Avastin: The Pursuit of Last False Hopes, Extinguished (by Skylanda)

In the past month, the Food and Drug Administration yanked its formal stamp of approval on Avastin – a chemotherapy drug designed to starve tumors of their blood supply – for the advanced stages of breast cancer. Because the drug still carries approval for other indications (especially late-stage colon cancer), patients can still obtain the drug by prescription for off-label use. But because it will lack formal indications for breast cancer, insurers are highly unlikely to continue paying for it. And at an estimated $100,000 per year for sustained use, Avastin is one of the most expensive drugs ever to hit the pharmaceutical market; it is very unlikely that few if any breast cancer patients will be paying for it on their own.

The outcry was immediate and predictable. Breast cancer advocates of some stripes decried the decision as a crime against women’s health – a travesty against hope. The opposition notes that the costs come with desperately little proven benefit, and that the drain on health care resource might go to uses that better suit both breast cancer patients and others who desperately need a slice of the health care pie. (A notably contrary voice in the debate has been the always-stalwart Breast Cancer Action, which applauded the FDA for revoking approval of Avastin, and implored the FDA to “uphold stringent drug approval standards over hasty access without legitimate clinical benefit”). Either way, one can bet the FDA did not tackle this bombshell topic lightly.

On the technical side, the FDA’s role is to protect and promote health, and they may be doing just that by revoking this specific indication for Avastin: in defense of women’s health, the risks of Avastin – risks like heart failure, internal hemorrhage, and intestinal perforation – come with little to no extension of life in the face of metastatic disease.

On the political side, the enemy of Avastin access is not necessarily the FDA: the FDA did not remove access to Avastin – the functional result of the decision was simply that Avastin will likely not be paid for by insurance because it no longer has an official indication for breast cancer specifically. (Off-label prescribing is allowed for most medications on the market with some rare exceptions – as long as a medications is FDA-approved, doctors can prescribe it for just about any indication, though insurance is less likely to cover expensive medications for unapproved uses.) If the medication were reasonably priced, this would not be an issue; instead, continuous use of the medication costs more than a mortgage on a split-level two-car garage house in most midwestern cities. But there is little outcry against Roche/Genentech, the makers of the drug, for their outrageous price gouging – an implicit collusion between the activist voice and the profit-makers that suspiciously mimics the dynamic between a hostage-taker and the sufferer of an obtuse form of Stockholm syndrome. While breast cancer activism has largely aimed its wrath at the FDA, few outside of Breast Cancer Action have squared off against Roche/Genentech for their rapacious pricing scheme that truly forms the barrier between patients and last-ditch use of the drug.

Avastin is not the first or last drug to land in the middle of such controversy over end-of-life access to drugs with potentially sweeping effects on both disease and remaining normal tissue. The compassionate use movement did not start with antiretroviral drugs – the revolutionary compounds developed in the early 1990s to combat AIDS – but that’s where the move to expedite trials and allow dying adults the right to off-label use outside of regulated trials got a foothold. And perhaps rightly so: during the worst of the AIDS epidemic, the rapid mortality rate far outstripped the ability of formal trials to absorb the number of people who could benefit from them – people who had nothing at all to lose. There is likely no way now to know for sure now, but some AIDS patients probably died faster from unproven and ultimately harmful experimental drugs. Some got the miracles they sought, miracles that are now go by routine names like nevirapine and abacavir, Combivir and Kaletra. This is the legacy that Avastin was born into when it was approved in 2004, and this is the environment that Roche/Genentech banks on when it faces down the FDA with a cadre of its own medico-legal experts backed by an army of breast cancer patients and family girded to fight the battle for a drug that annual nets the pharmaceutical conglomerate some several billion dollars – a sum that will take a large hit in the wake of the FDA’s recent decision. (Bizarrely, one line of this activism invokes a strain of libertarian reasoning that is equally circular as it is paranoid: that Avastin’s revocation by the FDA as a secret victory for ObamaCare socialist cost-control measures – in the same sentence decrying that Medicare will no longer cover the drug without FDA coverage, without ever wondering why Avastin costs so damn much in the first place. Government hands off my Medicare? Indeed.)

So to answer to the real root of whether Avastin should be available to women with stage-four breast cancer – whether the FDA was acting in the best interest of women at large and women with this horrific disease in particular – one also must now ask some tough questions beyond evidence and cost-effectiveness: Is it enough to rely on the internal narrative of the breast cancer patient – the first-person ethnographic voice that drives much of activism in the internet age – when this narrative may conflict openly with medical evidence? Can we rely on patient self-advocacy, when that patient self-advocacy movement had been so intentionally and powerfully tainted by the pharmaceutical manufacturers whose profits rely on the very lucrative and politically powerful business of breast cancer activism?

Every terminally ill person dreams of this age of miracles that AIDS sufferers received in the 1990s – a last-minute Lazarus reprieve that stays the executioner’s bell of their disease. Every pharmaceutical company knows this, and none have shown any moral restraint in invoking this sentiment and this desperation to their advantage, while twisting the knife of a substantial price tag into the backs of sick and dying consumers. As profit-generating entities, this is, after all, their raison d’etre. Pharmaceutical companies are like your distant acquaintance that shows up with supper when you’re sick, only to seduce your husband behind your back: they appear with cheery illusions of comfort. But they are not your friend.

Reasonable solutions are possible, but are unlikely to be invoked. Roche/Genentech could provide the few breast cancer patients who have actually responded to Avastin with supplies of the drug at cost – a true invocation of the phrase “compassionate use” – until this generation of patients fades out; with over a billion dollars a year in profits, this isn’t an unreasonable request. Insurers could also look at these few with some exception in mind. Moreover, research needs to be done (and probably already is) to understand and ultimately predict those exceptional Avastin responders – much as we understand why some breast cancers respond to tamoxifen and Herceptin, and others do not – and tailor chemotherapy regimens specifically for use specifically for people most likely to benefit from Avastin.

Until then, however, the FDA decision stands. Will the decision ultimately save or harm the lives of women with end-stage breast cancer? That remains to be seen.

Cross-posted from my newly relocated and relaunched blog, America, Love it or Heal It.

On Cleaning

I'm cleaning house. This is an important announcement, because I haven't got to it very much in the recent months.

My biggest cleaning problem is that I like to clean seams in appliances with a toothpick when I get going and seriously think about unscrewing the plates around light switches so that I could clean behind them, so nothing ever gets finished to my satisfaction. Or rather the Snakepit Inc. is on a pendulum between two cleaning extremities.

Speaking of cleaning, why isn't ease of cleaning a design requirement? Or if it is, who lets through all those non-cleanable gadgets? In my bitter moments I think this is caused by the gadget designers never having cleaned anything at all, not even their own ears. Because they can't hear the complaints.

Or are people not complaining? We should be.

Today's Cartoon

Via Erin PDX, can be found here.

Brush Me Pretty, Please

This is a fun site. It lets you toggle between a picture as it was initially taken and the airbrushed version which probably was used for publication. What percentage of all published photos are airbrushed? Does anyone know?

Perhaps we will know in the future:

Two Dartmouth computer scientists, though, created a program that can test how much a picture has been photoshopped. Their program accurately predicts how much humans think an image has been altered from its original. And for those of us who are still not aware how pervasive airbrushing is — and how drastic the changes can be — they included a nifty and mesmerizing tool that allows you to toggle between the original and final versions of pictures of celebrities and stock photos. It’s pretty shocking how much they all change.
This program has some real potential: imagine if advertisers and magazine photographers had to label every photoshopped image with its score. That would not only curb the excesses of airbrushing, but would show how unrealistic modern advertisements are — people could see just how many changes a typical image undergoes.

I have written about airbrushing before, given that one of its major uses is to make female fashion models and celebrities look slimmer and smoother. That creates, over time, the impression that unachievable perfection is actually not unachievable, but quite common, and that you, poor thing, are the only one with wrinkles or zits or fat or whatever.

The health concerns of airbrushing are mostly about eating disorders. From that point of view this is noteworthy: The Swedish fashion giant, H&M, now uses computer generated standard bodies for its models, with only the heads being interchangeable. And the skin color. That standard body is this:

The body stays constant, diversity is an add-on feature. The company spokesperson stated that the computer-generated body gives them one standard body to show the clothes on. Which is true. But why that particular body?

It is not a common shape, statistically speaking, and that is where the fear of eating disorders rears its ugly head. If a very slim body is presented as the common type in fashion magazines and on clothing websites, how do we tell young girls that other body shapes are, in fact, more common and equally acceptable? That they might be healthier for your particular frame and genetics?

I don't think the perception of what is desirable in women's bodies is just a problem among young girls, say. It's a societal judgment, these days. If you travel on the net as much as I do you will find this to be true. Just read the comments attached to any YouTube song by Adele, say.

More on Newt Gingrich And The Forced Birthers

He forgot to obey the wingnut definitions in the context of abortion but swiftly changed his mind. Good boy, Newtie, good boy! Have another wife.

Here's the summary:

Newt Gingrich has moved quickly to repair any potential fallout from his remarks last Friday to ABC's Jake Tapper in which he said that life begins at the "successful implantation" of a fertilized egg, rather than at conception. 
That is heresy to the pro-life movement, and had the potential to complicate Gingrich's rise in the Republican presidential polls, especially in crucial states like Iowa and South Carolina, whose early caucuses and primary are dominated by conservative Christian voters. 
"As I have stated many times throughout the course of my public life, I believe that human life begins at conception," Gingrich said in a statement posted Saturday on his campaign's website and sent to Joshua Mercer at CatholicVote.org, a conservative political site that had first called attention to -- and sharply criticized -- Gingrich's statement.

Too bad Newt is not a woman. Then he could walk his talk. For instance, if he happened to get a ruptured ectopic pregnancy, he could just let himself die rather than have the fertilized egg removed. But even as a man he could start a giant movement to have all those frozen fertilized eggs in fertility clinics implanted in forced birthers.

So the viper tongue part of me got the upper hand this morning. It happens, my friends. After too much stupidity in my reading menu.

This Is Neat

Millionaires saying: "Tax me!" And they are not masochists.





Added later: But some of the comments are utterly hilarious. A few wingnuts there don't seem to have a functioning brain at all. One commenter threatened anyone coming after his/her money (less than 50,000 dollars a year) for more taxes.

Given that the video is about millionaires, getting that interpretation from it is extremely odd. But probably a consequence of the non-stop Fox propaganda which aims to make the less well-off think of themselves as the well-off.

Laura Nyro

Was finally inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame! I'm happy. But not everyone is:

With the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, you just never really know.
Even when an induction seems like a sure thing it isn't, and maybe that's why the honor perennially raises more questions than it answers with its list of inductees.
The 2012 inductees, announced yesterday, are no different.
Would anyone have expected '60s singer-songwriter Laura Nyro to have garnered more support from the Hall's voters than Joan Jett or Heart -- who were also on the nomination short list?

On the other hand, others get the reason why I find her a genius:

The late Nyro had only three minor hit singles, the biggest being her cover of "Up On The Roof," which reached No. 92 in 1970. But her own compositions yielded classic pop hits for the likes of Barbra Streisand ("Stoney End"), Blood Sweat and Tears ("And When I Die"), The 5th Dimension ("Wedding Bell Blues," "Blowin' Away," "Stoned Soul Picnic," and "Sweet Blindness") and Three Dog Night ("Eli's Coming").
Still, Nyro would likely have been overlooked as a faceless songwriter had she not also evolved into a true album artist, pioneering a mix of jazz and r&b influences and singing in a gutwrenching voice that likewise mixed gospel and the street. There was nothing like her before or after, and The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's nominating committee and voters are to be commended for recognizing and honoring her enormous gifts and influence.

In a weird way, being too much of a cat who walks alone can hamstring you. It opens up arguments that Nyro doesn't fit into a narrowly defined hall of fame because her talent went all over the place.

As to that Joan Jett argument: Laura Nyro died over ten years ago, and I see her induction as overdue. Yes, it's bad that letting her in leaves other deserving candidates out. But last year Nyro was nominated and didn't get inducted, which is Jett's situation this year.

Sexist rant from Alec Baldwin (by Suzie)

After American Airlines kicked Alec Baldwin off a flight Tuesday, he tweeted that the company was one "where Catholic school gym teachers from the 1950's find jobs as flight attendants." In a Huffington Post column, he bemoaned the lack of elegance in air travel post-9/11.

I'm guessing he doesn't like older women who won't put up with his nonsense. Sue Sylvester needs to kick his butt. In addition to the comment being sexist and ageist, it's also anti-union. Gone are the elegant days when airlines could fire flight attendants for being too old. (I've written before about Baldwin's sexism.)

The airline's Facebook page has this account:

Since an extremely vocal customer has publicly identified himself as being removed from an American Airlines flight on Tuesday, Dec. 6, we have elected to provide the actual facts of the matter as well as the FAA regulations which American, and all airlines, must enforce. Cell phones and electronic devices are allowed to be used while the aircraft is at the gate and the door is open for boarding. When the door is closed for departure and the seat belt light is turned on, all cell phones and electronic devices must be turned off for taxi-out and take-off. This passenger declined to turn off his cell phone when asked to do so at the appropriate time. The passenger ultimately stood up (with the seat belt light still on for departure) and took his phone into the plane’s lavatory. He slammed the lavatory door so hard, the cockpit crew heard it and became alarmed, even with the cockpit door closed and locked. They immediately contacted the cabin crew to check on the situation. The passenger was extremely rude to the crew, calling them inappropriate names and using offensive language. Given the facts above, the passenger was removed from the flight and denied boarding.

Apparently, most of his wrath was directed at a flight attendant in first class. I'm betting his rude and offensive language included sexist slurs. He's lucky that he's just a misogynist. If he had used religious or racial slurs, he might actually face some consequences.

Plan B Stays Prescription Only For Young Teenagers

Via Rheality Check, I hear about this:

For the first time ever, the Health and Human Services secretary publicly overruled the Food and Drug Administration, refusing Wednesday to allow emergency contraceptives to be sold over the counter, including to young teenagers. The decision avoided what could have been a bruising political battle over parental control and contraception during a presidential election season.
The contraceptive pill, called Plan B One-Step, has been available without a prescription to women 17 and older, but those 16 and younger have needed a prescription — and they still will because of the decision by the health secretary, Kathleen Sebelius. If taken soon after unprotected sex, the pill halves the chances of a pregnancy.
Although Ms. Sebelius had the legal authority to overrule the F.D.A., no health secretary had ever publicly done so, an F.D.A. spokeswoman said. Nor had such a disagreement been the subject of such extraordinary dueling press statements. Dr. Margaret Hamburg, the F.D.A.’s commissioner, issued a lengthy statement saying it was safe to sell Plan B over the counter, while Ms. Sebelius countered that the drug’s manufacturer had failed to study whether girls as young as 11 years old could safely use Plan B.

"Whether girls as young as 11 years old could safely use Plan B?" Are we then going to study whether girls as young as 11 years old can safely get pregnant, bring the pregnancy to term and deliver a child?

I understand what Sebelius is saying, though the quoted article points out that some drugs currently available over-the-counter are quite harmful to children and nobody has tried to turn them into prescription-only. I also understand that Plan B might in theory be worse for very young girls than a surgical abortion. I understand all those considerations and could write about them.

But because this whole thing is about politics the only proper way to discuss it is also a political one. Hence the importance of these sentences in the above quote:

For the first time ever, the Health and Human Services secretary publicly overruled the Food and Drug Administration, refusing Wednesday to allow emergency contraceptives to be sold over the counter, including to young teenagers. The decision avoided what could have been a bruising political battle over parental control and contraception during a presidential election season.

And this is what we should be thinking about! The first time EVER the Health and Human Services secretary publicly overruled the FDA! And it was about the question whether girls even have reproductive rights. Similar arguments have dominated the airwaves when it came to vaccinating young girls against the human papilloma virus.

All this is grounds for a bruising political battle which Obama wants to avoid. Making Sebelius do the overruling allows him to stay above the political fights in the place he prefers to be.

Today's Shallow Thought: Austerity for Some, Xmas Bonuses and Golden Parachutes for Others

That's a short summary of the obvious difficulties in promoting an austerity policy all over the world when one sees the promoters step out of limousines in their $5000 tailored suits and better haircuts than I have!

If we really mean to promote austerity, we should bring everyone down to that level. That means gigantic drops for the wealthy one percent. Austerity for so many others is already the wolf knocking on the door at the end of each month when they paycheck has been spent. Even for many nominally in the middle classes.

Here's my Christmas suggestion: I want to hear all the powers that be tell us in public what they are giving up for this austerity lent. Their private airplanes? Weekly pedicures? Third homes in Aspen?

This is a shallow thought but it is based on real outrage, the kind that burns cold and pure inside my warped mind. If you are telling other people that they have been but naughty children and must now suffer (whether they did anything wrong or not), the least you can do is to show the way to that land of suffering by your own behavior.

What Are Taxes Good For? The Case of User Fees in Fire Fighting.

Who needs public services funded by taxes? Let's see:

A Tennessee couple helplessly watched their home burn to the ground, along with all of their possessions, because they did not pay a $75 annual fee to the local fire department.

Vicky Bell told the NBC affiliate WPSD-TV that she called 911 when her mobile home in Obion County caught fire. Firefighters arrived on the scene but as the fire raged, they simply stood by and did nothing.

...

South Fulton Mayor David Crocker defended the fire department, saying that if firefighters responded to non-subscribers, no one would have an incentive to pay the fee. Residents in the city of South Fulton receive the service automatically, but it is not extended to those living in the greater county-wide area.

So it goes. The markets won't provide if you don't pay for the service. The reason the firefighters came at all is probably to be ready to stop the fire from spreading to those properties whose owners had paid the extra fee.

The market alternative (which the local government was using here outside the city limits) has its drawbacks. The most obvious one is that it increases the likelihood of larger fire damages for everyone.

Suppose that you pay for the firefighting services but neither your left-hand or right-hand neighbor does nor do the people living in the house behind yours. In theory, all those three houses could be on fire and the firefighters would wait and see if they need to protect your house. By the time the fire crosses your property line it might be crossing from three directions.

At the same time, the quoted argument about the necessity of not fighting the fire if the owners didn't pay the fees is a valid one. If you get the service without paying for it, why pay at all?

Hence the superiority of tax-funded services in cases like this one. Because taxes are obligatory.

This story reminded me of a historical incident I read about. One community in Finland, several centuries ago, created an early fire fighting unit by promising to pay certain farmers a fee, collected from the community, for each fire they put down. This progressive idea ran into some problems the next time harvests failed, because one group of farmers had a second potential source of income. So many farms suddenly lost barns to inexplicable fires.

What these two stories share is the importance of incentives and the lesson that some things really are better funded using non-market alternatives. In the case of fire fighting that means either tax funding of permanent employees or the use of volunteer fire fighters.

Head: Meet Desk. Desk: Meet Head

Would banging your head really hard against your desk change your basic beliefs?

Because logical arguments, careful data and sophisticated writing don't seem to do that in cases where the beliefs come from that murky back brain, perhaps created by a frightening incident in early childhood.

This is about political arguments, naturally, given that I'm writing a political blog, and it is that blog and my general journeys debating all over the Internet that have taught me how sticky basic beliefs are, how often the argument starts from the conclusions and then works backwards.

I'm not exempt from that. But I swear to you that I visit my basic beliefs (carefully opening the cage door and tossing some bloody meat in first) to interrogate their honesty, truthfulness and overall sobriety.

The feminist example of this has to do with the basic beliefs of some innatists: that women are naturally suited to coyness, inability to understand numbers and a desire to marry monogamously for money, whereas men are naturally suited to spraying their sperm around indiscriminately, while carelessly tossing off fundamental theories about the nature of the universe, and then going home to multiple nubile Barbie wives.

If one set of arguments doesn't support the conclusions, another set of data will be created but the conclusions will not change. We are now several such spirals down the road when it comes to gender roles. It's a fun exercise to see all this worked out from the early 1970s to the present day. The conclusions do not change; only the arguments about how to reach them do, and always in the sense that new arguments will be created to reach the unchanging conclusion.

I can create similar examples from other topics in politics. The belief in the essential evil of governments is one I see clearly because I do not share it. Or at least I do not share the parallel belief which usually goes with it: that markets are sunny grandmothers who treat us all with great justice.

Given the essentially non-logical nature of so many basic beliefs, how do we debate them? Are we limited in this to only those whose basic beliefs are yet unformed on a particular topic?

What President Gingrich Would Do For Women

What do you think?:





Pay special attention to his use of the term "males" for men. I have found it fairly often to be MRA code for "men." After all, the term "male" refers to all male animals, not just human males. To use it in this context seems highly correlated with the assumption that gender differences are all biological, that traditional gender roles are unavoidable and so on.

In any case, Newt is not worried about women earning less, not at all. From his past:

A January 19, 1995, New York Times article reported on concerns about women in military combat roles that Gingrich had raised while teaching a history course at Georgia's Reinhardt College. The Times reported that Gingrich told his students that "females have biological problems staying in a ditch for 30 days because they get infections, and they don't have upper body strength," and added that men "are basically little piglets; you drop them in a ditch, they roll around in it."

Gingrich reportedly further said that if being in combat "means being on an Aegis class cruiser managing the computer controls for 12 ships and their rockets, a female again may be dramatically better than a male who gets very, very frustrated sitting in a chair all the time because males are biologically driven to go out and hunt giraffes."

Hahahaaa!

A PR strategy for fighting rape accusations (by Suzie)

Accused rapist and men's rights activist Julian Assange got permission today to delay justice longer. (Please stay with me -- the issue is broader than Assange.)

Two high-court judges in London, who ruled earlier that he should be sent to Sweden, will let him raise an issue with Britain's Supreme Court. Assange contends that police and prosecutors should not be allowed to issue European arrest warrants. The judges disagreed, but said they felt "constrained" to let him proceed. Why? Perhaps because he has rich and powerful backers.

Wired reports:

Assange has 14 days to submit a written petition to the Supreme Court. If the court refuses to hear his appeal, he has no more avenue for redress and will be extradited to Sweden. If he is granted an appeal hearing, that appeal will likely take place at the Supreme Court around May next year.

The longer he fights, the longer his two accusers live in limbo. Of course, they are not the only women who have accused a man of sexual assault, only to have hatred heaped on them while they wait for justice. Assange and his outraged fanboys have smeared them, and details of their private lives have been published on the Internet. They have kept a low profile, in part, I'm guessing, for their own safety.

He has crowdsourced witness intimidation.

I have seen no evidence that any media in the U.S. or U.K. has tried to interview them or their attorney, with the exception of a few sentences from the lawyer now and then. Instead, Assange and his global team of lawyers frame the case in their own way. In fact, he has just hired a PR firm in Sweden to handle the media there.

In Sweden, his case will be a test of men's rights to women's bodies, as in the frat-boy chant of "no means yes, yes means anal." His lawyers have argued that, if a woman agrees to sex with a condom, it isn't a crime if the man has unprotected sex with her without her consent. His lawyers also have said it's no crime for a man to use physical force to try to penetrate a woman if she quits struggling and goes along with it. British courts have disagreed.

Earlier, one of his former British attorneys said Assange wasn't wanted for rape, but rather "sex by surprise," a minor charge found nowhere but Sweden. That wasn't true, but it did plenty of damage. Did the lawyer intend to mislead the public, or was he unable to contact his counterpart in Sweden and ascertain the truth?

If/when Assange finally goes to Sweden, I hope courts will consider the credibility of someone that acclaimed journalist Nick Davies called "extraordinarily dishonest."

Although he and his flock have viciously attacked former colleague Daniel Domscheit-Berg for writing a book on WikiLeaks, I haven't heard anyone dispute D-B's assertion that he and Assange "grotesquely exaggerated" how many volunteers WL had, wrote under different pseudonyms to make it seem like more people were involved, and misled people on the extent of their technology. D-B said this was done to intimidate enemies as well as gain support from potential allies. It also may have led whistleblowers to think that WL really could protect them.

In the early days, D-B writes, Assange was very interested in marketing WL. "From the media we tried to learn how to manipulate public opinion. ... For us, the important thing was not how something really was, but how one sold it."

Here's a rundown of Assange's misinformation campaign against the sex-crime allegations:

When the accusations were leaked in August 2010, Assange said he didn't know who the women were. That was not true, of course. He suggested elsewhere that the Pentagon was playing dirty tricks. Holocaust denier Israel Shamir, who has been paid by WikiLeaks, published a story suggesting one accuser worked for the CIA. Assange's British lawyer called the case a honeytrap.

Then the spin changed. The lawyer said he had been misquoted, and WL Central said Assange never suggested his accusers did anything wrong. My best guess is that this was done to avoid a libel suit.

But it also fits with a common marketing strategy: A company unveils a sexist ad, or the ad gets "leaked" to YouTube. Feminists and others are outraged. The company pulls the ad, apologizes and says it never meant to offend or the ad wasn't authorized. Meanwhile, the company gets a lot of publicity with a targeted audience -- men who like to put women down.

Some people don't like victim blaming. So, Assange assures them he isn't doing that. Meanwhile, many of his fans continue to bash the women, and we are supposed to believe that he cannot stop them.

I bet he starts attacking the women's credibility again once he's in Sweden, which has much more liberal laws on libel. By then, he may give up his bizarre contention that Sweden is more of a banana republic than a civilized country. (His former lawyer in Sweden, Bjorn Hurtig, said recently that the Swedish judicial system "generally holds a very high standard.")

Assange once thought so highly of Sweden that he sought permission to live and work there. Two days later, two women went to police, who determined that their statements amounted to sexual molestation and rape. A prosecutor dismissed the idea of rape, but Assange was still under investigation for molestation. The women's attorney, Claes Borgstrom, appealed to a higher-ranking prosecutor, Marianne Ny, who put rape back into the mix.

Assange has insisted that this was improper. But both Swedish and British law lets higher-ranking prosecutors overrule subordinates, said Senior District Judge Howard Riddle in his rejection of Assange's appeal in February 2011. (Cryptome has a transcript.)

After Ny took the case Sept. 1, Hurtig claimed, she made no attempt to interview Assange before he left for London at the end of September. Actually, Ny had contacted Hurtig, who later said he couldn't find Assange. Riddle said Hurtig corrected his evidence at the last minute, but in such a low-key way as to be misleading:

I do not accept that this was a genuine mistake. It cannot have slipped his mind. For over a week he was attempting (he says without success) to contact a very important client about a very important matter. The statement was a deliberate attempt to mislead the court.

Later, the Swedish Bar Association issued a warning to Hurtig, who Assange has since replaced.

There was discussion that Assange might return to Sweden in October. Instead, he released the Iraq documents -- some say prematurely. A Swedish court issued an arrest warrant for him in November, and Assange then released the U.S. diplomatic cables. He sold himself as a freedom-of-information martyr.

By claiming falsely that Swedish prosecutors had not tried to interview him earlier, Assange made it appear that they had little interest in the sex-crime allegations until he released sensational documents.

This also lent more credence to his claim that Sweden was trying to extradite him so that he could be turned over to U.S. authorities, who would imprison him in Guantanamo, torture and execute him.

But his lawyers never presented any evidence, and his own defense witness -- a former Chief District Prosecutor in Stockholm -- said that scenario couldn't happen. Riddle noted that it's easier to extradite someone from the U.K. to the U.S., and that, if Assange is extradited to Sweden, and the U.S. then wants him, Sweden would not only have to approve the extradition, but it also would need the approval of the British Secretary of State.

His lawyers complained that Assange hasn't been formally charged with any crime; they haven't seen all the evidence against him; if he returned to Sweden, he would languish incommunicado in jail; the trial would be held behind closed doors; and he would not be tried by a jury of his peers.

After listening to testimony disputing this, Riddle said he believed that Sweden intends to prosecute Assange, but that Ny is required to interview Assange and finish her investigation before bringing formal charges. Prosecutors are not required to give the defense all of their evidence beforehand. In jail, Assange might not be allowed communication with the outside world. But once someone is jailed pending trial in Sweden, the trial follows quickly, usually in two weeks. In sex-crime cases, accusers can choose to have testimony heard in private. Cases are decided by judges and those they appoint as lay judges.

Assange may not like the Swedish system, but it's similar to procedures in other European countries, Riddle said.

"TRUTH WILL OUT!" screams a hoodie peddled on a WL site to raise money. We can only hope.

The Gates Foundation and ALEC

ALEC stands for The American Legislative Exchange Council. Here's what it is:

The most important group, I’m pretty sure, is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which was founded in 1973 by Henry Hyde, Lou Barnett, and (surprise, surprise) Paul Weyrich. Its goal for the past forty years has been to draft “model bills” that conservative legislators can introduce in the 50 states. Its website claims that in each legislative cycle, its members introduce 1000 pieces of legislation based on its work, and claims that roughly 18% of these bills are enacted into law. (Among them was the controversial 2010 anti-immigrant law in Arizona.)

If you’re as impressed by these numbers as I am, I’m hoping you’ll agree with me that it may be time to start paying more attention to ALEC and the bills its seeks to promote.

...

Becoming a Member of ALEC: Not So Easy to Do

How do you become a member? Simple. Two ways. You can be an elected Republican legislator who, after being individually vetted, pays a token fee of roughly $100 per biennium to join. Here’s the membership brochure to use if you meet this criterion:
http://www.alec.org/AM/pdf/2011_legislative_brochure.pdf
What if you’re not a Republican elected official? Not to worry. You can apply to join ALEC as a “private sector” member by paying at least a few thousand dollars depending on which legislative domains most interest you. Here’s the membership brochure if you meet this criterion:
http://www.alec.org/am/pdf/Corporate_Brochure.pdf
Then again, even if most of us had this kind of money to contribute to ALEC, I have a feeling that membership might not necessarily be open to just anyone who is willing to pay the fee. But maybe I’m being cynical here.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has just awarded ALEC a grant:

American Legislative Exchange Council
Date: November 2011
Purpose: to educate and engage its membership on more efficient state budget approaches to drive greater student outcomes, as well as educate them on beneficial ways to recruit, retain, evaluate and compensate effective teaching based upon merit and achievement
Amount: $376,635
Term: 1 year and 10 months
Topic: Advocacy & Public Policy
Region Served: Global, North America
Program: United States
Grantee Location: Washington, District of Columbia
Grantee Web site: http://www.alec.org

I'm somewhat confused about the purpose of this grant. ALEC is supposed to educate its membership only? And that consists of Republican politicians and people able to afford the steep membership fee? That doesn't sound like a group which would need charitable help in the first place. Neither does it sound like a group which would stay uninformed without such a grant.

Then there are all those code words in the purpose statement which refer to getting rid of teachers' unions.
-----
For more on this topic, check out Karoli at Crooks&Liars.

Interesting

This twitter message. It shows a picture of a woman, with this text:

A woman from Jeddah in 1873, before 'Saudi' Arabia was created. No black robes, gloves, or face veils.

Single old pictures cannot tell us anything about what was common for women during that era, because a single old picture is just that. What it can tell us, of course, is that at least one woman let herself be photographed in an outfit which today would be regarded as completely unacceptable.

The whole tweet is about a question I've thought of often: We don't really know how the women in the past dressed.

When an extreme Islamist argues that "modesty" for women means head-to-toe black, face veils and gloves, he bases it on a constructed view of what "modesty" might have meant during the era of the prophet Muhammad. But we don't know how women then dressed. We don't know what "modesty" meant in that context, and the Koran does not, in fact, mention head or face veils at all.

It argues that both men and women should dress modestly and that women should cover their bosoms. Everything else is someone else's interpretation, most of which seems to forget that the command also applies to men.

As far as I understand it, the argument for certain type of veiling is based on a reported saying by Muhammad, who told a woman that she should leave uncovered only that which is acceptable to be seen. But what were those body parts in that era? Is it really possible that they amounted to only one eye per woman? And how did the poor women do their farm work dressed like that?

A Fun Read Recommendation

That would be Terry Pratchett's Monstrous Regiment. The novel is part of his Diskworld series but can be read without any background in that world, except perhaps the knowledge that its denizens consist of not only humans but also of trolls, dwarves, vampires, werewolves and so on.

Pratchett writes humorous fantasy with a political twist. I like reading him in the bathtub, so all my books are weird wave-shaped bricks by now. I wrote that because I cannot really say much about the book without giving away the plot and some of the laughs.

Oppressing Women Does Not Pay

On the level of a country, that is. The international competitiveness of a country suffers from that need for the oppressor to keep one foot on the neck of the oppressed. Hard to do much work while being locked together that way.

More seriously, the proper oppression of women requires women to be uneducated, unable to earn money on their own and severely limited in mobility. The maintenance of all this is a job in itself, and countries which choose to go this way have handicapped more than half of their populations. This will have negative economic consequences.

Sure, countries which have won the resource jackpot of oil can maintain women's oppression because of that extra source of income. But when the oil reserves run out, they must face the same basic economic facts: Choose to oppress women and you will choose ultimate poverty. This is because women are half of all people. Throwing away most of women's human resources will keep a country poor without those Deus ex machina resource jackpots.

But there is a more direct example of how oppressing women might not pay. Take the Egyptian election results, where the very conservative Nour party has fared well, currently placing right after the more moderate Islamic Brotherhood:

The Nour Party espouses a strict interpretation of Islam similar to that of Saudi Arabia, where the sexes are segregated and women must be veiled and are barred from driving.

No wonder that the Islamic Brotherhood states that it doesn't want to go quite that far. Tourism is an important industry for Egypt:

The Egyptian tourism industry is one of the most important sectors in the economy, in terms of high employment and incoming foreign currency. Egypt is one of the best known touristic countries in the world. It has many constituents of tourism, mainly historical attractions especially in Cairo, Luxor and Aswan, but also beach and other sea activities. The government is always trying to promote foreign tourism since it is a major source of currency and investment. There are plans to get to 14 million visitors by 2011, by means of the improvement of touristic facilities and advertising of Egyptian tourism in international media, in order to maintain a steady demand for visiting Egypt.

Tourism is also very important in Morocco and Tunisia, both countries where moderate Islamic parties won recent elections. Banning women from swimming with men, requiring women to wear veils and so on could kill the tourist industries of all three countries, because most of those tourists come from Europe and my guess is that roughly half of them are women. Even if the rules only applied to local women, few tourists would enjoy being scowled at for not being properly covered, say.

Gloomy Night Thoughts on Women's Rights

I was thinking Bad And Sad Thoughts last night (all night!), after hearing about the early election results in Egypt and especially about the large support the ultra-Orthodox party seems to have. If the Muslim Brotherhood joins forces with them, the debate in Egypt will be between moderate Islam and very extreme Islam and the secular parties will be left out of power altogether. Never mind that they were a major actor in the earlier demonstrations and protests which got Mubarak removed from power.

And what will happen to women, including the women who faced violence and danger while protesting? What will they get?

From that point on my bitter thoughts veered in several different directions and some of those will become future posts, including the question of women's rights in a society where the majority (of both men and women, perhaps) believes that women should not have equal rights, the definition of democracy as simple majority rule, the question of education and women's status and the whole long and bloody learning process which proper democracy requires, not to mention the laws which protect the rights of minorities.

Other strands went into that logically impossible The Three Big Guy Religions land where one cannot argue anything with a fundamentalist because of what was written by someone thousands of years ago, where logic is meaningless, even if one uses it to show the inconsistencies in a particular holy book, and where the consequences of arguing can well be fatal. The way religion has become a form of self-definition (Us vs Them) in many parts of the world, including in the areas where Islam is the major religion worries me greatly.

Traditional interpretations of religions are Very Bad News For Women, and the more they take root the longer it will take for women to win the status of full human beings. By early morning I was thinking it would take more than an additional hundred years on the level of this whole planet. But that's my guess right now. Hundred years.

And of course one of the main reasons why it will be that slow (oh how I hope I'm wrong there!) is that mostly people truly aren't that bothered about how "others" treat "their" women. There are always more important problems to solve. Poverty comes first, wars come first, health comes first. Indeed, everything comes first! And aren't women really innately different in any case? Democracy has spoken and decided that it's not for women. Blabla blah.

Feminism indeed is the longest revolution.

As well as extremely poorly paid. Sure, there are international NGOs working on behalf of women. But if one relates their size, power and numbers to the populations at risk the effort is pitiful. Laughable! Ridiculous! A bandaid/sticking plaster that covers a suppurating tumor.

I do understand why things are the way they are. We live in the Dark Ages when it comes to human rights for women. Thinking of it that way gives me more energy, because all I really need to work on is keeping the tiny flickering light lit so that it can be found when the time is right.

Aren't you glad you read through this?

Meanwhile, in Egypt And Elsewhere

Early election results:

Two major Islamist political parties prevailed in the first round of Egypt's parliamentary elections, an election official told CNN Saturday.

The Freedom and Justice Party, the political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, received 40% and Al Noor Salafi Movement won 20% of the said Yousri Abdel Kareem, head of the executive office of the Higher Judicial Election council.

Al Noor Salafi, a hardline group, and the Muslim Brotherhood, a more moderate movement, each claimed a lead after votes were cast on Monday and Tuesday.

It is probably too early to predict what this, and similar victories by Islamist parties in Morocco and Tunisia might mean for women's rights and status in the respective societies.

But none of the winning parties campaigned on the expansion of women's rights. This suggests that those rights will not be expanded. Whether they will be shrunk or not remains to be seen. The Al Noor Salafi group wants to impose more rules on women. The practical policies of the other, more moderate Islamist parties with victories in those three countries are harder to predict.

But I'm not optimistic. The lessons from earlier revolutions (including the Iranian revolution and the post-Berlin-Wall changes in the ex-Soviet bloc) remind us that women are unlikely to be among the direct beneficiaries. Rather the reverse, for some women, at least.

Corruption in the media (by Suzie)

People become journalists because they want to hang out with powerful people and get power themselves. This desire for power corrupts the editors of mainstream media, and they stop holding accountable powerful people in government, corporations and the media itself.

This is a paraphrase of the pot calling the kettle black what accused rapist Julian Assange said to a Hong Kong conference via Skype last week.

By all means, critique the mass media, but don't fall for the marketing ploy that the new is always improved. So, let's look at the paragraph above. Some people may go into journalism in hopes of hanging out with sports and entertainment figures, but I've never known anyone who became a journalist to get close to the Secretary of Agriculture. Instead, most mainstream reporters I know got into the business because they wanted to change the world and/or they thought they were good writers. That's not so different from people in indy media of various kinds.

I agree that power can corrupt people, but don't think it happens only to people in the mainstream media, or that the desire for power always translates into protection of powerful people.

When I worked for the mainstream media, my bosses were gleeful when a reporter could expose the wrongdoing of a powerful person. For myself, it fed my desire to do good in the world, and it made me feel like I had some power against systematic injustice. Others liked power a bit too much. Because he's dead, I can mention a former editor and publisher:

"He used to refer to me as 'the skirt,' " said Sandy Freedman, Tampa's mayor during Mr. Harvill's years as the Tribune's publisher. "He once told me that I would never get anything done in this city unless I had run it past him first."

Of course, some journalists do protect powerful people. They may admire the powerful, enjoy hanging out with them, make money or get jobs from their connections. But does anyone believe that people outside the mainstream media care nothing for power? Imagine a GEICO ad: "Is Assange a megalomaniac?"

Look at it another way: Would Assange reveal wrongdoing by one of his benefactors? If he fled Britain to a country that didn't extradite people to Sweden, do you think he would start attacking the government of that country?

Do you think bloggers never suck up to powerful people? I guarantee feminist bloggers think twice before lambasting another feminist blogger.

Gender enters into all of this because power is essential to traditional ideas of manhood, while power can be seen as unattractive in women. Thus, it's easier for men to be openly ambitious. There are more men in power, and male wannabes can try to buddy up to them. When a woman tries to get close to a powerful man, however, the man may assume sex plays some role. For example, if Assange did not assault two Swedish women who volunteered to help WikiLeaks, he, at least, had sex with them. For those who see nothing wrong with that: If the head of an organization has sex with less powerful women, other women may question what role they might have in the organization.

In mainstream media, protecting powerful people can be about protecting sources of information. It's similar in law enforcement. You let some things slide in hopes of getting more important information later. This has all sorts of complications, including the definition of "important" and "later." For instance, some men think the treatment of women is a personal matter, not an important issue, and thus, will keep quiet about the sexism of a powerful man in order to continue to have access to him. In the case of Assange, many supporters think sexism and rape are not important compared with the release of government secrets.

Assange was livid when the Guardian detailed the accusations of sexual assault against him. (He is expected to appeal an extradition order Monday to Britain's Supreme Court.) Because he knows so little about journalism, he didn't understand that newspapers will protect the anonymity of people who leak information to them, but will not protect a named source against accusations of wrongdoing.

Some journalists don't publish information on powerful figures because they fear for their safety or they don't want to be sued. The dangers are worse for reporters whose organizations can't protect them or don't have lawyers on retainer.

As in any revolution, continue to fight what's wrong with mainstream media, but don't be naive about whatever takes its place.

Today's Toys: Segregated By Gender

Like these. Note also the color-coding on which I have written before.

On The Skills of Getting Elected Vs. Governing

Atrios commented on this article about Martha Coakley, the woman who, according to some, campaigned so badly that she lost Ted Kennedy's Senate sheet to the Republican Scott Brown. I'm not so sure that Coakley's campaigning ability was the only reason, given that Massachusetts has never (never!) sent a woman to the US Senate.

But whatever. The point I wanted to make in this context is this: A politician's ability to get elected may have little or no correlation with that politician's ability to do the actual job well.

Telegenic applicants do well. Applicants who look like someone you'd like to get drunk with do well. Applicants who speak well do well. Applicants who understand the mass psychology of politics do well. None of those test the applicants' ability to govern.

Sure, we learn some things during the long and tedious process of election campaigning, and of course there are politicians who both campaign well and govern well. But campaigning skills are getting ever more separate from governing skills.

That may be why I find the horse-race reporting of the Republican presidential candidates' performance so very boring.

A Musical Interlude

The incomparable Nina Simone plays "You'll Never Walk Alone."

The Eruption of Bimbos

This is the way one is to describe some male politician having a history of extramarital affairs, I guess. Jon Huntsman:

Jon Huntsman doubled down on criticizing rival Herman Cain's presidential campaign in light of new allegations that he had a 13-year affair. 

"We’ve got real issues to talk about, not the latest bimbo eruption," Huntsman said to the Boston Herald on Wednesday.

Why not call it "the eruption of brainless erections?"

I understand the lure of a term like "the eruption of bimbos," I do. It's a way to shame a politician, and who cares what it says about the women (some undefined mass of them) who are called bimbos:

Bimbo, in its popular English language usage, describes a woman who is physically attractive but is perceived to have a low intelligence or poor education. The term can also be used to describe a woman who acts in a sexually promiscuous manner. The term itself is not explicitly negative, but is most often used as a derogative insult towards a woman.
Use of this term began in the United States as early as 1919, where it was used as a slang term for an unintelligent or brutish male.[1] Its first inclusion in an official dictionary for its female meaning was in 1929, where the definition was given simply as "a woman".[2]

Fascinating history that word has! Of course we have no actual evidence of the intelligence or education of the women Cain may have sexually harassed or had affairs with. We don't even know whether they are promiscuous or not!

What we might start concluding here is that Mr. Cain himself might be promiscuous!

But the biggest problem by far is Huntsman's decision to lump together women who accuse Cain of sexual harassment with the rumors that he has had a mistress. Accusing someone of sexual harassment makes you -- let me check -- "a woman who is physically attractive but is perceived to have a low intelligence or poor education. The term can also be used to describe a woman who acts in a sexually promiscuous manner."

So.

Silly And Not-So-Silly Things For Today

None of these are silly in an innocent way unless you take a very, very long view and regard yourself as belonging to the ethnic group of pixies, orcs or elves. And then to the male gender.

1. These pieces of advice to "single girls" of the late 1930s look silly to us now, right? But wait a moment! It's not that different from 2011, after all! And I hear that McMillan's ideas might become a television series, too.

2. Ten things the iPhone Siri will help you get instead of an abortion. Self-explanatory silliness.

3. Andrew Sullivan's lazy post on how "politically correct egalitarianism" about racial differences in IQ scores has strangled the study of intelligence. What is silly about that is Sullivan's assumption that he can scribble down a few lines on a vast, vast topic which comes with a long history of ghoulies and ghosts, having to do with the misuse of such scores and other similar measures in the past, without any further responsibility.

Ta-Nehisis Coates reminds us of those ghoulies and ghosts, and Amanda at Pandagon has a good post on the problems of identifying IQ scores with some nebulous concept of general intelligence. Here is what I wrote on the topic in the autism post comments below:
The general problems:

1. The IQ tests obviously are affected by what used to be called "nurture." You have to be able to read and write and understand the language the test is in (including the language in the sense of the types of words it uses, such as long ones, perhaps). Because of this, the test results are correlated with a) parental income, b) the quality of school a person attends or attended and c) social class, when defined widely. If a particular ethnic group has a lower average income, worse schools and perhaps a different culture at home (such as immigrants might), then -- surprise! --- they are going to score lower, on average, EVEN IF whatever the actual innate part the IQ test measured were the same as that of some other ethnic group.

2. This means that you have to standardize, to compare like with like, if you wish to draw conclusions from IQ tests. That links to a second problem, which is that any attempt to compare test results across groups should control for the way the samples are selected. Some countries, for instance, might use IQ tests mostly to find gifted children, some others might use them to find children who need special schooling because they can't manage ordinary classrooms. You can't compare two countries which differ in this way and expect to find something general about the intelligence of the two populations. One country would test low IQ scores, the other one high IQ scores. This is a relevant concern also when we compare groups of any kind, because UNLESS the people are randomly selected and UNLESS there is no particular reason WHY the test is taken, we are quite likely to get different samples from different populations.

3. One can do better on an IQ test by practicing similar type of problems. This works both against the idea that the test measures something fixed and innate, as Amanda points out, but it also means that those people who get more practice in their everyday lives will do better than those people who do not get that practice. Both home environment and schools matter here, too. This is not quite the same as the first argument, because I'm talking about practicing the specific kinds of things here, rather than general environmental factors.

4. The IQ test was not initially created as a measure of general intelligence, but of a child's ability to benefit from ordinary school classes. That modest goal has been forgotten altogether, when it turned into a possible measure of general intelligence. BUT the test doesn't even pretend to measure aspects which clearly ARE important in the latter concept: Memory and creativlty, for example, are not measured at all. Neither are any talents which don't translate into paper-and-pen answers or keyboard answers.

5. The Flynn effect: The average scores have crept up over time. Because it's very unlikely that evolution could change an innate characteristic that quickly, this also serves to point out the non-innate aspect of the tests.

6. The stereotype threat: This refers to people doing worse on a test if they are told that their group usually does worse on it, as compared to a case where they are not told that. This is important, because EVEN FALSE findings about racial or gender differences in IQ scores CAN then become self-fulfilling prophesies. It is the stereotype threat which makes Sullivan's lazy few lines on the topic a crime in my view. If you are going to write on a topic of this type, you owe your audience some hours of proper research first.

I Missed My Blogoversary

What an ugly word for something so beautiful and life-affirming! But I forgot about it. You can send in belated happy-blogoversary wishes, of course. And money.

Mmm.

I should write about whether the gap I filled still exists and when I should fade into the history and other such things but I'm going to get a chocolate cake instead.

The I-love-you is aimed at you. If you don't like chocolate cake, how about a puppy picture?

A Good Post on the Magical Waist-To-Hip Ratio

Can be found here. I recommend reading it not only for that particular story (i.e., the evolutionary psychology argument that heterosexual men everywhere prefer a waist-to-hips ratio of 0.7 in searching for women to mate with) but also about her more general points on the psychologist's fallacy in this context.

Autism. It's The Uppity Women's Fault.

This is one of the worst pieces of so-called science reporting I have come across for a very long time. Granted, it's in the Daily Male Mail which is all about trying to get women out of the labor force and back into the kitchens, barefoot and pregnant and preferably very, very stupid. But still.

The article is a steaming turd, perhaps fished from the toilet bowl of one Michael Baron-Cohen, well known for his open distaste for the distaff gender. Or perhaps some of it is from the brain of Michael Hanlon, the writer of the piece. It's hard to say.

Let's hold our noses and jump straight into the article:

For some years now Professor Simon Baron-Cohen (cousin of the comedian and actor Sacha), a psychologist at Cambridge University, has been developing his theory that something called ‘assortative mating’ may be at least partly to blame for the spectacular rise in autism diagnoses.

The theory states that when people with strongly ‘systemising’ personalities – the sort of people who become engineers, surgeons, computer experts and who shine in some aspects of business – marry each other and produce children, the effects of this kind of ‘male brain’ are genetically magnified, increasing the chances of producing an autistic child – a child with what Prof Baron-Cohen suspects is an ‘extreme male brain’.
 
Strong ‘systemisers’ are often slightly obsessive, perfectionist and make great scientists and are often extremely talented at music. But they sometimes have difficulties socially interacting with other people – a combination of traits that can blend into the milder end of the autism spectrum.
 
Cambridge University’s Autism Research Centre is now asking members of the public who are graduates and parents to take part in a survey which will investigate any links between educational achievement, what kind of job they have and how their children develop.

Specifically, the new study will attempt to find out whether two ‘strong systemisers’ do indeed have a higher chance of producing autistic children.

A few warnings are due at this point: First, the whole concept of "systematizing" is due to Baron-Cohen. He created this concept and he markets it. As I have written earlier, the questionnaire he used to define "systematizing" behavior is loaded with bad questions which, whether intended or not, will confuse gender roles with "systematizing" behavior. To understand what he really intends by the term, let's just say that he believes men are logical and women are emotional.*:

In his book "The Essential Difference," the Cambridge University neuroscientist [sic] Simon Baron-Cohen (cousin of Sacha of “Borat” fame) wrote: “The female brain is predominately hard-wired for empathy. The male brain is predominately hard-wired for understanding and building systems.”

Second, the concept of "an extreme male brain" as the autistic mind is also his. He assigns emotional brains to the female sex and logical brains to the male sex, never mind that even his biased test cannot get there and never mind that there is no reason why the two characteristics should not be both present at the same time, both high or both low and so on. His book on the gender of brains (The Essential Difference) makes for hilarious reading, by the way.

Third, the planned study appears an odd one. If strong "systematizing" behavior is defined somewhat similarly to mild autism, then it would not be unlikely, given the apparent genetic aspect of autism, that two parents with signs of mild autism would have at least as high a probability of having an autistic child as one parent with signs of mild autism and a higher probability than two parents with no signs of autism.

So what is Baron-Cohen going to actually measure in this study? Only occupations and educational achievement? Or something like my description here? And what is it we would learn from this all? I'm also confused about the reason to only include people who are graduates. Surely his famous systematizing tests could be done on any parents, whatever their education levels are. So why limit the study in this manner?

Note, finally, that the planned study is already endangered. He is asking people to self-select for the study, while openly informing the potential participants what it is that he hopes to find.

Assortative mating, by the way, refers to similar people marrying each other. What Baron-Cohen has in mind is the idea that the drastic increase in the number of diagnosed autism cases might somehow be linked to a drastic change in the proportion of people who marry similar people.

For this to make any sense at all, there must have been a humongous change in the likelihood of assortative mating in the fairly recent past. A humongous one. And I really mean a humongous one.

And this is where I cannot tell if the rest of Michael Hanlon's article is his own theory about what might have caused such a change or if it is still part of Baron-Cohen's theorizing. I wouldn't be surprised, either way, because I'm familiar with Baron-Cohen's misogyny. But in any case, one gentleman or another tells us that this drastic change is due to feminism! In the past clever women didn't get married at all or only late in life, so they didn't have time to give birth to lots of autistic children! And logical gentlemen preferred dumb blondes without an education!

An example:

Until relatively recently in our history, being exceptionally bright was not much use to you if you were female. In Victorian Britain, for example, the opportunities for a woman to earn her living through brainpower alone were extremely limited.
According to the 1901 Census, there were fewer than a hundred registered female doctors in the whole of the United Kingdom.
Going to university was difficult and expensive – most did not even allow girls to study. There were certainly few opportunities for careers in engineering or the sciences.
You could become a teacher or a governess, or maybe, of you were exceptionally talented, earn your living writing or in the arts. Most of the professions were closed, as was the world of business.
Brainy women were not even seen as particularly desirable partners. Clever or rich men chose brides on the grounds of looks, ‘breeding’ or both.
Having an IQ in the 140s probably counted against you if anything. The traditional image of a ‘dumb blonde’ hanging off the arm of the successful politician or businessman was a horrible cliché but it had an element of truth.
And in any case, very clever women would have often been mad to get married.

You feel dizzy? I did, after reading that a few times, because Hanlon confused education, an acquired characteristic, with "systematizing" which is supposed to be an innate characteristic, as if a Victorian young maiden couldn't have had a "systematizing" brain because she was not educated!

Hanlon also makes the case that women didn't really have many career opportunities at all which suggests that most of them got married as fast as they could, what with the need to eat and so on. But then he argues that bright women wouldn't have wanted to get married, because of losing those nonexistent and poorly paying career opportunities offered by governessing and such. This is a mess. And I haven't even pointed out that Hanlon's view of the Victorian era has no ordinary working-class women in it at all.

What we are to take home from that silliness is the idea that smart women in the past did not reproduce. Now they do! Possibly with smart men! Voila, an explanation for increased autism!

The big, big problem with this argument is that there is no way of testing it. We cannot go back to Victorian times, armed with the Baron-Cohen test ("Do you like to collect train timetables?"), to see if assortative mating was less common then than now, and we cannot learn what percentage of smart or stupid women reproduced then as opposed to now. So the whole approach appears doomed.

But of course that is not its point, not at all! This piece has to do with the Dangers Of Educated Women and the Dangers Of Working Women. If only women did not go to college! If only women stayed at home! That neither of these probably affects assortative mating is irrelevant. That neither of these would affect "systematizing" if it is an innate characteristic is irrelevant. The important message is out.

And the message is that it is the fault of mothers. Not the fault of fathers, even though it takes two to tango, assuming that this hare-brained theory is taken seriously, but the fault of mothers who should not have gone to college and who certainly should not be logical thinkers.

It takes a lot of work to get those sexist messages out. But then the history of autism research is a stained one. In the 1950s autism was thought to be caused by "refrigerator mothers":

In his 1943 paper that first identified autism, Leo Kanner called attention to what appeared to him as a lack of warmth among the fathers and mothers of autistic children.[3] In a 1949 paper, Kanner suggested autism may be related to a "genuine lack of maternal warmth", noted that fathers rarely stepped down to indulge in children's play, and observed that children were exposed from "the beginning to parental coldness, obsessiveness, and a mechanical type of attention to material needs only.... They were left neatly in refrigerators which did not defrost. Their withdrawal seems to be an act of turning away from such a situation to seek comfort in solitude."[4] In a 1960 interview, Kanner bluntly described parents of autistic children as "just happening to defrost enough to produce a child."[5]

These early researchers couldn't put the blame for autism on uppity career mothers, so they put it on "refrigerator mothers." Which just goes to show that it is always the women's fault.
----
*It's important to point out that he asserts this but does not prove it in any way, given that a) his tests are biased (examples linked to male gender-roles are overwhelmingly used in the systematizing questions) b) even then any gender differences are slight and c) the division into "systemizers" and "empathizers" does not go by gender terribly well. Only 40% of the women who took the test actually fall into the group which would be characterized by what Baron-Cohen calls "a female brain."

Likewise, there is no currently existing evidence to suggest that women are "predominantly" "hardwired" for empathy. What does it even mean, that "predominantly"? Everyday life requires the ability to think logically, to understand fairly complex sequences (even following a recipe requires that, and you don't get much more gender-linked tasks), and to empathize about something may require systematizing, the ability to arrange complex information in a way which lets one understand what the situation is and why the person deserves empathy or not.

And the term "hardwired" is almost always used in the absence of any actual evidence of how that would be achieved.

The War on Christmas

We are losing, Atrios points out. Because Bill O'Reilly on Fox News stated that his side is winning the war on Christmas.

If you don't know what that war might be all about, you probably don't live in the Wingnut Land of American conservatives. To quote the quite conservative David Frum:

But the thought leaders on talk radio and Fox do more than shape opinion. Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics. Outside this alternative reality, the United States is a country dominated by a strong Christian religiosity. Within it, Christians are a persecuted minority.

Bolds are mine.

The war on Christmas is hard to take seriously. It sounds like something from Terry Pratchett's Diskworld books. What we should take very seriously, however, is this new war on facts.

A Guest Post by Anna: A Literary Canon of Women Writers, Part Thirteen: Last of the Nineteenth Century

Echidne's note: Earlier parts of this series can be found here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 ,Part 5, Part 6, Part 7,Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11 and Part 12.

Christina Georgina Rossetti (5 December 1830 – 29 December 1894) was an English poet who wrote a variety of romantic, devotional, and children's poems. She is best known for her long poem "Goblin Market", her love poem "Remember", and for the words of the Christmas carol "In the Bleak Midwinter". Her poem "Love Came Down at Christmas" has also been widely used for a carol. She was deeply religious and often suffered from depression, as well as suffering from Graves Disease for the last decades of her life; she eventually died of breast cancer.

Her most famous collection, Goblin Market and Other Poems, appeared in 1862, when she was 31. It received widespread critical praise, establishing her as the main female poet of the time. Hopkins, Swinburne, and Tennyson praised her work, and with the death of poet Elizabeth Browning in 1861 Rossetti was considered her natural successor.

The title poem is one of Rossetti's best known works. Although it is literally about two sisters' misadventures with goblins, critics have interpreted the piece in a variety of ways: seeing it as an allegory about temptation and salvation; a commentary on Victorian gender roles and female agency; and a work about erotic desire and social redemption. Her works are widely available in English.

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886) was an American poet whose work became widely known and critically acclaimed after her death. She spent most of her life as a recluse in her Amherst, Massachusetts home. After her death in 1886 her younger sister Lavinia discovered her poems, and in 1890 Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Louis Todd published a heavily edited collection of her poems. A complete edition was not published until 1955, and an edition arranged in the way she originally arranged her poems was not published until 1981.

There were initially unfavorable reviews and skepticism of her literary prowess during the late 19th and early 20th century, but now Dickinson is considered a major American poet. Dickinson's poems are unique for the era in which she wrote; they contain short lines, typically lack titles, and often use slant rhyme as well as unconventional capitalization and punctuation.

Some scholars have suggested that the numerous letters and poems that were dedicated to Susan Gilbert Dickinson indicate a lesbian romance, but this is difficult to verify as Lavinia and Susan burned some of Emily's letters, as Emily had asked them to. Emily Dickinson's complete poems are available in English in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson and Thomas H. Johnson.


Fatma Aliye Topuz (October 9, 1862 - July 13, 1936), aka simply Fatma Aliye or Fatma Aliye Hanım, was a Turkish novelist, writer, and women's rights activist. Although there is an earlier published novel by the Turkish female author Zafer Hanım in 1877, since that one remained her only novel, Fatma Aliye Hanım with her five novels is credited as the first female novelist in Turkish literature. Her husband was less clever than her and, during the first years of their marriage, did not allow her to read novels written in foreign languages.

Fatma Aliye published her first novel Muhazarat ("Useful Information") in 1892 under her real name, in which she tried to disprove the belief that a woman cannot forget her first love. It was the first novel in the entire Ottoman Empire written by a woman. The book was reprinted in 1908. Her novel Udi ("The Lute Player"), published in 1899, depicts a female oud player, whom Fatma Aliye met in Aleppo. Renowned novelist Resat Nuri Guntekin refers to Udi as one of the most important works, which attracted his interest in literature.

Her other novels are Raf'et (1898), Enin (1910) ("Groaning") and Levaih-i Hayat ("Scenes from Life"). She thematized in her works marriage, harmony between the spouses, love and affection, and the importance of courtship, contrary to arranged marriage.. Further, she created independent and self-reliant heroines, who work and earn own money without the need of a man.

In 1893, her prominence increased after the publication of Ahmet Mithat's book Bir Muharrire-i Osmaniye'nin Neşeti ("Birth of An Ottoman Female Writer") composed of Fatma Aliye's letters. In these letters, she expresses her never-ending enthusiasm to learn. Her essay "Nisvan-ı İslâm" was translated into French under the title "Les femmes muselmannes" and also into Arabic language, and her novel Udi into French. A criticism of her, published in a French newspaper, about a book titled Women of East and West by Frenchman Émile Julliard attracted much attention in Paris. Her work was also exhibited at the library of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, USA and was listed in the catalogue of the Women's Library at the fair.

Beside her literary works, she wrote for thirteen years between 1895 and 1908 columns in the magazine Hanımlara Mahsus Gazete ("Ladies' Own Gazette") about women's rights without giving up her conservative views. Her sister Emine Semiye (1864–1944), one of the first Turkish feminists, was also among the intellectual women as editorial staff of the twice a week issued magazine.

In her 1896 published book Nisvan-ı İslam ("Women of Islam"), Fatma Aliye explained the situation of Muslim women to the western world. As written in her magazine columns, she defended in this book the conservative traditions contrary to the modern characters she created in her novels. Her works are unfortunately not widely available in English.

Note: The entries for the authors included in the literary canon for all of the nineteenth century have been placed in chronological order by the authors' dates of birth here.