A minister on Obama (by Suzie)

            The former pastor of my church conducted the memorial service for Obama's grandmother in December. The Rev. Mike Young is direct and honest in the great heretical tradition of the UU denomination.

            An example: He recalls working with a Catholic priest in Tampa. “If people came to Introduction to Unitarian Universalism, and their natural language was Catholic, but it had been shoved down their throat,” he would recommend they talk to the priest to see if they could still find a place in Catholicism. Similarly, the priest would recommend people to the UU church if they told him, “I can’t believe any of this shit.”
          "The other Catholic priests in town were idiots."
          Young left Tampa to become pastor of the First Unitarian Church of Honolulu, where the service was held for Madelyn Dunham.
          “The most interesting part was dealing with the Secret Service. I expected the Men in Black.” Instead, he said, “it was much more like a fraternity party. They were relaxed, friendly, chatty” but still thorough, including four sharpshooters on the roof, with rifles assembled from suitcases.
           Obama attended the only UU church in Hawaii for several years as a child. Previously, his grandparents and mother had attended a UU church in the Seattle area. Doesn’t Young want Obama to return to his UU roots? No, Mike is too UU for that.
          “People should go where their spiritual and intellectual path leads them.”
          Young, known for his social activism, voted for Obama.
          “In the primary, I had a choice between the first woman and the first non-white, both of whom I could support. And it was the first time since I turned 21 that I voted for, rather than against, a presidential candidate.”
          He refers to Obama as Barry. “That’s who he was here [in Hawaii]. No one here called him Barack.” At the memorial service, the 70-year-old minister saw Obama as “a tall skinny kid.”
          “The person who was the most impressive was not the president or Michelle. They were just folk.” Instead, Young was intrigued by how “bright and articulate” Maya Soetoro-Ng was. She is Obama’s half-sister and a local high-school history teacher. Young also learned from his director of religious education, who is an anthropologist, that Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, had been, not just an anthropologist, but “she was a damn good one,” who was instrumental in recovering traditional art and artisan skills in Indonesia. “She’s a person of significant standing in her own right.”
          If you're interested in more information about the service for Madelyn Dunhan, read what Young wrote under the Amazon listing for his book “A Preacher’s Poems.” 

Friday critter blogging (by Suzie)

Here are Deacon and Chloe playing in my sister's backyard. Deacon is the white German shepherd, and Chloe is a St. Bernard. It would not be wise to get between them. 

Chloe is an old woman - about 9 years old. We think Deacon is about 2. Chloe is trying to teach Deacon manners. For example, if he tries to eat food off of the table, Chloe will bark as if to say, "Young man! We do not eat food off of the humans' table! We sit beside them and stare pitifully until they give us their food."  

Dolphins

Via NTodd who got it from Aravosis:





It has some interesting gender commentary, too....

Today's Echidne Thought

Echidne thoughts are thoughts which I get, as it were, from outer space, suddenly, and usually this means that Echidne stuck them into my hat. After suitable censoring (no, sheep shears are not the new fashion accessory for women everywhere) I either jot them down for further digestion or let them loose here. This one is of the latter kind.

You know how the media discusses something controversial by picking some people from each end of the opinion-line to fight each other, bare-fisted and ready-fanged, in front of us all? That's in theory, of course, and even then the approach has a problem, because the most correct opinion might lie in the middle of that long opinion-line. Broccoli is not necessarily greater than Viagra-for-angels or worse than Dick Cheney's wet dreams. It may just be a vegetable.

Where was I? Oh yes: The second problem with this approach is that the representatives for the extreme opinions are selected oddly. Far too often I see the end-points defined by a rabid right-winger yelling and screaming at a Mr. or Ms. Milquetoast-Middle-of-the-Road (think of Hannity and Colmes). But there's a second odd selection criteria, and that's the topic of today's Echidne Thought:

Think of the way we debate gender roles. The two end-points are often seen as someone with Talibanesque views on women on one side and someone who'd let women go out and run for the President of the United States, sure (as long as the dinner is still on the table when the hubby comes home). Well, perhaps not quite, but you get the point: There's nary a radical feminist anywhere in sight.

More importantly, the two end-points of this opinion line are seen as 'Kirche, Küche und Kinder' for women, at one end, and 'legal equality of the sexes' at the other end. Or 'men should dominate' vs. 'everybody is equal'. Note what's missing there, as is missing from all the other debates about women's essential nature or whatnot?

The symmetrical end-point to the view 'men should dominate'. The effect of this one is to make 'compromise' appear something inbetween full equality and absolute male domination, and the effect is also to make someone like me come across as an extremist, when in fact arguing for equality should be the middle position. Don't you think?

Pope. The Soap Opera.

By Issouf Sanogo, AFP/Getty Images


It's hard not so see Pope Benedict's recent attempts to stuff both of his Prada-shod feet in his mouth as anything but soap opera. He would be excellent mental dissection material for a good satirist, except for the fact that what he says and does can kill people. Every word that manages to get out of his mouth past those Pradas becomes a rule for some Catholic person somewhere, a bullet which can kill.

So now this excellent Pope tells us that condoms are not the answer for Africa dying of AIDS. It's like saying that surgery is not the answer for cancer. Sigh:

Pope Benedict XVI said on his way to Africa Tuesday that condoms were not the answer in the continent's fight against HIV, his first explicit statement on an issue that has divided even clergy working with AIDS patients.

...

Benedict said that the Roman Catholic Church is in the forefront of the battle against AIDS.

"You can't resolve it with the distribution of condoms," the pope told reporters aboard the Alitalia plane headed to Yaounde. "On the contrary, it increases the problem."

The pope said that a responsible and moral attitude toward sex would help fight the disease.

About 22 million people in sub-Saharan Africa are infected with HIV, according to UNAIDS. In 2007, three-quarters of all AIDS deaths worldwide were there, as well as two-thirds of all people living with HIV.

Rebecca Hodes with the Treatment Action Campaign in South Africa said if the pope is serious about preventing new HIV infections, he will focus on promoting wide access to condoms and spreading information on how best to use them.

"Instead, his opposition to condoms conveys that religious dogma is more important to him than the lives of Africans," said Hodes, director of policy, communication and research for the action campaign.

While she said the pope is correct that condoms are not the sole solution to Africa's AIDS epidemic, she said they are one of the very few HIV prevention mechanisms proven to work.

Deep under all those feminine layers of frockery lies Benedict's heart, I suspect. Wonder what's there? One guess:

Why does the Church persist in such a manifestly immoral doctrine? One suspects that it must be the usual twisted thinking about sex and women. The Church's opposition to birth control is largely an outgrowth of its all-male composition and those males' attempts to degrade women's physical powers by asserting that women and the intercourse into which they supposedly tempt men are necessary evils ("It is well for a man not to touch a woman," Paul instructed the Christians of Corinth), the only purpose of which is procreation.

Misogyny may not be "the Church's one foundation," but it is a major part of the base on which it was constructed.

Read This

A post on adoption and its effects on the birth mother.

And The Winners Are....

The National Book Critics Circle awards for the best books:

The co-winners were Juan Felipe Herrera's Half the World in Light: New and Selected Poems (University of Arizona Press) and August Kleinzahler's Sleeping It Off in Rapid City (Farrar, Strauss), who both offered capstone books to important careers—works that were resonant, weighty, and accomplished.

Roberto Bolaño's monumental 2666 (Farrar, Straus), a tale of love and violence set within the framework of the fictional town of Santa Teresa, Mexico, that's widely regarded as the late author's masterpiece, won the fiction award.

...

The general nonfiction award went to Dexter Filkins's The Forever War (Knopf),

...

The biography award went to Patrick French's The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul,

...

The autobiography award went to Ariel Sabar's My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq (Algonquin),

...

The criticism award went to Seth Lerer's Children's Literature: A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter (University of Chicago Press),

...

The evening ended with a fitting memorial tribute to John Leonard.

Bolds mine.

The list of nominees did include women writers, and women have won various categories in the past. But it's odd to read this list (and even odder to scroll down the videos of the recipients, starting here) and then to muse over the argument that women are so rare among mathematicians and scientists because their talents are verbal and literary. I also suspect that if every single winner had been female people would have talked about that, and I think that the reverse situation is also worth some talk.

Happy Saint Patrick's Day

In its honor the background of this blog is green today. Heh.

P.S. Not celebrating the myth of snake killing in Ireland or the guy himself, but those who celebrate their Irishness today.

Some Headlines

The Austrian case of a man holding his daughter a prisoner under his house for decades has come to court. Some headlines from yesterday's papers:

Incestuous Austrian Father Admits Wrongdoing in Court

Incest trial begins for man charged with imprisoning daughter for 24 years

Austrian incest father pleads not guilty to murder

Trial for Austrian Incest Dad Begins

And so on. I understand that he is probably being tried for the incest part first, but those headlines still grate me because they suggest that it might somehow have been better if this man had kidnapped a total stranger, raped her 3000 times and kept her imprisoned underground for over two decades. The incest part appears to be the very least of his crimes.

Monday Critter

Because there are two long posts right below this one and because these are great pictures of Pippin, the intrepid explorer (by FeraLiberal, as usual).

Beckiples. Part II.

This post looks at the last five of the nine principles of Beckianism. Before I start on number five let me point out another neat trick that presenting the list and asking whether people agree with the principles does: It implicitly assumes that if you don't agree with what's written, then you agree with its opposite.

For example, to reject the principle #3, about striving to be ever more honest, doesn't mean that the reader doing the rejecting is intent on getting more and more dishonest day by day. But simplistic statements usually get their power from that invisible shadow side: the fear of appearing to agree to something unwholesome.

Keeping that in mind, here's the fifth Beckiple:

5. If you break the law you pay the penalty. Justice is blind and no one is above it.

The distinction between normative and positive statements is crucial when looking at these sentences. The statement is clearly a lie as a positive statement: The rich get away with softer punishments and so do white-collar criminals in general, while African-Americans are often punished out of proportion to the crimes they have committed.

It's a nice normative statement, on the whole (though I'd like to give justice some new eyeballs). But the Republican Party hasn't exactly fought for these principles in practice. Rather the opposite.

Beckiple number 6 is a beauty:

6. I have a right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, but there is no guarantee of equal results.

This normative statement is so deep that I need a diving bell to respond to it. Who is the "I" in the principle? Glenn Beck? Or his reader? Probably the latter. What does this 'right' consist of? How is it guaranteed to exist? Do all people have the same rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?

For instance, suppose that a person is born with a handicap of such severity that she or he can never make an independent living. How do we guarantee the opportunitites of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to this person? What do we do? Or rather, what should the government do? And if not the government, then who? Charity? How does that guarantee the right Beck argues to exist, given that charity is a fickle source of funding?

The point I'm trying to make (from a diving bell) is that people don't just 'have' the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, especially if this right is intended to be something more than lip service by the rich Beck. Some people will have much more of this right than other people, simply on the basis of luck, genetics, societal prejudices and so on. For this right to be meaningful, the starting line of this great capitalist race should be made the same for every person.

Beck doesn't mention that. I'm not even sure what he means by 'life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.' It could be something very minimalist, such as letting people who look like Glenn Beck be the winners in the race of life.

But of course I know what Beck is really trying to say with this principle, and it's all about unequal outcomes being just fine because they are caused by what people deserve. Rich people deserve to be rich because they worked hard. Poor people deserve to be poor because they were lazy. And so on. Never mind that some rich people are rich because they inherited their money or because they did something deeply unethical (if not illegal) in the market place, and never mind that many poor people are anything but lazy. Women, using the same argument, 'choose' to have children, and if this puts them at a disadvantage, well, it was their own 'choice' that made them trip on the hurdles in the race. Forget about the societal needs for the next generation; it's all a choice similar to picking an ice-cream flavor.

Now we move into the conservative bread-and-butter statement:

7. I work hard for what I have and I will share it with who I want to. Government cannot force me to be charitable.

The Axiom Of Greed. But is this statement a positive one or a normative one? It looks like a real mongrel. The second sentence is false as a positive statement, because the government can indeed force us to be charitable through its power to tax us. The first statement might also be intended to be a positive assertion, but then it might not be true for all readers, some of whom don't work at all or very hard. So that's one way of viewing the seventh principle: as a positive assertion which is mostly false.

But I think it's probably meant as a normative rule against income redistribution through the government, combined with a value judgment that the person agreeing to it is also a fantastically hard worker (and rather mean-spirited). Would it be OK for the government to force people to be charitable if those people didn't work very hard? I'm not sure.

Mmm. I'm turning all dry-and-academic here. Still, note the term 'charity' in this context and the very clear separation of the 'I (who works hard)' from 'the government'.

To call income redistribution 'charity' disguises some aspects of the former which distinguish it from charity. Beck sees the recipients of such redistribution as 'the others', the ones that he might support by throwing a quarter into a hat in the street. But income redistribution is much more than that. It's a social insurance system which might one day cover someone like Glenn Beck should his life fall apart. Or the grandchildren of Glenn Beck.

Income redistribution also has immediate benefits for those who are paying for it. A society with extreme income inequality can easily become a banana republic where the rich live in armed enclaves while the poor roam the streets. I don't want to live in that kind of America, but it probably would suit Beck just fine.

The Beckian world doesn't have a government which is 'of the people, for the people, by the people'. Instead, the horrible villain-government can come and try to force obligatory charity on hard-working people. That the government is elected by the people, as its representatives, doesn't enter the discussion at all.

I'm almost done with the Beckiples (and no, that wasn't so funny, after all). Only two more to go:

8. It is not un-American for me to disagree with authority or to share my personal opinion.

I sincerely hope you didn't die laughing after reading that one, given the last eight years of the conservatives telling us that criticizing the Bush administration amounted to treason! But I whole-heartedly agree with this new interpretation of the conservative dogma, and show it by trying to chew our Glenn into little pieces here. Metaphorically speaking, natch.

Finally, the last principle:

9. The government works for me. I do not answer to them, they answer to me.

I thought the government worked for me? And you. And you. And so on.

The government doesn't work just for Glenn Beck and it doesn't answer just to Glenn Beck, or to any one of the people reading through these principles. To the extent the government is 'of the people, for the people, by the people', any one of us can indeed be made to answer to it (such as in a court of law). But it's certainly true that the government is the servant of The People. However, 'The People' does not equal one conservative talk-show host or any one reader of his website.

Beckiples. Part I.

Glenn Beck (the famously rabid conservative media pundit) has listed Nine Principles on his website. These are supposed to be the principles a conservative holds, and if you, the reader, agree with at least seven of them, well, then you are a Beckian conservative! And you memorize the Nine Beckiples. Aren't I cute today?

I'm going to discuss those nine statements in some detail. But before I do that, it's important to distinguish between positive and normative statements/value judgments. A positive statement expresses something which supposedly is. For example, "Echidne is a blogger" is a positive statement and it happens to be a true one. "Echidne is a three-pronged fork" is also a positive statement, but it happens to be a false one.

A normative statement is an evaluative one or one which argues that something should be. "Echidne is an asshole" is a normative statement, assuming that we use 'asshole' in the non-concrete sense. Whether this statement is true or not is something that depends on the value judgments of the person making it or responding to it.

The distinction between positive and normative statements is sometimes a slippery one. But it's never a great idea to mix the two types in all sorts of odd combinations and that's what Beck does in his Nine Beckiples.

Let's look at the first four principles in greater detail. The first one goes like this:

1. America is good

I bet you immediately noticed that this is a normative sentence, in the sense that the reader is supposed to agree to the basic idea that America is good. At the same time, it would be possible to write a long book about the goodness of America in all sorts of different political, social and economic fields, to see if America indeed comes out smelling of roses in all of them. That's not what Beck intends, naturally. What he means is that only the dirty-fucking-hippies 'hate' America.

Yet any thinking person can easily swallow the contradictory concepts that America might be absolutely fantastic in one area of life and not-so-great in some other area of life. Such a thinking person could even accept the idea of patriotism and love of one's country while acknowledging its flaws and problems. But Beck doesn't like shades of gray.

The second Beckiple:

2. I believe in God and He is the Center of my Life

This is clearly a positive statement by our Glenn. He's telling us that he believes in a god and that his god is the center of his life. He invites you to join the Beckians if you also believe in a god and have him as the center of your life.

But nowhere is it specified which god this might be. I suspect it's a Christian god, of the male sex. What if the reader is a very religious Wiccan or Buddhist? Are those types of people welcome among the Beckians or not? Atheists certainly aren't. Then there's the whole question of what Beck's god's beliefs are. There are people who believe in gods who want them to do stuff which to outsiders looks pretty awful and wrong, and before I'd commit myself to having a permanent god lodger in my house I'd like to know a little more about His dogma.

We learn even more about Beck in the third principle:

3. I must always try to be a more honest person than I was yesterday

A great principle! But what does 'honesty' mean in this context? Honesty to yourself or towards others or both? Does it mean opening your mouth ever wider and stuffing in a bigger wingtip every day? Or does it mean self-examination, meditation and humility? And why is this particular quality listed so early in the principles? What about loving your neighbor like thyself, for instance? Still, I might be on the way towards becoming a Beckian, because I certainly think Glenn Beck should become more honest every day.

The fourth Beckiple is where the dog of anti-feminism lies buried:

4. The family is sacred. My spouse and I are the ultimate authority, not the government

These are normative statements. The first one takes a religious concept, 'sacredness', and applies it to the nuclear family. What does it mean to say that the family is sacred? And based on which religion? Fundamentalist Christians argue that men are the heads of the family. Islam argues the same, with the addition that the male head of the family may have multiple female spouses. Is Beck telling us that these particular family arrangements should never be changed?

Or perhaps he uses the term 'sacred' to imply that the government should keep its paws off family matters? This becomes a real problem when a member of the family is abused or killed by other family members, doesn't it?

The second statement, also normative, tells us that families are not democracies but tiny dictatorships where the dictators are the parents. Funny that he wrote 'my spouse and I are the ultimate authority', given what I stated about the patriarchal family above.

So much for the first four principles. The other five principles will take a post of their own.

Chronicles of A Dying Culture: Hooter’s Swim Suit Pageant Edition by Anthony McCarthy

A fellow insomniac told me last week about flipping through the cable stations in the early, early morning to see women in bikinis having stuff sprayed to their bottoms. It turned out to be a contest sponsored by what is widely considered to be the mildly pornographic restaurant chain, Hooters. My friend noticed something familiar about the spray can, though he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. It was spray adhesive that he’d used on the job to attach Formica to wood. He showed me a can he had in his basement. It looked distinctly dangerous and considering the kind of solvents and other chemicals those kinds of things contain, it probably is.

Here’s what a “FOX Sports Blogger” says about it.

The Secrets of the Pageant

The girls have this magic concoction that keeps the bottoms of their bikinis in place. They call it butt glue. In actuality it's an acrylic adhesive that they're getting sprayed onto their posterior. I wonder if the manufacturers know that what their making is being used to hold bikini bottoms in place. That would make for a whole new marketing campaign. Do you need to attach lightweight foam to something? Do you need to prevent your bikini from riding up? Use our adhesive. And apparently it's not fun to take off. I can't imagine why. I mean it seems natural that you're supposed to apply it to your skin and then rip it off.

Bring something like Hooters up in the blogs and you'll get yelled at for infantalizing women, for "disrespecting their choice". Does anyone really believe that thinking, informed adults would do this as a matter of choice?

Do read the blog and count the number of men associated with this mentioned by name as opposed to the women. It's a good indication of who are considered people in this and who are considered interchangeable objects.

Comments please?

Why ask, “Why Do Women Try To Change Men”? by Anthony McCarthy

Would you forgive an uncle for bragging? Without coaching, my twelve-year-old niece was outraged last year when she saw the movie of My Fair Lady. She hated the ending when Eliza went back to Henry Higgins in the end of it and found the big baby’s slippers for him. It is the inherent sexism in the assumption that Eliza Doolittle would submit to his tyranny that outrages her, being informed that it was a distortion of Shaw’s original is just confirmation that the Hollywood treatment of the ending was all wrong.

Marianne Jacobbi makes a similar mistake in her short piece which asks today “Why do girlfriends and wives keep trying to change their men”?

In the movies, love changes people for the good all the time. After Henry Higgins gave his pupil Eliza Doolittle an extreme makeover, she morphed into a fair lady and they fell in love. Imagine how it might have played out had there been a sequel, My Fair Gentleman.

Love Higgins? Who couldn't take Eliza at her word when she says she doesn’t love Higgins after he proposed to adopt her and marry her off to Pickering. More to the point there is this:

LIZA. Freddy's not a fool. And if he's weak and poor and wants
me, may be he'd make me happier than my betters that bully me and
don't want me.

HIGGINS. Can he MAKE anything of you? That's the point.

LIZA. Perhaps I could make something of him. But I never thought
of us making anything of one another; and you never think of
anything else. I only want to be natural.

And shortly after that:

HIGGINS [wondering at her] You damned impudent slut, you! But
it's better than snivelling; better than fetching slippers and
finding spectacles, isn't it? [Rising] By George, Eliza, I said
I'd make a woman of you; and I have. I like you like this.

LIZA. Yes: you turn round and make up to me now that I'm not
afraid of you, and can do without you.

HIGGINS. Of course I do, you little fool. Five minutes ago you
were like a millstone round my neck. Now you're a tower of
strength: a consort battleship. You and I and Pickering will be
three old bachelors together instead of only two men and a silly
girl.

It’s too bad that Jacobbi doesn’t have the time to go into it farther because she has some mildly interesting observations to make on the subject, though she really began with the wrong question. Considering her use of the film distortion of Pygmalion* she should have asked why people try to change other peoples’ behavior. Going into the eternal stereotype of women nagging men should be an occasion for more interesting exploration than she can fit into the tiny last page of this Sunday magazine treatment. And you can begin by asking why men who nag are eternally let off the hook.

Higgins proposal that they be “three old bachelors together” is interesting for two reasons. One is his inability to see the liberated Eliza as a woman, the second is his idea that their menage a trois will produce independence. Given the way he condescends to Pickering it’s hardly going to be a marriage of equals. And the idea contains an almost universally accepted lie. Any man who is honest would tell you that even someone who isn’t married or as much as a bachelor as Higgens can hardly escape men who nag, pressure, bully, browbeat and actually beat on other men to try to change them. And I am certain that some men do worse to women to enforce change in their lives. And I know many women who just don’t try to change anyone’s behavior, either because they know, perhaps from experience, it’s likely to be futile or because they won’t demean themselves by doing it.

So what do you make of the eternal issue of “nagging women”? And, considering how much nagging men put up with from other men, why it’s only an issue when women do it?


* If she would do herself the favor of forgetting Hollywood and Broadway and going to Project Gutenberg to read the original along with the long post script Shaw added explaining the further history of Eliza, Higgins, Freddy, Pickering and, Clara (Freddy’s sister, as one is apt to forget). Of course Eliza didn’t fall in love with Higgins. Who could? She married the more pliable Freddy. Shaw goes into a lot of detail about how the marriage and the subsequent poverty and move into “trade” changed both of the young couple. The picture of the struggles and compromises they are forced to accept are a lot more interesting than the play. It’s a lot more interesting than the movie and musical “romantic” ending. Though it really shows that Shaw had a real mean streak in him. I don’t think he could have written Higgins without it.

Though it’s his treatment of the liberation of Clara from first the conventions of upper middle-class conventions, then the ridicule of her new crowd that are really interesting. Maybe it’s because she’s not saddled with the responsibility of a husband like Freddy.

Math Class is Tough! (by Phila)

New research into mathematical ability and gender offers an intriguing explanation for the fact that men are more likely than women to succeed at math and the physical sciences. Apparently, men see the hard sciences as a source of authority that complements and reinforces their dominant social status, and are therefore willing to make an extraordinary effort to master the skills that define success within these fields, and to create normative obstacles to female competition.

I'm just kidding. Actually, it's the female deviation from the male standard that cries out for a simplistic explanation.

Women tend to choose non-math-intensive fields for their careers -- not because they lack mathematical ability, but because they want flexibility to raise children or prefer less math-intensive fields of science, reports a new Cornell study.

In other words, if you have a man and a woman with identical mathematical skills, the woman is more likely to avoid math, because she needs to remain "flexible," and pursuing a math-intensive degree offers her much less flexibility than studying millennial subcultures of the English Civil Wars, or mastering Chinese, or becoming a doctor.

"A major reason explaining why women are underrepresented not only in math-intensive fields but also in senior leadership positions in most fields is that many women choose to have children, and the timing of child rearing coincides with the most demanding periods of their career, such as trying to get tenure or working exorbitant hours to get promoted," said lead author Stephen J. Ceci, professor of human development at Cornell.

Women sometimes get pregnant and give birth. And having given birth, they remain more likely than their male partners to sacrifice their careers for childcare, whether they're studying low-dimensional topology or Nuer folkways. This is known as "choice."

It seems to me that we're on pretty familiar ground, so far. But perhaps the real revelations are forthcoming.

Women also tend to drop out of scientific fields -- especially math and physical sciences -- at higher rates than do men, particularly as they advance, because of their need for greater flexibility and the demands of parenting and caregiving, said co-author Wendy M. Williams, Cornell professor of human development.

"These are choices that all women, but almost no men, are forced to make," she said.

Alright, now we've learned that women are forced to "choose" to drop out. But why does this happen more often in scientific fields?

Women today comprise about 50 percent of medical school classes; yet women who enter academic medicine are less likely than men to be promoted or serve in leadership posts, the authors report.

So women often don't get promoted and aren't usually put in charge. Could this have something to do with why they drop out?

Apparently not.

[A]lthough "institutional barriers and discrimination exist, these influences still cannot explain why women are not entering or staying in STEM careers," said Ceci. "The evidence did not show that removal of these barriers would equalize the sexes in these fields, especially given that women's career preferences and lifestyle choices tilt them toward other careers such as medicine and biology over mathematics, computer science, physics and engineering."

I'm losing my bearing here, so let me recap. It won't help to remove barriers to promoting women, because women's "career preferences and lifestyle choices" — the ones they, but "almost no men," are often forced to make — will ultimately ensure that women are underrepresented in computer science.

Could these "preferences" have anything to do with the existence of "institutional barriers and discrimination" that women recognize in advance, and choose to avoid? And if so, isn't it a little high-handed to call that a "career preference," as opposed to — I don't know — oppression?

The study may actually address this issue. But as usual, the press release doesn't. Quite the opposite, in fact.

And I still have no idea how they reached the conclusion that "women tend to choose non-math-intensive fields for their careers... because they want flexibility to raise children," considering that "non-math fields are also affected" by female "choices," and "only 19 percent of the tenure-track faculty members in the top 20 philosophy departments are women." (I guess philosophy doesn't provide much flexibility either, despite everything you've heard about the Deleuzian plane of immanence.)

They do offer some solutions, for whatever that's worth:

The authors recommended that universities and companies create options for women with math talents who want to pursue math-intensive careers. These could include deferred start-up of tenure-track positions and part-time work that segues to full-time tenure-track work for women who are raising children, and courtesy appointments for women unable to work full time but who would benefit from use of university resources (e-mail, library resources, grant support) to continue their research from home.

Sounds good to me. Then, all they'll have to worry about is the ongoing imbalance in childcare responsibilities, and being passed over for promotion 'cause they're women. And so on.

Cell Groups (by Phila)

Xicano Pwr discusses the increase in secessionist talk on the far right, as exemplified by the noted constitutional scholars Chuck Norris and Glenn Beck:

Has secessionism become mainstream? It might have. A 2008 Zogby International poll revealed that 22% of Americans believe that “any state or region has the right to peaceably secede and become an independent republic.” Some 18% “would support a secessionist effort in my state.” It is obvious Chuck Norris is part of the 18 percent.

Of course, "peaceable" secession is not what Norris and Beck are talking about. As with so many other conservative undertakings, the process is the goal: violent upheaval is an end in itself. What we're dealing with is racist and misogynist rage, period; maudlin references to the flag and the Constitution and liberty are simply alibis that allow followers to build a dirty bomb — or fantasize about it — with a clear conscience.

[Norris] continues; calling on a second American Revolution and concludes that there are “Thousands of cell groups will be united around the country in solidarity over the concerns for our nation.” More concerning, Norris feels we are on the eve of war. He closes with the words of Sam Houston.

“We view ourselves on the eve of battle. We are nerved for the contest, and must conquer or perish. It is vain to look for present aid: None is at hand. We must now act or abandon all hope! Rally to the standard, and be no longer the scoff of mercenary tongues! Be men, be free men, that your children may bless their father’s name.”

This is nothing new; it's always one minute to midnight in the radical-right imagination. The crisis Norris anticipates is not some gun-grabbing socialist takeover, but the violence conservatives themselves are constantly yearning to commit. The conflagration they foresee is the one they hope to bring about, so they describe it as an objective threat they must deal with preemptively.

The fact that people like Norris and Glenn Beck are clownish, inarticulate, and painfully stupid is exactly what makes them so dangerous; there's no better type of person for the job. If a new Civil War breaks out, Beck is more likely to accidentally shoot his own dick off while watching cable coverage than to lead a battalion of flabby kulturkampfers against The Yale Divinity School Latina/o Association. But that doesn't matter; he'll still be a hero of the people. In revolution, as in foreign wars, the role of the conservative firebrand is to inspire someone else to kill people, enjoy it vicariously while staying out of harm's way, and blame the victims for the body count once the smoke has cleared.

The funny thing is, the alleged forward march of collectivism is the excuse for forming a brutally conformist, hive-mind collective that's "united around the country in solidarity." The new world that this uprising will achieve is vague, but definitely glorious, much like Heaven. There's little intellectual need for a post-revolutionary plan, and no need at all to worry about the law of unintended consequences, which presents an obstacle only to relatively sane endeavors. The demands of women, minorities, and "liberals" are analogous to the regulations that prevent the free market from working its magic; the New Order will simply self-organize once these obstacles are removed. Norris's war isn't some sort of suburban putsch; it's an almost impersonal force that will spontaneously arise to restore the natural order, into which everyone who counts will then fit as comfortably as a STANAG magazine in an AR-15.

That being the case, he's not simply threatening teh socialists and feminazis; this rhetoric is also a reminder to conservatives that they're either with the "cell groups," and the natural order they represent, or against them. Which really ought to frighten them as much as us.

A Book Read Fifty Years Too Late by Anthony McCarthy

My thanks to the anonymous e-mailer who recommended that I read Aldous Huxley’s Brave new World Revisited. Having admired the novel, which I think is a lot more impressive than 1984 in its vision of domestic social and political trends, I’m ashamed to admit to never having read Aldous Huxley’s essays. There are points on which we differ, some sharply, but he said a lot of the things I’ve been harping on about fifty years earlier. And a lot better.

Here’s a link to the book online. The Art of Selling is the chapter that was pointed out to me as being very similar to some of the things I’ve written. .

- The survival of democracy depends on the ability of large numbers of people to make realistic choices in the light of adequate information.

- Effective rational propaganda becomes possible only when there is a clear understanding, on the part of all concerned, of the nature of symbols and of their relations to the things and events symbolized. Irrational propaganda depends for its effectiveness on a general failure to understand the nature of symbols.

- But unfortunately propaganda in the Western democracies, above all in America, has two faces and a divided personality. In charge of the editorial department there is often a democratic Dr. Jekyll -- a propagandist who would be very happy to prove that John Dewey had been right about the ability of human nature to respond to truth and reason. But this worthy man controls only a part of the machinery of mass communication. In charge of advertising we find an anti-democratic, because anti-rational, Mr. Hyde -- or rather a Dr. Hyde, for Hyde is now a Ph.D. in psychology and has a master's degree as well in the social sciences. This Dr. Hyde would be very unhappy indeed if everybody always lived up to John Dewey's faith in human nature. Truth and reason are Jekyll's affair, not his. Hyde is a motivation analyst, and his business is to study human weaknesses and failings, to investigate those unconscious desires and fears by which so much of men's conscious thinking and overt doing is determined. And he does this, not in the spirit of the moralist who would like to make people better, or of the physician who would like to improve their health, but simply in order to find out the best way to take advantage of their ignorance and to exploit their irrationality for the pecuniary benefit of his employers.

And from the previous chapter:

- Human beings act in a great variety of irrational ways, but all of them seem to be capable, if given a fair chance, of making a reasonable choice in the light of available evidence. Democratic institutions can be made to work only if all concerned do their best to impart knowledge and to encourage rationality. But today, in the world's most powerful democracy, the politicians and their propagandists prefer to make nonsense of democratic procedures by appealing almost exclusively to the ignorance and irrationality of the electors.

I was afraid that Huxley wouldn’t go as far as I’m afraid we’ll have to in order to save democracy but as he states the obvious truth that the prerequisites for The People to govern themselves by a representative democracy are not optional but are, in fact, absolutely mandatory, democracy won’t survive without legislation preventing mass marketed lies. From the last chapter, What Can Be Done?

- No, I repeat, there can never be such a thing as a writ of habeas mentem. But there can be preventive legislation -- an outlawing of the psychological slave trade, a statute for the protection of minds against the unscrupulous purveyors of poisonous propaganda, modeled on the statutes for the protection of bodies against the unscrupulous purveyors of adulterated food and dangerous drugs. For example, there could and, I think, there should be legislation limiting the right of public officials, civil or military, to subject the captive audiences under their command or in their custody to sleep-teaching. There could and, I think, there should be legislation prohibiting the use of subliminal projection in public places or on television screens. There could and, I think, there should be legislation to prevent political candidates not merely from spending more than a certain amount of money on their election campaigns, but also to prevent them from resorting to the kind of anti-rational propaganda that makes nonsense of the whole democratic process.

Such preventive legislation might do some good; but if the great impersonal forces now menacing freedom continue to gather momentum, they cannot do much good for very long. The best of constitutions and preventive laws will be powerless against the steadily increasing pressures of over-population and of the over-organization imposed by growing numbers and advancing technology. The constitutions will not be abrogated and the good laws will remain on the statute book; but these liberal forms will merely serve to mask and adorn a profoundly illiberal substance. Given unchecked over-population and over-organization, we may expect to see in the democratic countries a reversal of the process which transformed England into a democracy, while retaining all the outward forms of a monarchy. Under the relentless thrust of accelerating overpopulation and increasing over-organization, and by means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms -- elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest -- will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial -- but democracy and freedom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.

The fifty years since the book was published prove that we are living out what Huxley saw with such impressive insight. Maybe, due to his family heritage, he realized that the mass media had fundamentally changed the political environment to the extent that the old guarantees which would have provided the possibility of an informed vote no longer hold. We can only look back at the developments in politics and the media and see the reality of what Huxley saw made true.

Last year the possibility of democracy was saved, for a time, by the disgust of the public over the Bush regime or, less optimistically, by the results of his economic pillage catching up with his party. It wasn’t the “free press” that saved us from four more years, it was reality going over the heads of the press. As the biological environment won’t survive delay in facing up to the ruinous environmental results of corporate libertarianism, democracy won’t survive with the media we’ve got today. I don’t think the new media will prove to be the savior many are confident it will be. If anything lies are more easily spread online than before. We risk too much if their hunch is wrong. The dangers of requiring the press to serve the essential needs of a democratic society are real, abuses of any kind of regulation will arise. But those dangers are prospective, uncertain and remedial. The dangers of the media we have now are a clear danger to the life of a democracy and the free people it serves.

Saturday Critters

Here's 1WattHermit's Thumper (on her back) having a relaxing afternoon with her packmate (whose name I forget). You may notice that Thumper is missing a front paw. Hermit rescued her " from a cattle pen where she was being harassed by boxers and german shepherds after she lost her foot to a steel trap." She's now quite content.

And here's Pipsa enjoying the winter turning into spring:





You can click on the pictures to make them a little bigger.

Friday critter blogging (by Suzie)

Deacon, a white German shepherd, was skin-and-bones, tied up in the Texas sun, when my sister saw him and offered to take him home with her. In her house, he was ungainly, knocking over things, with no training or manners. She kept telling me that she didn't want to keep him, but she wanted to make sure that whoever adopted him would really love him and treat him well. When I visited last month, I realized that she's not giving him up.

In two cars, we took him and her St. Bernard to a vet who works out of an RV in a grocery-store parking lot. We huddled outside while the dogs got shots, plus medication to prevent fleas and heart worms. I'm looking forward to universal health care for pets because the costs are high these days even when the vet is working out of an RV. 

Rosewood, gender and domestic violence (by Suzie)

            This post relates to the one below. A white mob attacked the black residents of Rosewood in 1923. Historians have documented the deaths of six African Americans and two whites. The remaining residents fled, and the mob burned the small town. This was part of a wave of terrorism against African Americans after World War I.
         If you’ve never heard of Rosewood, or if you only saw the fictionalized movie, I encourage you to read the excellent report that led to the Florida Legislature awarding compensation to victims and their descendants in 1994.
         Unlike other lynchings, the Legislature considered Rosewood unique in Florida because state authorities had ample time to prevent crimes, but failed to do so and then failed to prosecute. 
         I did a lot of reporting on Rosewood in the 1990s, and I saw a parallel with domestic violence. Authorities have often known that crimes were being committed, but they failed to intercede or prosecute. Some women fled their homes, taking only their children. They struggled financially, as did the Rosewood descendants.
         But violence that happens in the home is often seen as a personal matter, and the public may not understand the scale of it. Similarly, more people are injured in accidents in the home than they are in plane crashes, but the scale of the plane crash and the public spectacle guarantees more attention. (I don't mean to imply that attention is always good. For starters, it can increase the terror and the spread of misinformation.)

         Domestic violence may have played a role in Rosewood. The violence started when a 22-year-old white woman was beaten in her home in a nearby town, and the woman said a black man attacked her. African Americans say the culprit was a white lover, and she lied to protect herself. They say the white lover was a Mason and he asked for protection from his black male comrades. Meanwhile, whites suspected an escaped black convict, and they thought Rosewood residents were hiding him.

         The state report rarely mentions gender, but we can assume most of the journalists – the people who helped form public opinion – were male. The white mob, law enforcement and other government officials were all, or almost all, male. Black women and a few white women helped protect black residents, especially children.

          On both sides, people believed that men proved their manhood by fighting the enemy. Men had to protect women and their communities. They had to maintain their dignity.
           Of course, I think the white vigilantes were wrong, and African Americans had a right to defend themselves. But who is right and who is wrong is not so clear in many other conflicts. That's why we need to analyze how notions of manhood and womanhood fuel violence.

Emmett Till, lynching and white women (by Suzie)

Racism and sexism are intertwined, sometimes in ways that aren’t apparent or can’t be discussed without angering people. I was reminded of that when reading an old Ms. magazine that mentioned Emmett Till being lynched for "flirting” with a white woman.

A lot of people blasted Susan Brownmiller for her 1975 commentary on the case, some accusing her of suggesting the 14-year-old deserved to be tortured and murdered for harassing a woman. Brownmiller has denied this, writing in 1999 that: “Till and the men who lynched him shared something in common: a perception of the white woman as the white man's property."

Some critics don’t consider what Till did harassment and think any mention of his actions is an attempt to blame the victim or lessen the monstrosity of his murderers, who were never brought to justice.

Others criticized Brownmiller for "centering" a white woman. Kimberle Crenshaw wrote in “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,” published in “Feminist Legal Theories” in 1997:

While patriarchal attitudes toward women’s sexuality played a supporting role, to place white women center stage in this tragedy is to manifest such confusion over racism as to make it difficult to imagine that the white antirape movement could be sensitive to more subtle racial tensions regarding Black women’s participation in it.

Till was murdered in 1955, and the case had a huge impact on the civil rights movement. When Brownmiller wrote two decades later, she didn’t have the power to make the white woman more important than the boy, even if she had wanted to do so. Even though it’s taboo, I still think talking about her commentary helps people understand how white male supremacy has worked to control white women and people of color.

In “White Man Falling,” Abby Ferber notes how sexuality continues to be integral to the thinking of white supremacists.

Defining black women as promiscuous and oversexed, combined with the belief that all women were the property of white men, meant that the only form of rape that was actually considered such was the rape of white women by black men. In this case, rape is seen as a violation of white male property rights.

In English law, rape was a crime against men's property rights, explains Darlene Clark Hine and Kathleen Thompson in "A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America." They note that, after the Civil War, African Americans saw the rape of black women by white men as an affront to the manhood of black men.

Karen, in the Feminist Mormon Housewives blog, wrote about her research into rape cases in the antebellum South. She said enslaved black women had no legal recourse if they were raped, nor did any wives against husbands, although attitudes against both of these actions existed.

In the 19th century, all-male juries were skeptical of rape claims in general, and a woman had to prove that she was physically forced. If she couldn’t, she was seen as licentious. If she could prove rape, a white woman from a “proper” background would still be seen as tarnished. Before the Civil War, Karen found, enslaved men accused of raping white women usually were not brought to trial or convicted because white men wanted to protect their economic investment in slaves.

After the war, that changed, of course. White men feared black men would infringe on white men's rights to white women, and the protection of white women was used as an excuse for the political and economic domination of black men. Into the 1900s at least, the perceived morality of the white woman affected the treatment of black men accused of assault, according to Lisa Lindquist Dorr in "White Women, Rape, and the Power of Race in Virginia, 1900-1960."

During witch-burning times, women had been seen as earthy temptresses. Slavery was one strong impetus for white women to be recast as good and pure, with black women being seen as bad. "White women had to pretend to be the former, and black women were doomed to be seen as the latter," Hine and Thompson wrote. The authors also quote Hazel Carby:

The institutionalized rape of black women has never been seen as powerful a symbol of black oppression as the spectacle of lynching. Rape has always involved patriarchal notions of women being, at best, not entirely unwilling accomplices, if not outwardly inviting sexual attack.

While fighting lynching, Ida B. Wells-Barnett capitalized on this thinking about rape when "she declared that no one really believed black men were raping white women," Hine and Thompson wrote. Instead, she suggested, accusations cast aspersions on the morality of white women.

Nevertheless, she and Frederick Douglass noted that most lynchings did not stem from white women's accusations of sexual assault. Even when assault was the excuse given, the motivation often was economic, and almost all of the lynchings were committed by white men.

That brings me back to the Emmett Till case. Roy and Carolyn Bryant owned a store whose customers were mostly black sharecroppers. Roy Bryant was often on the road, leaving his 21-year-old wife alone, or with her sister-in-law and their children. She saw Till as big as a man, and she said he grabbed her and talked about dating her. If this was true, then it wasn’t flirting; it was intimidation. She didn’t tell her husband initially, but word got out in the small town.

Others say she lied, and I find that just as plausible, but it’s hard to know the truth because testimony conflicted. Nevertheless, I have no doubt that the Bryants were racist, and Roy Bryant committed murder.

But racism would have to work differently if sexism was taken out of the equation, if men no longer used women as proxies to fight each other, if men didn’t see women as property, if men no longer tied their status to women’s sexuality.

And Some More Happy News

Spring is a-coming! Sniff the air, notice that round yellow thing up in the sky, hear the squeaking of the birds (the more musical ones are not here yet)! If you put your mind in your toes while standing quietly you can feel the earth pushing. New life being birthed.

And president Obama restored funding to the United Nations Population Fund (UNPFA)! The global gag rule removal and this restoration mean that the American pro-lifers no longer can release their anger at the women of the world. That is very good news.

Ross Douthat is the new New York Times extra-conservative columnist. He's taking Kristol's place in the columnist stable. Probably switching his tail at all the flies buzzing around Maureen Dowd while chewing the conservative oats with fellow-wingnut, David Brooks, to take the horses-in-stable analogy too far.

Even that hiring is good news, because I've been waiting for a good sarcasm-target. Sometimes a goddess must work very hard to turn yet-another-male-conservative hire into good news. But it will be fun to take a magnifying glass to Mr. Douthat, to see what might be hiding under his hat and to poke around there a little.

The Winnenden Barbeque. TRIGGER WARNING.

The most recent school killer in Germany fits the usual pattern: young, male and angry. Some killers appear to shoot randomly, some butcher mostly teachers, some focus on killing girls and women. The Winnenden slaughter was of the last type:

Almost all of the victims were female. Eight of the nine students killed were girls, and the three teachers shot by Tim Kretschmer were all women. Seven other women are recovering from serious injuries at a nearby hospital.

Officials have refused to speculate about why the gunman singled out women. But as Heribert Rech, interior minister for the Baden-Wuerttemberg region, said at a news conference. "It is noteworthy that primarily girls were killed -- eight girls and one boy. The teachers killed were women."

As his victims lay wounded on the floor, Kretschmer screamed: "Are you not all dead yet?"

May all his victims have peace. May those who loved them have peace.

But I'm not wishing peace on the journalists and politicians who after noticing the gender of the victims blithely go on to speak about how to prevent similar future massacres without suggesting a single thing to combat the hatred of women that this butchery demonstrates.

Sure, we need better mental health care. Sure, parents and teachers and other adults should pay more attention to depressed teenagers. Sure, guns should be controlled better at home (or shouldn't be there in the first place). But we shouldn't just skim over the misogyny of the Winnenden barbequer.

In fact, the time right now is not to focus on him but on his victims and their lost lives:

Witnesses said that a woman school teacher threw herself over a student to protect her and was shot in cold blood.

Bless her.

Today's Funny Post

Ari Fleischer (who used to work for the Bush White House as an interpreter) has come back visiting everyone to polish George Bush's reputation for the posterity. This interview with Chris Matthews is a particularly hilarious yelling match. Watch carefully after about 1:10:

The White House Council On Women And Girls

President Obama signed an executive order for first such council:

The council, which will meet regularly, will include members of the Cabinet and of several other agencies and will be led by senior aide Valerie Jarrett. Tina Tchen, deputy assistant to the president and director of the Office of Public Liaison at the White House, will serve as the executive director.

Obama made special mention of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who stood near him on stage at the East Room event, as an example of women breaking barriers, and he noted that he had had the privilege of participating in a "historic campaign with a historic candidate who we now have the privilege of calling Madame secretary."

"But at the same time, when women still earn just 78 cents for every dollar men make, when one in four women still experiences domestic violence in their lifetimes, when women are more than half of our population but just 17% of our Congress," he said before signing the order. "When women are 49% of the workforce but only 3% of our fortune 500 CEOs, when these inequalities stubbornly persist in this country in this century then I think we need to ask ourselves some hard question and we need to take a hard look at where were falling short and who were leaving out and what that means for the prosperity and the vitality of our nation."

Read my Gender Gap series at echidne-of-the-snakes.com to get a better understanding about the gender gap and what causes it. The reality is more complicated than either of the two commonly expressed political views (gender gap is women's fault, gender gap is discrimination) can express.

It is certainly important to address, though, especially, because that figure the quote gives us only applies to full-time workers, which means that women actually earn a lot less than men, because many more women work part-time during the childbearing years of their lives. That also means less retirement income for women later on.

When I first read about the creation of this Council my emotions were mixed. I could already hear the piping and chirping from the anti-feminists, all about women getting a special council for just themselves when all men have is the whole world. At the same time, the inner Echidne was grumbling that she didn't want a special council for women but a world where women's issues were included in a matter-of-factual way and everybody saw those issues just as human issues. Then the sceptical me worried that whenever one starts a committee or a council, that's all one is going to get on a particular issue.

Lisa Belkin writes about some of the doubts she has. Though my views are not the same in many ways, I agree that the Council could be used to ghettoize some issues which really are everybody's issues. But then not having the Council at all would have the same effect and with much less attention to those issues. I hope that the net effect of the Council will be positive for women and girls by reminding everyone in the government about their existence, if nothing else.

Today's Deep Thought

How long before we start hearing that in this great recession women don't need jobs as badly as men?

This Bob Herbert column provoked a commenter on Eschaton to wonder if Herbert had something of that sort in mind when he wrote this:

The seeds of today's disaster were sown some 30 years ago. Looking at income patterns during that period, my former colleague at The Times, David Cay Johnston, noted that from 1980 (the year Ronald Reagan was elected) to 2005, the national economy, adjusted for inflation, more than doubled. (Because of population growth, the actual increase per capita was about 66 percent.)

But the average income for the vast majority of Americans actually declined during those years. The standard of living for the average family improved not because incomes grew but because women entered the workplace in droves.

As hard as it may be to believe, the peak income year for the bottom 90 percent of Americans was way back in 1973, when the average income per taxpayer, adjusted for inflation, was $33,000. That was nearly $4,000 higher, Mr. Johnston pointed out, than in 2005.

Men have done particularly poorly. Men who are now in their 30s — the prime age for raising families — earn less money than members of their fathers' generation did at the same age.

What Herbert fails to mention is that the fathers of the men who are now in their 30s made, on average, a whole lot more than the mothers of the women who are now in their 30s, for instance. He also fails to mention that men in their 30s still earn more, on average, than women in their 30s.

Merit Pay For Teachers

This is what Obama has proposed today, together with longer school days and charter schools:

President Barack Obama called for tying teachers' pay to student performance and expanding innovative charter schools Tuesday, embracing ideas that have provoked hostility from members of teachers unions.

He also suggested longer school days — and years — to help American children compete in the world.

I'm in total agreement about the longer school days and years, for several reasons, including the fact that children in many countries do spend more time studying and that the school days and years here are no longer very well matched with the working lives of the children's parents. I also want to get more art, music and similar creative things back into schools and the only way that might happen is through longer school days. It could be that I just feel bitter because my school days were really long and that I want revenge. Who knows?

The charter school bit is more problematic, because it's not clear that charter schools necessarily do better than normal schools.

The merit pay idea is problematic in a different way: It's very hard to define the output of a teacher in an objective way and that's what we need if we wish to reward merit fairly. I imagine that merit pay might be used as a power tool in some schools in the absence of such fairness.

The problem in measuring teacher output has to do with the way that output is produced: with the inputs of both the student, the teacher and the teaching environment. An excellent teacher could have bad outcome measurements if she or he taught at a school with no resources and lots of poorly prepared students who don't want to learn. Think of the output of a physician and you might spot some similar problems.

Why is nobody proposing that we pay physicians on the basis of merit, hmh? Could it be that physician pay is already very good? What does good salary produce in this context? More people with great skills entering the field? Do the countries which lead the international education statistics use something like shitty salaries and then merit pay? Or do they pay their teachers well to begin with?

None of this means that we couldn't introduce a merit pay system. But it needs to take into account those other factors: how well or poorly the children are prepared, what their homes are like, how much money the school system has and so on. And if teacher pay, on average, is not rising, introducing merit pay is just introducing another testing hurdle for people who consider going into the field, a hurdle they might not pass. That means that the expected pay in the field would look even worse and the outcome would be fewer and fewer people going into teaching.

The Excellent Slave

Do you think people used to write guide books about how to be a perfect slave in, say, the old Athens with its many slaves? And if they did, would it contain stuff like this:

Those priorities may include rising early to feed the owner's family, being available anytime to satisfy the owner's desires (barring a few "ungodly" or "homosexual" acts), seeking his approval regarding work, appearance, and leisure, and accepting that he has the "burden" of final say in arguments. After a slave has respectfully appealed her owner's decision—a privilege she should not abuse—she must accept his final answer as "God's will for her at that time," Peace advises. The godly slave must also suppress selfish desires (for romance, a career, an equitable marriage), practice addressing her owner in soothing tones, and maintain a private log of bitter thoughts to guide her repentance. "If you disobey your owner," Peace admonishes in The Excellent Slave, "you are indirectly shaking your fist at God."

That's not a real quote. I changed the word 'wife' to 'slave' and the word 'husband' to 'owner', but otherwise left the message as it stood in the original article which is based on a book about Biblical Womanhood and the Quiverfull movement. As far as I can figure out, the concept of biblical womanhood equals the concept of willing slavery. It puts no demands on the way the owner should behave and it gives the slave no other support except to learn to love the chains that bind you. Or bite you.

I do get very upset when I read about all this. I do. Note that it's not only about the women who reallyreally want to be slaves; it also applies to the rest of us wimmin:

Their concerns extend to questions—on Christian marriage counseling; on women speaking in church or exercising authority over men as, say, teachers or cops—that are nearly as divisive in conservative churches as gay marriage is in mainline denominations. "A lot comes into this," Peace tells me. "Not just husbands and wives, but women as pastors, women in church. It's not a matter of 'Good Christians can differ on the issue.' This is a slippery slope they're on. It's like wherever the world goes, 30 or 40 years later, the church goes, too."

The reference to women as teachers or as cops has to do with the belief that no slave should ever wield power over any owner.

It's striking how similar all this advice is to the advice I have read from extreme Islamists. Peas in the pod, these religious nuts are, to mix my food metaphors.

Retouch Me, Please

Lindsey Beierstein (of Majikthise) pointed out this interesting video about retouching and how very common it is in magazines, these days. The pictures we see are not about real people. Even the beautiful models are not beautiful enough. What that does to us all is an interesting question, and the video points out some possible consequences as well as some ways to combat the false standards that retouching everything has created.

Good News

This:

US President Barack Obama announced Friday the creation of a new foreign policy position designed to tackle global women's issues.

Obama named Melanne Verveer, an aide in former president Bill Clinton's administration, as ambassador-at-large for international women's issues. She will serve at the State Department under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The appointment, which has to be approved by the Senate, "is unprecedented and reflects the elevated importance of global women?s issues to the president and his entire administration," the White House said in a statement.

Clinton has put efforts to improve the lot of women at the heart of boosting international development, which she says must be an "equal partner" with diplomacy and defense in US foreign policy.

This is good news, because it's important to view international relationships with other countries not just through their mostly male leaderships, and because the usual way of thinking tends to make us blind in some ways. As an example of the latter, remember how George Bush was to liberate Iraq? Yet that liberation was seldom viewed from the point of view of the majority of living Iraqis, women. It was as if the term 'citizen' only applied to men.

It Hurts, Baby

Violence hurts. It's not love. But something has gone missing in the recent chatter about domestic violence or intimate violence, a fundamental distinction which should be there. Or so I think, even though I'm hesitant to write about it should I be wrong.

But in my mind there's a difference between violence used as a slave collar around someone's neck and the kind of violence that two people might get into in a furious, drunken fight. They are not necessarily always two different things and the latter is not necessarily a healthier sprout in the garden of emotional problems but the two really are not quite the same. For instance, it's possible for a person to stop using physical violence in a warped relationship and to simply substitute something else for that slave collar, to continue the almost-total control of another human being in other ways.

I think the distinction used to be made in the past? At least I recall reading about the controlling behavior and the way violence was used to make someone's power total over another person. But the most recent takes appear to treat all physical violence on the same terms. Sometimes yelling and screaming are seen as physical violence, too, or the phenomenon is talked about without any attention to degrees of violence and so on.

What I'm wondering if this is the best way to get at the first type of violent behavior I depicted, the kind which ultimately paralizes the victim and makes her (or perhaps him) unable to escape. It's not the beating per se that does this. Or is it? I believe it's the overall setting of extending total control over someone. Physical violence is a tool in that but not the ultimate disease that we should address. The ultimate disease is the desire to be the total master of another person or persons.

So if we tell young people that violence in an intimate relationship is wrong, are we telling them enough?

Meh

My new favorite word, one which combines scorn, world fatigue and "whatevah" all in one short syllable. Say it while facing the dark winter sky and you feel like the god/dess of everything you survey, or at least liberated from the burdens of always having to care about something, to care for something, to care.

It doesn't really work. But it's fun to pretend. Besides, you can mutter it under your breath if you are not alone and only you know that now you are free! Free to be bad! Free not to give a shit. Try it. Your fangs might grow over your lips, your eyes might glow red in the darkness, your claws might retract, then grow long. Then you could go and suck the life out of a carrot. Sigh. I shall never be a famous writer of horror stories.

Mmm. Sudsy!

The Vatican tells us what all women may celebrate on the International Women's Day (which was yesterday): A washing machine! Yup. That's what has liberated the little ladies:

As International Women's Day is celebrated, the Vatican had a novel message for the women of the world: give thanks for the washing machine. This humble domestic appliance had done more for the women's liberation movement than the contraceptive pill or working outside the home, said the the official Vatican newspaper, Osservatore Romano.

It would have to be something of that sort, would it not? Something which doesn't change the job-assignments at all, something which doesn't actually affect the gendered division of labor or the unequal valuation those roles have. Women are still seen as responsible for doing the laundry and not allowed to be priests in the Catholic Church and so on.

Note that it's quite possible to be very grateful for the washing-machine and yet find this particular contribution to the International Women's Day utterly insulting as a trivialization of the severe economic, health and social problems women in so many countries struggle with.

Goody Two-Shoes

I had the misfortune of reading the original Goody Two-Shoes story, misfortune, because its moral is an odious one. Nevertheless, it serves as an introduction to the fascinating topic of shoes. Or the way they are used to describe people: well-heeled, down at heel, a woman with round heels.

A woman with round heels is one who is easy to get on her back, I learn, though that term is now rather ancient. But what would a heelless woman be called? Here's a picture of the new Nina Ricci heelless shoes (the first pair on the left):





They might be good for kicking someone, but I doubt having the balance of the body weight on one's toes that way does much good to the spine. If we need to wear impossible-looking shoes I'd like them with little engines and wings and possibly coffee-making facilities. And rhinestone snake embroidery.

Happy International Women's Day!

I'm sure that you have been swamped by it in the media. Hours and hours about women on this day! All the bobble-heads on television suddenly being female! Articles penned by women on the front pages of all newspapers! Demands that women be treated equally by laws and cultures of all countries! And so on and so on.

Of course if you live in the U.S. you wouldn't know that today indeed is the International Women's Day. It's not an important day here at all. March, by the way, is supposed to be women's history month, too. Crickets...

Real Freedom is Dependent on Equality by Anthony McCarthy

A common fault of our political discourse is that crude labels, terms and slogans are used as stand in for ideas when they, in fact, only stand for attitudes and opinion preferences*. I don’t know if this is due to our ingrained habits of practicing reductionism, so useful in physical science, frequently so wrongheaded and fallacious when dealing with complex areas of life.

The idea that freedom and equality are separate and opposing ideals is often stated in attacks made on liberalism. The idea that forcing equal treatment of all people will damage the freedom of some of them seems to make sense. After all, when there is a clash of interests and the mandated results are equal, someone is usually not going to get to do something they want to do. But that assumes that all of what we call freedoms or, as some like to say, liberties, are all the same in value and necessity. It pretends that things we call “freedoms” are really the same sorts of things.

The ability to do what is necessary for the simple sustenance of life is clearly not in the same category as exercising a preference in entertainment options, though both are talked about as being “freedoms”. The freedoms of most interest to people who don’t confront a daily danger of starvation or disease are frequently those which fall decidedly into the category “optional”. I’d guess the largest number of the pixels and spots of ink spent on passionately discussing “freedom” in the United States today would fall into the range of the somewhat unimportant to the entirely frivolous and on to the clearly stupid. The English language isn’t used very precisely to distinguish between the freedom to ask for enough to eat to live another day and to freely promote the non-regulation of “new financial instruments”. And there are real consequences in that inability to rank the two in importance as the politics of the past several decades shows. It is a tell-tale symptom of a fatally sick country when there is more freedom to grab the media and political office to lie on behalf of con men and thieves than the advocates of economic equality have.

Is there a right to lie? Is there a right to promote fraud? Does the freedom to lie, as the advocates of unregulated markets have enjoyed in abundance, have any real value that we need to protect? Is it a “freedom” when the results rob millions of their money and their ability to exercise the freedom to keep what they earn and to live in a home instead of on the street?

I don’t think there is any right to lie. Especially when the lie is magnified in the mass media and produces a real loss of rights to innocent people. The “freedom” to lie isn’t a freedom that I need to defend. I think a political and legal system that doesn’t make the distinction between the freedom to lie and right to tell the truth is not viable in the long run. I don’t think a political or legal system that treats contracted lies, based in clear and well funded deception, as instruments of “freedom” granting con men the force of law is sustainable. The enormous number of means devised to lie and deceive for profit during the past forty years are what has produced the situation we are in today. Pretending that those duped by them are free agents only makes the courts and the government the allies of the thieves.

There is also no justice to be had in a legal system in which those with the financial means can hire lawyers to grind down those they wrong. There is no democracy when those with money can turn an election to those who will serve them instead of the deceived public. Any government and legal system which willfully ignores the inequality in a system such as ours and treats the entirely predictable overall result is an engine that ensures the elective freedom of the few and destroys the real freedom of the many. Real equality isn’t opposed to real freedom, it is a prerequisite for it to exist. Real justice doesn’t allow someone with vast resources to ‘freely’ use them while the opposition has no such resources. Any judge that pretends they are administering justice in such an unequal match is a fraud. A real justice system would make certain that the resources brought to bear in legal cases were the same.

While the dolor expressed by those deprived of their “freedom” to exercise their ability to cheat by deception or to enjoy the dividends of legalized theft may be quite genuine, it isn’t the same kind of thing as the anguish of someone who has been roped in by the whiles of a con man and robbed of what they need to survive. There is no equality in the cleptocracy we live in, and the freedoms are as ill distributed as the money is.

* I think this substitution of merely symbolic concepts to stand in for more complex realities accounts for a lot of the intellectual stagnation we experience. It’s harder to look at what is really there and face that there isn’t going to be any way to fit that reality into a logical or statistical engine to get an entirely stable result than it is to pretend that you can. I think that accounts for some of the more brutal blog brawls you see among people who are generally in agreement. You can reduce reality down only so far, then trying to force further reduction, however convenient it seems, doesn’t work to produce either a realistic view or something that really works.