Connect The Dots: Matt Lauer Interviews General Motors CEO Mary Barra. Morocco Prime Minister Bemoans Working Women.

The horrors of employed mothers!

In Morocco,  Prime Minister Abdelilah Benkirane has spoken about the deep disaster that working women have caused in his country.  He compares women safely inside the home to lanterns or chandeliers. If the lantern walks out of the home, the home will be in darkness.

He then continues:

...by complaining that the “sacred status God gave” to mothers who stay at home was being disrespected. “We will continue to defend our position against this modernity that is trying to eliminate family in our lives by reversing the roles of men and women,” he said.

There's an "I'm-Not-A-Chandelier" response to his comments in the social media.

So it goes.  What I like about Benkirane's statement is the open admission that he fears a role reversal.  How horrible it would be to have him viewed as a chandelier!  How horrible it would be if he wasn't allowed to go out or participate in politics!

I planned to write about his views as one stage in the process of greater gender equality, perhaps comparing it to the fears some Americans had that the suffrage of women would result in apron-clad-men having to stay at home and care for the children while the women went out, dressed for business and smoking cigars.  That was based on an old anti-suffrage poster.

Luckily, I didn't have to go quite that far back in the US history, because we heard from Matt Lauer so very recently.  His interview with the CEO of General Motors Mary Barra contained several daring questions about the true meaning of womanhood and motherhood:

Conservative Writers on Campus Rape

Remember that George Will column about the coveted nature of being a victim of a sexual assault on US college campuses?  I wrote about it earlier.  The column brought poor George some trouble, partly because of the illogical and furious voices on the net.  Or so he thinks.  The St. Louis Post-Dispatch also dropped his column after the controversy.

What's so terrible about suggesting that being raped is a coveted status, Will appears to ask us.  It's a legitimate intellectual position to take, to argue that sexual assaults can be just bad sex, bad choices by the victim. 

Perhaps he should ask that question of those victims or survivors who spend years, decades even, in therapy, who try to bind together the frayed bits of their lives, who desperately try to trust people again, who strive for healthy sexuality and fail, over and over again.  Who are afraid to go out, for instance.  Those sufferers are not all women, either.

My apologies for that paragraph.  Will's column didn't have paragraphs of that sort, and their absence was part of the problem.  If you are going to write about the "nonexistent" sexual assaults, also write about the "existent" ones,  unless you are willing to hear from the sufferers of those, to correct your oversight.

This whole topic lures odd stuff out of the woodwork.  For instance, this one:

A George Will column about sexual assault, which received lots of criticism and caused one newspaper to drop the longtime syndicated conservative columnist, had all male editors, the Washington Post's Erik Wemple reported on Friday.
“On that day, there were three males, if that is important to you,” Alan Shearer, CEO and editorial director of Washington Post News Media Services, which is the company that syndicates Will's columns, told Wemple in response to a question about whether any women had reviewed the column.

Is it important to you?  And if it is, what do we learn from that?  I'm not sure.  Are we to assume that male editors couldn't identify with being a victim of a sexual assault but would identify with, say, being falsely accused of one when sex turns out less than wonderful? 

What are the statistical odds of a man being either the victim of a sexual assault or of being falsely accused of one?  My guess is that the former group is larger than the latter group, but a group of three editors would be unlikely to have anyone from either group, given the overall statistics. So are we to think that men, as a class, cannot identify with the victims of sexual assaults but women, as a class, can?

That may be the case.   When I call these arguments odd I don't mean that they wouldn't have actual content or that they wouldn't be worth investigating.  At the same time, there's a sense of war fronts being set up in a certain way, with conservative writers worrying about the rights of college students who are accused of sexual assault to due process and liberal or progressive writers worrying about the same rights for college students who allege that they are raped or sexually assaulted.  If you omit gender references, that's what you get.

But you can't really omit gender in this conversation.  The conservative writers quickly fall back to "innate" positions where the women are supposed to be the gate-keepers, where they are supposed to be modest and to cross their legs, where they are not supposed to get inebriated, and where nobody explicitly negotiates sex, unless it's for money. 

None of that has saved India from a wave of publicized gang rapes or killings, by the way, and neither has the idea of "implicit consent" worked anywhere where "consent" can be interpreted as being out in the streets without a chaperone or having a short skirt or whatever other cultural rules are being used to define "consent" from one extreme angle.

Is there anything at all useful in these conservative writings about sexual assault?  Perhaps what I have revealed above?  That the debate is about where to draw the line which defines that we have moved from sex to sexual assault, and that different people have very different ideas about where that line should be drawn.  Remember the legitimate rape arguments?

Still, it would be a great idea to create a short question which everyone can use about sex, a question which isn't too clinical or too weird, one which can be answered in the affirmative by anyone who wants to have sex with the one popping the question, with full understanding of what it is one has agreed to.  We don't have that in our cultures, and we need that.



 

Anna Katherine Green. The Mother of the American Detective Novel.

She wasn't the father of the American detective novel, but her first novel, the Leavenworth Case (1878), was one of the first detective novels ever written*.  One site describes the book's  importance as follows:

That device has, of course, been used time and time again in mysteries, and for this and other reasons, it is sometimes tempting to fault The Leavenworth Case as a clichéd work…until one realizes that this is the book that established the situations and lines that would later become clichés (for instance, when asked whom he suspects of the murder, Gryce cryptically replies: “Every one and nobody”).

Arthur Conan Doyle and Wilkie Collins admired her work, and Agatha Christie specifically mentioned her as a role model.

I'm writing about her because I read quite a bit of her work over the weekend.  Her style is Victorian florid, with upper class young women depicted as virginal frail flowers, wilting in the wind, petals dropping off if the woman forgets to wear a hat and so on.  It may be that writing style which has kept Green in the shadows**.  And the books I read have plenty of the kind of sexism and classism etc. which grates on the modern reader.

But Green was born in 1846, and for a woman to write in those days she  had to write the way Green did, at least in the sense that the female characters had to comply with the then-common gender norms.  A lot of fainting, a lot of trembling, and those would excuse her clever plot schemes.  She can also create realistic characters when her pen describes older men or older women or charladies and others of lower class.  Then she is both funny and perspicacious.

I wasn't familiar with Green's writings before.  Perhaps you are, if you like detective novels.  But it was pretty exciting to meet and spot the prototypes of Miss Marple, the basic plot of the Pale Horse and several other plot devices later writers have used.  As that first quote pointed out, her work seems full of cliches until you realize that she created many of the ideas which now look old hat to us.

Why was I excited about all that?  Because it's always nice to find how the magic trick was done, where, say, Agatha Christie and others got their basic ideas and how they built on those, and because it's nice to slot some of the missing puzzle pieces into the history of the detective novel.  Anna Katherine Green certainly belongs there and is a major piece in the overall puzzle.



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*She probably wasn't the very first woman to publish a detective novel in the US, so in that sense she wasn't the mother, either.  Stepmother?
**On the other hand, the fainting and trembling women are not exactly uncommon in the books written by Victorian men and neither is the florid language.

Fairness And Other Nonsense in the Gospels

I don't think Erick Erickson is a Viking, despite the name.  He's a conservative pundit who recently wrote about Christianity and the "gay mafia" (his term), the point being that Erick's  god will smite (smite!) gays and lesbians and orders true believers to disapprove of same-sex love.  That particular god also approves of the stoning of adulterers and otherwise matches the ancient models of the gods of thunder. 

Because humans interpret and define divinity on the basis of their own understanding, warlike cultures get war gods and so on.  The views of divinity change over time.  That's why the god in the Bible appears to have multiple personalities.  Only some of those, for example, want to oppress women a lot.  Jesus doesn't have much to say about the importance of keeping women down or about the perfidy of gayness.



Which brings me to the quote from Erick, the son of Erick, which I find most illuminating:

When preachers give up that prophetical role and focus only on the pastoral, we get people claiming the gospel is about fairness and other nonsense.

I'm for fairness and other nonsense myself.  But it's certainly true that any religion with staying power will be fuzzy and muddled enough (and even more so after a lot of interpretations) that almost anyone can find something in it to match their desires about how the divinity should be.  Thus we get the smiting god, the god who drinks blood, the god who chases the traders out of the temple, the god who defends the prostitute, the jealous god, the grieving god, the loving god, even the fairness-and-other-nonsense god.

And if your particular variety isn't catered for, you can always start a new sect.  For instance, one which tells that rich people are rich because god wants them to be rich, or one which tells you that you can have as many wives as you wish.

Religions also have wonderful aspects, great messages and the ability to help those who suffer.  At the same time, humans interpret presumed divine words (or their ideas of those) pretty poorly, on the whole.  We are very clever at stressing the bits we like and ignoring the bits we don't like.  Those who support literal readings of holy books are not much bothered by the fact that they talk about aspects of cultures which existed centuries ago and sometimes refer to very specific historic events or by the fact that literal readings are ultimately not feasible, because of both the internal inconsistencies they create and because of the problems of interpreting the meanings of ancient languages today.

What are you going to nail your view of life to?  That might be the ultimate question which religions try to answer, but as the case of Erick Erickson demonstrates, the answer depends on the wielder of the hammer.

Stephanie Kwolek, RIP

Stephanie Kwolek died two days ago at the age of ninety.  She was the inventor of Kevlar and the fourth woman to be added to the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Added later:  More about her in this NYT article which also mentions the lack of promotions etc.

Speed-Blogging 6/19/14: Straw-Feminism, American Apparel, Scott Walker Etc.

Short posts, because I didn't get enough sleep for long posts.   Here they are:



Straw-feminism on Twitter:  Anti-feminist trolls pretending to be feminists create hashtags such as these last week:

Anonymous image board 4chan has a section called /pol/. Sometime around Thursday or Friday of last week, users on /pol/ decided to try and get the hashtag #EndFathersDay trending on Twitter. Users at the time compared it to similar fake activism tags like #WhitesCantBeRaped, which, as a quick search on Twitter reveals, appears to have been a failed prank attempted last week.

More about this form of trolling  here.   I have no idea what motivate these particular examples of trolling, though I'm pretty sure that misogynists would participate eagerly.  Others might just like to break things or stir the pot because pranks make them feel powerful.

Speaking of trolls, the founder of American Apparel, Dov Charney, is the reason behind the porn approach the firm uses in advertising of women's clothes. I've wondered about those ads, because the intended buyers are women.  Are women to be self-sexual?  Aroused by what Dov is aroused by?  Who knows.

In Japan, something a bit sexist happened in politics.  That's not uncommon in several countries, by the way, the United Kingdom being famous for sexist gestures in the House of Commons when female members give speeches.  Men describe boob shapes in air and so on.

What's interesting about the UK use of political aggression is that it's not about what is being said but about who is saying it, and the desired results are probably silent or (even better!) absent women in the corridors of power.  It's that generalizing aspect of the aggression which makes it something to write about.

Finally, there are rumors about possible trouble for Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.   Those who have read me before know that I see him as a Ringwraith from Tolkien's Lord of the Ring, obeying blindly the commands of a central conservative think tank.  Some background for the case can be found here, and the most recent take here.  This is a general article about the history of Walker's climb to power and how it relates to race.



  

Today's Research Granola: On Beefy Facial Features, Women's Odds of Becoming Principal Investigators in STEM Fields Etc.

1.  Here's a fun study summary for you about the reason why our male ancestors had such very strong jaws that nobody ever would have wanted to hit them in the jaw while, say, boxing:

A new theory suggests that our male ancestors evolved beefy facial features as a defence against fist fights.
The bones most commonly broken in human punch-ups also gained the most strength in early "hominin" evolution.
They are also the bones that show most divergence between males and females.

Don't worry about that seeming illogicality of both arguing that beefy facial features evolved as a defense against fist fights AND that the bones most commonly broken in human punch-ups are those same strengthened ones.  This is because the argument is not about today's humans but about early hominins.  Human males today no longer have that "protective buttressing," at least to the same extent.  According to the study authors, this is because it's no longer needed, probably because fist fights are something from ancient history.

I have nothing against their hypothesis, except that it's impossible to test.  For example, we have no way of knowing if ancient hominins engaged in fist fights or if they fought by using some other tools.  But I really wonder about this argument:

Today's Deep Echidne Thoughts: Inadvertent Meat-Eating, Tribalism And Window-Washing

And not so deep ones.

First, if a mosquito commits suicide in my cold coffee by this computer and I drink the coffee (because I like cold coffee but not ice coffee so I let it go cold), am I no longer a vegetarian?  How can I atone?  ---  Asking theoretically, of course.

Second, what can we do about tribalism?  The soccer games a lot of you are watching are about tribalism, the US gundamentalist ammosexual movement* is about tribalism, what is happening in the death fields of the Middle East is also largely about tribalism.  About who is in "our" group and who is not.

Tribalism in sports is much preferable to tribalism in the killing fields, naturally.  The UN should encourage it.  Indeed, we should bring back gladiator fights**, but only between the heads of the states and runners for those posts.

As an alternative to wars, that is.  And yes, I know it wouldn't work***, but the idea is a good one in theory.  We could allow modern weapons to make the fights equal for people of different sizes, ages and genders.  The outcome could only be protested as a prelude to a second match, between, say, the seconds-in-command.  The fight would never leak down to the general populations.

Third, window-washing.   This is a deep thought topic only because I have been doing it.  Imagine nearly hundred-year old windows, with that up-and-down guillotine movement.  Imagine having to wash them on the outside from a long distance from the ground, dangling half outside.

Imagine an intrepid goddess armed with a mallet and chisels (for opening recalcitrant antique windows),  bottles of window-washing liquid and rags, part of her clinging to the frame of the house, her mouth holding the rags (for lack of more arms (one is needed to hold on to the house for dear life) and a prehensile tail).  Imagine how all that looks and how it feels when the top frame decides to drop on the neck of the said goddess.

Well, I won, this last weekend.  But the victory is always temporary, as it may be in politics, too.  And that should bring you an odd kind of optimism when things are going very badly on the international front.
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*These terms refer to second amendment fanatics.  I don't know who invented them but they are pretty clever slurs.
**Like John McCain in one corner, armed with hammers, John Kerry in the other corner, armed with French after-shave.  To make an example from the past.  So to say.
***It wouldn't work, because the minute we invented this scheme all countries would pick someone very brawny and violent and without relatives as the nominal head of the state.  Real strings of power would be held by the Usual Suspects.

Goldman Sachs CEO on Income Inequality

Worth checking out what Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs says about the growing income inequality:

Income inequality is destabilizing and "responsible for the divisions in the country," CEO and chairman of Goldman Sachs Lloyd Blankfein said on "CBS This Morning" Tuesday.
"The divisions could get wider," Blankfein said. "If you can't legislate, you can't deal with problems. [If] you can't deal with problems, you can't drive growth and you can't drive the success of the country. It's a very big issue and something that has to be dealt with."
He said one way to deal with it would be to "make the pie grow."
"Too much of the GDP over the last generation has gone to too few of the people," he said.

He also hints at the need to look at how the pie is divided, by the way.  Because the pie has been growing; it's just that it has been eaten by fewer people.  So the growth policy isn't really working, right?

The story goes on explaining how hard it is to figure out the reasons for the growing income inequality.  Though I respectfully want to point out that several of the reasons are quite easily determined, because they are the consequences of specific policies:  Increase the regression of income taxes, favor capital over labor in who pays the most taxes,  encourage the off-shoring of good jobs, do your utmost to tear up all safety nets (which the rich don't need, duh).

Blankfein's reference to politics is that "if you can't legislate" comment.  But the problem of American politics is that they are money-driven, that they are beginning to mirror the needs and desires of the one percent and become less and less reflective of the more general needs or desires.

Indeed, the same appears to be true on international level, too.  Trade policies are often crafted to comply with the interests of corporations, not with the interests of workers or consumers.

Thank You

For your kind donations and for reading here.  I now have enough for a new computer, with an ergonomic keyboard and a large screen!   Big hugs and mwah.

The negative side is that I won't put myself out to pasture as early as I planned. 

Women Are Hard To Animate. Thoughts on Representation of Women in Movies, Television and Games

That "women are hard to animate" comes from today's Funny Files.  The excuse for not having female characters in the next game of a series called Assassin's Creed is that to have them would have doubled the workload of the animators.

That's polite shorthand for meaning that the customers of the game are viewed as being mostly male, so having female characters just isn't cost-effective (well, except perhaps for the tit-value), but it's also a lot like the old "but then we need toilets for women" argument which was made when some colleges had to turn coed.

Others found that defense funny, too.  Still, there's something deeper I can dig for you in this quote:

“Assassin’s Creed: Unity,” which takes place during the French Revolution through the Napoleonic wars, is a four-player co-0p, explained by Amancio here. Players can customize their gear, but always see themselves as the main character, Arno Dorian.
“Because of that, the common denominator was Arno,” Amancio explained. “It’s not like we could cut our main character, so the only logical option, the only option we had, was to cut the female avatar.”

That "deeper" has to do with the initial focus.  If the focus is on a guy called Arno Dorian and his adventures during Napoleonic wars, well, it IS a bit hard to put female heroes into the story. A realistic portrayal of women would be as a few sisters, wives and mothers, as victims of rape and other war violence and as prostitutes, right?  From the guy point of view (which we all can assume, I believe).  We don't know a whole lot about how women "played" war in history.  You could add something about trying to steal enough potatoes between the army lines to stay alive without getting caught, perhaps, to make the game more realistic.

That wasn't very clear.  My point is that these stories are picked from a certain angle, an angle of traditionally male heroism, and even when that is not the case most of us are lulled into believing that a handful of women in a large list of participants is a mixed gender setting in a movie or television series.  Just think of the Noah's Ark (which also consisted of all white characters).  Probably a fifty-fifty distribution of men and women in some movie reads as a chick flick to many viewers.

One reason for all this is that we tend to see women portray womanhood in their roles, not play roles of individuals who have different temperaments, characters and so on.  That's why having a handful of women in a movie looks like inclusion, even if they all play the role "women," because that role might be subconsciously compared to the number of dentists or gamblers or whatever in the same movie, never mind that most of the rest of that list are played by men.

A similar thinking applies to roles played by people of color (so women of color get a double dose here).  The only solution I can see is to increase the numbers of those groups closer to their actual population proportions.  Once a certain critical coalition size has been reached in jobs, say, women (or any other less represented group) stop being seen as representatives of their group and start being seen as individuals.  We are getting there but we are not there yet.

ISIS

Isn't it sarcastic that the acronym ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) is also the name of an ancient Egyptian goddess?  Because the ISIS, this time, is certainly not about a revered goddess but about creating a modern Islamic caliphate, a country stretching from Syria to Iraq and beyond, where the role of women would not have anything to do with potential divinity.

Never mind.  Given the current violence and population displacement, those concerns are not the foremost.  Stopping the violence would be, if anyone in the whole world just could figure out a way to do that, either in Syria or in Iraq.  That doesn't seem feasible.

Then the recriminations.  It's certainly true that the American invasion (to punish Saudi suicide bombers in 911 the US had to attack an unrelated country,  Iraq, though it was really about oil)  precipitated the current situation.  For instance,

While not as big as what it had been prior to the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq's military under Saddam Hussein boasted an estimated 430,000 soldiers and another 400,000 personnel in paramilitary units and security services when U.S.-led troops invaded in spring 2003.
Still, the Iraqis proved no match for coalition forces.
After the military was overrun, it was dissolved -- along with Iraq's defense and information ministries -- by Paul Bremer, the top U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq.
That left hundreds of thousands of troops suddenly out of work. Those with ranks of colonel and above -- who knew the most about strategy, tactics and more -- were hit even harder, as they weren't entitled to severance packages and couldn't work for the new Iraqi government.
Then they had to go somewhere.
According to Fawaz Gerges, a professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science, "hundreds, if not thousands, of skilled officers of Saddam Hussein's ... joined ISIS."

This is an example, one of many, of the lack of proper thinking before and during the US invasion of Iraq.

It is also true that the state of Iraq was patched together by the British, once upon a time, and doesn't lend itself to be a natural state, and the West's constant thirst for oil and the associated colonial history has played a major role in preparing the ground for the current events.

But we shouldn't  assume that the area would be a peaceful Eden in the absence of any Western influence.  The current violence in Iraq has to do with the Sunnis and the Shias and the Kurds, and the current violence in Syria is also religiously motivated.  The ISIS group appears to support an extreme form of an Islamist state in Raqqa, Syria,  where Sharia laws are rigidly applied, in their original medieval forms, and so on.  At the same time, their tactics in Iraq rely more on the support of Sunnis and the unhappiness with the current Iraqi leadership, because that works out better in the Iraqi context:

In the Syrian city of Raqqa, their strict brand of Islamic law holds sway. Activists and residents say music has been banned, Christians have to pay an Islamic tax for protection and people are executed in the main square.
In the Iraqi city of Fallujah, however, residents say the group has so far taken a more moderate approach, choosing to overlook some practices it considers forbidden.
The makeup of its forces also varies to a degree. In Syria, foreigners play a larger role than in Iraq, where locals tend to dominate.
The group has been able to do this, in part, because of the simmering anger in Iraq’s Sunni minority community toward Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. They accuse al-Maliki of treating them as second-class citizens.

None of what I write here is based on any kind of expertise.  These are my amateur thoughts.

I'm not sure how democracy is historically developed, but I fear it begins with at least some bloodshed, and far too many countries appear to exist at that stage right now.  That's my more optimistic interpretation of what might be happening.  The pessimistic one is about a world divided by money and religion and sinking ever deeper into absolutes which cannot be questioned.

Though ISIS is unlikely to be strong enough on its own to create a permanent Islamic emirate or caliphate.  Ironically, should it succeed in that the outcomes would be bad for its future residents. The extremist Islamic model is a very poor fit for modern needs of economic and social development.

You've Been Bradwilcoxed. Washington Post on How Women Can Stay Safe.

I'm singularly blessed by my warped sense of humor.  It lets me enjoy the most recent Washington Post opinion piece on women, after the George Will one (about being a victim of sexual violence as a coveted status), partly because it reminds me of this opinion piece in 2008, about us wimminfolk:

We Scream, We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get?

Imagine something like that published in WaPo about any other large demographic groups!

Anyway, today's piece is quite wonderful.  It suggests that all men should get married and have children, because that way they stop being violent towards women!

How We Should Cover Mass Murders

Yesterday I began a post with this:

It might be time not to give any publicity for the killers in these mass shooting events, because of the copycat criminals and the very real possibility that what the killers want is posthumous fame or notoriety.

I didn't finish the post.  But it wouldn't have made any difference in terms of what is clearly taking place right now.  Journalists should seriously think about how to report on mass murders, to keep the focus on the victims, what was lost by their deaths, what good things they did while alive, how great the grief is for those left behind.  The perpetrator should not be the focus, if at all possible, and when it is not, the treatment should take care to avoid the type of coverage which copycat killers would wish to read about themselves.

Being A Victim: A Coveted Status. Or So Writes George Will.

George Will is a conservative writer whom Charlie Pierce once compared to a vinegar decanter.   That was funny because it is apt.  Now George has decided to write about the crisis of sexual violence on US college campuses.

Colleges and universities are being educated by Washington and are finding the experience excruciating. They are learning that when they say campus victimizations are ubiquitous (“micro-aggressions,” often not discernible to the untutored eye, are everywhere), and that when they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate.

Bolds are mine.

Will's message is that there is no crisis, that "males" get unfairly accused, that "females" are encouraged to see pity f**ks or similar as rapes.  If you are not quite convinced, George Will also tells us (he will tell us!) that  progressives want trigger warnings on all university reading materials, too:

Now the codes are begetting the soft censorship of trigger warnings to swaddle students in a “safe,” “supportive,” “unthreatening” environment, intellectual comfort for the intellectually dormant.
It is salutary that academia, with its adversarial stance toward limited government and cultural common sense, is making itself ludicrous. Academia is learning that its attempts to create victim-free campuses — by making everyone hypersensitive, even delusional, about victimizations — brings increasing supervision by the regulatory state that progressivism celebrates.

Hmm.  Now I want marshmallows.   Then I want to stab them hard.

George commits three common not-so-nice crimes in his piece. 

First, he picks a story about sexual violence which is as marginal as possible (from his point of view).  By picking that story and ignoring all the other stories he manages to suggest that sexual violence on campuses is pretty much nonexistent, and if it does exist, it's due to "the ambiguities of the hookup culture, this cocktail of hormones, alcohol and the faux sophistication of today’s prolonged adolescence of especially privileged young adults."

Second, he picks something which indeed has happened but which is both uncommon and avidly debated among progressives as indicative of the coddling culture on all campuses:  the demand for trigger warnings in college courses.  By implying that all progressives are for such warnings Will is being dishonest, and by not actually studying how common such trigger warnings are in reality he is being sorta lazy. 

Third, he argues that "males" have been denied due process:

Then comes costly litigation against institutions that have denied due process to males they accuse of what society considers serious felonies.

This glides over the fact that many "females" argue that they have been denied due process or justice.

These are not viewed as real crimes because Will is writing an opinion piece, not reporting on the issues.  But crimes they are from my point of view, because they aim at distorting the way the readers would interpret the events after consuming his story.

Bang! POw@#! Guns

I have not followed the nuts-and-bolts gun politics in the US well enough to know what real changes have taken place in the recent decades, but it looks to me as if guns have more and more rights in some states, even while they enable more efficient mass killings, more gun accidents at home (many involving children), more instant-rage-turned-to-life-long-grief-and-regret, more successful suicides.

While skimming some recent gun news I saw a comment which argued that cars kill more people than guns and should be banned first.  The comment was intended to show how inane anti-gun people are, I guess.  But thinking about cars and guns can be useful in this context.

For example, we accept the idea that cars can be dangerous, that one needs to pass a driving test before being allowed to drive one, that one needs insurance for the car, that the license to drive can be taken away, that one shouldn't text-and-drive, that one shouldn't drive drunk or on drugs and so on.  As far as I can tell, getting a permit for a gun doesn't require a shooting test or a written test about the rules which apply to gun use. 

Then there's the fact that the initial argument doesn't standardize for the number of cars vs. guns or the total amount of their use and doesn't even ask the basic question about the utility of cars vs. guns for most people or note that killing something very efficiently isn't the main idea behind cars but pretty much is the main idea behind guns.

I was also struck (pun not intended) by this Twitter picture which has to do with the lack of cultural rules about how to carry a gun if one wishes to do it openly, about how to predict who it is who might be planning a killing spree and who just wants to come across as an asshat in public.

The man on the left is Justin Bourque who allegedly killed three police officers in Canada and was apprehended yesterday.  I have no idea who the man on the right might be, but most people would react to the two in identical manner.  That's because seeing someone with a gun leads one to expect that it will be shortly used. Well, a "one" who has not grown up in a gun culture, that "one" would not wish to share the street or the store with people carrying rifles like that, and the reason is that anyone doing it looks like Justin Bourque.

The whole field is screaming, begging and pleading for a lot of difficult-but-crucial studies:  What happens to gun deaths in a state when the regulations are eased/tightened and when guns are more/less easily available?  What is the number of deaths avoided by someone using a gun defensively?  What is the number of deaths caused by someone using a gun defensively in error?  How many accidents resulting in deaths can be blamed on guns?

But we also need a conversation about the rights of others, those who are now expected to share the world with someone armed-to-the-teeth-just-in-case.  There are real psychological costs from having to shop next to someone carrying a gun (where are the exist if something happens, what could I crouch behind, how is this person feeling about others right now?) 

I'm not terribly optimistic about that conversation taking place in the US, because of the misuse of the second amendment:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

That "well regulated Militia" fell down the memory hole, never to reappear.  I wonder what the "Founding Fathers" would say about the current interpretation of that right...

Guilt and Threats. Final Fund-Raising Plea

Guilt


I only remember afterwards how much writing about something like the Santa Barbara butcher takes out of me.  While the writing flows I just channel it, feeling cool, calm and collected (though the research before that stage is another story).  But when it's all over, the price must be paid.  Thank goddess for migraine medications.

Similar problems attach themselves to any painful writing.  I have a lot of thoughts about the term "rape culture," some even helpful thoughts.  But when I try to write about them my head becomes verrry heavy and I need a nap first.  And first and first.

The point -- if there is one -- is that different types of emotional energy can fuel one's writing but they are not all equally costly or cheap.  Others' pain and suffering demand rapid payment, and that payment is high.

That's self-pitying stuff and of no importance, but I snuck it in because someone might be bent towards donating money by that whine.  (And snuck is a word, I swear.)

Don't let me press your guilt buttons.  Mostly I love what I do here.  It beats window-washing and toilet cleaning and many other jobs for which nobody pays me, and the writing on the blog stays while the windows and toilet bowls just ask for more cleaning.

Threats

If guilt doesn't affect you much, how about threats?  I might do an Elizabeth Wurtzel and write about myself All. The. Time.  I might decide that a pope who never had children is right about children being the point of all existence, that nothing is worse than old age without children.  Francis should know, after all, given that celibacy thing.

I might write how our whole existence (as determined by "science") is just as vehicles for our genes to reproduce themselves.  I might go one better on Wurtzel and friends, and decide that the point of our lives is to be an environment for our stomach bacteria to thrive so that they can pass their genetic information on, that the point in having children is to guarantee future environments for those stomach bacteria. -- Come to think of it, I would probably make a lot more money if I chose those paths of the writing life or the paths the Ann Coulters of this world are busily plowing.

Duh. I'm not very good at threats.

Thank You

My deepest thanks to all of you who have sent me money or encouragement (with vague future promises of money).  I adore all of my readers, because you are smart, kind and eloquent.

Silly Posting: Quolls, Vultures And Vladimir Putin

This is quoll, an endangered Australian animal.

The cuteness hides a major carnivore (thanks to Richard_Thunderbay for the hint):

There's a lesson in all this.  I like to think of it as the Defense Of The Seemingly Cute And Little...


K Street in Washington, D.C., now has real vultures.   Which is funny, because K Street is where all the political lobbyists have their perches.

Vladimir Putin has commented on a statement by Hillary Clinton, about Putin's recent acts looking a bit like what Adolf Hitler did in the 1930s.  Most of that exchange is what politicians do to each other, but this is worth commenting a bit more:

“It’s better not to argue with women,” Putin said, taking specific aim at Clinton’s gender. “But Ms. Clinton has never been too graceful in her statements.”

So our Vlad poked at our gender.  Which means that his forefinger was in my ribs and in the ribs of all womenfolk all over the world. And of course what he said is trivial and based on that 1950s code of wimminz-who-can-understand-them-just-say-yesdear-to-your-wife-always, and it doesn't truly hurt, that poke.




But it's still worth pointing out.  If you can't argue with women, then women in the public sphere will either rule the roost, totally, or will be utterly and completely pedestaled and then ignored.  Vlad put some distance between rational people and women in that comment, though he later added that women should be strong and that means not criticizing him:

“When people push boundaries too far, it’s not because they are strong but because they are weak,” he added. “But maybe weakness is not the quality for a woman.”

I need to take some pictures of me on a pony.

Speed-Blogging, 6/4/14: Girly Hurricanes, Writing While Female, Learning To Be A Man And Other Stories

Why do hurricanes with girly names result in more deaths?  Lingering sexism as the main author of the study suggests?  Perhaps.  But I'd still want to double-check while thinking about this explanation:

For a start, they analysed hurricane data from 1950, but hurricanes all had female names at first. They only started getting male names on alternate years in 1979. This matters because hurricanes have also, on average, been getting less deadly over time. “It could be that more people die in female-named hurricanes, simply because more people died in hurricanes on average before they started getting male names,” says Lazo.

The study author argues that those facts don't matter, but surely the much smaller sample size of hurricanes called Chuck or Bob affects the comparisons.  So might the very large death tolls of the early hurricanes, though, once again, the author states that this is not the case.  I haven't looked at the study, what with being tired after traveling and also emotional as is the wont of female goddesses.

Just kidding there.  #NotAllGoddesses are emotional basket-cases (though Hera is).  I plan a long post on the #NotAllMen and #NotAllWhites Twitter hashtags, by the way.  Very very long it will be, and complicated.

This is an interesting piece about how to review literature written by women.  I partly agree, partly need more thinking on all that (i.e., asking myself if male writers are held to the same standards or not).

And this series of pictures teaches you how to be a man.  It's tongue-in-cheek, and right away made me imagine similar series of pictures about how to be a woman (walking on corkscrews under your heels, the prison of bras etc.).  Why does performing a gender have to be so much work?

An interesting story about the real estate market in London, England.  It suggests that the reasons why some invest in housing have nothing to do with wanting a place to live in.  That's obvious, of course, but what happens when a plurality of buyers act on those kinds of incentives?

Finally, I really really want to be a fly on the wall in one of the Bilderberg meetings, to learn what our overlords (and a few token overladies) are planning for this planet.


  

I Need This Necklace

This one.

Reading unmoderated comments on major websites is extremely painful.  Doing it on a permanent basis turns the brain into a Waldorf salad, kills all hope about humanity and maximizes the profits of antacid producers and therapists.

The Third Fund-Raising Post

Because it's nearly impossible to gauge readership*, these days, one aspect of this fund-raising drive is to stand as a proxy for it.  If you can't contribute right now but are a regular reader, you could let me know in the comments to this post.





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*Given that anyone subscribing to the RSS feed is invisible to me.

Men's Wallets And Their Partner's Orgasms. The Life of A Study from Pre-Birth Popularization to Silent Death.

 Here is a story about the life-cycle of one 2009 evolutionary psychology study and its popularization.  The study had a simple conclusion:  Women are created by evolution to be gold-diggers.   Too bad that this simple conclusion turned out to be wrong.  Too bad that very few people even today know that it turned out to be wrong.

This is because the early publicity of the initial study (most of which took place before critics could get hold of the paper) offered the popularizers something they might dream about:  A study which seemed to show that women had more frequent orgasms the higher their male partner's income was!  Talk about click-bait!  The story has sex in it, the story has the perfidy of women in it, the story has science which proves the perfidy of women.

The Second Fund-Raising Post

A sad horse story with a happy ending:

A mare gave birth a few nights ago to a healthy foal, but the mare died from complications of the birth.  The breeder whose mare this was noted the sadness in social media, and was soon matched with a different horse breeder (of a different horse breed) who also had had a birth at the farm, but this time the foal was born dead.  A horse-trailer and some goodwill, and the orphan foal was transported to the bereaved mother mare.  The foal was rubbed with the new mother's blanket, the mare promptly accepted the new baby, the baby drank enough milk to create a new round foal-breed and then the new mother-child pair nuzzled each other.


A cat picture:

You can donate money for this blog via PayPal (in the left column).  Thanks for reading here, whether you can help with the dough or not and whether you saw through my manipulation efforts here or not.

Howard Kurtz to Hillary Clinton: Press Mean To Women? Deal With It!

Via Digby (who gets the main problem with Kurtz's advice), Howard Kurtz had this to say:

My take is this: Let's say Hillary's people are right and that the press is petty, sensationalist, often unfair and sometimes mean to women? Deal with it. It's like complaining about bad weather. Every candidate has to cope with an adversarial media, and Democrats usually get a break at least on social issues.

Because I have such smart readers, I bet you can tell the flaw in that assertion already.  Yes, it's the fact that being "mean to women" is an aspect of this treatment which doesn't affect "every candidate" equally.  Only some candidates get attacked because of the demographic group they belong to.  That would mostly be women and minorities, and the total sum of all meanness aimed at a candidate is not constant. What that last bit means is this:  Someone who gets racist or sexist criticism will also get other types of mean criticism.

But the real flaw in the argument is in the reversal that it hides:  Should women deal with the fact that they are attacked when Hillary Clinton is attacked for her gender?  Because that's what those slurs effect.  They attack a whole gender as collateral damage for being "mean" to a politician.  They also reveal quite a bit about the values of the attacker, of course.

If This Is True It's Bad

According to one site, the April police check of Elliot Rodger, the Santa Barbara butcher, was because of the videos he had posted, but the police never watched those videos:

Santa Barbara Sheriff's deputies checking on Elliot Rodger weeks before he killed six college students were aware of but didn't view disturbing videos that prompted calls about his well-being.

That is not good policing, right?  Those videos are the evidence which made Rodger's family concerned.

Worth Reading, 5/29/2014: Measles. Misogyny.

1.  Measles have returned as an infectious disease in the US.  The main reason has to do with the anti-vaccination movement.  The fewer the people are who get vaccinated, the lower the herd immunity is.  Whether to get a vaccination or not is one of those cases where the benefits and costs of the decision fall partly on the rest of the society, but where the individual's decision-making does not properly take those into account.  Because, duh, other people.

Similar thinking applies to the overuse of antibiotics in that the effects of that overuse on the rest of the society may not enter the private calculus.



2.  I was surprised by some of the debate about what motivated the Santa Barbara massacre:  the insistence that the causes must be found in only one aspect of the horrors.  Either it's mental illness, or it's gun or it's misogyny, and because  misogyny isn't that rare in the US society (or any of the other societies I know about), it can't be misogyny!  Because most misogynists don't go on a rampage!  But then neither do most gun-owners or most people who use mental health services. 

The lack of proper gun control in the US is a major factor, possibly the main reason why the rates of mass killings in this country are so high, and the holes in the mental health network have played a role in many of the earlier killings.  But that these two factors are important doesn't mean that the reasons the Santa Barbara killer gave us or evidence from prior mass killings should be ignored.

This 2013 NYT article provides some tentative support for the way mental illness and social trends might interact.  Put in a simple way:  Perhaps the talk in the society influences the talk inside someone's head, perhaps the tone of conversations in a  PUA group (not comfortable reading) influences the tone of someone's already-dangerous thinking.  Then there's the entitlement-to-sex thinking, as discussed in this article.

Maya Angelou, RIP

Maya Angelou has died.

 Ailey, Baldwin, Floyd, Killens, and Mayfield

by Maya Angelou

When great trees fall,

rocks on distant hills shudder,

lions hunker down,

in tall grasses,

and even elephants

lumber after safety.

When great trees fall

in forests,

small things recoil in silence,

their senses

eroded beyond fear.

When great souls die,

the air around us becomes

light, rare, sterile.

We breathe briefly.

Our eyes, briefly,

see with 

a hurtful clarity.

Our memory, suddenly sharpened,

examines,

gnaws on kind words

unsaid,

promised walks

never taken.

Great souls die and

our reality, bound to

them, takes leave of us.

Our souls,

dependent upon their

nurture,

now shrink, wizened.

Our minds, formed

and informed by their

radiance,

fall away.

We are now so much maddened

as reduced to the unutterable ignorance

of dark, cold

caves.

And when great souls die,

after a period peace blooms,

slowly and always

irregularly.  Spaces fill

with a kind of

soothing electric vibration.

Our senses, restored, never

to be the same, whisper to us.

They existed.  They existed.

We can be.  Be and be

better. For they existed.

My Annual Begging Week Starts

Time to pay the piper.  That would be me.  I need a new computer and it needs to be ergonomic and have an enormous screen.  So I hope all my imaginary readers will pay for it!  And cover my chocolate budget and the migraine medications I need after writing posts such as the one right below.  And all the fees I've paid to get hold of studies which I then tear apart here.

I'm not asking you to pay for my labor though that would be utterly wonderful and also just, given that my hourly wage rate on this blog is about one cent right now.

If you have no money, don't worry.  You can always send me some later when your ship comes home.

Instructions on how to finance this blog with PayPal are in the left column.  Lump-sum payments turn out to work better than a monthly subscription, though either is perfectly fine with me.

Whether you can contribute or not, thanks for your custom, for your wisdom and for your kindness.

Love

Echidne

The Day Of Retribution. On Elliot Rodger, the Butcher of Santa Barbara.

This post is about the slaughter carried out by Elliot Rodger in Santa Barbara.  It is about violence, the hatred of women and the general hatred of humans.  Consider carefully whether you wish to read it.

1.  The Recent Events

Elliot Rodger, 22,  spent last Saturday killing people in Santa Barbara, California.  He first brutally stabbed to death three men in his apartment:  Cheng Yuan Hong, 20, George Chen, 19 and Weihan Wang, 20, then got into his BMW with  his three semi-automatic legally acquired guns and headed to that UCSB (University of California, Santa Barbara) sorority  he had rated as having the largest number of pretty tall blondes, the kind of womanflesh he wanted to have on his plate but was denied because the damn dinners had rights to refuse him!

He planned to kill all women inside the sorority, but was stopped by the fact that nobody opened the door however hard he banged on it.  Poor Elliot!  Things always worked out against him.  No wonder he was filled with such rage, as witnessed by his manifesto for the butchering or "the day of retribution."

Instead, he shot at the three young women standing outside the sorority building, killing Katherine Breann Cooper, 22, and Veronika Elizabeth Weiss, 19.  The third victim is still alive and I hope that she will recover.

What Rodger tells us in his manifesto is that this is the plan he had for killing people because he was owed that retribution for all the sex he deserved but wasn't getting while other men were getting it:

First horribly carve up men in his apartment, then kill all the sorority residents, then just  drive around the place shooting and hitting people with his car.  With the exception of failing to wipe out the sorority, his plans were going pretty well.

He next killed Christopher Ross Michaels-Martinez, 20, at a local delicatessen.  He was probably chosen randomly, as "one of the animals,"  Rodger's view of other humans.

No more immediate deaths on his rampage through the streets, though his car drove into two bicyclists (and two other individuals) and his bullets hit pedestrians walking by.  In all, six victims were killed,  seven other individuals were hurt on this "day of retribution."  Two of the hurt remain in serious condition.  I hope all of them will be made as whole as possible.  I hope those who loved the dead (including those who loved Rodger) get some peace.

The day ended with Rodger's suicide.

On Favoritism, Not Hostility, As The Basis For Discrimination

Tony Greenwald and Thomas Pettigrew argue that it's in-group favoritism rather than hostility to outgroup individuals which drives some parts of discrimination. An example:

Take this hypothetical scenario: When conducting reviews of two employees, a manager finds they both fall between two performance categories. The manager gives a higher category to the employee whose child is friends with the manager’s child, leading to a promotion and salary raise, while the other employee receives a smaller raise and no promotion.
Was the manager consciously discriminating against the second employee? Or did she simply give a boost to someone to whom she had an “ingroup” connection?
“Your ‘ingroup’ involves people that you feel comfortable with, people you identify with,” Greenwald explained. “We usually think first of demographic characteristics like age, race, sex, religion and ethnicity as establishing an ingroup, but there are also ingroups based on occupation, neighborhood and schools attended, among other things. Outgroups are those with whom you don’t identify.”

The idea is that people feel most comfortable with people most like themselves, and that's why race, sex, religion and other aspects matter.

I haven't been able to read the overview (the study) yet (keep getting error messages), but the question what drives discriminatory behavior is certainly something I've researched quite a bit.  The differences can vary greatly, at least in theory, from outright hatred and disgust towards certain types of individuals to social norms and codes which are followed unconsciously and without any actual intent to harm or help anyone.

That's a very bare-bones summary of the various theories.  But "nepotism," interpreted as favoring those who are very close to the decision-maker (promoting the no-good nephew or niece), looks like the closest theory to the one Greenwald and Pettigrew promote.

Nepotism (or whatever you wish to call this) looks like the flip-side of discrimination based on negative views or discriminatory social norms.  But it is usually interpreted as somewhat narrower, because the number of people "most like ourselves" can be defined as a fairly small group in some interpretations.  The term "nepotism" refers to favoring one's relatives over others, after all.

It looks like Greenwald and Pettigrew expand the idea of "most like ourselves" or the definition of "ingroup" to people of the same gender and/or race.  I'm not convinced that this expansion works, though I agree that preferential treatment for cousins, college buddies etc. is common.  But as stated, I haven't read the study yet.

Still, if you notice that in my previous post I discussed a case where female customers gave lower ratings to female client service representatives than male customers, it's clear that the favoritism theory based on giving preferential treatment to those we identify with cannot be the only explanation or probably even the main explanation of what's going on there.*

My guess is that the motives for the way we behave are complicated, that social norms matter, including outdated social norms, and that the role of ingroup motives in discrimination is not unimportant but is unlikely to be sufficient to account for the choices people make.  I do agree that discrimination is probably less often based on outright hostility or hatred than on more fuzzy motives and that much of it is unconscious.
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*Another example of this comes from a 2012 study of faculty mentoring where the professor's race or gender didn't affect the reduction in mentoring female students and minority male students received, with the possible exception of Chinese professors who were somewhat more likely to wish to meet a student with a Chinese name.  A better explanation in this case, too, looks to me to be the social norms theory, the idea that certain types of people "belong" to the top, that certain types of people exude competence while other types do not and so on.

On Female And Male Client Service Representatives

Bryce Covert talks about an informal study on female and male client service representatives and how satisfied their clients are with their work:

At least at one company, female client service representatives get lower scores from their clients even when they perform better than men and have more experience.
Larry Kim, founder of internet marketing company WordStream, recently analyzed about 300 responses from the company’s clients to a request to rate their level of satisfaction with their client service representative at his company on a scale of one to four. He found that all of the men on staff had above average scores, while all women had below average scores. “In fact, the lowest scoring male rep rated higher than the highest scoring female rep!” he wrote in a post about his findings.

Kim also found that the pattern favoring male client service reps was stronger among female clients than male clients, though both rated men higher. 

Larry Kim's blog gives more information about the study.  What's a bit tricky about it is the total number of client service representatives:  nine, as far as I can tell.  Nine is a small number and individual personalities can affect the results.  Another tricky bit is the way Kim measures performance of an account, as a measure of the performance of the client service representatives.  As he notes himself, the performance of the accounts depends mostly on the clients themselves (though it's also true that "customer satisfaction" can depend on diffuse and hard-to-quantify items, including the gender of the representative).

Nevertheless, it's useful to note that the female client service representatives had accounts which did better than the accounts of the male service representatives, and that most of the difference in the satisfaction evaluations came from the middling accounts, those that fell in the middle of their performance.

All that is to say that I'm not sure how conclusive this study can be.  But it reminds us of a particular type of discrimination in economic theory:  Customer discrimination.  If customers prefer men over women or whites over blacks, on average,  the preferred group will do better over time, will get more raises and more promotions and more business in general.

Gendered Birthday Cards For Tots

I had to get a birthday card for a two-year-old (or perhaps for her parents, given her age), so I went to the local pharmacy-cum-trinkets store.  The cards I found were segregated by gender.  Perhaps not all of them, but the ones which gave an age for a young child were.  The cards for girls were all cuty-cuty-cuty and pink and purple.  The cards for boys had cars and Spidermen on them.

There's no way a two-year-old is demanding such differences.  Just pointing out for all those who believe that gender differences are mostly biological that we sure tend and weed and water that garden in which they grow.

Today's Action Alert: Meriam Yehya Ibrahim

Is about Meriam Yehya Ibrahim in Sudan:

Meriam, who is eight months pregnant, was raised as an Orthodox Christian, her mother’s religion. Her father, a Muslim, was reportedly absent during her childhood. She was arrested and charged with ‘adultery’ in August 2013 after a family member claimed that she was committing adultery because her marriage was invalid, as her South Sudanese husband is a Christian. The court added the charge of ‘apostasy’ in February 2014 when Meriam asserted that she was a Christian and not a Muslim.
Meriam was convicted of both charges on 11 May 2014 and given three days to recant her faith. When she refused, she was sentenced to death for ‘apostasy’ and 100 lashes for ‘adultery’.

You can protest her treatment here or here.

This is about religion but it is also about the gendered way religion here is determined.  It doesn't matter what Meriam says she is, it doesn't matter that her mother was/is an Orthodox Christian and that she was brought up as one.  It is what his father is or was which overrules everything.  That her marriage would be argued to be invalid is because Muslim women are not allowed to marry non-Muslim men, even though Muslim men, in general, are allowed to marry non-Muslim women.

Where We Can Have Nice Things

This is a great story about how a restaurant owner responded when someone wanted his waitstaff to show more skin.

This piece, about the headlines the gossip and celebrity news pick for female celebrities, is both fun and serious.  The serious part is naturally realizing that the message of the pictures is in the original headlines.  The fun part is normalizing the headlines.  More serious stuff about the same phenomenon can be found in this Guardian piece.

And this piece talks about that thing most of us already knew:  What makes us attractive (or not so much) is pretty dependent on how we are as individuals. 

There's a longer post in this all about the cartoonish focus on large breasts etc. in evolutionary psychology on one side and the fact that most people don't mate and have children with people they have picked on the basis of just their bra or jock strap size on the other side.  But I haven't read the original research so I can't write that post quite yet.  (I wonder if most people realize how much work even a flippant short post can be if the writer wants to know the field.  This is preparation for my beg week starting tomorrow.)

Stop the Presses: Chirlane McCray Is A Bad Mother!!!!

Some posts I love to write, others I love to imagine as the head of a giant monster trying to eat me while I push knitting needles and cayenne pepper into its eyes.  Who wins that struggle to death is anyone's guess.

This is the second type of a post.  It also has that stink of musty old cellars, the echo of spider webs wrapped around patriarchal gender norms and the clink of cheap dollars in the till of New York Post, a not-so-venerable New York newspaper.  It has decided to write about the parenting skills of a woman, Chirlane McCray, for no other reason than the identity of her husband who happens to be the mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio.

Get it?  The parenting skills of politicians' relatives matter!  Hence the descriptions of Barbara Bush as the devil mother in the past (for someone must be responsible for George Walker Bush and usually that someone is a woman).  And all those articles we read about how good a father Bill Clinton might have been or might not have been, right?

Except that male relatives of politicians are not judged on the basis of their parenting skills.  Even not paying child maintenance for one's children is no big deal.  But the wives of politicians!  They must f***ing be perfect traditional ladies and mothers, for else the sky will fall.

And of course it's perfectly AOK to discuss the mothering experiences of politicians' wives and to rank them.

The most annoying aspect of debacles like this one are that those who rise up in the defense of women like Chirlane McCray often use the same framing:  She's not a bad mother, she's a perfect mother, as all mothers are supposed to be!  And this and this and this proves her perfection.

We can't get off that merry-go-round.

Now the really funny stuff.  McCray's sin appears to be that she admitted not being absolutely and totally dedicated to 24/7 mothering from the beginning:

“I was 40 years old. I had a life. Especially with Chiara — will we feel guilt forevermore? Of course, yes,” McCray told New York magazine for its cover story this week.
“But the truth is, I could not spend every day with her. I didn’t want to do that. I looked for all kinds of reasons not to do it.”
The disclosure — bound to horrify most moms — shatters the carefully crafted image of de Blasio’s close-knit family, which helped vault him into office.

This, my sweet and erudite readers, is the Perfection Myth of Motherhood in full operation.  McCray's admission is expected to "horrify most moms." Had people only known earlier that Chirlene McCray admitted that motherhood has its shadow sides, de Blasio would never ever have gotten into the office!

Just remember, while you read this, that de Blasio is the mayor, not McCray, and that the discussion is not about his fathering skills or how he felt when tradition required him to quit all paid work and spend all his time with his newborn daughter.

It's a rubbishy piece, that New York Post one, but it manages to stuff into a small amount of space the expectation that all child-rearing is to be done by mothers, that all mothers must love every minute of the experience, that fathers are not expected to do hands-on fathering and that public criticism of anything but mothering perfection is fine.  Finally, the piece tries to relight the Mummy Wars, once again.

Really Fast Blogging, 5/20/14: On Dinesh D'Souza, Arthur Sulzberger and on Adjunct Use in US Colleges

1.  Dinesh D'Souza has entered a guilty plea:

Conservative author and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza entered a guilty plea Tuesday to a charge that he used straw donors to make $20,000 in illegal contributions to Republican Senate candidate Wendy Long in 2012, officials said.
The unexpected guilty plea came on the same day the trial for the strident critic of President Barack Obama was set to open in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.

Most of the story is available at the above link. 

I have read some of his writing.  The guy loves his flamboyantly conservative conclusions and then seeks for anecdotes or partial stuff to support them.  That doesn't set him apart from most propagandists, though his use of the little anecdote and personal opinion seemed to me rather extreme even within that group.

The point of this short post is that I'm not getting pleasure from D'Souza's current troubles, despite his opinion of himself as the moral and religious person fighting the forces of evil.  I'd get more pleasure about a court case in which his writings entered the guilty plea of having been based on trickery.

2.  Arthur Sulzberger, the publisher of the New York Times, has come out with more comments about the firing of Jill Abramson, the previous executive editor of the Times.  Many of those comments aren't very helpful, because Arthur is not great at affecting wider opinions.  Here he brings in Dean Baquet's sorta role in the firing:

At that dinner, “I learned the severity of his feelings,” Sulzberger said, which I took to mean that Baquet gave Sulzberger an ultimatum of sorts. Baquet himself had earlier been offered a job at Bloomberg News. Now, Sulzberger worried that Baquet might leave. “At that point, we risked losing Dean, and we risked losing more than Dean,” Sulzberger said. “It would have been a flood, and a flood of some of our best digital people.” Sulzberger went into the office the next day and relayed to Abramson that his meeting with Baquet had not gone well. He gave himself 24 hours to make sure he was doing the right thing, he said. Then he offered the executive-editor job to Baquet. On Friday, May 9, he told Abramson it was time to make a change. The announcement was made five days later, on Wednesday, May 14. 

I could be quite mistaken, but my guess is that Sulzberger in the linked interview tried to turn the Abramson firing into a sort of upper class version of Oppression Olympics, by oddly passing the blame for what happened to both Abramson's nastiness and the threat of losing Baquet altogether if Abramson wasn't kicked out.   Sulzberger had to act so that the Times wouldn't lose Baquet (and others)*!  What can a guy do when he has to choose between a "first" great black guy editor and a "first" nasty white female editor?

What would you like him to do, hmm?

As I said, perhaps I'm imagining the hint here.  But the real blame doesn't belong to Baquet and framing it all in those terms is lamentable.  It is Sulzberger who has the power to fire and hire here, and if he made the wrong hiring decisions in the previous round it's still only his fault, not Baquet's fault.

3.  Finally, on the use of adjuncts** in American universities.  Adjuncts are like contract workers, people who were initially lured into the academia by the promise of a long-but-narrow-and-guaranteed bread over their lifetimes and the promise of a life spent thinking and writing and teaching, but who now often find themselves working hard in order to scrape together minimum wages, without an office, health insurance or retirement.  According to some estimates, adjuncts might be two-thirds of the academic teaching force, though exact figures are hard to get.

If markets actually work in labor, we would expect there to be a supply-side response.  The worse the outlook is for people with PhDs, the fewer will choose to enter those fields.  Something that looks like a great short-term idea for colleges (get cheap labor with lots of flexibility) may not be such a good idea in the longer term, even for the colleges (it's not good in the short term for the adjuncts, for research or for the students), because the faucets spewing out future workers will turn to drip-drip if being such a future worker is not a nice job in the ivory towers but scraping together a meager living with no security.

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*But elevating Dean Baquet doesn't seem to stop people from leaving.
**The linked piece is just an introduction into the topic of adjunct use and may conflate somewhat different phenomena.

Operation American Spring. Millions and Millions. Or Hundreds?

You may have read about the populist right-wing movement called Operation American Spring and its planned march in Washington, DC this weekend:

The “second American revolution” got off to a slow start in Washington, DC on Friday, falling roughly 9,999,950 people short of their goal of 10 million angry, constitution-weilding participants. (That was the low-end estimate. They were prepared for upwards of 30 million).
The few who did make it to Washington, D.C came with a laundry list of grievances, ranging from Benghazi, to Obamacare, to President Obama’s birth certificate, to general lawlessness.
“Our main goal is to return our government to the constitutional government,” said Marty Church, a protestor who traveled to Washington, D.C from the Maryland suburbs. “The whole administration is based on lies,” added Fred Lachance, another protester from Maryland.

It's all a bit confusing, as to the attendance numbers, isn't it?  How could people expect ten million marchers and end up with a few hundred?  This Washington Times piece suggests that the talk about millions wasn't based on just wishful thinking or at least not just on wishful thinking without any prior wishful thinking:

Initial projections were for between 10 million and 30 million to come from around the nation and converge on the downtown capital city streets outside the White House and Capitol Building — a number the organizer of the event, Army Col. Harry Riley, called optimistic yet doable, given one million militia had already agreed to come.

 It could be that more people will arrive before Sunday is over, of course.

The outside reactions to the events so far have had some Schadenfreude in them.  That's not too unexpected, given the birth certificate and Benghazi aspects of the organization's list of Most Important Grievances.  And, yes, I found this funny, but then I started feeling sorry for the organizers.  That latter feeling is a major flaw in my character and probably the reason why I have so little power and influence in this world.  I should be more brusque and mercurial, the way powerful people are (a subtle hint to the Jill Abramson posts below).

Is there any wider lesson in all this?  I believe so.  If you abstract away from the illogical and hope-based and weird bits, the warning for all of us is not to believe that those we follow on Twitter or read on the net Represent The Majority Opinions, not to remain in our comfy ideological bubbles all the time, not to interpret 10,000 comments from 100 fervid people on one little site as a sign of mass support.

The Internet has exacerbated the bubble phenomenon, and it does have this particular danger as well as wider dangers about people not agreeing on the same events, evidence or even the same reality.

Still, I think those organizers deserve any ridicule they get because they have enlisted a god on their side.  That is always extremely bad manners.

How I Can Tell I've Been Sick

The first sentence in the post below is one long paragraph!  A boa constrictor sentence, a sentence you cannot read without drawing in more breath, a monster of a sentence.

I write short, succinct and sarcastic (though with a gentle femininity), so the fact of that monster sentence, together with it not being edited by me is a sign of ill health.

And thank you, I am pretty recovered now, except for blips in the writing and some fatigue.  When I used to do karate I could tell an oncoming head cold or something similar by my sudden inability to do as many pushups or kicks or punches, even when the other daily stuff was still perfectly AOK.  Now I can tell similar stuff from a sudden inability to remember what "fist" is in Finnish ("nyrkki") or what the real word for"magnamonious" might be.

My divine theory about all that is this:  We have a fixed total amount of energy of all sorts.  When we get ill or contemplate getting ill, some of that energy is channeled to the immunity system and whatever parts of our bodies are hurting.  So there's less for other stuff, including grammar, pushups and being nice to people.  You can try that explanation next time people call you grumpy.  Maybe you are coming down with something?