Be Very Very Afraid. The Reason, Right Now, Is Ebola.

It has taken me a few hours to recover from the mistake of trying to absorb today's news and tweets and soundbites, because the overall message I get (whether that is the message that's being sent) is to panic.  And today we are to panic about Ebola in the US.

Panicking is the mature and adult reaction, my friends*.  Or at least the headline writers believe that clicks will rise if a bit of panic is in the air.  Thus, even  sound and rational articles about the Dallas Ebola case have headlines which  ask whether we should all panic or at least describe people who are not sure if they should panic**.  And some articles can barely squeeze in a few facts about Ebola. 

Why not just give all the information about how one can catch Ebola and how one cannot catch it?  To their credit, most articles try to do some of that (though not all), but the information is often buried deep in the body of the article or qualified by terms such as "health authorities claim."

And few write-ups seem to understand the public health actions of tracking and containing.  For example, that Daily Male Mail's screaming headline "Up to 100 exposed already in Dallas Ebola shambles" is such utter rubbish.  The point is to create panic.  This is what that 100-people figure actually represents: 

The immediate priority of health officials is contacting all those who might have come into contact with Mr. Duncan after he became symptomatic, which is when the disease can spread.

Health officials said to think of the contact tracing as moving in concentric circles. Health officials focused first on those who had the closest and most intimate contact with Mr. Duncan after he became symptomatic because they are at the greatest risk of infection. That group includes at least four family members and three medics who are being isolated.

 The next group includes those who had more casual contact with Mr. Duncan after he grew sick. More than a dozen people in this category will monitored by the authorities for 21 days, which is the longest documented time it has taken for this strain of Ebola to begin to cause illness.

These people will have their temperatures checked daily but are free to go about their daily routines unless they begin to show symptoms.

 The final group includes the secondary contacts — those who came into contact with people who came into contact with Mr. Duncan. Since the risk of infection in this group is minimal, they are not monitored daily. But their names are put in a database in case any one of them unexpectedly becomes ill and so authorities know how to reach them quickly if needed.

All bolds are mine.  The point is that hundred people most likely have not been exposed.  The reason they are identified is for the public health authorities to define the largest possible circle within which any possible new cases could come from, so that action can be swift and future spread of the disease can be stopped. That's how epidemics are fought.

So.  Whatever the problems in the treatment of the first Ebola case in the US in Dallas (and there were problems), we are not all going to die of Ebola and we cannot get it from asymptomatic individuals who happened to have been in the same airplane with us.  Come to think of it, the ordinary flu is killing a lot more people right now in this country, I'd bet.

I understand that new threats trigger an odd primitive reaction of this type in us humans (remember SARS?)***, while we can comfortably live with pretty high risks of death from traffic accidents or the flu.  But we could override that primitive reaction by vaccinating ourselves with all the relevant facts.

On the other hand, things could be much, much worse.  For instance, libertarians could be in power in Texas.  Here's a libertarian opinion on the proper role of the government in controlling communicable diseases:

Carla Howell, National Libertarian Party Political Director, says “governmental bureaucracies” involved with epidemic control are ineffective compared to private and voluntary efforts, in addition to costing too much money and violating individual rights. 

"The sole purpose of government is to protect our life, liberty and property from harm caused by others in those few instances where the private sector cannot do a better job," Howell writes in an e-mail to Newsweek. “Containing Ebola in Africa is best left to private charities such as Doctors Without Borders rather than the NIH [National Institutes of Health] or the CDC. Screening is better handled by airlines and private hospitals that are both liable for damages and fully free of government red tape. (Sadly no such hospitals exist today in the United States).”

Mmm.   Bolds are mine.  The point Howell misses is that the control of epidemics is  one of those areas where everyone  agrees that we need the government.  Even arch-conservatives agree.

That Howell doesn't  suggests to me that she is unaware of the public goods/private goods dichotomy.  The private sector cannot do as well as the public sector in controlling epidemics, because of that public good aspect.  This is true of for-profit firms but it's also true of nonprofit organizations, because they lack the enforcement ability which is necessary when patients must be quarantined or areas closed off or entrants to a country checked.

Isn't it nice that the many panic topics for today don't include libertarians running the US public health system?

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*As that silly rhyme tells us:  "When in doubt or danger, run in circles, scream and shout. " It should really be "When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout."  Rhymes better.

**Inside this story, for example,  the relevant information can be found, but you have to search for it:

None of the children have symptoms, and the chances that they passed the virus to other people at the school are extremely low, health officials said. Even when people are infected with Ebola, they are not contagious until they get develop symptoms. And even then, the virus can be transmitted only through bodily fluids and close physical contact.

***It has several characteristics.  One is the fear caused by not-knowing, the fear of something new, a sinister monster rising from the fog, suddenly.   Another one is an odd insistence for zero risks as the only acceptable ones (when we accept positive risks in most areas of life), the refusal to be reassured by an expert stating that something has an almost-zero probability of occurring.  A third one is the near-total focus on the new threat.  All these are probably useful behavior patterns when a new wild predator, say, entered the area where prehuman humans (heh) lived, but is less beneficial when it is applied to ISIS, SARS, bird flu, Ebola and so on, especially by those who are far away from the actual threats and get the reaction triggered by news. 

Training To Be Batman's Wife. Gender Lessons From Children's Clothing.

Here are two t-shirt stories about gender.  They cropped up almost simultaneously.

 The first one, by Melissa at Shakesville, is about t-shirts licensed and approved by DC comics:

On the left, we've got a men's shirt that depicts a scene inspired by Superman/Wonder Woman, which, you'll remember, was a romance themed title developed last year to appeal to women since why would we ever want to read a comic book that's not about kissing? (edit: it's actually from a cover of Justice League 12, however, because DC does sure love their crossovers) The text reads "Score! Superman does it again!"...

Also, Wonder Woman's a lasso-less "it" now, we guess. Yeah, that's why her arm's all weird at the bottom of the shirt; she's supposed to be lassoing Superman in the picture. But why present a powerful female superhero using one of her trademark symbols as a marker of sexual agency when you can instead present her as a stiff, rigid board to be scored upon?

On the right is a shirt from the juniors department of Walmart, which says "Training to be Batman's," and then "wife" in a different more stereotypically feminine font. It's a little known fact, but you are not allowed to spell the word "wife" in any font other than cursive.

The second story, from Canada, is pretty similar.  It is about onesies for infants for sale at Target:

Baby onesies at a Target store that label little boys as future superheroes and little girls as their dating partners has sparked online outrage after two University of Waterloo professors called attention to their message. 
...

Target Canada responded to questions from CBC News about the pyjamas in an email on Tuesday.
Company spokeswoman Kalynn Crump replied: "Target strives to treat all our guests with respect, and it is never our intent to offend anyone. We appreciate the feedback we’ve received and will continue to listen to our guests to ensure we offer merchandise that appeals to, and reflects, our diverse guest population.”
When asked if Target would remove the onesies from the shelves, Crump said Target didn't "have any plans to make adjustments to our assortment at this time."

There's the Superman S-symbol in both, but the message is a bit different for boy and girl babies.

The topic isn't the most important in the world but worth thinking about.  For example, try to imagine what would happen if we did a gender-reversal on those messages.  I doubt a single t-shirt or onesie would be sold.  Second, note the way the female messages are preparation for the female sexual role, even though these pieces of clothing are meant for children.  

But I get that these are jokes intended for the people reading the messages in the clothes, and most of those are adults.  Even the different script for the word "wife" in the upper picture is because the idea is that the reader will get surprised by that addition:  "So she's in training to be Batman?  No, but Batman's wife!  Heh."

In a way t-shirts and onesies of this type are training tools. 

What's Fun To Watch Today

On the net, that is.  You might begin with this Republican voter ad aimed at women.  It's utterly hilarious:



Note the equation between picking a bridegroom (or a bridal dress!) and picking a candidate, the attempt to make the debate a mother-daughter one and the idea that political issues are like the cost of a wedding dress. I love it because it shows how very hard someone thought about how to interest women in the Republican Party, then the light bulb: weddings!

Besides, I thought that prospective brides are supposed to be Bridezillas who want to the most expensive wedding dress possible?  At least that's the danger with the stereotyping the Republican Party does here.

To balance out that one, Nadia Kamil does feminist burlesque

Girl Brains And Boy Brains, Take #456789. By Dr. Michael Mosley

The BBC Horizons had a program on this idea:

Do you have a "male" or "female" brain? Are there really significant brain differences between the sexes and if so, do these differences matter? BBC Horizon investigates.
When it comes to the tricky and explosive question of how much, if at all, male and female behaviour is driven by brain differences, Professor Alice Roberts and I sit on different sides of the fence.
I believe that our brains, like our bodies, are shaped by exposure to hormones in the womb and this may help explain why males tend to do better at some tasks (3D rotation), while women tend to do better at others (empathy skills), although there is, of course, an awful lot of overlap and social pressure involved.
Alice, on the other hand, thinks these differences are largely spurious, the result of how the tests are carried out. She worries that such claims may discourage girls from going into science.

The debate between Roberts and Mosley may have been quite good, even wonderful, but I'm not writing about that since I haven't watched it.  Instead, I want to write about this advertisement for it by Michael Mosley.  Or call it priming?

Yes, it's priming.  We are introduced to Mosley's arguments in great detail, from 3D rotation to empathy skills to, later, specific pieces of research.  We are not introduced to any of Roberts' arguments, except in the general sense that she believes the differences (all of them?) are largely spurious, based on how the tests are carried out, and worries about girls being discouraged from going into science.  Thus, we get one set of arguments in great detail and nothing but vague noises from the other set of arguments.  Perhaps this is understandable.  Mosley obviously wants to present his point of view as the correct one.  But it's important to note how the story is told.

This is particularly important, because the two pieces of research Mosley particularly mentions are pretty controversial ones!  He loves the work of Simon Baron-Cohen (the PS to this post is a good explanation why Baron-Cohen's basic theory about what distinguishes the female brain from the male brain is problematic) and he loves the Ingalhalikar et al. brain imaging study (which I covered in some detail here and its reception here and here).  To pick those two as examples of solid and sound research on biological sex differences in the brain is a bit shocking.

Mosley likes Baron-Cohen's idea of the female brain as mainly good at empathizing:  understanding the emotions of others and relating to them,  and the male brain as mainly good at systemizing:  the analysis, creation and understanding of systems.  If that sounds a bit like the old argument that women are emotional and men are rational, well, it is in the same family.  There's no earthly reason why a person cannot be both empathizing and systemizing or (almost) neither*, yet the basic theory  treats the two as competing and sex-linked characteristics.  And that's why men are more likely to be nerds:

One of the scientists who has most strongly influenced my beliefs is Professor Simon Baron-Cohen of Cambridge University.
He argues that, broadly speaking, there are two different "brain types". There are empathisers, who are good at identifying how other people are thinking or feeling, and there are systemisers, people who are more interested in trying to take apart and analyse systems i.e. people who are a bit nerdy.
We are all a mix of the two, but most of us are more one than the other. Men tend to sit more along the systemising end of the spectrum, women at the empathising end, though there are plenty of exceptions.

Got it?  If not, you should go back and re-read the end of this post.  Then notice that Mosley, too, interprets empathizing and systemizing as mostly mutually exclusive characteristics.

And created by biology, especially by the amount of testosterone a fetus may have experienced during pregnancy:

But is this simply the product of social conditioning? Professor Baron-Cohen thinks not, that exposure to different levels of hormones in the womb can influence the brain and subsequent behavour. Some of his most intriguing findings have come from on-going research into a large group of children who have been followed from before they were born.
At around 16 weeks gestation, the children's mothers had an amniocentesis test, which involves collecting samples of the fluid that bathes the womb. The researchers measured levels of testosterone in the fluid and have since discovered intriguing links between those levels and behaviour.
"The higher the child's pre-natal testosterone" Professor Baron-Cohen told me, "the slower they were to develop socially. They showed, for example, less eye contact at their first birthday". They also had a smaller vocabulary when they were toddlers and showed less empathy when they were primary school age.
On the other hand he found that being exposed to higher levels of testosterone in the womb seems to enhance some spatial abilities. "Children with higher levels of pre-natal testosterone were faster to find specific shapes hidden within an overall design."

On US Infant Mortality

Why is the US infant mortality rate so high?  The international rankings place US somewhere in the vicinity of Croatia, despite the US being about three times as wealthy.  A new study by Alice Chen, Emily Oster and Heidi Williams uses microdata to compare the US with Finland (picked for having very low infant mortality rates) and Austria (picked for both representing the average in Europe and for data comparability). 

The study suggests a greater role for post-neonatal mortality (deaths in months one to  twelve) than earlier studies which focused more on neonatal mortality rates.  It  concludes that the post-neonatal disadvantage of the US is driven:

almost exclusively by excess inequality in the US: infants born to white, college-educated, married US mothers have similar mortality to advantaged women in Europe. Our results suggest that high mortality in less advantaged groups in the postneonatal period is an important contributor to the US infant mortality disadvantage.

In other words, the fates of infants born to less advantaged women in Austria and Finland are better, on average, than the fates of infants born to similarly less advantaged women in the US. 

Why that is the case isn't completely clear from the study.  For example, identifying the causes of death after the neonatal period is helpful, but not completely so.  My guess is that part of the difference lies in the fact that the less advantaged groups in the US are less likely to have low-cost access to health care or a permanent relationship with a health care provider. 

The concrete recommendation the authors of the study make focus on the idea of home nurse visits for new parents:

Identifying particular policies which could be eff ective is beyond the scope of this paper and is an area that deserves more research attention. One policy worth mentioning is home nurse visits. Both Finland and Austria, along with much of the rest of Europe, have policies which bring nurses or other health professionals to visit parents and infants at home. These visits combine well-baby checkups with caregiver advice and support. While such small scale programs exist in the US, they are far from universal, although provisions of the A ffordable Care Act will expand them to some extent. 

Randomized evaluations of such programs in the US have shown evidence of mortality reductions, notably from causes of death we identify as important such as SIDS and accidents.

At least in Finland (I'm not sure about Austria) these operate in conjunction with the ante-natal clinics, as part of a process which begins before the woman gives birth and continues with checkups by specialized nurses, first at the home of the family and later at the same clinics that were used for ante-natal care.  Put in another way, all this is an example of accessible health care.  

Here Be Dragons. What US Conservatives Think About US Liberals.

"Here Be Dragons" is what was assumed to have been written on the old maps when the mapmaker didn't know anything about some far distant area.  I always loved that optimistic statement!  The dragons must be somewhere, after all.  But it looks as if the only place where that sentence truly was written was on one old globe.

I was reminded of those lovely dragons when I read this article about how American conservatives view American liberals.  Two snippets:

Here’s the view from the Heritage Foundation: Liberalism creates self-indulgent, licentious hedonists willing to cede every other kind of freedom to an increasingly authoritarian government.
“Give up your economic freedom, give up your political freedom, and you will be rewarded with license,” said Heritage’s David Azerrad, describing the reigning philosophy of the left. “It’s all sex all the time. It’s not just the sex itself—it’s the permission to indulge.”

And:

But liberalism isn’t just about pleasure-seeking and moral relativity: The oppressive nature of liberal government has crept into our popular culture as well, warns Voegeli, senior editor of the Claremont Review of Books. Coupled with the demand for tolerance and self-actualization is the growing tyranny of political correctness.
According to liberals’ worldview, “humans are too psychologically frail to maintain their self-esteem when faced with harsh criticism,” he said.
“Fairness then requires protection against not only sticks and stones, but against names, dirty looks, inappropriate laughter, white privilege, and ‘mansplaining’ that could generate a feeling of the inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect people’s hearts and minds in a way unlikely to ever be undone,” Voegeli concluded.
Nothing less than the future of freedom as we know it is at stake. “What will then be left of what Madison called ‘the vigilant and manly spirit which actuates the people of America, the spirit which nourishes freedom and in return is nourished by it’?” wondered Azerrad.

The emphasis is mine.

This is fascinating stuff.  I never realized that I'm fleeing freedom and have lost my manly and vigilant spirit or that I was getting so much hot sex that my ability to take any kind of criticism has been sucked out of me. 

Then, of course, my map would have the dragons in a completely different place, because freedom for Mr. Azerrad or Mr. Voegeli means something rather different than freedom for women or racial minorities or poor people etc.  Indeed, descriptions of the above type must imagine what dragons might look like, what they might eat, how they might fly, how they might procreate and so on.  When that information is lacking, make assumptions!

And the same could go in reverse.  Knowing that hampers my gleeful writing here.  But at least I have learned something about a few on the US right edge:  They think liberals are willing to give up everything for sex* (even though my following various events suggests that newsworthy sexual escapades and even sexual crimes are certainly at least as common among Republican politicians and clergy as they are among Democratic politicians and clergy, and probably more so) and they seem to have a very specific definition of "freedom."

I'm not  sure what "freedom" means in Republicanese,  but it might mean power in the hands of a particular group of people and not in the hands of other groups of people.  The latter groups are expected to meekly accept their places in the hierarchy, led by others and managed by conservative religions.

That came across all Marxist!  Gulp.  I'm not a Marxist, though he did ask some of the right questions.  In fact, I'm probably not even a liberal, what with a dearth of sexual escapades and no obvious desire to have the whole world run by governments (or the corporations or the various religious bosses).

The liberal dragons drawn on those conservative maps are weird stereotypes.  The same would be equally true of conservative dragons drawn on liberal maps, or at least somewhat true.  That is sad, because the lack of proper communication is one reason for the infected politics of this country today.

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*This one makes me a bit confused.  Notice that it's the political right which is the home of those who write diatribes (content warning for those two) about the need for women to take responsibility for becoming victims of sexual violence and notice that the concerns about sexual violence are portrayed as political correctness gone amok.  Then there's the idea that the alleged victims of sexual violence exaggerate, label bad sex as rape and so on.  As far as I can tell all this comes from rather righty places.

So the definition of who is entitled to licentiousness and/or safety might matter in understanding the concerns in the quote.

The Fox Guys Just Can't Help Themselves

Which this story shows about two Fox news male hosts on "The Five:"

Kimberly Guilfoyle took a moment to salute Major Mariam Al Mansouri, who reportedly led her country's airstrikes Monday against the Islamic State. Guilfoyle noted how rich it was that an Arab woman was leading the charge against the militant group, given that women aren't even allowed to drive in some countries in the region.
"The problem is after she bombed it she couldn't park it," co-host Greg Gutfield quipped. "I salute her."
"Would that be considered boobs on the ground or no?" Eric Bolling chimed in.

Miraculous comments!  To combine a situation where women aren't allowed to be in most societal roles with old stale sexist stereotypes and lewd comments...  I wonder how the brains of Eric and Greg actually operate, especially given that all this is about aerial attacks against a war-torn country and against a group which enslaves women, children and old people, after killing their prime age male relatives,  and which has recently put to death a female human rights lawyer.

This isn't even about inappropriateness or tone-deafness.  I truly can't imagine how someone would  come up with those particular jokes in that context. 

How does the internal conversation go:  "Well, those Muslim countries really are awful about the way they treat women.  But let's insert a few jokes about how even crack pilots can't park if they are female and about the fact that women have bigger breasts than men!  That way we show...what?  That Greg and Eric really do understand why the Saudis don't let women drive cars?"

The Answer to the Universe And Everything: Blackcurrant Juice

Is not 42.  It's blackcurrant juice.  Well, blackcurrant juice is as good an answer as any I can think of.  It also happens to be what I'm drinking right now.

That paragraph is offered as a humble parable of some of what's going on in our public conversations.

Take the Emma Watson post I wrote below.  I kept it back for a few days, I used multiple respectable sources and so on.  But then we learn that the site itself is a hoax site, except that it's a hoax site in a deeper sense than wanting to, say, cause havoc among the 4Chan lot.  It's a hoax about a hoax about a hoax?  And I'm not at all sure who it is intended to hurt or if that even matters.  It's so meta that there's nowhere further out to go, no way to wrap everything into an even larger cloak of opinions, emotions, static and clickbaits, no way to dance even faster on that narrow fence between reality and something with pink clowns and frilly monsters.

Now that I got that off my chest let's see if I can write anything real.

Emma Watson, the UN Speech And Nude Pictures. The Art of Silencing.

Lewis's Law:

The comments thread on any article about feminism justifies feminism

That's about right, based on my experience of too many hours spent on reading the comments threads.  Not all the comments are just plain misogynists but a very large percentage of them are.  Then there are the comments about feminism as a cancer on the body politics, something more dangerous than wars and epidemics and extreme Islamist takeover fears (though at least the feminazis get properly squashed by that last nightmare).

That's the background to the most recent story about Emma Watson who played Hermione in the Harry Potter movies.*  She gave a speech to the United Nations.  The speech is well worth reading in its entirety, because though it's not deep in research or in information it makes the case for more need for women's and men's rights in this world quite well.

What happened next?  This:  The merry boyz at the hacker site 4Chan decided to show Emma who really is the boss in this world by informing all of us* that nude pictures of her would soon be made available.  The justification seems to be in her daring to give that speech.  As a deleted comment at Gawker supposedly stated: 

“She makes stupid feminist speeches at UN, and now her nudes will be online,” one comment allegedly read, adding that the images are set to appear in under five days.

And 

The site threatening Watson was greeted with glee on 4chan and Reddit, where commenters explicitly stated their hope that the threats would force her to abandon her feminist campaigning. "If only her nudes got leaked and she had the load on her face. Her feminism kick would be over," a commenter wrote. "If this is true her recent feminism rally is going to be shutdown hard," wrote another. "Feminism," one 4chan user opined, "is a growing cancer."

There you have it.  Now the 4Chan and Reddit brigades are not representative of all mankind (used properly, for once!).  But we don't need very many people willing to smear someone's reputation on the Internet or to pass on false rumors about her death or to threaten her with death or rape to make public speaking on certain topics pretty expensive for women like Emma Watson.

Indeed, the only deeper motivation for all that I see is the idea of silencing such voices.  If they only were silent!  Mary Beard has written extensively on the possibility that the Internet harassment of women and of feminists is  about silencing people by making the costs of speaking very high.

A shallower analysis suggests that the idea of nude pictures of women is somehow the proper punishment to feminist speech.  A nude woman cannot be feminist, nudity is bad, it takes away a "good" woman's reputation.  But why would the boys (and girls?) at 4Chan think so?

My guess is that some of them do think so, because women are either whores or Madonnas and as we know Virgin Mary never said anything except "your will shall be done" and whores are raucous.  So silence is what good women should cover themselves with.

On the other hand, the move to publish nude pictures of Emma Watson (whether they exist or not) is also to declare public ownership of her sexuality.  Any man can ogle at her and she cannot stop them!

The private and public ownership models of women's sexuality are used side by side on this old earth.  Thus, we get the nude pictures of women who are deemed to be publicly owned and we get the color-coded burqas in Mosul under the Islamic State for married and unmarried women.  So that everyone knows which ones have not yet been doled out to their proper private owners and are therefore available?

I'm probably over-analyzing the reasons that makes a bunch of teenaged boyz feel powerful on the net.  But even if they are teenagers who haven't really thought all this through very carefully the outcomes are the same:  A breach in that public/private ownership wall, the hope that someone's reputation can be ground to shards under the big boots, the unthinking equation of equal gender rights with feminazi thuggery and so on.

For note that the response from those who seem to disagree with Watson's message is not to discuss the message, to debate it, to suggest alternatives or different angles.  It's just to punish Watson for speaking.  It also suggests a vast lack of information about how the majority of women on this earth live and how limited their rights are and how little they are respected as anything but fertility resources.  An American privileged point for misogyny.

This could be a storm in the teacup in the sense that we cannot tell how common the views and behaviors of the 4Chan people are.  But that's the general problem with Internet debates, with what is stressed and with what slides by almost unnoticed.

For different reactions to these events, check out here and here.
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*Added later:  Even if the website threatening to release the Emma Watson nude pictures is itself a hoax as this article argues, the  analysis in this post applies to public speech by women on the net.

Things To Read 9/23/14. On The Angry-Black-Woman Meme, What Americans Deem Morally Acceptable, Gaming and Misogyny And Other Topics

This poor post puts together all my little ideas which were not watered enough to become sturdy trees on this here blog.  Also a few smaller items which I found interesting.  Much of this is depressing stuff but not all, partly because several items are about something that wouldn't even have been talked about a generation ago.  Now enough people get enraged and the conversation happens.


1.  The discussion following this article by Alessandra Stanley on Shonda Rhimes.  Here are two takes on it:  Melissa Harris-Perry does a reversal of the "angry black woman" meme and Margaret Sullivan addresses general issues with the review.  The piece also has a response from Stanley.

2.  Some interesting statistical and survey pieces (yes, Virginia, statistics can be delicious and exciting!).  First, this piece on the disappearing US economic middle class is worth reading and thinking about.  I haven't spent enough time figuring out if everything relevant is included but the statistics show that something changed around year 2000.

Second, the responses to this Gallup survey about the ethics and morality of various items is also interesting.  The differences between what Democrats, Independents and Republicans find most revolting is very informative:

Republicans, independents, and Democrats have differing views of the morality of several issues. Democrats are more likely than Republicans to consider issues like divorce, gambling, medical research using embryos, and having a baby outside of wedlock morally acceptable. But Republicans are more likely than Democrats to see wearing fur, the death penalty, and medical testing on animals as morally acceptable. Independents tend to fall in the middle of the two groups.

At least the vast majority of Americans finds birth control morally AOK.  That's worth thinking about in the context of the Hobby Lobby decision and the suggestion (here) that the religious right will not be satisfied until it is their religious right to ban other people from accessing birth control.

Third, the question of the world population growth isn't as clear-cut as earlier rounds of predictions implied.  Because resource availability is linked with potential future wars and climate change and because population growth makes such wars more likely knowing about this altered prediction matters.

3.  The summer of rage in the gaming industry:  If you know nothing about this topic you might wish to begin with this calm article in the Boston Globe. Slightly less calm takes are available in large numbers.  (You might wish to think before you read those last two links.  They are pretty full of generalized misogyny.) 

Though I haven't followed the summer of rage in any great detail (lying on the grass and watching the patterns white clouds make against the blue sky is much better for one's mental health), the way things are going offers an interesting natural experiment on what happens when girls try to enter the extremist type of boys' tree-house.  It's more complicated than that, but the essential aspect of the anger is of the "barbarians are coming" type.

4.  Finally, the way New Zeeland celebrates women's suffrage.

Deciphering the Sexual Violence Views of Rush Limbaugh

Today's mood:  Grumpy

If my blog writing was based on paper sources, I would now be invisible behind skyscraper-tall piles of paper and books.  That's because so many huge and important issues are happening at the same time and each and every one demands real research, real thinking and gives me such migraines that I end up hiding under the covers.  For instance, my internal judge demands that I write on intimate partner violence, on the ethical codes of American football, on women and the Islamic State, on police power and its relation to race and sex of the people the police lords over.

So what's stopping me?  Not that this interests anyone else but it's my blog, after all, and the question interests me.  Partly what stops me is the speed with which What We Argue About changes.  By the time I've done the research and enter the room to give my speech everybody else has moved on to the bar a couple of streets away.  The work is somewhat pointless.  But the alternative (of blurting stuff out quickly) doesn't seem very pointy, either.

The other reason it seems pointless is that very wide public debates on issues such as intimate partner violence tend not to lead to sharper conclusions or agreements.  The same arguments fly past each other.  Indeed, confusion often increases, and I have a natural allergy (scales itching and falling off) to circular debates of no real intention to clarify anything.

So that's why you are getting an analysis of Rush Limbaugh's views on rape and intimate partner violence.  It's not because our Rush matters very much anymore and it's not because he is like the puppet sitting in the lap of some manipulator, made to blurt out the most extreme arguments so that other arguments look less extreme or so that his audience can feel that wonderful elation hearing their own thoughts firmly stated.

It's because what Rush says does show us one extreme stand in the debates about sexual violence, and that is concentrated in two of his utterances.

A Post Full Of Good News

Because good things do happen in this world.  The news we read focuses on the problems, the wars, the epidemics and the suffering.  This is natural and important, but once a problem has been solved, an epidemic conquered or a war ended we don't have a resting period to enjoy that.  Then the next problems, epidemics, wars and types of suffering are presented for our attention.

This is my attempt to provide a little balance.

First, the UN reports that

...the number of children under five who die each year fell by 49 per cent between 1990 and 2013, from 12.7 million to 6.3 million, saving 17,000 lives every day.
"There has been dramatic and accelerating progress in reducing mortality among children, and the data prove that success is possible even for poorly resourced countries," said Mickey Chopra, head of global health programs at the UN Children's Fund, better known as UNICEF.
The report, titled Levels and Trends in Child Mortality 2014 and compiled by UNICEF, the World Health Organisation, the World Bank, and the UN's Department of Economic and Social Affairs, said that the rate for deaths of children under five fell from 90 deaths per 1000 live births in 1990 to 46 in 2013.
Overall, in developing regions, the rate fell from 100 per 1000 live births in 1990 to 50 in 2013, the report said. In rich, developed regions, the rate fell from 15 per 1000 live births in 1990 to six in 2013. In the United States, the decline was somewhat less dramatic, from 11 per 1000 live births in 1990 to seven in 2013.

This is huge.  And wonderful.  More progress is needed, but progress has taken place.

Second, the Raiderettes, the Oakland Raiders cheerleaders, won a lawsuit about their earnings.  They finally get minimum wages for their work!

The two Raiderette cheerleaders who revolted against the team this year—suing the Oakland Raiders for paying them less than minimum wage, withholding paychecks until the end of the season, and never reimbursing them for business expenses—have declared victory. Lacy T. and Sarah G., who filed a class-action suit on behalf of their fellow Raiderettes this spring, have reached a settlement with the NFL franchise. The team will pay out a total of $1.25 million to 90 women who cheered between 2010 and 2013. That translates to an average $6,000 payout per cheerleader per season for the first three seasons covered by the suit, and an average of $2,500 each for the final season. (Right before Lacy’s lawsuit hit, the Raiders unexpectedly padded the 2013 cheerleaders’ checks with additional cash). According to Sharon Vinick, lawyer for the Raiderettes, future Raider cheerleaders will be paid minimum wage for all hours worked, receive checks every two weeks, and be reimbursed for business expenses they incur in the course of the job. 

Similar suits have been filed against the Bengals, Bills, Jets and Buccaneers.  What's so very grating about the way these cheerleaders are being paid is the contrast to the very affluent teams and the size of the paychecks they otherwise dispense.  Another lesson to note is that the small specks in the market which are individual workers cannot, all on their own, negotiate work contracts with powerful behemoths on the other side of the market, the way conservatives seem to think wage negotiations work.

Third, it's good to remember, given the recent revelations about intimate partner violence and family violence in the NFL, that US statistics suggest intimate partner violence has been getting less common over time:

From 1994 to 2011, the rate of serious intimate partner violence declined 72% for females and 64% for males.

Statistics on sexual violence can be difficult to interpret when many victims don't report crimes etc., but reporting probably has not become less frequent during the last two decades.  This suggests to me that the trend is in the right direction.  Even the very widespread and sometimes acrimonious discussions we have about intimate partner violence today are a sign of that change.  It was the silence in the past which allowed us to remain ignorant about the true extent of intimate partner violence and domestic violence.  

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Hobby Lobby. The Sequel of The Decision Tailored Narrow Enough Not To Fit Anyone But Wimminz.

Ian Millhiser writes about a new case which uses the Hobby Lobby decision to suggest that

Citing Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, the Supreme Court’s decision last June holding that the religious objections of a business’ owners could trump federal rules requiring that business to include birth control coverage in its health plan, a federal judge in Utah held last week that a member of a polygamist religious sect could refuse to testify in a federal investigation into alleged violations of child labor laws because he objects to testifying on religious grounds.

So you open the snake box and out come snakes.  Then you have to lure some of the snakes back, giving them legally different names, stating that certain rights (such as the right of children to be protected) matters more than other rights (right to hide behind your religion in everything).  And all the snakes are in a big pile and refuse to move because they were comfortable out of the box.

Which is shorthand for me not being a lawyer etcetera.  But the point stands:  You really cannot make laws about just them little ladies and you really cannot favor some religions over others when you decide that religion is a get-out-of-jail card or a substitute for taking the fifth.

Why Can't A Woman Be More Like A Man? My Review Of A UK Telegraph Article on Biological Sex Differences

This is the title of a new book about biological sex differences.  The first I heard about the book is today's article in the UK Telegraph.  The bolded bit at the beginning of the article gives us all the clickbait anyone would wish for:

Yes, it's official, men are from Mars and women from Venus, and here's the science to prove it
In his fascinating new book the developmental biologist Lewis Wolpert argues that there is actually hard science behind many of our stereotypical gender roles

After all that the article itself is quite disappointing, because everything in it is pretty old hat.  Wolpert argues that men are more promiscuous than women because of that evolutionary biology "hard science" which took a time machine and went back to prehistory and decided that the most promiscuous men left the largest numbers of children, all with hard-wired promiscuity gene.  Oh, except for the female children, of course.

Then there's the problem of trying to figure out who the men are promiscuous with if they are heterosexual.  Either women, too, are promiscuous (which even the more recent evolutionary psychology stuff admits to) or a small number of women are extremely promiscuous.

Wolpert places a lot of weight on Simon Baron-Cohen's research in this piece.  For instance, the mechanical mobile vs. face study is one in which Baron-Cohen participated:

A few hours after birth, girls are more sensitive than boys to touch, and 40 hours after birth girls look longer at a face than boys, while boys look longer at a suspended mechanical mobile.

Perhaps this study (on very young infants) has been replicated by someone later, but when I looked into it a couple of years ago I didn't find any evidence that it had ever been replicated.   The study was been criticized by Elizabeth Spelke in 2005 and by Alison Nash and Giordana Grossi in 2007.  I strongly recommend reading those criticisms, because one of the magical tricks in the writings of this field is to present a particular piece of research as the very-final-and-confirmed scientific truth when, in fact, the debate in the field continues.

Can you spot the difficulty of responding to something like this piece by Wolpert?  Almost every sentence he writes makes me think of references that show otherwise or at least cast doubt on his statements.  For instance, the stuff about women being better at empathy than men doesn't necessarily mean (if true) that the differences are inborn, and distinguishing between reported empathy and other measures of empathy may matter.

But none of that is visible in Wolpert's arguments:

Emotional differences are also manifest. Almost the opposite of aggression is empathy, an emotion that marks a fundamental difference between the two sexes, being much stronger in women. Empathy is the ability to share others’ feelings, to take a positive interest in them and to decode non-verbal emotional cues. Simon Baron-Cohen’s theory is that the female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy, while the male brain is predominantly hard-wired for systemising, that is, for understanding and building systems.

The problems with Baron-Cohen's systemising vs. emphatizing theory are many and serious.  I have written about them before, but in case you missed it, a VERY long excerpt from my files is attached to the bottom of this post.  It's important to understand what the evidence for Baron-Cohen's theory really looks like, so do take a few minutes to read that excerpt after the asterisk.*

Some Of My Pet Hates. On Twitter Opinions, On US Reactions to the Islamic State And Such.

1.  A new journalistic fashion is to  write a short piece about what people say on Twitter on some issue.  The piece begins by setting out the point of the debate or describes some recent event.  It then goes into a list of Twitter comments and presents them as --- what?  As evidence?  As opinions?

The latter, usually.  But what are we to conclude from those opinions?  That they are generally held?  That they are the most common opinions on some question?  That they are important opinions?  That they are unusual opinions?  Given by famous people?

The process of picking the Twitter opinions for such a piece is opaque.  First, Twitter opinions are not like an opinion survey.  The people who include themselves in a conversation are a self-selected bunch, to use statistical language, not a cross-section of all affected individuals.

Second, the actual opinions in some Twitter conversation don't always give the flavor of the final post.  That's because the journalist picks the interesting opinions or wants to bring out a particular point by showing the support or criticism it received.  That selection process (which is probably subconscious) means that the final sample in the piece may not look like the Twitter conversation in the actual numbers of tweets which are in support of or opposing some opinion or person.

Third, what those two points mean is that the overall meaning of what is covered in the piece is unclear.  We can't conclude that the opinions in it are common among some general population of interest, we can't conclude that the opinions in it are even the most common among Twitter users or the people in that particular discussion.

Using Twitter as a source can also be valuable, in the sense that it brings out opinions which might not otherwise be included, and writing about Twitter opinions is also meaningful when the story consists of those opinions, i.e., is about what someone famous said on Twitter etc.

That's not what I am irked by here, but the kinds of stories which add Twitter opinions as if that was additional data, not opinions, as if that was a way to show the widespread significance of some issue.

2.  The parallel use of "males-and-women" or "females-and-men" in stories about gender.  I see this a lot.  It's annoying because one could write "women-and-men" or, if absolutely necessary, "females-and-males." 

And guess what's really weird?  This particular mistake is by far most common in pieces by meninists and others bent towards that way of thinking.  So common that I wonder if it's a coded message or something!  Here comes the biological essentialist telling us why men rule and women drool.

3.  The last but certainly not the least of my current irritations is the way political fronts arrange themselves neatly by opinion into camps on the Islamic State question.  Bomb that demonic area back into stone age goes the right-wing message, just a little sharpened by me.  And the equally sharpened-by-me left-wing message seems to be that the US is every bit as bad as the Islamic State or if not the US then Saudi Arabia so what's the difference?

There's a prior readiness for those fairly absolute stances, and some of that is because of the way the right-wing belligerence of the past has fed into the discussion by creating "Islamophobic" prejudice which then has created a particular defensive response from the left-wing which has contributed to the right-wing arguments and so the circle continues.

The problem with such absolute stances is that they impede the analysis of more detailed data or arguments and make nuanced debate almost impossible.   They can also create very odd ethical bedfellows.  For instance, suddenly women's rights matter to some in the US extreme Christian fringe or matter less to some in the US social justice left-wing because different fears are weighed in those cups of the scale and some fears take precedence.

I get the great difficulty of trying to have a more nuanced conversation.  Our hind-brains have been triggered to take over  (danger!danger!).  Sadly, that tends to result in dualistic thinking of good and evil, of what matters and what doesn't, and often a forcing of everything to line up with either good or with evil.

Speed Posting, 9/12/14: The First WOC To Lead the American Bar Association, Oscar Pistorius and Ray Rice

Paulette Brown is the first African-American woman elected to lead the American Bar Association.

Oscar Pistorius has been found guilty of culpable homicide in the death of his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp.  "Culpable homicide" in South African law is roughly equal to manslaughter.  His actual sentence could be as long as fifteen years or he could even avoid prison altogether, depending on the judge's decision.  The decision not to find Pistorius guilty of premeditated murder hinges on this:

In South Africa, a perpetrator can be convicted of murder if he or she had foreseen that their actions would lead to someone's death and still proceeded with that course of action.
Ms Masipa said she could find no proof that Pistorius had the requisite intention to "kill the deceased, or anyone else for that matter". 

Legal expert Prof Pierre de Vos tweeted : "Not sure rejection of [murder charge] is correct here.
"Surely if you shoot into a door of a small toilet and know somebody behind door you foresee and accept possibility of killing?"
But the judge clearly said on both Thursday and Friday that the prosecution had not proven beyond reasonable doubt that the athlete had foreseen that he would kill someone when he fired four shots through the door of his toilet in the early hours of Valentine's Day 2013.

In the US it's difficult not to see that case as relating to the question of intimate partner abuse and how famous people are treated when they are found to have committed such abuse or even the death of the abused.  But the South African context is somewhat different:

There is a perception here in South Africa that most crime is committed by poor black people targeting the white middle classes or the wealthy elite.
Cue "white fear" - a phrase used to refer to the rich white haves in society who live behind high walls, afraid of the intruder who may come in the night. It was the threat of this intruder that apparently gripped Pistorius with fear on that tragic morning.

It's still hard to say whether Reeva Steenkamp received justice.  I get that legal decisions must be framed on law and evidence and don't always match our innate feelings of what would have been just.

Talking about intimate partner abuse, the Ray Rice case in the United States has provoked a lot of debate about what Janay Palmer and the survivors or victims of abuse in general should have done or should do (and a lot of debate about the National Football League's values, culture and general behaviors). 

I'm still trying to write something very long on intimate partner violence in general, but certain powerful and emotional pieces are worth reading both about the reception of the news by some who would defend Rice or blame his then-girlfriend-now-wife and the dilemma of trying to understand victims who don't leave the abuser or who refuse to charge the abuser: 

First, on the question why victims don't leave their abusers, read this and this.  Second, on the views of some black men who take Rice's side and what's wrong with those views, read this.

Note that all those pieces try to increase our understanding of these cases.  They are not about what courts should decide in any particular case.  Neither do the "why I stayed" pieces mean that the society shouldn't interfere or that the matters are somehow private business.


  

Meanwhile, in the state of Missouri, contraception and abortions are bad, guns good

This post puts together three stories I read about Missouri yesterday.  The first is about a legal case where Paul and Theresa Wieland don't want contraceptive coverage to be available for their daughters who are covered in the parents' group health insurance policy.  The daughters are twenty, nineteen and thirteen.  The couple's lawyer argues that 

“The employees are to Hobby Lobby what the daughters are to Paul and Teresa Wieland,” Timothy Belz, an attorney from the conservative Thomas More Society, who represents the Wielands, told a panel of three federal judges on the appeals court in St. Louis on Monday. A district court had dismissed the case, saying the Wielands lacked standing to sue.

 Whatever the legal merits of that case might be, the idea that parents and employers should have the right to determine whether their adult children or employees, respectively, are allowed to use contraceptives and that both of these are about religious freedom strikes me as stupid.  It's not religious freedom for the adult children or the employees.  But I guess it would be viewed as nothing but religious freedom in a feudal society.

Missouri legislature has been busy creating laws which keep women safe!  In the first such law:

 Missouri women seeking abortions will face one of the nation's most stringent waiting periods, after state lawmakers overrode the governor's veto to enact a 72-hour delay that includes no exception for cases of rape or incest.

Supporters of the law call it a reflection period.  In case a woman was impulse-buying an abortion and needed time to reflect on that.

Another new law is also about the safety of women and other people in Missouri! It's a new gun law which makes it easier for people to have guns on them:

 Missouri lawmakers expanded the potential for teachers to bring guns to schools and for residents to openly carry firearms, in a vote Thursday that capped a two-year effort by the Republican-led Legislature to expand gun rights over the objection of the Democratic governor.
The new law will allow specially trained school employees to carry concealed guns on campuses. It also allows anyone with a concealed weapons permit to carry guns openly, even in cities or towns with bans against the open carrying of firearms. The age to obtain a concealed weapons permit also will drop from 21 to 19.

These three stories are not about the same issues.  But they all reflect the political power distribution in the state of Missouri:  Who has the right to self-defense, who has the right to decide who has the right to self-defense and which types of self-defense (or even aggression) are supported by the powers that be. 

How To Read Reports: The New Unicef Report On Violence Against Children

I learned about this new report at Think Progress:

One in ten girls has been sexually assaulted. Six in ten children are regularly beaten by their caregivers. Half of all girls between the ages of 15 and 19 believe a man is “justified” in hitting his wife. Nearly one in five homicide victims are children.
Those are just a few of the findings in a new report from UNICEF that details the “shocking prevalence” of violence and abuse against children around the world. The study — which represents the largest-ever compilation of information on the scope of child abuse — draws on data from 190 countries, and concludes this type of violence has been so normalized that many children are growing up with the assumption it’s just the way the world is supposed to work.

The report has important information.  It tells us where homicide of children (and especially of boys) is common, for example.  That would be in the Caribbean and Latin America.  This should be viewed against the background of high homicide rates in that area in general.  The report tells us that this relatively small area is responsible for 32% of all homicides on this planet (though I'm not sure how the planet is defined here), and speculates that the reasons are in criminal gang activity and the wide availability of firearms.  It's of interest to note that ten countries account for more than one half of all child homicide victims, with Nigeria leading by a wide margin, followed by Brazil, India and the Democratic Republic of Congo.  The United States gets to be included among those ten countries, too, even though it's pretty different in economic and power terms.

So one lesson the report teaches us is that children are not immune from the general levels of violence in an area.  And neither are children immune from the cultural and religious beliefs of their demographic groups.  Thus, the quoted figure of almost half of all girls (44%) between the ages of 15 and 19 believing that a man is justified in hitting his wife (if she burns his dinner, if she neglects the children, if she goes out without his permission etc.) is because that's what the cultures of the interviewed girls believe.  And the boys have similar beliefs, on average, though in several countries the percentage of girls who believe in the husband being entitled to beat the wife is higher than the percentage of boys who believe the same thing.

But here's where I got a bit worried about the report:  Several of its tables quote data separately for various areas and then for the whole world.  The thing is, the underlying data does not cover most of Europe (it does cover Eastern Europe) and neither does it cover the United States or Canada (or Russia, I think).  That's because the data predominantly comes from lower-income countries:

Given the general lack of uniformity in the way data on violence against children are collected, this report relies mainly on information gathered through internationally comparable sources, including the UNICEF-supported Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS), the US Agency for International Development (USAID)-supported Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), the Global School-based Student Health Surveys (GSHS) and the Health behaviour in School-aged Children Study (HbSC).

These international survey programmes have been almost exclusively implemented in low- and middle-income countries (with the exception of the HbSC).

So while the focus of this report is largely on these countries, this should in no way be interpreted to suggest that violence against children is not found in high-income nations.

To that end, the report also uses country-specific facts or evidence derived from small-scale studies and national surveys to shed light on certain aspects or circumstances from a variety of countries for which representative or comparable data are unavailable.

The omission of most of the high-income countries doesn't make what is included any less important.  But it does mean that we cannot interpret the averages in the report as pertaining to the world.  The "world" includes all countries, and the views on, say, how justified husbands are to beat their wives are unlikely to be exactly the same in Europe and North America as they are, say, in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The speed with which journalists are now forced to work is probably behind the fact that I've recently spotted a lot of similar problems in published reports or discussions of reports (such as the Rotherham one on child sexual exploitation).  If all you have time to look at is the press release, the press release better be a very good one.  In this case the report itself seems to equate the concept of world with the countries included in the report.  That would not be a problem if the omitted countries were, on average, like the included countries.  But they are not .

---
Added later:  Why would this minor thing bother me so much that I wrote about it?  Because the more the speed of news delivery increases the more the audience will be left with false or at least somewhat misleading information.  That's not what information dissemination is supposed to do.

Climbing the Mars Hill. Mark Driscoll's Misogynist Church Eight Years Later.

I wrote about the Mars Hill church and its creator, Mark Driscoll, eight years ago on this very blog!  You can even read that antique post. 

The Mars Hill church is a good case study on extreme religionists and what makes their little hearts thump and their little minds tick. 

I sometimes suspect (fairly often, actually) that one big draw of extremist literal interpretations of Islam, Christianity and Judaism is the very literal permissions the holy books give to hate on women and to control women and to state that gods want women subjugated.  That is, I think some people, especially misogynists, are drawn to those interpretations because they sanctify their unpleasant bundles of feelings about women and sex and give permission to hate on women.  All this could work in the reverse direction, naturally, so that someone who finds the literal God or Allah then just realizes that now he or she must hate on women and build them tiny little corrals in which they can breed for the purposes of one sire.  The reverse direction seems more likely to me.

So how is the church of misogyny and homophobia working out for Mark Driscoll, it's sole progenitor?  It's done pretty well over the years.  Lots of people have joined Driscoll's flock of true believers.  But not that long ago someone found that Driscoll has been foaming-at-the-mouth about the perfidy of the wimminz on the Internet.  Under a pen-name.  Here are a few examples:

Mark Driscoll has long been a controversial figure, whether posting on Facebook about effeminate worship leaders, or saying wives had to take some of the blame for their husband's infidelity if they had 'let themselves go'.
Revelations this week that the Mars Hill pastor had in 2000 posted a series of condemning messages online under a pseudonym were therefore met with almost universal horror.
The series of posts, which have been removed from message boards, reveal a tirade of angry rants.
Beginning with the words "We live in a completely pussified nation," Driscoll – under the name 'William Wallace II' – initiated a thread in which he condemns the majority of Christian men for being "Promise Keeping homoerotic worship loving mama's boy sensitive emasculated neutered exact male replica evangellyfish."
According to Driscoll, "It all began with Adam, the first of the pussified nation, who kept his mouth shut and watched everything fall headlong down the slippery slide of hell/feminism when he shut his mouth and listened to his wife who thought Satan was a good theologian when he should have lead her and exercised his delegated authority as king of the planet.
"As a result, he was cursed for listening to his wife and every man since has been his pussified sit quietly by and watch a nation of men be raised by bitter penis envying burned feministed single mothers."

Driscoll ended his comment by noting that he expected many women to disagree with him, but "they like Eve should not speak on this matter".
"And, many men will also disagree," he added, "which is further proof of the pussified epidemic having now become air born and universal."
 

The linked article states that these revelations were met with horror.  But surely everyone knew what Driscoll preaches?  I seem to have figured it out eight years ago.  Is it the stronger language that makes the new revelations so horrifying?  That we see his Freudian slip hanging tattered under his priestly robes?  Or is it that we cannot criticize someone's religious beliefs until that someone says the same thing with nasty slurs?

Whatever.  Driscoll isn't doing quite so well right now.  He was removed from the Act 29 network in August, and now his evangelical mega-church is shutting down some of its member churches:

The Washington-based evangelical megachurch Mars Hill is shutting (some of) its doors. Following controversy over founder Mark Driscoll’s well-documented homophobic and sexist remarks, church officials announced over the weekend that they would be closing several of Mars Hills 15 Pacific Northwest branches, citing financial difficulties caused by “negative media attention.” Several staff and clergy members have also been laid off. At the end of last month, Driscoll himself announced that he would be taking a six-week-long leave of absence.

Men are More Harassed On The Net Than Women. So Cathy Young Tells Us.

She does so in a recent Daily Beast article with the title "Men Are Harassed More Than Women Online."

It's worth thinking about that title, even knowing that Young herself didn't pick it.  That's because the only evidence she offers for men being harassed MORE than women is a Demos study, which argues that famous men receive more Twitter abuse than famous women.  More about that study later.

The rest of Young's argument consists of anecdotes about individual men who have been harassed (and does not consist of of anecdotes about individual women who have been harassed), the extent of the harassment they have suffered, examples of feminists harassing anti-feminists and so on, as well as the fact that a sizable minority of what Young regards as harassers are female, even though the majority are male.

She then tells us to ignore the 2006 study which found chat room bots given female usernames receiving twenty-five times more threatening or sexually explicit messages than bots with male and neutral usernames.  And why should we ignore the study?  Because Young tells us that the Internet has changed since 2006.  But the study wasn't about something which could be affected by such change, given that it isolated one single question:  That about the impact of being taken for a woman rather than a man on the net, all other aspects being held constant.

Unless we assume that the current cross-section of Internet users is quite different from the 2006 version, with far less sexist behavior, it's difficult to see why that study wouldn't still matter.  It's not a decisive study, of course, but then neither are the studies Young prefers.

She refers to two studies.  The first one is a Pew Institute study about Internet use with a focus on privacy and security of Internet use.  That study has a question (p. 94) which relates to Internet harassment and stalking but does not define these terms to the respondents and does not distinguish stranger harassment from harassment by acquaintances (including people from the respondent's past) or even by advertisers.  Eleven percent of the men interviewed and thirteen percent of the women interviewed stated that they had experienced Internet harassment or stalking.

The study also asks (p. 98) whether the respondent agreed with the statement "Something happened online which led me to physical danger."  Five percent of the female respondents and three percent of the male respondents answered in the affirmative.  But it's hard to know what specific types of examples those answers might have reflected.  Anything that could lead a person to physical danger could qualify, not just harassment by strangers on the net.

Whatever our interpretation of that study, it doesn't demonstrate that men are harassed more on the net than women, right?

That assertion is based on the Demos study.  I tried to find the study at the link given here but was unsuccessful. Thus, what I have to say about the study is based on the summary information the people at Demos have provided and a couple of takes on the study found elsewhere.

The Rotherham Report On Child Sexual Exploitation. My Analysis.

1.  The Events

Welcome to Rotherham, England, a manufacturing town near Sheffield.  Right now the town is famous for a reason it would not have chosen:  The Rotherham Report:  In this town of 250,000 inhabitants at least 1400 young girls were sexually groomed, raped, gang-raped and pimped over a period of sixteen years while many of the authorities responsible for protecting the girls did nothing or actively suppressed information about the wide-spread abuse.

Fourteen hundred is probably a low estimate of the extent of this abuse.  But even that number turns out to mean one new victim every few days over that time period. Professor Alexis Jay, the author of the report, quotes several examples of the abuse these girls faced and the responses of the police and the local politicians to earlier reports on the same problem:

At least 1,400 children were subjected to appalling sexual exploitation in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013, a report has found.
Children as young as 11 were raped by multiple perpetrators, abducted, trafficked to other cities in England, beaten and intimidated, it said.

...

The inquiry team found examples of "children who had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone".

...

Failures by those charged with protecting children happened despite three reports between 2002 and 2006 which both the council and police were aware of, and "which could not have been clearer in the description of the situation in Rotherham".
Prof Jay said the first of these reports was "effectively suppressed" because senior officers did not believe the data. The other two were ignored, she said.
The inquiry team found that in the early-2000s when a group of professionals attempted to monitor a number of children believed to be at risk, "managers gave little help or support to their efforts".
The report revealed some people at a senior level in the police and children's social care thought the extent of the problem was being "exaggerated".

What accounts for the way these children (mostly girls (1)) were failed by the society?

These were broken girls to begin with, most of them, often coming from homes with mental illness, drug abuse and other problems, frequently taken into care by the social services.  These were the kind of girls who traditionally are not allowed to have a childhood.  These were the kind of girls who act out, who believe the grooming for sex to be love, the love they so desperately seek for.  These were the kind of girls the police sometimes regarded as adults, fully able to consent to sex with strangers.  And these were often the kind of girls that social workers despair over:  Difficult cases, refusing help, refusing to name their torturers for fear of further violence to them or their families or because the tainted "love" they received was taken as real love and affection or because they had been beaten and dulled into slave-like submission.

But in the Rotherham case these were also white girls and their descriptions of the perpetrators of the abuse singled out men of Asian origin.  Hence the second proffered explanation for the societal failure here has to do with the fear of being accused of racism(2) and the fear of hurting community relations between different races:

The majority of those behind the abuse were described as Asian, while the victims were young white girls.
Yet the report found that councillors failed to engage with the town's Pakistani-heritage community during the inquiry period.
Some councillors were said to have hoped the issue would "go away", thinking it was a "one-off problem".
The report said several staff members were afraid they would be labelled racist if they identified the race of the perpetrators, while others said they were instructed by their managers not to do so.
Several councillors interviewed believed highlighting the race element would "give oxygen" to racist ideas and threaten community cohesion.

To understand the reference to the failure of "engaging with the town's Pakistani-heritage community" can be difficult for an outsider.  My reading suggests that the two communities were viewed as two separate worlds and that the "ambassadors" from the Pakistani community were old men, imams and wealthy businessmen.  They were the ones who appear to have interpreted that community to the rest of Rotherham and they were the ones who were deemed the proper representatives of that community.  Several articles address the sexual abuse of Pakistani girls in Rotherham and elsewhere and point out that the women in that community were not able to get their voices heard.

What this means is that we don't know the number of Pakistani victims in Rotherham.  But whites are the majority group in that town and thus would be most of the victims of any group of sexual abusers.  In short, the alleged perpetrators didn't have to "target" white girls for their victims to mostly consist of white girls.

Come On, Give Us The Names, Senator Gillibrand!

This is the current storm in the teacup of US gender politics.  Or the teacup in the storm, depending on how you view the case of what Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) wrote in her new book Off The Sidelines and what happened then.

Her book states that several (male?) senators made inappropriate comments about her body, her weight and her looks:

“Good thing you’re working out, because you wouldn’t want to get porky,” Gillibrand revealed a senator said to her in a story in People.
“Don’t lose too much weight now. I like my girls chubby,” Gillibrand said another senator said to her.
“You know, Kirsten, you’re even pretty when you’re fat,” Gillibrand added another senator said to her.

Now at least a couple of Beltway Boyz want her to name names.  If there are no names, it didn't happen.  And if she is not willing to name names why put the stuff in her book in the first place? What if these were Democratic senators, and Gillibrand is protecting them?  What if she is trying to "pull a Hillary on us" (a move named after Hillary Clinton) by implying that she's going to be the brave girl who will climb into the old boys' tree-house, and also into power, while the old boys aren't allowed to defend themselves.

All this is boring (Would you name someone who has a lot of power over you or with whom you need to work closely in the future?  But might you still not want to point out stuff about the culture in which people in the US Senate work?) and impossible to prove or disprove without more evidence.

But the events are still worth examining.  For instance, the demand for naming names is aimed at Gillibrand, not at the unnamed senators she writes about.  This suggests to me that Gillibrand is not believed.

That took me on a detour to an article which uses transgender people to learn more about gender roles and the reactions to someone's gender:

Ben Barres is a biologist at Stanford who lived and worked as Barbara Barres until he was in his forties. For most of his career, he experienced bias, but didn’t give much weight to it—seeing incidents as discrete events. (When he solved a tough math problem, for example, a professor said, “You must have had your boyfriend solve it.”) When he became Ben, however, he immediately noticed a difference in his everyday experience: “People who don't know I am transgendered treat me with much more respect,” he says. He was more carefully listened to and his authority less frequently questioned. He stopped being interrupted in meetings. At one conference, another scientist said, "Ben gave a great seminar today—but then his work is so much better than his sister's." (The scientist didn't know Ben and Barbara were the same person.) “This is why women are not breaking into academic jobs at any appreciable rate,” he wrote in response to Larry Summers’s famous gaffe implying women were less innately capable at the hard sciences. “Not childcare. Not family responsibilities,” he says. “I have had the thought a million times: I am taken more seriously.”

Bolds are mine.  It's a detour because the idea of women having less authority, the idea that women are questioned more and believed less readily is one which rings a very loud bell in my own experiences. *

But it's only a detour, because the Gillibrand example is about something different than the questioning of her expertise as a politician, and one could argue that to suggest that a group of eighty male Senators (out of a total of one hundred) contains at least three guys who make inappropriate comments to women smears all the men in the Senate.  At least it gives each of them a probability of 0.04 of being the kind of guy who talks about a woman's porkiness.  I wouldn't worry about that probability myself.

Onwards and upwards, my friends.  Suppose that these events did happen.  Are they just examples of how men talk to each other, innocent quips not intended to mean anything?  I read that comment somewhere.  Let's try it out.  Imagine a heterosexual male senator telling another heterosexual male senator:  "You know Bob/Jim/Bill, you're even pretty when you're fat."  Or:  "Don't lose too much weight now.  I like my boys chubby."

Or do a gender reversal on those comments by assuming that the recipient is a man and the commenter a woman.

The first of the three comments linked to above might pass those sieves or colanders.  The other two certainly would not.
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*I'd like everybody to be equally questioned.  It makes me very prepared and guarantees that I fairly rarely spout on stuff I know nothing about.  On the other hand, it takes a lot of time and the hurdles of disbelief really get tiresome as the decades roll by, not to mention wondering what opportunities all this has made me miss.

Convert Or Kill Them

That's the advice Phil Robertson, a reality television star, gave Sean Hannity on the Hannity show when it comes to the Islamic State.  Now why anyone would interview a reality television star on the best US foreign policy with regards to the Islamic State beats me.

The other odd thing about that advice is that it exactly mirrors the views of the Islamic State, which has offered various religious minorities those very options:  Either convert or lose your life.

The utterances of Phil Robertson don't have the same weight as the utterances of the spokesmen of the Islamic State.  Neither do American right-wing Christians kill people the way the soldiers of the Islamic State do.  But it's still worth pointing out the mirroring:  You (the other people) work for Satan, we work for the real god.  All the billions of people in the middle do not matter for either side.  Not really.

None of this is intended as some sort of a "we do it, too" defense of the horrors that the Islamic State is carrying out.  But the reasons why it uses the media to advertize its cruelty are much more complicated than Phil Robertson or Sean Hannity understand, and the best long-run US reaction is very unlikely to be proposed on Fox.

Happy Labor Day

Things to think about:


The Five Day Workweek
The Forty-Hour Week
Annual paid vacation time
Paid parental leave
Safety Rules At Work
Guaranteed Minimum Wage

Some of those exist in various places, some of those used to exist but seem to be passing or never existed at all.  All of those allow us ordinary humans to be productive in the society while also having families, fragile bodies and the need to spend a few minutes of the day admiring the beautiful sky.

Add to the list.