Vicarious Guilt vs. Voluntary Encouragement by Anthony McCarthy

Using the neglect of Daniel Hauser, the 13-year-old boy whose parents have kept him from receiving treatment for lymphoma, as an attack on the large majority of the population who are religious is a good example of the dishonesty and counter-productive thinking rampant in blog culture. It starts in assigning vicarious guilt to people who not only aren’t involved in the crime of the parents, but who completely disapprove of what they’re doing.

The fact is, the parents wouldn’t be breaking a law against this kind of child neglect if there wasn’t a law to break. Most people think it should be illegal or those laws wouldn’t have been adopted or maintained in the legal code. Most of the people who draft those laws and adopt them are religious believers elected into office by religious believers. Blaming them because someone broke the law they approve of is stupid. You might as well blame them for any other crime someone commits.

The fact is, very few religions teach that it is all right to refuse a child medical treatment. Those I’m familiar with would probably hold that what the parents are doing is sinful. They see it for the child neglect it is, the opposite of parental responsibilities and obligations.

How can people be responsible for acts that they disapprove of, have tried to prevent by making it a crime and who will largely be in favor of the prosecution of the parents? If you can make sense of the accusation of the majority of religious believers for the acts of two parents, it must be through something other than the application of reason.

I once asked another blogger promoting the same kind of vicarious guilt why they didn’t focus on the far larger number of people who are denied treatment because they either can’t pay or don’t have medical insurance. Call it systemic medical negligence. In the United States, I’d imagine such people, including children, outnumber the victims of faith-based child neglect by, at least, many hundreds to one. You could also work in the fact that some of those people can get free treatment from religious charities and institutions. You might wish that these religious charities and institutions could provide more free treatment than they are able to now. That is, you could if focusing on people being denied available medical treatment was the real purpose of their posts. That is a question I have asked a number of times to a response of stony silence.

Since it was Jerry Coyne who is the example linked to, I think I’m entirely within my rights to ask him why he is encouraging attacks on Moslems. If he or those who he chooses to associate with, can accuse people who have no association with Daniel Hauser’s parents of encouraging them, I can ask him to account for himself.

Just below that post is one in which he brags of his inclusion on the board of , uh, .... what is being dubbed, “The Reason Project”. In joining onto the board and encouraging people to join, he proudly associates himself with Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, he actively promotes them and, so, one would be entirely within their rights to assume, what they have said.

I’ve gone into Harris’ encouragement of a nuclear first strike against Moslems and his statement that it might be justifiable to kill people for their ideas in the absence of acts generally held to be necessary to justify killing someone. His hostility to Moslems, and other religious believers is his entire shtick. Chris Hitchens’ rabid, far from rational, promotion of the war in Iraq, his general hatred of Moslems and his enthusiasm for the killing potential of cluster bombs is also general knowledge.

So, Jerry Coyne, why are you promoting these things? You want to explain yourself the next time someone suspected of being a Moslem here is attacked or murdered on the basis of their religion? Unlike religious people who have no connection to the Hausers and who vigorously disapprove of what they’ve done, you’re proudly touting your choice to associate yourself with Harris and Hitchens.

I also don’t understand what Ayaan Hirsi Ali thinks she’s going to accomplish in joining up with Harris and Hitchens on this board. How is she going to change the minds of people Sam Harris wants to target for a nuclear first strike? I’d imagine even anti-Islamic people, even atheists who live in the cities to be incinerated in his proposed nuclear bombing, might not be enthusiastic about her after this. I had thought that she wanted to improve the lives of women who are the victims of Islamic fundamentalism. I don’t see how any reasoning person could think this is the way to do that.

Update: As to discerning Coyne’s intention of posting on the story you might want to consider this post:

Child doomed by religious faith

With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion.

-Steven Weinberg


No conflict between science and religion, you say? Have a look at this article from the Minneapolist StarTribune. Thirteen-year old Daniel Hauser,....

....This is a life-or-death conflict between science, which can save the child, and religion, which is killing him. No conflict here? What would Francis Collins say?

(Thanks to P. Z. Myers at Pharyngula for calling this to my attention. He has a post on this incident.)

Just why he wants to bring Francis Collins into this I haven’t been able to figure out.

If you want to see what he think of the practice of assigning vicarious guilt, and this doesn’t convince you, his blog archive isn’t very big and it’s easy to find.

“Body of Woman Found” by Anthony McCarthy

Echidne once said here that she wanted to be able to walk down any street without fear of being attacked because she is a woman. That is an entirely reasonable desire, to not have your life restricted because you have to take into account the reign of terror that is so prevalent. But year after year you live with it and you know it would be dangerous not to. It generally goes unmentioned or is taken as if it was some natural phenomenon, like the weather. Don't go there, is advice given as casually as a reminder to wear a raincoat. "Or you might get killed" is so well understood, it's not said.

Some of Suzie’s recent posts made me stop being distracted from the issue of the terror campaign against women. They have stuck in my mind and have been making me brood over an unpaid obligation.

In the aftermath of the murders of the Amish school girls, in October 2006, noticing how that horrible crime was covered by the press, the real nature of the murders of women due to their gender became obvious to me. Women are the target of a lynching campaign just as black Americans and others were in the 19th and 20th centuries. A woman is lynched somewhere in the United States almost every singe day, it’s been going on for decades.

The results are not only the deaths of a horrific number of women and girls just about every single day, it is in the terror women live under and the depressing, damaging effects of the intended demoralization. A boyfriend or husband who murders a woman doesn’t’ only target her, the clear message is that men have the right to use women as objects and to dispose of them if they want to. A man who murders a woman due to her gender believes he is within his rights to do so. The society we live in has instilled that belief through constant and pervasive, generally subtextual though sometimes explicit lessons. The movies and TV are full of them, there to be seen any time you watch.

Here are two pieces recovered from the blog I tried to start the week after the school girls were murdered, I will explain that doomed effort in a footnote.

MURDER

Every day four women die in this country as a result of domestic violence, the euphemism for murders and assaults by husbands and boyfriends. That's approximately 1,400 women a year, according to the FBI. . The number of women who have been murdered by their intimate partners is greater than the number of soldiers killed in the Vietnam War.


Don't Say Tragedy, Call Selfish, Cowardly Hate Crimes What They Are

The news readers keep saying that the murders of Naomi Rose Eversole, Marian Fisher, Lina Miller, Mary Liz Miller, and Anna Mae Stoltzfus, and the attempted murder of other, still endangered girls is a tragedy. It isn't a tragedy. Tragedies are not planned in detail, they are not planned with everything including toilet paper for the comfort of the murderer taken into an Amish school from which adults and males are released before the murderer begins to carry out his plans. This was a hate crime planned and committed by a man who felt he was entitled to murder little girls he didn't know. He felt that his gender entitled him to terrorize, humiliate and murder them.

This wasn't a tragedy, this wasn't a story set into motion for the entertainment or revenge of the gods, this was one man who believed his being born with a penis gave him the power of life and death over these girls. Maybe over all girls. He could have chosen any girls to murder. This man choosing to murder girls from what he would certainly have known was a pacifist sect is everything anyone needs to know about his sense of entitlement and his cowardice. His name and identity are useless except as a study in that particular type of cowardly, selfish man. After what there is to know about him has been collected and studied he deserves to be erased from the collective memory of the world.

Lynchings are not tragedies, they are crimes, sordid murders by self-centered cowards who believe that their gender, race, religion, ethnicity or class entitles them to murder other people. Knowing the murderers for what they are is all anyone needs to know about them. Using that knowledge of their taste in entertainment, their hobbies, their upbringing and their other pathologies in order to avoid producing more of these defective human beings is all that they are good for. None of this should be anything but a scientific study in pathology.

Dwelling on the names and lives of these cowards risks turning them into something they aren't. While studying their psychological flaws the fact that they were selfish and cowardly should never be forgotten. People with mental illness can sometimes be selfish slime too. Normal people might see them memorialized on TV as examples of evil, potential killers will see them as heros to be emulated or topped. Ignoring that possibility even as the programs talk about the "copy-cat" nature of a lot of these crimes is a crime in itself. It is the same crime the neighbors of Kitty Genovese committed when they ignored her as she was being murdered. It is cynical indifference. It is time to put an end to sensation murder used as profit driven entertainment and entertainment posing as news. It is part of the problem in the age of TV and video.

Call these crimes what they are. Don't memorialize the criminals. Don't instruct their admirers and fellow degenerates.

* Note:

The blog died in the difficult and confusing change from the old blogger to the new one that happened just after I began it. My old blog started acting up at the same time and eventually died, largely due to my technical incompetence. I still have no idea why that happened.

I think it’s a good idea to put these lynchings in the face of society on a continual basis and to call the crimes what they are. I’m not so sure that one person trying to maintain a blog dedicated to that purpose will do the job. I think every blog should document the extent of the terror campaign through posts or in the comment threads. That is a task that everyone should be involved in. Just as in the piece about the suppression of sexism on the blogs, we’ve all got to do it.

To the person who asks why I’m bringing this up now? The headline in a newspaper wrapping something I ordered through the mail says that police suspect that a woman. was murdered by her husband. She isn’t named, it just says “ the body of a woman was found”.

What constitutes domestic work and exploitation (by Suzie)

          Recently, I was trying to explain to T and P, two Fulbright scholars from Asia, why white feminists have been excoriated for hiring women of color to do domestic work.
          T studies feminism and postcolonialism. I don’t know P as well but she seems to support feminist ideas. Neither is rich in her home country, but both hire people to do domestic chores, a common practice in many developing nations.
          In “Feminist Anthropology,” Ellen Lewin cites critics of middle-class American women who act like they’re being charitable when they hire someone to do domestic work and don't treat it like a regular job, with structured job descriptions and proper pay.
          But U.S. women didn't invent that approach; I have no idea how far back it goes. Both T and P consider hiring the less fortunate to do domestic work as a charitable act, in part. They say they treat employees as family members, to some extent, such as paying for the schooling of children.

          I can understand people who want domestic labor to be treated more professionally, but I don’t think people who treat it less formally are necessarily less feminist. I’ve got two white American friends who are doing cleaning to make ends meet, but they aren’t bonded or licensed, and they can make more money with more flexible hours than if they go to work for an agency. 
          The people whom T and P hire often face barriers to other employment, perhaps because of their gender, ethnicity or religion. They may be looked down upon as country people. They may lack formal schooling.
          T and P oppose oppression, but they benefit from the existence of people who will work hard for little money. To a much greater degree, this holds true in richer countries like the U.S.
          For another aspect, here's what Anna Carastathis wrote on the Canadian site Kick Action about the feminism of 1960s and '70s:

Privileged white feminists fought for increased access to professional jobs that were male dominated, ignoring the fact that women of colour, immigrant women, and working class white women were being overworked, often in places far away from their families, just to survive and support their children -- sometimes in white feminists’ homes, cleaning their floors and caring for their children.

For privileged white feminists, the problem became the “double shift”: working during the day in a professional job, and coming home in the evening only to work more, caring for their husbands and children.

To lessen this workload, instead of demanding that their husbands pull their weight, or that the state provide an adequate accessible childcare, domestic work became offloaded to women of colour.

          In the U.S., feminists of different races worked hard to try to make childcare available, and they have tried to get husbands to do more household duties. Many white feminists have been involved in antiracist work. And some women of color, immigrant women (like my aunts) and poor white women (like me) benefited from professions hiring more women. I’ve written at greater length on this before.
           Few of us are self-sufficient. Many depend on other people to grow, harvest, process, cook, package, transport, etc., at least some of our food. The same goes for clothing and household items. This work used to be done at home; it was once domestic work. Now many of us – including “women of colour, immigrant women, and working class white women” - “offload” this work on others who may have left their families behind to get jobs, and who make less money than we do under worse conditions – including in countries where T and P come from.
            The woman who buys a new top at Target without wondering about the people who grew the cotton, picked it, processed it, sewed it and shipped it … the woman who doesn’t wonder how these employees were treated by their supervisors or how much they got paid … is she worse than the woman who pays her nanny too little? 

            Elle, Ph.D., says white feminists have had a hard time accepting that they “have and do benefit from the relegation of women of color to low-wage, low-status ‘reproductive’ work.”
            I would expand that concept to many people, regardless of color. It's so easy to forget those who live far away and whose names we do not know.

           ETA: Just to be clear, I'm not trying to criticize T&P, who do much good work. I'm criticizing those who would criticize them. 

Friday flower blogging (by Suzie)

I needed something bright because, where I live, we may have to build an ark. 

Count Your Blessings!

One of them is surely that Rick Santorum is not in power right now:





From Think Progress:

Part of that "patrimony" that has "worked for 200 years" — besides limited franchise — is apparently the subjugation of women. Santorum has declared that birth control is "harmful to women" and "harmful to society." And in his book, "It Takes A Family," he railed against "radical feminists" who "succeeded in undermining the traditional family and convincing women that professional accomplishments are the key to happiness."

Dippity-doo!

Dancing At The Edge Of The Abyss

That's how writing is at its best. What more could I ever ask, what other delight could ever compare to that incredible rush, that inner wind touching everything, blowing everywhere, demanding everything? There are no words to describe that high. The paradox of words needing words, of the silence that is full of words.

Then imagine trying to do that with a faulty vocabulary, in an alien tongue, like holding small sharp objects in numb paws. Then the anguish and the failing and the hunger, the inability to be the dance, the faltering steps. Then the abyss.

But the dance is worth it.
-------
1Watt, Hermit took the picture of the Luna moth. The moth that dances the drunken dance of the night.

On Cheney

Remember him? The power behind the throne for the last eight years, the Darth Vader of American politics? The man many believe was behind all those policies which led to the current situation?

Yeah, that Dick Cheney. He has broken many patterns in his life: refusing to have anyone know what the Vice President's job might be, hiding out of sight for most of his time in that job, getting incredibly low approval percentages from the American people and so on. I always thought that he had a mental thing about Iraq, because even in the after-shock of 911 he refused to focus on anything but Iraq. IraqIraqIraq, get the bastards now! That's how I imagine his dreams went.

Anyway, he is breaking yet another pattern of Vice Presidents: He keeps on criticizing the new administration. Which of course means that he keeps on reminding us about the previous administration. This is not something the Republicans want to happen, of course, because the vast majority of Americans really hated the Bush administration by the end of those long eight years.

Cheney has given a tandem speech with Obama. By that I mean that he gave a speech on the same day as Obama, each directing at least some of the messages to the other speaker. But of course Obama is the president of the United States and Cheney is not. What he is I don't quite know, to be honest. Perhaps he really was the power behind the throne? Who knows.

In any case, now he is the PR officer of the Bush presidency (and of course his own vice-presidency):

In his speech, Cheney repeatedly invoked the horrors of Sept. 11 and made the case that "tough interrogations" and other policies of the Bush administration helped save American lives.

"They were legal, essential, justified, successful and the right thing to do," Cheney said of the interrogation techniques. "They prevented the violent death of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people."

In an apparent reference to the Obama administration, Cheney also charged that "people who consistently distort the truth" about the interrogations "are in no position to lecture anyone about 'values.' "

He warned: "To completely rule out enhanced interrogation methods in the future is unwise in the extreme. It is recklessness cloaked in righteousness, and would make the American people less safe."

On the issue of bringing Guantanamo detainees to stand trial on U.S. soil, he said, "You don't want to call them enemy combatants? Fine. Call them what you want -- just don't bring them into the United States."

He asserted, "For all the partisan anger that still lingers, our administration will stand up well in history -- not despite our actions after 9/11, but because of them."

Because of them? I wish he had given some examples. How did they catch the anthrax poisoner(s)? How was Osama bin Laden finally caught? Why on earth did the administration decide to invade Iraq which had nothing to do with 911? Who was on duty when 911 happened? Was the torture really used to try to find an Iraq connection to Al Qaeida, to justify that hasty move from Afghanistan to Iraq?

Sigh. Then there were the costs of all that warfare, the blind eye of the FDA not focused on Chinese medications, pet food and food products, the jobs being globalized overseas, the increasing income inequality in this country, the total lack of bipartisanship, the fundamentalization of several departments of the government and the politicization of all of them. That's what Cheney proudly flaunts.

Welcome To Teh Silly

The Republican Party had this fantastic idea to rename the Democratic Party:

Republicans on Wednesday abandoned an effort to label their opponents the "Democrat Socialist Party," ending a fight within the GOP ranks that reflected the divide between those who want a more centrist message and those seeking a more aggressive, conservative voice.

Supporters of the resolution asking the Democratic Party to change its name instead agreed to accept language urging Democrats to "stop pushing our country towards socialism and government control."

It is the apex of silliness, of course, and was only pursued by the extreme edge of the wingnuttery. But did you notice something weird about how this has been discussed in the media? Let me help you by reminding you of the treatment of the rabid left and its inexplicable hatred a year ago or so. Even the New York Times did a piece or two of the deranged bloggers of the left.

And then this silliness! Treated with kid gloves and neutrality.

At least we are reminded about the power of naming and who appears to have the right to do that.

Yard Salad

That's what I had for dinner tonight: Young dandelion leaves and chives from my chive plant. Now if I only figured out how to grow cheese I'd be all set for the coming apocalypse (or one of the ones which are always coming).

I should add that I also had chocolate, though not in the salad.

Added later: This post is a good example why I don't tweet much. My life is full of fascinating adventures such as this one.

Separate But Equal?

Ann Friedman has written an interesting article about the new political/social/cultural websites intended largely for women: Jezebel, Double X, and so on. Here's a spoonful from Ann to get you salivating:

Earlier this week, Slate launched Double X, an online magazine "founded by women but not just for women," which bears an eerie resemblance to the women's pages of yore. It is the latest in a series of women-focused online magazines to split off from general-interest news and politics sites. Gawker Media has Jezebel -- a blog founded as an explicit rebuttal to glossy women's magazines that both counters and falls into many of the same traps. Yahoo's Shine and AOL's Lemondrop focus on the traditional women's mag topics of fashion, sex, and celebrities.

Double X began as The XX Factor, a blog written by Slate's female contributors. Several other news and politics sites have created separate blogs for women's issues -- such as Broadsheet at Salon and Woman Up at AOL's Politics Daily -- which have yet to be relaunched as separate sites. And I'm sure there are many more gendered niche sites in our future, as Internet advertisers and publishers alike seek to target specific groups of readers. (Slate publisher John Alderman told Advertising Age in January, "We are doing what hasn't been done, which is focusing on the top of the women's market.")

The proliferation of woman-centric sites raises the sorts of questions that keep a feminist editor up at night. If Slate saw a demand for more content about women, why didn't it start publishing more articles for and by women on its main site? The decision to devote micro-sites to groups that aren't white men -- The Root for black readers, Double X for women readers -- implies that Slate recognizes the need for more coverage that caters to women and people of color. But it doesn't want that coverage mucking up its main product.

The big question naturally is whether this development is good for women or not. The answer depends on what the alternative might be (women equally represented everywhere, no woman-focused news anywhere etc.), and what the ultimate objective of these sites might be (to give women a place for news only they are interested in? to make men read those same news? to give more power to women-focused news?)

The ultimate question is naturally why women can't be mainstreamed.

I feel funny even writing that last sentence, given that this is a feminist blog or a quasi-feminist blog or a feminazi blog or whatever, but never a general political blog, never! To write one of those I need to pretend that women don't matter except when it comes to abortion.

Let's calm down and stop clutching our pearls as the big boys say. Let's think about the academia and how it solved that pesky problem of the 'proper place' of women's studies. In most places they were ghettoized, for both good and bad reasons. Whether this slowed down the insertion of women into various mainstream courses is unclear to me, but I do think that it's much easier to get rid of Women's Studies departments than women in all the various curricula.

On the other hand, if we didn't have those separate departments perhaps we'd have no women in most of the curricula? Who knows. Perhaps this isn't even pertinent when thinking about the journalistic problems or benefits of 'separate but equal'.

Hahahahaaaaa!

Watch these videos of Glenn Beck on the View:








Courtesy of Media Matters via Atrios.

Note Whoopi's body language in the second video.

More Good News

Senator Ted Kennedy's cancer is in remission and he will return to work full time. That's good news.

Also, Anna Chatten is believed to be the first woman to work in the pits for Indy 500 (link courtesy of jh). I love First Woman stories, but of course I love it even better when there's no longer a need for them. I'd also love First Man stories, though of course we get them in the sense of human=man. It's the other kinds I'd love to hear about.

Finally, here's a climbing cat. This cat is a good metaphor for the way some of those Firsts must climb up smooth walls. We should take more notice.

I added the cat for crowd appeal. mmm.

Teach Your Children Well

This odd bit of news links to something I've been discussing with a few people recently:

A man who tried to hire a prostitute to take his 14-year-old son's virginity as a present was spared jail by a court on Friday.

The Polish national took the boy out in his car and allowed him to pick out the prostitute, who was standing at the side of the road in the red-light district of Nottingham.

But the 42-year-old father was arrested because the teenager had chosen an undercover police officer, Nottingham Crown Court heard.

The man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was handed a 10-month prison sentence, suspended for a year, after he admitted a charge of trying to solicit a woman to have sex with a child, the Press Association reported.

The court heard that the father, who came to Britain eight years ago, was arrested last July during an undercover operation by the city's vice squad.

Prosecutor Adrian Harris said the man and his son had approached the undercover officer whose code name was Sarah and beckoned her over .

He asked "Sarah" how much it would cost for her to have sex with his son and they agreed on a 20 pound fee. However, when the car pulled over, the man was arrested by plainclothes police officers.

"The boy said that they had driven past the girl and his dad pointed to her and said 'will she do?'" Harris said.

"He said 'yes' and they had turned round. He said his dad did this because he was still a virgin and he was taking care of that for him."

Judge Jonathan Teare said he would spare the father jail because of his excellent character and that he believed he did not mean any harm to his son.

There's so much in this short quote to chew on! The father is spared jail because he didn't mean any harm to his son. But the prostitute he picked for his son could have been a fourteen-year old girl, you know. Or a woman who was a victim of sexual trafficking.

Then consider the juxtaposition of this custom of teaching your young sons how to have sex (not completely rare, based on my reading) with the traditional insistence of virginity for teenage girls. There's an adding-up problem in that juxtaposition, and its solution is to introduce the market for paid sex. But then not all women can remain chaste and pure! Rats!

So we get this double standard of sexuality for women: Good girls don't do it, except with their husbands. Bad girls take care of the rest of the needs for sexual release. And the latter must be stigmatized, because otherwise the good girls might prefer to be bad girls themselves! Sexual control of women is more complicated than some simple form of mate-guarding, say.

All that is of course mostly in the past in this country, but those old ideas whisper through our culture and our pretenses, and they often nudge our understanding the way they nudged the judge's comments in the above quote.

Two Wrongs Make A Right? Or One Woman On The Bench.

The Supreme Court has a majority of conservatives and catholics on the bench. What does that mean for women's rights? Guess.

You don't even have to guess, because we are getting enough evidence to tell. The Ledbetter wage discrimination case was one of those and the current "old maternity leave discrimination justifies current pensions discrimination" is another one:

In 1978, Congress passed the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, which required companies to offer pregnancy leave on equal terms with disability leave policies for men.

Prior to the new law, many employers forced women to take unpaid personal time off for pregnancy and birth. AT&T was among them.

Upon passage of the new law, AT&T changed its policy to provide paid-leave benefits to expectant employees.

At issue in AT&T v. Hulteen was whether the company could continue to rely on service records from the 1960s and 1970s that exclude credit for pregnancy time off to calculate pension benefits 30 or 40 years later as those female employees approach retirement.

Lawyers for the women argued that failing to credit the prior unpaid pregnancy leave in determining pension benefits would amount to a new and current form of gender discrimination in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and the Pregnancy Discrimination Act.

"Impermissible retroactive effect"

Three former employees, Noreen Hulteen, Eleanora Collet, Elizabeth Snyder, and a current worker at AT&T, Linda Porter, first filed a discrimination charge with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The women's union, Communication Workers of America, also joined the suit.

The EEOC found reasonable cause to believe that AT&T engaged in gender discrimination against the four women and other similarly situated female employees by refusing to grant full-service credit for pregnancy leaves taken before the 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Act. The agency permitted the four women to file a federal lawsuit.

In the subsequent lawsuit, a federal judge ruled that the women were victims of gender discrimination. An appeals court panel reversed. That decision was reversed by the full Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals, which agreed with the trial judge that AT&T had engaged in a current violation of the antidiscrimination law.

In appealing to the US Supreme Court, AT&T said its policy denying paid leave for childbirth was not an illegal form of gender discrimination in the 1960s and 1970s. The company said it was entitled to calculate pension benefits without having to retroactively apply the provisions of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act to what had been a legal policy followed in prior years.

In reversing the Ninth Circuit, the Supreme Court ruled that the appeals court had given impermissible retroactive effect to the PDA.

"Although adopting a service credit rule unfavorable to those out on pregnancy leave would violate Title VII today, a seniority system does not necessarily violate the statute when it gives current effect to such rules that operated before the PDA," Justice David Souter wrote in the majority opinion.

This is not a clear-cut case, but then few cases coming up for Supreme Court review could be called that. I can see the argument of the seven-member majority. But look at that last paragraph in the quote a little bit more carefully. What Souter is saying that it's OK to discriminate against women now if the current discrimination is based on something which took place before that particular discrimination was deemed against the law. A sort of grandfathering clause of discrimination!

In any case, what we have is a Republican Supreme Court, and it will be here for a generation or more. (Try the veal!) Roberts is a good example of what to expect:

In every major case since he became the nation's seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party.

Mmm.

This case also highlights the problem with having eight guys lounge about on the bench. None of them took pregnancy leave in the 1960s or 1970s, you know.

Honey, Would You Kill That Crocodile For Me?

Remember the Promise Keepers? They are probably still around, teaching men how to be the high priests of their families (which includes subjugating the wife).

When I first read about their principles I came across a defense of the female subjugation they demand. It went like this: "Is it so much to ask women to subject themselves to men's leadership? Consider that these men are willing to give up their lives for their families if asked! Compared to that, what's a little oppression?"

That's a paraphrase, with some of me thrown in, but what was said is true. The spokesman for Promise Keepers argued that men as the high priests of their families WOULD give their lives in their defense IF it was ever asked, and that is every bit as much as women voluntarily enslaving themselves for the rest of their married lives.

It's very funny. I remember immediately thinking that the women should offer to die in their places if only the men would take over that slave part.

It's not very often people are asked to bravely die in the defense of their families. Indeed it's almost as rare as the opportunity life gives us to wrestle bears and crocodiles. Yet those skills are what makes a man! Pam at Pandagon links to the blurb of a new book on masculinity:

Dear Fellow Conservative:

Today's weak and pusillanimous Nanny State is anything but hospitable to true manhood.

And that's why we need real men more than ever.Ultimate Man's Survival Guide

But our society today offers no clear rite of passage for young men. Instead, every male must learn how to be a man as best he can—after all, such knowledge isn't written in our genetic codes.

That's why Frank Miniter's The Ultimate Man's Survival Guide is a Godsend! It gives young men what they need to become not effete "metrosexuals" skilled at the ins and outs of high fashion and cocktail chat, but well-rounded men who can fight off bears and alligators, create a tourniquet out of a t-shirt, set a dislocated joint, rescue a drowning person—and pick the perfect cigar and bottle of wine.

I'm eagerly awaiting the hordes of conservative men walking around Manhattan puffing on the perfect cigar and carrying a baseball bat in readiness for the alligators and bears. What fun!

But note that first sentence in the quote. You can't make misogynism much more obvious without saying it out loud, and that's why I still wonder about women who choose to spend time in the conservative political circles.

The Wall Street Journal had a related book review last weekend. It's all about the emasculation of fathers:

In the most affluent parts of the Western world, a historic transference of power has taken place that is greater than anything achieved by the trade-union movement, the women's movement or the civil-rights movement -- and it hasn't even been extended the courtesy of being called a movement. Fathers, who enjoyed absolute authority within the household for several millennia, now find themselves at the beck and call of their wives and children. Indeed, most of my male friends are not fathers in any traditional sense at all; they occupy roughly the same status in their households as the help. They don't guide their children through the moral quandaries of life -- they guide them to their extracurricular activities from behind the wheel of a Dodge minivan

....


"Home Game," Mr. Lewis's account of becoming a father to his three children, begins promisingly. "At some point in the last few decades, the American male sat down at the negotiating table with the American female and -- let us be frank -- got fleeced," he writes.

The poor sucker agreed to take on responsibility for all sorts of menial tasks -- tasks that his own father was barely aware of -- and received nothing in return. If he was hoping for some gratitude, he was mistaken. According to Mr. Lewis: "Women may smile at a man pushing a baby stroller, but it is with the gentle condescension of a high officer of an army toward a village that surrendered without a fight."

Mmm. They probably forgot those crocodile wrestling skills. Poor, poor fathers! To fall from such a height (high priest of the family) to nothing more than...the level of women! How sad! How frightening.

I have written about these topics seriously and sensitively and with compassion towards men in the past. But this time I won't, because neither of the linked pieces shows any courtesy to women at all.

Onward, Christian Soldiers!

Did you know that the President's daily intelligence briefings about the Iraq war had covers with Bible verses? The "President" here naturally refers to George Bush. You can view a slide show of the covers here.

It's all very medieval, sigh.

Good News Monday

In Kuwait four women were elected to the 50-member parliament. That's eight percent! Not bad for the very first parliament which will include women. They have their work cut out for them, given the economic troubles of Kuwait, not to mention the Islamic bloc which appears to largely promote bills to make women's lives more difficult. Though perhaps the U.S. Congress isn't that much more advanced. Women are a minority and some representatives also push for bills which make women's lives more difficult. -- Nevertheless, this is very good news for Kuwait. After all, women only won the vote there in 2005.

And Lithuania elected a woman for its president. She has a black belt in karate. Hiyah! (As an aside, I recommend martial arts for all women. They teach many useful things, including how to yell "hiyah" from the belly while chopping someone's neck off.)

For The Person Who Wished For A Transcript by Anthony McCarthy

If you are tempted to suspect that I am privy to anyone’s inside knowledge, I had no idea Richard Lewontin would have a major essay-cum book-review in the upcoming New York Review of Books when I wrote that belated birthday piece about him last month. As with his lecture which was linked to in that post, that piece touches on many of the issues that have gotten me into trouble here. As some of you might know, though Lewontin is one of the least favorite materialist of many another materialists, he is one of the living scientists for whom I have the most respect and affection.

The essay-review is worth reading because of Lewontin’s observations of the social milieu in which Darwin and other figures in evolution developed and published their work, it’s a short course in refutation of the typical romantic view of Darwin that constitutes the total of what many of his most ardent admirers think they know about him. The number of those who respond with a blank stare when you mention other figures in evolution who preceded and whose discoveries rival Darwin’s in importance, is always surprising. .

This three item list of the major discoveries made by Charles Darwin, and Alfred R. Wallace is probably more useful than most of what gets printed about evolution this year.

Darwin-Wallace explanation of evolution, the theory of natural selection, is based on three principles:

1) Individuals in a population differ from each other in the form of particular characteristics (the principle of variation).

2) Offspring resemble their parents more than they resemble unrelated individuals (the principle of heritability).

3) The resources necessary for life and reproduction are limited. Individuals with different characteristics differ in their ability to acquire those resources and thus to survive and leave offspring in the next generations (the principle of natural selection).

Lewontin’s pointing out the fundamental difference between biological evolution by natural selection and the social Darwinism that is it’s more usual popular construction, often at the hands of some of the most fundamentalist of “Darwinians”, is another most salient point..

The parallel between the arguments for natural selection and nineteenth-century economic and social theory, however, misses an extremely important divergence between Darwin and political economy. The theory of competitive socioeconomic success is a theory about the rise of individuals and individual enterprises as a consequence of their superior fitness. But even though the Industrial Revolution resulted eventually, at least in some countries, in a general rise in material well-being, the number of immensely successful entrepreneurs is evidently limited precisely because their success depends on the existence of a large mass of less successful workers. No population can consist largely of people like Henry Clay Frick.

The theory of evolution by natural selection, in contrast, is meant to explain the adaptation and biological success of an entire species as a consequence of the disappearance of the less fit. Provided that a species does not become so numerous as to destroy the resources on which it depends, there is no structural reason why every individual of that species cannot be highly fit. If we seek a true originality in the understanding of Darwin and Wallace, it is to be found in their ability to adapt a theory meant to explain the success of a few to produce a theory of the success of the many, even though the many may be competing for resources in short supply. Whether they were conscious of this divergence of the theory of evolution by natural selection from the reigning economic and social theory is a question.

You could justifiably ask how many of the ultra-Darwinians who are ascendant now ARE conscious of this diversion, today, and to what extent Darwin himself was. Though I’ve already posted on that this year and am not in the mood for that eruption just now.

Lewontin asks another question which I think is important to the understanding of the Darwin brand name, which I think is more harmful than helpful for the real science of evolution today.

How are we to explain the extraordinary activity surrounding the 150th anniversary of the appearance of On the Origin of Species ? It seems unlikely that an enthusiasm of equal magnitude will greet the 150th anniversary, seven years from now, of Mendel's paper, if we can judge by the moderate celebrations of its one hundredth in 1966. Yet genetics in its present molecular stage pervades the public consciousness as more and more genes are discovered that may be relevant to health and longevity.

I think there are a number of reasons that Gregor Mendel, whose work, as is pointed out in the essay, saved the Darwin-Wallace model of evolution, won’t be celebrated on his anniversary with even a small fraction of the hoopla surrounding the Darwin bicentennial.

First is that he wasn’t the subject of a devoted and ideologically driven campaign of promotion in his day. Wallace wasn’t either which is why his name is far lesser known today. Some of that is the place that Darwin holds in British nationalism, he’s a national hero and not the persecuted figure of some popular PR. Which brings in the difference in social class to the mix. Read the quotation from Ricard Owen, a contemporary rival to see that there were those who noted his social position and the part it played to Darwin’s advantage. It’s impressive how much today’s over-the-top ultra-Darwinism is done by Brits and their admirers here.

Second, there is Mendel’s position as an Augustine monk. Unlike Occam whose life as a member of the strictest faction of Franciscans is almost entirely ignored by those who invoke his name, ceaselessly and with wildly variant accuracy - you can’t pretend that Mendel wasn’t a “faith head”. That would render him an embarrassment to many of today’s more ardent Darwinists.

Third, related to the last point, pea plants don’t have the ability to excite the invention and imagination of those “red in tooth and claw” competitive scenarios that seem to be, alas, totally replacing the observation of the real in the popular evolutionary mind. His life, his discoveries from the patient work of pea cultivation and measurement doesn’t have the same theatrical appeal as the Voyage of the Beagle.

Anyway, please read the entire review. It’s a great refresher in this important part of contemporary culture and, in refutation to one of my recent opponents has claimed, that Lewontin definitely and demonstrably hasn’t “lost it”.

Remember This When The Pundits Say The Country Can’t Afford The People by Anthony McCarthy

You can count on hearing it in some form every time you turn on the TV or radio, The People are just a frill whose welfare is an unfordable luxury in these hard times. Some things don’t seem to change, we’re too expensive in good and bad times and the times in between. Right now it’s health care, you turn on Washington Week in Review or any of the other insider blather sessions and that’s the almost universal conclusion. Not one they reach, the one they start out with.

Well, as anyone who has any capacity to think should be able to figure out, The People of the United States get very expensive health care, the most expensive in the world. It’s excellent, if you can afford it, if you can’t you don’t get it. A large percentage of that expense is because The People have been duped into letting a massive, expensive and corrupt insurance industry insert itself between them and the medical industry. That industry, like all others in this country, then uses its enormous financial resources to buy political influence to corrupt the congress, the administration and, one could strongly suspect, the judiciary, into allowing them to steal even more money from us. If you doubt they have the media in their pocket take note of who buys the time during just about any “news” show on TV. And as always with a corrupt elite, elegant insider DC media has never smelled a big heap of money they didn’t want to cosy up to and whisper nice things about.

Other countries with elected governments have cut out the insurance industry and the government, under much more direct control of The People there has filled that position in health care, in just about every case, it would be political suicide for politicians in most of those countries to come out and propose an American style medical industry. Those guys don’t seem to get to form governments. If you know of a case where that isn’t true, I’d be very surprised to hear it. Though some of them, no doubt would like to sell their People down the river, they can’t come out and say it.

Here it’s different, Ronald Reagan got his big start in politics by helping instill a paranoid fear of “socialized medicine”. Harry and Louise are just two of his bastard kids. You could point out that he was a paid pimp for the insurance-medical brothel, but you’re not supposed to tell the truth about St. Ronald. One thing that is often said is that he ruined the Soviet Union into collapse through an arms race, forcing the Soviet government to spend itself into destroying itself. That’s a line that is often heard, though there are some muted rebuttals to the official version. Interestingly, it appears to make sense to some of the opponents of the present Russian government who are worried that recent history is repeating itself. Russia’s Military Budget Sucks the Nation’s Lifeblood

The argument here isn’t in whether or not this piece of Ronald Reagan hagiography is accurate, it’s in what it shows us about the American establishment. The same media, especially the DC based talking shop you’ll hear all over TV this morning - between pharma commercials - accepts as revealed knowledge both that Reagan forced the Soviet Union into collapse through military spending and that it’s too expensive for The People of the United States to have access to universal health insurance. There just isn’t any money to pay for it. There’s a pretty big hole their story, the United States defense budget, the largest one in the world, by many times is never spoken of as driving us to collapse. Our military expenditures are never seriously consider as being too big, to expensive, unfordable. Apparently the United States military budget through some magic, doesn’t drag down the American economy, and considering how much of a cut the media gets from the military industry, you can see why they might not have noticed*.

Barney Frank, in a little noticed comment in The Nation made this unusually simple observation

When I am challenged by people--not all of them conservative--who tell me that they agree, for example, that we should enact comprehensive universal healthcare but wonder how to pay for it, my answer is that I do not know immediately where to get the funding but I know whom I should ask.

I was in Congress on September 10, 2001, and I know there was no money in the budget at that time for a war in Iraq.

So my answer is that I will go to the people who found the money for that war and ask them if they could find some for healthcare.

Notice the passage I've set off in larger type. Remember that when you hear the media recite from their lessons, "Where is the money for health care going to come from".

In the same piece he said:

The math is compelling: if we do not make reductions approximating 25 percent of the military budget starting fairly soon, it will be impossible to continue to fund an adequate level of domestic activity even with a repeal of Bush's tax cuts for the very wealthy.

In other words, American military spending is ruining us.

The congress found the money to pay kill people in Iraq, a war the corporate media helped to whip up. Many of the same people who you will hear on TV today, many of the same media organizations who were falling all over themselves to lie us into invading Iraq are the same ones who are saying that the country can’t afford for its People go see a doctor in time to avoid an even more expensive health emergency or in time to save their lives.

What the country can’t afford is a lying, privileged, elite media that dupes us into living like corporate serfs who they can be sold and disposed of when we’ve had everything stolen and can’t produce any more profit for them.

* When faced with this kind of argument the media will immediately shift from talking about dollars to talking about percentage of GDP. Changing the units of measure, depending on the propaganda point being promoted, is a practice I first noticed coming from conservative think tanks during the Reagan administration. It’s become pervasive through out the media.

Majority Now Pro-Life!!!!

That would be the majority of Americans, 51%, according to a recent Gallup poll. I'm sure you have heard about this already:

The Gallup Poll reported Thursday that 51 percent of Americans now call themselves pro-life rather than pro-choice on the issue of abortion, the first time a majority gave that answer in the 15 years that Gallup has asked the question.

The findings, obtained in an annual survey on values and beliefs conducted May 7-10, marked a significant shift from a year ago. A year ago, 50 percent said they were pro-choice and 44 percent pro-life _ in the new poll, 42 percent said they were pro-choice.

The new survey showed that Americans remained deeply divided on the legality of abortion _ with 23 percent saying it should be illegal in all circumstances, 22 percent saying it should be legal under any circumstances, and 53 percent saying it should be legal only under certain circumstances.

The findings echoed a recent national survey by the Pew Research Center, which reported a sharp decline since last August in those saying abortion should be legal in all or most cases _ from 54 percent to 46 percent.

Polling Report collects polls about abortion. It shows that the latest polls (April and May) have been all over the place.

This most recent Gallup poll demonstrates a flip of the percentages in the pro-choice and pro-life categories from just a year ago. Such a big change would usually have something to do with recent news (and not necessarily part of a long-term trend), but it's hard to see what those news might have been.

A different hypothesis is also possible:

Gallup said its new poll showed an increase in the pro-life position across Christian religious affiliations, including an eight-point gain among Protestants and a seven-point gain among Catholics. It also reported a 10-point shift toward the pro-life category among Republicans but said there was no significant change among Democrats.

"It is possible that, through his abortion policies, Obama has pushed the public's understanding of what it means to be 'pro-choice' slightly to the left, politically," according to the Gallup analysis. "While Democrats may support that, as they generally support everything Obama is doing as president, it may be driving others in the opposite direction."

This could be the explanation, I guess. But let's take a step back and ask what it is exactly that these polls do. First they contact a certain number of people and ask them about their opinions (with questions that are sometimes not very well formulated). THEN they generalize the findings of that sample to all American adults or voters or whatever the group of interest might be.

How did the Gallup poll do that generalization? Did they standardize the various opinions using stated political affiliations? For instance, suppose that Republicans last year were 30%, Independents 30% and Democrats 40% of the electorate (just as an example). Then those might be the weights used to calculate the final 51% finding. I suspect that they did something like this, given that we are told the shift is caused by Republicans and Republican-leaning Independents and that Democrats have not changed their opinions.

Now, I've read that the Republican Party is shrinking towards its base. If this is true and if the poll uses old percentages for each political affiliation we could get these results even without any real change in the American public opinion. I'm not saying that this is what happened. Further research is necessary. But it's worth pointing out.
---
Addendum 1: Check out the results over time in this Gallup summary. What's very odd about it is where the changes in the most recent polls are: at the extreme tails.

Addendum 2: Gallup really should give more detailed information. I cannot find out if the sample is a simple random one, if they use post-stratification, what the exact percentages for Republicans, Democrats and Independents are, or anything else that would let me test my hypothesis that the results are driven by how the political groups are weighted.

Addendum 3: The most likely hypothesis seems to be a sampling error. The sample has "too many" Republicans and "too few" Democrats, as shown in this post.

Two old friends happen to meet on the street. by Anthony McCarthy

- Oh, hi. It’s been a while,
- Yeah, e-n-t-u-r-y.
- What?
- E-n-t-u-r-y.
- What’s that spell?
- Long time, no c.

They think they’re the height of adolescent sophistication, but I can still make them cringe.

Suggested Summer Reading by Anthony McCarthy

I wish I’d known about Susan Coyne’s beautiful little memoir of the summer she was five-years-old while my nieces were young enough to enjoy it. As it is, they’ll probably have to wait until they’re old enough for adolescent cynicism to dissipate enough for them to appreciate it. And that might take years.

Along with some fine description of the boreal forest of Canada, most of the book is about her friendship with old Mr. Moir who had a cottage next to the one where her family spent the summers. The form of their friendship was two-fold, in her frequent visits to help him in his garden or to do chores and in a series of letters he wrote to her as the fairy princess Nootsie Tah. He ingeniously covered his tracks and made the letters so convincing that even the mockery of her older siblings didn’t shake her belief in their authenticity. She was also lucky enough that her parents and nanny cooperated in the effort. Along the way, Mr. Moir sparked her interest in literature and the theater.

The conclusion of the story, including Nootsie Tah’s deciding to return to her home in Peru, having to end their correspondence, and a young girl growing out of that part of her life, might invoke the cliche “bitter sweet”. But in Coyne’s handling the sadness isn’t bitter at all. It is a lot like watching a child grow up and leaving behind their beloved stuffed toys. Coyne’s luck held in this case. Her parents had the foresight to keep the letters for her and Mr. Moir’s children were able to return what she’d left to the fairy princess.

My mother has been watching a family of five baby chipmunks who live with their mother under her raised garden bed, all week. They’ve been gradually making their way from the protection of the cement blocks that hold the bed, where they can take quick cover. Being what she is, my mother’s worried about them even as she says she knows their safety isn’t in her hands and as she knows some of them almost certainly won’t live to adulthood. And that’s what it’s like to care about children who are not your own. At the end of the book, Coyne’s mother is quoted, “ A ship is safe in harbour but that’s not what a ship is for”. And that’s what our lives are, a ship that should start out in safety but which is not meant to stay there. Like those chipmunks’, our lives are for something else. But the beginning is as much a part of the whole as any other part of it.

Susan Coyne might be most familiar as an actress, particularly in the role of Anna in the great Canadian TV series Slings and Arrows. People who bothered to read the credits would also know that she wrote large parts of the series and was one of the co-creators of the original idea for it. She’s also been engaged in translating Chekhov’s plays for the Soulpepper Theater in Toronto as well as in writing plays. The parts of the book written by her, Mr. Moir’s wonderful letters comprising a large portion of it, are beautifully written in a style that unusually matches great simplicity with emotional engagement. Something that is one of the hardest things to achieve. Having both watched the series and read this book, I am going to be looking for more of her work.

Kingfisher Days by Susan Coyne ISBN-10: 0887547303 ISBN-13: 978-0887547300

I believe the book was also published under the name In The Kingdom of the Fairies.

What is ‘women’s oncology’? (by Suzie)

          A. Is it the treatment of cancers that occur only in women? (Some people may not know that breast cancer can arise in men. Others might cite gynecologic cancers, not thinking of transmen.)
         B. Does “women’s oncology” refer to cancers that occur predominantly in women?
         C. Is it the study and treatment of any woman with cancer? 
         Answers matter in the allocation of resources.
         Last week, I went to a reception for the new Center for Women’s Oncology at a comprehensive cancer center where I get my care. The center combines the clinics for breast and gynecologic cancers.
         I wore a beautiful outfit in deep pink that I had just gotten from Goodwill. What was I thinking? I had worn the wrong gang colors. Because my cancer arose in my "lady parts," people told me that I should have worn teal, the color for ovarian cancer, which seems to have morphed into the color for all gyn cancers.
         The color for my cancer, leiomyosarcoma, is purple, but few people know that because we are the abject. (I’m sorta, kinda referencing Judith Butler.)
         There was live music, gourmet hors d’oeuvres from a catering staff, and an open bar. One doctor joked that patients might not mind the usual wait time if the waiting room could retain the bar.
         Survivors were given a white rose and a tote bag when we left. (In sarcoma, we don’t even get drugs approved for us; we’ve got to use other people’s drugs off-label.)
         At the women’s center, we won’t keep the bar, but there’s no doubt that women whose cancers arose in their reproductive tracts will get an upgrade in amenities by the merger with the breast clinic. Breast cancer patients tend to have the best.
         I understand that many women have worked hard to raise money for breast cancer. In a system that relies heavily on volunteers and donations, however, you can expect that people with rare diseases will get less.
         As an example: I was amazed to hear that some breast-cancer patients get teddy bears after surgery that they can hold to their chests when they cough, sneeze, etc., to minimize the pain. After major abdominal surgery, I was lucky that someone suggested holding a hospital pillow against my body.
        In the new center, plush bathrobes in a light sage, tied with a ribbon, rested on the exam tables. I asked if those were the gifts we could win in the drawing. No, I was told, patients would be wearing them. WHAT?? We don't have to wear stiff paper drapes or white-with-small-flowers-and-washed-a-zillion-times-in-hot-water gowns?
        Combining the breast and gyn clinics can save money in terms of staffing and space. People I trust also say there's a benefit to more doctors and researchers collaborating. (That's why I wish oncologists in gyn and sarcoma would collaborate more. They rarely go to each other’s conferences, for example.)

        There’s a genetic link between some breast and ovarian cancer. For the women with that genetic profile, it makes sense to join forces. But there are other cancers connected by genetics or treatment, e.g., retinoblastoma and soft-tissue sarcomas. I hope all oncologists and support staff understand the various connections.
        Breast cancer has been marketed as the sexy cancer – save the ta-tas!!!! ® – and as the women’s cancer. Not to be outdone, gyn oncologists have the Women’s Cancer Network. Meanwhile, lung cancer kills more women than breast or gyn cancers.

         I wonder how women with other kinds of cancer feel.

Friday critter blogging (by Suzie)

These are sea lions, shot by my friend Mary when we went to San Francisco in 2004. Some of you Northerners are ready to bask in the sun, I'm sure. Meanwhile, the rainy season has started where I live. 

The Prehistoric Man And Other He-Stories

The prehistoric man was a pretty good seamstress.


Addendum:
I should flesh out this post a little. It has to do with the use of "man" to refer to both human beings and to biological males. "Man embraces the woman", goes the old saying about why everybody knows that "man" means both men and women and that "he" stands for both sexes. Except when it does not. This particular article tells us:

"The mission also found caves used by prehistoric man," he said.

"The most important item is an awl made of animal bone and granite, which shows that prehistoric man devised many ways to sew leather," Khaled Saad, who headed the mission, was quoted as saying.

When Saad says "prehistoric man devised many ways to sew leather," do you visualize a hairy cave-woman inventing those ways or not?

A commenter and reader of this blog, kg, notes that Sam Harris does something very odd in his book The End Of Faith in this regard. First he applies the generic "he" in the book to refer to human beings. But then, on page 60, he writes this:

Imagine that you are having dinner in a restaurant with several old friends. You leave the table briefly to use the restroom, and upon your return you hear one of your friends whisper, "Just be quiet. He can't know about any of this."

What are you to make of this statement? Everything turns on whether you believe that you are the "he" in question. If you are a woman, and therefore excluded by this choice of pronoun, you would probably feel nothing but curiosity.

On re-reading Harris I noticed that on the very next page (61) to the above example Harris writes:

Of course, even the change of a single word can mean the difference between complaisance and death-defying feats: if your child comes to you in the middle of the night saying, "Daddy, there's an elephant in the hall," you might escort him back to bed toting an imaginary gun; if he had said, "Daddy, there's a man in the hall,: you would probably be inclined to carry a real one.

Note the mental agility that female readers of this book must possess: First you are allowed to notice that the pronoun "he" might not refer to you. But then only a page later you are expected to assume that your child is a boy and that you are a daddy.

The Pink Memory Hole

Orwell's dystopic book 1984 had a memory hole in each office. Changed opinions were sent down it, never to be remembered again. That he put one of those into his book is because the public memory indeed seems to have a built-in memory hole, one which distorts events of the past, sometimes before our own internal memories have had time to falsify them to match.

Recent headlines concerning what Nancy Pelosi knew about torture smell to me a little bit like memory holes. It's not the question of Pelosi's knowledge that has gone down the memory hole, of course, but the central point that torture was something the Bush administration decided to allow and that it was the Bush administration which was in power a few months ago. Pelosi should tell us what she knew and why she acted or didn't act. But focusing on her is akin to focusing on the morals of an eyewitness to a murder while ignoring the murderer.

This process of forgetting is incredibly quick and probably almost totally unintentional. Which makes it most interesting to ask what bits of the history of feminism go down the memory hole. Some of that disappearing must also be unintentional. Some is perfectly intentional. People want to rewrite history all the time, and winners always get the upper hand in that.

I remember reading a book a long time ago about the endeavors of a woman in the 1940s to record the feminism of the early 1900s. She had to climb into dusty attics in university libraries to retrieve the material she needed, and her days were soundless and solitary. To then open one of those books which discussed the suffragettes! The noise and the quarrels and the emotions and the intensity! The facts! And all slumbering in a dusty attic.

Something like that is taking place again. So much of feminist writing I read is ahistorical, based on apparently no knowledge of the arc of feminist history, reinventing the female wheel of life over and over. Are we losing anything by this approach?

I wonder. On the one hand life today is not the exact copy of life a hundred years ago, and the immediacy of our current concerns may be conveyed better with that approach. On the other hand, I tire of the waste that ahistoricity produces, tire of the need to have to go through the same material in a slightly different form, tire of the renewed search for solutions which have already been proposed.

Then there is the lateral memory hole. Information coming from countries outside the United States is very often never even entered into the process which could make it remembered. Aspects of gender relations which are specifically American are deemed universal and written up in that format. This is not something unique to American feminism: Almost all aspects of public debate here do that kind of forgetting. That this ultimately means less information is ignored.

Tremble Before Me!

So I was on the road most of the day today, including New York City rush-hour traffic and suddenly I do not love humans very much. Then I came home to only dial-up for fuck's sake. And the milk had gone sour and I still can't find the dead mouse in the wall. It is there, somewhere, or perhaps the fridge finally needs thorough cleaning. What do you think? Don't say anything.

Then I read some of the posts (I mistyped that first as boasts) on a new duh-feminism website (or so it seems to me right now), and came across a post about how very unnecessary the old-style-feminism has become:

The same woman at the Times who snagged me in the elevator that day had done the same thing on an earlier occasion, to ask about a semi-spurious trend story published in the paper that day. It described Yale students and recent graduates (I'm one) who were planning to "opt out" for a year or two or five when they spawned. She was aghast to hear that I didn't have strong feelings either way, and warned me against dropping out of the workforce. God help my shallow self, as I stood there looking at her rumpled suit and dated hair and frown lines, I was overwhelmed with pity. Perhaps watching me breeze into the life she had so laboriously carved out for herself—or worse, stray from the hard line in a way that she and other feminists couldn't allow themselves to—felt to her like a bitter betrayal.

But it felt great to me.

So it's all settled then? Glad to hear that, though perhaps feminism is a little bit more than about the personalities of individual women or the nastiness of two of them, don't you think? And ageism isn't that pretty, either. But whatever. Duh.

Now this is fun. I think that I'm going to start writing posts like that, too. It's easy, takes no research and I'm sure I can think of something outrageous. For instance, I used to bite my toe nails when I was a tiny goddess. Then I'd spit them out all over the living-room rug. There is no need for nail clippers in my world.

Speaking of my world, I received some mail for my bullying piece. May I gently point out to all the nasties out there that I'm not the same as 'all feminists', that what I say is not the dogma of the feminist movement (as you can see from the above quote, duh) and that, indeed, I have no official standing among the stern sturm-troops of professional enforcers of feminist discipline. I am me. Is that so hard to comprehend? And isn't that ultimately what the feminist movement is trying to hammer into the thick skulls of nasties everywhere? That women are every bit as much individuals as men and deserve to be treated as such?

Finally, I don't like to argue with very stupid people. It's a waste of time and I don't get paid for the teaching. If you want to debate feminism, first at least read about it.

Hate crimes & gender (by Suzie)

          The House has passed the Matthew Shepard Act, which “would expand the 1969 United States federal hate-crime law to include crimes motivated by a victim's actual or perceived gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability.” It awaits Senate approval.
          The attention over this bill has centered on hate crimes against gay or transgendered people. I’m thankful to LGBT groups for pushing its passage. But I’m concerned when these groups and others disappear male violence against women as women.
          Check out the information from the Human Rights Campaign. It doesn’t feel compelled to discuss violence against women, unless they are lesbian, bi or trans. It focuses on its particular issues. In contrast, a feminist organization like NOW could not limit itself to gender without being criticized.
         An NYT editorial endorsing the Matthew Shepard Act talks about protecting the rights of minority groups, but women aren’t a minority. The editorial says African-Americans suffer the most from hate crimes. Actually, women of all races suffer the most, but many states don’t include gender and thus, we aren’t counted.
          Even when people are on our side, even when they have done important work that will benefit us, we cannot allow them to define terms in ways that marginalize us.
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          I’ve written about this before.

Today's Silly Joke

Here it is:

A dyslexic walked into a bra.

I'm currently on the road and forgot to pack my muse, assuming that I could have found him. He's mostly carousing these days, getting new tattoos and trying to find someone else to be a muse to. Honest.

We should return to our regularly scheduled programming tomorrow.

The Bully Boys Gals

The New York Times tells us that women are horrible bullies towards other women:

YELLING, scheming and sabotaging: all are tell-tale signs that a bully is at work, laying traps for employees at every pass.

During this downturn, as stress levels rise, workplace researchers say, bullies are likely to sharpen their elbows and ratchet up their attacks.

It's probably no surprise that most of these bullies are men, as a survey by the Workplace Bullying Institute, an advocacy group, makes clear. But a good 40 percent of bullies are women. And at least the male bullies take an egalitarian approach, mowing down men and women pretty much in equal measure. The women appear to prefer their own kind, choosing other women as targets more than 70 percent of the time.

In the name of Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, what is going on here?

Just the mention of women treating other women badly on the job seemingly shakes the women's movement to its core. It is what Peggy Klaus, an executive coach in Berkeley, Calif., has called "the pink elephant" in the room. How can women break through the glass ceiling if they are ducking verbal blows from other women in cubicles, hallways and conference rooms?

How indeed!!! Note that the article isn't too bad in the middle, but returns to this lunacy in its conclusions:

"The time has come," she said, "for us to really deal with this relationship that women have to women, because it truly is preventing us from being as successful in the workplace as we want to be and should be.

"We've got enough obstacles; we don't need to pile on any more."

This piece sounds to me like yet another in that long series the Times has: What Is Wrong With Working Women? These stories always create or magnify a problem and then offer anecdotal evidence on how awful the problem is.

To get to that point, the present article quickly slides by the facts: Men are more often bullies than women and if you work a little on those percentages you will find that male-on-female (heh) bullying is a larger percentage than female-on-female bullying. But never mind, we shall write about the latter! Yes.

Then we are going to pretend that all working women know the names of Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem and we are also going to pretend that these feminists believed in some universal sisterhood, easily shared by all women in a society which is still based on patriarchy.

See how it works? Now we have a problem of evil women keeping other women down. To the extent this happens, might it have something to do with the musical chairs that many firms still play with women? If only a few promotion slots are available for women, and if women know this to be the case, well, they are going to compete against other women, right?

The conclusion of the article tells us that this is a problem women should fix, what with all the other problems women have to cope with (such as guys bullying them more). Those other problems or their solutions are not, however, written up in the New York Times. It's much safer to focus on what is wrong with women themselves.

Does that remind you of something? If female bullies mainly attack other women because women are seen as easier targets, could it be that the same motivation underlies articles like this one? Attacking the Big Boys With The Moneybags is scary, as those moneybags make excellent defensive weapons.
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A Post-Script: Women do bully, of course. It would be odd to assume that they don't. But an article like this one takes out one slice (female-on-female bullying) from the bully-pie and focuses on it while completely ignoring the majority of bullying relationships. Does that treatment provide extra clarity and better solutions? I very much doubt that.

Manna From Heaven?

That phrase occurred to me when reading this piece about a plan to trim two trillion dollars from the costs of U.S. health care, purely by voluntary cost cutting measures:

President Obama will announce today that the health care industry will try to cut $2 trillion in expenses over the next decade to slow the rising cost of medical care, two White House officials familiar with the plan said.

If successful, the cuts could help reduce costs for families and provide money for an expansion of health care coverage backed by Obama and some Democrats in Congress, said the officials, who briefed reporters but refused to be identified ahead of Obama's announcement.

"If these savings are truly achieved, this may be the most significant development on the path to health care reform," said Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, which advocates for expanded health care coverage. "It would cut health costs for families and businesses, and it would enable adequate subsidies to be offered so that everyone has access to quality affordable health care."

Six medical trade groups, including the American Medical Association and America's Health Insurance Plans, which represents health insurance companies, have agreed to the cost-cutting, which could save the average family of four $2,500 in 2015, according to the sources. Health care costs would continue to rise, just not as quickly.

Are you salivating for more? I was, because I'm wired that way. But, alas, we are never told what these miraculous cost-saving acts might be. That's something for the future, I guess.

Neither are we told why those extra costs weren't already cut. After all, the market competition conservatives so worship should have forced them to be cut. So what's going on? Hmm. Note that the six medical trade groups could also be called monopolies if one wanted to be rude.

In any case, it's highly unlikely that those cuts wouldn't have any effect on the quality of care or its accessibility, and then we'll have an argument over that, too.

If that sounds grumpy it's because I don't believe that manna will suddenly fall from the sky. Cost containment is necessary, but so is learning exactly how it's supposed to come about.

To Bite The Helping Hand?

General Motors contemplates just that:

The U.S. government is pouring billions into General Motors in hopes of reviving the domestic economy, but when the automaker completes its restructuring plan, many of the company's new jobs will be filled by workers overseas.

According to an outline the company has been sharing privately with Washington legislators, the number of cars that GM sells in the United States and builds in Mexico, China and South Korea will roughly double.

The proportion of GM cars sold domestically and manufactured in those low-wage countries will rise from 15 percent to 23 percent over the next five years, according to the figures contained in a 12-page presentation offered to lawmakers in response to their questions about overseas production.

As a result, the long-simmering argument over U.S. manufacturers expanding production overseas -- normally arising between unions and private companies -- is about to engage the Obama administration.

Essentially in control of the company, the president's autos task force faces an awkward choice: It can either require General Motors to keep more jobs at home, potentially raising labor costs at a company already beset with financial woes, or it can risk political fury by allowing the automaker to expand operations at lower-cost manufacturing locations.

Robert Reich points out that this example should make us do some serious thinking about the value of bailing out American companies if they then take their production (and often even their profits) abroad, leaving American workers worse off and the government with less tax revenues.

On the other hand:

Analysts who study the auto companies and their global operation warn against allowing political passions to obstruct GM's efficiency.

"If we start making political decisions with the auto industry, we're going to be in tremendous trouble," said Michael Robinet, vice president of global vehicle forecasts at CSM Worldwide.

Hmm. But this means that the auto industry shouldn't be bailed out in the first place.

War against women (by Suzie)

        In a newspaper opinion piece, Casey Gwinn enumerates the mass killings of 60+ people in the United States since March, "with men responsible for all the deaths and nearly all the cases involving men with a history of violence against women." (Two were in my area.) He continues:

We all must redouble our efforts to raise awareness and call for more resources in the war against women and children. We must call it what it is. It is not violence against women. It is most often violence by men against women.

          This pertains to our recent discussion of what to call "domestic violence," and I was happy to see it in a newspaper whose op-ed page tends to be conservative.

The Quality Of The Opposition by Anthony McCarthy

Note: I’ve never been in a position to post an actual leak before, but I’ve been able to confirm that this was an e-mail sent to members of the Maine State Legislature in opposition to the gay marriage bill. I have removed the name of the sender, other than that, it is exactly as it came in the e-mail. I’m not making this up. A.M.

When I Was A Child

I believe most men in this State, would have to agree, young boys are vile little creatures. When I was a child I did certain things I would not do today. They were shall we say childhood indiscretions of a sexual nature. These indiscretions took place from my earliest memory, which I grew out of by my mid teens, and if not for that present culture I may have grown out of them even sooner. I remember being curious of both sexes particularly girls. I remember us boys measuring ourselves against each other. Also friendly sword fights were known to break out amongst us, and I will leave that up to you to figure out. There were many other things to numerous to mention, and gory details will serve no purpose, but I grew out of these things quite naturally, and to my knowledge so did all the other boys and girls whom I am linked to by childhood indiscretion. Apostle Paul said, when he was a child he ".understood as a child, but when I became a man, I put away childish things." 1 Corinthians 13:11

If Senator Damon's bill (LD 1020) passes it will make it nearly impossible, particularly for boys, to reach normal sexual maturation. Why? Answer, because they will have in essence, adult homosexuals standing over them sayings to every young boy "O! you thought this, you said that, you did this, op! you see you're a homosexual." No! No! No! They are not homosexuals they are normal boys. With this type of peer pressure we will not see males reaching emotional or physiological sexual maturity until some of them reach forty years old, or even older.

Molestation defined: to interfere with. I call Damon's bill Child Molestation, because it will interfere with their normal development by creating an environment where children will be made to feel guilt when comparing their actions to those of adults, and no child should have to feel guilt for what adults do, but more than that, this bill will retard children's normal development just so homosexuals can increase there numbers. Therefore, Damon's bill goes way beyond even child abuse; this is cruelty to children, with slavish overtones.

No legislator, if they were to be honest, can deny that most childhood sexual indiscretions would naturally disappear and others could be reformed through proper parental or religious instruction, unless this process is interrupted by some form of coercion-LD 1020 is that coercion. The biggest stumbling block being presented to children through this bill is, was I born this way, and the answer is yes, but adult homosexuals do not want them to grow out of it. This bill will hinder and may ultimately eliminate both natural and instructional growth. I would not want to be a child today and have to sift through the issues of sexuality fostered by adult homosexuals. This is Child Molestation and it will ruin the next generation of young people. There is no way Child Molestation will ever become permanent Maine Law.