Interpreting Tweets: Written on Seashore Sand, Until The Next Wave vs. Cuneiform Tablets

Are your tweets simple sentences in a chat you have with someone on Twitter?  Are they mini- thoughts carefully framed and considered?  Are they jokes you pass on?  Are they information?  Do you know if the information you offer is correct or not?  Are Twitter discussions real discussions, given that the system doesn't quite allow us to know who the participants are?  What is the sound of a tweet when it drops into the universe without any response?  Did you reach someone or not?  What if you tweet about what you had for breakfast and someone saves that tweet and uses it later in some completely different conversation? 

Are there powerful goddesses and gods of Twittersphere?  Does talking to invisible people you don't know make you feel freer to say what you mean?  Or less free?  Is it easier to be angry on Twitter than in real life?  Is Twitter more democratic than the mainstream media (however defined) or no more democratic?  Are tweets like scrawls on the seashore sand which the ocean smooths away in the next moment or are they like cuneiform tablets, to be one day (soon!) unearthed by future archeologists?

How are tweets to be interpreted?

That is a very serious question, my friends.  I ask it, because Twitter, right now, is one of the best imitators of actual oral discussions or chats on the Internet, because it is a way of carrying out a conversation and because the way the tweets are restricted in length makes each tweet resemble one short snippet of an actual conversation.

People chat on Twitter, people post kitten pictures on Twitter, people transmit opinions, arguments, information and feelings on Twitter, and all of that is done in very short soundbites, in a way which makes one feel there's just this conversation going on, and if something is misunderstood then you clarify, the way you would while sitting around a kitchen table or on a bar stool in a pub.

I'd argue that most people think of Twitter use as close to oral communication.  But once a tweet has been birthed and sent off into the Twittersphere it is also something quite different.  The extreme analogy I use in the title of this post is that it's like a cuneiform tablet, to be regarded as an independent piece of written evidence, to be read in isolation of the conversation it belongs to and to be judged, pretty much, as if it is not that different from a book excerpt or an excerpt from a published speech. 

Except that the context itself can be very difficult to properly establish in Twitter conversations.  A published speech or a book allows those who wish a fairly quick way for checking what the context was.  It is much more difficult to establish the overall contents of a Twitter debate.  Some of them continue for days, for example.

I see individual tweets used in blog posts and in articles where the author posts screenshots of various tweets, tied to some wider topic, and usually that treatment doesn't cause problems, because the tweets are picked carefully, to present a range of opinions or feelings, say.  But it's easy to see that taking one tweet out from a longer debate also offers a different way of analyzing it.

As I noted, we have always had the problem of taking statements out of context.  But when those statements can be produced almost instantaneously,  by large numbers of people, and not always with much thought given to those future archeologists, in a setting which resembles spoken communication, that problem is made much more common.

The cuneiform tablet approach to the analysis of tweets is to assume that some particular tweet stands alone (which it may or may not do), and to then continue to dissect it on the basis of  its own contents.  In an extreme form this can resemble the way archeologists use a cuneiform tablet, written by one scribe,  to draw conclusions about, say,  the ancient Sumerians.





 

The Washington Redskins. Or What's In A Name.

If you have followed the discussion about the name change proposal for  Washington Redskins, I strongly recommend reading this article (to the very end). 

It both explains why such proposals are not very important for at least some groups of Native Americans and why, at the same time, they can be very important, and it offers a lot of important nuance and additional information: 

It explains about the racial profiling of those who live on the reservation, it mentions the very high unemployment rate and other large problems the locals face and, in my opinion, it asks why we are not having national movements to fix the enormous economic problems of many Native Americans.

This is something I see missing in the privilege-based debates about gender, race or ethnicity or both of those at the same time.  Despite certain clear benefits that come from introspection in understanding one's own privileged position on various social thermometers, that understanding doesn't necessarily result in workable proposals for change about the underpinnings, so to speak.  We need more resources for the reservations, more resources for Native Americans in general,  not just the removal of team names which appropriate Native American history.

The "Dancing Girl" from Mohenjo-daro

Isn't this little statue wonderful?

From the Wikipedia article:

A bronze statuette dubbed the "Dancing Girl", 10.8 centimetres (4.3 in) high and some 4,500 years old, was found in Mohenjo-daro in 1926. In 1973, British archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler described the item as his favorite statuette:

"She's about fifteen years old I should think, not more, but she stands there with bangles all the way up her arm and nothing else on. A girl perfectly, for the moment, perfectly confident of herself and the world. There's nothing like her, I think, in the world."

John Marshall, another archeologist at Mohenjo-daro, described the figure as "a young girl, her hand on her hip in a half-impudent posture, and legs slightly forward as she beats time to the music with her legs and feet."^[14] The archaeologist Gregory Possehl said of the statuette, "We may not be certain that she was a dancer, but she was good at what she did and she knew it".

I love the moments when one reads about some ancient human culture and suddenly comes across that  feeling: the person talked about or viewed could be someone here and right now, someone we can understand and appreciate as a human being,  the reminder of the humanity of all people who once were. 

I also love the girl in the statue and the work of whoever made it, because it is a statue of the person, not a mere visual symbol of characteristics which were deemed desirable for some wider purpose.

Getting Your Just Desserts

Or your just deserts.  For Fox News host Martha MacCallum they might be the same thing for women:

Fox News host Martha MacCallum asserted on Wednesday that women did not want special laws ensuring equal for equal work because they already were compensated “exactly what they’re worth.”
After President Barack Obama used his State of the Union address on Tuesday to call on Congress to end workplace discrimination practices that “belong in a Mad Men episode,” Fox News asked two men, liberal radio host Alan Colmes and Fox News host Tucker Carlson, to debate equal pay for women.
Carlson argued that women actually made more than men if the time they “voluntarily” took off work to raise children was factored in.

“The numbers don’t lie,” he insisted. “The losers in the Obama economy have been men.”
MacCallum accused politicians of talking about female workers like they were victims “who we need to make sure she gets what she deserves.”
“The numbers, when you look at them, do not bear out that there is a war on women in the workplace,” the Fox News host added. “And I think it’s a question of how liberals and conservative view what needs to be done for women.”

This is such a fun word soup.  First, everyone and their great-uncle feels free to talk about the meaning of various earnings, despite the fact that there are mountains of actual economic research on the topic of the gender gap in wages and related questions.  This feeling that one knows stuff without knowing it angers me, because of that Puritan streak I have:  Do the research before you open your mouth and bare your fangs.  And no, we cannot just say that women are earning exactly what they are worth, which means all women in this country and in all jobs.

Another example of this not-knowing-your-facts is the very common argument that men earn more only because they work more hours in the labor market.  That's because most studies still show a difference in earnings when the hours spent working are held constant (taken into account).  It is true that some of the difference in overall earnings between men and women has to do with different paid work hours (unpaid work at home is not taken into account in those comparisons), but it is not true that the whole difference can be attributed to worked hour differences.

Second, there's the idea, again, that the gendered roles of who take care of children doesn't matter at all, that "choice" is the explanation for why women choose certain jobs, that women freely "choose" to earn less, that women "choose" to take time off for childbearing and child-rearing and so on.  This is an assertion, not something that we can deduce from research, this idea that all the reasons for gender differences in earnings are voluntary on women's part.

I have written about the way the term "choice" is used in political arguments before.  But the main  point worth repeating is that choice is carried out within a set of constraints.  Those constraints are different, on average, for men and women, and the consequences of certain "choices" are also different.  This doesn't mean that there is no choice, just that to understand why we end up with the roles we do end up with requires a study of the wider framework in which they take place.  And here the role of the Republicans as the party which fights tooth-and-nail against maternity leaves, subsidized health care and in general the idea of women in the public sphere matters.  It matters because they are pulling the framework within which women make these "free choices" in one direction.

A lot more could be written about that quote, such as a careful analysis of the losers and winners in the "Obama economy" which conflates the administration's action and inaction with the recent recession with what Republican governors have done in their states to increase unemployment and so on, and which carefully moves the magnifying lens from the group which is really doing well (those on the top of the earnings pyramid) to a kind of gendered re-reading of the data. 

Why the latter is tricky is because of the recession effects:  Men are more likely to lose jobs first in recessions because they are more likely to work in the bellwether industries (construction, manufacture and transportation), but men are also more likely to see recovery in those jobs faster.  The recovery from the recession (such as it is) is still an ongoing process, and, as we should expect, the unemployment rates of men and women are coming back towards their usual rough equality. 

But the new jobs people are getting, both men and women, do look like not-so-great-jobs.  And the large unemployment differences are between whites on the one side and blacks and Latinos on the other side, another topic Fox News will not address.

Speed Blogging, 1/29/2014: On SOTU (Sorry), How To Have CEO Kids and the Frightening Outlines of Women

First, the SOTU speech.  I fell asleep before that started and so didn't watch it.  And then I decided not to write about it because the SOTU speeches of the past didn't much matter, even though I spent effort and time to analyze them.  Aren't you happy on my behalf?

Second, this article about how to bring up successful children:  The gist is to make your children like this:

It turns out that for all their diversity, the strikingly successful groups in America today share three traits that, together, propel success. The first is a superiority complex — a deep-seated belief in their exceptionality. The second appears to be the opposite — insecurity, a feeling that you or what you’ve done is not good enough. The third is impulse control.

Now, those children might end up really unhappy, because of that inner insecurity and because at the same time they believe that they are better than people from other groups.  But they have excellent impulse control so they will climb to the top of the social hierarchies!

Richard Kim talks back to the authors.   I still can't get over the idea that creating unhappy children is a Good Thing because they will be rich one day.  At least they can cry in a Rolls Royce, I guess.

Neither can I quite see how any of this would work if all racial and ethnic groups did the same thing, because the places at the top of the society are but few and getting fewer every year.  You might derange your kids for no good reason!

Finally, I'm not at all sure that the authors, Chua and Rubinfeld, have really looked at the data.  If certain groups of immigrants come into this country with high levels of education and other groups as refugees who have gone through hell and may not be able to read, well, their children might fare differently in the US, and you can't give that a nod and then just drive on holding your favorite parental-style theory.  And whether we have good data to distinguish the economic performance of Mormons from that of Protestants and Catholics, say, is something I don't know, but I wonder how much Mormons might help each other to get ahead and I also wonder what the data actually shows, once we standardize for all the relevant economic variables (education, location etc.).

Third, an American agreement with the fairly common idea that women are responsible for making heterosexual men think about sex:

A Southern Baptist pastor in Virginia has warned women in his congregation that they are sinning if their clothes allow others to see the “outline” of their bodies.
The Christian Post pointed out on Tuesday that HeartCry Missionary Society founder Paul Washer had posted the sermon to YouTube last week, where he says that God wants women to “adorn themselves with proper clothing.”
“That tells me that there is clothing that’s improper for a Christian woman,” the pastor explains. “That’s just logic.”

It's the same logic the Taliban used (and may still use) in Afghanistan:  The shape of a woman must not be visible through her burqa.

What about cardboard boxes (piled up high enough to cover all of me) with a periscope?  The advantage is that I could have all sorts of guns inside the box and nobody would know.  The disadvantages are pretty obvious.  But no outlines would be visible.

I have sometimes imagined what might happen if women had the ability to make themselves completely invisible.  You'd think that would be great for all the religious men who don't want to see women's outlines.  But then women could sneak into any place, without being spotted!  The horror of it.

I'm fed up with these arguments, because they take all agency away from men (uncontrollable beasts, men seem to be, in some religious thinking) and because my research into the question of women's clothing is that any amount showing, even if it is two eyes, would make some religious preacher tell us that women must cover up more.

This is not to argue that there should be no rules about what people wear, of course, just that the rules should not be so much more burdensome for women than in general. 

Why You Should Not Move To Scandinavia or to The Nordic Countries

This article is a nice adjustment to all that Scandinavia-worship, by the UK Guardian.  Read it and make sure that you don't want to move to the mosquito-filled ice-cold hell that is Northern Europe.  It is a dreadful place*.  Just don't go there!  You will become suicidal if you do.

Kidding there, because it's in my interest to have a lot of nature left over in case I desire to move Snakepit Inc. back into Finland.  But not completely kidding, because an important reason for those things which are going well in Scandinavian countries is social cohesion, and because there are a lot of mosquitoes and depressive people up there. 

And as Michael Booth,  the nasty-minded humorist at the Guardian,  writes:

The myriad successes of the Nordic countries are no miracle, they were born of a combination of Lutheran modesty, peasant parsimony, geographical determinism and ruthless pragmatism ("The Russians are attacking? Join the Nazis! The Nazis are losing? Join the Allies!"). These societies function well for those who conform to the collective median, but they aren't much fun for tall poppies. Schools rein in higher achievers for the sake of the less gifted; "elite" is a dirty word; displays of success, ambition or wealth are frowned upon. If you can cope with this, and the cost, and the cold (both metaphorical and inter-personal), then by all means join me in my adopted hyggelige (home).

Well, not really "as the humorist writes," because he writes from the outside.  That's why he is not sticking well enough for social cohesion.  If you get my point.  He thinks he is a tall poppy!  How dare he!  More seriously, the jury is still very much out on how the Scandinavian "miracle" would work in a more diversified society.

I think that the "ruthless pragmatism" argument is wrong, by the way.  The reason for that pragmatism is something which I have thought about a lot, and that has to do with how much rational thought and evidence is allowed to influence the political systems of various countries.  If I had to simplify a bit, I would say that the Scandinavian countries allow a lot more rational stuff to affect the political discourse than the politicians in most other countries, including the US. 

I don't know the reason for that, but I believe the differences are real**, and one reason why corruption and bribery are so rare in Scandinavian politics. 

To conclude, it seems that Michael Booth must have met me:

I am very fond of the Finns, a most pragmatic, redoubtable people with a Sahara-dry sense of humour.

There you go.   When I open my mouth sand falls out.

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*As the story is humor I can't be bothered to correct all the mistakes Booth makes.  Just enjoy the parody.
**Based on both following the news and debates in Finland now and on what beliefs I had etched into my brain when I was growing up.  I come across all innocent and naive about the power of facts and logical arguments because I was made to expect that this is how the world works.  But do note that the difference is not huge or that Finns aren't watching soap operas from the US most of the time. 

No Taxpayer Funding For Abortion Act

This was passed in the US House but will not become a law.  It's still worth a closer look:

The House of Representatives passed a bundle of abortion restrictions Tuesday that would dramatically reduce the number of health insurance plans that cover the procedure. The vote was 227 to 188, with one lawmaker voting present
The No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act (H.R. 7), sponsored by Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), would prohibit insurance plans sold in the new health care exchanges from covering abortion, and it would eliminate tax benefits for small businesses that purchase insurance plans covering abortion. The bill would also prevent the District of Columbia from using its own locally raised funds to subsidize abortion care for low-income women.
Currently, more than 80 percent of private health insurance plans include abortion coverage, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research group.

The bill would not actually prevent federal taxpayer dollars from funding abortion because the Hyde Amendment has already done that for more than three decades.

Why is it worth a closer look?  Because the Republicans, when elected, seldom run on the promise to spend most of their time on abortion but that's what happens once they are in office.  Because there is no real movement to have an act called No Taxpayer Funding For Killing Innocent People Abroad With Drones, say, and we don't even really question why that is the case.

On A Bicycle Built For Two. Or the Current Politics of The Conservative Marriage According to Ross Douthat.

That's fun.  The current political discussion on marriage is not quite so fun.  The two halves of it which came together inside my brain-box have a lot of trouble staying together and, indeed, desperately wish to get divorced.

The first half is a recent study about divorce.  I haven't been able to read the original study yet, but most write-ups regard it as fairly well done.*  What the study authors argue is this:

Demographers Jennifer Glass at the University of Texas and Philip Levchak at the University of Iowa looked county-by-county at divorces for a study to be published later this month in the American Journal of Sociology. 

Their study controlled for the effect of poverty, which is greater in the southern Bible belt and is known to contribute to higher divorce rates. Even accounting for income and the higher rate of marriage overall in southern states — an alternative to unmarried cohabitation more common in less conservative households — divorce rates in counties with higher proportions of conservative protestants remained higher.

The religiously conservative states of Alabama and Arkansas have the second and third highest divorce rates in the U.S., the authors noted. at 13 per 1000 people per year while New Jersey and Massachusetts, more liberal states, are two of the lowest at 6 and 7 per 1000 people per year. 

The strongest correlation showed that early marriage and low income among religious conservatives factor into the higher divorce rates. “Unpacking these variations, Glass and Levchak found that the high divorce rate among conservative religious groups is indeed explained in large part by the earlier ages at first marriage and first birth, and the lower educational attainment and lower incomes of conservative Protestant youth,” the authors wrote.

The study also argues that the divorce effect even works on people who live in areas with large numbers of conservative Protestants, even if they themselves don't belong to that group.  The tentative explanation the researchers offer is this:

According to their paper, it’s not just believers who are affected—simply living in an area with lots of right-wing evangelicals makes divorce more likely, because the prevailing community norms and institutions affect everyone. The more powerful Christian conservatives get, the worse the problem becomes. “One plausible interpretation of the results is that as conservative Protestant presence increases, elite conservative Protestant influence grows stronger, which results in policies and programs that do little to reduce divorce, but only increase early marriage,” write Glass and Levchak.
“One of the things that happens is that early marriage and parenthood in particular are bad times for very young women to be entering the labor force,” says Glass. “They withdraw from the labor force and withdraw from schooling to take care of their kids.” Meanwhile, she says, “it’s become very, very difficult for young men to support an entire family. Families that are formed early have a really difficult time making ends meet with the human resources they have at their disposal.”

So what do we have here?  Something that has actually been known for a while, in a fuzzier form:

The rates of divorce are considerably higher in the Republican heartland than in the Sodom and Gomorrah of the more liberal states (such as Massachusetts, the Sodom of conservative imagination).  Much of that is linked to greater poverty in the former, but some, at least, does seem to be linked to conservative Protestantism.  That it is conservative Protestants who most worry and fret over marriage makes a kind of sense, except that they blame the problems on liberals.

The second half:  Ross Douthat's recent column.  Douthat is a good example of those conservative religious people who blame divorce on liberal values.  He begins by suggesting that both sides in this political debate (the god-fearing conservatives and the Sodom folk) should make certain concessions:

Or both sides could be a bit more honest about the roots of marriage’s decline.

Honesty from conservatives would begin by acknowledging that policies championed on the right — mass incarceration in response to the post-1960s crime wave, Bain Capital-style “creative destruction” in response to Carter-era stagnation — have often made it harder for low-income men to find steady work and stay out of prison, and made women understandably wary of marrying them.

Then this honesty would continue with a concession that certain kinds of redistribution — especially if tied to wage-earning — might help make men more marriageable, families more stable, and touch off a virtuous interaction between the financial and the personal.

Right now, I think some conservatives — though not enough Republican politicians — are willing to concede these points. But I don’t see a readiness among liberals to make any concessions of their own, beyond the minimal acknowledgment that all things being equal, two parents are often better than one.

A more significant concession would be to acknowledge the ways in which liberalism itself has undercut the two-parent family — through the liberal-dominated culture industry’s permissive, reductive attitudes toward sex, and through the 1970s-era revolution in divorce and abortion law.

Bolds are mine.

The bolded first paragraph suggests to me that Douthat wants to see wage subsidies for low-earning men.  He's not spelling it out, but that's what the redistribution tied to wage earning must mean in this context.

And note that last paragraph, for the liberal-blaming.  This clashes with the findings of the Glass and Levchak study.  But it's also a hint that Douthat likes the idea of forcing marriage on people and the idea of keeping them married.  He talks about that later, when he offers various "compromises":

Many marriages, especially in the upper-middle class, were strengthened by caution and delay. But for couples with more limited resources, and more to lose from failure, no-fault divorce may have reduced the value of the institution and the sacrifices embraced on its behalf.
When liberals claim social conservatives don’t have any policy ideas for marriage promotion, then, they’re somewhat self-deceived. A sustained conservative shift on abortion policy and marriage law probably would, over the long term, increase the rate at which couples take vows and stay together, and improve the life prospects of their children.
So one hypothetical middle ground on marriage promotion might involve wage subsidies and modest limits on unilateral divorce, or a jobs program and a second-trimester abortion ban.

The idea of various abortion bans is to force women into marriages, the idea of making divorce more difficult is to keep people married, whether they wish to do that or not.  All this smells of forcing to me, and Douthat argues that the outcome is good because it is good for children to have two parents.

But here's the problem with that:  In the first half of this post about the marriage (or divorce) of the two thought types the problems of the conservative Protestant marriage culture boil down to the exact thing that Douthats dislikes:  They make divorce more likely.

Yet he wants people to be forced into that very type of marriage, one which favors getting married so early that the women haven't acquired an education which guarantees decent earnings later, one which favors the norm of early childbirth and the mother staying at home with the child or children, one which therefore results in young families with many mouths to feed and only one wage-earner.

What Douthat adds to that is the argument that people should be forced to take the stresses of that type of marriage without being able to leave it very easily because it is better for the children.  But here we enter the question whether any kind of marriage (even one that is all stress and fights, say) is better for the children than growing up in a divorced home.  Research suggests that this is not the case.

The question Douthat is not asking, really, is what type of marriages we wish to create.  That may be because he assumes that all people are pretty evil and must be made to live the way Douthat believes people should live, based on his conception of what divine rules on this are, or because he believes that in some weird sense all marriages are created equal, so the only question is how to push enough people into the marriage mold.

It's the marriage mold which matters here.  When we debate something like "marriage" we bring to the conversation our own deeper ideas what marriage might mean.  If I had to make a guess about Ross Douthat's deeper ideas in this context, I'd say that he believes in a certain kind of traditional marriage, based on heterosexuals marrying, the husband being the boss of the family, the husband earning all the money in the family and the wife doing all the child-rearing and all the household chores, and the number of children in the family being determined by either chance or by what the husband deems suitable.

That may be quite wrong.  But whenever I make that assumption about the conservative deeper ideas of marriage what conservatives say or write starts making sense within that narrow context:

Same-sex marriage is then clearly deplorable because how can we decide which of two men or two women should be bringing the bacon home and which one should be cooking it?  How can we keep child-rearing a purely female task if the parents are two men?  And who on earth is going to be the god-determined boss in such a family?

Likewise, the recent conservative statements about the government being Uncle Sugar for unmarried women or Wendy Davis' husband seen as a Sugar Daddy can best be interpreted within that narrow framework:  In the conservative worldview married women are like employees and married men are like the employers.  The employer pays for the work of the employee, and that work consists of housework and child-rearing and sex.  In return to that work, the employer funds and protects the employee and promises not to use other labor for those chores on the side, such as sex.**

If a woman is not carrying out the whole list of those tasks, then her husband (or the government) is seen as paying for nothing but sex.  Ann Coulter called Wendy Davis a kept woman, because her husband helped her to get an education.  Mike Huckabee sees the role of the government as a way to bypass the delivery of marital work to the proper employer of the married woman which is her husband.

What do you think of that interpretation?  Do note that I'm NOT saying that marriages are like that or that husbands are like that or that wives are like that or that marriage cannot be absolutely wonderful and delightful, only that a certain strain of conservative thought is based on those implicit (and economic) assumptions.

This also explains why married women in the labor force are still seen as problematic among some social or cultural conservatives.  The more time a woman spends outside the home, the less time she has for that proper labor that married women are assigned in the conservative thinking, especially child-rearing.  And a woman bringing in money is also interfering with the assigned tasks of the conservative husband which is to be the wallet for the whole family unit.  Because his role as the family CEO is based on that role, anything that threatens it is of grave concern.

OK.  Now go and read Douthat's column again.

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*This is one critique which argues for problems in the study but even its writer agrees that the main conclusions apply. The church-attendance stuff the author uses to differentiate between those young Protestants who stay married and those who do not is, by the way, trickier to use than he or she implies.  That's because the causality between divorce and church attendance is very likely to go the other way:  Young people attending church regularly who then get divorced might stop attending church regularly.  Thus, it's not at all clear that regular church attendance protects against early divorce.  --  We need time series data to test for the most likely direction of causality there.

**Adopting this approach finally let me understand why one conservative writer, Danielle Crittenden, in her book (What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman) argued that men and women make similar size sacrifices for marriage when she tosses her career plans out of the window and when he agrees not to have a mistress.

I read that book years ago and could never understand how such a wild comparison could be made.  Aren't the women, too, agreeing not to have lovers, and why is that not a sacrifice?  But within the conservative framework of marriage as an  employer/employee relationship this makes sense.

Shallow Thoughts For This Friday

1.  You know you need your eyes checked when every story about buffer zones around abortion clinics reads like it's about butter zones and when the "chivalry" that Kathryn Lopez (a conservative writer) praises Mike Huckabee for reads to me like "cavalry".  On the other hand, that's exactly how my best creative thoughts have been born, from mistakes of various types.  Mmm.

2.  On procrastination:  Here's one opinion piece about the best way to stop procrastinating in writing:  Get your hip joints replaced.  

That was a flat-falling joke, because the writer does have an interesting idea:  That the creative part of your brain (most likely not the right brain hemisphere, however)  might be awake when you are still all groggy with sleep.  If that means having to get up at six am, I'm never going to get anything done.  Some nights I'm hardly asleep by six am.

On the other hand, it's possible that my creativity is awake and doing stuff when I'm asleep.  That would explain why I work so very hard and get so very little done:  My creativity is spent on truly frightening technicolor nightmares and on those all-papers-coming-out-of-desk-drawers-while-poodles-climb-fire-ladders-and-charming-ladies-walk-by-leading-pigs-on-leashes.  Just to summarize where today's creativity was spent.

Procrastination is both a real problem and a form of self-defense.  The latter isn't appreciated enough.  If you delay making a fool out of yourself you feel better for a while longer. 

3.  You cannot really have a list of shallow thoughts with just two thoughts.  That's because humans see two things as a pair.  To have a crowd of shallowness you need three things or more.  Writing about that made my list a proper one and also helped in procrastinating.

Two Short Posts On Legal Stuff and Courts: The Munoz Case And Little Sisters of the Poor

First, and most importantly:

A Texas judge ordered life support removed from a pregnant Haltom City woman who has been kept alive at John Peter Smith Hospital against the wishes of her family.
State District Judge R. H. Wallace ordered the county-owned hospital to discontinue providing life-sustaining measures to Marlise Muñoz, 33, who has been hospitalized since just before Thanksgiving after she was stricken by a pulmonary embolism when she was 14 weeks pregnant.
The family went to court earlier today seeking to have that life support be removed after the county hospital declined to do so. Wallace ordered that life support be removed by 5 p.m. Monday.
A court document filed shortly before the hearing was set to begin states that Marlise Muñoz is 22 weeks pregnant, that she met the clinical criteria for brain death on Nov. 28.
This week, attorneys for the Muñoz family released a statement saying that medical records indicate that the fetus is “distinctly abnormal,” with lower extremities deformed, and suffers from a number of other serious health conditions including water on the brain and heart problems.

I have not written much about this case for several reasons (including the inappropriateness of forcing a public debate over  the private grief of one family, the awfulness of the idea that even dead women can be used for something, the clear prioritizing of the embryo or fetus over everything in this case, including the wishes of the widower and the wishes he reported his wife had, combined with the obvious question of whether a fetus can incubate inside a dead body for any amount of time, even after the woman was without oxygen for long enough to become brain-dead and so on).  But clearly the Texas laws need rewriting.

Second, the Little Sisters of the Poor case:

 The Supreme Court on Friday extended a temporary order from Justice Sonia Sotomayor barring the Obama administration from enforcing a part of the Affordable Care Act against an order of nuns.
The health law requires most employers to provide insurance coverage for contraception. The nuns of the Little Sisters of the Poor said the requirement is offensive to their religious beliefs.
An accommodation allowing them to opt out of the requirement — by issuing a certification to an insurance company to offer the coverage independently — also made them complicit in immoral conduct, the nuns said.
In an order Friday, the Supreme Court said that the administration must not enforce the contraceptive coverage requirement against the nuns while the case is pending before a federal appeals court. In addition, the Supreme Court said that the Little Sisters “need not use the form prescribed by the government” to qualify for an exemption.

On Dec. 31, just hours before the requirement took effect, Justice Sotomayor had temporarily blocked enforcement of that part of the law against the nuns and some affiliated groups.
According to the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which represents the nuns and other challengers to the requirement, preliminary injunctions had been granted in the lower courts in almost all of 20 similar cases. Justice Sotomayor acted after the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, in Denver, declined to issue an injunction.
The nuns, who operate nursing homes for poor people in the United States and around the world, provide health benefits to employees through a “church plan” that is exempt from federal regulations that apply to most employer-sponsored insurance, the administration said. The nuns, their health plan and the company that administers the plan will not be required to cover birth control, the administration said in urging the Supreme Court to dissolve Justice Sotomayor’s stay.
The Little Sisters “need only self-certify that they are nonprofit organizations that hold themselves out as religious and have religious objections to providing coverage for contraceptive services,” the administration said on Jan. 3 in a brief filed with the Supreme Court by Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr.
A lawyer for the nuns disagreed.
“The government demands that the Little Sisters of the Poor sign a permission slip for abortion drugs and contraceptives, or pay millions in fines,” said the lawyer, Mark L. Rienzi, of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. “The sisters believe that doing that violates their faith, and that they shouldn’t be forced to divert funds from the poor, elderly and dying people they’ve devoted their lives to serve.”

As far as I can tell, extending the stay in this case is normal, until the case is presented to the Supreme Court.  Also as far as I can tell, the case is about whether filling a form is offensive to the moral beliefs of the nuns.

The wider connections I'm thinking about are questions having to do with wars and other forms of legal governmental killing.  Those are morally offensive to many religious and non-religious people, but there is no real way of avoiding paying for those from our taxes.

Then there's the general question if it ever should matter what the religions of the Justices at the bench of the Supreme Court might be.  I don't have an answer to that question, by the way.

But  right now six of the nine Justices are Catholic and three are Jewish which makes those religious groups pretty over-represented, when viewed in terms of the population percentages.  I'm not arguing that the Justices would let their religions affect the decisions or that we should apply a religious test to the nominees to SCOTUS.  Still,  thinking about possible answers to this question is useful when many of the cases coming up concern one particular religion.

Read more here: http://www.star-telegram.com/2014/01/24/5511776/fetus-in-munoz-case-is-not-viable.html#storylink=cpy

Have You Seen My Libido? Mike Huckabee Thinks It's Out of Control.

Yup.  Huckabee thinks my libido might be out of control, perhaps out gallivanting, spending money on rubber underwear and G-strings, ogling at the bottoms of all beautiful men strolling by and getting drunk in public bars on White Russians.  Or any color Russians.  Or any other nationality.  Because of that lack of control.

That was fun.  I never realized right-wing religious politicians such as Mike Huckabee have a sense of humor.  Huckabee is a former Arkansas Governor and a former runner-up in Republican presidential candidate elections and I have followed what he says for a long time.  He never came across as a funny guy before, though he did once advocate the Biblical submission of wives to their husbands.

Anyway, this is what he has just said about the Republican war on women and free contraception:

"If the Democrats want to insult the women of America by making them believe that they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a prescription each month for birth control because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of government then so be it! Let us take that discussion all across America because women are far more than the Democrats have played them to be," Huckabee said.

This is still very funny.  Note that the social conservatives don't believe that good women have a libido.  Good women are only supposed to have sex when they want children.  Probably while closing their eyes, staying veryvery still and thinking of the Tea Party or the Fibonacci series or what to cook for him tomorrow.

In the conservative worldview, only sluts have a libido, but in any case (and at the same time!) all men have a giant libido and women have little postage stamp libidos and that's why women must be the gate-keepers in the sexual marketplace.  That's also why conservatives never try to control the male libido, or notice that the birth control women get actually does sorta benefit heterosexual men as it takes two to tango.

Well, that's not the real explanation, that "why" in my last sentence.  It's the conservative way of looking at only women's behavior when it comes to sex.

I love that Uncle Sugar reference, too!  It does so much for those who argue that there is no Republican war against women, especially when we put it into the context of the most recent assault against Wendy Davis who is running for the governor of Texas. 

Ann Coulter stated that Davis married a Sugar Daddy to put her through law schools (an old solution traditionally used in reverse by men who went to medical or law or business school while their wives worked as secretaries or nurses or teachers, though those wives never got called Sugar Mommies).  And Erick Erickson, an anti-feminist conservative, joined in:

"So Abortion Barbie had a Sugar Daddy Ken," tweeted Fox News pundit Erick Erickson, referring to Davis' famous filibuster of an anti-abortion bill in the Texas state Senate last year and to her second husband. "[Not] exactly the bio she claimed."

Women can have Uncle Sugars (the government) or Sugar Daddies (husbands).  But male politicians whose wives help them with their careers and then end up being divorced are never called Sugar Mommies.  Neither do we have any similar name for men who make a lot of money out of the government subsidies for large firms, say*.

My point is not about what Wendy Davis has done in her past life.  It's about the way conservatives view women's proper roles in life and how those views translate into criticism of uppity women in general.  That's how you get a criticism of Wendy Davis as having abandoned her children because she was not the custodial parent for a few years after her divorce or because she showed ambition.  Now gender-reverse that criticism.  It doesn't bite at all, because the conservatives don't assume men to do the hands-on care of their children and because the conservatives don't see anything wrong with male ambition.

And it is in these generalizations that the conservative war on women is best shown.
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*These are not aimed at men only, of course, but the leadership of such firms is predominantly male, and as I point out in the post, heterosexual men also benefit from the birth control their partners use.

On Abortion And Birth Control. Or Why I Am Pro-Choice.

One problem with having such an old blog as I do is that I have covered most of what I wish to say on particular topics before.  When some annual date of importance comes up I now sigh and fret, trying desperately to find something new to say on that particular topic.

This time I decided to go and see what I have in my archives.  I still like this 2007 post about the reasons why I am pro-choice:

So many different levels on which this one could be answered. There is the little girl who heard a story about her grandmother's best friend, a long time ago, a friend who aborted her pre-wedding pregnancy with some implement found on the farm, because getting pregnant before marriage made a woman into a whore and a slut and she would be ostracized for the rest of her life. Instead, she was buried in her wedding dress before the scheduled wedding date. The story was told to the little girl for a different reason, perhaps, but what she took away from it was the idea that a world that puts such pressure on women is horribly wrong. And she wondered why there was no pressure to ostracize the man. - There might be a lesson here about how feminists are created, too.

Then there is the teenager who read a book where doctors let a pregnant woman with cancer die without painkillers, because those painkillers might have hurt the fetus. And the same teenager went out to parties and realized that in a slightly different world, with those stern pro-fetus values, she herself might get raped and then made to be pregnant for nine months and to give birth, too. And she might die because of this and have no legal defense.

Fast forward to the young feminist who read lots of legal books on abortion, lots of arguments against and for, lots of impassioned pleas on both sides, scientific evidence and quasi-scientific evidence. What she saw was that some anti-choice people were sincere in their belief that a person is created at the point of conception. But she also saw that many of those who expressed this belief also liked the idea of killing people just fine, provided that they were out of the womb and that the killing was done by men in power. And there were many in that camp who really liked the idea of taking the power over fertility away from women as a group, and there were those who also liked the side-effect of removing most freedoms from women's lives by banning contraception. Kinder, Kirche und Küche people.

Closer to the present time. Add color to the film at this point. The goddess in the chrysalis stage realized the immense problems that would be created by the decision of the anti-choice crowd that persons are created at conception. Think of those Russian dolls where there is always another doll inside the one you open. Well, this is what this decision would do to women who are pregnant or able to become pregnant. We would all become containers or potential containers for Real People, and our every step would have to be monitored to defend the unborn and the yet-to-become-unborn. We would have to eat raw oats and sit with our ankles crossed while Beethoven is played in the calm room with integral signs painted on the walls. Because if we don't do these things we are guilty of endangering the Real Person. The decision how we are going to deliver a child could become one over which we can go to prison. Someone else might have to decide for us because of the Real Person inside us.

Note that this is not just about abortion. It is about all fertility, about pregnancy and about delivery. Once someone makes the decision that the embryo is at least as important as the woman with the uterus, well, we are going to build the adversarial approach between the two, and doctors, lawyers and politicians will all walk into our uteri, with little suitcases full of rulebooks.

This may sound exaggerated to you, and it is, in the sense that I've taken the anti-choice position to its logical endpoint, the point it would reach without any resistance from the rest of us. We see the beginnings of this in those court cases where women are imprisoned or restrained for using illegal drugs or for refusing the recommendations of the medical profession as to the preferred form of giving birth. These decisions are based on the adversarial assumption and they exist to protect the fetus, not the woman. She is seen as a criminal, not someone who needs help herself or perhaps better information. That many of these cases fly below our radar screen is because the women involved are poor and/or illegal drug-users and often belong to a racial or ethnic minority. But the same principles would one day be applied to a white woman who doesn't want to undergo a Caesarian section. Our race or our class would not save us from this destiny.

In short, I think that most of this debate is about the control of fertility, about the control of the size and the makeup of the next generation, and different women face different types of pressure in this. Some women, white ones in this country, are urged to have more children. Other women, minorities in this country, are urged to have fewer or at different times in their lives. But all women will see their own say over their lives reduced by the anti-choice forces should they ever come to power.

Being pro-choice is not just being pro-abortion if the woman wants it. It is also treating a pregnant woman as a full human being and not letting her body or her decision-making be possessed by those she doesn't want to allow in. This does not mean that no other considerations ever prevail, but the principle of the woman's full personhood must not be violated. So I think.

I chose to treat this assigned essay question for today's anniversary of Roe v. Wade from a personal angle. But on most days I don't think about it this way. I see the larger and larger contexts in which all this would play out in our lives. Practically all levels of equality of the sexes require that women can control their own fertility. If that is taken away from us we can never be truly equal in anything else.

And More Wifely Voluntary Submission. Representative Steve Pearce Speaks.

Rep. Steve Pearce (R-NM) (an American politician of one conservative flavor) tells in his memoir that wives should voluntarily submit to their husbands.  Wives are not inferior, nosir!  They are just supposed to behave as they are.

The reasons have to do with Mr. Pearce's religion, though he puts a fun tilt on that:

Rep. Steve Pearce (R-NM) believes that although a wife is supposed to "voluntarily submit" to her husband, she is not inferior to him, according to the Washington Post.
"The wife is to voluntarily submit, just as the husband is to lovingly lead and sacrifice," Pearce wrote in a December memoir "Just Fly The Plane, Stupid!" that cites the Bible. "The husband's part is to show up during the times of deep stress, take the leadership role and be accountable for the outcome, blaming no one else."
Pearce also writes that while the wife is not inferior, she must nevertheless be obedient to her husband.

The tilt is that "showing up during the times of deep stress."  Where is he hiding at other times and how do we define times of deep stress?

This begins to sound a bit like the story I was once told by an anti-feminist guy on the net that the deal about wifely submission is this:  It's not much to ask that wives submit when husbands are ready to give their lives for their wives!

Sounds like a very one-sided bargain for most people because such extreme events where a husband should be willing to give his life while protecting his wife are pretty uncommon (luckily) for most of us, and because if they happen and the husband fails to die for the wife, well, how do you then undo the contract that has been running for years?

Duh.  I'm stupid to address any of that with sophism.  It's about power, not about logic, in any case.  But do note that if we followed Mr. Pearce's rule of wifely submission no married woman with a living husband could ever truly take a leadership role in the society.  Because the real power would be in the hands of her husband.  How could we vote for a female married politician if it's really her husband we are voting for?  And going backwards in history, how could married women have credit cards and bank accounts in their own names if it's really their husbands who control everything they do?

To his credit, Mr. Pearce also argues that husbands shouldn't exploit all this power they are given over their wives.  But it's hard to see what actual restraints his religious beliefs would put on husbands who do just that.  After all, the wives are supposed to be obedient.  If the husband becomes a bully or an abuser, what is the obedient wife to do?  Relinquish her obedience?  Who decides when she can do that, because clearly she cannot make the decision.

The model Mr. Pearce advocates is a popular religious model, both in right-wing Christianity and in much of Islam.  It crops up in other religions, too. It's also a very dangerous model because power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Not to mention the fact that such hierarchical marriages sound extremely suffocating and confining, even for the supposed leaders if they take their responsibilities seriously.

But the real reason I write about these opinions (not terribly common among the general population in the US or in the legal systems of any country today) is that the requirement of absolute and permanent voluntary submission by the wives at home is incompatible with general gender equality.

As a complete aside, isn't Mr. Pearce's argument interesting when set in the wider conservative talk topic of the day which is the importance of marriage in combating poverty?  We should ask more often what conservatives mean by traditional marriage, turn some stones over to see what might be crawling under them.  

Speed Blogging, 1/21/2014. On Poultry Inspections, Guns And How Social Media May Affect Our Thinking

Contents:  Gun violence, sexual violence


1.  What could possibly go wrong by letting workers of the factory, rather than outside inspectors,  be in charge of more poultry inspections against salmonella?  It's a win-win!  Cheaper chickens in every pot, more money for the firms and lower taxes!

When salmonella next strikes, the politicians who fix the problem could get accolades and bouquets of roses for being decisive and caring.

I was unable to find more about this proposal, but it's a good teaching example of an odd political failing when it comes to prevention.  Politicians tend not to get punished for removing proper prevention, but they can get rewarded for fixing the problems their own lack of prevention created.  Say a politician spends money on making traffic intersections safer and prevents a lot of fatal accidents because of that.  In the next election cycle she or he may not get re-elected because of all that money spent on preventing deaths.  The prevented deaths are invisible, the money expenditure is not.

2.  Meanwhile, on educational institutions and guns:

 One person was shot to death on the campus of Indiana's Purdue University on Tuesday, and a male suspect was in custody, authorities said.
 
...

The frequency of shootings at schools and universities in the United States is fueling the national debate over gun control. On Monday night, a student was shot and critically wounded outside an athletic center at Widener University in Chester, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia.
Last week alone, two students were shot at a high school in Philadelphia, another was shot at a high school in Albany, New York, and two students were shot at a middle school in New Mexico.
Gun ownership laws in the United States have come under intense scrutiny since December 2012, when 20 young children and six educators were shot dead by a long gunman at Sandy Hook elementary school in Connecticut.

In other gun news for just the last few months, we have toddlers killing themselves or other toddlers with guns and we have cases like this one, as well as the Renisha McBride case and so on and so on.

3. This is an interesting piece about the online use of the word "rape" and the difficulties in studying the meaning and prevalence of rape threats, say.  A snippet worth thinking about:

This is changing how we talk to one another. To have the attention of anyone at all, people are increasingly forced to push their communications – whether text or images – out of any shadow of subtlety. It needs to be the brightest star in a sky of very bright stars and busy astronomers with short attention spans. For Oxford neurologist Susan Greenfield, this is a world of 'yuck and wow'. She fears that it could be literally re-wiring our brains. Her warning was itself of course duly turned into a sort of meme, 'yakawow'. You can buy the t-shirt.

The use of rape on Twitter has to at least partly slot into this wider process where taboos – including rape - are being ruthlessly desensitised online. This is creating a more permissive cultural backdrop against which rape threats are made. The threat itself however remains undiminished in either its gravity or the harm it can do to the recipient. The worst-case scenario is that, desensitised to the word, we become desensitised to the act.

I guess the question I have about this is the alternative theory:  That the use of desensitizing language may always have been common among certain sub-groups or within certain conversations, such as in locker-rooms or bars, and that what we see on Twitter, say, is simply seeing that happen.

That's not necessarily the theory I support.  I suspect that the social media do have some impact on our ability to view the other participants as fully human, partly, because we are suddenly able to discuss things with strangers with whom we have no shared history, and partly, because talking to a screen makes it easier to forget that real people hide behind it.

Still, the possibility that our brains are being affected by all this is certainly worth some research.

 

Two Stories About Gender Politics

First Story:   Misogyny


The UK Telegraph posted an opinion column on misogyny in 2013.  One could criticize it because of the great difficulties of measuring misogyny on a global level or changes in it or whether horrible gang rapes in India, the rising gender gap in wages in the UK or the hostility shown towards women on the Internet can even be made commensurate on some easily interpreted scale.

But it IS an opinion piece, and it DOES point out that anyone who is a woman can face that thing JUST because she is a woman and for no other reason.  "That thing" could be misogyny, as in hatred of women, or perhaps just mild contempt towards women or perhaps the objectification of women as mere providers of sexual and reproductive services or as creatures who are supposed to be confined to the homes and not seen or heard outside it.  But whatever it is, it is real, among some fraction of people, both men and women, though probably more commonly among men.  And whatever it is, there is an element of ranking in it, and the ranking is based on one's gender, nothing else.

Here's where the fun enters the picture:  Guess what the most common topic of conversation in the comments attached to the piece are?  If you guessed misandry (the hatred of men) you get a very large box of chocolate truffles and a position as one of my priests or priestesses.  That's because the comments seem to have been astroturfed by certain groups of MRAs.

And yes, I know I shouldn't read comments to any articles about feminism or misogyny etc.  Is there a twelve-step support group for comment readers?

We also need a twelve-step group for those who don't understand that discussing one topic doesn't mean that the opposite topic should also be discussed (or that it is obviously, and without evidence, an equally large or larger concern) or that such an omission is tantamount to misandry.  We need a twelve-step programs to teach people about why how often something happens does matter.  We need to teach people that omitting all the data which doesn't support your position while presenting anecdotal evidence to support it is not the proper way to generalize about something.  And we need to find a way for me to ultimately accept that none of this is likely to happen, because the debate is about power, not about facts.   Sigh.


Second Story:  The Emasculation of Men

And power is the proper framework for understanding why Fox News runs a script saying "The Wussification of Men" while interviewing an Australian writer who has come out with the book about the death of manly men and what it means.*   :

Australian author, Nick Adams was the guest for this segment and he basically said that feminism (and for some reason, the government) is purposely emasculating men. And apparently, this isn’t happening in just the United States!

Even in Australia, we’ve gone from wrestling with crocodiles to wrestling with lattes.

Presumably the number one hobby of all Australian men once was wrestling crocodiles.

But more importantly, Nick Adams believes that what being a man means is stuff like wrestling crocodiles and  although he also believes that men are like that in an innate sense, the society still manages to turn them into wussies!  Feminists are all-powerful!  Feminists can even overpower the "natural" definition of manliness.   That is pretty illogical.  Either the "natural" definition of manliness is not natural at all or what Adams talks about is rubbish.  Well, both really. 

But there's more!  Is feminism a threat to national security?  Adams:

Absolutely, without a doubt. I think it has wide-ranging implications. Weeps and wussies deliver mediocrity. And men win. And what America’s always been about is winning. So I think it’s pivotal to the health of the country.

Now put that in your pipe and smoke it!  It's men who win, not weeps and wussies, and weeps and wussies are men which make Nick Adams think about those other kinds of humans, women.   Who naturally should be weeps and wussies.

And even more:  The other guy in the video asks if all this is about "whitewashing" the differences between genders and about trying to make everyone be neutral!  Let's return to those innate sex differences.  Except then the same guy asks how do we teach boys to be boys and girls to be girls to fight this wussification tendency.  So we are right back in that same confused thinking where manly men and wussy women are innate categories but we have to worry about how to create them  in child-rearing.

I could do a proper analysis of all this but it's not worth it, because the story is not about facts.  It's about who is allowed to be on top in the societal power ladders, applied to the question of gender.  And that Fox News has this story is just another arrow in their quiver in the war against women.  Because whatever evil things one might wish to assign to feminism, it's not feminists who attack men talking football or who attack hunters or who insist on banning crocodile wrestling.
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*And the reference to doing the dishes at the beginning of this section is very illuminating, because it implies that manly men don't have to care about doing the dishes.  This is intended as humor, but it's inserted for a reason.  If we take it as part of the whole message, then we are told that men are innately unable to care about doing the dishes, whereas women somehow are assumed to be the reverse.  

On Martin Luther King Day 2014

An aspect worth learning about is Martin Luther King's economic arguments.  Here's one article which discusses them:

Today, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is most often remembered as a crusader for racial equality, not economic justice. But those struggles were inextricably intertwined for the civil rights leader, whose 85th birthday is being honored this weekend. Even during his upbringing, as he wrote in 1958 [PDF], he knew “that the inseparable twin of racial injustice was economic injustice.”

He also referred to global economic inequalities in at least this speech.  When I follow various discussions about racism, white privilege and so on,  I often crave more attention on the economic infrastructures and how to fix them. 

Changing the way US schools are funded is not a glittery and exciting topic, but it would go a long way towards making sure that all children, whatever their race, ethnicity and family income, would get to start the marathons of life at the same starting line.  I want to see school funding detached from local property taxes, because those create an instant feedback loop from poor areas to poor schools (and from wealthy areas to wealthy schools).  Indeed, I'd like to see positive discrimination for poor schools:  More teacher pay, more computers, more after-school activities, to compensate for the problems poor families face.  And programs like Head Start should be supported, not attacked.  If a particular program doesn't work, fix it, don't demolish it.

Changing the way the labor markets function, putting more effort into guaranteeing living wages, annual vacations, parental leaves, affordable daycare and so on, would do a lot to reduce the daily struggles of the poor, and because a larger percentage of blacks are poor, this would serve to reduce the racial differences, too*. 

Accepting that anti-discrimination programs are needed, rather than fighting them, would make the systems of getting jobs and keeping them fairer.  Unionization matters.  That unions are dying in the US means that the relative power of the employers is increasing.   The conservative argument that workers or job applicants can just negotiate their individual deals with the firms doesn't even work for the more educated and powerful workers, and it certainly doesn't work for a janitor or a supermarket cashier.  We need organized activity on the worker side of the labor markets.  We actually need that on the global level, given that large firms are now globalized.

Why does this matter for racial and ethnic differences and racism?  Because it partially addresses the very infrastructure which also contributes to different outcomes by race.  As long as the different income classes show different percentages of people from various races/ethnic groups, the economic problems remain intertwined with the racial problems.  Addressing the economic problems directly is a very important part of the wider dream Martin Luther King had.
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*This is because to some extent the wealthier individuals and families can negotiate some of these benefits.  Low-income workers cannot. 

On Studies: On Black Fathers Doing Well And On The Importance Of Women Keeping Their Names When Marrying

 On Fathering By Race And Ethnicity

This study (pdf) based on interviews about parenting is a much-needed corrective to those ideas that the black families are in crisis because of the absent fathers.  Though it is true that a larger percentage of black fathers do not live in the same household with their children, this does not mean that black fathers within the groups "lives with their children" or "does not live with their children" do worse than white fathers or Latino fathers etc.  Indeed, they do  better or equally well*, as the table below describes**:

 

 The statistically significant differences in the overall study, when it comes to gender and ethnicity, are not between black fathers and fathers of other racial or ethnic groups, but most likely to be found between Latino fathers and fathers of other ethnic groups.  I think this suggests that cultural differences about gender roles matter when it comes to how parenting chores are shared, which is great news because we can affect cultural ideas and they are moving towards shared parenting by mothers and fathers.

As an aside, the questions in this study also remind us how parenting is defined differently for fathers and mothers.  I doubt any study about  mothers would assume that eating meals with their children is a measure of parenting or involvement with their children.  It sounds like a fairly minimal measure of being present.  Having the responses to all the same questions by mothers (and by the rage, ethnicity, age and education etc. of them) would have been useful, too.


On The Meaning Of Women Keeping Their Name When Marrying

ADDED 1/19/2014:  See the correction at the top of Amanda's post.  The Dutch study she writes about has been retracted as fraudulent.  Note that this does NOT tell us anything about possible results from other such studies.  It just means that the particular study was retracted.  What I say about things such studies should take into account below still applies, however. 

Amanda writes about studies which find that women who keep their birth names when marrying are viewed differently than those who take their husband's last name.  A Dutch study found:

A woman who took her partner’s name … was judged as more caring, more dependent, less intelligent, more emotional, less competent, and less ambitious in comparison with a woman who kept her own name. A woman with her own name, on the other hand, was judged as less caring, more independent, more ambitious, more intelligent, and more competent. 

I haven't gone backwards in the link chain to the original studies, sorry.  Too much work, too little goddess energy, so I can't say much about the differences between countries in the percentage of women who keep their names.  That percentage matters greatly, because if few women keep their birth names at marriage, then the signal "I keep my name" tends to be mostly about the stereotypes of what it means when a women doesn't do the usual and traditional thing of taking her husband's name.  If more women choose the option of keeping the birth name, the stereotype gets misty or evaporates.  I mention all this because it matters when we apply, say, Dutch data, to the US setting or the setting in some country where keeping birth names is very common.

This links to the possibility that women who keep their birth names indeed might be more ambitious and independent etc. than those who do not, and that this is what drives the difference in perceptions, at least in countries where keeping one's birth name is rare.

Amanda on that possibility:

The difference in perception matters on an individual level, as the Dutch researchers found that name-keepers are more likely to be hired for jobs and are hired at higher salaries. Much higher salaries, in fact, making nearly $500 a month more.

The snag, when it comes to the idea that keeping one's birth name could therefore result in higher earnings, is that this might not be the case if the initial group of women who keep their birth names indeed are more ambitious and more focused on getting promoted or hired.  In other words, the causality might not run from "keeping one's name" to "higher earnings" but  from "being career focused" to both "keeping one's name" and "higher earnings."

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*Not all the differences between the numbers given for black, white and Latino fathers are statistically significant, so not all the differences can be ranked.
**I didn't find this table in the pdf for the study summary.  It may have been created by someone else from the study data or it may be available in some more detailed manuscript of the study.  But as far as I can tell the numbers do come from the study, only they ignore the data on fathers who did these things less often than daily.

Friday Blogging Thoughts

1.  I have a new ergonomic mouse!  That, my friends, means a little less pain and suffering in this highly paid avocation.

2.  I didn't write the posts today my muse was telling me to write (he really knows best).  Now I feel disgruntled.  Disgruntled is a scrumptious term for the way I often feel while wading through the primeval muck parts of the cyberspace.  Try it in your mouth (not the muck, the word) and see if you agree. 

Exigent is a brand new member of my adopted language family, as in "the exigent demands of my muse went unheeded."  This turned them into  nagging, as in a common interpretation of why someone nags.  It's often just not being listened to.  Sorry, muse.  But the topics will keep.

3.  This is a wonderful accompaniment to almost anything:  Why Don't You Do Right, sung by Lil Green in 1941, the original version of the song:






More about the singer, Lil Green here.  She died far too young.

Short Posts, 1/17/2014: Plastic Surgery Apps For Children, Whooping Cough And What Some Texas Charter Schools Teach.

1.  What's the app that nine-year-old children (girls?) really, really might need?  The wizards at Apple and Google thought that it might be an app where the child can play being a plastic surgeon.  The patient, to be operated on, is either Barbie or Barbara, depending on the app, and the surgery is to make the patient thinner or cuter!

Both the apps have already been withdrawn due to protests.  But as this article points out, that they were ever created tells us something unsavory about the world we live in:  You are never too young to start learning about the importance of being thin and cute.  For people named Barbie or Barbara.

2. Whooping cough is back.  In some parts of the US, adults likely to be in contact with infants (who are too young to get the vaccination themselves) are told to get booster shots against whooping cough (pertussis).

This was not the case in the fairly recent past, because childhood vaccinations against this infectious disease  were almost universal.  When most children are vaccinated, the few who cannot get vaccinated for health reasons or whose parents are opposed to the idea of vaccinations can avoid the disease through herd immunity:

Herd immunity (or community immunity) describes a form of immunity that occurs when the vaccination of a significant portion of a population (or herd) provides a measure of protection for individuals who have not developed immunity.^[1] Herd immunity theory proposes that, in contagious diseases that are transmitted from individual to individual, chains of infection are likely to be disrupted when large numbers of a population are immune or less susceptible to the disease. The greater the proportion of individuals who are resistant, the smaller the probability that a susceptible individual will come into contact with an infectious individual.

Herd immunity stops working when those who don't get vaccinated become too large a proportion of the total population.  This is what seems to be happening in the US:  Whooping cough is back.  This is not good:

Whooping cough, also known as pertussis, is a highly contagious bacterial disease that attacks the respiratory system. Last year, the United States had the highest number of whooping cough cases since 1955, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. During 2012, the CDC received reports of 48,000 cases and 18 deaths, with most of the deaths occurring in infants.

Note that a (private) decision not to have a child vaccinated has different consequences depending on how many others nearby make the same private decision.  If those others are few, the odds are that the children who didn't get the shots will do just fine.  If, however, those others are many, the disease will be back and some non-vaccinated individuals will die of it. Including, in this case, infants too young to get the shots.

Put into economic terms, some of the benefits from getting vaccinated or from having one's child vaccinated fall on the wider community as an increase in herd immunity, but these benefits do not usually enter the private calculations individuals and parents make.  Because those external benefits are ignored, the number of children vaccinated against whooping cough, say, is too low from the overall social point of view. 

Was that boring enough for you?  The deeper economic point is that vaccination is an example of an act where the costs fall on the individual or family getting vaccinated, including any negative-side-effects the vaccination causes or is believed to cause, whereas some of the benefits fall outside that private sphere.  This means that the negative aspects of vaccination get more weight in the decision-making than the positive aspects.

3.  Some charter school programs in Texas, funded from public sources, seem to teach the students interesting versions of biology and history.  For example:

On the feminist movement, Founders Classical Academy students are taught that feminism “created an entirely new class of females who lacked male financial support and who had to turn to the state as a surrogate husband.”

You can add that to the list of all the evil deeds attributable to feminism (a very long list which includes the total destruction of Western civilization).  Isn't it interesting, by the way, how the use of the terms "females" and "males" often signals a manosphere approach to a gender topic.  What's wrong with using "women" and "men?"

More seriously, feminism has not been powerful enough to be the culprit in so much evil, and that above quote makes no sense if we take it as written.  The author probably means financial support for children.  Women, on their own, and without any children, very rarely qualify as surrogate wives of the state.  That's as often as men in the same situation would qualify as surrogate husbands of the state. 

The distinction may sound trivial but it's one that is often ignored in certain types of writing about gender, where the assumption seems to be that children are created through parthenogenesis and that child maintenance payments or welfare payments for children are to be counted as money women get.  Because of that parthenogenesis thingy and because custodial parents are more often mothers than fathers.









  


 

What The Twitter Talks About Today: The Foot And Leg Of A Giant Hillary Clinton on the Cover of Time Magazine.

The use of Twitter comments as a basis for a column or a post is new.  I am not a fan of it, because writing about people's opinions on something on Twitter is a) writing about those opinions as news, not writing about whatever the opinions are attached to, and b) there is often no way to judge whether the opinions picked for closer analysis are in some ways representative, the oddest, the most common on Twitter and so on.  -- Note that "representative" and "most common on Twitter" are not the same thing if by "representative" we mean what most people within some group in the real world think about some topic.  That's because the data on who is on Twitter, who is noticed on Twitter, who speaks for what group on Twitter, all of those are undefined, and also because what is noticed depends on whom the writers are following in the first place.

After that stern paragraph, what my Twitter feed  today talks about is the new Time magazine cover of Hillary Clinton, this one:

We know that the pant-covered leg and the foot in a heeled pump is supposed to represent Hillary Clinton, because of the attached text.  The woman in the picture is a giant, walking out of the picture, while a tiny man clad in a suit is clinging on to her heel, clearly distressed and uncomfortable.

It's a fascinating picture, telling us lots and lots and lots about the American political culture: 

Here's a country which has never had a woman president.  Here's a country which, right now, has one credible candidate for that path-breaking role.  She has lots of baggage, she is vastly hated and vastly admired, she is regarded as both an exception from all the rules and a general code for "uppity women" or "women oppressed in politics" or "white upper class women ruling this world" or "the power of nepotism".  She is both nothing (clawed her way to power on the pant leg of her husband) and everything (the one realistic chance to get a female president, the first blast of the trumpet for (not against, but provoking that "against") the monstrous regimen of women).

Clever, indeed, that picture!  Because what it describes is both correct and outrageously incorrect:  Hillary Clinton is a powerful candidate, yes, and especially powerful in the imagination of American conservatives.  But that's not really the whole (or even the main) message of the cover.  For that a photo of Clinton herself would have sufficed.

No.  That's a general picture of uppity women shod in stiletto shoes (the sexual feminine power) while also appropriating the power suit of men (the traditional male dominance), grown larger than life while the poor tiny guy tries to hold on.  It's a picture about the misogynists' world, the world where people of Hillary Clinton's gender are the ones in power, the world where giant women rule everything, where men are reduced to miniatures desperately hanging on.

All this is quite wonderful.  The picture tells us so much about how gender stereotypes are created, groomed and disseminated.  Why that works is because of the tendency to view women in politics as general representatives of some group, not as individuals.  That, in turn, depends on the relative rarity of powerful women. 

Doesn't that make your head hurt?

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As an aside, click-bait covers of this type about women are not at all uncommon among the US magazines.  Here are a few earlier examples: