year of college -- so when he, after about a half hour of fooling around, put on a condom I was like, "Whooooah, what are you doing?" But I'd had two forties and I kept drifting in and out of consciousness -- my tolerance, obviously, wasn't what it is today -- and I woke up to find him sticking it in. I'd said 'no' a bunch of times and when I came to I just froze, stopped, turned over and slept. In the morning I chewed him out (by informing him I wasn't putting him on "my list" -- oh no she didn't!) and after that he kissed my ass so liberally I thought he might have learned from it.

But then in Israel I saw this other girl who used to hook up with him and she assured me he remains a douchebag, only now one that practices medicine in New York. Anyway, I sure hope he saves some lives, and I remember that sexual experience a little more vividly than most of the consensual sexual experiences I've undergone in a similar state of intoxication, but neither sentiment makes it RAPE, does it? It's something, "date rape" I guess, but it's not rape unless I say it was, right?

I feel terrible about discussing this, to be quite honest, because I think the post reveals something quite private. But it is the part about the man "remaining a douchebag" which made me decide to address the "gray rape" issue (also discussed very well by Shakes and by Ann at feministing.com). Because my interpretation of that sentence is that this man has continued raping women ever afterwards. Except that what he does is not seen as rape, as long as the victim is just too drunk to resist. Just douchebaggery.

There is no such thing as "gray rape". There are aggravating and extenuating circumstances to crimes, sure, and some rapes are more heinous than others. Some people who are raped are not as damaged by the rape as others are, also true. But rape, by definition, is nonconsensual sex of the penetrating kind. And someone unconscious or asleep cannot consent. It doesn't matter if the rapist is known to you. It doesn't matter that you don't feel harmed by the rape. It's still rape.

This whole discussion about "gray rape" sounds to me like an attempt to return to the era where a woman had to be pretty much killed to prove that she had been raped. Judges used to argue that the rapist's body must show violent marks from the raped person's resistance, for example. Otherwise it was just "bad sex". Of course fighting back may not be such a good idea when someone holds a knife on your throat, say.

Do we really want to go back to those times?

Some Reading

I have written a couple of geekier posts for the TAPPED blog. But the real reason I'm adding this post is to remind you to read Phila's Friday Hope Blogging regularly. It's an important antidote to the teeth-gritting, misery and moaning which is the style of so much political blogging. Our psychological health requires balance, so a dose of Phila at least once a week and some time with children, lovers, animals and nature is absolutely necessary.

And real books, of course. I'm not sure if I would still be alive without books. You can tell us what you are reading and which books have saved your life in the comments below. Also, which books are really funny, because laughter is one of those things we need, too. My humor reading has recently consisted of Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, but things always change in that field.

What Are Political Blogs For?

Atrios has some ideas about this today:

One problem that the "netroots," whatever that is, has is that there's tendency by Democrats to see it as just another player in the interest group checklist politics game. So, sometimes "this will piss off the blogs" is a consideration, and a similar one to "this might piss of NARAL" or "this might piss off the Sierra Club." We're a noisy somewhat influential group to be placated somehow.

Now that's not how I see things as I think blogs should be seen more as an opportunity to influence media coverage and narratives, as well as helping to stitch together a broader-based political movement.

But it isn't very surprising the Democrats don't really understand how blogs work within the media, as they've long failed to understand how the media works generally. So it's difficult to communicate and explain the "good" the blogs can do when a lot of them just see us as a noisy sometimes-pain-in-the-ass. This isn't true of everyone in DC, of course, but one has to remember that of congressional staffers are often shockingly young and really can't be expected, no matter what their talents, to have a grip on all this stuff in a sophisticated way.

I agree that people who don't read blogs on a regular basis often have very weird ideas about what blogs are. This even includes some people in the traditional media, and many of the discussions on blogs I read there reveal more about the fear of blogs as a competitor for the financially troubled newspapers than about what blogs actually can do and can't do.

Blogs don't do actual reporting, or only in very few cases. Blogs can't replace a news office, or only in the very unlikely case that a blogger has independent sources of wealth. Blogs will not make newspapers obsolete, though the newspapers of the future will be on the Internet and most likely somewhat changed from their current form.

So what are political blogs for? To provide a conscience for mainstream journalists, sure. To be a whipping boy or girl when politicians need one, sure. To provide a way of creating mass movements or of nurturing them, sure. But to me the most important job of blogs is to turn silence into sound, to give those who are not listened to in the corridors of power some place to say what they want to say, to make the political conversations more inclusive and more thorough.

I only wish they had come up with some better name for these things than "blogs". It sounds like a hot potato in the back of your throat.

Good Night And Good Luck

I finally saw that movie, but I'm using the headline to refer to Alberto Gonzales's departure from the Department of Justice. I hope we now have better luck.

President Bush's reaction to the news shows very clearly that those who believe he simply hires friends are correct. George sees his pal Bertie as a totally innocent guy who was dragged to mud for political reasons.

Today's Deep Thoughts Picture

Yes, it's Barbie imitating me. Such a difficult knot of contradictory ideas. Heh.

Ladies, Start Your Vacuum Cleaners

(The picture doesn't really go but it was too funny not to include.)


This is the beginning of one popularization article about a health study. The study, which followed a large group of European women for six years, was about the effect of exercise on the prevention of endometrial cancer. It tried to include all forms of physical activity, not just what is usually regarded as exercise, but also activity at work and at home. This is how the results were summarized:

Premenopausal women who are very physically active --especially those who put in the most work around the house -- may be cutting their risk of developing cancer of the uterine lining.

Among 253,023 women followed for more than six years, those who had not yet reached menopause at the study's outset and were the most physically active were 34 percent less likely to develop endometrial cancer than their more sedentary peers. Three to four hours of household or recreational activity each day produced the greatest benefit.

"This amount and type of activity is achievable by many in the at-risk population," Dr. Christine Friedenreich of the Alberta Cancer Board in Calgary, Canada and her colleagues write in the International Journal of Cancer.

Three to four hours of household activity each day, achievable by many in the at-risk population????? Does Dr. Friedenreich plan to do that now herself? And what will she clean after the third day or so? I assume her children are all grown up, based on the picture of her I've seen.

The study itself may be perfectly fine. Or not. I have not read it, but the point it makes is a valid one: exercise and moving the body in general may prevent certain types of cancer. It suffers from the usual problem of these studies, which is that someone might do less exercise because of already suffering from early parts of the ailment or general ill health, and that the correlation one finds could be because of that and not because exercise has prevention benefits.

But the popularizations I have seen latch on to the household chores part of the study and never really let go. They also don't mention, on the whole, that post-menopausal women had no benefits from exercise at all. So you could pack your vacuum cleaner away when your periods stop, with no ill effects.

Why is any of this worth writing about, except for the discussion of the general benefits of exercise? Because Dr. Friedenreich's results are candy for the anti-feminists who think that women have a gene for vacuum-cleaning which men miss even though most machine genes are lodged inside the bulldog-shaped male heads (see post below). Now they can tell long-suffering women saddled with all household work on top of a paying job that it's for their own good.

The real difficulty is this: Any follow-up study of men and exercise will NOT find a beneficial effect from household chores simply because men don't do them to the tune of three or four hours of day. It's quite possible that this would benefit men, healthwise, but we will not establish it from a study looking at actual time use data. In that sense all these studies are deeply reactionary or at least non-feminist.

I found a column pointing out this, too. The writer notes:

Let's see. If I can leave the office at 5 today, I'll be home by 6 and I can do housework until 10! Oh, goody! I can't wait to get started. Do you think the boss might even let me leave early? I don't want those 250,000 European women in the study to beat me at this game. Ladies, start your vacuum cleaners!

There's just one problem. I hate housework. In fact, my entire philosophy of who should do housework can be summed up in one sentence: "There's a reason God invented teenage boys."

Just last night, I was lying on the couch reading when, in the midst of the leisurely act of turning the page, I noticed out of the corner of my eye a tumbleweed of dog hair roll gently by. "Somebody vacuum that up!" I yelled to my boys, and went back to reading.

Feel guilty? Who, me? Not a chance. I'm just trying to protect them from prostate cancer.

Mmm. Perhaps the writer doesn't have a husband around to protect from prostate cancer. But I have recently noticed these kinds of discussions once again avoiding any mention of the adult male partner in the household, as if women are afraid to make the point that actually needs to be made, which is that the household work is not hers alone by some divine obligation.