Hiding Behind Masks

Atrios posted Shepard Smith discussing the hatred he sees in his e-mail messages:





All kudos to him and the Fox News for allowing this to be aired. The validation of hatred is something I have thought about a lot. That's one bad change that the cyberspace has allowed: We walk through it masked, with a false sense of anonymity, we open our mouths and out spew all the resentment, fear and hatred we must bar in during our everyday lives. It's as if we didn't say it, after all. Some cyberspace creature did it and there's no flesh in that space, no flesh that can bleed, no bodies that die. What's perhaps worse, we may learn to take others spewing as something innocent, just a way to let off steam.

Or that's how it sometimes feels. You can find websites which specialize in White Supremacy or Male Supremacy or hatred of the Jews or of the Muslims, and those who participate there get validated in their anger and in their stereotypical beliefs, not corrected, not helped to see their grudges from a wider perspective, not made to begin the slow process of understanding.

It's not debate I want to limit or even strong feelings and language. It's the self-perpetuating enforcement mechanism which I see as dangerous, combined with more and more isolation in the sources that people use for their news, more and more of ganging up against the 'others', more and more scapegoating. The e-mails and blog comments shot into the silent space that is the news media isn't a solution to all this but perhaps part of the problem, because the masks are still on and because the lines are drawn for battle and not for debate. All that contributes to the process of 'othering' the opposition.

The masks in the title of this post are not necessarily bad, of course. Neither do I mean to attack Internet anonymity, for example, but the general feeling one easily gets that the voices in the cyberspace are not attached to real people, that what one says doesn't somehow matter as much as saying the same thing out in the street or in someone's living-room. Though locker-room talk is perfectly fine, for some reason.

I'm not sure if this makes any sense, and I wish to stress that my concerns are only about a small percentage of cyberspace exchanges. A much, much smaller percentage still would actually engage in violence because of the extra support they perceive from various websites. Still, talking about this is something we should do.

The Obama Effect?

From Atrios:

I didn't catch who was speaking on the phone to MSNBC, but he said this kind of violence can be attributed to what he called "the Obama effect," basically racist nutjobs being driven insane by President Obama.

I'm somewhat optimistic that there are fewer of these people than one might fear, but...

I presume that this refers to the Holocaust Museum murder, but it could equally well refer to the killing of Dr. Tiller. Cast your mind back to the nineties, if you can (if not, Google the Oklahoma bombing), and you might agree that there's a tendency of extremist aggressors to get more desperate when societal trends don't go their way. These people are not many. I sincerely hope that no talk show host or blogger or columnist tries to wind them up the way they did before the Oklahoma bombing.

More Of Teh Cute

Doug's Sasha who will grow into a very big girl. But note how perfectly she matches the floor in color? The necessary tactile contrast between her fur and the slick wood makes it perfect.

This is fun. Maybe I should start a cuteness blog? Instead of the stick-knitting-needles-in-your-eye-sockets blog I have now.

I Don't Like You Anymore

A new USA Today poll suggests that Republicans are not happy with their very own party:

In thinking about the Republican Party's troubles, consider this: One-third of Republicans now say they have an unfavorable opinion of their party.

There's no such dyspepsia among Democrats. Just 4% have an unfavorable view of their party.

The findings of a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll underscore the perilous state of the GOP. Over the past three years, Republicans have lost control of the White House, the House of Representatives and the Senate, and they're now struggling to forge a unified response to the popular new Democratic president.

What makes some Republicans so unhappy? It's hard to tell from that short summary of the findings (and I'm too lazy to look up the data). Perhaps the unhappy people would like to see their party more extreme? Perhaps they are pining for the good ole times, about six months ago, when America was strong?

Or do they want their party to be less extreme? But those folk have probably already fled the party.

This topic is related to what happens when some poll finds that people think the country is on the wrong track: Many writers feel that their particular complaints have been vindicated. Thus, progressive bloggers use these results to indicate that Americans would like to turn left and conservative bloggers use the same results to indicate that Americans would like to turn right. It would seem simple enough to add a question about the manner in which the country has gone off the track, to give us a bit more information. Of course this particular poll may have that question which would let us know more about it later, as the newspaper promises.

Brainy Echidna Proves Looks Aren't Everything

All Is Revealed! Here:

That rain also wipes away signs of echidna foraging and denning. It took Mr. Opiang months of searching before he found his first echidna. Then he discovered that if he followed trails of freshly dug nose pokes at night — the holes that echidnas made with their beaks as they foraged for earthworms — he could find a den where a sated echidna would be hiding. He learned to grab them under the stomach, where there were no spines. "If you hold them against yourself, they're friendly and they won't struggle," he said.

On the Internet nobody knows you use nose pokes...
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Thanks for bk for the link.

Your Daily Overdose of Cute

Courtesy of the puppy Sasha (who's going to grow into a half-mastiff) and her human, Doug.

Every Sperm Is Sacred

That's a Monty Python song (do watch the video). Interesting how we never discuss sperm rights in the abortion debates. Or do we? Don't go that way, Echidne, this is a serious post.

So Ross Douthat has written a beautiful, almost elegiac, column on abortion, with the title "Not All Abortions Are Equal." The title is meant to make you subconsciously think that women's equality is irrelevant for this topic which is defined by Mr. Douthat and concerns the way we can save people like Dr. Tiller from getting murdered.

That way is to give in to the demands of extreme anti-abortion fanatics so that they stop killing people:

If abortion were returned to the democratic process, this landscape would change dramatically. Arguments about whether and how to restrict abortions in the second trimester — as many advanced democracies already do – would replace protests over the scope of third-trimester medical exemptions.

The result would be laws with more respect for human life, a culture less inflamed by a small number of tragic cases — and a political debate, God willing, unmarred by crimes like George Tiller's murder.

God willing, indeed. Let's apply the same arguments to the Islamic terrorists: If we only gave them what they want they would stop terrorist acts against the West! Let's do that! Surely Osama bin Laden would allow us to micromanage some parts of our own lives as women? Surely?
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An update: Dr. Tiller's clinic is no more.

Me And McCaughey

Traveling is hazardous to your health because polite guest manners sometimes require that you sit silently while watching Fox News (instead of hammering the television screen to smithereens as all ethical people would do). That happened to me last Saturday evening. I was stuck listening to Betsy McCaughey frightening us to death by implying that WE ARE ALL GONNA DIE if Obama changes the U.S. health care system at all.

My blood pressure rose enough to cause bright red steam to come out of my eyes and nostrils, true, so perhaps McCaughey has a point. Her other points are biased ones, though. Here's an example:

Gigot: The Obama administration is making a kind of a core argument on health-care reform. It's saying if we insure more people, bring more people under government subsidies, we can save money. Save money--is that possible?

McCaughey:: No, it is very important that everyone has coverage. But it will not save money. Once people are insured, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, they will use about 70% more health services than they currently do. The most problematic area of this effort is this: The president wants to slow the flow of dollars into the health-care system.

Gigot: Right.

McCaughey: That's going to force cuts in hospital budgets, fewer nurses on the floor, less diagnostic equipment available, and waits for treatment.

Note Gigot's first misleading summary. Nobody argues that giving more people health insurance would reduce the costs of health care, rather the opposite. But that's what Gigot says. Once you erect a strawperson it's easy to light it with a match and that's what McCaughey does.

In fact, the Obama plan I have read (which may be changing, of course) aims to cut costs by preventive care, by better use of technology and - most importantly - by increasing competition through a public insurance alternative. These proposals may not work, true, but to confound them with the increases in access is just unethical.

Then McCaughey goes on to argue that Cuts Must Be Made And They Will Cause Your Death, without giving any evidence on that. In any case, nurses are already scarce in quite a few hospitals and waiting times for treatment can be long even in a merry capitalist market. Besides, I thought that cutting the fat is what corporations always love doing? Why is it suddenly the case that there is no fat? Note also all those uninsured people who are already kept waiting and waiting and waiting for basic health care services.

Another example of McCaughey's remarkable method of presenting evidence in a biased way is this:

Gigot: But if you talk to the Obama administration people, they say, Look, we spend 18%, almost one out of every five dollars of this whole economy, on health care. And they say, That's too much, because the costs are rising. We've got to get this under control.

McCaughey: Well, actually--

Gigot: Are you saying that's not the right direction for policy?

McCaughey: No. Americans spend more on health care than Europeans, for example, because they earn more. Ninety percent of the difference in spending is due to higher per capita incomes in the United States. And we spend more, but we also get more. For example, American women have mammograms more frequently. Their breast cancer is detected sooner and treated faster, and they have much better survival rates than in most parts of Europe.

This is fun! McCaughey got that ninety percent figure from Uwe Reinhardt's 2001 article, I think, but she doesn't explain it correctly. It's true that health care spending is correlated with income. After all, richer countries can afford to spend more. But this doesn't mean quite what McCaughey implies. Here's a more recent graph from Reinhardt:





What does it mean? This:

You'll notice that there is enormous variation in health spending per capita in different countries within the O.E.C.D. But the graph also indicates that there exists a very strong relationship between the G.D.P. per capita of these countries (roughly a measure of ability to pay) and per-capita health spending. The dark line in the graph is a so-called regression equation (whose precise mathematical form is shown in the upper left corner).

That line tells us something important about the relationship between a country's wealth and its health care spending.

Just knowing the G.D.P. per capita of nations helps us explain about 86 percent of the variation in how much different countries pay for health care for the average person. Canada, for example, on average spent only PPP$3,678 on health care per person in 2006, which is about 55 percent of the amount the United States paid per person. But Canada's G.D.P. per capita in 2006 was also smaller than the comparable United States figure, although not that much smaller (it was 84 percent of the American level).

The line helps us estimate that roughly $1,141 of the $3,036 difference between Canadian and American health spending per capita – or 38 percent — can be explained by the underlying difference in G.D.P. per capita alone.

An additional insight from the graph, however, is that even after adjustment for differences in G.D.P. per capita, the United States in 2006 spent $1,895 more on health care than would have been predicted after such an adjustment. If G.D.P. per capita were the only factor driving the difference between United States health spending and that of other nations, the United States would be expected to have spent an average of only $4,819 per capita on health care rather than the $6,714 it actually spent.

I love this stuff, I do. What about her second point that Americans get more from their health care system than Europeans do? Some do, of course, and medical research in this country is excellent. But over forty million people have no health coverage, and the U.S. doesn't do as well in all conditions as it does for breast cancer.* Then there's that little matter of lower life expectancies in the U.S. than in the comparison countries, though of course the reasons are complicated and not only about the health care systems.

You can read through the rest of the McCaughey interview and find lots of other similar points, including the blind assumption that all technology in health care is good and useful and saves lives, however it is used and even if it only helps with diagnosis but not with the consequent treatment. Then you can have red steam coming out of your eyes, too.
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*I think some of the breast cancer success story has to do with the very active publicity campaigns and political work carried out by volunteers in that field in the U.S.. Note also that a recent study compared the U.S. with several other countries in terms of disease management for a wide range of diseases. This study (which I can't find to link to right now) found that the U.S. did well in some fields, especially in breast cancer, and not so well in some other fields.

Women under-represented in clinical trials (by Suzie)

This is a news release from the University of Michigan, and I'm posting it verbatim because I think it's really interesting.

Women are under-represented in clinical cancer research published in high-impact journals, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Taking into account the incidence of particular types of cancer among women, studies included a smaller proportion of women than should be expected. The analysis looked specifically at studies of cancer types that were not gender specific, including [sarcoma,] colon cancer, oral cancers, lung cancer, brain tumors and lymphomas.

The authors looked at 661 prospective clinical studies with more than 1 million total participants. Results of this study appear online in the journal Cancer and will be published in the July 15 print issue.

“In the vast majority of individual studies we analyzed, fewer women were enrolled than we would expect given the proportion of women diagnosed with the type of cancer being studied. We’re seeing it across the board in all cancer types,” says study author Reshma Jagsi, M.D., D.Phil., assistant professor of radiation oncology at the U-M Medical School.

“It’s so important that women are appropriately represented in research. We know there are biological differences between the sexes, as well as social and cultural differences. Studies need to be able to assess whether there are differences in responses to treatment, for example, between women and men,” she adds.

The National Institutes of Health’s Revitalization Act of 1993 explicitly calls out the importance of including women in clinical research, noting that clinical trials should enroll adequate numbers of women to allow for subgroup analysis.

The U-M researchers found that studies reporting government funding did include higher numbers of women participants, but the impact was modest – 41 percent, compared to 37 percent for studies not receiving government funding.

Traditionally, researchers were told not to include people of vulnerable populations in their studies. This group included women of childbearing age. “By protecting them from research, we’re excluding them,” Jagsi notes.

Previous studies have found some barriers to clinical trial participation are lack of information, fear and a perception of interfering with personal responsibilities, such as child care.

“Sometimes participating in research studies can be time intensive. Women today are often stretched very thin trying to deal with the balance between domestic responsibilities, their cancer diagnosis, and often a career as well. They may be particularly likely to find clinical trials too burdensome. In that case, researchers should consider providing compensation to help with transportation or child care expenses,” Jagsi says.

This under-representation of women is not necessarily the result of conscious decisions, points out senior author Peter Ubel, M.D., director of the Center for Behavioral and Decision Sciences in Medicine at U-M.

“Clinical researchers are not purposely trying to exclude women from their studies. All the more reason they need to consciously and earnestly revise their recruitment methods to give more women a chance to volunteer,” Ubel says.

Methodology: The researchers looked at all original clinical cancer research published in five top oncology journals and three top general medical journals in 2006. The journals included were the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Lancet, the Journal of Clinical Oncology, the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Lancet Oncology, Clinical Cancer Research and Cancer. Articles were analyzed to determine factors including the number of participants, gender of participants, type of cancer and funding source.

The percent of women was summarized in two ways: The overall percent of women from all studies; and the average percent from each study that were women. The first method gives greater weight to larger studies, while the second method allows each study to have equal weight. Women’s representation was lower than expected, based on general population incidence data, according to both analyses.

Thank You

From the bottom of my cold reptile heart! I was able to pay for my conference hotel room and my meals with the funds you sweeties donated (Washington D.C. is expensive). Those three days are the seeds which I shall now water with my tears and then awesome trees will sprout, full of apples of wisdom! If you get my meaning.

More seriously, I have lots of new ideas about the media and the blogs and what's been wrong with this blog (partial answer: lack of sexual titillation which is what draws clicks on even political blogs). Mmm.

And Something To Muse Over

That's a suitable pastime for women, is it not? Being the muse and musing. So amusing. Yes, I'm very tired right now, almost deliciously delirious (change but one letter and the world changes! heh).

This is what happens when I can't really write for a week, so sorry.

I happened to get hold of a book on early women aviators (Women Aloft). Great stuff, and I shall write more about its contents later. But right now I want to quote from one page in the book, page 13:

When Germany's first woman flier, Melli Beese, took the test for her license in 1911, male colleagues at the flying field tried unsuccessfully to sabotage her by tampering with the plane's steering mechanism and partially emptying the gas tank; for a woman to fly, said one of them, "would take the glory away from us."

That's a deep statement. It hits right into the heart of something that we still see: Having the girls share in some endeavor cheapens the endeavor for certain types of men. Why is that the case?

The only answer I can think of is that those men think women are inferior. If women, even just a few among all women, can do something, then that 'something' must be easy and not worth doing. That's how the glory is stripped from them.
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Picture of Elinor Smith

Riddle Me This

President Obama made a surprising appointment last week:

President Barack Obama's appointment of Alexia Kelley, founder of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, as director of the Department of Health and Human Services' Center for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives took the pro-choice movement by surprise. On Thursday, the day that news of the appointment leaked out, Marcia Greenberger, co-president of the National Women's Law Center and a quintessential Washington insider, told me that she "hadn't heard anything about it till today, and we are trying to get to the bottom of it."

What Greenberger and others will want to know is why the post, which includes oversight of the department's faith-based grant-making in family planning, HIV and AIDS and in small-scale research into the effect of religion and spirituality on early sexual behavior, has gone to someone who both believes abortion should be illegal and opposes contraception. That's right -- Kelley's group of self-described progressive Catholics takes a position held by only a small minority, that the Catholic church is right to prohibit birth control. Were there no qualified religious experts who hold more mainstream views on family planning and abortion, views that are consistent with those of President Obama?

What was he thinking? That's the riddle. Is this part of his attempt to tame the fundamentalist anti-women folk and turn them liberals-in-all-but-reproductive-choice? And if so, is he throwing as girlies to the wolves? The wolves being the Pope's boyz. Or is this all part of some extremely advanced chess game which will leave us all so much better off, ultimately, but which we are unable to follow with our puny little brainz? Or are we to hold the hands of the contraception foes because they care about the poor?

I don't know the answer, but recommend reading the linked article, even if it means you have to sit through an ad.

Home, Sweet Home!

I'm back at the Snakepit Inc., and managed to push the cobwebs aside enough to slink through the doorway, though the suitcases are still in the car. Your regularly scheduled programming will continue when I get my bearings and sealegs.

It's odd that the word 'home' in Finnish means that green moldy gunk. Makes one ambivalent about using it to refer to the place where you can legally lock other people out. Though perhaps not.

Nut calls other nut "a fruit" (by Suzie)

       

This just in, regarding Scott Roeder, accused of killing Dr. George Tiller:

Troy Newman, president of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, ... e-mailed The Associated Press, saying: "This guy is a fruit and a lunatic."

Let me get this straight: Is Newman calling Roeder gay, or just using that as a demeaning epithet? I checked Google definitions to make sure I wasn't missing something, and I'm pretty sure that Newman wasn't insinuating that Roeder is a ripened ovary.

Thoughts on privilege (by Suzie)

        I decided to blog (again) on privilege when a friend commented that he didn’t consider something racist, and another reader said he and others needed to “have a chat with a random black person or two,” apparently missing the line in which my friend noted he was African-American.
       We know that all African-Americans or women or members of whatever group you want to name don’t think alike. Their desires differ. What offends one may not offend another. And yet, many of us – me included – may lapse into faulty reasoning when we disagree with someone from a different group, especially when they belong to a group that we consider to have privileges over us. I may gripe about a man who just doesn’t get it, only to encounter a woman who shares his opinion. (And then I write her off as having false consciousness. Just kidding, sort of. I guess that's a post for another time.)
         Some people use “privilege” as shorthand for: You haven’t thought of these issues in the same way that I have because they don’t affect you in the same way. Sometimes that’s true. Then again, there are plenty of people who reach the same conclusions despite different backgrounds and experiences. Conversely, those with similar backgrounds don’t necessarily have similar opinions. They may experience the same things, but they may understand the experiences differently.

          I also see “privilege” used to mean: You don’t have to think of these issues because they don’t affect you. If some people have the luxury of not having to know about, or understand, various issues, it would seem like the converse would be true: Others would have no such privilege – they would have to face these issues. But that’s not necessarily true. A girl who grows up in a small town without sexual violence may have the privilege of not having to worry about it. Meanwhile, a boy who grows up in a household with a single mother and a bunch of sisters might not have the privilege of ignoring issues pertaining to their safety. The middle-school boy who was raped repeatedly by other boys may grow up with issues of personal safety similar to girls who have been gang-raped.

           I thought of these definitions of privilege in recent discussions of people with mental disorders and their caregivers. Caregivers don't have the privilege of being oblivious to (some) issues. They don't experience them the same way the people with the disorder do -- but then again, the latter don't all react the same way either. Unlike many people diagnosed with Alzheimer's, for example, my father was delighted. He often thought he had one illness or another, and when one was confirmed, he almost took pride in it.

         Not having dementia is an unearned privilege over those who do. But I can assure you that a person who is not living with and caring for a parent with dementia has unearned privileges as well. Our society isn't particularly geared to people with Alzheimer's or those who care for them.

       Was it a privilege for my father not to have to care for anyone, not to have to change anyone's diapers, not to have to prepare meals and medications? Yes, it was a privilege he enjoyed all of his life, but he never asked for - nor did he want - the privilege of having his daughters do this for him. He hated old age and would have preferred to die. But, as I yelled at him from time to time, "The law won't allow me to kill you." (We shared the same sense of humor, and he had grown hard of hearing.)

        My father did little child-rearing, and after my parents divorced, he paid very little child support. If I had fallen sick before he did, he might have given me some money, but he would never have cared for me in the way that I cared for him. Nevertheless, I loved him. My father, ambivalent about children, never asked for the privilege of having two dutiful daughters who lived with him and cared for him, but he had them nonetheless, in part, because of a culture that encourages us to love our parents and because he had enough money to support the whole household.

        (Yikes, this turned into a Father's Day post. At least, that's out of the way.)

        In their knapsacks, people carry all sorts of advantages and disadvantages, some earned, some unearned. The contents of their knapsacks will change over time. As a result, I find privilege a useful term in describing groups, but not as useful in sizing up individuals.

       Echidne, Phila and I have talked about writing on privilege. I'll write more, and I look forward to their posts. I hope you will share your thoughts.

Friday butterfly blogging (by Suzie)

This is a zebra longwing, Florida's state butterfly. I can't think of any sexual innuendo or political joke, sorry. 

Notes For A Post On Terrorist Killings

These are notes for a post I really cannot write with this shitty laptop which gives me garden tiller ads every time I try to learn about the murder of Dr. Tiller. The notes are not the same as a finished post, sadly, but I hope that they are better than nothing.

I watched Rachel Maddow tonight, and she sort of muttered off the corner of her mouth that the killer of Dr. Tiller is a terrorist just as the Muslim man who killed one soldier and wounded another is one. I'm not sure how we define terrorism but Rachel's comment made me think about the possibility that both of these (alleged) killers saw the murders as religiously justified, as 'right' in some sense, as something good people on the correct side would ultimately condone.

Against this background you might find it fascinating that an earlier program (news?) on MSNBC called Dr. Tiller 'controversial'. The American mainstream media does not call the U.S. military 'controversial' though it is certainly described in negative terms in some parts of the world. This difference may be a subtle one, but it has something to do with how we value the victims of violent crimes and how that affects our condemnation of the crimes that made them into victims. It may even define what we call terrorism. If violence is only against women, say, it might not qualify as terrorism.

For much more relevant commentary on Dr. Tiller's murder, see Rheality Check posts.

Where The Women Are

This is still on the CAF conference and my impressions on it. The conference just ended and in many ways it's too early for me to write any type of summary post about the 'status of the progressive movement' in this country or some similar high-faluting post. But I did notice that there were women on most panels, plenty of women among the media and plenty of women among the organizers. All this is very nice, though of course we should have plenty of women in most places given that women are the numerical majority. Still, I'm pleased with what I saw and that included many women of color.

Still, only one of the larger sessions was on women's issues (on the treatment of mothers in the labor force). I don't think we live in the post-feminist society quite yet (that will take another millennium or two), and it would have been nice to have more discussion on gender (including its various interactions with class, ethnicity, religion and race) and its impact in a focused way.

Though I must admit that women's issues did crop up in several general sessions and that was most excellent.

Smell The Money!

That wasn't a session at the CAF conference, but two sessions did discuss the financial crisis of the newspapers (and that of the television still to come) and the options that the New Media has for actually paying people enough to make a living, the New Media being this here Internet and all the various ways it can be used to post news and to discuss them.

Sadly, it's tough to make money that way, because advertising doesn't seem to work as well on the net as it does on slices of dead trees. Advertising works better for local news blogs, given that local advertisers can focus their efforts on those, but general blogs don't find it that easy to attract advertising dollars. This means that we have to look for some other means of funding news and analysis on the net. Don't you think it's weird in any case that hot dog or car or bra ads used to pay for all the important news?

So it's not often we smell the advertising dollars on the Internet, and when they do smell they just may smell bad. This is because advertisers want to be linked to the most clicked items on large political blogs, and those are about...boobs! Yup. Breasts, female nudity and such are the most clicked items on, say, Huffington Post.

That is weird and rather disheartening, on many levels, including the feminist ones. Does it really mean that Huffington Post would do best by simply dropping all political coverage and by focusing on all the sex (which translates into women's bodies) and scandals it can dig up? And are women on political blogs such rare readers that their clicks have no impact at all? Or are those simple click measures ignoring the real reason why readers are on the site in the first place? Perhaps they read all sorts of different articles and only click on the sex stuff for whatever reason before leaving? If that is the case then cutting the other coverage would ultimately hurt the blog.

The smell of money is important, because covering political news, investigative reporting and political analysis are all extremely important for a democracy to survive. If we rely on unpaid volunteer work in those areas we are not going to get enough coverage and the coverage we are going to get will be slanted towards the opinions of those who can afford to work for just the love of the task.

The money problem does have solutions (such as nonprofit forms of firms, public sector subsidies etc.), but we haven't really started the debate on those. The time to start talking is now. Feminist writers have lots to say on the topic, by the way, because feminist writing has had to face that marketing problem a long time ago.

A Comment On Commenting

While the cat is away
The mice will play.

I'm not a cat (a snake is not a cat) and neither are you, my sweet and erudite readers, mice (though mice are yummy). But I am on the road and only have access to the most tedious Vista-infested laptop, and I can't really follow the commenting very well under these circumstances. So I have turned on comment moderation (assuming this beta version works). My apologies for any inconvenience that might cause you.

Battle For The Courts

This was a great session at the CAF conference! Marge Baker (People for the American Way) moderated it very well by structuring the questions, Dahlia Lithwick (Slate), Maria Blanco (Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Race etc.), Bill Lurye (AFL-CIO) and Adam Bonin (Cozen O'Connor) were all excellent in explaining their deep knowledge about the courts and their political significance.

I learned new stuff, too! For instance, there's no real (legal) definition of an 'activist' judge except that of a judge who decided something the conservatives disliked, and the wingnuts have truly managed to sell us their vocabulary and their political programs. That progressives/liberals are not more concerned about the courts is especially worrisome given that one panel member noted that George Bush The Son appointed roughly one third of all Federal judges and that these judges were carefully picked to be younger, more rigid in their party-political affiliations and more conservative, all following the same playbook. Yet the courts ultimately set the ramifications which govern all our lives.

Thus, we should be concerned about the courts not only because of reproductive choice but also because of cases such as the Lily Ledbetter one and in general the conservative tendency to reduce the little gals' and guys' access to courts as a remedy.

Rethinking Afghanistan

That was the title of a session today at the CAF conference. The speakers were Robert Greenwald (a documentary film-maker), Anand Gopal (a journalist for the Christian Science Monitor), Roshanak Wardak (Member of the Parliament, Afghanistan) and Ann Jones (author). Dr. Wardak is a native Afghani and the other three panelists have spent considerable time in Afghanistan.

The rethinking the panel urged us to do is about the role of the U.S. military. All four argued that the presence of American military forces makes life more difficult in Afghanistan, and that those forces should be withdrawn, if the well-being of ordinary Afghanis is what we are concerned about.

But the military invasion wasn't about the well-being of the ordinary Afghanis, whatever Laura and George Bush once told us. It was about Afghanistan as a terrorist haven and training camp, and given the similar role of the nearby tribal areas in Pakistan it's not terribly likely that the U.S. military would just leave.

I found the discussion on women's issues most interesting. Several panelists pointed out that the women in Kabul and a few other larger cities may have benefited from the 'liberation' the American forces brought. Girls can go to school in those areas and some women can work outside the home or choose to do without the burqa. But nothing at all has changed for the vast majority of women, especially those who live in very traditional rural areas. One panelist quoted a Supreme Court judge who had stated that women in Afghanistan have two rights: to obey their husbands and to pray at home.

Ann Jones argued that the presence of U.S. forces in rural areas actually diminishes the freedom of local women and girls. The men lock them up to protect them from foreign men. She also pointed out that the U.S. military has been taught to respect the local 'cultures' so well that they only talk to the powerful men in the villages and ignore all other villagers, including all women. But this makes the Afghanis think that the American talk about women's rights is so much hogwash. After all, Americans themselves only pay attention to the men in the villages!

What are we to conclude, then, about the future for the women of Afghanistan if the forces stay or if they leave? The message I got (though I'm feeling unusually cynical, these days) is that their future is gloomy either way but perhaps slightly less so if the forces leave.

Find The Flaw

I'm at the conference organized by the Campaign For America's Future. (Many thanks to you for paying for the hotel room which is charming and old-fashioned and fits me to a t.)

One of today's sessions was called "Affordable Health Care For All". We heard what U.S. Secretary of Labor, Hilda Solis, had to say on that topic. We also heard Governor Howard Dean, Dr. Salomeh Keyhani and William McNary, and all four agreed that the public insurance option should at least remain on the table.

A single-payer system appears to be ruled out on political grounds, went the consensus of this panel. Instead, we should aim at --oh, let's say -- affordable high quality insurance for all Americans!

And pigs would float if they were born with parachutes. I'm getting tired of a list of desires when combined with a plan which will do nothing to fulfill them. Sure, we need affordable insurance. But how are we going to get that?

Note that the reason other countries have lower health care costs is largely because they have one dominant source of public health care funding, perhaps combined with a small private insurance market. It is this which keeps the costs low. One large buyer can negotiate low prices and take advantage of huge quantity discounts and the public sector has the power to make new rules and regulations to limit the high rate of price increases in health care.

But we are not going to have that. We might not even get a public insurance option! So what is it exactly that we would get in the most recent Obama plan?

I guess there would be extra emphasis on preventive medicine and cost-savings through information technology, with the hope that these would lead to cost savings. But those savings are unlikely to be very large. They certainly won't balance out the enormous cost increases which will come about when all those previously uninsured people suddenly get medical insurance (remember the goal of having universal coverage).

All that suggests a further nasty thought in my tired head: If there are unexploited ways of achieving cost-savings, how come didn't all those health care firms already take advantage of them? Hmh? Especially given the great advantages those firms are supposed to have over a governmental delivery system? You know, the brisk competition in price we see all over the place?

Without the public insurance option the Obama plan will contain very little that would slow down the rate of increase in health care costs. That's the flaw I see in the plan and that's the flaw which would ultimately make it fail. This means that we really must fight for the inclusion of the public insurance option.

Coverage of a killing (by Suzie)

      

       A few thoughts on the killing of Dr. George Tiller, an abortion provider. First, my former newspaper has this headline: "Abortion provider was polarizing force." This, from a paper whose longtime political cartoonist, Wayne Stayskal, championed the right to own guns and equated abortion with murder. I love it when the media accuses others of being polarizing.  

       The headline is on a shorter version of this AP story, which describes Tiller as "strident" in its first paragraph. "Strident" is generally defined as loud and harsh, but the article doesn't give any evidence of that. Instead, it says, he rarely gave interviews in recent years.

        William Saletan has written a piece for Slate in which he suggests that most people who are pro-choice would have a hard time performing a late-term abortion, just as most people who oppose abortion rights would have a hard time murdering a doctor.
        But the analogy doesn't hold. Any nut can get a gun and kill someone at close range. But Tiller had medical training, years of experience and a clinic in which to operate. Those who have no qualms about late-term abortions cannot simply step up to take Tiller's place. 

        Saletan compares both abortion providers and their assassins to veteran soldiers. That must make women the battlefield.     

Idle Reading

I grabbed a book almost blindly, to read during my trip. So it turns out to be Fraser's The Golden Bough, and I'm reading it before bed:

For five days afterwards this song was sung in all the houses: --

Dread Fairy King, I sacrifice before you,
How nobly do you stand! you have filled up my house,
You have brought me a wife when I had not one,
Instead of daughters you have given me sons.
You have shown me the ways of the right,
You have given me many children.

What strikes you about that little ditty? It's sort of funny to note the "ways of the right", of course, but the really noteworthy bit is about how the singer (who is to think of himself or herself from a man's point of view) is happy to have a wife and happy not to have daughters. Apparently the question where the wives are grown doesn't enter into the calculations.

I was also struck by the fact that the preceding paragraphs in the book suggest this song was certainly sung by women. The training in self-loathing used to start early. Probably still does, in many parts of the world.

I have decided to stop blogging. The decision is entirely my own and, I think, it came as a surprise to Echidne and my fellow guest bloggers when I told them last week. I greatly admire their work and hope they and other guest bloggers will continue here for a long time. This is one of a handful of truly original and important blogs and I was deeply honored to be asked to contribute to it.

The form of blogging doesn’t lend itself to what I’m trying to do. That is the reason I’m not going to continue. Dealing with complicated issues, avoiding the customary language, a shorthand that is a hindrance to real thinking, doesn’t work. It would seem, more often than not, readers come away thinking I’ve said the opposite of what I tried to make clear.

But the typical ways of talking about issues, trying to make complex realities into easily recognized and manipulated building blocks, only leads to propaganda and the results that you can get from that degraded form of discourse.

These issues can’t be reduced to a series of tweets and I will not distort them in order to attempt a deceptive simplicity that is no better than lying. I can’t make people read what I’ve actually written or prevent them from misrepresenting what I’ve said. That is the real sticking point. I can choose to stop.

If I can figure out another way to do this on a blog, I might try again. For now, especially in this economy, my style doesn’t seem to be useful for that.

I hope that those who are serious about the fight for equality and democracy, to save the environment and to prevent injustice will continue to be active. I will, just not in this form. It is for good this time.

yours truly,

Anthony McCarthy

A Guest Post

We are honored by not one but two guest posts this weekend. Here is the second one. It is by Liz O'Donnell*:



The Audacity of Dopes: Thoughts on the Double Standard

As we know, conservatives and some media types are crying racism based on one 33-word sentence from a 3,930 word speech Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor gave in 2001. Noting that Justice Sandra Day O'Connor had said that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases, Sotomayor remarked. "First, as Professor Martha Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."

Said Rush Limbaugh about Sotomayor's comment, "Here you have a racist — you might want to soften that, and you might want to say a reverse racist.

It was Rush, wasn't it, who said during the presidential election, "Clinton's testicle lockbox is big enough for the entire Democrat hierarchy, not just some people in the media. ... Her lockbox, her testicle lockbox can handle everybody in the Democrat hierarchy."

I say of Limbaugh: Here you have a misogynist – you might want to soften that, but I don't.

CNN's Glenn Beck said of Sotomayor's statement, "She sure sounds like a racist."

It was Beck, wasn't it, who said of Hillary Clinton, "She is like the stereotypical -- excuse the expression, but this is the way to -- she's the stereotypical bitch, you know what I mean?"

I say to Beck: You sure sound like a sexist.

On MSNBC, Nora O'Donnell discussed Sotomayor's nomination with Pat Buchanan who said Sotomayor was an affirmative action nominee. O'Donnell asked Buchanan if he considered that maybe there were no qualified white men to which he responded, "No, it did not occur to me. You mean there are no white males qualified? That would be an act of bigotry to make a statement like that. [...]

It was Pat Buchanan, wasn't it, who said when Sen. Hillary Clinton "raises her voice, and when a lot of women do ... it reaches a point ... where every husband in America ... has heard at one time or another."

I say to Mr. Buchanan: That would be an act of sexism to make a statement like that.

Tucker Carlson said of Sotomayor's 2001 comment, "That's a racist statement, by any calculation."

It was Carlson, wasn't it, who said of presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, "There's just something about her that feels castrating, overbearing and scary."

I say to Tucker Carlson: That's a sexist statement, by any calculation.

To be clear, I am not comparing Sotomayor's statement, taken out of context, to the statements these men made during the last election. Anyone who reads the entire speech will glean a broader understanding of the judge's remark. I am merely pointing out the blatant double standard to which these men subscribe. Their righteous indignation (pun intended) doesn't fly and quite frankly their identity politics tactics are premature. Two women on the Supreme Court would not equal white male oppression.


----
*Liz writes about F words: feminism, (life in her) forties and
sometimes family. Her work has been published in The Boston Globe Magazine, The Atlanta Journal Constitution and The Glass Hammer where she covers women and the workplace.

Preferential Treatment (by Phila)

Matthew Yglesias compares Sonia Sotomayor's "preferential treatment" to that of white conservatives:

Beyond the simple observation that conservatives really and truly are fanatical in their defense of the prerogatives of white people, the obvious observation to make is that everyone in life has been treated preferentially by someone at some point. Sometimes if you face a lot of disadvantages in life, people recognize that and extend you an extra helping hand. Or maybe, like John Roberts, you were educated at a private boarding school before attending Harvard. Or maybe you’re Irving Kristol’s son. Or maybe because your ideology pleases Rupert Murdoch, he agrees to cover the losses of the magazine you work at.

This displeases Robert VerBruggen, who presumably clawed his way to an eminent position at NRO's Phi Beta Cons through willpower and the sweat of his brow.

When someone is privileged in life — for example, by going to an elite boarding school — he can leverage these privileges to make himself more qualified for various positions. When someone is privileged in the awarding of a credential — such as by receiving a degree for less or lower-quality work than others had to do — this makes the credential less valuable. In other words, it papers over a lack of qualifications.

Having granted that last point, as we must, most of us would go on to imagine a situation in which a wealthy white legacy student does less or lower-quality work than his peers, gets a prestigious degree regardless, and proceeds directly to the board of a multinational company, or some thinktank whose goal is to maintain a stranglehold on political power and the national terms of debate. We might even imagine him holding forth stridently on some complex subject like genetics or climatology, even though he barely managed to "earn" his MBA, and spent his few science classes irritating professors with talking points gleaned from J. Philippe Rushton and William Dembski.

VerBruggen, I'm sure, would find these scenarios totally outlandish. As he sees it, wealthy, privileged people use privilege to better themselves, which is what makes them great. By contrast, greedy, grasping, dim-bulb minorities like Ms. Sotomayor use privilege to crash High Society. Picture a 1906 cartoon of a cannibal in a tuxedo and top hat, spouting comical malapropisms at a dinner party, and you'll get the basic idea.

No one, not even white-folks-lovin' conservatives, disputes that minorities get fewer "special advantages in life than do middle class white men." The issue at hand is whether that fact mandates we hold minorities to a lower standard when it comes to hiring and university admissions — and then, apparently, forget they were held to a lower standard when they're nominated to the Supreme Court....

If universities didn't treat minorities preferentially, there'd be no question about whether Sotomayor's graduation from Princeton with honors means anything less than anyone else's.

In this last sentence, VerBruggen acknowledges that certain people's qualifications can basically be taken on faith, even if they involved "leveraging privilege." To anyone with the slightest self-awareness, or the faintest glimmerings of conscience, that really ought to set off a few alarm bells. If VerBruggen isn't saying that gender and skin color are strongly suggestive of inferiority - and that any "honors" minorities flaunt are likely to be stolen, like a twenty-dollar bill in the pocket of a sharecropper - it's hard to know what he is saying.

He'd probably argue that this isn't about minorities and women per se; he's just worried - in his amiable, doting way - about the corrupting effect of special advantages on people who "normally" lack them; he might fret just as ostentatiously over the table manners of people at a soup kitchen, for all I know. But I suspect that if AA were repealed tomorrow, he and his co-religionists would soon find equally earnest reasons to suggest that people like Sonia Sotomayor are substandard and inadequate and ultimately ludicrous, in accordance with the popular theory which states that you're only a racist if you dislike minorities for no good reason.

In any case, VerBruggen's bright idea is to let inborn privilege continue to work its magic in the lives of people who have it, while demanding that women and minorities prove their (alleged) worth by overcoming the structural disadvantages that inevitably arise from this process. As usual, "preferential treatment" is fine, as long as you have the correct preferences.

Reclaiming the forest for women (by Magda Santos)

Walking Florida’s wilderness trails is one of the most beautiful, peaceful and fascinating pastimes. The spiritual and philosophical become secondary to pure enjoyment.

However, as a woman, my first concern turns from peace and beauty to safety. My first thought is not communing with the forest and its animals or camping in the moonlight. It all turns into keeping myself safe.

Why? Simple, how many newspaper stories have you read about women attacked, raped, and killed? How many times have you heard the horrible statistics about domestic violence? Then there are the murders of whole families by angry distraught men. Here in Florida, we were unwillingly a part of the death of two women and two children by a husband and father.

Then there’s the difference in stature between the sexes. Most women are smaller and not as muscular or even as strong as most men. That keeps us at a disadvantage. Remember, we’re not encouraged to be physically powerful; it threatens men, alienates potential husbands, and doesn’t make us look feminine like the emaciated models on posters, runways, and magazines.

I can just imagine the first time a man chose a weaker woman. “No, no I don’t want an Amazon; she’s my equal. I want someone I can push around.” Eventually it became an important social thought embedded in our psyche.

So what does all of this have to do with women walking in the woods? It illustrates our need to evaluate risk, benefits and be careful, not carefree. Feeling carefree is not for people with access to little money, opportunity, and strength.

     

I host an Internet radio show called Speak Freely on Saturdays at 4 p.m., and recently, I interviewed someone who teaches a woman’s style of chi kung. We talked about the influences of nature on the many chi kung forms and at the end of the interview I asked if she practiced with her students outdoors?

Her response was it would be wonderful but some of the movements are provocative and it would be dangerous to practice in the park nearby. In addition, some of the women are survivors of cancer and violence and they would feel too vulnerable. I respect their decision and understand their feelings of vulnerability.

However, if you wish to venture outside, there are many ways of protecting yourself and as most personal security experts suggest the best idea is to look like a difficult target. You see most thieves, rapists, murderers, and other bad people look for the easiest target. They move on to the house that has no lights on, the keys left in the car, the woman without a dog.

They look for opportunity. I once left a camera in my car with the windows down in a suburban neighborhood and sat across the street. A thirtysomething white male with a female walked by the car and saw the camera; he reached in and took it, shrugging his shoulders as he looked around. I walked across the street and took the camera back from him. He was not apologetic or remorseful. I only tell you this story to show you how opportunism works.

So, hide your knife and make sure you know who’s next to you at all times. Keep your herd mentality and don’t be picked off. You don’t want to be the hiker that stays behind or eats alone.

A woman’s world is limited only by the amount of time and courage she wishes to use for a given task. Now, if she wishes to use her capital by spending time outdoors she will have to cultivate awareness and self-defensive skills. Self-defense classes are abundant, take one and tips on personal security are numerous. Hear are just two: Wear drab-colored T-shirts that help you blend in to the scenery and say, "I’m not looking to hook up." Then the old standby: There is safety in numbers. Hiking with groups like Florida Trails or the Sierra Club will help keep you safe. Nature is waiting to show you all her beauty and soothe your soul.

Don’t give up the outdoors out of fear. Reclaim the forest. Besides they don’t call her Mother Nature for nothing. See you on the trails.
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You can listen to Magda on her radio blog. This guest post was posted by Suzie.

Against Bigotry: My Last Words Here on the Subject by Anthony McCarthy

In all of the stuff I’ve read about the alleged war between religion and science, both sides seem to forget one of the clearest features of both their side and the other. Both science and religion are activities engaged in by humans and, as far as we know now, only by humans. There is not a single word or idea about either one that isn’t the product of a human mind, mouth or hand. There is no unmitigated expression of either the natural universe or the supernatural, no expression of them is more than symbolic or a substitute for the direct experience of the thing itself. All expressions in all topics, true, false, undecided, etc. are a completely human interpretation of their experience.

Religion is the expression of peoples’ interpretation of what they have every right to believe is their personal experience of the supernatural, in whatever form that takes. How much of their experience is covered under “religion” varies with personal interpretation. Religion is not a formally limited word. Being personal, it is wildly variable. Being an attempt to understand what is a profound and difficult experience, the symbolic expression of it is bound to be not much more than metaphorical. When mistaken as science or history, the vital essence of the metaphor is destroyed. And its not only religious fundamentalists who do that. Absent actions that harm others, religious belief is the property of the believer.

Science is the expression of a small part of peoples’ experience of matter and energy as it appears to their perceptions. Science exists as the result of a formal adoption of fairly definite procedures and methods. It is strictly limited. Or should be. Since science deals with what is a relatively simple part of reality, its symbolism frequently achieves something fairly accurate and useful. Often all too useful. Science is meant to be a source of universal instead of personal truth and as such is the property of everyone.

The expression of religious experience is not filtered through a relatively fixed series of universally adopted methodical refinements, it can’t be because it’s purposes and subject matter are too varied and are not in any way sufficiently limited to permit that. The realities and relationships it deals with are far too complex for that.

Science, which exists only in order to obtain an enhanced degree of reliability in understanding and manipulation of the material universe, can’t be practiced without passing its raw materials through those kinds of formal filters. Science without those filters is unreliable. That large parts of even the material universe are not able to be refined with science makes it a far more limited activity even within the material universe. Science, being an attempt to gain an enhanced level of reliability, doesn’t deliver that when it abandons or neglects the stringent practice of its methods. When it does follow those strictly, it is the source of our most reliable information about some of the material universe. When it doesn’t follow them strictly, its reliability is liable to break down, in the worst cases, catastrophically. For that reason what can be and has been treated by science and what hasn’t been is a vitally important consideration, would that it was more often considered.

You might have noticed that this discussion has, so far, left out the extremely important issue of good and bad, morality. Morality deals with interactions between living beings, the observation of rights and practicing justice and kindness. It is commonly thought that morality seems to be the proper concern of religion and has nothing to do with science. That idea is possible only if you ignore that as human activities and human concerns, there is no way to completely isolate them from having an impact on the rest of life. Interestingly, it is on the field of morality, of the struggle for the true, the good, the noble and the right, that the epic smack down between religion vs. science, for the minds of humanity is waged. Considering the frequently dishonest and dirty part of that, it’s not the reasoning mind that is being engaged. I will point out in passing that it is a grudge match waged by those who purport to represent the rest of us, whether or not we want to be associated with them.

Science doesn’t exist in a disembodied perfection, in a pure and chaste form, any more than religion does. The activities of both impinge on the lives of people and the lives of the countless other beings we are related to on this planet and, perhaps someday, beyond it. Religion frequently descends from its higher intentions of delivering justice and kindness and becomes as sordid as any other human activity. No less than religion, in its popular form and even in some who should know better, the romantic view of science rivals the worst of disingenuous depictions of religion.

Science has intentionally provided us with the means to kill millions in a single day. We know its deliberately made products have killed hundreds of thousands in two events, and many tens of thousands in others. The bombs that did that were intended to do just that. As a tool of commerce, it is one of the strongest forces with which we are destroying our planet. As with religion, only those who have done this in science are to blame for that, though the rest of us withholding the condemnation of those who do implicates us all in their crimes against life.

Both religion and science are useful to the acquisition and concentration of wealth, both, as wealth enhancement for its authorities, are liable to become potent tools of evil*. Both frequently have been and are entirely willing tools of evil today. Both, for example, have been used to justify racism and sexism, economic inequality and the murders of millions. Real life impinges on both to an extent and in ways neither is generally willing to admit.

Science should be held to its methods of achieving its enhanced reliability, though it often isn’t. What gets called by the honored title “science” often depends on the status of the person pushing it far more than what they’re pushing. While this is especially true in that part of science which depends on faith, popular science, it is often true even at levels above that. As others have also pointed out, scientists can’t read everything, they can’t even analyze everything they might need for their own work, much of what they use is taken on faith.

At times the eye rolling of scientists aware that something habitually regarded as being science is garbage, is suppressed because they don’t want to have to put up with the fussing by colleagues in other departments at faculty meetings. But if you get someone in the hard sciences to talk candidly, they can be quite expressive on the topic of the fraudulence of much that is called and popularly regarded to be orthodox science. They can be especially, and often quite publicly, verbal about the scientific deficiencies of rivals in their own field, with equally prestigious positions, or those even higher. Sometimes this can be reminiscent of the squabbling between two, closely related, religious sects. So the reliability of the entire field of “science” is not rock solid. It doesn’t deliver perfect reliability, it very often doesn’t serve the truth or improve the lives of people or other living beings. It’s conclusions are fully liable to being suppressed and its forgeries uncorrected for reasons entirely unrelated to diligent analysis and review. The trope that all the evil that science does is due to its corruption by “engineers” engaged in the applied corruption of altruistic, pure research, is bull feathers. You could make a sizeable list of truly evil practitioners of science who were never excommunicated from its rolls anymore than some of the most evil figures in our history weren’t from their religions. .

Religion too has its many failures and, at times, of horrible consequences. Due to the dramatic exposures of its hypocrisies and crimes against justice, religion is hardly lacking in bad press these days. Nor should it. Lacking formal procedures, it is harder to hold all of religion to standards of service and consistency but it should at the very least not be hypocritical. But that is as true for politics, trade, professions and any other collective effort to effectively do something in the world. Faulting them for not having methods and procedures which are certain to deliver the goods makes no sense. The insistence that one of these non-scientific, collective, attempts produce results as reliable as the best products of the physical sciences - dealing with much simpler phenomena - is clearly pointless. You may as well condemn all of science because scientists act sometime act with all the imperfections of people engaged in religion.

The idea that science and religion comprise two, non-overlapping magisteria of human activity is a good but limited view of the situation. I think that Stephen Jay Gould, the most famous proponent of the idea, was trying to define the two areas in conflict in a way that would separate them along a clear demilitarized zone. I think he really wanted to get back to his work and not get side tracked into a side show career, as some of his colleagues have been. Trying to get the fighting sides apart so more important things could happen was a noble effort at a limited peace. I also think he was being realistic about how we live our lives.

Among the legitimate goals of NOMA, as it’s often called, is to restrict the formal literature of science and the teaching of science in the public schools to their only legitimate subject matter. Science can’t be informed by anything outside of its subject matter and the methods developed to understand it. As mentioned, when science is extended past those, it’s not science anymore.

Religion-as-science doesn’t give reliable results because it can’t limit itself in that way, its subject matter is infinitely broader, it can’t restrict itself to a single methodology of collecting information. The results of even the best of religion, won’t be the results of science. It is news to many when they hear it but this fact is not news to many thoroughly religious people.

But among those other area of life mentioned above, religion can be and frequently is, informed by the most rigorous and reliable product of science. Religion, as politics, commerce, the arts, etc. do not require an exclusive wall against science. Being manifested in the material universe, inhabiting it, they could hardly avoid it. They can still exist and are often improved by consulting the specialized and limited product of science. There are even common areas of activity among them, sometimes, though, when those don’t serve any good end, they should be abandoned.

Politically, going past the struggle to keep religion from being imposed on formal science and science from stupidly trying to do what it can’t in the area of the supernatural, is a waste of time and a big mistake. The war on religion and the war on science does not need to define what we think and do, we don’t even have to be neutral in it. We can ignore the entire thing.

The life of a scientist or a religious believer is never honestly defined only in terms of one or the other. Both science and religion exist within individual people, within the same mind. It, more often than not, does. A person puts into effect the methods of science and delivers results, valid or invalid, to a positive, negative or inconclusive result. The same person participates in politics and, more often than not, other, non-scientific experience which they draw conclusions from for themselves. The person doesn’t contain non-overlapping anything, though they can compartmentalize when they have to perform a specific task. They don’t generally consult their political ideas when they make their bed or sweep their floor or balance an equation. They don’t consult their feeling of the necessity to give to the poor when they are observing the action of energy on a body in order to measure it as part of an experiment. The same person can do different things. They can have a life outside of and inside of work.

The public, political, problems that can come from and be solved with science, religion or any number of other human endeavor, generally concern avoiding doing harm to ourselves and our environment and to use resources more effectively in order to enhance the general good without causing worse problems. A large part of that is the effort to prevent those with enhanced power from abusing those with less or no power. Animals and plants, having no political power and demonstrating little in the way of effective planning for their protection, are the most vulnerable of all. Many people have almost as little ability to withstand the onslaught of the powerful armed with science, religion, the law and other tools.

As with the law, the potency of science and religion can be turned either way. The prestige of much of religion frequently has nothing to do with its justice or goodness. Much of the prestige of science has nothing to do with the search for truth, it has to do with its utility to those who have wealth and power and the large salaries that can result from serving the powerful. That money making potential and utility to those who want to use them are some of the few things it shares in full with religion. Pretending that either has a good track record in selfless service is one of the crueler jokes on the rest of us. The service to the common good has been spotty, both as intended effect and in its stated virtues being made real and effective. Lying about those records is another thing both science and religion have in common.

So, there we have it in all it’s marred, mixed, muddled and weathered reality. The works of human minds, mouths and hands, both science and religion. Both publicly aspiring to the highest truth and good, both thoroughly a part of human life in all its limited imperfection. Both should stop pretending and lying, neither should be allowed to lie about the other. And both of these exalted magisteria are fully a part of life, they are no purer in the reality of life than politics.

We, The People are saps when we fall for the cover stories and PR of all of them. They’re all of use to the greater good, but only when they serve it. Keeping them honest, making them serve the common good is the real problem. Not refereeing their eternal bickering.

* I think the relegation of the concept of evil to the status of a quaint and slightly embarrassing concern of a more credulous past should be abandoned. Evil, as anyone with a brain can see, is flourishing. Far from being a neurotic fixation keeping us from a happiness we have as a right, real guilt is preventative. People who don’t feel guilty about doing evil things, unsurprisingly, don’t have any hesitation to do them when they can get away with it. People can’t be monitored continually, they have to have internal limits on doing the rotten stuff they want to do. A lot of obsessive guilt is over things that hurt no one, people feeling that kind of guilt should stop indulging themselves and concentrate on what they do that hurts other people.

A Personal Note: I have had my fill of this stupid cultural squabble and especially the undifferentiated bigotry generated on the blogs of the left from the self-selected “science” side of it against all of religion. I did not live through the progress of the civil rights era to silently watch a rebirth of bigotry flourish on the nominal left. The “religion” side of the squabble is on the right and, at least, I can ignore that while pursuing my own side of the infinitely more important political fight. That, friends, is what I’m in this for, to fix our politics. I would invite bigots on both sides to go soak their heads and step out of the way because there is serious work for serious people to do and they’re being obstructive jack asses.

If “science” wants to shoot itself in the leg with stupid attacks on the vast majority of the population who are religious, including the majority of people who accept evolution, I can’t stop them. I will ask other people on the left to consider if that fight is worth more than the fight against global warming, for universal health insurance, to stop nuclear proliferation, against patriarchal sexism, racism, and a discouragingly huge agenda of absolutely necessary change. Scientists should ask themselves as well if they really want to get involved with the psycho-drama of the two warring camps of fundamentalists who have inflicted this distraction on us. But that’s their choice to make.

Quite frankly, and I’m sure most controversially, the most that the “pro science” side has a right to demand is that the formal literature of science and public school classrooms be restricted to the legitimate subject matter of science. Those are the only two legitimate areas in this that are of general public concern. Those people who have grabbed onto this dispute to promote a war on religion are a liability to those who really want to prevent religion being inserted where it shouldn’t be.

And in so far as public school biology classes are concerned, evolution has to take its place in a curriculum that deals with matters of more pressing concern to most public school students and the adults they will become. Most of them will need to protect an environment that will sustain their lives, sustain themselves with adequate food and clean water, avoid diseases, prevent pregnancies and venereal diseases through science-based contraceptive education, than will need to be familiar with the concept of natural selection.

And even within the section on evolution other topics such as genetic drift will have to become part of the subject as they gain more prominence. Topics vitally important to preventing racial, national and gender bigotry are of more pressing need than a familiarity with the history of classical evolution. It would be absurd to think that the fight over evolution is responsible for any of the problems exacerbated by ignorance of biology, the conventional American school schedule is probably more responsible for that. But there is no way that the anti-religious PR that has muckled on to the science of biology will help fix that. No more than their fundamentalist opponents program will.

Except in so far as it is useful to a student, evolution is of only cultural interest. Not everyone requires an extensive understanding of evolution in their work. We are talking about the one and only biology course many of these students will ever take in their entire lives. Not everyone receives a graduate level degree in any of the life sciences.

Trying to insert God into science is a supremely anti-religious act, as far as I’m concerned. It is to make God subject to the restrictions of the material universe. Personally, it confirms my suspicions about the religious defects of biblical fundamentalism, but that’s a personal observation only.

I am going to stop blogging on this issue except as it has the potential to damage the left’s chances in politics. Other than that it has wasted time better spent on important things. The warring sides are idiots, even the smartest of them. As noted here last week, it’s something I finally figured out. I don’t have any more time to waste on idiots who don’t care about fixing anything. We should tell them all to leave us out of it and ignore them when they attempt to divide us and to distract us from getting something done.

Domestic work, part 2 (by Suzie)

          I went out with T&P for a final dinner before P returns home. On a whim, I pulled in to a sex-toy store, thinking P might not be familiar with them. In the aisles of costumes, all for women, I explained that there’s a greater expectation that women will dress up for men than vice versa.
         Many feminists who identify with the third wave would say it’s fine if a woman dresses in a maid costume because anything that leads to sexual pleasure is liberatory. If a sex worker dresses as a maid to fulfill a man's fantasy, some feminists would say she has a right to do what she wants with her body. But if a woman hires another woman to do actual maid work, then the employer is a bourgeois racist who has bought her freedom at the expense of another woman, according to some people.
        This led back to last week’s topic. Because of the history and demographics of the U.S., it may be hard for people to see domestic work outside of the context of the exploitation of women of color. Last week, I tried to point out that people hire others for domestic work around the world, often within the same ethnic group. Employers often are not rich. It isn’t inherently exploitative – or, at least, not any more exploitative than any other labor. I think T&P show compassion when they try to find work for poor people, who are from their own ethnic group, but often rural. 
       I do understand that domestic work is ripe for abuse, especially when women work far from home, and men are involved. Here’s an article on that subject.
       Other jobs also are prone to abuse, such as ones in which workers travel a long way to work in sweatshops or in the fields. On the other hand, working in her hometown or inside her home is no guarantee that a woman won’t be abused. 
       Here’s an interesting article on who has been employed in domestic work in the United States. When women can find work that pays more, they often take it. If white women are blamed for shifting domestic work to women of color, wouldn’t individual women of color also be guilty when they move into better jobs? Progressives praise poor people for being resourceful and hard workers – until those people succeed financially, and then they become the oppressors.
        If white U.S. feminists bought their liberation at the expense of the women of color who did domestic chores, what about women of color here or in developing nations who pay for domestic work? 
        My mother had a bachelor's degree and worked as a Spanish-English secretary before she married. Afterward, my father didn’t want her to work. This was all about his status as a man who could provide for his family. It had nothing to do with household chores. It wasn’t like my mother stayed home all day; she did all sorts of volunteer work. When my parents divorced after many years, my mother faced age discrimination and could find only a low-paying job. She sold plaster figurines in a shop, and we kids sometimes helped by scraping the seam off the plaster with a special blade. One good thing about the job was it had down time when Mom could do creative writing.
        I’m sure there were white women who chose to have a professional career only because they could afford to hire a maid or nanny. But others wanted their own money, even if they had to continue to work inside and outside the home.

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        By now, I hope I’m at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, telling doctors about sarcoma nonprofits. In a better world, I wouldn't have to do this work for free -- or at all.

        I’ll have a new topic next week. 

Friday flower blogging (by Suzie)

This is not porn. Please explain in 500 words or less. (Cf., last week's comments.) 

Feed Me!

This is my annual fund-drive. Last year you lovely people helped me to replace my computer and that's why I'm still blogging! (OfcourseIreallyspentitallonchocolate.)

This time I need help for a conference trip. You want me to go, you do.

You can find donation buttons hidden all over this blog. Don't give if you don't have money to give. Thanks.

Tonight's Health Care Story

While at the drugstore tonight I found the usual cashier in the back of the store, sitting on a chair. He looked like death warmed over. Truly awful, and his temperature was high enough to heat the air around him.

We started chatting (well, I butted in and he's too polite and charming to tell me to fuck off). He has rheumatoid arthritis all along his spine, no health insurance, expensive (but pretty useless) pain-killing drugs and a job in which he is not allowed to sit down but must remain standing even while using one arm to load customer's heavy purchases into plastic bags. He needs much more intensive treatment than he can afford. He needs health insurance. He needs a stool to sit on and a more suitable job.

Living with chronic pain is living in hell, and it's not much good for your family or friends, either. Neither is it good for the employer, because they might lose an excellent and intelligent worker in their short-sighted chase for immediate savings.

I left feeling useless, angry and guilty. I shouldn't have left him there like that, but then neither should this country have done that to him and to so many others.

The Little Cottage...

Or a few scattered thoughts on the housing crisis. Atrios notes that things are going to get worse before they will get better, and that's certainly the case for those who are struggling to pay mortgages which are now higher than the value of their dwelling. Either they are going to lose whatever investments they have made in the house or they are locked in, unable to move. But have you asked yourself who might benefit from this crisis? It's not just people looking to buy for the first time (assuming they can get a mortgage from the deranged banking system.)

At the same time, if you compared average family incomes to the average house prices a few years ago it was pretty clear that something smelled off in the housing market: the "average" house was unaffordable (using the old rules) by the "average" family in almost every single area of the country. So the prices had to come down or the incomes had to go up. We all know which of the two happened.

Today's Deep Thought

It's horrible to be wrung dry when you have a fund drive. Maybe people could pay for my continued silence? Like in a protection scheme?

Something will turn up. In the meantime you should listen to Malvina Reynolds:

Hunting Sonia

Everyone who reads this blog is an intelligent, empathic and fascinating creature (smear it thick enough for ya? mwah). Thus, everyone here knows that what the Republicans are doing to Sonia Sotomayor is a game they have to play. But it's a dirty and nasty game, and it's fascinating to see how the talking points are presented. Media Matters has put the main talking point and its repetition into one video:





Television viewers wouldn't get the same impression because those moments are sprinkled over a longer stretch of time. But the ultimate impact is the same one: Sotomayor is a racist! Of course she is also empathic which is bad because it's womanly! (Even though George Bush The Elder praised Clarence Thomas for his empathy).

Watching that video is like looking into the abyss in which fear lives among some conservatives, the fear of the poor-and-unwashed (wimmin! Hispanics!), the fear that some time of revenge is nigh and that they will be the victims of that. I almost feel pity until I remember that all that is pretense, that these guys on the video make good money and wield a lot of power.

Adam Serwer has a beautiful response to the pertinent question of what Sotomayor actually said and what it means. I especially like the observation that no particular set of life experiences makes one a neutral observer of the world or capable of reliving other people's experiences by just thinking about them. We can try (that's what empathy is for), and we should try, of course. But Pat Buchanan's opinions about the world are colored by his own history, his gender, his race, his religion and his ethnic group. These don't disqualify him for having opinions about questions he has never experienced, of course, but they should remind him of the need for modesty and the need not to view people with other life histories and defining characteristics as somehow 'not standard'.

But that's how Sonia is hunted. I don't want to join in that hunt. But I'd like to know her position on Roe v. Wade.