On Pax Dickinson. And A Little on James Taranto.

Here's where I go wrong.  Dickinson was, until today, working for the Business Insider.  He is pretty well known as an eager anti-feminism tweeter.

After reading his tweet yesterday (having to do with the titstare presentation), I got all excited about discussing what, if any, the difference might be between misogyny and the things he finds not misogyny:

In other words, I have been doing this wading-in-the-nuclear-acid-waters for so long that my emotions are no longer triggered on, that I directly focus on the logical questions and dwell among them, instead of saying something uplifting out of clear-burning anger and such.

What saved me from that error (if error it is) were two things:  First I read, in one place, the long list of tweets Dickinson* has sent over the recent months, here (do read the list!), and if he doesn't have a serious problem with women I am a pink mouse goddess.

Second, Dickinson got fired, apparently because of his  sexist and racist tweets and the responses they created.  That, sadly, means that lots of the foam-and-fury now will be about a truth-speaking man getting fired by evil feminazis.  So let me plead my case and note that I was asleep during those events. 

Still, that list of Dickinson's tweets sounds like something from one of the worst MRA sites.  And that makes me wonder how many people like him have powerful posts in this world and how they use those posts.

Which brings me to James Taranto, of the Wall Street Journal,  who has done his fair bit from an Evo-Psycho angle on us wimminfolk.  His latest tweet:

Hard to interpret that cryptic tweet, of course.  The headline he refers to is this:

Shellie Zimmerman Won’t Press Charges Against Her Husband. Alleged Domestic Violence Victims Often Don't.

So a kind explanation of Taranto's outburst is that nothing can make Zimmerman innocent, not even the charges being withdrawn.  But that kindness would be superficial, because the fact remains that many alleged domestic violence victims don't press charges, even when they truly are victims and not just alleged victims.  Then there's the wider context to this, what with Zimmerman shooting a black teenager.

A different explanation would be to put that comment in the framework of Taranto's other opinions on gender.
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*I kept mistyping his last name as  "Packinson!"  Get it?

Peeling the War Onion

Peeling an onion gives you tears, especially if the onion is one of the northern types (which, in my opinion, are onions on steroids).  The trick is to have a few unlit matches between your teeth while you do it and to have the water running from the faucet.

The onion I was trying to peel over the weekend is a different type.  It's the War Onion:  The odd desire of human beings to go to war.  For note that even when a war seems unavoidable and a necessary evil, there's that desire, to show how tough a country is, to force "respect" from other countries, to worry about the "standing" of one's own country, to go rah-rah and to wave the flag.

That all these things crop up, even after we all know what killing is really like and what it results in (end of beings, enormous grief for the survivors, displacement, long-term mental suffering, physical destruction), there's still a sizable number of people who view it all almost as a football game or at least as a computer war game.

At the same time, I get why not all wars can be avoided, I get the political calculus and the fact that some types of wars are about whether those people survive or whether  "my" people survive.  An existential fight.  But most wars don't fit that bill.

So why can't we avoid wars better?

You might be astonished that Echidne,  who bills herself as a minor goddess, doesn't know the answer.  Duh.  But I think it's useful to take the War Onion apart, layer by layer.  It's more than peeling, of course, because you end up with nothing.  In some ways that's the real significance.

The top layer of the onion is always some recent horror, some recent insult, some difference of opinion, of religion, of values that appears not amenable to diplomacy.  Why it doesn't bend itself to diplomatic means may not always be that clear, but looking at the layer below that one gives us some answers, about the history of the events, about resource distribution between and inside countries, about bad leadership, evil dictators, past grudges, and so on.  A careful study of that history might tell us where things could have gone differently, but that careful study is often possible only many years after the events.

Move one more layer into the onion, and you might come to the resources, both the fight over new-found resources or the fight over very scarce resources.  Some of these fights are just about greed and dominance, some are about survival.  Many of the powder keg areas of the world have that underground rift, of insufficient resources or of resources others want, and that's why they are potential or actual places of war. 

The Israel-Palestine hostilities are about many things but among those are resources, access to water, access to fertile land.  Likewise, I was shocked to learn that Egypt doesn't have enough arable land to support its large farming population.  That fact explains much of the poverty in the country and explains one part of the current unrest.  And in Syria, lack of water is one of the reasons why the poorest farmers had to give up farming and move to cities where they create the suffering and marginalized population from which the rebel movement could do its recruiting.

The lack of resources is not enough for wars, but it may well be one of the necessary conditions for most wars.

Go one layer deeper, almost to the heart of the War Onion, and what do you see?  Perhaps some unpleasant aspects of human tribes.  The desire to divide people into "us" and "them", the desire to base that choice on religion, ethnicity or race.  It is not just a desire, of course, but a fact, in many cases.  Hence civil wars are not about brothers killing brothers, but about brothers of the "right' faith or ideology killing brothers of the "wrong" faith or ideology.

Whether this or the resource layer are deeper can be debated.  They interact.  Thus, if there is enough space, land, water and food, the "wrong" type of people can be endured, and to some extent propaganda can be used to raise the in-group/out-group emotions even when resources aren't that scarce.  Think of the Existential Threat propaganda, the use of the self-defense argument when it's clearly not applicable. 

I'm not sure where the quality of the leaders enters all this.  It matters, greatly.  A warlord will not work for peace, a dictator will not fix the resource scarcity of one part of the population,  the leader of the "free world" will try to manipulate what that world consists of.  And what those leaders care about, in terms of their private psychological makeups, matters also.

But in some ways I think the emptiness in the very middle of the War Onion is Mother Nature turning over in her sleep and scratching the itch caused by too many fleas in one area.  The system is out of balance, and something needs to be adjusted.  That this adjustment is horrible for most sentient beings is sad for them.  Still, it is one solution to the resource problem:  With fewer people the resources stretch better.

That is not intended as an actual description, not intended as implying that the planet thinks or acts in a conscious way, but a way to suggest that if we tended to the underlying problems perhaps we would have fewer wars, fewer acts of collective violence.  Among those underlying problems the climate change is a major one to work on, because without that work we are going to get worse resource shocks. 

If that was coupled with proper population levels?  More investment in knowledge and education, so that individuals learn ways to manage those in-group/out-group feelings?  More focus on equitable division of resources?  These are probably childish thoughts.

 

Titstare!

Titstare is an app.  It takes pictures of "you" when you stare at tits.

The Guardian wrote about it, too:

Over the weekend at the Techcrunch Disrupt hackathon in San Francisco, Australian duo Jethro Botts and David Boulton jumped on stage to present Titstare, an app that lets you "stare at tits". As they presented their project in under 60 seconds, the audience laughed at the numerous tit-related puns.

I never thought I'd write a post with that name, fellow titholders!  Or racks.  Or racks for tits?  Not sure what the proper synechdoche here might be.  But note that our mates Jethro and David didn't use a synechdoche!  They talked about tits as the things we are all obviously interested in and the things we need an app for.   For ogling purposes.

And I never thought that I'd do an actual analysis of what's wrong with having this particular presentation at that type of meeting.  But it seems necessary to do that, because so many people appear to have the mental age of twelve when it comes to women, tech and tits.  If only women could leave those tits at home when they want to work in tech, things would be much better, right?

But the real message of presentations like this one is that women are not supposed to be in the tech field!  Notice who the intended audience for the speech is.  I don't go around ogling at tits, ever, though I have some weird hobbies.

And that probably goes for the vast majority of women.  So this particular app, in the way it was designed, assumed that the audience in the room would consist of heterosexual men.  The only slight hesitancy in that was the quick reference to women not liking tit-ogling.  But it was quickly passed!

Let's do the analysis, my friends.

First, I don't mind humor about tits, given that it is in the right proportion.  Suppose that I cracked jokes about pricks, non-stop.  Every time you came here you'd read yet another post about pricks, without any real reference to the prick-holders as people.  It is that non-stop approach that gets old-old very quickly, and if you happen to be a prick-holder you'd judge my approach akin to someone who invited you for dinner and then you turned out to be the main course.*

Second, and this is because the more stuff about tits and racks and so on we hear about in coed conversations, the clearer it becomes that to some men that's what women are.  Bits and pieces only.

Third, there's a strong whiff of entitlement in these kinds of treatments.  I could never do that non-stop-penis-column because I don't feel entitled to something like that, not to mention the fact that I do think of prick-carriers as human beings, some of them awesome, kind and gentle and so on.  But Jethro and David don't have those qualms.

Fourth, there's the in-group and out-group aspect of all this.  The presentation assumes that the tech in-group consists of hetero blokes, all keen to ogle at tits.  That the room might have contained a few tit-holders was lamentable but easily ignored, and, besides, this was a joke!  And note that even if it was a joke (perhaps a sorta reverse laugh at the tit oglers), it still was a joke that would hit someone who has been the oglee differently than someone who has been the ogler.

Fifth and finally, place this into the context of women and tech.  Women tend not to go into tech, and some have argued that the reason is in the brogrammer atmosphere (tits and such).   It is that atmosphere which is of concern, not any particular silly stunt like this one.  But that such silly stunts are regarded as AOK, that is what tells us about the atmosphere.

So it's not that I can't take a joke.  But what is funny depends on that background, on one's life experiences, on whether one is a dinner guest laughing at the joke or the rump roast being served.

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*That still isn't a good counterexample, because my blog would be just one place.  The reality is that puerile talk about tits can be found in umpteen zillion places on the net.

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Added later:  TechCrunch has issued an apology.

Today's Action Alert

Is to help Ann Kristin Neuhaus.

Why?  Katha Pollitt explains.

Speed Blogging, Fri Sep 6, 2013: On Exclusion, Reproduction, Legos and Elections.

1.  Worth reading:  How Women's Voices Were Excluded from the March on Washington.  This is not uncommon in any social justice movement or any political movement, at least in the past.  The default position for women is to serve as the gals' auxiliary, and if women have special concerns or goals they are told to wait for those until the more important goals are met.  But all this is much better than the right-wing religious movements which explicitly exclude women.  But then the exclusion of women is often one of their major objectives.

Still, even the progressive movement can do better.  And feminism can do better in terms of inclusion of people from different ethnic and racial groups and social classes, as has been recently extensively discussed on the Internet.

2.  In Turkey, the Prime Minister Erdogan wants Turkish women to have at least three children each, preferably five.

Mmm.  Reproduction is usually treated differently from production.  If some country wants to increase production, it doesn't just tell that this is so.  It gives the firms and workers incentives to do so, and mostly that is money or similar incentives.  But when it comes to the hard work of reproduction, women are just expected to open the faucet more or less, as per the commands!

It is this differential treatment which tells me pretty clearly how women's roles in reproduction are viewed.  Both Erdogan and the US right wing want to make women (at least some women) have more children, and the way to do that is by using the stick, not by handing out carrots.  Thus, Erdogan wants to limit access to abortion and so do the US right-wingers.   To force women, in short.

3.  The Lego toy company has come out with a female scientist mini-figure.  She isn't even pink or frilly!

4.  Finally, something quite fun (via Gromit):  A German election ad video. 

Going For Chinese Food Tonight?

The odds are pretty good for that, even if you don't decide to eat Chinese cuisine.  That's because of large percentages of such foods as tilapia (a fish) and apple juice sold in the US already come from China.  Indeed, when I last cleaned my freezer I noticed that the frozen beans I had there were labeled "Made in People's Republic of China."

There's nothing wrong with food being grown in any particular country, of course.  But there's something pretty wrong if food flown or shipped across half the world is still most cheaply produced that way, that China could really be the most efficient country in the production of most anything, so efficient, that the products can then be shipped all over the world more cheaply than they could be produced locally and still make a nice profit for everyone.

It's not impossible.  But it's extremely unlikely.  Other theories are that the farming method in China ignores environmental costs or that the Chinese workers are heavily underpaid or that the Chinese government subsidizes the industry.  Or all of those together, in varying proportions, depending on the product we are looking at.

Here's the worrying part of the question:  Past evidence suggests that quality control in China is poor and that the incentives managers and workers have contribute to lower quality, because low price is so important.  Bad quality control, combined with an increasing market share in food by China, means that any bad quality control will affect consumers all over the world.  Or at least in those countries whose governments are not willing to do their own additional quality control.

Chicken nuggets.  That's the most recent food product joining this particular dance:

Just before the start of the long holiday weekend last Friday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture quietly that it was ending a ban on processed chicken imports from China. The kicker: These products can now be sold in the U.S. without a country-of-origin label.
For starters, just four Chinese processing plants will be allowed to export cooked chicken products to the U.S., as first reported by . The plants in question passed USDA inspection in March. Initially, these processors will only be allowed to export chicken products made from birds that were raised in the U.S. and Canada. Because of that, the poultry processors won't be required to have a USDA inspector on site, as The New York Times , adding:
"And because the poultry will be processed, it will not require country-of-origin labeling. Nor will consumers eating chicken noodle soup from a can or chicken nuggets in a fast-food restaurant know if the chicken came from Chinese processing plants."

Fascinating.  Let's get this straight:  First the chickens will grow up to adulthood and face execution in the United States or Canada.  Then they will be shipped to China, the first foreign trip they take.  In China they will be processed into foods such as chicken nuggets.  Those nuggets will then take the second across-half-the-world trip, to end up on your plate, perhaps!

But you won't know whether you are eating an adventurous traveler chicken nugget or just a stay-at-home version!

I doubt that makes any environmental sense at all, and I can't see how it can make economic sense,   What I mean by the latter is this:  If the same chicken was processed in the United States using exactly the same ingredients, rules and regulations, would it be more expensive than one which did two trips between the US and China?

There's more to this story, about planned changes in how chicken processing lines will be inspected by the USDA:

Basically, these changes would replace many USDA inspectors on chicken processing lines with employees from the poultry companies themselves.

What on earth could go wrong there? 

This would be hilarious if it wasn't potentially a serious health hazard.

On Blog Comments

This post talks about their purpose.  What do you think about having comments, not having comments, the best way to moderate them and so on?

In my experience most comments on newspaper sites without moderation are cesspools.

But then I was thinking about this beautifully written and argued article, which I sadly think describes something that might not be the right reason why poor white women who dropped out of school have experienced such huge reductions in their life expectancy.  The comments to the piece did point out the most likely real cause for this phenomenom:  A cohort effect.

Squarelyrootedblog in the comments explains what might be going on:

I hate to say it since this is such a well-written and deeply-felt piece, but I think the central finding it is based on (like the paper it draws from) is mostly due to a cohort effect. From 1990 to 2008 the share of white women over 25 who completed high school went from 79% to around 88%. This means the group under study shrank by nearly half over those two decades. The reason is, essentially, that while the hs grad rate for white women stayed the same over those years, the oldest part of the cohort phased out into the next life - that older part having graduated in a time when hs graduation for women especially was less tethered to socioeconomic status. Basically, the patriarchal oppression of prior generations, which kept relatively higher socioeconmic status white women from completing hs, was fudging the stats, masking the difficult conditions of the bottom 10% from statistical view. Is it possible that things have gotten objectively worse for that bottom 10%? Sure. Do we know that from this data? No. The question we need to ask is "have conditions changed, for better or for worse, for a certain constant subset of the population over time?"

That is a useful comment, and the comments here (sparse as they may be) are also almost always useful.  At the same time, the comments are a lot of work for the blogger and weeding out trollery etc. can be as unpleasant as disinfecting the garbage can.

The Blogger's Rush Hour, Nokia and Rubber Boots

There are times (like right now) when I have too many topics to write about, topics which I want to write about, topics which deserve to be written about, topics which are just too goofy not to write about and so on. 

What happens then is  what happens in the rush hour traffic.  No topic gets through the intersections in my brain, except by crawling and horn-tooting.

Interesting, innit?  Probably not, but I'm a bit like Buridan's ass today.

On most other days I keep asking myself if it's even useful to write anything.  Sigh and alas and woe is me and my sermons are given in an empty temple, and in any case I'm worse than a thousand Hitlers.

In other news, this is a joke about the Nokia-Microsoft trade:

Nokia used to make rubber boots.  Perhaps they still do.  They also used to make snot rags (tissues for the nose).

The New Washington Post And Rape Apologists

CONTENTS:  RAPE


The Washington Post has a new owner, Jeffrey Bezos, and he's going to create a new golden age for the newspaper!

I don't know if two recent opinion  pieces in the WaPo are part of this gold-seeking.  But they were published within just a few days.  Let's have a look at what they say.

The earlier opinion piece, by Betsy Kurasik  is a plea for the decriminalization of statutory rape of students by teachers, if I understand it correctly.

It argues that the sex can be consensual.  It doesn't talk about the problems that would follow decriminalization.  The teachers are in a position of authority over the students,  the teachers have power over the students' grade, the students are still taught to look up to the teachers and in many places to obey them.  That makes student's consent a concept fraught with difficulties (if the legally minor status of many students in such relationship wouldn't already cause sufficient problems).

What makes the piece unpleasant (to put it very mildly)  is its hook (journalese for what grabs someone's attention long enough to get the reader start on the article), which is rape and the rape victim's suicide:

There is a painfully uncomfortable episode of “Louie” in which the comedian Louis C.K. muses that maybe child molesters wouldn’t kill their victims if the penalty weren’t so severe. Everyone I know who watches the show vividly recalls that scene from 2010 because it conjures such a witches’ cauldron of taboo, disgust and moral outrage, all wrapped around a disturbing kernel of truth. I have similar ambivalence about the case involving former Montana high school teacher Stacey Dean Rambold. Louie concluded his riff with a comment to the effect of “I don’t know what to do with that information.” That may be the case for many of us, but with our legal and moral codes failing us, our society needs to have an uncensored dialogue about the reality of sex in schools. 

As protesters decry the leniency of Rambold’s sentence — he will spend 30 days in prison after pleading guilty to raping 14-year-old Cherice Morales, who committed suicide at age 16 — I find myself troubled for the opposite reason. I don’t believe that all sexual conduct between underage students and teachers should necessarily be classified as rape, and I believe that absent extenuating circumstances, consensual sexual activity between teachers and students should not be criminalized. While I am not defending Judge G. Todd Baugh’s comments about Morales being “as much in control of the situation” — for which he has appropriately apologized — tarring and feathering him for attempting to articulate the context that informed his sentence will not advance this much-needed dialogue.

I'm tempted to conclude that Kurasik would decriminalize child molestation, too.  After all, that might reduce the number of molested children who are killed.  While we are at it, let's decriminalize all crimes short of murder, because doing so will reduce the likelihood that, say, armed robbers will kill the people they are robbing.

I'm tempted but not really going there, even though Kurasik almost did.

The second and later piece, by Richard Cohen,  links twerking, Miley Cyrus and the Steubenville rape case.  It's one of those "old man yells at the clouds" piece in some ways, in other ways it's an apologia for the sexual exploitation of young girls, which Cohen sees as perhaps caused by Miley Cyrus:

So now back to Miley Cyrus and her twerking. I run the risk of old-fogeyness for suggesting the girl’s a tasteless twit — especially that bit with the foam finger. (Look it up, if you must.) But let me also suggest that acts such as hers not only objectify women but debase them. They encourage a teenage culture that has set the women’s movement back on its heels. What is being celebrated is not sexuality but sexual exploitation, a mean casualness that deprives intimacy of all intimacy. Cyrus taught me a word. Now let me teach her one: She’s a twerk.

It's hard not to read that in any other way but as implying that women are at fault if they are sexually exploited, that there's no causal link from popular culture and pornography which demand certain behaviors from female performers, that peer pressure is irrelevant, that young men are helpless victims of stupid young women and so on.   It's also worth pointing out that the song Cyrus twerked about, the song she was interpreting on stage*, that song was sung by Robin Thicke, the guy who was standing there fully clad, singing about tearing someone's ass into two and so on.  But for Cohen he doesn't exist at all, it isn't his song that all the shit was about.

My goal is not to argue that all young women are completely blameless or that they wouldn't often participate in their own debasement, for many and complicated reasons, including the fact that the markets want it (for performers)  and that their peer groups want it (for teenagers).  But to erase so much of the picture!  How does Cohen do that?

What did Cohen return from when he began that quote I give you above?  He returned from explaining to us why the Steubenville rape case was not rape at all!  Here's why:

The first thing you should know about the so-called Steubenville Rape is that this was not a rape involving intercourse. The next thing you should know is that there weren’t many young men involved — just two were convicted. The next thing you should know is that just about everything you do know about the case from TV and the Internet was wrong. One medium fed the other, a vicious circle of rumor, innuendo and just plain lies. It made for marvelous television.

So now you know.  Except that I followed the case and knew the details.  According to Wikipedia (warning: this is Wikipedia, not a peer-reviewed publication, but what I read there matches my memory):

According to trial transcripts, at approximately midnight, the intoxicated victim left a drinking party with four football players over the protests of her friends. They went to a second party where the victim vomited and appeared "out of it". The same group left after about twenty minutes heading to the unsupervised home of one of the witnesses.

While in the backseat of the car during the fifteen minutes en route, her shirt was removed and Mays violated the semi-nude victim with his fingers and exposed her breasts while his friends filmed and photographed her. In the basement of the house, Mays attempted to make her perform oral sex on him. Now unconscious, she was stripped naked and the second accused, Malik, also vaginally violated her with his fingers. She was again photographed. Three witnesses took the photos back to the second party and shared them with friends. ^[3]

On March 17, 2013, Mays and Malik were convicted of rape after the trial judge found they had used their fingers to penetrate her vagina and that it was impossible for the impaired girl to have given consent.^[2]

The victim testified in court that she had no memory of the six-hour period in which the rapes occurred, except for a brief time at the second location in which she was vomiting on the street. She said she woke up the next morning naked in a basement living room with Mays, Richmond and another teenage boy, missing her underwear, flip-flops, phone and earrings.^[2]

The evidence presented in court mainly consisted of hundreds of text messages and cellphone pictures that had been taken by more than a dozen people at the parties and afterwards traded with other students and posted to social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, and which were described by the judge as "profane and ugly."^[2]

In a photograph posted on Instagram by a Steubenville High football player, the victim was shown looking unresponsive, being carried by two teenage boys by her wrists and ankles. Former Steubenville baseball player Michael Nodianos, responding to hearsay of the event, tweeted "Song of the night is definitely Rape Me by Nirvana" and "Some people deserve to be peed on," which was reshared later by several people, including Mays. In a 12-minute video later posted to YouTube, Nodianos and others talk about the rapes, with Nodianos joking that "they raped her quicker than Mike Tyson raped that one girl" and "They peed on her. That's how you know she's dead, because someone pissed on her."^[4] In one text, Mays described the victim as "like a dead body" and in another he told the victim that a photo of her lying naked in a basement with semen on her body had been taken by him, and that the semen was his. In a text message to a friend afterwards, he said "I shoulda raped her now that everybody thinks I did," but "she wasn't awake enough."^[5]

In the days following the rapes, according to the New York Times, Mays "seemed to try to orchestrate a cover-up, telling a friend, "Just say she came to your house and passed out," and pleading with the victim not to press charges.^[2]

Bolds are mine.

Hmm.  So the two defendants were convicted of rape.   Perhaps Cohen doesn't know the definition of rape or prefers the definition of forced insertion of the penis  into the vagina (excluding the insertion of fingers or the attempted insertion of penis in her mouth from his definition)?

The question of how many individuals were involved in the events depends on what one means by involvement, I guess.  But certainly a large number were aware of what was happening (I watched all the YouTube videos that fall and saw lots of people in the room where the then-happening events were discussed), and more than one of them took pictures of the victim.  So is one involved when one comments on sexual molestation while it happens but does not try to help the victim or seek help?   Or when one gets a kick out of photographing her body?

Enough on all that.  These two pieces are opinions.  That the Post published them within a short time interval may not tell us that we are going to see one of these every few days.   But something smells off to me, because neither piece is especially well researched or argued.  Indeed, both take an exaggerated position when it comes to rape:  That of an apologist.

I'm not opposed to the kinds of discussions these pieces try to elicit.  I'm opposed to the way they are written and to the lack of careful thought behind them.  I also can't help noticing that both pieces are in some ways about the agency of the victims and about the presumed lack of agency on behalf of the accused.  Hence the title of this post. 
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*For a different angle to the whole Miley Cyrus performance and its relationship to the intersection of race and gender, read this.

On Striking Syria. Questions.

I'm confused, so this post is mostly in the form of questions.  First, read this long article or at least Digby's take on it.  I have no way of judging whether the Polk piece gives the correct facts or not.

But if it does, note two things.  First, climate change and the relationship between resources (too few) and people (too many) are part of the picture.  Not the total picture, but part of it, just as it is part of the picture in the Israel-Palestine conflict and in Egypt, too.

Second, note this part of the Polk piece:

5:         Who are the insurgents?

 We know little about them, but what we do know is that they are divided into hundreds – some say as many as 1,200 -- of small, largely independent,  groups.  And we know that the groups range across the spectrum from those who think of themselves as members of the dispersed, not-centrally-governed but ideologically-driven association we call al-Qaida, through a variety of more conservative Muslims, to gatherings of angry, frightened or dissatisfied young men who are out of work and hungry,  to blackmarketeers who are trading in the tools of war, to what we have learned to call in Afghanistan and elsewhere "warlords."

Each group marches to its own drumbeat and many are as much opposed to other insurgents as to the government; some are secular while others are jihadists; some are devout while others are opportunists; many are Syrians but several thousand are foreigners from all over the Middle East, Europe, Africa and Asia.   Recognition of the range of motivations, loyalties and aims is what, allegedly, has caused President Obama to hold back overt lethal-weapons assistance although it did not stop him from having the CIA and contractors covertly arm and train insurgents in Jordan and other places. 

The main rebel armed force is known as the Free Syrian Army.  It was formed in the summer of 2011 by deserters from the regular army. Similar to other rebel armies (for example the “external” army of the Provisional Algerian Government in its campaign against the French and various “armies” that fought the Russians in Afghanistan) its commanders and logistical cadres are outside of Syria.  Its influence over the actual combatants inside of Syria derives from its ability to allocate money and arms and shared objectives; it does not command them.  So far as is known, the combatants are autonomous.  Some of these groups have become successful guerrillas and have not only killed several thousand government soldiers and paramilitaries but have seized large parts of the country and disrupted activities or destroyed property in others.

In competition with the Free Syrian Army is an Islamicist group known as Jabhat an-Nusra (roughly “sources of aid”) which is considered to be a terrorist organization by the United States.  It is much more active and violent than groups associated with the Free Syrian Army.  It is determined to convert Syria totally into an Islamic state under Sharia law. Public statements attributed to some of its leaders threaten a blood bath of Alawis and Christians after it achieves the fall of the Assad regime.   Unlike the Free Syrian Army it is a highly centralized force and its 5-10 thousand guerrillas have been able to  engage in large-scale and coordinated operations.

Of uncertain and apparently shifting relations with Jabhat an-Nusra, are groups that seem to be increasing in size who think of themselves as members of al-Qaida.  They seem to be playing an increasing role in the underground and vie for influence and power with the Muslim Brotherhood and the dozens of other opposition groups.

Illustrating the complexity of the line-up of rebel forces, Kurdish separatists are seeking to use the war to promote their desire either to unite with other Kurdish groups in Turkey and/or Iraq or to achieve a larger degree of autonomy.  (See Harald Doornbos and Jenan Moussa, “The Civil War Within Syria’s Civil War,” Foreign Policy, August 28, 2013).  They are struggling against both the other opposition groups and against the government, and they too would presumably welcome a collapse of the government that would lead to the division of the country into ethnic-religious mini-states.

Is that correct?  I can't tell.  But suppose it is correct.  How, then, to interpret this?

The White House’s aggressive push for Congressional approval of an attack on Syria appeared to have won the tentative support of one of President Obama’s most hawkish critics, Senator John McCain, who said Monday that he would back a limited strike if the president did more to arm the Syrian rebels and the attack was punishing enough to weaken the Syrian military. 

Which of the rebel groups would get the US support?  Jabhat an-Nusra, labeled as a terrorist organization?  Al-Qaida?   And if none of those groups are very large, the winning group would not necessarily be anything different from the current dictatorship.  Warlords, for instance, don't spell democracy to me.  But then I am very confused.

One of the awful aspects of wars are the refugees, both external ones and misplaced persons inside the country.  The pressure they face is not the only problem; the countries which now host them are going to be stretched to the limit, too.  Are we doing enough about this?  And if not, what else could be done?

I wish the world could intervene in some useful way.  But I can't think of any that would get the political backing it needs.
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For other views, go here and here and here.

  

Why Women Shouldn't Conduct Orchestras

 Vasily Petrenko - Picture © Mark McNulty

It's year 2013.  The apples are ripe, the leaves soon turn yellow, and the luscious Vasily Petrenko (the principal conductor of the National Youth Orchestra and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic in Britain, as well as the principal conductor of the Oslo Philharmonic in Norway) tells us that girls cannot conduct orchestras.  

The reasons have to do with male sexuality, pretty much, and also that cumbersome thing called "family" which men don't have to worry about:

The principal conductor of the National Youth Orchestra and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic has provoked outrage by claiming that orchestras "react better when they have a man in front of them" and that "a cute girl on a podium means that musicians think about other things".
When conducted by a man, musicians encounter fewer erotic distractions, Vasily Petrenko claimed. "Musicians have often less sexual energy and can focus more on the music," he said, adding that "when women have families, it becomes difficult to be as dedicated as is demanded in the business".

In translation, all orchestras consist of nothing but heterosexual men or perhaps of lesbian women*, and seeing a "cute girl" on a podium means that sex rears its nasty head.  The fault for that is in the presence of the cute girl, of course.

In case you think that older and/or ugly women could do the job, Petrenko points out that women have families and then can't be dedicated to the business.

This is more delicious than a freshly-out-of-the-tree red-cheeked and blushing apple (I hate apples, too)!

I like Petrenko's defenses even better!  He explains that he meant all this would be true in Russia, not necessarily elsewhere, but he also suggested that if he had made these statements in Britain rather than in Norway they would have been AOK!  High-Fives Dudebros!

The only good point Petrenko makes that different countries indeed are at different places when it comes to the general approval of sexism of all types.  There are places where you can open your wide mouth and insert that elegantly shod foot and not much happens, except perhaps some applause or high-fives.  In other countries people like minor Greek goddesses go on for reams (or would be for reams if this was paper) about the logical problems in Petrenko's views.

Such as these:

Everything he says pretty much would apply to school teachers!  They stand in front of the class!  They are often women!  Even young women, gasp.  And the class may contain teenage heterosexual boys.  So there.  Let's get rid of all female teachers, too.

Come to think of it, we should probably make sure that no woman ever leaves her house, just to make sure that all that sexual energy doesn't spill about and make hard-working male conductors slip.

Sigh.  Petrenko is an asshat here.  He lives in the late 1950s.  He also fails to notice that the career he thinks only men can have while having families is so probably because some woman is taking care of his family.  Things are interlinked. 

And he appears to know nothing about the fact that orchestra member auditions were one of the first places where real sexism was shown to exist.  When the auditors for a place in an orchestra played behind a curtain, many more women passed the hurdle than was the case before, and over time orchestras (at least in the West) began employing many more female musicians.

Most of them are probably heterosexual, so one could argue that having Petrenko standing up there might make their sexual juices flow, too.  But were that the case, Petrenko would probably advocate excluding them, rather than firing his very own self.
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*Added later:  I don't think either group would have any actual trouble following a female conductor, of course, but Petrenko appears to assume something of that sort.

What's Sauce for The Goose Is Not Sauce For The Gander? Robin Thicke And Robin Thicke Parodied.

First there's the Blurred Lines song by Robin Thicke, with lyrics which are really all about the supposed blurred lines about whether no means yes and so on.  You can see the song here:



And you can read the lyrics to the song here.  A small taste:

One thing I ask of you
Let me be the one you back that ass to
Go, from Malibu, to Paris, boo
Yeah, I had a bitch, but she ain't bad as you
So hit me up when you passing through
I'll give you something big enough to tear your ass in two
Swag on, even when you dress casual
I mean it's almost unbearable
In a hundred years not dare, would I
Pull a Pharside let you pass me by
Nothing like your last guy, he too square for you
He don't smack that ass and pull your hair like that.

The video shows several men in suits and several women in what amounts to very skimpy beach wear.  Some observers think that's how hetero sex looks:  men all suited up and women in their underwear.  I've read YouTube comments, my sweetings!

Then there's this parody take on the Blurred Lines song, called Defined Lines:



It's lyrics are stronger and more reverse-sexist, but the idea is to do a gender reversal.  The singers performed the song as part of the University of Auckland’s Law Revue show.  That's in New Zealand.

The parody video seems to have been removed from YouTube for a while, but it's back at the time I'm writing this post.

What's fascinating about the latter song are the comments to it.  Quite a few of the male commentators regard the parody as an example of misandry, the degradation of men and an example of the feminazis wanting to have their high-heeled foot on their necks.*  But this doesn't seem to make them understand the point of the reversal parody at all.

Other men (and women) get the point.  Popular media defines sexuality as naked or barely-clad women who want everything anyone might think to do to them, and having that definition painted like a bull's eye  on all women's backs (or at least young women's backs) makes life sometimes disgusting and often more cumbersome.

The other thing some critics of the reversal don't seem to get that objectifying men in  a few rare parodies doesn't equal in volume the non-stop treatment of women that way, doesn't make the two things identical, doesn't make one type of sexism every bit as bad as the other type of sexism**.

Because the sexism in the reversal is an attempt to wake people up, to show how it feels when the shoe is on the other foot, to show the gander how the goose feels.
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*Except that feminists are supposed to be ugly and not wearers of high-heeled shoes.  The reason they are feminists is because they hate men and want women to rule the world, and also because they can't get laid but would really want their hair pulled and their asses torn in two and will end up happily making sandwiches for all misogynists.  Or something like that, summarized from some of the comments in the thread attached to the parody song.  At the same time, a remarkably large number of comments were positive so don't over-paint this tendency.  Otherwise you are beginning to slip and slide into the equivalent of all-women-are-sluts disease, only from the other side.

**Quite honestly, if men and women were presented in equally degrading ways in sexual media things would probably be better.  For one thing, men are less likely to accept that treatment as can be seen from the comments to the parody post.  For another thing, then everyone would have that bull's eye painted on their backs.  But naturally I'd prefer something better than equal degradation.

How Older Parents Are Wrecking The World

It's that time of the year again when we talk about too old parents having children.  I'm annoyed by this piece in the New Republic, even though it might make many good medical points.  My annoyance is based on four factors:

First, the article is a vast exaggeration of what's going on.  A vast exaggeration.  Take the title:

How Older Parenthood Will Upend American Society The scary consequences of the grayest generation.

We have the upending of the society!  We have the scary consequences!  And yet there's this:

That women become mothers later than they used to will surprise no one. All you have to do is study the faces of the women pushing baby strollers, especially on the streets of coastal cities or their suburban counterparts. American first-time mothers have aged about four years since 1970—as of 2010, they were 25.4 as opposed to 21.5. That average, of course, obscures a lot of regional, ethnic, and educational variation. The average new mother from Massachusetts, for instance, was 28; the Mississippian was 22.9. The Asian American first-time mother was 29.1; the African American 23.1. A college-educated woman had a better than one-in-three chance of having her first child at 30 or older; the odds that a woman with less education would wait that long were no better than one in ten.

Bolds are mine.  What that paragraph supports is not the upending of the American society.

Second, the story is written from an upper-class point of view and largely reflects the concerns of those who must choose between further education and having children early.  Delaying childbearing for those reasons is NOT the largest global reason for the reduced fertility rates in many countries. It may be a consequence of wanting a smaller family size, but worldwide fertility rates are not dropping because women everywhere are delaying childbirth for careers!

Third, the story conflates fertility rates and late births in a way which leaves me feeling that the author wants everybody to have lots of children, and that the way to do that is to begin at menarche or so, given that the body then is less likely to have accumulated toxins or mutations or whatever might make the children of older parents more likely to have problems.

Indeed, the story tries to press all the panic buttons together!  Though I must give it kudos for pressing them on men, too.  Usually these articles only press women's panic buttons (We women always do everything wrong:  If we are black, we have children too young and without husbands.  If we are white, we don't have enough children or too late, at least if we are not poor.  If we are white and poor,  we also have children too often without husbands and so on.  I'm going to stop reading this crap.)

Fourth, this article contains something which I've noticed before in these kinds of articles.  Here's an example.  It's a subtle one, following some time after an assertion that feminists really are celebrating older parenting everywhere!

If you’re a doctor, you see clearly what is to be done, and you’re sure it will be. “People are going to change their reproductive habits,” said Alan S. Brown, a professor of psychiatry and epidemiology at the Columbia University medical school and the editor of an important anthology on the origins of schizophrenia. They will simply have to “procreate earlier,” he replied. As for men worried about the effects of age on children, they will “bank sperm and freeze it.”

Bolds are mine.

What's irritating about this?  It pays no attention to people's life circumstances, the absence of paid maternity leave, the difficulty of establishing a family in one's early twenties, the absence of protections for women who take a maternity leave from work and wish to return to the same position in their career paths, the absence of support for daycare and so on.  And note that the people who have to "procreate earlier" are really not all people, because some can bank sperm and freeze it, assuming they can afford that.

I've read similar opinions in earlier old-mother articles, and they always give orders like that, pretty much.   Sorta shape-up-or-ship-out.

At the next step in the article the author gives us the usual good advice about what's needed for that earlier procreation to happen.  That advice (of which the first paragraph is aimed at only the educated upper classes, by the way) will be ignored, as it has been, for decades:

Demographers and sociologists agree about what those policies are. The main obstacle to be overcome is the unequal division of the opportunity cost of babies. When women enjoy the same access to education and professional advancement as men but face penalties for reproducing, then, unsurprisingly, they don’t.

...

More immediately effective are policies in place in many countries in Western Europe (France, Italy, Sweden) that help women and men juggle work and child rearing. These include subsidized child care, generous parental leaves, and laws that guarantee parents’ jobs when they go back to work. Programs that let parents stay in the workforce instead of dropping out allow them to earn more over the course of their lifetimes.

Compare that to the medical advice that "people" will just have to procreate earlier.

OK.  After picking through all that, the piece has good points about the fact that having children late in life carries larger risks than having them early.  To what extent epigenetic studies about mice or rats directly translate into humans is unclear, however, and the article would have much benefited from placing the numbers it quotes into a proper framework.

It's not terribly informative to tell us that some condition becomes more likely with parental age if we are not told what percentage of all children the condition applies to and, thus, what the actual increased risk might be.  Given that most people still have children relatively young, the societal upending the post predicts doesn't seem called for.  At least I wanted to know exactly what percentage of American men and women have their first child after the age of, say, forty.

Just to remind you again, the average maternal age at first birth in the US is 24.5 years, not forty years.  Thus, to write about the scary consequences of the graying generation is like telling us that the sky is falling.  But that treatment is good for clicks, advertising income and the survival of a struggling newspaper, right?
 

On Whether the US Should Intervene in Syria

It is a very sad day when the best piece on this was written by a humor site, the Onion.  That piece is sarcasm of a very dark kind and says nothing much about the human suffering.  But trying to decide on the basis of human suffering is equally impossible, unless one has the ability to predict the  total future casualties (as well as their split into innocent bystanders and willing participants) under each option.

I'm not well informed about the situation in Syria but it seems to me that none of the sides in the civil war are on the side of ordinary democracy for the majority of Syrian people.  It looks like a religious-cum-political-cum-economic power struggle between fairly small groups.

What's truly awful about these situations that the "innocent bystanders" are always the least powerful and often the ones the next power-brokers will oppress.

On Depression And Gender

A new study (seems to be based on a doctoral thesis by one of the authors) suggests that depression rates among men may have been underestimated because of the symptom list that is commonly used.  In other words, perhaps, as the authors argue, depression is as common in men as in women (or even more common in men).  But perhaps not.


The problem I have with the study (which I quickly read) is that I didn't spot the part where the lists of symptoms are nailed down as defining depression.  Something like people feeling better after getting medication for depression or other therapy for depression, something which links all the various symptom lists to the same illness.


I may have missed that part.  But in general the measurement of mental/ and emotional illnesses can be tricky.

Still, the study findings are interesting.  For example, when the authors used a combined scale which included both traditional (sorta female-coded items) and new "masculine" items, women and men tended to score about the same.  In addition to that, it wasn't necessarily just the men who seemed to score higher on the "masculine" items but a significant number of women, too:

The second scale, the GIDS, included traditional depression items as well as the alternative, male-type items from the MSS. The MSS appeared to identify depression in a group of men who disclosed more externalizing symptoms. However, we know that men’s experiences of depression are not uniform. For some men, these alternative symptoms would be enough to assess depression, while others would experience the more traditional symptoms of depression. Given that a significant number of women also met our depression case criteria using the MSS indicates that both women and men would benefit from a scale that contains an array of symptoms that better reflect the heterogeneity of the depression experience.

If the authors' new scales indeed measure depression better in many men (and many women), then their use will be an improvement, always assuming that effective treatment exists.  More people can be helped.

A Breastfeeding Joke And Slightly Related Comments

This is the joke:

I think it is funny, anyway.

More seriously, and because I read some theoretical literature in the last few days, the treatment of breastfeeding in the media is fascinating.  There is a push for more breastfeeding and there is also increased acceptance of public breastfeeding.  But the need for both of those is because of how female breasts have been coded in the recent past (and still are):  As sexual titillants.  If there isn't such a word (titillant) it should exist.

But I also think that the same person could be for breastfeeding and against public breastfeeding, if that person believes in the women-in-the-private-sphere-only argument.  Being able to take your baby out with you without considering the feeding rhythm gives women more freedom.

Which links, a bit wobblily (another word that doesn't exist?), to my observation comparing Finland and the US.  At least where I live in the US the presence of children is a bit ghost-like.  The streets are sorta empty of them and glimpses of families are nowhere as common as in Finland.  And the number of young dads as the only adults with their children out doing things is much, much higher there than here.

I have some ideas about what drives these differences, and it isn't different birth rates.  Americans are much more afraid of what might happen to unsupervised children playing with other children outside, and Finns have paternity leave which serves to increase the bonding between fathers and children.  I also think the societal values are somewhat different in the two countries.

Blog Spam

I spend a few minutes every day on spam.  It's like having to sweep the same corner of the living-room every day, for some weird reason.

And now I'm getting curious about the spam industry.  For example, I didn't use to get much spam until this last spring.  Now it's continuous, even though Disqus' spam program catches most of it so you never see it.

But what fascinates me right now is where the spam goes.  On this blog it goes to the post about "Get Lucky at 35,000 Feet."  Why the spammers pick older posts is obvious.  But why certain older posts?

I get that the work posting spam is poorly paid and I'm not yelling at the people doing it.  But perhaps something could be done about the algorithms which make spam profitable for firms.

On The Concept of Privilege As A Tool in Social Justice Movements

Contents include rape and sexual harassment.



I've written about this before, but there's more I want to say about it, partly brought up by this quote from a post about the new supposedly feminist website called Bustle:

Based on his statements and interviews, it seems fair to say that Goldberg has, at best, a rudimentary understanding of the concept of feminism — while it's a broad and controversial term for sure, most people who have bothered to read up on the subject seem to agree that part of being a 21st-century feminist includes embracing intersectionality, questioning stereotypes, being aware of your privilege, and letting women speak for themselves.

Bolds are mine.

Being aware of your privilege is fine, and it as an excellent tool for introspection, for understanding what I don't have any lived-in experience about, for understanding that the world can treat other people quite differently, and for placing oneself at the beginning of some debate (do I know something worth sharing here?  do I make assumptions about what others know that are incorrect?)

But what about using the concept in other ways?  That's where I think the concept of privilege fails as a tool.  It's too blunt, too prone to being used as a shut-up in conversations, too prone for being used as a check on the ideological purity of someone to be in the room (which also turns lack of privilege into a certain type of odd privilege).  To give you an example, to tell someone his or her privilege is showing is a statement which both conveys certain information and argues that the person has committed a faux pas of a type, that the person probably should shut up and leave the conversation.

That doesn't matter, perhaps, except in the sense that one catches more flies with honey than with vinegar, though it does tend to stop any further attempts to increase mutual understanding.

 What matters much more is when privilege is used as an actual tool of theoretical analysis.

The reason for that, in my opinion, is that the concept of privilege is so stretching, so meaningless, so capable of inversions that we don't get anywhere by using it.  The bigger worry, by far, is the idea of starting to add up privileges, to decide who is the least privileged, and then to use that impossible summing to make conclusions about what one should do in a particular situation, whose position one should focus on, whose worries one should evaluate. 

That's partly because some things listed as privileges can depend on one's choice, partly, because many aspects of privilege focus the study of a societal problem on the relative position of different individuals with respect to that problem, and such focus then tends to blind us to the larger problem and concentrate on individuals and their lives rather than the wider problem.  But the different types of privileges are not commensurate and so trying to sum them up introduces pure subjectivity into the analysis.

To give you a more concrete example of some of the problems, I have urban East Coast "privilege".  But if I move to a bubolic area, because of my own choice, I lose that "privilege?"   I can now participate in discussions as a representative of rural people?  That doesn't make the best approach to the very real problems of the rural poor or the very real problems of how to provide, say, adequate media coverage of sparsely populated areas or how to make sure that feminism or other such movements aren't just bicoastal ones.  In a sense the concept of "privilege" is both too general, vague and too narrow, individualistic.

Here's what I really want to stress:  My criticism of the concept of "privilege" is not an argument for implying that one's race, gender, ethnicity and so on wouldn't place people into different boxes, with different access to the good things in life and with different levels of bad things happening to us.  It's crucial to be clear about that.  But when we lump all the different aspects of these and other concerns (social class, religion, sexual preference, gender identity, health etc.) together and throw them into one box marked "privilege" we don't really get very far in our analyses.

That's because different types of "privilege" have different underlying reasons, and a proper study of those reasons is imperative, in my view.  One way of doing that study is by looking at one particular question (say, race) first in isolation and then in how it interacts with other important questions (gender, income, etc.)  If we don't do that disaggregated analysis, we are stuck with a concept of "privilege" which tells us very little about what to do to make things better.

To apply all this to a particular problem, consider the recent media coverage of gang rapes and sexual harassment and the like in India.  Let's begin with a piece published at the CNN.com about the experiences of an American exchange student in India.   The story is an outpouring of pain and grief with very little analysis (which isn't necessarily required of such stories).  But it also equates the sexual harassment the writer had to undergo with the whole country of India in a way which might be essentializing, implying that India is somehow ineradicably a misogynist place which foreign women should avoid.

A companion piece at the CNN.com site provided a different narrative of the possible experiences of another exchange student on the same trip.  The author of that stressed the kindness and humanity of the Indian men she met and the fact that one shouldn't label a whole society based on what some individuals in it do.

Here's where the concept of privilege enters all this:  A post on Ms Magazine site discusses these two essays from the point of view of a professor of gender studies. The post makes a complicated argument:

So RoseChasm is not incorrect to feel hunted, but her words unfortunately line up with global power grids. She depicts India as irredeemably patriarchal, with no nod to the long history of Indian feminists protesting against sexual violence in public spaces, homes and by police and military. By default, the U.S. gets seen as a haven of gender equity. We forget that U.S. campuses have four times the number of sexual assaults that off-campus sites do, that domestic violence kills in record numbers and that the U.S. military commits rapes in huge numbers with little impunity. RoseChasm’s testimony may be a terrified survivor’s account, but it reinforces ideas of places like India as primitive frontiers, desensitizing us to violence launched against other countries with the alibi of culture.
RoseChasm wants to be invisible, neutral, “just a person” in India, but the very fact of her presence on a study abroad trip underlines a one-sided privilege: Students on such programs can travel to others’ lives, gawk at them and pretend to live their lives for a brief moment, with little recognition that people may be looking or talking back, sometimes in violent ways. For women on these trips, this becomes a violent, gendered difference from men in their programs, to be sure, but for all it’s a reminder that global inequalities often provoke vicious backlash. And RoseChasm’s U.S. privilege doesn’t protect her from the everyday violence Indian women negotiate. A return to the U.S. provides no protection from gendered violence, either—it only compounds the complete lack of safe havens for women.

The bolds are mine.

My beef isn't with the author, Srimati Basu, pointing out the global power grids or the fact that American tourists in India are privileged in many ways over the general Indian population.  My beef has to do with the idea that the modern concept of privilege benefits the analysis here.  The older one, based on income, education and social class, might have been more useful.

Basu's two points in that context are contradictory.  She both argues that the US and India are not that different* when it comes to gendered violence AND that the author of the initial essay, RoseChasm, is privileged** because she can move from one of these countries to the other, whereas Indian women cannot do so.   But if that is so, then Basu herself, say, is privileged when it comes to the US, compared to poor American women.  Basu can leave the country, they cannot.

That's nit-picking, sure, and a bit stupid.   My point may become clearer when we introduce to this discussion the most recent gang-rape case from India:

Out on an assignment, the photojournalist was raped in a deserted textile mill in central Mumbai on Thursday evening after the five accused assaulted and tied her male colleague.
Twenty police teams, including 10 from the crime branch, are tracking their three other accomplices, all of whom have been identified and are aged between 18 and 20.
On Friday afternoon, the police had arrested Chand Abdul Sattar who lives at Dhobi Ghat, close to the mill. The accused later confessed to the crime.
"We have arrested one of the suspects who has named the others involved in the incident. The suspect has also confessed to the crime," Mumbai police commissioner Satyapal Singh had said in a press conference on Friday.
The five men, all school dropouts, were jobless and visited the mill often. Two even have robbery cases registered against them.

If we apply the privilege concept to this story, it might be necessary to point out that the victim comes across as probably of a higher social class than the perpetrators, who are school dropouts and unemployed.  From this it's not a terribly big step to discussing which rapes are in some sense more understandable than other rapes and so on.   I don't want to go there.

This is what I see as a big problem with the simultaneous discussion of different types of privileges and attempts to compare them or to add them up or to subtract from them.  I don't see how that approach would diminish any of the underlying problems.  The tools for fighting poverty and global inequalities are different from the tools for fighting rape, in general, and I don't think that conflating the two increases our analytical abilities.  This doesn't mean that an understanding of the variables which make rape more likely on the perpetrators' part isn't useful.  But that's something different altogether.

To conclude, I want to reiterate that this post is about the concept of privilege as an analytical tool, not an argument for the absence of what the concept attempts to capture,  and certainly not an argument against using it as a device for introspection.
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* The discussion of gender violence in different countries often concludes with the argument that gender violence exists everywhere.  This is correct, of course.  But it's still important to study different cultures, the way they handle rape and sexual harassment, whether the authorities take them seriously or not, whether the victim-blaming and shame associated with being a victim is identical and so on.  It's also important to try to get good international figures of actual rapes and to understand the reasons for any differences that are found.  Those reasons include several possibilities:  For example, women have different "rights" to go out alone or unattended by a male relative, and how the society views those "rights" determines the incidence of rapes in complicated ways.  Then the rate at which women report rapes can differ because of the cultural incentives or disincentives for doing so.  And so on.  To give one extra flavor of the complications in this, it's possible that a country which experiences an upsurge of attention aimed at rapes (such as India) may, in fact, be improving its actual hidden statistics if those rapes in the past went unreported and even hidden.

Such international comparisons should avoid the kind of approach that Basu warns us about.  But the comparisons are necessary for both learning what works in the prevention of gender violence and for measuring improvements.

**That RoseCharm tells us she suffers from PTSD and was admitted to a psychiatric ward for some time and is now on mental disability leave from college further complicates the analysis if we use being able-bodied or able-minded as yet another form of privilege.

What Some Treatments of Chelsea Manning Teach Us About Views On Women

On CNN Newsroom:

CNN host Fredricka Whitfield continued to incorrectly refer to Chelsea Manning as a male as one of her guests suggested that providing Manning with hormone therapy while in prison would be "beyond insanity."

During the August 24 edition of CNN Newsroom, Whitfield invited civil rights attorney Avery Friedman and criminal defense attorney Richard Herman to discuss the possibility of providing Manning - previously known as Bradley Manning - with medical treatment for her gender dysphoria while she serves her sentence in an all-male military prison for leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks.

Herman, who is a regular CNN legal commentator, railed against the possibility of providing Manning with adequate medical care, calling the idea "beyond insanity" and suggesting that Manning could get "good practice" presenting as a female in prison: 

HERMAN: It's absurd. Sometimes we have to step back and say, "you know, some of these cases we cover, this is beyond insanity." There's no way that taxpayers are going to pay a hundred thousand dollars for a gender transformation for this guy while he's in prison. If he wants to be Chelsea, he can practice all he wants at Fort Leavenworth, because those guys are there for a long time. So he can get good practice and when he gets out, he can have the operation or whatever, and he can pay for it.

Bolds are mine.  I wonder what on earth Herman might have meant by that comment.

No, I don't.  The implication is that the role of women is to get raped and that a male prison is a good place to practice for that role, given the high rates of prison rape.

Meanwhile, in Finland, the chief editor of a newspaper called  Kaleva cut a joke on the topic of transgender Manning:

Tietovuotaja Bradley Manning haluaa muuttua naiseksi. Se ei ole ihme. Laverteluhan on aina ollut ämmämäistä".

My translation:

The information leaker Bradley Manning wants to turn into a woman.  That's no wonder.  Blabbing/tale-telling has always been what chicks/hags do.

When questioned about it, editor Mantila defended his joke as summarizing everything important really well.  He also didn't get what the fuss was about and pointed out that his newspaper has been among the most liberal when it comes to sexual minorities.  Nobody should be wrapped in cotton wool, he also stated, not even sexual minorities.

I went and read the comments to the story about Mantila's beautiful and hairy foot in his mouth, and most didn't think his joke was that good.  But one person there linked to a Daily Mail article which argued that women do so speak more than men.*

The placement of transgender individuals into a scheme of theoretical analysis about gender can be very difficult.  But one way of approaching this might be to look at it in the context of enforcing rigid gender norms, including the impossibility of leaping over the border between male and female sexes.

 If we apply this tool, the above two examples seem to demonstrate the idea that Manning is moving from the better sex to the worse sex, one which is sorta made for passive reception of sexual advantages but which also talks nonstop.
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*The article from last February, which I missed, is about testing boy and girl rats.  The boy rats are more vocal than the girl rats and get more attention from the mommy rats.  There's a difference in a protein P2 between the boy and girl rats (boy rats have more of it), and when the researchers switched the relative amount of P2 in the boy and girl rat brains, the girls became more vocal and got more mommy attention. 

The researchers then argued that in a small sample of human children (5 girls, 5 boys) the girls had more of P2 than the boys.  But they never measured how vocal those girls and boys were.  Yet the popularization argued that "Women Really Do Talk More Than Men."

There are all sorts of problems with that, of course, because the study didn't show any difference in how vocal the children were and even the initial study didn't compare adult rats with each other.  A sample size of ten can be a bit tricky, for all sorts of good reasons, too.  For a nice discussion of the issues, go here.

But do see the leap the commentator took:  We move from the idea that women tell more tales, blab more to the idea that women just speak more.  The latter is now somehow associated with the idea that women would leak more information than men.

Speed Blogging, Monday 8/26/2013. On Anniversaries, Women in the Obama Administration and The Question of Religious Freedom

Or word salad.  Not coleslaw, but the kind of salad where you have goat cheese lumps, too, among lettuce leaves a bit too big to swallow without knife-work.

First, Saturday was the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, today is the 93rd anniversary of the ratification of the 19th amendment (women's right to vote).  So we are a very very young country when it comes to civil rights.  Worth keeping in mind. 

Second, the Koch brothers have decided not to buy the Tribune papers.  This is good news.  Or as much good news as we are likely to get for a while so you should revel in it.

Third, has the Obama administration a good record of hiring women or not?  That may depend, as wise people say, but the weasel-word of "diversity" doesn't suffice as a defense:

“The president’s commitment to diversity is second to none, and his track record speaks to it,” Alyssa Mastromonaco, the deputy chief of staff, said in an e-mail message. “This is a man who has appointed women as national security adviser, as White House counsel, as budget director and to lead the task of implementing our single most important domestic policy accomplishment,” namely Mr. Obama’s health care law. “This president has single-handedly increased the diversity of our courts, and he will continue to select from a field of highly qualified and diverse candidates for all federal posts.”

For those who don't know of my dislike of the term "diversity," a short explanation:  You can have diversity with a government which has one white woman, one black man, one Asian-American man and umpteen zillion old white guys.  "Diversity" is not the same thing as a representative government*, in short, and it's a representative government that I think we want.  "Diversity" could provide that, of course, but it also offers a loop-hole for those who don't want a representative government etc..

Fourth, I find the concept of religious rights or religious freedom interesting because it can clash with other types of rights, given that religious rights only crop up in a society with more than one flavor (or perhaps intensity) of religion.  One crucial question is naturally to what extent religious rights infringe on the rights of those who don't share the same religion.  This article addresses some of those issues. 

But very few articles analyze how women's rights and religious rights may conflict on a much deeper level, if the religion specifies women's roles as inferior and secondary and if survival after death is taught to depend on the internalization of those teachings.  That puts the believing woman into an impossible Catch-22 position when it comes to choosing between her religion and her human worth. 

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*Representative in terms of population group sizes, with certain basic guarantees and possibly positive discrimination to reassure that group such as Native Americans have representation, too.

Random Writing Post. Can Be Ignored.

This is necessary because I took two days off from the computer and its simulacrum of the real world.  But that's a post for a different day when the gears in my brain are better oiled.  I'm feeling more and more that I pretend-live on the net and that my real life isn't saved and set aside for that, to be enjoyed later.  Must consider.

In any case, the last two days I spent at the seaside.  Wonderful view of the Mother Ocean, making me feel tiny tiny and unimportant, yet quite safe.  The world is OK, even if the human race disappears which might be an improvement, from the ocean's point of view.

I watched a family of groundhogs and they came by to check me out.  An interesting inter-species moment.  A worried look from the groundhog (waddling quickly past after turning its head to gawk at me), a worried look from me until I figured out what animal this was and that it most likely wasn't rabid but just sorta tame.  Or it had tamed me or whatever.

To return to the topic of that first paragraph:  I took the weekend off because of how my return from the Finnish vacation struck me:  The Internet (Twitter, blogs, articles and so on) pulled me hither and pushed me yonder and made my brain feel like I had been twirled around for an hour.  I would follow a thread of thought and find it disintegrate into hundreds of strands which would then get entangled with each other and produce a knot impossible to tease apart.  I would try to follow some other thread of thought and end up with the same dilemma.  Where is my place here?  Do I have any useful function left?

I don't know, and neither does the groundhog.  Though it likes lawnmowers which make its dinner easier to reach.