We Care About The Hot One

This post is about the alleged Russian spies, in particular one of them, the sultry-eyed, pouty-lipped one. This is how the media discusses our (yes, our) infatuation with her:

But mostly we care about the hot one.

Ever since photos of Anna Chapman began circulating online late Tuesday, the Internet at large has been foaming, frothing, fanatic for details about the reported 28-year-old secret agent/Maxim model look-alike who specialized in sultry-eyed, pouty-lipped, come-hither stares. Da, da, da!

News sites immediately uploaded photo galleries. Someone said "Bond Girl" and we all immediately began casting her biopic in our minds. Scarlett Johansson -- no wait, Jessica Biel!

...

The three-minute video, entirely in Russian, is now going viral on YouTube, with plenty of salivating fans. "That's one hot Russian spy," Assaultman45 offers in the comments section. "Her punishment should be a date with me."

That was the Washington Post! And here comes the Los Angeles Times:

One day you're a 28-year-old red-haired beauty from Russia trying to make it as a "businesswoman" in New York City. The next, your name and sexy Facebook profile photo are splashed all over the world, your every status update — "Pain is only weakness leaving the body," for instance — the subject of international fascination. You are a femme fatale.

And all you did was allegedly participate in a Russian spy ring.

Every good Cold-War-style spy scandal needs a Natasha, and Anna Chapman, who appeared in court Monday in designer jeans and a white T-shirt, has emerged as the tale's sexy antagonist.

I keep asking myself why that bossy goddess who takes my body over once in a while is so firmly intent on writing about this topic. It's a silly topic, a topic of no special importance, a topic which will get me into trouble as a prudish and humorless feminazi.

All she will tell me is to do a gender reversal to find out the reason. A sultry male spy would not be written up in such a manner because heterosexual women do not have that kind of generality in people's minds. Even if he would make us sweat and faint and breathe very very rapidly and develop misty bedroom eyes none of that would be subsumed under the general umbrella of him being hot to everyone in the whole world and nobody would expect heterosexual men to faithfully join in the admiration of the man. His sexiness would be described as something only affecting women.

But a female spy with sultry eyes is obviously sexy to everyone on this planet.

So the post is a very meta one. An opportunity to glimpse at the underpinnings of our popular culture. It's not a criticism of the way the media covers the hotness of an alleged spy. The media is covering it in the exact way the society thinks.

Nag Nag Nag

Have I already written about nagging? Probably, but it bears repeating (get the joke?)

Nagging is a very gendered term, even if the web dictionaries mostly give it neutral definitions, such as

1. To annoy by constant scolding, complaining, or urging.
2. To torment persistently, as with anxiety or pain.

These are correct, as far as they go. But "nagging" is not a term we use when a man constantly scolds, complains or urges (Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck nag, by the way), unless we wish to point out that he is engaging in a stereotypically female behavior and should shut up.

Nope, it is women who are described as "nagging," and especially wives or girlfriends. The term is intimately linked to what goes on in heterosexual intimate relationships. Using the first definition given above, nagging therefore means a situation where the man is annoyed by the constant scolding, complaining and urging of his wife or girlfriend. Sometimes he is so annoyed that he blows her brains out.

Nagging is like "gossiping" or "bitching": Something negative which only women are assumed to do. But if you carefully define such verbs as to their real contents you will find that men engage in them, too. For example, gossiping about the sexual peccadilloes of politicians is politics because men participate in it!

Still, men might nag less than women, on average, and here is why: Though it is probably true that there are people who nag just for the joy of nagging or because they wish to torture someone, nagging is really the rusty weapon of the relatively-less-powerful.

To see why I inserted "relatively" into that definition, think of a workplace. Bosses don't nag to their subordinates, because they don't have to nag. Subordinates don't nag to their bosses, because if they do they get canned. (Instead, they "bitch" about the boss to each other which suggests that these pejorative verbs about female complaining are perhaps about the complaining of the less powerful in general.)

Nagging is not practical in a rigidly hierarchical setting. But heterosexual relationships may not be that hierarchical. Even the more hierarchical ones have openings for negotiation (who takes out the garbage, who does the dishes, who picks up the dry-cleaning) or at least for manipulation, something into which nagging can be slipped.

Put in different terms, "nagging" might be found somewhere along a straight line ranging from pathological behavior by the nagger to pathological behavior by the "naggee." Yet we tend to focus on the former end of the dimension when discussing the phenomenon.

To create an example closer to the latter end, think of a situation where one partner makes a completely reasonable request which the other partner refuses to hear or to respond to. Assume that this refusal makes life much harder for the one who made the original request. Assume, furthermore, that she/he cannot easily leave the relationship. What is the next step in these negotiations? It is not difficult to imagine that it might be renewing the request, in various ways. Which would be called nagging.

Sure, this might be a rotten strategy. But then what is the alternative?

Pope Ratzi And The Boyz

I was changing the ropes in my eighty-year old two-sash window the other night. The old ropes were rotten, and without them the window would not open or if it did would not stay open. But from the outside you couldn't see the rotten ropes. The window looked quite functional.

The Catholic Church under Pope Ratzi and Hiz Boyz is similar. The Church doesn't look dysfunctional but it is. And the dysfunctional bit is under that fancy miter hat. It needs changing, desperately.

Here is why: A few days ago the Pope expressed his anger at the Belgian police:

In a sign of sharply rising tensions between the Vatican and Belgium, Pope Benedict XVI on Sunday criticized as "surprising and deplorable" a raid on church property last week by Belgian police officers investigating sexual abuse by clerics.

In an exceedingly rare personal message and rebuke of a sovereign country, the pontiff also stressed the church's "autonomy" to conduct its own investigations and criticized the "deplorable methods" of the Belgian police, who detained bishops, confiscated files and even drilled into the tombs of at least one cardinal in the Cathedral of Mechelen, north of Brussels, in a search for documents.

"On several occasions I have personally reiterated that such serious issues should be attended to by both civil and canon law, with respect for their reciprocal specificity and autonomy," Benedict said in a statement circulated by the Vatican on Sunday.

Pay attention to his tone, to how he demands reciprocal specificity and autonomy, how he is angry at the way his boyz are being treated.

Then here's Ratzi more recently:

The pope handed one of the most powerful jobs in the Vatican to a cardinal who said recently that abortion was wrong, even in cases of rape.

The reshuffle also saw a senior prelate moved from the institution that helps frame the Catholic church's "pro-life" doctrines after he appeared to question the announcement by another archbishop that the mother of a child rape victim had removed herself from the church by arranging for her daughter to terminate her pregnancy.

Archbishop Rino Fisichella was transferred to head a new department charged with stemming the advance of secularisation, particularly in Europe.

It is the appointment of Cardinal Marc Ouellet, however, that is likely to arouse most controversy. As prefect of the Congregation for Bishops, Ouellet, until now the archbishop of Quebec and primate of Canada, will be responsible for drawing up shortlists from which the pope decides who is to get a bishop's mitre.

The prefecture is often regarded as the third most important job in the Vatican administration since its incumbent can prevent even the most gifted priest from rising to a position of leadership in the church. Ouellet has in the past been touted as a successor to Benedict.

This year, Ouellet provoked what the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation termed a "firestorm of criticism" when he told an anti-abortion conference in Quebec City that terminating a pregnancy was a "moral crime" even in rape cases. He said he understood that a sexually assaulted woman should be helped and her attacker held accountable. "But there is already a victim," he said. "Must there be another one?"

Note how some victims (priests and embryos) matter so much more than other victims (everybody else), how autonomy is not something a raped woman or child can ever expect to have and how very serious the consequences of Pope Ratzi's woman-hatred can be for the whole church. We could have decades of woman-hating bishops just because of him.

This is a church which explicitly bars women from all real power. I find it utterly astonishing that we regard such an organization a valid participant in the discussions about rape, child abuse and the question of women's reproductive rights.

Twilight Zone...

Listen to the interview with Sharron Angle here. Digby's comments on it are worth reading.

Mine might not be because they are unprintable.

Quiet, At Last (May Trigger)

An item in the Bangor Daily News has the following headline:

Police affidavit: Brooks man shot wife over nagging

The first paragraph reads:

The Brooks man accused of shooting his wife to death Friday told a friend he did it because she had been nagging him over a truck muffler, according to a police affidavit released Monday at Waldo County District Court.

Michael Littlefield then laid down on the floor next to Deborah Littlefield's body, while he contemplated shooting himself.

Dear me. If she hadn't nagged so much she'd still be alive! Let that be a lesson to you all naggers out there.

It's subtler than that, but not by much. There's the focus on the thoughts of the murderer, an attempt to explain, perhaps even to justify the crime. I'm trying to apply this approach to other crimes: A man raped and killed a child because she or he excited him sexually? A thief broke into a house because he or she wanted a new Ipad?

This approach is sometimes taken in other killings, but hardly ever in the initial coverage. The motives for a killing are usually hashed out later as the story develops. But the exception to this rule is in cases of the kind discussed here: domestic murders, most committed by men who kill their partner and often also the children. Then the coverage begins with attempts to explain why he did it.

This is problematic, because it turns into victim-blaming.

Austerity: For You But Not For Me

This European opinion piece on the need for austerity politics has the usual stuff:

That's fine as far as it goes. But how should full employment be defined? Should we be aiming for a return to conditions as they were before the crisis unfolded in 2007 and 2008? Or should we accept that the boom which preceded the bust was, itself, undesirable and that no policymaker with a reasonable grip on reality should be hoping to see its return?

If so, we need to adjust our expectations of what can be achieved by Keynesian policies. The economic world isn't composed of simple binary choices along the lines of full employment versus unemployment or recovery versus recession. If we're coming out of recession, but we don't want a return to the conditions that preceded the recession, we have to accept that, pre-recession, we were probably living beyond our means.

To that extent, Keynesian policies have limitations. They have certainly helped to prevent a Great Depression Mark II. But they cannot take us back to where we were before the crisis because, at some point, we need to get a grip on the excessive debts which led to the crisis in the first place.

...

Keynesian policies may prevent the worst from happening, but they cannot take us back to a world of leverage where creditors are forever dipping into their pockets to provide money for the profligate to spend on all sorts of madcap ventures. Eventually, debtor nations need to adjust their spending habits. The US, the UK and others have been living beyond their means for many years and will probably have to accept that the level of output and its growth rate are now permanently lower than they appeared to be before the crisis began.

The case for austerity rests on accepting this new reality. Austerity is hardly pleasant, but it might just prevent a repeat of the problems which, two years ago, culminated in the worst Western recession since the 1930s. That, in itself, would be some achievement.

What the author discusses are various economic theories, and that is fine. But do try to find the Man Behind The Curtain because he is there. Notice how "we were living beyond our means" where the "we" is left undefined but intended to cover everybody. Notice also "a world of leverage where creditors are forever dipping into their pockets to provide money for the profligate to spend on all sorts of madcap ventures." Finally, notice how "austerity" is introduced as the proper response to the profligate spending on madcap ventures and to, yes, full employment!

But I very much doubt that the author of this piece is going to now live an austere life. Most likely not a singly yacht needs to be sold nor a caviar dinner canceled. Austerity is intended for the Little People, because it always means cutting back on government spending and unraveling the safety nets on which the less affluent rely in all daily market acrobatics.

And who benefits from that? The rich, because they will then not have to pay higher taxes! They don't need safety nets and they don't want to pay higher taxes. Indeed, austerity for us means a comfy lifestyle for them.

Neither are we going to focus on the true profligate who caused the problems! Those tend to belong to the rich and will not suffer from the cutbacks in public spending. Indeed, austerity will be mostly enforced on those who probably never were big spenders at all and who didn't cause the problems to begin with. Little People. This applies whether a particular Little Person bought too much house or saved carefully and never splurged on anything.

This class aspect or fairness aspect of economic policies is almost always buried underground and its grave made pretty. But you must dig it up, because these policies are not just dry economic theories which we can safely skip.

For instance, the author of this opinion piece tells us that inflation is worse than unemployment and that we must curb inflation, even if that means higher rates of unemployment. What he is really saying is that the wealthy suffer more from inflation (which reduces the value of money) than from unemployment (which doesn't affect the rich).

Inflation has other negative consequences, of course, such as the problems it causes for people living on fixed incomes, and writing about the question how to control it is perfectly fine. But never take your off the Man Behind The Curtain when reading these stories. He has his hand in your pocket.

On Barbeques

Someone noted in Eschaton comments that it's almost always the men who do all grilling outside, not women. In this country, that is.

Isn't that fascinating? Grilling in the backyard is like doing physics! Girls can't do it or are not interested in it or there's a biological difference caused by some prehistoric humans deciding that Man Is The Tender Of The Hearth. Except, of course, that for centuries humans have cooked over the open flame and most of that cooking has been done by women. So the explanation has to be found elsewhere.

And I believe that it is cultural. Cooking at home became acceptably masculine only when it was not done in the kitchen, when it had an aspect of the campfire attached to it. The reason why I find this fascinating is the strength of something which really must be based on culture.

A Naive Post on Gun Rights And The SCOTUS

I'm going to go all naive in this post, because I want to. The topic is this:

The Second Amendment's guarantee of an individual right to bear arms applies to state and local gun control laws, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday in a 5-to-4 decision.

The ruling came almost exactly two years after the court first ruled that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own guns in District of Columbia v. Heller, another 5-to-4 decision.

But the Heller case addressed only federal laws; it left open the question of whether Second Amendment rights protect gun owners from overreaching by state and local governments.

The ruling is an enormous symbolic victory for supporters of gun rights, but its short-term practical impact is unclear. As in the Heller decision, the justices left for another day the question of just what kinds of gun control laws can be reconciled with Second Amendment protection.

The majority said only that the right to keep handguns for self-protection at home is constitutionally protected. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., writing for the majority, reiterated the caveats in the Heller decision, saying the court did not mean to cast doubt on laws prohibiting possession of guns by felons or the mentally ill, those forbidding carrying guns in sensitive places like schools and government buildings or those regulating the commercial sale of firearms.

This is another of those 5-4 decisions which show how the wingnuts are going to rule the country through the judicial branch for decades to come. A reminder for all of us that the court matters. A lot.

I promised to be naive, and I will. My first thought on reading this is that desperate unemployed people can't get jobs or help from the local government but their right to be armed is honored! That makes for a really happy society in which to live.

My second thought was the one I always have when reading about the Second Amendment, which is to try to stretch my poor brain to make the leap from "well-regulated militia" to Bob-can-have-a-rifle-in-his-pants.

My third thought was about the equilibrium in the gun-carrying markets: It seems to me that the more common guns as threats become (check out Anthony's post below), the more necessary it becomes for everyone to carry.

And I don't want to live in such a world. Too many people have road-rage. If you have a gun in the car, your momentary rage can turn into a killing one, and lives are ruined. Too many people get into shouting matches in bars. If even one of the participants has a gun, things will turn bloody. Too many people have fights with their partners at home. Too many people get drunk before such fights. And so on.

My fourth thought was about those NRA slogans: "Guns Don't Kill. People Do," and "An Armed Society Is A Polite Society." They are both rubbish, of course.

It's true that guns don't get up in the closet, walk out and start killing people at the local shopping mall. But it's every bit as true that a guy going over there to kill people with his bare hands or even a knife doesn't manage to kill very many people before he is stopped. The same guy with a gun can do much more damage. And no, having everyone armed in the mall is not the answer to the mass shootings. It would cause even more dead people, unless you assume that all the shoppers are trained sharp-shooters with minds as cool and calm as yogurt under stress.

Which reminds me of that "well-regulated militia" statement. The "well-regulated" part. Shouldn't that mean something like requiring extensive training in gun use, gun storage and how to stay calm in stressful situations when carrying a gun? A test which you have to take every few years to show that you are a careful shooter?

The "armed society is a polite society" argument is equally wrong. It is based on an assumption that if everyone was armed no quarrel could ever escalate because we'd all be thinking of the gun the other person is visibly carrying. Such calmness and forethought! Just what happened with the mortgage crisis! And of course the mythical Wild West was a very polite place.

Finally, this decision is another example of the states' rights argument being most malleable. States have rights which conservatives like. They don't have rights which conservatives dislike. So it goes.

My State: Humid

Why do we call people with the names of sexual organs when we are angry with them? Sexual organs are nice! Sexual organs are, in fact, our gateway to this world, and sexual organs may be the only gateway to paradise we shall ever experience.

Instead of honoring nasty people by calling them c***s (trying to avoid the censors here), why not call them humids? Because humidity is truly awful. Awful.

I have to keep wiping the keyboard, you know, and my divine nose has a drop at its end.

Holly Cole Trio

Neon Blue

Questions I’d Like Kagan To Answer But Which She Wouldn’t Answer And They’ll Not Be Asked [Anthony McCarthy]

Of course, the first one is whether or not she would defer to the line of rulings granting corporations civil rights as “persons”. That is the first and worst way in which the oligarchic wing of the judiciary is attacking The People and our inherent rights. It’s getting worse and, as I will never stop yelling at the top of my lungs, it is destroying the capacity for legitimate, self-government.

I don’t think any nominee for the lowest court in the country who doesn’t hold that all government, including their office, is only legitimate to the extent that it exists by the just consent of an informed electorate is fit to hold the office. It should be an absolute requirement of all holders of public office to affirm that The People are the source of all authority, based on their informed judgment. Our Supreme Court is now packed with men who are doing their best to destroy that legitimate foundation of government.

Today’s Boston Globe Magazine has a rather whiny column by Farah Stockman (Harvard 1996) about the “Harvard Stigma”, on the occasion of the Senate hearings on Elena Kagan’s nomination. It points out that Harvard Law grads have been very generously represented on Supreme court, naming David Souter, Anthony Kennedy and Anthony Scalia as all being products of Harvard. And those are only some of the Republican appointees to the many Harvard seats on the court. I’m sure there are many members of gender and ethnic identities that would like to suffer that kind of stigma. Given their percentage of the population, Harvard grads are among the least stigmatized members of the species. Barack Obama, a product of Harvard Law wouldn’t have been the first Harvard Man to be making Supreme Court appointments, though he’s the first person of color to be in that position. I have no qualms about saying that if he hadn’t gone to Harvard Law, or one of the handful of other elite law schools, that he wouldn’t be president today. The various Senators representing the -- well, thankfully, you can’t exactly call it a fraternity these days – are far, far from the first to confirm nominees.

Of course there is a lot of slamming of Harvard by the far right, though George W. Bush’s association with it wasn’t any kind of a problem for them, no more than Scalia’s or Kennedy’s. The far right lies and distorts, it’s what they do about everything. If Elena Kagan had come from the far from elite law school of the University of Southern Maine, that’s the hook they’d be using against her. I have no hesitation to say that even if she’d proven to be a brilliant legal mind with the most inspiring judicial temperament and practical wisdom and a passion for fairness, she’d never have been nominated if she had come from that school. I think that Stockman might know more about that if he didn’t have Harvard blinders on.

I think that many, maybe almost all, graduates of elite institutions tend to have a real lack of appreciation for the intellectual lives most of us live. I think the longer they spend at those institutions, the more institutional loyalty they develop, the more they associate with other products of their and other elite universities, the less they learn of or remember about the wider culture. I think that is how we can get Supreme Court justices who consistently rule in favor of the elite against the needs of the many. That is how they can make the most ludicrous rulings based on legal theories that real life shows are both unjust and intolerable. The evidence I’ve seen leads me to think that Harvard Law School is an institution that produces willing tools for the perpetuation of privilege. As far as I’m concerned, if any of them want to escape that association, they should put some of their intelligence to that task. Some have, there are some people who have an association with Harvard who didn’t eat the lotus. I hope Kagan, who will be confirmed, is one of them.

As to other questions I’d like her to answer, this week’s abomination suspending the deep water drilling moritorium by "judge" Martin Feldman would make the issue of the definition of judicial conflict of interest most topical. As that Harvard Man Tony Scalia has shown to an absolute certainty, justices can rule on issues in which they have the most flagrant conflicts of interest and there is no legal mechanism to prevent that or to remove judges guilty of that form of corruption. With the rulings favoring deep water drilling, despite the clear disaster it is, by a judge who benefits from it financially, THAT IS A SITUATION THAT DISCREDITS THE ENTIRE JUDICIAL SYSTEM. There is no reason for anyone to respect the law when they see that crooked judges can get away with it in the full light of day.

Note: I also see in today’s paper that the real estate billionaire Walter Shorenstein died. Among his many philanthropies is the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. I’ve written on that institution and the kind of journalism it honors and promotes. I’ll link to that as an exhibit that the problems at Harvard aren’t just found in the law school.

Why anyone would endow anything else at the obscenely overly endowed university turns from being a matter of philanthropy into one of pyramid building. Seeing what Harvard has done with the Kennedy School itself, no one should expect anything that will upset the oligarchs to come from anything they get their hands on.

Camille Pagliaized, Ayn Randized....

If you have never heard of Camille Paglia, count yourself among the lucky. The late, great Molly Ivins wrote the definitive take on Camille:

There is one area in which I think Paglia and I would agree that
politically correct feminism has produced a noticeable inequity.
Nowadays, when a woman behaves in a hysterical and disagreeable fashion, we say, ``Poor dear, it's probably PMS.'' Whereas, if a man behaves in a hysterical and disagreeable fashion, we say, ``What an asshole.'' Let me leap to correct this unfairness by saying of Paglia, Sheesh, what an asshole.

Twenty years later, and we still have Paglia but no Ivins. Which suggests that there is no god. It also suggests that someone, somewhere, in those backrooms of power wants to stick one in our feminist eyes, bad. I'm beginning to think that it's not only the poor we shall always have among us but the woman-haters. Now try to get that printed in the NYT!

But Paglia gets printed there, on a topic which begins:

WILL women soon have a Viagra of their own? Although a Food and Drug Administration advisory panel recently rejected an application to market the drug flibanserin in the United States for women with low libido, it endorsed the potential benefits and urged further research. Several pharmaceutical companies are reported to be well along in the search for such a drug.

The implication is that a new pill, despite its unforeseen side effects, is necessary to cure the sexual malaise that appears to have sunk over the country. But to what extent do these complaints about sexual apathy reflect a medical reality, and how much do they actually emanate from the anxious, overachieving, white upper middle class?

This is compost. Utter compost. There is no evidence whatsoever that there is some new sexual malaise that 'appears to have sunk over the country,' and Paglia gives us exactly zero evidence on such a giant change happening over time or in the recent past. Neither is there any evidence that the 'overachieving white upper middle class' is somehow behind the demands for female viagra.

What's behind it is the medical industry which created Viagra for men (and with unforeseen side effects!) and now tries to get another equally large market out of women. This has nothing to do with the level of libidos somehow having dropped. But of course it allows Paglia to go and dig around in that old compost of hers for some less digested bits of bullshit:

Androgynous female heros have a dampening effect on the libidos of someone! Who? Heterosexual women? I doubt it. But the story was supposed to be about women's libidos, right? Suddenly it's about heterosexual men not desiring women who have low voices and artificial boobs.

She doesn't mention porn at all. I bet you a zillion grillion units of your choice that many more men have watched porn than those androgynous female heros, and if there is anything that has changed in the last two decades it is easy and hidden access to porn. But in Paglia's world men watch Alien and no porn whatsoever.

But what does any of that have to do with female Viagra? Nothing, as far as I can tell. The whole piece sounds so much like my limbering-up exercises when I start writing; the kind of word salad one gets when clearing the brain as one would clear the throat:

Start with lack of female libido which must exist for the story to grow wings but then quickly move to talking about male libido (which already has Viagra!) and how it must be hurt by the way men are neutered (clipclip) and pussy-whipped into something nobody in their right mind would want to fuck. Instead, give me the old Italian countryside, with haystacks and a violent rape of a peasant woman who really does like it after the bruises fade. Because sex is violence and violence is sex and all women like to be at the receiving end of that violence.

Except, of course, Camille Paglia.

Hmm. Perhaps I should post my limbering exercises, too?

Fascinating how easily an anti-feminist piece gets posted in these days. If I hadn't been recently told that men are ending and that feminazis are in power everywhere I'd feel a little surprised. But of course Paglia is just a counterpoint to all those thousands and thousands of feminist articles we read every day in the NYT. Maureen Dowd, among the many, many female columnists must be balanced, right?

OK. That was my very own compost. The truth is that we still live in backlash times. It's as if the powers-that-be hear invisible feminist voices inside their heads, all the time, and must, yes, must counterbalance them by offering column space to Paglia.

Assholes.

It’s Time For Loaded Up Liberals To Make A Showing [Anthony McCarthy]

Now that prominent Republicans like Sarah Palin, Republican candidates for the Senate and other offices are making thinly veiled threats of assassination and insurrection as politics by other means, it’s high time for folks on the left to start investigating the use of “second amendment remedies” to address our political frustrations The right wing members of the Supreme Court are encouraging these nut cases in only slightly more veiled language. Together, they’re turning the United States into one big bad neighborhood. I think it’s time we responded in the way they’ve handed us. The growing prevalence of right wing loons carrying arms at public events makes it necessary to form a new group. Actually, to form a number of new groups dedicated to openly and conspicuously carrying guns in the kinds of displays that are beginning to make the United States look like a pale, over-fed version of Somalia.

Gays With Guns would be one of these groups with a very good reason to begin attending appearances by Republican politicians, right wing religious figures, the whole alphabet soup of right wing front groups that have every letter covered. I can’t imagine anything that the right wing would welcome more than a large number of aggressive gay folk exercising their “second amendment rights”. How could they object?

Women With Weapons is certainly a group that could make a good showing at anti-choice events, Hooters Clubs, Video Game conventions..... the opportunities for a mind blowing show of constitutional rights by this group are more abundant than for just about any other.

I’d really like to see Mexicans With Magnums, Latins Loaded-Up and other such groups appearing with their large, legal armaments showing up to Anti-immigration events, Glenn Beck and Lou Dobbs appearances, etc.

I could go on finding alliterative names for potential groups all night.

The prospect of hanging is supposed to be a great aid in concentrating the attention. I can’t think of something the country needs more than focused attention. It certainly seems to be rather blase about politicians threatening armed violence against the government. This issue is over-ripe for it as we head into the election season. I think the Supreme Court, Republicans and Blue Dogs and, indeed, the entire right should be allowed to see that it’s not only straight, white conservatives who have the ability to amass arsenals and brandish them in public. Somehow, I think if these and other groups began to show up armed to the teeth in venues where prominent Republican politicians were appearing, it might have a remarkable effect in bringing things into focus.

Tiny Houses As If People Really Mattered [Anthony McCarthy]

Note: I’m unable to write this morning. Given that unemployment insurance extension is being blocked in the Senate, and, so, many more people will be unable to afford housing I thought I’d repost these two items from 2007 with more links to resources, which generally have worth while links of their own. I'll probably be writing about homeless people more in the coming months.

When they retired from the farm, my grandparents lived in "the little house", about 16 feet square, four rooms and a water closet. There was also an outhouse in a tiny, unattached shed. Though it was a perfectly good place for two people to live and they had lived there with two of their children early in their marriage, it would probably never be allowed today. At least not unless it was on wheels.

The tiny house movement is a good thing, a rational reaction to the absurd mega-mansions that people have been gulled into wanting. Seems that a lot of people are rethinking letting a large house and mortgage eat up their lives. While some of the tiny houses are jewels of traditional and modern architecture, those are out of the income range of many who you really need a tiny house. As the Cooper Hewitt exhibit which featured the Mad Housers pointed out, there are 90% of the world who need to get through a life as well.

The Mad Housers began in Atlanta, Georgia. It's a group which builds tiny shacks for homeless people where they can sleep and get out of the elements. The houses are built by volunteers of donated materials and then turned over to the people they are built for. Their website shows two basic models, with plans. There is the 6x8' house with a sleeping loft and the 4x8' "low rider" for situations in which the housing has to be really inconspicuous. In northern climates they would have to include insulation, even with the tiny, funky home-made wood stoves they provide. While I'm not sure about the stoves, they say they've got a good record of safety. Still, I'd like to see one before I decide on it.

The Housers, like any well thought out shoestring group, has to be very careful about where they expend their limited resources and volunteer time. While the placement of the huts is often of marginal legality, there are some situations more marginal than others. I'm impressed at their practicality and realism. Some of their clients use the huts as a way to get out of destitution some of their clients are so down and out that they will probably never climb out.

Lending people money at a ruinous rate of interest, risking their falling into destitution is not only legal, it's encouraged by banking and lending laws. Providing housing for people living in the rough makes you an outlaw. Sometimes, at least. In their FAQ there is one dealing with the advisability of providing housing for people without houses as if being disparately poor without a place to sleep wasn't bad enough. Somewhere in the things I read for this post someone asks if people would rather have someone sleeping in their doorway or in one of these huts. Maybe that question is the best answer.

Taking Care of Unfinished Business
Or A Modest Disposal.

Responding to the post last week about the Mad Housers huts for destitute people, some readers asked what the inhabitants of these tiny huts would do about toilet facilities. I appreciate the practicality of their question about this, perhaps, second most important issue facing anyone who would live in such a tiny house. It could be pointed out that the Mad Housers' clients, already being homeless, would have long ago found ways to deal with the problem. You don' t need to have a house to have the need of a toilet. One can imagine many solutions, some of them quite hygienic, some far from it.

There is a simple alternative that might be considered, especially now that it's freezing cold. I read The Humanure Handbook a number of years back* and am pleased to find out that it is available as a free online download. When properly done, the odor is reported to be minimal and the sanitary implications minor and far simpler than dealing with plumbing. That is when it's properly done. You will want to observe the advice given in the book strictly, especially keeping the necessary compost well away from water sources and fully composting the waste. If you think the idea of using human waste as fertilizer is repugnant, there is an excellent chance that you are already eating food that is grown using some kind of human waste now. Human waste is widely used as fertilizer, wouldn't it be best to do so in a way that is more likely to render it safer?** That's not to mention that even the meat industry recommends treating poultry and other meat as if was hazardous waste. E coli, for Pete's sake. Enough said?

For some people finding a source of clean, uncontaminated, pressure-treated-free, sawdust or a substitute is probably the greatest obstacle but for many that might not be insurmountable. Jenkin's system is a better way than to dump it into the drinking water, a practice that has been accepted with remarkable equanimity considering what it means. We are all down stream.

* No further personal details will be given.

** Ideally all waste should be used to generate bio-gas to produce energy and cut down on methane being released into the atmosphere. Methane is known to be a lot more of a problem than carbon dioxide in global warming. There are many small scale biogas plant plans available.

UPDATE: From My E-mail Box Is this supposed to be funny?

The issue achieves a sense of urgency through the natural concerns of some astute readers. Actually, it's an issue to which we all give our full, though unconsidered, concern at least once a day. If we are fortunate. Though it's an issue which we are used to allowing to pass unconsidered shortly after the business is concluded. The problem, is however, a problem that is quite important and which requires more reflection. While we are happy to be relieved of it, untroubled, the problems flowing from it don't just float away never to trouble us again. Even with our modern systems of distraction and denial, the ramifications will inevitably pile up and demand our attention. It's a rather unsavory problem but one which becomes far more than distasteful when ignored.

Experience teaches us, though that such things won't be seriously considered; however, when someone does feel the necessity of bringing it forth. Not without a leavening in the lump. As it were. Still, it's not a subject that naturally lends itself to a dry wit, though a stale jokes are often resorted to. I think it's best to just let nature take its course, oiling the skids as necessary.

Different ways to see and know (by Suzie)

If a food critic says the pomegranate glaze tantalizes the tongue, she’s really saying, “I liked it, and I think you will, too.” But she refers to a disembodied tongue, a tongue that belongs to no one in particular, to avoid using I, I, I over and over. Unfortunately, avoiding the first person gives a false sense of objectivity. It obscures the writer’s point of view.

The tension between different points of view, between objectivity and subjectivity, has been on my mind since Echidne first wrote about “The Killer Inside Me” May 21, and a movie critic dropped by to argue. Bear with me as I use “Killer” to illustrate my points.

The narrator of the film is a violent sociopath who is especially brutal to women. Director Michael Winterbottom says:

Lou Ford is a very extreme kind of character, but at the same time, everyone does things like treat people badly who are closer to them, who are self-destructive, you see that all around you.

Talk like this, which disappears gender, reinforces the battle-of-the-sexes myth, in which men hurt women and women hurt men, and it all equals out. It doesn’t. Men commit much more serious violence against women than vice versa.

The two actors who play the women attacked by Lou distance themselves from characters they see as self-destructive. Their comments remind me of women who think they are safe from violence because they are not like victims in one way or another.

Kate Hudson, who considers herself empathetic, says about her character: “There is something kind of masochistic about her. She wasn’t easy to empathise with.” Jessica Alba, who plays a prostitute, says:

It really was the most tragic of love stories. I also felt she had a death wish, because she was always egging him on and provoking him. She finally found a man who was man enough to go through with it.

“Anyone who might find the violence in this movie gratifying or arousing is already virtually beyond the bounds of professional help,” writes Andrew O’Hehir in an updated review titled “Much Ado about Misogyny.” I assume he means the violence that doesn’t involve sex. Because lot’s of men find the S/M arousing. Just Google Alba’s name and “spanked.” She plays a prostitute, and Casey Affleck is Lou, a deputy sheriff. She hits him, and he throws her on a bed and beats her with his belt. Her misery soon turns to pleasure. Great. Another image of a woman who wants to be tamed, who wants rough sex. Since she’s a prostitute, you know she loved it. Or, as Alba suggests, she was thrilled that she finally found a lover who could be “man enough” to kill her.

Critics have noted that we learn little about the women, compared with Lou. Some identify with no one in the film, while some – to my horror – identify with the killer. Owen Gleiberman writes: “… as Lou betrays, lies, and murders again, our identification with him is slowly severed.”

Similarly, O’Hehir writes of “this handsome, intriguing good-boy/bad-boy character, in whom we have invested at least a little prurient identification” before he tries to beat his lover to death. The audience feels “that we are implicated in the crime.”

Who is this “we”? What significance does the movie have for people with a different perspective, who don’t feel any identification with Lou, who didn't find the sex hot?

He talks about a “simplistic and uninformed” viewpoint, followed by: “I'm reminded of then-Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's attacks on the ‘Grand Theft Auto’ games, which she clearly hadn't even looked at, let alone tried to play.” Steve Simels made a similar argument to those of us who criticized “Killer” before its release.

I’m not saying that people who can watch awful things are themselves awful, but that doesn't make them more objective than people who can't stomach brutal violence against women. Knowledge of male violence can be informative when judging a movie depicting it.

An interesting coda: I checked to see if Simels had written a review, only to find him pleased that O’Hehir had mentioned him in another piece.

… but as far as I'm concerned he still owes me big time. The week before, also in Salon, he posted a Sundance Fesitval dispatch on Michael Winterbottom's forthcoming film version of Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me which suggested that the film might be worth seeing despite its disturbing depictions of violence. This occasioned some serious garment-rending over at a feminist-oriented website I look at occasionally, and when I suggested in a forum over there that it might be appropriate to hold off on said rending until one had, you know, actually seen the movie...well, let's just say it wasn't my most popular suggestion this year."

Sounds like he defended O'Hehir, right? Wrong. In his comments to Echidne's original post, he said some lines of O'Hehir's were "pretentious bullshit." He later called them "errant nonsense. So why I'm obligated to defend the idiot is beyond me." And finally, "I think the reviewer has, at the very least...issues." Perhaps his perspective changed as he changed audiences.

Friday critter blogging (by Suzie)

Which is the bigger dog?

It's Mi Hija, the white one in the background. My Ginger, a Chihuahua, is in the foreground. Bonnie, Mi Hija's mama, took the photo while Ginger-sitting for me.

Perspective is a tricky thing. More on that later today.

Thursday, Again. And The Accusations Against Al Gore.

On posts: There are always some big ones that got away. Like in a fishing tale. I often have these ghost posts in my mind or even in a draft form. Why some posts stay that way is a mystery, though one good reason is that certain topics require so much work that I couldn't write on anything else the whole week, whereas others are half-thoughts which don't quite make it to the stage where I want to expose them for scrutiny. Others are my pet posts which nobody else probably likes (such as planned obsolescence and computers where the obsolescence is now front-loaded and may not in fact raise profits or my desire to have a prehensile tail and all the uses it could have.)

And then you get topics like the accusations against Al Gore. Those just cropped up, and although I have read everything I can find on the case I don't have enough information to be the judge and the jury on it yet. What I do dislike, however, is the new pattern I see where women are first thought of as lying when it comes to accusations of sexual assault.

I'm sure that some women do lie. I'm also equally sure that there are people who burn down a warehouse to collect on the insurance or people who otherwise stage crimes. Yet those cases are not used as an argument about the prevalence of some crime in general or about the presumed innocence of victims who come forward. Rape, however, is beginning to be different*.

And this is bad for the victims of rape. A comment to this post argued that if this accusation is a false one it makes getting justice more difficult for women who actually have been attacked. That is a strange way of looking at it. It makes all women the same, once again: just a piece out of that amorphous pile of femaleness. It therefore argues that sexism in the form of statistical discrimination is AOK or at least understandable, and it puts the onus on this accuser (assumed to be making it all up) hurting other women rather than on -- oh, say the rapists.

Likewise, if the apriori assumption that rape accusations are false becomes more and more common then rapists have less to worry when they plan their crimes, as punishment will be even less likely than now.

Even less likely, because the court system already tends not to pursue cases which don't look very strong on the evidence, and because many rape victims do not want to undergo a second horrible experience by going to court.

That's what I worry about when reading all those blog comments about the accuser of Al Gore just being after his money or the Salon post about how celebrities are often the target of false accusations.

The problem with the latter argument is that we have no idea how many true allegations could be fielded against various celebrities, given that any victims of such might not come forward.

This means that we have no idea how common, in the relative sense, false sexual assault accusations against celebrities might be. That they seem common to the author of the Salon piece is probably because the false accusations, or those which are deemed false even if they are not, get the lion's share of publicity whether they are aimed against celebrities or not.

None of this is directly about the accusations against Al Gore. But these are my thoughts on how feminist thinking would interact with these news.
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*MB pointed out that the law has had such a tendency for a long time and she is quite right. I had in mind a shift in the public coverage of rapes and alleged rapes rather than the overall bias that has been and still is a problem in the judicial systems of many countries.

Australia's New Prime Minister

Has lady bits!

This is good news, because the more women in powerful posts we see the less we associate only masculinity with power and the easier gender equality will be.

Mmm. Twirls hair.

President Obama has congratulated Julia Gillard:

The White House press office released a statement Thursday saying, "President Obama offers his congratulations to Julia Gillard on her assumption of the position of Prime Minister of Australia and on the historic step of becoming Australia's first female prime minister.

We could create a long-term game out of the following: Which countries (and how many of them) get at least one female head of state (or its equivalent in power) before the United States does?

My guess is that quite a few do. It's not that Americans are so much more scared of women at the helm but that the political system here makes it harder to get women elected. The two-party system, in particular, makes all this much trickier, because it encourages dualistic thinking of all types.

Why Buy A Pig When You Can Get Cheap Sausage?

That is my (or probably someone else's) extremely rude reversal of the usual "Why buy a cow when you can get cheap milk?" (And yes, stupid spell-checker, I know that else's is wrong but it flows.) I wanted to put it into the post title because I'm so very nice and so very boring and so very snake-slippery that I have to provide something for the anti-feminists to attack later on (when I'm famous).

That reversal is most enlightening, I humbly think. It's worth 20,000 words at least, because it points out something many automatically take for granted when talking about heterosexual premarital sex and such, which is that men want the milk but women want the pig.

I have argued a zillion times that this stereotype simply isn't true. The evidence is visible if you want to look for it. For instance, women commit adultery, too! Women actually like sex! Some women like sex with people they don't love! Men actually like the cow! And so on and so on.

And not only is it not true, it is built on presumed animosity between men and women as groups of people, and yet that view does not come from feminists who are more likely to discuss gender as a group thing. It comes from the anti-feminists who believe that men just want sexual access and that women must refuse it until they get the ring and the meal ticket for life and other such goodies.

Note that I'm not describing my own views here but what I see as the invisible premise in all those conservative girls-gone-wild stories: Women should be the gatekeepers in the sexual soccer world cup and men should keep trying for goals all the time! Because you are on opposite teams, see.

Those are some of my thoughts when I read Amanda's response to a book review in the Atlantic Monthly(where else?) about a new book called Chastened, all about a woman who decided not to have sex for a year and lo and behold!:

Are you in love at the moment? Is there someone in your life?

I joked to a friend a couple months ago, "Oh, God, this book's coming out again. Maybe I should just hire somebody. Even my male friends took on the part of fiancé for that happy ending, however cynical we are, we still...But I think in a way it makes it more informative, and makes it more the experiment I was thinking of, because I'm implementing these lessons that I've learned. And I'm actually quite happy, actually quite content. There's been a lot less sex, but more romance. And a lot more emotional closeness.

So now she is all chastened.

The interview isn't that bad, I think, and the topic contains interesting angles. It refers to pornography and its coarsening (sticks out tongue here) effect on real-life sexual expectations. It points out that people, both men and women, may desire something more than just physical sex from at least one relationship. But then it hints at the ring on the ring finger as the ultimate reason why women, and not men, should choose to be chastened.

That's back to the-cow-and-the-milk argument*, though the author of the book makes other points, too, one being the right to say no when you really don't want to go to bed with someone.
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*Writing about topics like this one is difficult because I have two frameworks in my divine head. One is about an ideal world and what the rules would be in that, the other one is about the world I think exists right now. Sometimes the obvious solutions in the former make things more difficult in the latter, and sometimes the obvious solutions in the latter delay the wonderful day when we all tiptoe into that ideal world of the future.

And the reason why the title of this post sounds so impossibly silly is partly because marriage has not really been mostly about sex for women. It has been about survival, about a way to have enough to eat and a roof over one's head and about getting a group of people to support one in child-raising. Having sex without contraception outside marriage made the achievement of all those other objectives less likely, because of the labeling a woman would get and because she might now come with ready-made children that needed more support. Yet the conservative argument here assumes that men prefer milk to cows always and women prefer pigs to sausages always. It's just how it is.

Gals And Computers

A reader sent me a link to a piece about Mattel's online poll concerning the next occupation for the Barbie doll (yes, the thing with two mile long legs, no hips and breasts the size of aircraft carriers). The results:

Mattel recently conducted an online poll asking girls everywhere to choose Barbie's next occupation from the following choices — surgeon, architect, news anchor, environmentalist and computer engineer.

The overwhelming choice among the girls was news anchor. But adults in the blogosphere, on Twitter and Facebook launched their own campaign for computer engineer Barbie.

Mattel relented and decided to go with both, news anchor and computer engineer Barbie. "We couldn't ignore the outcry," said Michelle Chidoni, a spokeswoman for the company.

The Barbie brouhaha points to a key conundrum today when it comes to women and professions in science and technology. Many people see a need for more females in so-called STEM professions (science, technology, engineering and math). But fewer and fewer young women seem to be gravitating to such jobs, thanks in part to the geek factor.

That the girls picked a news anchor shows the importance of seeing women in various occupations. There are no female computer engineers on the television sets the children watch. These results also reminded me of the fact that when children pick among, say, ideal occupations they certainly pay attention to the social acceptability of a particular occupation for them.

This means that public-executioner-Barbie would get very few votes, naturally, but it also means that occupations which are not viewed with approval for women in general will not get as many votes. Children have radars about this.

To return to women and computer science, the field has an odd history. Go back thirty years and you find a much higher percentage of women taking computer science in undergraduate education! Then the percentages drop, very fast, until suddenly computer science has become the field the evo-psychos quote when arguing that women just naturally and biologically do not like numbers or abstract thinking in general.

Except for that odd history. If the dislike was that natural there shouldn't have been a different time. But there was:

Twenty-five years ago, more young women in colleges and universities were drawn to computer science than today. From 1971 to 1983, incoming freshman women who declared an intention to major in computer science jumped eightfold, to 4 percent from about 0.5 percent.

Jonathan Kane, a professor of mathematics and computer science at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, recalls the mid-1980s, when women made up 40 percent of the students who majored in management computer systems, the second most popular major on campus. But soon after, the number of students majoring in the program had fallen about 75 percent, reflecting a nationwide trend, and the number of women fell even more. "I asked at a department meeting," he says, " 'Where have the women gone?' It wasn't clear." His theory is that young women earlier had felt comfortable pursing the major because the male subculture of action gaming had yet to appear.

And:

Globe review shows that the proportion of women among bachelor's degree recipients in computer science peaked at 37 percent in 1985 and then went on the decline. Women have comprised about 28 percent of computer science bachelor's degree recipients in the last few years, and in the elite confines of research universities, only 17 percent of graduates are women. (The percentage of women among PhD recipients has grown, but still languishes at around 20 percent.)

And (though the most recent number here looks out of the pattern to me):

And in 2008, women earned only 18 percent of computer science degrees, compared to 37 percent in 1985.

This is all extremely curious. What I really should have done for this piece is to research what those women who got degrees in computer science in the 1980s did with them. Do they work in the field? If not, what is the reason? But I don't have time for that.

Still, I think the Geek Hypothesis has some truth in it. The field turned into geekdom so very fast and the stereotype of a geek is a guy, living in a sub-basement with other geeks and delivered pizza and coming out only during the hours of the night. Note that I like geeks a lot and do not agree to these stereotypes. But they are out there, and I have seen men employ them in a defensive manner, not necessarily to keep women out but with that effect. For instance, reading posts about how geeks get all the girls with big tits does tend to make a female reader feel as if she might never be allowed into that basement except the way the pizza is allowed in. Likewise, many of the geek sites are pretty sexist in their comments.

All this ties even more to something which is underplayed when people discuss women and the sciences:

To be the only woman in the room is bloody hard. I have done it enough to know. You get to be a) yourself (if lucky), b) the person that makes locker-room discussions impossible because of your very presence (as those discussions will be about boobs and how they are like pizza) and c) all womankind, used as a sounding board to what Women Think as well as the thing to attack when a girlfriend has pissed someone off or the thing to console someone for the same.

Then add to that even one woman-hater in the room! The other guys can be nice and neutral and still the whole atmosphere will be polluted for you. The solution is to get those critical coalitions of women into that room. About 30% will do it, in most cases. Once you have that level, the gender of the few women stops mattering and they become just your average geeks.

The newest article I linked to doesn't talk about this much, if at all. It talks about the framing of an occupation in male terms and tries to re-frame it in terms which would appeal to more women. And of course such a re-framing is needed! After all, much of computer science is exactly like languages and girls are supposed to do so well in them that they never shut up!

Mmm. Perhaps I should end this post here.

Today's Funny Misogynist I

One misogynist comment in that place where they now gather (the Atlantic Monthly) stated that women are useless creatures because the only reason they feel the faintest sexual desire is testosterone. And testosterone belongs to men!

Those horrible creatures have even stolen their hormone from men!

Then from an e-mail I got: Young women pay more for car insurance than young men (not true) because women have no three-dimensional spatial abilities and therefore should not be allowed to drive.

I've decided to share these things with you, sweeties.

McChrystalized

Stan McChrystal, the lean and mean attack dog. You are going to meet him at noon on the long and dusty streets of Somewhere in Afghanistan and he is going to be a faster draw than you are. Just count the notches in his guns, the ones which hang so relaxedly against his chaps-covered legs. Look into those pale eyes, squinted against the harsh light. Are they alive or are they dead? Do not look for mercy in Stan The Gun.

Unless you belong to his team, the team of killers and marauders and spy-masters. If you are lucky enough, you and Stan will go out with the boyz and get drunk while cracking rude jokes about all the people with fewer guns. You will dance together, you will hug together (rough and manly hugs only, with bruises left behind) while the French surrender monkeys only dream about a rod as stiff as yours.

OK. I got carried away while reading Michael Hasting's well-written Rolling Stone article on General Stan McChrystal and the way he plays the hard boyz game in Afghanistan. Hastings gets to go to places where I could never go and the response he gets I would never get. But a goddess can dream, and for a few seconds* I felt strangely attracted to the world the article painted: one where everything you do matters, where your word is the law, where your guns will kill people or not, depending on what you decide. A world of power or at least a world where power is the game. Because it all sounds like a John Le Carre novel, except without that one guy in the books who has deep feelings and thoughts.

I find it hard to shake, that unreal feeling. I find it hard to think of the human chess game where the Karzai-doll is dressed up as a leader, where he is moved from one opinion to another, where this warlord gets funding and that warlord gets killed, where the General badmouths the Vice-President and where we all then discuss whether the General should be fired or whether he is so important as the game-master that he must be retained, even when that means that the president will lose the penis-measuring part of the game.

It's an unreal feeling not only because I'm still facing McChrystal at the OK Corral in my mind (he having just downed a bottle of whisky and with a toothpick between his firmly pressed lips) but also because none of us has any say in the decision about McChrystal and his future. And because of the way the article weaves this wonderful story of exceptional masculine belligerence together with puny bites like these:

At one point on his trip to Paris, McChrystal checks his BlackBerry. "Oh, not another e-mail from Holbrooke," he groans. "I don't even want to open it." He clicks on the message and reads the salutation out loud, then stuffs the BlackBerry back in his pocket, not bothering to conceal his annoyance.

"Make sure you don't get any of that on your leg," an aide jokes, referring to the e-mail.

Or this

Now, flipping through printout cards of his speech in Paris, McChrystal wonders aloud what Biden question he might get today, and how he should respond. "I never know what's going to pop out until I'm up there, that's the problem," he says. Then, unable to help themselves, he and his staff imagine the general dismissing the vice president with a good one-liner.

"Are you asking about Vice President Biden?" McChrystal says with a laugh. "Who's that?"

"Biden?" suggests a top adviser. "Did you say: Bite Me?"

What's in those quotes is called bitching when women do it but here it is something else. Something honest and raw and real. Like a le Carre novel.

That's one possible reading. Another one reads like bedtime for General McChrystal, or perhaps not, depending on the Realpolitik of the situation and what might benefit some group in power the most in the short run or in the long run, what might win elections here in the United States and what might create "stability" in Afghanistan, whatever that means and assuming that it can be created at all.

If I only could shake off those images of Stan the Gun I could write something on the substantive questions in the article.
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*Well, a few minutes.

Insiders And Outsiders

Atrios linked to this post at Firedoglake:

Americans overwhelmingly rank jobs and the economy as the most important challenge facing this country, according to a new CBS News/"New York Times" poll. The disconnect between the Washington elites, who have been swept up in deficit hysteria, and the rest of the country couldn't be more stark.


CBS News/NYT Poll (PDF)
What do you think is the most important problem facing this country today?

Economy/Jobs: 40
Oil Spill in Gulf: 13
Health Care: 5
Budget Deficit/Nat'l Debt: 5
War/Iraq/Afghanistan: 3
Immigration: 3
Moral Values/Family Values: 2
Misc. Foreign Affairs: 2
Misc. Government Issues: 2
Politicians/Government: 2
Other: 20
DK/NA: 3

The point is naturally that the politicians in Washington D.C. are out of touch with little people and their concerns. It's a valid point. The reasons for that out-of-touchness may be partly as illogical as the look, but partly they are based on the location of the moneybags. Political campaigns can be used later on to lure at least some voters, but to get those campaigns started you need money. And the strings of the moneybags are held by people who don't really fret over unemployment but might be somewhat concerned about deficits.

Why? Because they are Big Earners and pay more taxes and because Big Earners don't lose their jobs and if they do they can live off their savings. Likewise, Big Earners tend not to have family and friends who are Little People, what with social segregation and the like.

All this may not be as important a reason for writing about the deficit and the need to cut a few more needy children off the welfare rolls than the current desire for Sensational Writing, the need to Present The Other Side. You know, like the stories about journalists trying to find the golden lining around the oil clouds. We all want to be jostled out of our boredom with sex, lies and inane counter-arguments.

But even if that is the reason for the current sensational streak in almost everything it is still based on some type of insider-outsider thinking. The outsiders can be treated as so much fodder because they are outsiders.

More Forced Birth Thoughts

I often read the comments in more mainstream places to posts about abortions, because I want to understand where the different arguments come from. A very common basic anti-abortion argument has to do with pulling oneself up by the bootstraps, always acting right, in a modified version suitable for the weaker and sillier sex: Women should cross their legs if they don't want to have children.

This opinion seems to be as common as the baby-killer argument if not more so. It is based on the idea that human beings are in complete control of their destiny. Nancy Reagan once created a "Just Say No" campaign for fighting drugs, and that's what is behind this forced birth response: You didn't say no. You asked for it, slut. Now enjoy the consequences!

This makes having a baby into a punishment which is a very odd "pro-life" value in itself. But it also doesn't assign the same punishment to the men who didn't cross their legs (tie a knot to it?). I have never seen an article about the need for men to understand that if they have sex with a woman they naturally expect to become fathers and must not whine when that happens. But I have read several articles about how very natural men wanting to have lots of sex without love is, and that sex is assumed to be without any negative consequences.

It could be that the posters who write about slutty women deserving their just desserts also run vigorous campaigns against slutty men. I doubt that, though. The Puritanism only crops up when the topic is women's sexuality.

We Are All Ambidextrous Now!

That's what Eleanor Clift says, anyway:

EMILY's List: Confronting the Growing Ambivalence Over Abortion

One of the issues that arose in a recent e-mail chain among the writers who contribute to WomanUp was regret that an organization like Emily's List, which helps elect Democratic women, only supports candidates who are pro-choice: "I believe there are other issues that are very important to women. So let's say a woman happens to be not pro-choice, but is pro everything else. Why exclude her?" It's a good question, and the answer dates back to the founding of Emily's List in 1985. At the time very few women held public office, and attitudes toward abortion rights divided sharply along political lines. The Republican Party called for a constitutional amendment to ban abortion, while Democrats fought against restrictions on reproductive rights and defended Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion.

Twenty-five years later, attitudes about abortion are a lot more nuanced. Just about every woman has seen her own or someone else's sonogram, and it's not so easy to insist that no laws need apply. Younger women have a more complex view of abortion, and they don't view the issue as passionately as their mothers. "If you ask them if they support abortion rights, they say they don't know or they don't want to answer that question," says Jen Bluestein, Emily's List communications director. For an organization created around the core mission of promoting reproductive choice, that could be a problem, and that's why its new president, 36-year old Stephanie Schriock, a native of Montana with a strong libertarian streak, is forging a new way forward.

Except she doesn't seem to do that, much, if you read the rest of the piece. It's one of those eat-your-cake-and-don't-get-fat posts. EMILY's List will still require the candidates it supports to be committed to upholding Roe v. Wade. That, my sweeties, is extreme enough for this country as we all know.

I made several starts on this post, simply because there are so many possible paths to take, from a statistical analysis of opinions on reproductive choice over the last forty years, to asking how it was that women in the past didn't know it was an embryo they were aborting but now they do know (thanks to sonograms!) to wondering if one can have fully informed opinions on reproductive choice in a country which at least in theory still offers that choice to women (how does one imagine the alternative?). But you know all that.

Still, the question Eleanor Clift poses in that quote is too tempting to ignore, the one about why not support a woman who is for everything but reproductive choice.

The answer is that women's equality depends on reproductive choice. Read about women's history if you don't think that is true. Go and read the misogynist sites if you don't think that is true. Think about what it means not to have control over your fertility in a world where societal support structures for families with children are minimal and where hands-on child care and responsibility for children is still pretty much viewed as women's job.

Now, reproductive choice is not synonymous with abortions. If we had perfect and safe birth control which would automatically be on until one wants to have children the lack of abortion rights would be fine. But that's not the world we live in.

I Hate New Hampshire

I do. Just drove through it today, because I had to, in order to get out of beautiful Vermont. And don't you dare tell me that I shouldn't hate New Hampshire, because it is most certainly hateworthy. Here's why:

I was parched for water so I stopped at one of those state of New Hampshire rest stops. The stop contained a building with vending machines, a building with a guy sitting behind a counter full of maps and a store selling alcohol. Water was to be had in the vending machines.

Except that the smallest bill I had was a tenner and the machines wouldn't accept that. I went to the store to see if they sold non-alcoholic beverages. They do not. Neither are they willing to change a ten-dollar note to something smaller.

Next I went to the man with the maps. He refused to change the note, too. He also told me that they used to have a money changing machine but someone robbed it so they removed it. Hence the need for me to die of thirst, naturally.

I finally managed to find 1.75 for the water vending machine. Except that nothing came out of the machine. Then I kicked it. And drove away parched with scaling scales and all.

Both Sides Now

This is a new radio show featuring two women:

Both Sides Now is a new weekend radio show offering both sides on every issue, with Arianna Huffington, editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post, and Mary Matalin, former top aide to the Bush/Cheney White House. Hosted by Mark Green.

Loads of shows feature two or three men, of course, so it's nice to hear two women hashing it out. Except for who these two women are: One W-Stands-For-Women Bushist and one woman whose news website sells by having tit pics on the front page.

So we are not going to hear interesting feminist opinions in that show. Which may be a blessing in disguise as most such debates (with two sides) on feminist questions juxtapose "women really ARE human beings" with "women are crap". And we view that as objective and neutral.

The Other Half Of The Question [Anthony McCarthy]

This morning I asked a half of a question, Would you want the friends of your children, their boyfriends, girlfriends to have their minds formed by the worst of media?

That was the less troubling half of it. The more troubling half is would you want the enemies of your children, their sadistic boy or girl friend, a very potentially violent school mate who they might not even know, to have their minds informed by the worst of media? Because they could very likely have that last one now.

That is a question that the media libertarians should have to answer, that is also a question that liberals who believe the situation as it lies is tolerable forced on them. I don’t think it is tolerable. I don’t think there is any reason for anyone to just accept it because they think that question has been settled because the Supreme Court has spoken.

There is a lot more to think about at Nancy Carlsson-Paige’s website.

I don’t have any idea what she would think of my post, which should not be taken as representative of her thinking, it is my sole responsibility.

Happy Fathers' Day

To all you dads out there. I'm giving you cute dog pictures as a present.

Remember Sasha? To refresh your memory, this is how she used to look:





And this is how she looks now:





Pictures by Doug.

I Don’t Believe It Anymore I’m Not Pretending I Do [Anthony McCarthy]

This has been developing over the last several months.

When I sat down to write this post it was going to be about another story in today’s paper about a teenager being tormented by bullies in her school. As that story was forming itself on the screen, details about the campaign of terror waged against one child, I changed my mind.

I decided to say instead, I just don’t believe it anymore. I believe that child’s oppression is the result of what her oppressors think and where they learned that from. And I think it’s clear where some of it comes from. Their behavior is the result of it.

I don’t believe the predominant dogma of media libertarianism, I won’t fall for it anymore. I don’t believe that we have to be fair to malignant media or its producers or those who sell it or even those who consume it. I don’t believe they deserve it, they don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt anymore. I’m not going to be their stooge or carry their water. I don’t believe that liberalism and a decent life can survive in a society that gives media carrying malignant content an absolutely free reign.

When you let anything into the media stream you’re going to get seductive violent, sexist, hateful crap that will be seen by children and others who will learn to be twisted, mean, selfish, sociopathic units of consumption instead of people you would want to encounter. Not people you’d want to meet in person, not even on the other end of the telephone line or processing your online order.

And if that’s true for you, as an adult, it is many times more true for your children and other children.

The clear fact that different media had different effects and so probably shouldn’t be considered the same kind of thing as a printed text, didn’t occur to me until sometime in the 1980s when someone told me that a couple in town habitually watched porn videos with their children in the room with them. I didn’t make the connection between having a machine to show movies in your house with it becoming not only possible to watch the most depraved forms of pornography and violence with the youngest children, but that, inevitably, it would often be done. I did know that none of the children in that family was older than ten and that they went to school with my nieces and nephews. Consider that. YOU might just turn it off, you might protect your children from the effects of the worst the entertainment industry offers but they almost certainly will be in school with children who have been imbibing it since they were in diapers. Would you want the friends of your children, their boyfriends, girlfriends to have their minds formed by the worst of media? Because that’s the situation we’re in now thanks to technology mixed with media libertarianism.

They are in your children’s schools, your children won’t be able to avoid them. And, don’t lie to yourselves, the chances are you children will be seeing the same commercial depravity that those young horrors are, if not in your home while you’re assuming they’re doing their homework online or in their friends’ homes.

You might want to listen to this interview with Nancy Carlsson-Paige about the effects of media on young children. In a piece she wrote with Diane E. Levin they point out some really horrific facts:

Children in the United States are swimming in a culture of violence which has its effects from subtle to deadly on every child. The violence comes in many forms--family abuse, violence on the streets, in the community, violence in the news. Every 10 seconds a child in this country is abused or neglected. Every 2 hours a child is killed by a firearm.

And then there is entertainment violence--every child's automatic membership in a media-saturated, popular culture that glorifies violence through images, actions, and models marketed to children via television, toys and other products, videos, video games, and Hollywood films. On television alone, children see 32 acts of violence every hour and over 1,000 murders a year. Teachers and researchers have been warning for more than a decade that this violent culture marketed to children has harmful effects, both in the present and for the long term.

It's been pointed out a number of times, here and elsewhere that between three and four women a day are murdered in the United States because they are women. It’s been stated that this is a lynching campaign against women, a terror campaign that kills many and robs all women of their full freedom. Media that feeds social misogyny encourages that violence. And we see the same campaign against children. Twelve children a day killed by firearms, I haven’t read enough yet to make any parallel to lynching but it is clearly a disaster that is killing more than 4,300 children a year. It’s not hard to imagine that the psychological effects on the rest of children can’t be good. And their turning 18 isn’t going to fix that.

The pretense of media libertarianism that began in the 1950s was that the product an unrestricted media would bring would be innocuous, that “studies showed” there wasn’t a correlation between media violence and violence in society. I won’t go into the character of those “studies” except to say they were junk science. And the media didn’t even believe it themselves. We’ve noted here before that the same line of “no effect” wasn’t the same one they were selling to advertisers the entire time as they touted the ability of media to influence behavior. But all that was in a much different media. TV was under content codes, there were no home videos or computers. About the only thing that is the same is print and that was regulated for content too, especially graphic content.

I just don’t believe it anymore, I’m not willing to pretend I do. We live in a country where the Supreme Court has declared that the protection of children isn’t a greater interest than the entertainment of adults. The highest authorities in our country have abdicated adult responsibility on behalf of commercial media and its distributors. And in the name of freedom. Burning the village to save the village wasn’t a more ironic concept. In that, I think the judicial system has adopted and extended the same two ended lie that the media libertarians were pushing. Only they are embedding it into the law of the land. The rest of government is lying right along with them.

I especially don’t believe that there is any rational reason that a distinction can’t be made between text and photography and video and live performance. The founding fathers might have been ignorant of the potential difference, in 2010 there is no excuse for us to pretend we don’t know that.

Liberalism has been declining the entire time that media libertarianism has been rising. That isn’t any kind of paradox unless you mistook the reason for liberalism to ever have existed to begin with. Liberalism has been twisted into libertarianism along the way. The seductive message of liberty on behalf of Ulysses and other great works of fiction have made liberals forget that their purpose isn’t to be impartial. It made liberals forget that they have no business suspending judgement. The purpose of liberalism is to promote ends, it is to push an agenda and to oppose forces in the media that oppose that agenda. Equality, a decent peaceful life, an informed electorate, and a host of other benefits to the world are the real goal of liberalism. That’s what I still believe in. And pretending it was wrong for us to make distinctions even among books (which have no inherent right) was among the stupidest acts of capitulation in this decline. Putting Last Exit to Brooklyn on public library shelves was never any serious concern of real liberals. The message of the book is hardly a promotion of womens’ rights, equality or anything positive. The content makes it entirely different from information about contraception and gender equality and safer sex or sex in the context of mutual respect and affection. It is possible to distinguish the necessary from the malignant, the positive from the oppressive. They should have let the illiberal junk fight it out on its own.

I don’t believe that all media is equal or deserves to be equal or that it should all be treated the same way. I believe that liberalism that has adopted media or corporate libertarianism has ceased to be liberal. I’m not buying those transparent libertarian lies anymore. I think it’s possible to make distinctions between malignant media and media that isn’t, I think that if we ever want a decent society it is necessary to come up with the processes for doing that while protecting media that is beneficial. If it isn’t, we are doomed to becoming a species dominated by psychopaths.

Media that promotes the opposite of equality and treating people and the world decently should be opposed, it’s not the equal of media that promotes good, it appeals to the worst in us, the most selfish in us. It’s selfishness is seductive and gives it power that media promoting unselfishness will not have. It should be opposed.