Today's Evo-Psycho Story: Not All Men Are Pr**ks

This is written up on Slate:

In an article soon to be published in Evolution and Human Behavior, University of Texas–Austin graduate student Cari Goetz and her colleagues explored what they called the sexual exploitability hypothesis. The hypothesis is based on the differences between male and female reproductive strategies as humans evolved. For ancestral women, casual intercourse with an emotionally unattached man who had no clear intention of sticking around to raise any resulting offspring constituted a massive genetic gamble. By contrast, for a man with somewhere around 85 million sperm cells churned out every day—per testicle—the frivolous expenditure of gametes was far less detrimental to his genetic interests. Goetz and her team began with the assumption that—because our brains evolved long before prophylactics entered the picture—female cognition is still sensitive to the pregnancy-related consequences of uncommitted sex and women remain more reluctant than men to engage in it. They set out to test the idea that any indication that a woman’s guard is lowered—that she’s “sexually exploitable”—is a turn-on for your average man. “[T]he assessment of a woman’s immediate vulnerability,” surmise the authors, “may be central to the activation of psychological mechanisms related to sexual exploitation.”

Get it?  Men's ideal reproductive strategy is to toss their seed around with abandon.  Women's is the reverse, so to speak, and therefore men will try to coerce women into having no-strings-attached sex whereas women will try to avoid being so coerced.  This, my friends, is the second kind of evolutionary psychology in action, the kind I call EP, the kind where the fact that we have no knowledge of the reproductive strategies of our ancient ancestors can be ignored and replaced with theorizing of the above sort.

That fertilization is not exactly the same thing as passing one's genes on to the next generation (and the one after that), that pregnancy in that prehistoric era must have been a very dangerous state, that bringing up a child to the point where he or she, in turn, was fertile was even harder!  But all that is ignored in the story which states that men's reproductive strategy is to mate with as many women as possible.  Perhaps that wasn't the strategy which worked best?  Perhaps it was?  We don't actually know.

Never mind.  The Slate popularization assumes that we all accept that basic premise, and then continues:

This is an inflammatory hypothesis, of course, and the language employed in the field doesn’t help matters. It’s worth noting that in the evolutionary psychology sense, the word exploitable simply means that a woman is willing or can be more easily pressured into having sex—which takes her own desires, rather disturbingly, out of the equation. Even if she’s the aggressor, a prostitute, or a certifiable nymphomaniac, having casual sex with her would still constitute “exploiting” her (or at least her body), according to this model.
So how did this team put their sexual “exploitability” hypothesis to the test? Goetz and her colleagues planned to call a bunch of undergraduate males into the lab and ask them to rate a set of women in terms of attractiveness based on their photographs. But first they needed to pick the appropriate images. To figure out which sorts of women might be deemed most receptive to a sexual advance or most vulnerable to male pressure or coercion, they asked a large group of students (103 men and 91 women) to nominate some “specific actions, cues, body postures, attitudes, and personality characteristics” that might indicate receptivity or vulnerability. These could be psychological in nature (e.g., signs of low self-esteem, low intelligence, or recklessness), or they might be more contextual (e.g., fatigue, intoxication, separation from family and friends). A third category includes signs that the woman is physically weak, and thus more easily overpowered by a male (e.g., she’s slow-footed or small in stature). According to the authors, rape constitutes one extreme end of the “exploitation” spectrum—cheesy pickup lines the other.
By asking students for the relevant cues, the experimenters reasoned, they’d keep their own ideas about what makes a woman “exploitable” from coloring their study. When all was said and done, the regular folks in the lab had come up with a list of 88 signs that—in their expert undergraduate opinions—a woman might be an especially good target for a man who wanted to score. Here’s a sampling of what they came up with: “lip lick/bite,” “over-shoulder look,” “sleepy,” “intoxicated,” “tight clothing,” "fat," "short," "unintelligent,” “punk,” “attention-seeking,” and “touching breast.”

May I remind you that all this is supposed to have a foundation in a reproductive advantage for men?  If we take the basic evo-psycho hypothesis seriously, then one might predict that men would choose especially capable women for those one-night stands.

After all, the JustSo story seems to assume that the women will bring up any children they have, even if the men walk out on them.  Otherwise the behavior would not have any particular reproductive advantage.  Given how hard being a single-mother must have been in that imaginary African past, the more capable a woman was the more likely she was to pass the man's genes on after that quick one-night stand.

But lo and behold!  The exact reverse seems to be the criterion which is used to pick those one-night stands.  Adjectives such as "weak" and "unintelligent" and "sleepy" are used to describe a good target for the prehistoric pickup artist.

And of course none of these judgements have much to do with prehistory.  They do have something to do with a subset of American undergraduates and the culture which has produced them.  That's about all that can be said here.

Now let's dive into all that rape-related shit.  To repeat, the study looked for indicators of vulnerability:

These could be psychological in nature (e.g., signs of low self-esteem, low intelligence, or recklessness), or they might be more contextual (e.g., fatigue, intoxication, separation from family and friends). A third category includes signs that the woman is physically weak, and thus more easily overpowered by a male (e.g., she’s slow-footed or small in stature). According to the authors, rape constitutes one extreme end of the “exploitation” spectrum—cheesy pickup lines the other.

Hmm.  We are getting back to rape as an evolutionary adaptation here.  But the actual indicators appear to be a hotch-potch of unrelated things, ranging from behavior which appears to be sexually inviting (touching breast or tight clothing or over-shoulder look) to behavior which reflects vulnerability (intoxicated or short).   And, of course, "unintelligent."

The follow-up study to the initial one found that "not all men are pricks" in the words of the popularizer:

In a follow-up study (that ended up being published first), the authors tried to add some nuance to their sexual exploitability hypothesis. Graduate student David Lewis led a project to narrow in on the specific type of man who would be most alert to the sort of "exploitability" cues outlined above. Not every man, it seems, is equally proficient at homing in on these weak spots in women. So he and his colleagues asked 72 straight men to evaluate the same photos as before, and in the same way. But this time, the researchers also measured some key personality traits in the male raters, as well as the extent to which they desired and pursued uncommitted sex. The students were asked, for instance: “With how many different partners have you had sexual intercourse without having interest in a long-term committed relationship with that person,” and, “How often do you experience sexual arousal when you are in contact with someone you are not in a committed romantic relationship with?”
The main finding to emerge from this follow-up study was that the more promiscuity-minded men who happened also to have deficiencies in personal empathy and warmth were the ones most vigilant and responsive to female “exploitability” cues. Men without this critical calculus—say, a disagreeable man who prefers monogamy, or a caring one who likes to play the field—are more likely to have these cues fly right past their heads and miss the opportunity to capitalize on an “easy lay.” So rather than the sexual exploitability hypothesis summing up the male brain as one big ball of undifferentiated stereotype, the caveat here is that there are multiple subtypes of reproductive strategies in men. Not all men are pricks, in other words.

Do you know what I'd like to know?   How would those "more promiscuity-minded men who happened to also to have deficiencies in personal empathy and warmth" score in a study about, say, theft?  I'm not at all sure that what that study found has much to do with sexual selection per se.  It may have more to do with certain personality types and how they interact with the world in general than about the reproductive inheritance assigned to these men (which appears to be the use of coercion and perhaps violence).

Does any of this prove anything about natural selection?  The popularizer seems to think so because he suggests that Mother Nature is a misogynist:

It’s easy to see the sexual exploitability hypothesis as misogynistic, but I don’t believe the authors are advancing a chauvinistic ideology. Take those kinds of complaints up with natural selection, not the theorists untangling its sometimes-wicked ways.

Who knows what ideology EP practitioners have?  Ahem.    Still, I'd argue that this particular popularization is almost as misandrist as it is misogynist.  But most importantly, these two studies have not proven the sexual exploitability hypothesis as a result of natural selection.  Nothing of the sort!

One must not make those giant theoretical leaps without the intervening steps, you know.  We have no evidence about the way sexual selection functioned in some prehistoric era, the studies appear not to control for the effects of culture and the study of young American undergraduates looking at pictures on computers cannot be regarded as some kind of proof of genetic memes having to do with how human men choose one-night stand partners.

Still, EP practitioners often assume that those giant theoretical leaps have already been made.  Hence the suggestion that one should take the complaints to natural selection.  That's probably my strongest problem with the EP folk:  They tend to treat their theories like religion.

That's particularly notable in something like this popularization where the studies popularized address something (exploitative behavior) which is clearly not the main reproductive strategy of human males if it even is one at all.   That one appears to be pair-bonding and the creation of larger family groups.

But discussing the most obvious candidates for natural selection isn't anywhere near as much fun as discussing rape or being a pickup artist as reproductive strategies approved by Mother Nature.
------
And what about that question the popularizer asks, as a challenge?  This one:

I think it’s fair to say that the findings are consistent with the authors’ sexual exploitability hypothesis—and evolved sex differences in reproductive strategies more generally. But here we run into one of the consistent criticisms of evolutionary psychology, which is that there can be a “just-so story” to explain every data set. Perhaps the effects reported by Goetz and her team can be interpreted just as well from a non-evolutionary perspective. (If you think so, I’d be curious to hear your ideas in the comments section below.) However you interpret them, results like these can feel self-evident, given that “obviously” men would find drunk and air-headed women easy to screw. But we also must be on the lookout for our own retrospective biases: After all, I’m not so sure most people would have predicted that men would also find such women more attractive. All else being equal, would you really have thought that the average man would subjectively perceive such women to be physically more alluring than their sober, bright-minded peers?

Answering that question really requires getting the studies and then wading through them.  Because the list of indicators of exploitability is all over the place.  It's pretty easy to see why a woman touching her bare breasts would be regarded as sexually attractive or at least inviting sexual approaches.  It's also possible that sexually aroused women have that sleepy look.  Or, rather, that what is called a "sleepy" look in the studies might be interpreted as the look a woman might have when approaching an orgasm.  Likewise, the way one looks when drunk on wine might not look that different from the way one looks when drunk on desire.

To give a more precise response I'd have to read the studies, alas.  And then I'd be even angrier than I am already.












 

Echidne's Education Rant

Mitt Romney has come up with his education policy.  It's more of the same and would make the problem worse.  But that is so very common in American politics that I can't even get properly angry.

Well, not angrier about it than I already am.  The basic problems in the US education system are income inequality, residential segregation and the local funding of education.  When those are put together we end up with an unequal system, one where the districts that really need more resources than any other districts in fact end up with fewer resources.  Then the schools in the poor areas (where the students have many more problems) will fail and the solution is to punish the schools and the teachers.

The conservative solutions are an extremely odd form of free-marketism.  An extremely odd form!

Just think about it:  Parents, even those parents who had little education themselves, are expected to be able to shop around for a good education for their children, when what "good education" might mean is hard to define, except in the very long term, and when the information about schools is at best very partial.

At the same time, it looks like markets are not expected to work when it comes to teachers!  Teachers can get their salaries slashed, their retirement incomes shrunk and their reputations destroyed, and the conservatives expect that there will be plenty of well-prepared and skilled teachers in the future!  Nope, they don't need to be paid for going to college!  They are expected to teach only because it is a calling.

Though what the conservatives really want is for mothers to educate their children at home, for nothing.  That would cut the taxes.  That it would also be an extremely expensive form of education doesn't matter as the costs would all be individualized instead of socialized and mothers should be glad to sacrifice for their children, even if conservative politicians are not willing to sacrifice for the children of the country.

A big aspect of education is that the benefits do not fall just to the individuals who get educated but also on everyone else.  We are all ultimately happier in a society where people can read and write, where the colleges and universities produce capable physicians, managers, lawyers, dentists, teachers, social workers and so on.  But the free-marketeers tend to ignore that aspect of education altogether and only see a corporate-centered worker benefit as relevant.

If you eat your seed corn you will not sow any in the future.

The Gallup Pro-Life/Pro-Choice Poll

This one:

A record low 41 percent of Americans call themselves 'pro choice' on abortion, with the number sliding among independent voters, a key political group, a Gallup poll released on Wednesday showed.

The results of the May poll come as abortion and contraception supporters have come under increasing pressure in Congress and across the United States.


"Pro choice" is a label for people who favor the right of women to choose whether to bring a pregnancy to term. "Pro life" is a label for those who back legal protection for human fetuses, including outlawing abortion.

The pro choice figure in the May poll is 1 percentage point below the previous low of 42 percent in May 2009. It is down from 47 percent in July 2011, Gallup said in a statement.

Fifty percent of those surveyed described themselves as 'pro life.' That is 1 percentage point short of the record high, also in May 2009, it said.

"It remains to be seen whether the pro-life spike found this month proves temporary, as it did in 2009, or is sustained for some period," Gallup said.

And that's quite correct.  However, this poll shares with all other polls about abortion the difficulty of knowing what the questions really mean.  The same poll asked the respondents whether abortion should remain legal under all cases, under some cases or never, and the percentages choosing each of those alternatives, respectively, were 25%, 52% and 20%.

Those numbers should be compared to past Gallup polls which you can do here.  That comparison shows much less change and it is, after all, the question of about legality that is of real interest, not the question whether a respondent considers herself or himself pro-life or pro-choice or some combination of the two.

The Peonies. A Re-Post

This is a draft for a short story I wrote some years ago. You might enjoy it at the peony time of the year. Or not, given that it's a bit O. Henryish.


The tulips were pushing up from the black soil. They looked like knives, Bruce thought. From his window he could see sharp green knives piercing the cold soil all over the front yard. The tulips were Rosie's. She had planted them last fall, pushing the bulbs into the soil one by one, leaning on her crutches.

There was a list somewhere. A list about the tulips, what they were called and what plants would rise up around them. Bruce knew that he should look for the list; Rosie had spent what little strength she had left to write lists about all her plants, lists about the tasks of gardening, even lists telling him what to anticipate, what to look for, how to enjoy the beauty of her garden. He wasn't ready to look for the lists yet.

The house was silent. Bruce took his breakfast dishes back into the kitchen and then climbed up the steep stairs to the top of the house. There he had his study, his lair as Rosie had called it. The walls were covered with bookshelves and the shelves with books he loved. This is where he had escaped family Thanksgiving parties and rowdy grand-children's visits. This was where he used to relax, put his feet up and lean back in his old armchair while listening to the faint sounds of pre-dinner clatter Rosie was making in the kitchen downstairs. All was well in the world.

Now, of course, nothing was well in his world. He took down a favorite volume about the Civil War and opened it randomly. The words were just words printed on the paper. He put the book back in its place and turned around. He could see the back yard from his high window. Green knives in the back, too. He turned on the television set and sat down for another day of existence.

Some weeks later he noticed the first buds on the tulips. Most of them were plain green but a group near the dining-room window sported buds which shimmered darkly through the green. Were they infected with something, Bruce wondered? Rosie would have known. Her lists might tell him. He should look them up. He spent the day vacuuming, doing laundry and buying groceries. At night he put on a cardigan and opened the door to Rosie's room, her study. It was cold and smelled stale. He turned on the light and saw the lists she had left him, neatly stacked on her desk. The top one was about tulips.

He sat down to read.
"The ones under the dining-room window are called 'Queens of the Night', Bruce. They are as black as tulips come."
That explained the color of their bulbs.
"They are beautiful. I planted them in the middle of yellow-leaved hostas for contrast. The hostas are probably not up yet."
Bruce couldn't remember about the hostas. It wasn't something he normally noticed. But he would check tomorrow.
"They are stern, these tulips, and sad. But they also have a flame of life in the middle, a kind of sexiness as the name suggests. Do you remember New Orleans, Bruce?"
He couldn't read any further that night.

The following weekend Bruce's son came to visit with his young family. The house was full of children's laughter and cheerful-sounding conversation. Bruce wanted to ask his son about the tulips but couldn't get the topic introduced. They spent the afternoon out, and Bruce came home tired. The sun was setting and its rays struck the now open black tulips with a malicious glee. Bruce glared at them. His anger was quite impartial; he was angry at the tulips, his son and Rosie. He was angry at the idea of gardening. Gardening was what Rosie did.

That night he couldn't sleep because of the heavy meal they had had in a noisy restaurant. He took the tulip notes to bed with him and continued reading.

"The ones in the back yard are lily-shaped tulips. Their petals are tipped. I always thought of them as butterflies trying to take off. The most beautiful ones near the fence are called 'Ballerinas'. You'll see why when they flower: They look just like dancers in their tutus standing on point."
'Ballerinas', Bruce mouthed. What did he have to do with 'Ballerinas'? Who invented these idiotic names in the first place?

"They should flower at the same time as the bleeding hearts behind them. The bleeding hearts should echo the pink in the tulips, or so I hope. Oh Bruce, I so wanted to see them together! I know that you don't care for such things but won't you watch out for them, for my sake?"

Bruce turned off the light and lay there, his eyes filling with tears of anger. How dare Rosie do this, play him like a violin? She always fought unfairly, and now he couldn't even point that out to her.

In a few days all the tulips were in flower. The garden looked deceptive, as if Rosie was still there to care for it. Bruce made notes of the heights of the different varieties and counted their blooms. He tried to appreciate the color harmonies and contrasts, but for this he had to take Rosie's list out and to study it sitting on the front steps. Neighbors passing by complimented him on the tulips. He didn't want to remind them that he hadn't planted any himself. Then he became worried about the upkeep the tulips might require. Surely Rosie used to do something to them every spring?

He looked up her list of garden tasks. It was written differently, it was businesslike with chores, tools and times listed in a table. This was Rosie, too, her cool, professional side. Still, Bruce read through the list twice seeking in vain for a more personal note. He was impressed by the sheer volume of physical labor needed for gardening. Rosie never asked for his help.

He began the following morning with the cleaning of the flowerbeds, raking and aerating the soil. He carted compost from the pile by wheelbarrowfuls and spread it across the beds. His shoulders ached and sweat trickled down his nose. The earth had a deep smell. He didn't know if the compost was spread to the right thickness and he wasn't sure if he hadn't removed something from the beds that was supposed to stay, but he slept well that night.

It rained in the morning. The rain pelted the windows and smeared the view through them with tears. The tulips stood up against the grayness like so many colored flags, like soldiers in gaudy uniforms, refusing to bend in the face of the inevitable. Bruce cracked the window open. The smell of wet earth and green leaves drifted in, mingling with the rain and the soreness in his muscles.

He suddenly missed Rosie so much that his body felt stretched thin, pulled infinitely long until it reached the borders of the realm of the dead, until he turned into an insistent throbbing of one desperate thought, this thought knocking on the sealed doors of the dead, asking for Rosie O'Leary. The pain was unbearable, not bearable, but he bore it anyway. After a few moments, or an eternity, it receded, and Bruce stood there looking out into the rain again. He hated being alive.

Later that day he moved all Rosie's lists up to his study and arranged them in an order that seemed logical. He took the top one, titled 'Late Spring-Early Summer' and sat down to read it in his armchair. The rain drummed on the roof. It was almost cozy in his den, warm and dry. He shuffled the papers in his lap and a faint whiff of Rosie's perfume touched his nose. It pierced him for a second.

"You are going to hate the weeding, Bruce. I always hated it. The weeds crop up so fast this time of the year and you can't let them win, that's how you are. That means an aching back, my dear. There is some liniment for that in the medicine cabinet. I am sorry for your pain, but the weeding will do you good."
Bruce grimaced at the thought and turned the page.

"My favorite moment of late spring was always the opening of the peonies. I never planted them, they came with the house, and I don't know what they are called. They have these small hard buds, like hands held in a tight fist against fear or anger, and ants crawl over them, seeking the sweetness in them. I could never decide if it looked like a horror film or the prelude to some erotica. The first spring when we moved to the house, remember, when the children were tiny?, I wanted to pull the peonies out because they gave me the shivers, but there was so much to do that I never got around to it. Now, of course, I am grateful for that, for the next stage is the opening of their buds and that is worth everything. They opened for us all those years, love. All those years we had together."

Bruce was crying now, his body releasing the sobs in tune with the rain on the roof. He stumbled up and leaned against the cold window panes, crying.

When the rain slowed down his tears also did and he was able to stand straighter again. He didn't really want to go back to the list but he wanted to know about the opening of the peonies.

"The buds break open when you're not looking. Perhaps they just can't take the stroking of the ants any more, or perhaps the mild night wind blows them open. Anyway, one morning when you go out there they are, these gigantic, blowsy, crushed flowers, like white-and-pink silk, straining to open even more towards the sun. It is so sensual, Bruce. You must touch them, put your senses in your fingertips and lips and touch them. And then you must inhale their scent. Hurry, for they won't last very long.

I miss your body, Bruce. Even in this hell of pain, with my body being pulled apart by the final crunching of death's teeth, I want you. I know that you can't want me now, I understand. But you will want me when I am dead and the peonies will help."

When Bruce went to bed that night the sheets felt like Rosie's hands on his chest. The air was heavier, moister, than usual, and as he drifted asleep he turned to Rosie's side of the bed trying to pull her into his embrace. He dreamt about naked flesh and sex and woke up half-guilty half-relieved.

The spring speeded up. The tulips stretched their petals wider and wider and then dropped them. Other flowers took their place. Bruce fertilized and weeded, staked and weeded, watered and weeded. His muscles ached and he couldn't get his nails clean. He now knew Rosie's early year lists by heart and had started reading her gardening books. He wasn't going to be a gardener; that was what Rosie did, but he wanted to do this one thing for her. When his daughter who lived in France called him he told her all about the garden. She seemed pleased.

Then the peonies opened. It was just like Rosie had written. Yesterday they were all holding their closed fists up to the sky, today they were bending down, heavy with blossoms both celestial and obscene. Bruce looked around to make sure that nobody was looking and then buried his face in them. They were scented with innocence and hope and the smell of love and frenzied couplings. They caressed his face, their silkiness a thousand remembered nights with Rosie. Bruce stood there, half-crouched, while his body filled with longing, grief and desire. That moment Rosie was there with him, one with him, and also saying goodbye to him.

He spent the whole day with the peonies, until a hunger made him so weak that he barely made it back into the house and to a gigantic supper. After supper he moved Rosie's gardening books up to his study and selected a volume to read. He wanted to buy something new for his garden. A rose bush, perhaps.

One More Fund-Raising Post

It's that time of the year.  My warmest thanks to all who have contributed to the expenses of this blog.  There's still time to contribute and the expenses haven't quite been covered.

On Unemployment

This graph is interesting.  It is about employment and what is happening to it:

Note the impact of the (Republican)  governors getting rid of public sector workers.  Something to remember in this war against unions and teachers.

Paul Krugman has pointed out that the recent/ongoing/repeating  recession has given us plentiful evidence of Keynesian economics functioning.  But most economists will not pay attention:

... the right wing of the profession is just covering its ears and yelling “La, la, la, I can’t hear you.”

More from Krugman here.

Choices, Choices... Condescension Or Contempt Towards Women?

Those seem to be the two realistic choices American politicians offer us wimminfolk.  The Republicans are all about contempt towards women, as women or as people.  Women are only of value as the potential or actual aquaria for egg-Americans.  Now, egg-Americans are of intrinsic value!

And what about Democrats?   Or, let's say,  the current president*?  According to Campbell Brown, Obama condescends to us poor wimminz:

WHEN I listen to President Obama speak to and about women, he sometimes sounds too paternalistic for my taste. In numerous appearances over the years — most recently at the Barnard graduation — he has made reference to how women are smarter than men. It’s all so tired, the kind of fake praise showered upon those one views as easy to impress. As I listen, I am always bracing for the old go-to cliché: “Behind every great man is a great woman.”
Some women are smarter than men and some aren’t. But to suggest to women that they deserve dominance instead of equality is at best a cheap applause line.

Mmm.   I was once told that I'm a very smart woman;  even smarter than the average man.  Now that hurt.

Still,  nobody in their right minds can possibly believe that women are on their way to world domination, just because more women than men go to college.  That's the case even in Saudi Arabia...

If the conditions of the majority of the world's women applied to people in general and not just women we'd call it something like serfdom.   We don't like to talk about that so instead we discuss the possible end of men, a future of the monstrous regiment of women and other similar red herrings.

But whatever.  If* Obama sounds off in some of his comments, well, almost all politicians do when it comes to talking about (or to) that weird and mysterious species: women.

Campbell Brown continues her piece by arguing that the proper safety net for women is the family, not the government.  That works out very well for all the women whose families belong to the one percent, of course.

She then suggests that people can't chew gum and walk at the same time.  Or at least that politicians can't do that.  Women must choose between jobs and reproductive freedom!  Or between jobs and insurance coverage for the contraceptive pill.   And women overwhelmingly choose jobs when offered that false dichotomy as a choice!  At least those women she has personally quizzed on that topic.

I wonder what she would say if someone asked her what it is,  in fact, that the Republican Party is offering women in this election.  It's not more reproductive choices, that's for sure, and I'm extremely skeptical of the idea that some kind of a confidence fairy would pop up with a Republican administration and suddenly turn all those business people hoarding their money into "job-creators."
----
*A different question is whether Obama, in fact, said that women are smarter than men or that women will soon dominate this country if not the world.  I don't think he did.

Why We Cannot Afford Security In Old Age

This opinion piece conflates many of my favorite hatreds in one piece!  It begins with the extrapolation of a trend to its logical absurd end-point:

IF nothing is done about entitlement spending, and if our current tax breaks continue, then by 2025, tax revenue will be able to pay for Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, interest on the debt and nothing else. The rest — defense, medical research, highways, education, energy — will have to be financed by deficits. Social Security’s funding is predicted to run short in 2033, Medicare’s trust fund in 2024.

One can do similar extrapolations with any kind of spending which is increasing.  Just figure out how many years that trend will take before all money in the world will be spent on just one good or service!  How many years before all the government money goes into national defense?   How many years before we spend all our national income on health care alone?

That's the first pet hatred.  The second is the hidden assumption in that paragraph that we cannot increase, say, the funding of Social Security.  Granted, there's a quick side-stab at the tax breaks but the rest of the piece goes on to explain why we have to change retirement age.  That we could reduce the regressive aspect of the payroll tax is something polite people never mention.

The third one is the conflation of Social Security with Medicare.  The two are different programs, you know, and it's Medicare which is in some real trouble, not Social Security as such.

The fourth pet hatred of mine has to do with the way these articles always, always attack certain programs and never the country-building or defense programs.  How much money has this country frittered away in Iraq and in Afghanistan?  For what benefit?  How many people could have gotten health care or retirement benefits with what was spent there?  Not to mention the lives saved if we could learn to do less war.

Indeed, I will not take these woe-is-me pieces about the entitlement programs seriously until the writer also addresses the military-industrial complex and its entitlements.  A good way to begin is to count the number of lives saved or made better under each alternative use of government funds.

My final point, not quite worthy of the label "pet hatred,"  has to do with Medicare spending.  Yes, Medicare IS expensive and, yes, we need to install good efficacy studies in geriatric health care, ask some hard questions about what the best types of care are for the group of individuals near the end of their lives and how to deliver that care most efficiently.

BUT the fact is that most health care spending will be done by all of us when we are old.  That is the nature of the beast.  Comparing the health care costs of younger individuals with private insurance to Medicare costs doesn't make much sense.  We cannot save money by turning old people into younger people (although such comparisons do show that centralized systems, such as Medicare, have much lower administrative costs).

In other words, health care for the group that is currently covered under Medicare will always be the most expensive chunk of the national health care expenditure.  How we fund that care is the real question.  Do we really want the frail elderly to pay for it at that point in the life cycle?

Gender Politics

In the Congress.  That's the title of a Washington Post editorial about the re-authorization of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). 

I happen to think that the name of that act was probably a mistake because the law is about particular types of violence, the types which in the past were not really regarded as "real" violence such as domestic violence.  Much of that affects women more as victims than other kinds of violence but the law is not intended to protect only women.

But that's not what I want to write about.  Instead, it is the term in the title "gender politics."  Whenever that crops up it really means particular types of issues about the silly wimminz.  Like when they want something.

We don't see "gender politics" when Republican governors want to get rid of pensions for teachers or stop nurses from being able to unionize.  We don't see "gender politics" when job programs invest money in roadworks and bridge construction or when the military budget is an untouchable holy cow in all government budget fights.  In reality, the dimension of "gender" exists in many more political choices than we are commonly allowed to notice.

Neither is the term used for those Internet diatribes with which I'm most familiar, what with having visited the many misogynistic sites.  Now that's gender politics!  Or gender warfare.  A mild example can be found here though even that one is not safe for work reading.

A Guest Post by Anna: A Feminist Literary Canon, Part One: Before the Nineteenth Century

(Echidne's note:  This is the first post on the feminist literary canon by Anna. )

Many movements for social justice have produced literature which leaves a lasting impact, such as Letter From Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King Jr, or Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. I thought it might be helpful to make a list, with explanation, of feminist literature which has done so. I certainly don't claim this is the final authority, and if you want to make your own canon I think that would be excellent. But I thought this might be a good starting point for people who want to read the most lasting and influential feminist writing. I have organized this canon by the chronological order of the authors' births. The first post in this Sunday series covers the authors we know about who were active before the nineteenth century. The nineteenth century is when first-wave feminism began, but there were those producing what might be considered feminist literature before that time. This post is dedicated to them.

Christine de Pizan (also seen as de Pisan) (1363 – c. 1430) was an Italian-born woman who spent most of her life in France, and wrote entirely in Middle French. She was well known and praised as a poet, and was Europe's first professional woman writer. In Letters to the God of Love (1399) she expressed her unhappiness over women's lot within Medieval society and argued against the underlying sexism in popular literary works. She continued such arguments on behalf of women in Letters on the Debate of The Romance of the Rose, which was released to French readers in 1401. In this she argued against the belittling of women in The Romance of the Rose. This was the first recorded literary quarrel in France and was eventually taken part in by a chancellor of the University of Paris, poets, and even French royalty.

In Christine's Vision (1405), she wrote that a man once stated to her that educated women were unbecoming because they were so uncommon; she replied that ignorant men are more offensive - they are even more unbecoming because they are so very common. In her most famous work, The Book of the City of Ladies (circa 1405), she imagines a city for women, including all the famous women who have ruled in history, as well as women who have honored their parents, guarded their chastity, been faithful to their husbands, and who have become martyrs for their faith. This book was written in response to a book by Mathéolus, most likely his Lamentations, as translated by Jean le Fèvre; that book, while professing to address the subject of respecting women, turned instead into another attack on women and all their supposed vices.

In The Treasure of the City of Ladies (circa 1405), de Pisan writes about the effect of women’s speech and actions in everyday life. She argues that women should recognize and promote their ability to make peace, which she thinks will allow women to mediate between husband and subjects, saying that "skill in discourse should be a part of every woman’s moral repertoire". She also claims that slanderous speech erodes one’s honor and threatens the sisterly bond among women. She offers advice to governesses, widows, and even prostitutes. Her works are widely available in English, and The Treasure of the City of Ladies is available in French here.

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim  (15 September 1486 – 18 February 1535) was a German magician. In response to the commonly held low opinion of women in his day, he wrote Female Pre-eminence: Or the Dignity and Excellency of that Sex, Above the Male (1529), which is a reversal of that opinion. It was originally written in Latin, and can be found in English here.

Jane Anger was an English author of the late sixteenth century. The only evidence of her is Her Protection for Women, a pamphlet published in London in 1589, of which only one original copy survives. The full title is Jane Anger her protection for women, to defend them against the scandalous reportes of a late surfeiting lover, and all other like venerians that complaine so to bee overcloyed with women's kindnesse. Jane Anger was responding directly to Thomas Orwin's Boke His Surfeit in Love, with a farwel to the folies of his own phantasie.

She argues that men only see women as objects of sexual desire, and that once that desire is satisfied, they abandon them – this in response to the claim that women are all lustful and untrustworthy. The Protection combines classical myths with vernacular polemic. According to a modern commentator, "Protection is peppered with classical Latin quotes, feminist interpretations of the Bible, jabs at men and their poor logic, and references to events of antiquity, [and] to strong and virtuous women, classical and contemporary women.” The pamphlet can be found in English here.


Marie le Jars de Gournay (6 October 1565 - 13 July 1645) was a French writer whose feminist works include The Equality of Men and Women (1622), The Ladies' Grievance (1641), The Promenade of Monsieur de Montaigne (1594) and The Apology for the Woman Writing (1641).

The Equality of Men and Women was the first work she published under her own name rather than a pseudonym; it spread quickly throughout Europe, and was cited by contemporary writers defending women. The Ladies' Grievance explored the oppression of women, and The Promenade of Monsieur de Montaigne, a bestseller, was one of the first modern psychological novels, and also one of the first to explore female sexual feeling. It showed the suffering of women who are dependent on men.

In her autobiographical The Apology for the Woman Writing, Gournay defended every aspect of her life, from her moral conduct to her household management. These works are available in English in the book Apology for the Woman Writing and Other Works (The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe) by Marie le Jars de Gournay, translated by Richard Hillman and Colette Quesnel. 


Judith Sargent Murray (1751–1820) was an early American advocate for women's rights, an essayist, playwright, poet, and letter writer. In her landmark essay "On the Equality of the Sexes," published in the Massachusetts Magazine in 1790, she claimed that women’s seeming inferiority to men was due to their lack of education, not any inherent defect. Alice Rossi's book The Feminist Papers starts with Murray's essay. The essay can be found in English here.

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759 –1797) was an eighteenth-century British writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights. Her best known book is A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (1792); she wrote it in response to reading Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord's 1791 report to the French National Assembly, in which he stated that women should only receive a domestic education. Wollstonecraft argued that women ought to have an education commensurate with their position in society, claiming that women are essential to the nation because they educate its children and because they could be "companions" to their husbands, rather than mere wives. Instead of viewing women as ornaments to society or property to be traded in marriage, Wollstonecraft maintained that they are human beings deserving of the same fundamental rights as men.

When it was first published in 1792, Vindication of the Rights of Woman was reviewed favorably for the most part, and was almost immediately released in a second edition that same year; it was also released in several American editions and translated into French. The writers Mary Hays and Mary Robinson specifically alluded to Wollstonecraft's text in their own works, and Mary Hays cited the Rights of Woman in her novel Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796) and modeled her female characters after Wollstonecraft's ideal woman. However, scholar Elizabeth Carter was unimpressed with the book, and Thomas Taylor, a translator who had been a a landlord to the Wollstonecraft family in the late 1770s, wrote a satire called A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes, claiming that if women had rights, animals should too - he considered both ideas absurd.

Wollstonecraft also wrote the novel Mary: A Fiction (1788), in which Mary is forced into a loveless marriage for money, and ends up dying alone and unhappy, though she does befriend a local girl and falls in love with another man; both die of tuberculosis, and the ending of the novel implies that Mary will soon die as well.

Her second novel still further critiques women’s economic dependence on men; titled Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman (1798), an unfinished novel published posthumously and often considered Wollstonecraft's most radical feminist work, it features a woman imprisoned in an insane asylum by her husband, who has also had her child taken away, though she is not insane; the woman, Maria, has an affair with a fellow inmate and a friendship with one of her keepers, a working-class woman named Jemima.

After Wollstonecraft died in 1797, her husband William Godwin published a memoir of her life which revealed her illegitimate child, her love affairs, and her attempts at suicide. While Godwin believed he was portraying his wife with love, sincerity, and compassion, contemporary readers were shocked by Wollstonecraft's unorthodox lifestyle and she became a reviled figure for approximately the next century.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is widely available in bookstores and can be read In English here.
Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman can be read in English here.

 

Mary: A Fiction  can be read in English here.

 

 

Car Dreams

In two years my car will be old enough to vote.  But my car dreams are not about finding a replacement or trying to figure out how to live without a car.  That part is taken care with the rational part of my brainz.

My dreams are about something different.  For instance, I have always wanted a car that could be shrunk to a little attache case on wheels for parking purposes.  Or alternatively, a car which has retractable stork legs which grow out of the bottom when the car needs to be parked.  Then one could just hop across all the parked cars and settle somewhere on the second floor so to speak.

And even before car manufacturers installed balloons in cars I thought that external balloons would be a great idea, as a form of defense against butt-flies and other careless drivers in traffic.  They would have been transparent balloons naturally.

A different set of dreams has to do with desiring a BMW.   Eat my smoke!

And the memory of the one time I  test-drove a 1950s Daimler.  It had real burl walnut in the dashboard...

Getting Something For Nothing. David Brooks.

Want to hear something funny?  I started reading David Brooks from the other end, with this:

Neither the United States nor the European model will work again until we rediscover and acknowledge our own natural weaknesses and learn to police rather than lionize our impulses.

And I thought:  Wow, the guy is advocating regulation of the financial markets, finally!   I must give him credit when the credit is due.

Then, of course, I read the column in the proper order and it's just Brooks' usual missive from an Alternative Reality where Democrats are selfish and greedy and Republicans are not at all selfish or greedy.

In that Reality the past was gold-tinted and wore rosy-but-firm spectacles on its pinched nose.  In that Reality this was true:

The American founders did this by decentralizing power. They built checks and balances to frustrate and detain the popular will. They also dispersed power to encourage active citizenship, hoping that as people became more involved in local government, they would develop a sense of restraint and responsibility.

 They dispersed power?  To land-owning white men, if I remember correctly.

The whole column is preposterous.   As Charlie Pierce states, Brooks deserves to be pelted with rotting fish for that one.  Because that wasn't unknown in the actual real history of Europe and the United States which has very little to do with the Alternative History Brooks posits at the beginning of his fable.

I really should do a write-like-David-Brooks day.

This is Funny. About Advertising

Men are not necessarily portrayed well in advertising, either.  But it's certainly true that the advertisers haven't succeeded in making men sufficiently insecure about everything yet.

Thanks to knuckles for the link.

Violence As A Form of Pronography*

This is almost too common to write about, though I have written about the Missing. White. Young. Pretty. Women.  phenomenon before.  It's very complicated, racist, ageist, lookist and myth-based.   But it does NOT mean (as some misogynists say) that women are somehow valued as human beings  more than men, at least if they are white, young and pretty.

I'm used to those stories by now.  Still,  (WARNING)  this is truly horrible:

She was found still wearing the shimmering silver cocktail number she wore to celebrate her wedding. She was as bright as the sequins on that dress. Young. Beautiful.
But within two days of saying, "I do," she was dead.
Police officers in the suburban Chicago town of Burbank found Estrella Carrera, 26, in the bathtub of the condominium she planned to share with Arnoldo Jimenez, 30. She had been stabbed multiple times.
"This was a brutal murder," Capt. Joe Ford, spokesman for the Burbank Police Department, said Wednesday. "There is some aggression, obviously."

-----
*Misspelled in the hope that this doesn't catch in the filters

Shoes

I never post about shoes!  Well, except to point out that one should be able to walk in them without permanent back trouble and without cutting off spare toes which stick out and without tottering like someone not used to stilt-walking yet.
  
But these are very funny.

----
From Saying Yes

Even Dolphins Gang-Rape!

I missed all those popularizations about the raping gay  dolphins:

Dolphins have been defamed. Six weeks ago, the Daily Mail informed us about The dark side of Flipper: He's a sexual predator who resorts to rape to get his way.
And the Daily Telegraph also told a similar tale: "according to scientists", dolphins resort to "rape" to assert authority.
Other news outlets around the world carried similar reports. Examples: bisexual and exclusively gay dolphins (MSN); male dolphins are bisexual, US scientists claim (Australia's News Ltd); and male bottlenose dolphins engage in extensive bisexuality (ZeeNews, India).

Anyone who has read my litanies about how science is popularized knows why The Daily Male Mail would print that popularization or why the Daily Telegraph would follow suit.

Many popularizations popularize stuff that's not in the initial study, of course.   But this one is really an extreme example because the particular paper did not discuss rape or homosexuality in dolphins:

Are you kidding me? If the ‘writers’ of these articles had read the paper, they would have noticed that it contains nothing about the sexual behaviour of the dolphins they studied, bisexual or otherwise, aside from brief mentions of the possible consequences of social networks on reproductive success. It certainly didn’t mention anything about bisexual behaviour, homosexual behaviour, or rape.

That's good advice, about actually reading the paper one summarizes and popularizes.

What's instructive about this case is that it tells us so very clearly WHY certain studies get popularized and many others do not.  That this particular study had nothing (or very little) to do with the sexual behavior of dolphins doesn't matter at all.

A study twenty years ago has argued that dolphin bulls engage in behavior which to humans looks like gang-rape:

Richard Connor and other colleagues showed, almost 20 years ago that male dolphins work in alliances to cut a female off from the pod and coerce her into mating. It's a behaviour that forever associated male dolphins with the human idea of 'gang rape.'
...

The other side of the dolphin story illustrates my point. Dolphin bulls behave like gang rapists, harassing solitary females until, exhausted, the female copulates with one or all of the males.
Perhaps the similarities with the most repellent coalitional behavior among men are merely superficial. Perhaps they run deeper than that. That makes a fascinating question to be researched. Sensitively. But no matter what the findings, what dolphin males do in Shark Bay doesn't make that kind of behavior any more acceptable in men.

It's unclear to me how often this behavior has been observed, whether it is common or unusual and whether the observer's interpretation of it is correct.   But it was reported in a study twenty years ago, not in the study this past spring.




 

Repeat After Me: A Government Is Not A Business. A Government Is Not A Family. A Government Is A Government.

OK, that sounds a bit shrill.  But I'm fed up with the argument that having an MBA or experience in running a private firm (sometimes to ground) is useful for those who would like to be the president of a country.   I'm equally fed up with the argument that just like a family, the government must do belt-tightening when times are bad.

A country is not a corporation (yet) and a country is not a family.

There are good economic and other reasons why we don't run families like corporations or corporations like families, and there are even better reasons for not running a government like a firm or a family.

Though often it does sound as if conservative politicians want to be like those old-fashioned economists who were reputed to know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

Meanwhile, in Mississippi, Bubba Carpenter Teaches Women Morals

This is about abortion, of course:

Via Rachel Maddow:
"It's going to be challenged, of course, in the Supreme Court and all -- but literally, we stopped abortion in the state of Mississippi, legally, without having to--  Roe vs. Wade. So we've done that. I was proud of it. The governor signed it into law. And of course, there you have the other side. They're like, 'Well, the poor pitiful women that can't afford to go out of state are just going to start doing them at home with a coat hanger. That's what we've learned over and over and over.'
"But hey, you have to have moral values."

Sounds like Bubba is soo tired of hearing about those coat hangers.

Obama, The First Girl President

Via Digby, I read a piece Dana Milbanks wrote about that:

Nonsense. Obama is not the first gay president. He is the first female president.
Consider his activities on Monday: He sat down to tape a session with the ladies of ABC’s “The View” — his fourth appearance on the talk show by women and for (mostly) women. He accepted an award from Barnard College and gave the commencement speech to graduates of the women’s school. Heck, he even appeared in public wearing a gown.
Obama was still early in his address when he acknowledged that his praise for the young generation of women is “a cheap applause line when you’re giving a commencement at Barnard.”
But Obama was being modest. He didn’t deliver a cheap applause line. He delivered an entire speech full of them. His reelection campaign has been working for months to exploit the considerable gender gap, which puts him far ahead of likely GOP rival Mitt Romney among women. But Monday’s activities veered into pandering, as Obama brazenly flaunted his feminine mystique.
He speculated that “Congress would get a lot more done” if more women were there. He speculated that, although no women signed the Constitution, “we can assume that there were founding mothers whispering smarter things in the ears of the founding fathers.”
He announced that “more and more women are out-earning their husbands. You’re more than half of our college graduates and master’s graduates and PhDs.” He told them that they are “poised to make this the century where women shape not only their own destiny but the destiny of this nation and of this world.”
And they can look good doing it! “You can be stylish and powerful, too,” he said. “That’s Michelle’s advice.” The first lady, the couple’s two daughters, and the president’s mother and mother-in-law had recurring roles as “strong, remarkable women” in the speech.

Stories like this one have a history, of course.  Bill Clinton was called the first black president and, as Milbank, notes the Newsweek  calls Obama the first gay president.

Still, I sense something slightly different in this writeup.  Obama's "feminine mystique?"  "Even appeared in public wearing a gown?"  Well, the Pope does, every day, and nobody calls him the first female Pope.  (I crack myself up here.) 

Imagine corresponding references to the first gay president, say.

No.  This one needs to be read against the proper cultural background, and that is all about how some men (don't know how many but enough for me to learn this on the Internet) dis other men:  By implying that they are really women. 

Thus, Milbank's writeup doesn't only discuss the purported topic of his post (which is the political gender gap).  It also disses Obama as not quite a man, as something clearly below a man.  That is the case whether Milbank intended it to be or not.  Though I suspect he did intend it, given his past history.

A Fund-Raising Plea

It's that time of the year again!  If you enjoy the posts here  consider contributing to the survival of the blog.  Don't give if you have little.  And thanks to those of you who already have contributed.

Keeping this thing going takes a huge amount of time and energy which I can't use for money-making endeavors.  Otherwise I wouldn't beg.

A picture to make you want to contribute:

Thanks to all who read here.

On Citizens United: How Every Dollar Became Equal in Politics

Jeffrey Toobin has written about the role of Chief Justice John Roberts in the decision which made it legal for any rich person to buy elections anywhere in  this country,  Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.  The article, in the New Yorker,  is well worth reading.  A snippet:

In one sense, the story of the Citizens United case goes back more than a hundred years. It begins in the Gilded Age, when the Supreme Court barred most attempts by the government to ameliorate the harsh effects of market forces. In that era, the Court said, for the first time, that corporations, like people, have constitutional rights. The Progressive Era, which followed, saw the development of activist government and the first major efforts to limit the impact of money in politics. Since then, the sides in the continuing battle have remained more or less the same: progressives (or liberals) vs. conservatives, Democrats vs. Republicans, regulators vs. libertarians. One side has favored government rules to limit the influence of the moneyed in political campaigns; the other has supported a freer market, allowing individuals and corporations to contribute as they see fit. Citizens United marked another round in this contest.

Yes.  Except that there is no such thing as a free market of ideas if by "free" we mean a market where everybody  can enter equally easy and where everybody can be heard without any payment required and where everybody can get the same size audience without any need for millions of dollars of money.

That is the basic problem with the Citizens United decision and its consequences:  It gives people political power in direct proportion to their wealth.   Thus,  Chief Justice Roberts explicitly wants to trade real democracy for the power of established moneyed interests when he states this:

As Kennedy had in Citizens United, Roberts said that governments could never take steps to equalize opportunities for candidates in electoral contests. “ ‘Leveling the playing field’ can sound like a good thing,” he wrote. “But in a democracy, campaigning for office is not a game. It is a critically important form of speech. The First Amendment embodies our choice as a Nation that, when it comes to such speech, the guiding principle is freedom—the ‘unfettered interchange of ideas.’ ” The Roberts Court, it appears, will guarantee moneyed interests the freedom to raise and spend any amount, from any source, at any time, in order to win elections.

As an aside, I notice that the officers of Citizens United are all men.

And in Wisconsin, the Nazgûl Governor Still Rules

More Nazgûl news about Scott Walker, the ringwraith governor of Wisconsin:

In Waukesha County, Walker also dismissed calls by Democratic Party of Wisconsin that the governor provide details on why he set up a criminal defense fund as part of the ongoing John Doe investigation of Walker's aides while he was county executive.
"Gov. Walker is the only governor in this nation who has a criminal defense fund. The only governor. And he is stonewalling this state and he is stonewalling the media by refusing time and time again to answer who's paying the tens of thousands of dollars in a legal-defense fund for himself, and I don't know who else he is paying for."

The linked article also talks about the terrible unemployment record of governor Walker's rule in Wisconsin.  I think the money comes from Sauron.  But what do I know.

One Never Stops Not-Learning

Especially if one is a very stubborn one.   Which I am.


I have an old back injury which makes lifting very heavy objects inadvisable.  Except I keep thinking that perhaps this time it won't hurt.


I've been spring-cleaning...


Also, it's not very smart to think that this time the painters won't have painted the ancient sash windows shut.  They always do.  So I spring-clean armed with a hammer, chisels, razor blades and safety-glasses.  To allow that monkey-dangling outside second floor windows which is necessary for washing them on the outside!


And Mariella the spider lost her extensive palace in the corner of my study.  I feel bad but she was allowed to spend there the whole long winter while I kept clicking away.


But the Snakepit Inc. is beginning to look rather bright.  Let's hope it makes my posts brighter, too.


Oh, and this is getting-at-your-money time, so if you haven't paid for the pleasure of being here yet, please do.

Today's Lesson in Resistance

Comes from cormorants in Finland.  In one area the fishermen have a special permission to try to stop them from nesting on one island this year.  The reason is that cormorants are argued to be rivals for fishers.

Various approaches have been tried to stop the birds from nesting.  One was the use of "disturbance banners":  gaudily colored strips which would move in the wind.

This is what the birds did with them:

In Today's Nazgul News

Aka about Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin:

Documentary filmmaker Brad Lichtenstein, who says he captures both sides in his work, videotaped the conversation that Walker had with Hendricks and Mary Willmer-Sheedy, a community bank president for M&I Bank. The filmmaker was recording what Willmer-Sheedy and others in Janesville were doing to try to create jobs in an area hard hit by the shutdown of its General Motors plant and related businesses.
In the video, Hendricks told Walker she wanted to discuss "controversial" subjects away from reporters, asking him:
"Any chance we'll ever get to be a completely red state and work on these unions -"
"Oh, yeah," Walker broke in.
"- and become a right-to-work?" Hendricks continued. "What can we do to help you?"
"Well, we're going to start in a couple weeks with our budget adjustment bill," Walker said. "The first step is we're going to deal with collective bargaining for all public employee unions, because you use divide and conquer. So for us, the base we get for that is the fact that we've got - budgetarily we can't afford not to. If we have collective bargaining agreements in place, there's no way not only the state but local governments can balance things out . . . That opens the door once we do that. That's your bigger problem right there."

Divide et impera!  

The Catholic Church And Girls

Just lumping together two probably unrelated pieces of news.  One has to do with the war the Catholic Bishops here have declared against Girl Scouts.  Or, if you prefer, mere scrutiny rather than war.

The other is specific to one Catholic school:

All second baseman Paige Sultzbach wanted to do was play in her school's state championship baseball game tonight.
But because she is a girl, that won't happen.
Sultzbach is a freshman at Mesa Preparatory Academy, which had been scheduled to play Our Lady of Sorrows Academy in tonight's Arizona Charter Athletic Association state championship at Phoenix College.
But Our Lady of Sorrows, a fundamentalist Catholic school in Phoenix that lost twice to Mesa Prep during the regular season, chose to forfeit the championship game rather than play a team fielding a female player.
Our Lady of Sorrows school officials would not comment, but Sultzbach's mother, Pamela Sultzbach, said her daughter and the rest of the team received the news after Wednesday afternoon's practice.
"This is not a contact sport, it shouldn't be an issue," Pamela said. "It wasn't that they were afraid they were going to hurt or injure her, it's that (they believe) that a girl's place is not on a field."

The latter is more about fundamentalist religions in general.  For some odd reason they are always about controlling the wimminz. 

More Mummy/Mommy Wars! They Sell Magazines!

The Time did so well with the women-really-want-to-be-spanked issue that they've now expanded into a fight over attachment mothering.

I haven't read the stories yet.  All I have is the above cover photo (for the United States issue).  And clearly there is much to be written about the whole topic, much.  But most of it is smoke and mirrors, from a feminist point of view, however significant it might be from cultural etc points of view.

So lets wave away the smoke and cover the mirrors and look at what remains:

First, the "guru":

In a feature on the not-at-all-incendiary subject of “why attachment parenting drives some mothers to extremes,” writer Kate Pickert takes on motherhood and its “guru,” attachment parenting author William Sears.

Note anything interesting about this "guru?"  It's the same thing which is true of other famous people in child-rearing advice.  He is a man.

All the famous people advocating particular ways of bringing up children have been men,  even though it is women who are expected to follow the recommended scenarios.  Now, why would I be disturbed by that?  Imagine a reversal.  Say, a woman with no military experience telling men how to wage wars, and all men are obeying her dictates without any of them asking what she knows about wars.

Second, the impact of defining mothering as an all-exhaustive occupation, consisting of attachment mothering, home-schooling and  the impossibility of combining good mothering with work outside the home? What does it mean for the equality of women and men, in general?  What roles would be possible for women with children under that scenario?  And how could any woman with few material resources ever be a "good" mother, if that concept is defined by standards such as these?

If this is the road we take then feminism should look completely different, as I have written before.  Laws against gender discrimination at work and in education and such would not help mothers.

Third, the mummy/mommy wars.  They are not parent wars.  They are not daddy wars.  The people fighting in the arenas are women only, and the rest of the society are not expected to feel any responsibility for what might be going on there.  Pass the pop corn!

Indeed, all these three points have to do with the gendered division of labor in child-rearing:  Who gets to define the "right" practices, who gets to carry them out in practice, and who gets to watch and criticize.

My Annual Fund-Raising Campaign

Begins tomorrow.  The idea is to get my yearly blogging costs covered, at least when it comes to actual financial costs.  The opportunity costs of my time I mostly donate to the cause.  Well, completely donate to the cause.

You can use the PayPal button on the blog to donate.   Any amount is appreciated.  Don't give if you have little.  Just send warm thoughts in that case.

Conclusions In Search Of Evidence

This statement by Paul Krugman applies to a whole bunch of theories and arguments:

More on the structural unemployment thing. As Mike Konczal points out, there’s something clearly obsessive about the desire to tell a structural story. It’s not just that people keep coming up with new arguments after each successive argument is shot down by the data; it’s the fact that it’s the same people who keep coming up with new arguments, strongly suggesting that they really want to believe it’s structural, and won’t take no for an answer.

Read about the history of the attempts to prove women intellectually inferior in various ways, and you face the same thing.  The conclusions remain, even if specific theories are proven false.  New theories just take their place right away. 

Thus, we move from women's smaller brains (though not all have moved away from that one!) to which half of the brain each sex might use more  to gray matter or white matter to blood flow in the brain to PET scan images and on and on.  Whenever a particular theory has been shown false another theory takes its place and the game continues.  Because it is the game which matters, not the particular theories.

Or rather, those who pursue that game are firmly convinced of the correctness of their conclusions.  All that remains to be found is that missing evidence.  If this piece won't do, then keep searching!

You might argue that these games are to some extent symmetrical, and in Krugman's example they might be among some economists.  But in my example they are not.  One side always plays attack,  the other side plays defense.

On Obama's Same-Sex Marriage Statement

I think it's the right thing to do, of course.   What motivated the statement at this point in time could be worth pondering over. 

My guess is that Obama needs the youth vote and something of this sort is needed to get the young voters energized.  At the same time, those who are firmly opposed to same-sex marriage would most likely not vote for Obama in the first place, because of the other opinions which are bundled with that opposition.

Still, all this is pure guessing.

Meanwhile, in Kansas, Providers' Beliefs Are Protected, Women Are Not

Kansas has that wonderful governor Sam Brownback, our very own Talibani.  I'm sure that he will be glad to sign a bill just passed in the Kansas Senate:

A bill giving more legal protection to Kansas health care providers who refuse to participate in abortions was on its way Wednesday to Gov. Sam Brownback, despite concerns it would limit access to birth control and allow some professionals to block life-saving care.
The Senate approved the “conscience” measure, 23-16. The House passed the bill last month, and Brownback is expected to sign it. The new law would take effect July 1.
Abortion opponents argued that the legislation merely updates decades-old state laws preventing doctors and hospitals from being forced to participate in abortions or sterilizations. They said changes are needed because women seeking abortions can now use drugs to induce them, and health care professionals who oppose abortion shouldn’t face the threat of losing their jobs or being sued if they follow their consciences.
“This is about respecting the rights to conscience and others’ beliefs,” said Sen. Mary Pilcher Cook, R-Shawnee, who opposes abortion. “Let’s protect people’s beliefs.”
The measure extends “conscience” protections to clinics, doctor’s offices and other facilities other than hospitals. People are protected not only from being forced to participate in abortions but from referring patients for abortion services or participating in the prescription or administration of any drug that terminates a pregnancy.
The legal protections extend to any individual or institution that “reasonably believes” that the use of a drug terminates a pregnancy. Some critics said that provision will allow doctors and pharmacists to refuse to prescribe or dispense birth control.
They also said it could allow a doctor to refuse to provide chemotherapy to a pregnant cancer patient because it might end her pregnancy.

A long time ago I read a novel in which a woman was allowed to die of cancer without treatment (not even pain killers)  because she was pregnant.  It was a frightening read for a young goddess because it hammered home the principle of women's unimportance as people in themselves.  But when I had finished the book I could tell myself that it was just fiction.  

Now?  Not so sure anymore, though I hope that this law will not be applied to pregnant women with cancer. 

But this is the part which smells truly off:

Furthermore, critics said, patients wouldn’t know about a provider’s moral objections until the provider refused to provide treatment or dispense a drug – and the provider wouldn’t have to refer the patient elsewhere.

If this is the case then patients would  essentially be trapped.   It's like not listing the additives in some food item in the stores.  At a minimum,  all providers  should be required to list their beliefs openly so that prospective patients can find a provider they are comfortable with.

This is not about protecting the providers' beliefs.  This is about forcing those beliefs on patients who may not hold the same beliefs.

How come do we get these kinds of laws only about abortions?  Logic requires that they should apply to all ethical and religious dilemmas in health care.  Thus,  physicians who are Jehovah's Witnesses should be able to refuse to provide blood transfusions or stay silent about their advisability without anything bad happening to them.  And so on.

Fun With David Brooks

I haven't written about Brooks for a while.  I forgot how hilariously he writes.  His schtick is to zoom right in with a very assertive assertion, demanding that it be taken for truth.  Then he builds sand castles on that assertion.

That's what his most recent macroeconomic column does.  It begins with the assertion of two-types-of-people:

The country is divided when different people take different sides in a debate. The country is really divided when different people are having entirely different debates. That’s what’s happening on economic policy.
Many people on the left are having a one-sided debate about how to deal with a cyclical downturn. The main argument you hear from these cyclicalists is that the economy is operating well below capacity. To get it moving at full speed, the government should borrow and spend more. The federal government is now running deficits of about $1 trillion a year. Some of these cyclicalists believe the deficit should be about $1.4 trillion.
The cyclicalists rail against what they see as American austerity-mongers who resist new borrowing. They really rail against the European ones. They see François Hollande’s victory in France as a sign that, in Europe at least, the pendulum might finally be swinging from austerity to growth.
Other people — some on the left but mostly in the center and on the right — look at the cyclicalists and shrug. It’s not that they are necessarily wrong to bash excessive austerity. They’re simply failing to address the core issues.
The diverse people in this camp — and I’m one of them — believe the core problems are structural, not cyclical. The recession grew out of and exposed long-term flaws in the economy. Fixing these structural problems should be the order of the day, not papering over them with more debt.

Quite lovely!  Except for the fact that the two-types-of-people Brooks creates are his creations:

Just in case you thought that the failure of austerity in the United Kingdom and across the euro zone, and its rejection by voters in France and Greece, might be cause for changing course, David Brooks has a column to tell us otherwise. He says that there are two different arguments going on over economic policy which unfortunately don't intersect.
First, we have the cyclicists who worry about silly things like 25 million people who are unemployed, underemployed or out of the workforce altogether. These people are also likely to worry about the millions of people who are losing their homes and probably also the children of the unemployed, underemployed and displaced homeowners.
Then we have the far-sighted structuralists like Brooks who worry about the long-term. They worry about fixing government deficits and getting us the labor force that we will need in the future.
This is a great division that has considerably less to do with reality than Middle Earth and the Munchkins. What could Brooks possibly be drinking when he thinks that he has identified a group of economists/policy wonks who are only concerned about the cyclical problem of high unemployment and not the structural problems that created them.

Brooks loves to form imaginary groups of people in his columns!  He does that often.  He also puts opinions into the mouths of his imaginary groups and then tells us how the country (according to the creator Brooks) thinks on various issues by moving the lips of his puppets.

Thus, we get the small-town-good-Murkans who are conservatives and care about their families and really know what Murka is all about, and we get the uppity latte-sipping rich people in the east coast ivory towers who know nothing about Murka.   Brooks sets such groups against each other and then interprets the outcomes to his readers.  That the groups are not real or at least omit many other groups is irrelevant.   They are used from the other end:  To support the conclusions Brooks wants to reach.

And in this case the conclusion (once again, not based on any empirical proof) is this:

But you can only mask structural problems for so long. The whole thing has gone kablooey. The current model, in which we try to compensate for structural economic weakness with tax cuts and an unsustainable welfare state, simply cannot last. The old model is broken. The jig is up.

Just in case you didn't get that yet, Brooks repeats it:

Make no mistake, the old economic and welfare state model is unsustainable. The cyclicalists want to preserve the status quo, but structural change is coming.

That's  what the column really is about:  Brooks' personal belief that we cannot afford a welfare state.

But he does not offer any proof for that argument and neither does he map out what his desired alternative world would look like?  Neofeudalism?  A global concentration of a few large firms running everything?  And if the public sector should be shrunk who then will educate those future workers so that their skill sets will match the needs of those multinational behemoths (without teaching them anything that might make them socially belligerent, I presume)?  How would the problem of increasing income inequality and its impact on the society be solved in Brooks' future world?  Gated communities for the rich?   What for the rest of us?

It's perhaps understandable why most of those who argue against the welfare state have little to offer as alternatives.  The history of the nineteenth century Britain, say, suggests that the alternatives of unrestrained capitalism are not pleasant for most individuals. 

I don't know.  Looking at Greece, for instance, makes me think that what we cannot afford, as civilizations, is the demise of the safety net for ordinary people.

Meet Today's Misogynist, Jesse Lee Peterson

 Warning:  Skip this post if you get easily angered and find anger paralyzing or unproductive.

Jesse Lee Peterson was a guest at the conservative Hannity show where Kristen Powers pointed out his misogyny



According to Wikipedia, Peterson runs an organization called The Brotherhood Organization of A New Destiny (BOND),  and at the beginning of the show Sean Hannity told us that he is a member of the board over at the brotherhood.

Here is Peterson giving us a sermon about the perfidy of women. 






Hannity seemed OK with having Peterson on his show.  Indeed, he seemed angrier at Powers for her interruption. 

A quote from the sermon for any of you who might have difficulty viewing the video:

Women cannot handle power. It's not in them to handle power in the right way. [...] I think that one of the greatest mistakes America made was to allow women the opportunity to vote. We should've never turned this over to women. [...] It was a big mistake. [...] And these women are voting in the wrong people. They're voting in people who are evil who agrees [sic] with them who're gonna take us down this pathway of destruction. And this probably was the reason they didn't allow women to vote when men were men. Because men in the good old days understood the nature of the woman. They were not afraid to deal with it. And they understood that, you let them take over, this is what would happen.^[12]

What's the point of this post?  To remind Fox News that it is not nice to coddle woman-haters?  Or to point out that misogynists always view the question of what rights women have as something to do with "them?"  It is "they" who "gave" women too many rights and now it's time to take those rights back?  By what means? 

The Ghost Of Lawrence Summers' Comments on Women And Mathematics

Will forever haunt us.

Or rather, this Chris Hayes show suggests that the scales of unfair science denial are somewhat equated when the conservatives deny climate change and the liberals refuse to discuss racial and gender differences in IQ or innate gender differences in general.  This is what one of the guests,  Jonathan Haidt, says, beginning at about 4 minutes and 57 seconds.  Watch the following few minutes and then note who tries to say something there and does not succeed.

Jonathan Haidt has talked about Lawrence Summers' comments before:

The fields of psychology, sociology and anthropology have long attracted liberals, but they became more exclusive after the 1960s, according to Dr. Haidt. “The fight for civil rights and against racism became the sacred cause unifying the left throughout American society, and within the academy,” he said, arguing that this shared morality both “binds and blinds.”
“If a group circles around sacred values, they will evolve into a tribal-moral community,” he said. “They’ll embrace science whenever it supports their sacred values, but they’ll ditch it or distort it as soon as it threatens a sacred value.” It’s easy for social scientists to observe this process in other communities, like the fundamentalist Christians who embrace “intelligent design” while rejecting Darwinism. But academics can be selective, too, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan found in 1965 when he warned about the rise of unmarried parenthood and welfare dependency among blacks — violating the taboo against criticizing victims of racism.
“Moynihan was shunned by many of his colleagues at Harvard as racist,” Dr. Haidt said. “Open-minded inquiry into the problems of the black family was shut down for decades, precisely the decades in which it was most urgently needed. Only in the last few years have liberal sociologists begun to acknowledge that Moynihan was right all along.”
Similarly, Larry Summers, then president of Harvard, was ostracized in 2005 for wondering publicly whether the preponderance of male professors in some top math and science departments might be due partly to the larger variance in I.Q. scores among men (meaning there are more men at the very high and very low ends). “This was not a permissible hypothesis,” Dr. Haidt said. “It blamed the victims rather than the powerful. The outrage ultimately led to his resignation. We psychologists should have been outraged by the outrage. We should have defended his right to think freely.”

What fun!   I have looked at the extreme-tails hypothesis in a fairly recent post, and it looks quite a bit more complicated than the implicit assumption Haidt seems to have:  That men simply are more likely to always score more in the high tail and the low tail of any particular test distribution.

So what did I write about Summers' comments in 2005?  It took me some time to dig those posts up but here they are:

Part I

Part II

Part III

Hmm.  Those posts still look to me as if I'm discussing the theories Summers presented, to the extent they could be discussed in 2005.  But I guess Haidt didn't refer to unknown weird bloggers when he talks about how the left savaged Summers.   That the right sorta joined in (to defend Summers and to, incidentally,  savage women)  he also ignores.

The overall topic of the Chris Hayes program deserves a completely separate post so I'm not going to address it here, except to note that I sense a certain kind of compromise proposal in the works in Haidt's mind:  Give them the "science" they like and maybe then they will accept the "science" we like!

Perhaps I'm wrong about that.  But my view of research is much more complicated than those that cropped up in the discussion which appeared to suggest that all science (including hypotheses which cannot be empirically tested) is somehow equally reliable, that no scientist has particular prior biases and that every new study is without problems until other researchers point those out.

That self-correcting approach probably works over eons.  It doesn't work terribly well in the short run, and the reason is that theories themselves create those bonded groups.  If a sub-field has only one set of basic theories (such as inside evolutionary psychology) then the criticisms cannot come from inside, and the academic reward structure doesn't provide incentives for outsiders to offer their criticisms.

As a slightly different example, there is no general field of "gender similarities" to counteract the field of "gender differences," as an example.  Janet Hyde has written on gender similarities and has been called biased because of that.    But those who choose to work on gender differences cannot be without prior beliefs themselves and those tend to be of the type which make someone choose to look for differences, not for similarities.

All this is a far cry from the simple arguments that people like some science and hate other science and pick just on that basis, though of course that happens, all the time.   But this does not mean that everything printed somewhere as a study is equally reliable or necessarily problem-free, and it does not mean that Lawrence Summers' utterances about a field he is not an expert in should be regarded as part of scientific inquiry.

Spice Cookies

I found one recipe on the net which looked very similar to the recipe I lost.  It's not the same (I tested it) and a bit sweeter than I like but you might find it worthwhile.  The measures are in deciliters (dls) and grams (g) but my measuring bowls have both cups and dls, and the grams can be estimated if you don't have a scale as they only apply to the butter/margarine and you need two sticks minus a sliver.

Here's the recipe:

Ingredients:

200 g butter or margarine

2 dl sugar
1 tbsp molasses
1 medium egg
2 tsp ground cardamom
2 tsp ground cinnamon
1tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
6.5 dl pastry flour or white flour

Instructions:


Beat butter/margarine with sugar until foamy.  Add molasses and the egg (not the shells!) while beating well.  Mix the spices, soda, baking powder and flour separately and shift into the batter.  Let the final batter rest in the fridge overnight (or at least a few hours).  Roll it into small balls on baking paper and finally use a fork to flatten each ball.  Bake in a preheated oven (225 centigrade, 437 Fahrenheit) for ten minutes.

These are called fork cookies because of that use of the fork.  If the fork sticks, use some flour on it while pressing.  The ideal size is fairly small, I think, so this batch might make a hundred or so?

I added a smidgen of ground cloves to the spices.  This might also work as one of those cookies where you mold the batter into long sticks, freeze them, and then cut out cookies onto a baking sheet when you feel like some.

Why Men Should Not Be Priests

This is a funny list of ten reasons for excluding men from the priesthood.  It was posted several years ago.  Of course the reverse lists are conventional wisdom on the question why women cannot be priests.

The point, of course, is that the reverse list is equally funny or silly but we take it seriously. 

The fishes that swim in the ocean do not think water has a taste.  (I'm trying to make that into a meme about how people are blind to their old cultures and view them as simply obvious.)