Scott Walker and The Search For Truth

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, one of the Ringwraiths of the capitalist boyz' league (coughKochcough), has plans for the mission statement of the University of Wisconsin:

Gov. Scott Walker's proposed budget calls for essentially removing the public service language from the University of Wisconsin System's mission to focus more on workforce development, according to language released Wednesday morning.

Is the objective of a university to create worker drones?  Other hilarious changes in the mission statement include removing the goal of searching for the truth.

Walker is a likely contender for the next US presidential elections.  One day we may all learn how to please the firms best in our college careers!  What an irritating thought.

Training people for jobs is obviously part of the job of universities.  But the rewriting of the mission statement suggests a move away from the needs of the society on the whole and towards the needs of corporations.

Speaking of Scott Walker, here are his plans should he take over Washington, DC:

A Fort Dodge man asked Walker if he could use the same approach he used in “defeating unions” to take on liberals in Washington “and get some spending control bills and repeal Obamacare.”
“Absolutely,” Walker answered.

Destroying the unions is almost a done thing in this country.  It's also pretty closely linked to the increasing income and wealth inequality and bad news in many different ways, however badly some unions have behaved.  A person applying to be a janitor at a giant global firm cannot negotiate a contract as if both parties were the same size particles in some vat full of free-market ideals.

Clearly we need more of that.

On "Complementary" Gender Roles in Religions

The idea that men and women have been designed by a supreme power as complements to each other is common both in Christianity and in Islam.  Most recently I spotted a reference to it in an article about the Catholic Church and its woman problem:

Helen Alvare, a law professor at George Mason University and a consultant at the Vatican's laity office, said the language in the draft paper was remarkable given that it calls for "collaboration and integration" with men within the church. She said that mirrors findings from leading business consultancies that companies do better when men and women collaborate at every level.
"That statement is the strongest endorsement I have seen in a church document for what we sometimes call complementarity within the church," she said in a phone interview.

Bolds are mine.

I obviously clap my hands very hard for any positive change for women within Christianity, Judaism and Islam.  But I'm not a friend of the complementarity concept, not at all.

First, women and men are a lot more similar than they are different, and I believe that both genders need many of the same things.  To stipulate something different is almost like asking people to live on either just bread or on just water.  Parts of you will die if your diet is that monotonous.   

Second, there are soul-killing aspects in the rigid assumption of separate spheres by gender, and in extreme cases this leads to women losing their right to go out and watch the sunset or to get a job (assuming that the public sphere belongs to men).  One soul-killing aspect to consider is the fact that the complementarity is almost never defined by women but a few powerful male clerics.

Third, the complementarity assumption does great violence to those individuals (and I guess they are many) who suffer under the gender roles they have been assigned.  And when complementarity holds hands with the assumption of women's inferiority, many of those sufferers will be women.

Finally,  it's very important to remember that complementarity in roles, rights and obligations doesn't have to look like a cake divided into two equal halves, one given to men and one given to women. 

It could also be a cake divided into one tiny sliver and the huge remainder, and the sliver is given to the women.  Note that this division is also complementary, because the two parts add up to the whole cake!  Or the good and tasty bits of the cake could be given to one gender while the other gets the moldy corners.

If none of that convinced you just consider how I would arrange the world if all other people would have to be complements to me.  Wouldn't the risk be pretty high that I'd pick all the plum roles, all the roles with prestige and freedom, and that I'd leave the rotten bits to you lot?

Friday Facts And Some Fun: On Marissa Alexander, Colleen McCullough, Scott Walker And Others

1.  This American Life has a segment on Internet trolling of comedian Lindy West and another segment about the complaints people make about vocal fry, but only when it's young women's voices which have it.  Both are worth listening.  The Lindy West segment links to the online nastiness in general and in a bizarre way to the question whether we need a different kind of language policing when the message sent is a simple IHATEYOUBITCHDIE.

2.  New fragments of Sappho's poetry may have been found.   Her work is tantalizing because of its current scarcity despite the great reputation she possessed in antiquity.

3.  Marissa Alexander is out of prison but not free.  Her case is worth learning about because of the Stand Your Ground excuse didn't apply to it and because she almost received a mega-sentence for shooting a gun in the ceiling.

4.  An Australian newspaper begins the obituary of the best-selling author Colleen McCullough  like this:

Do a gender reversal on that.  Pick some famous guy whose books sell really well and begin the obituary by stating that X was a charmer, with a red ugly nose and a big belly, but he was still able to attract women, he said.  It's not impossible to imagine such an obituary, but it's much more unlikely than similar obituaries of famous women which far too frequently are grounded in the fact of them being women first.  That's why cooking skills or looks enter those kinds of obituaries.  Because they still matter for how we judge women and because famous women are still sometimes viewed as little dabs from the giant womanhood mountain.

5.  I adore this Freudian slip by Scott Walker, a Ringwraith and the Governor of Wisconsin:

But Walker did have a small Freudian slip in this part of his spiel. Walker said:
"I think that looking ahead as Republicans, we need to make the case that we are going to promote policies that promote and support and defend hard work in this company - er, in this country once again."

It's delicious, because Walker does the bidding of the Koch brothers, and also because many conservatives indeed see no real difference in how to run a country vs. Walmart:  Both are to profit the few who are viewed as the proper owners.

More on The Travails Of The Intrepid Factual Feminist: Deciphering Hoff Sommer's First Sexual Assault Myth

I feel mean enough to share some of the work that the anti-feminists make me do*.  This example is about the first item Christina Hoff Sommers talks about on her vlog as sexual assault myths.

It juxtaposes the one-in-five figure about college sexual assaults with a new figure which quickly flashes on the screen:  That one in 53 women experience sexual assault during the four years of college.  Before a quick look at a table which provides that number the vlog argues that a new report has come up with the "right" figure for the rate of sexual assaults during women's college experiences.

Got it?  Good.  Then next find out that report.  Read it.  Realize that it doesn't have a table with that one in 52.6 women figure.  Then realize that it doesn't have the other numbers in that table, either.

But...  The table with the calculations argues that its source is that very report.

The Language Police Is Coming To Get You

You may have read Jonathan Chait's opinion piece on the way language policing is perverting liberalism.

I read the piece a few times, but I'm still not clear on how his different examples relate to the topic he wishes to address, and I'm not 100% clear on what that topic is (freedom of speech issues?  what hurts the liberals?  what hurts Jonathan Chait?).  They span a range of cases, from wrecking someone's house because of what a person wrote, via the demands for trigger warnings in some college courses and campaigns to have controversial campus speakers banned, to an author being strongly (if humorously) criticized in a Twitter hashtag.

On the first and last of those examples almost everyone would agree:  nobody's house should be attacked because of something that person said and honest criticism of an author's work on Twitter is a legitimate form of debate.   The case of demanding trigger warnings (not a very widespread phenomenon, as I understand it, and criticized by several feminists) isn't about suppressing speech as such though I guess it could have a "chilling" effect on the courses of the professors responsible for reacting to the demands.  That leaves the question whether one should try to ban speakers or speech on campuses.  Those attempts are carried out by both the left and the right in this country, though in slightly different forms (e.g. firing a professor versus getting someone's invitation to speak cancelled).

Indeed, Chait's piece has so much material in it, much of it not of the same general species, that I had great difficulty making a straightforward summary about it.

Glenn Greenwald's response links to several other responses which you should read if you are fascinated by the topic of how we speak and do not speak, whom we listen to and do not listen to, and what it is that some people experience in online debates and how they interpret those debates.   But I agree with Greenwald that Jill Filipovic's tweet on all this makes a good point:

 

Julian Sanchez writes about some of those issues.  An example:

Let’s take it as given that this is not the case, and that any subjective chill experienced by folks like Jon Chait is not usefully understood as a problem of social justice. We can grant all that and still ask: Is there something unhealthy about discursive norms that lead to substantive self-censorship, even by the obviously privileged?  Not because these norms constitute an injury to the reticent privileged, or interfere with anyone’s sacred right to unfettered self-expression, but because they yield less robust, less interesting conversations?
Think of Solomon Asch’s famous experiments in group conformity, or the broader social psychology literature on information cascades.  The problem isn’t so much that some precious snowflake’s project of expressive self-realization has been constrained, but that constraints deprive groups of deliberative input that can help them make better decisions. When the constraints are on the order of “don’t use sexist or racist language,” probably nothing of value is lost.  When the constraints include “under no circumstances express any skepticism about any claim of sexual assault,” to pick a salient recent example, you may end up with bad journalism that hinders the ultimate goal of getting society at large to treat survivors’ stories more seriously and respectfully.

This is an important point.  To give another example, suppose that a social activist group is preparing a statement based on six cases of labor market discrimination against women and/or minorities.  Suppose one of the cases, the sixth,  isn't really like the other cases.  It's different and weaker and may not be an example about discrimination at all.  Suppose you think so, but say nothing because of the fear of group ostracism*.  Then the list of the six cases goes out and conservatives tear that sixth iffy case apart and imply that all the cases on your list are like that one.

So certain group norms can affect not only how robust a conversation is but even the outcomes from that conversation.
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*The fear of group ostracism is probably less if people meet in person than on the net.

By the way, I found the juxtaposition of rowdy public discourse and the question of ostracism interesting in the various takes.  They range from essentially arguing that if you can't take the heat stay out of the kitchen (which are even hotter for the more oppressed groups, by the way) to wanting all online mockery to cease because it's a form of language policing.  So what is free speech here?  The speech you like? 

I may be mistaken about that.  But it was one of the sticking points I had with Chait's arguments.

The End of Blogs?

Andrew Sullivan is killing his blog.  Dylan Byers comments on that and tells us this:

Sullivan was able to keep blogging alive (and lucrative) long after the era of blogs had come to an end -- at The Atlantic, at The Daily Beast, and, in recent years, through the funding of readers. It's also true that Sullivan's influence has waned of late. While there is still some demand for Sullivan's outspokenness -- he's at his best when he's arguing, aggressively -- there is far less demand for unspecialized aggregation.

...

Sullivan deserves immense credit for keeping his project alive, but its days were numbered.

So the blogs are waning.  What is waxing?  According to some, it's the Twitter.  But that's a distribution channel, not the content producer. 

The economic jargon in all that fascinates me.  We look at the demand side of the market:  What do people want?  They no longer want some smartass opining on everything and anything between heaven and earth.  They want, according to Byers, specialization and original content.

But what IS that demand for?  Writing?  Information?  Commenting?  Hanging out with friends and enemies?

Then there's the idea of "content."  To someone like me who adores and venerates that stuff called content the term sounds as if birthday presents exist only to justify an industry in wrappings and bows.

Still, I get the point, because people have to eat and to climb up career ladders.  But if blogs are dying (and as a general category they probably are), what is taking their place online? 

Mike Huckabee And Trash-Talking Women

This little snippet is worth thinking about, believe it or not:

Appearing last Friday on Mickelson in the Morning, an Iowa-based radio show, Huckabee recounted the culture shock he experienced when hearing profanity in the workplace while working for Fox News in New York City.
“In Iowa, you would not have people who would just throw the f-bomb and use gratuitous profanity in a professional setting,” Huckabee said. “In New York, not only do the men do it, but the women do it!”
He continued: “This would be considered totally inappropriate to say these things in front of a woman.” But “for a woman to say them in a professional setting,” Huckabee went on, “that’s just trashy!”

The quote makes two different points.  The first is about the kind of language which is appropriate in a professional setting for everybody.  The second is about different rules for men and women.  It's the latter which interests me.

Huckabee notes that men in the US mainstream culture were once frowned upon if they used profanities in front of women.  Note that this means they could use them when in all-male company.   Huckabee then adds his shock and horror when even women participate in such profanities!

So, you go, yawning.  Get to the point here.

Okay.   The point is that certain kind of speech was regarded as acceptable, but only by men and only to other men.  Swearing, using the fuck-words etcetera.  Perhaps calling someone you quarrel with a motherfucker?  Or asking that person to get on their knees for a blowjob?

On one level Huckabee is just pining for the imaginary past where women were ladies, at home and in the kitchen, and barely knew the facts that made them pregnant, while men were out there, fighting other men for the money that would support the little lady at home.

But on a deeper level it's well worth asking why women couldn't hear profanities or why women using profanities is the worst thing ever.

Is it the fact that uttering profanities is an act of aggression, and women are not supposed to be aggressive?

Or is it the possibility that using profanities means the user is taking an active sexual role in the verbal fights?  For example, telling someone to go and fuck themselves.  In Huckabee's world that's not the role women are supposed to have.

Then we come to the idea of purity, something not far removed from the Mediterranean concept of family honor as being preserved in the women's vaginas.  That's the root of honor killings, by the way, the idea that the behavior of the women in a family shames the men in that family and that they must revenge that shame.  A woman using profanities cannot be assumed to have shouldered the burden of purity right?

That's probably too far-fetched.  I have one further candidate to explain the rule that what goes in men's locker-room talk does not go in mixed company, and that's the fact that some of that locker-room talk, at least, is openly misogynistic and objectifying.  This explanation has the advantage of accounting for the reason why men are not supposed to continue the locker-room talk in front of women.  Just consider a guy calling an other guy a motherfucker when the mothers of both are present!  It's not really the swearing or whatever that is the problem there, but the use of the mother's sexual live as a slur against another man.

One Of Those Days... On How to Critique Research And Bad Popularizations. Or the Factual Feminist! (Guess Who That is)

I spend quite a lot of time avoiding research.  That's because almost anyone can quickly type out some outrageous claim and put it out on the net where it spreads like the Ebola virus.  When the claim is wrong, you could just put out a quick message saying that it's wrong.

Which would be like soggy toast.  But to do the actual work, the work of learning where the stupid thing came from, which studies it utterly ignores, which definitions it uses incorrectly etc. requires research.  Research takes a lot of time.  And nobody pays me for this type of research.  It's just my inner firm librarian which won't let me press "publish" on about three long draft posts because I haven't yet achieved complete expertise in umpteen different fields.

That stinks.  It stinks especially hard when most propagandists don't care about research at all.  The usual way someone like David Brooks -- to pick an example -- does this is by starting with his desired conclusions, then going back to the one study he chose, then -- utterly astonished --- he finds that the particular study supports what he says, to a tee!  And therefore that must be what research has established.

I was thinking about this when I looked through my arsenal of possible skills.  That I know how to read social science research in general is a big plus.  But I cannot be an expert in every single field of research, however ageless goddesses are.  Yet writing criticisms of studies often does require that.  It's a bit like playing tennis as an amateur with fifteen professional opponents at the same time, all of whom have an axe to grind with the issues.

To take a recent example, writing about how sexual assaults are measured in statistics, how the survey samples are arrived at, what the numbers mean etc. requires some pretty hard-tack chewing and work.  The minute I put a post on any of those up on the blog I get comments from people who spend all their time on just that one issue.  Some of them are real experts, others are real propagandists or whatever you might call them.  Well, most seem to be the latter. 

All that really means is a clear need for a group blog where people with all the proper expertise can shoot out well-written posts on iffy research.  Those group blogs might even exist!  I don't have to try to support the globe up on just my shoulders!  I could deflate my arrogance balloons!

But not as long as Christina Hoff Sommers, perhaps the best-known feminist-hater in the US, can write a video blog called "The Factual Feminist."  That's very funny, of course, that name, both the "feminist" label and the "factual" label.*  When you combine all that is funny in the title you get a post where women are bashed 99% of the time.

The idea of a five-minute vlog appeals to me, however.  Imagine a vlog by me called The Goddess With All The Facts! I'd spend five minutes of air time to refute or elaborate on Hoff Sommer's arguments on, say, the "correct" rape statistics or on the question how many women might lie about being raped.

Except that you CANNOT do that.  You cannot fly glibly over a whole large field of research, and you cannot just state that as all studies have some problems (actually varying from pretty good studies to utter rubbish), let's just refuse to put any number on, say false rape reports.

Then there's the additional confusion in that Hoff Sommers vlog**:  Of confusing activity on behalf of rape victims with the processes which are used to assess whether rape happened and what the conclusion of those processes might be.  The two are different things.  And no, colleges are not run by rabid feminists, and no, the processes do not necessarily result in a judgement which always finds for the alleged victim.  Though it may well be the case that having the colleges process sexual assault cases isn't working terribly well for anyone.

All this is very sad for me.  My inner librarian has now donned a whip and wants me to spend the next five years sorting out the facts.  But what she doesn't get is that the work I'd do would be partly wasted.   We lack the kind of agora where people actually try to search common ground and more reliable statistics.*** And in any case, some totally different game about data would attract her interest next.
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*If you haven't met Christina Hoff Sommers, the factual feminist, yet, here's some material for you:
Fun with Christina Hoff Sommers.  And a three-part series by me on her views about how much women deserve to earn.  Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.
**There's also the very big question about how we define "rape culture."  I once wrote ten pages on that for my own notes.  If people cannot agree on what constitutes rape, how can we even start with the idea of a rape culture?  And what do we call societies which require four male witnesses for a rape (which suggests that very few rapists would ever get caught)?  But at the same time, what do we call the kinds of values which clearly exist among sub-groups of young men (and some older ones coughBillCosbycough)?  What is the role of pornography in defining what "sex" means nowadays?  The role of entitlement to sex from that?
***We need one of these, by the way.  I resent the idea that because I'm a feminist my thoughts are supposedly known in advance or that I'd somehow on purpose pick poor research to support.  The proof of the pudding is in the eating.

Is Consistency the Hobgoblin of Little Minds? On the Death of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia

The hobgoblin reference is to Ralph Waldo Emerson.  It's also a reference to Western attitudes, both political and journalistic, to the extreme Wahhabi sect of Islam.  When the Saudi government pushes it on the rest of the world (by funding mosques and by sending preachers to those mosques) there's not much loud criticism.  But when the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq (ISIS) decides to use it as a blueprint to create its own nightmare world there's much loud criticism.

The difference is in oil, my sweetings.  Sadly, this suggests to me that if ISIS ever gets hold of enough oil resources, whatever president the US has then will hold hands with their leaders.

It's true that the late king Abdullah did push for certain minor improvements in the position of women.  But women in Saudi Arabia are still unable to drive themselves, are still subject to the custodianship and rule of their male relatives, and as far as my research has been able to prove anything, the only creative addition* ISIS has introduced to their version of the Wahhabi teachings is the idea of taking slaves (as long as they don't have one of the three Abrahamic religions), selling them to the highest bidder in legal slave auctions and justifying rape of female slaves as just appropriate use of war booty.

The rules about chopping off the hands of thieves, the rules about killing those suspected of homosexual activity and the rules about stoning adulterers**, those are all practiced not only in the Islamic State but also in Saudi Arabia (and a few other countries).

I'm welcoming any reforms that Saudi Arabia can carry out towards greater human rights, of course, just as I feel great urgency about getting rid of the "values" that ISIS is touting.  Any reform is better than none, and I also understand that resistance to reform inside Saudi Arabia is a powerful force and hard to fight.  Still, we cannot remember that half the population there (women) have far fewer rights and much less freedom than the other half.  Neither should we forget that the rulers in the country are not democratically.
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*Crucifixion as punishment (or as a way to display a corpse after death) may be another innovation by ISIS
**Women appear to be the victims of stoning more frequently than men, by the way.

Potential Moms and Painkillers! Today's Study Popularization.

If you ovulate you are a potential mom.  Indeed, you can be regarded as one if you are a woman between the ages of fifteen and forty-four!   It doesn't matter one whit if you are not going to become pregnant any time soon (or ever).  You are still a potential mom.


And perhaps you should just take any serious pain you have, without mega-strength painkillers.

Here's a story about all that with the headline:

Potential moms using painkillers, study finds

That means women between the ages of fifteen and forty-five, and the painkillers the headline refers to are opioid painkillers, such as Vicodin and OxyContin.  Those can cause birth defects in a fetus.

But how does that relate to women in that age group who are not pregnant or not planning to become pregnant?

Well, my dears, here's the answer:

Previous studies of opioid use during pregnancy suggest that the medicines could increase risk of major defects of the baby’s brain and spine, heart and abdominal wall.
But this is the first time that the CDC has looked into opioid painkillers specifically among women of child-bearing age, which is important because many pregnancies aren’t recognized until well after the first few weeks, and half of all U.S. pregnancies are unplanned, officials said.

Emphasis mine.

The study summary I discuss here gives not one single recommendation for all those "potential moms" out there.  It's hard not to read it as implying that pain is something "potential moms" should just bear bravely, or at least seriously consider that alternative.

I got carried away a bit thinking about all the stuff "potential moms" aka women do.  They might drink (gasp!), they might ski downhill at a rapid rate, they might dance all night through!  Perhaps all women of the fertile ages should be moved into protected housing where their diet and lifestyles could be controlled?

The CDC's own summary on the study is quite a bit saner.  It recommends this:

“Women, who are pregnant, or planning to become pregnant, should discuss with their health care professional the risks and benefits for any medication they are taking or considering.” said Coleen Boyle, Ph.D., MS.Hyg., Director of CDC’s National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities. “This new information underscores the importance of responsible prescribing, especially of opioids, for women of child bearing age.”

But to return to that bolded bit in the above quote:

It's based on an interesting flaw in how that statistic is used.  That half of all US pregnancies are unplanned does NOT mean that half of all pregnancies of every US woman are unplanned.  In particular, it doesn't take into account the difference between women who use contraception and women who do not use contraception.

Here's the Guttmacher Institute on that distinction:

To repeat from the graph:  The two-thirds of women at risk of unintended pregnancy who practice contraception consistently and correctly account for only 5% of unintended pregnancies.

I'm not quite certain why that distinction is so seldom made in these types of studies.  If it was made, angry Echidne wouldn't have to keep going all haywire* over the same stuff.

This distinction also matters, because now health care providers can ask women in the fertile age categories whether they practice birth control or not, and they can also tell the women who are prescribed opioid painkillers to be very careful not to get pregnant.

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*I've tried to figure out why I get so angry with the particular flavor of the pieces which use the "half of all pregnancies are unplanned" in this manner.  The reasons are  1)  that the assumption takes away all agency from women in the fertile age category (it doesn't matter what the women themselves do, pregnancy just "happens") and 2) that there is often a sense in these articles that fertile women really are just temporarily empty fetus aquaria rather than full human beings.



 

Huckabee on Theocracy

Huckabee is going to toss his hat in the presidential ring, I read.  It would have been a lot harder to write sarcasm without his presence so I'm grateful.  mm.

He's a man of God, Mike is.  He is going to run on the divine side:

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) said during an appearance Thursday on a Christian television show that he's thinking about running for President to help the nation know where laws come from: God.

"We cannot survive as a republic if we do not become, once again, a God-centered nation that understands that our laws do not come from man, they come from God," he said on the show "Life Today."
When Huckabee added that he wasn't demanding a theocracy, host James Robison said, "We have a theocracy right now. It's a secular theocracy."
"That's it!" Huckabee said, describing the current political order as "humanistic, secular, atheistic, even antagonistic toward Christian faith."

I need to take out my brain and vacuum it before returning it to its nest, what with the idea of something called secular theocracy. 

But what is the difference between theocracy and "understanding that our laws do not come from man [sic], they come from God?"  Please someone tell me.

I have difficulty with the extremist Islamic ideas (ISIS) of how a country is run as a theocracy, and I have difficulty with Huckabee's version, too.  Many years ago:

 ...former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee forcefully defended an earlier statement backing the biblical admonition that wives should submit to their husbands.

"I'm not the least bit ashamed of my faith or the doctrines of it," Huckabee said. "I don't try to impose that as a governor, and I wouldn't impose it as a president. But I certainly am going to practice it unashamedly.... "
He went on to explain that the Bible also commands husbands to submit to their wives and that marriage requires each spouse to give 100 percent to the other.

That's gobbledegook, that idea of mutual submission, based on the Bible.  But if you grant Huckabee his god ideas, it would suggest that in the past he wasn't going to use those to run the country.  How can you both have theocracy and not have theocracy?

The real problem, naturally, is that nobody truly knows how a divine power would rule a country (well, you could ask me about my rules).  What we have instead are writings by human beings who lived thousands of years ago and who lived inside a society which looks very different from many societies existing today.  Adulterous women were stoned, men had absolute rule over their families, homosexuality was a crime punishable by death and so on.  That the writers or recorders believed all this to be the will of god doesn't prove that it is.

But those are the writings the extremist literalists and fundamentalists attribute to gods in all religions today. Thus, Huckabee is a brother under the skin with those who planned the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq.  Granted, he's a much kinder and gentler brother, but he uses similar books as his guide to what should be.

The difficulty with that approach is pretty obvious for the rest of us:  How do you debate issues with someone who believes that he speaks for God? 

More On The No-Go Zones in Europe

Have you noticed that the debate about the Muslim no-go zones in Europe tends to take the final form of YES, THEY EXIST! NO, THEY DO NOT!   Rinse and repeat.

That isn't terribly helpful.  Neither is the invitation to go and see whether they exist or not, given that most of us cannot hop into our private jets and organize extensive visits of the world.  Why does it seem to be so hard to delve into the next layer and look at evidence which might point either way?  Or towards something more complicated?

I did a little bit of that work, starting with the assertion about 55 Swedish no-go zones (mostly because I can read a little Swedish).  This quote refers to it:

That night, on Anderson Cooper’s program, the concept crept again into the conversation, as retired CIA officer Gary Berntsen told the host, “Anderson, the Europeans and the French in particular have problems that are the result of also 751 ‘no-go zones’ in France where you have Islamic communities that have formed councils that are managing these areas. And the police don’t go in. If you look at Sweden there are 55 ‘no-go zones’ there. You know, firefighters or ambulance drivers go in there and they’re attacked. Their vehicles are lit on fire, their tires are slashed, and the Europeans have not pushed back against this. They can’t surveil people inside the ‘no-go zones’ if they get and go in there,” said the analyst, who called the zones “enclaves that are completely separated from the government.”

The idea of 55 Swedish "no-go zones" comes from a report by the Swedish police.  The report itself does NOT use the term "no-go zones" and as far as I can see it says nothing about religion. either, or about religious councils which are supposed to run the areas.

Instead, the report is about criminal networks (mostly dealing in narcotics) and loose criminal gangs in certain areas, and the power of those gangs.  Crimes are not often reported to the police, parked police cars are sometimes attacked, rocks are thrown at police and firefighters and it's difficult to find witnesses for crimes.  The one reference to alternative governments in the report refers to the criminal gangs themselves as being in power in a few areas, via the use of fear and threats in the local communities.   But the report also states that most areas do not fall under the concept of a "parallel society."

Could those 55 areas have a high percentage of Muslim immigrants?  That's possible, given that crime tends to hide in poorer areas and immigrants mostly begin as poor and are therefore more likely to settle into higher crime areas.  It's probably also the case that immigrants are among those criminal networks or run at least some of them.

But are those areas run as some type of miniature caliphates?  I found no evidence of that.  Note, however,  that it's not unknown for religious minorities to try to control the area in which they live.

What's the point of what I wrote here?  That crime might be what the idea of the so-called "no-go zones" are about, and that any "parallel societies" would be more tied to crime lords than mullahs, say.   Still, it is obviously important to avoid segregation along religious lines, especially when it coincides with economic and social segregation.

On Rabbits, Contraception, the Pope And Climate Change

Is this serendipity again?  I read a pretty depressing article about the likely consequences of climate change the other day.   Then I read what Pope Francis thinks of birth control.

The first article made me think about the possible solutions to what's happening to our little space ship Earth.

Many solutions to combat human-caused climate change are nearly impossible, because either people don't believe in climate change or have decided to feast until the Day of Demise or people want the countries that didn't get to feast a chance to do so, too, even if that speeds up the Day of Demise.  And then there are those who think we could work this out just fine if everyone agreed to an austere lifestyle with no computers and not much food etc.

I'm exaggerating, of course.  But there's something about human beings which make those self-assumed austerity solutions extremely unlikely.  The best solution to me seems to have a lot fewer people on earth in the long-run.  It might happen, in any case, because of the coming resource wars (which may already have begun).   But we could also carry out that solution by at least making sure that people don't have to have children they don't want to have in the first place.  Birth control, you know. 

A smaller total number of human beings would have a less damaging impact on earth and would also be able to have a higher material lifestyle, on average.  Other animals would have more space, too.

But what do I know, sigh.  The Pope obviously knows better, because he told his flock to be more open to life.  That's Pope-speak about not using contraception:

After discussing various threats to the family, including “a lack of openness to life,” he deviated briefly from his prepared remarks, transitioning from English to his native Spanish in order to speak from the heart about the subject.

“I think of Blessed Paul VI,” he said. “In a moment of that challenge of the growth of populations, he had the strength to defend openness to life.”

In 1968, Pope Paul VI released the encyclical Humanae Vitae, which upheld Catholic teaching on sexuality and the immorality of artificial contraception, predicting the negative consequences that would result from a cultural acceptance of birth control.

“He knew the difficulties that families experience, and that’s why in his encyclical, he expressed compassion for particular cases. And he taught professors to be particularly compassionate with particular cases,” Pope Francis said.

“But he went further. He looked to the peoples beyond. He saw the lack and the problem that it could cause families in the future. Paul VI was courageous. He was a good pastor, and he warned his sheep about the wolves that were approaching, and from the heavens he blesses us today.”


So it goes.  Though later Francis clarified that he didn't mean to advocate that Catholics should breed like rabbits.

Weird and fascinating stuff.  Not logical, but then very little about the recent world events looks logical to me. 

And notice all the animals in those pope-quotes?  Sheep, wolves, rabbits!  The types I worry about when it comes to climate change.  Serendipity, I say.  It would most likely be a better basis for writing than trying to make some sense of stuff.

The No-Go Muslim Zones of Europe

You may have read about these.  They are supposed to be areas where shariah law rules and where non-Muslims cannot enter safely.  The idea has been sprouted in the fevered minds of US conservatives, beginning with an "expert" Fox News had on who argued that the UK city of Birmingham is such a no-go zone.  He and the Fox News later apologized for the misinformation he spread.  Now the Governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal, continues with  similar arguments:

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) struggled to substantiate his claims that European cities have been taken over by Muslim extremists during an interview with CNN correspondent Max Foster on Monday in London. Jindal stood by the charge even as other prominent conservatives admitted that the allegations had no factual basis.
“There are neighborhoods where women don’t feel comfortable going in without veils that is wrong, we all know there are neighborhoods where police are less likely to go into,” Jindal said, referring to so-called “no-go” zones or areas that are too dangerous for non-Muslims to enter. The claim has echoed throughout conservative media in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in Paris.
Foster challenged the assertion repeatedly, explaining that, “you need to have sort of proper facts to back that up.” “I’ve lived here a long time,” he said. “I don’t know of any no-go zones for non-Muslims.”

It's all fun and games.  I tried to research this and found claims on various European anti-immigration sites, but none of them provide proper links to any evidence, just to opinions or statements that someone tried to create a shariah police force in Germany or that the Swedish police uses backup before going into some Muslim-majority areas with high crime rates.  The Snopes.com has more.

The only reason I write about this is that I do get the sense in all the debate about Islamic terrorism etcetera of an empty cavity just below whatever the day's arguments might be.  Or an ideological cavity of some type.  That cavity is then filled up with factoids or pseudo-theories.  It happens on both sides of the debate, by the way, though this does not make it a case of "both sides do it."  Rather, it makes it a case of "nobody seems to have the evidence."

Maybe it's simply the fact that when I follow up almost any argument presented in those debates I come up dry or end up as uninformed as I was at the beginning of the debate.  Hard survey data, hard data on religious utterings etc.  is not available at all, and so much of the data I find is on sites which are clearly not aiming at a neutral search for facts. 

The Arc Of Justice. Thoughts After the MLK Day.

Martin Luther King Jr. has given us many famous quotes.  This is one of them:

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

It can console and comfort people when times are bad.  But moral universe has no arc whatsoever if people don't push it forwards.  That's also a useful reminder.   I think today might be the time when racial justice will be sought and won in the US justice system, because so many people are working for it and because public opinion is getting more informed.  

Good News on The Saudi Blogger Raif Badawi

Here:

The activist sentenced to 1,000 lashes in Saudi Arabia underwent his first flogging despite the country’s Supreme Court being ordered to review the case, his wife has told the Telegraph.

Raif Badawi, 31, was due to undergo the second of 20 rounds of 50 lashes on Friday morning, a week after receiving the first in a public ceremony which was condemned worldwide.

Doctors ordered a postponement, saying the wounds from the first round had not yet had time to heal, giving rise to hopes that Saudi Arabia might be bowing to international pressure over the case.

But Ensaf Haidar, Mr Badawi’s wife who is now in self-imposed exile in Canada with the couple’s three children, said there was no sign yet of leniency.

Keep up the international pressure!

It's not clear if the lashes will be given anyway.  But the reason for the current suspension is international opposition.  I get that this clashes with the Saudi opposition to the international opposition.  But blogging is not a crime.  Lashing and imprisoning a blogger should be.

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Digby writes about that odd illogical treatment of Saudi Arabia by Western leaders.  Well, it's not odd because it's caused by oil greed.  But it certainly is illogical.  The Islamic State, for example, clearly has its roots in the Wahhabi sect of Islam, and that is the sect Saudi Arabia exports.  Then it plans to but fences around its own country.

The Busy Beavers of Uterus Legislation

That would be the Republicans in the US Congress.  The new Congress hasn't been open for business very long, but the House and the Senate already have at least six proposals about the proper ownership and use of uteri.

I glanced through those six proposed acts and found, to my great delight, that at least two of them were sponsored by Senator David Vitter (R) of Louisiana.  Yes, the man famous for the prostitution scandal.  I have to work hard to get my head around the idea that Senator Vitter can view the area around uteri as both his general playground and the area in which values about "unborn babies" should be determined by Republican principles.

The two proposed acts on which I have something useful to say are HR 36 and S 50.  The former states this:

Short Friday Posts 1/16/2015: On Female Circumcision, The End of Vagina Monologues (?) And Paid Sick Leave as Giveaways

1.  This is a very moving first-person essay on female circumcision or genital mutilation, depending on which term you prefer.

2.  Mount Holyoke College no longer performs Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues which had been an annual tradition.  The reason?  Focusing on vaginas is not inclusive:

...the argument is premised on the idea that a) not all women have vaginas, and b) some men do have vaginas, because some trans individuals identify and live as a different gender than they were born without getting genital reconstructive surgery. Ergo, a trans women is a woman, full stop, but she may have a penis. A trans man is a man, full stop, but he may have a vagina. Fine. I get that. I'm cool with that. And, regardless, it doesn't matter if I'm cool with it, because how other people define their genders/bodies/sexualities is none of my concern. If you are a woman without a vagina, neat; there is totally room for all of our experiences in this great big, crazy world.

Yet I am a woman with a vagina, and this becomes an area of my concern when people start saying that I shouldn't reference or acknowlege that—that it's in fact bad and intolerant so 20th century to even speak about it. The fact that some trans women don't have vaginas doesn't negate the fact that the vast majority of women do. And now, in the name of feminism, "female-validating talk about vaginas is now forbidden," as one anonymous writer on a Mount Holyoke messageboard put it. "That's so misogynistic under the guise of ‘progress.'"

That's a topic which will certainly get you into pretzel arguments!  I'm not at all certain that any trans man could get cis men convinced that talking about penises is not acceptable when it comes to defining men.

I agree with the author of that Reason piece in that talking about vaginas is in one sense pretty inclusive (as the vast, vast majority of women do happen to have them and as most of the oppression and control of women is based on those women having vaginas), while not talking about vaginas is pretty much patriarchy as it used to be (should you wish to use that word), whatever the good intentions are.

This is one example where views of oppressions appear to clash, and the reason is the lack of nuances.  It's not necessary for the word "vagina" to be erased for trans women to be covered by the term "women" or for feminism to stretch large enough to cover the needs of both cis women and trans women.  

The global debate on women's reproductive issues is pretty undeveloped, by the way.  We are nowhere near the time when talk about vaginas would somehow no longer be needed in the non-pornographic sense.  The pornographers will go on talking about vaginas in any case.

3.  On Fox News, Stuart Varney defines paid sick leave and parental leave as giveaways.*  Both he and the interviewer focus on who is to pay for such leave.  Varney says it's taxpayers for the parental leave proposal for federal workers and employers for the general proposal of one week of paid sick leave for all workers.

The framing is that the audience of the program consists of those who pay for this, not those who both pay for this and receive the benefits.  But surely the audience of Fox News also consists of those tax payers who cover the corporate takeaways?  Who pay more taxes because of the many and various deductions corporations are entitled to?

In any case the actual burden of paying some labor-related cost is divided between the employers and employees in differing proportions depending on the characteristics of the relevant labor market.

As the linked story explains, other developed countries in fact do have those horrible giveaways.  The US is competing unfairly, one might say, by refusing to have the same types of benefits which are regarded as normal elsewhere.

I like to think of benefits of this sort as just a part of the total compensation package.  Many jobs have retirement benefits, right?  They are ultimately just like wages.  The difference with paid sick leave, say, is that it somewhat reduces the risks the employees face because of causes such as illness.  And as the Media Matters article points out, it's often the poorest of workers who have the least of this type of insurance.

The Fox people worry about people taking the sick leave even when they are not sick, as a form of extra vacation time.  There's a fairly easy way to limit that tendency, and that is to require a note from a health care professional for the money to be paid.  That's what other countries do, I think.
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*Added later:  An interview worth reading in this context.

The New Pew Survey of Women And Leadership

You can read it here.  Surveys of this type don't really say very much unless they are put in perspective by repeated surveys over time.  That's because they are snap shots of one point in time and because the answers also depend on what else is happening at that time.

To take an example, the survey asked the respondents whether they personally hope to see a woman as the president of the United States over their lifetimes.  This is how the answers looked:

The problem with that question is pretty obvious.  The name "Hillary Clinton" hovers in the background and the fact that the Republicans don't have any female candidate with the same chances of succeeding will inform the answers.

But I turned all sad noticing that the only group of respondents in that picture where the majority would like to see a female president in their lifetimes consists of Democratic women.   Most people are pretty comfortable with the idea that women in power are about as rare as black swans.  Which suggests that the way the MRAs tell women are running the whole world isn't exactly what is really happening.  And feminism has a long workday (generations, my sweetings) ahead of it.

Still, many of the other answers in the survey are encouraging.  In interpreting surveys of this type it's important to remember various types of response biases (especially telling people what they wish to hear), but it's also important to keep in mind that many of the answers will reflect social stereotypes, norms and mores.  Those change very very slowly.

And as expected, men who vote Republican are most likely to think that all the necessary gender work has already been done:

Republican men (54%) say the country has made the changes needed to give men and women equality in the workplace. By contrast about two-thirds (66%) of Republican women say more changes are needed. Even larger majorities of Democratic and independent women and Democratic men agree that gender parity is still a work in progress.

 That's especially interesting given that the survey asks questions about the best time for women to have children if they wish to become leaders and what with the absence of maternity leave of any reasonable amount or the expectation that mothers should be the ones responsible for children.

Sam Brownback Might Have To Raise Taxes!!!

Run for your lives, because the sky has turned pink.  Brownback never saw a tax he didn't want to cut.  As the Governor of Kansas he got to put his daft ideas into practice.  The outcome?

On Monday, the state's legislature will take on the daunting task of trying to find hundreds of millions of dollars to balance the state's budget, which is facing a shortfall of $280 million for this fiscal year.
A big reason for the predicament, experts say: Some of the largest tax cuts in the state's history, signed into law in 2012 by Governor Sam Brownback.
One of the biggest cuts: The profits of small businesses and partnerships were made tax-exempt.
Tax policy experts like Joseph Henchman of the Tax Foundation suspect this change is a key reason for the state's unexpectedly large revenue shortfall. One concern is that other companies not eligible for the 0% tax rate may be trying to reorganize themselves so they, too, get the tax break.
The tax-cut package was supposed to boost the Kansas economy and small businesses. Problem is, that hasn't happened. At least not yet, although the effects of tax cuts can take years to materialize.

Mmm.  And pink unicorns might also be found one day.

So Kansas is now the Great Experiment in what happens when taxes are cut to the bone, and Brownback (the Free-Market-Obligatory-Religion prophet) might actually have to raise taxes back a bit.

Though even now he is considering cutting more spending:

One of Brownback's proposals for cutting this year's shortfall is to reduce the state's contributions to the public employee pension fund for the next six months, a controversial move especially considering that the state pension plan is already underfunded. 

What's behind all this weirdness?  Brownback's 2012 tax cuts:

The 2012 cuts were among the largest ever enacted by a state, reducing the top tax bracket by 25 percent and eliminating all taxes on business profits that are reported on individual income returns. (No other state has ever eliminated all taxes on these pass-through businesses.) The cuts were arrogantly promoted by Mr. Brownback with the same disproven theory that Republicans have employed for decades: There will be no loss of revenue because of all the economic growth!

The lesson in all this?  You need to study economics before deciding on some weird theory, based on free-market gods flying around.  It scares me that so many politicians have a religious attitude to something that consists of theories, evidence and arguments.

On the other hand, though I feel sad about the citizens of Kansas, these problems couldn't have happened to a more appropriate man.

Be Invisible. Be silent.

That's one of the rules of most fundamentalist religions when it comes to women:  The ideal woman will not be seen or heard.  Instead, she will obey the commands of whoever is declared her owner/guardian.

You can verify the truth of that assertion by a little bit of thinking.

I was reminded of this rule when I read about an ultra-orthodox Israeli newspaper amending the pictures of world leaders in the Paris protest march (that took place after the murders of people at a comic newspaper, a Kosher store and one policewoman out in the streets).  This is the original picture:

And this is what it becomes when the women become invisible (note that they are not even allowed to leave gaps):

Finally, here's a Twitter response to that photo-shopping.  I apologize for not yet finding the creator of that picture which simply removes all men from the (staged) picture:

Alas and alack, there is no matriarchal religion which would have enough power to photo-shop men out of pictures (not implying that this would happen in a matriarchal religion).  But the last picture is also enlightening.  Note how few people remain if only female world leaders counted.

When Women Rule Everything

Cardinal Raymond Burke (whom Pope Francis has demoted) has given an interview.  It tells us the reasons why men shun the Catholic Church.  It's because women rule it:

Some snippets:

Cardinal Raymond Burke said in an interview with website “The New Emangelism: Drawing Men to Jesus Christ and His Catholic Church” that the church needs to return to its male-centered roots and stop catering to “women’s issues” in order to regain its once robust standing in the world.
...

“I think there has been a great confusion with regard to the specific vocation of men in marriage and of men in general in the Church during the past 50 years or so,” Burke told The New Emangelism (TNE) in an interview published Monday. “It’s due to a number of factors, but the radical feminism which has assaulted the Church and society since the 1960s has left men very marginalized.”
“Unfortunately, the radical feminist movement strongly influenced the Church,” Cardinal Burke complained, “leading the Church to constantly address women’s issues at the expense of addressing critical issues important to men; the importance of the father, whether in the union of marriage or not; the importance of a father to children; the importance of fatherhood for priests; the critical impact of a manly character; the emphasis on the particular gifts that God gives to men for the good of the whole society.”
“The goodness and importance of men became very obscured,” he said, and that needs to change.
Women and their needs have not only decimated the church, he said, but the institution of marriage as well.
“I recall in the mid-1970’s, young men telling me that they were, in a certain way, frightened by marriage because of the radicalizing and self-focused attitudes of women that were emerging at that time,” he recalled. “These young men were concerned that entering a marriage would simply not work because of a constant and insistent demanding of rights for women. These divisions between women and men have gotten worse since then.”
Worst of all, he said, the church took a “fluffy,” womanly attitude toward sexuality.
“Making things worse, there was a very fluffy, superficial kind of catechetical approach to the question of human sexuality and the nature of the marital relationship,” he said, which has led to sexual anarchy, the abundant availability of pornography, homosexuality and child sex abuse.

Delicious!  Irresistibly funny, because it is so upside-down!  Cardinal Burke is so far in some other reality (perhaps in the world of hyenas?) that I cannot stop laughing.

But I'm not writing this post just to ridicule a cardinal of a very patriarchal church for believing that his church has been taken over by the radical feminists cabal when in actual fact women are not allowed to be priests, women are not allowed to have any real power in the church and contraception and abortion are banned with the aim of keeping all women at home while also maximizing the number of new little Catholics.

Well, yes, I am.  Honestly, this guy lives in a cloud-cuckoo-land.  No amount of female subjugation would make him satisfied, I suspect.  And did you notice that the female concept of sexuality is "fluffy" (pink ribbons around the genitals?) but nevertheless has resulted (according to Burke) in the crime of child sex abuse???

The gall.  So the men inside the church who were pederasts would not have been pederasts if some non-fluffy male concept of sexuality had reigned?  What would that be?  Having intercourse while boxing?  Or something more sinister.

This must be the most astonishing explanation for child sex abuse I've ever heard.  To fluffy a view of sexuality??!!

The second point (other than ridiculing Burke) of this post is how much it reminds me of some more extreme MRA creeds which assert that what men's rights really mean is the right for men to rule as overlords of women and the right to get respected for that.  Many of those creeds also begin with the assumption that the current society is run by a small number of radical feminists* (with frightening fangs and impossible powers, all aimed at killing off men), and that the proper rights of men (to be overlords) have been utterly stripped away.  Therefore, the status quo is seen as oppression of men.  Well, perhaps not in Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan, but in almost all other countries.  That's why we have had an unbroken chain of radical feminist female presidents and commanders of the military and popes and stateswomen and so on.

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*That radical feminism has always been a fairly small part of feminism and has had very little impact on religious and other institutions is irrelevant in both the case of Burke and the case of some MRA types.  That's because they paint any movements aiming for gender equality as a radical feminist takeover movement.  Indeed, I suspect that they know this and that the terminology is carefully selected.

Action Alert

Tell the government of Saudi Arabia to release blogger Raif Badawi.

Background:

A liberal activist sentenced to prison and flogging in Saudi Arabia underwent the first round of 50 lashes in public after Friday prayers, rights watchdog Amnesty International said.
Raif Badawi, who set up the “Free Saudi Liberals” website, was arrested in June 2012 and prosecuted for offences including cyber crime and disobeying his father.
The prosecution had demanded he be tried for apostasy, which carries the death penalty in Saudi Arabia, but a judge dismissed that charge.
He was sentenced to 10 years in prison, a fine of 1 million Saudi riyals ($266,666) and 1,000 lashes last year after prosecutors challenged an earlier sentence of seven years and 600 lashes as too lenient.

He will receive fifty lashes nineteen more times.

Snake-Eye Thoughts. Because I can.

1.  Life is complicated.  The world is complicated.  People who don't care about nuances miss an important basic fact about everything.  The solution to life, the universe and everything is not forty-two.

But that everything is tangled in a knot, that every solo singer has a discordant chorus in the background does not mean that there aren't any conclusions.  Sometimes even simple conclusions!  We need to search for them from the whole menu of twists and turns and among the many voices talking at the same time.

So why am I writing all that?  Because so much online debate demands simple solutions before the complicated problem is analyzed.  That's too early.

2.  I've recently found the little contrarian Echidne (with biiig fangs)  inside my psyche.  She's always existed but I have muzzled her.  Now she has chewed through her muzzle and wants to write all her crap out.  We shall see who wins.

The word I want here is not probably contrarian.  It's the case where I just suddenly and deeply disagree with those who walk my path on some aspect of the issues, and then I fight that part of me because of the stupid idea that if I'm not with you I have to be with the enemy.  The fear of loneliness (is anyone reading here?), the fear of disapproval by those I esteem.

To give you an example of one topic on which I disagree with many feminists, consider the #notallmen hashtag and similar ideas.  I don't think we should use group guilt in that context, just as I don't think we should blame all Muslims for what a few killers do.  My contrarian part has written a long post on that (a much better post than this short note, but still in drafts).  Whether it's of any interest to anyone (Bueller?) I don't know.

3.  Dirty vulvas.  People on Twitter have referred to a genital douche ad which suggests that women should clean their vulvas before going for a job interview.  To feel more confident that nothing stinks, I guess.

That's hilarious.  I'm imagining washing my vulva and hanging it out on the line to dry.  Given the freezing weather here I would then have, as one online friend stated, a frigid vulva.

Here's where the complications enter, however.  The ad is an ad, by a manufacturer of scents to use to cover up any vaginal smells.  How can they promote a product like that without coming across all 1950s misogynist?  What they are doing isn't that different from the deodorant ads etc. either.  Ads sell us insecurity and then tell us their products will take care of that.

Then there's the question of the role of the magazine, Woman's Day, which published the ad.  I see an enormous number of ads which are sexist in subtle ways, I see ads for alcohol and even cigarettes.

The real problem is in the existence of a product like that, a feminine douche.  It's not needed, based on what medical experts say, and it can even be harmful.  Water works really well.

 

Two Free Years of Community College

That's president Obama's proposal:

President Obama on Friday will propose making community college tuition-free for “responsible students,” launching what officials described as an ambitious plan for the federal and state governments to widen access to higher education.
Under a program dubbed America’s College Promise, administration officials said, an estimated 9 million students a year nationwide could benefit. The average tuition savings for a full-time student at a public two-year college was estimated to be $3,800 a year.
Obama’s goal, said Cecilia Muñoz, the White House’s domestic policy director, is “to make two years of college the norm — the way high school is the norm.”

What do you think about that?  The proposal has many benefits.  It could decrease wealth and income inequality over time, because community colleges are increasingly the road poorer and minority students take and one of the few open gateways to higher education.  It could also attract more middle- and higher-income students into community colleges, and that could work to increase their funding.  It could even partially reverse the resegregation of white and minority students in higher education.

It's good to note here that community colleges teach an enormous number of students and are pretty badly financed.  Perhaps because of the lack of finance and the greater needs of the poorer students (and the open enrollment), the average graduation rate of community colleges is quite low.  Sixty-five percent of students who began in community colleges fail to get any kind of degrees within five years. 

I recommend that Richard Kahlenberg article in the above link to anyone who wishes to think about this proposal more deeply, even though it doesn't directly address the two-free-years proposal.  There are many clear advantages to the proposal, but the negatives should also be pointed out:  If the majority of students end up not graduating with any kind of degree from community colleges, wouldn't that tax subsidy be partly wasted?  And to avoid wasting it, wouldn't it be important to vastly increase the general funding of community colleges?

The Charlie Hebdo Massacre And How We Talk About Religion

It's almost impossible to write about the role of religion in attacks of this kind, especially when the target is the West and when the culprits appear to shout Allahu Akbar (God is Great) while killing people.

No.  That's not true.  It's extremely easy to write about the role of religion in such attacks online.  But you must either go full force All-Muslims-Should-Be-Killed (if you are US right-wing) or US-Caused-It-By-Invading-And-Drones And The Reaction Is Understandable (if you are US left-wing).  And almost everyone can write But All Religions Do It Just Think Of The Crusades And The Klan.  The end of the story, because how can one meaningfully continue along on those lines if the actual question one has is different from the general Which Larger Group Is To Blame?

I exaggerate there, but not much.  What all that means is taking up the pen to write about this makes my gastritis flare up.  I swallow the unpleasant combinations into my stomach and then try to digest them.   I take up the pen so I don't have to surrender to my stomach.  Aren't you pleased that I shared?  And note the unintended connection to cartoons and the breaking of the cartoonists' pens.  The cost of silence.

And On The First Day The New Congress Gives Us.... What?

I predicted that it would be something in the war over who controls uteri.  That I was right is of no importance, because that's what conservatives need to give their fundie base:  The right to control women, pretty much.  Here it is:

Republicans in Congress are wasting no time following through on the anti-abortion agenda the GOP laid out after winning significant gains in the 2014 midterm elections.
On Tuesday, the very first day of the 114th Congress, two lawmakers introduced a measure to ban abortions after 20 weeks, in direct violation of the protections afforded under Roe v. Wade. Reps. Trent Franks (R-AZ) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) reintroduced the Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, the same legislation that successfully passed the House last year.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) — who introduced a companion 20-week abortion ban in the Senate last year that was stalled by Democratic leadership — has already indicated that he plans to re-introduce his own measure in the next few weeks, too. Now that the Senate is GOP-controlled, Republicans are anticipating that they’ll have enough support to pass the ban in both chambers this year, helping the anti-choice community gain momentum for this particular tactic to limit reproductive rights.

We are going to get loads and loads more of micro-changes.  Not any final giant attack, because conservatives don't want to lose those voters who are forced-birthers.  But lots and lots of money and energy will be spent on the uteri wars.

The Right-Wing Take on College Rape: Limbaugh and Schlafly, Sitting in A Tree.

Serendipity gave these two stories in one day. 

First Rush Limbaugh tells us that feminazis* teach on college campuses that all sex is rape, and that's why people think there is a rape epidemic on US campuses

Fuckin hilarious, our old friend Rush is (while slowly circling the drain of history).  Indeed, I've been taught (to my great surprise!) by various types of MRAs that feminists want to kill all men and teach that all sex is rape.  That first is because of a 1970s rant (The Scum Manifesto) by a woman called Valerie Solanas who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia.   The second is something taken from Intercourse,  a book by Andrea Dworkin, another 1970s radical feminist.  Wikipedia tells us:

In 1987, Dworkin published Intercourse, in which she extended her analysis from pornography to sexual intercourse itself, and argued that the sort of sexual subordination depicted in pornography was central to men's and women's experiences of heterosexual intercourse in a male supremacist society. In the book, she argues that all heterosexual sex in our patriarchal society is coercive and degrading to women, and sexual penetration may by its very nature doom women to inferiority and submission, and "may be immune to reform".^[59]

....

Such descriptions are often cited by Dworkin's critics, interpreting the book as claiming "all" heterosexual intercourse is rape, or more generally that the anatomical mechanics of sexual intercourse make it intrinsically harmful to women's equality. For instance, Cathy Young^[61] says that statements such as, "Intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of men's contempt for women,"^[59] are reasonably summarized as "All sex is rape".
Dworkin rejected that interpretation of her argument,^[62] stating in a later interview that "I think both intercourse and sexual pleasure can and will survive equality"^[63] and suggesting that the misunderstanding came about because of the very sexual ideology she was criticizing: "Since the paradigm for sex has been one of conquest, possession, and violation, I think many men believe they need an unfair advantage, which at its extreme would be called rape. I do not think they need it."^[63]

What's hilarious in Limbaugh's take is also hilarious in those teaching moments I was given:  Two women talk for everyone who believes in gender equality.  We should apply the same norm to MRA articles, indeed, to any politics.  Find the most extreme comments and assign them to everyone in a group.  Then make the person you are talking to responsible for those comments.  I didn't even know about Valerie Solanas existing, and I'm responsible for what she wrote almost fifty years ago.

The point that Limbaugh chases, naturally, is to make everything the fault of people who want gender equality.  Or more precisely, to turn everything against women.  The caller-in the video depicts doesn't get that, sadly.  But sancta simplicitas and all that.

Mmm.

How Not To Spend Your Paternity Leave

Here's a story about how not to spend your paternity leave.   That would be drinking while not having any interest in that new-born child:

My son was born in March, and my sabbatical went from early May to mid-January, which, in a tidy coincidence, is nearly nine months. But since his care was taken care of by his mother—whose apparent willingness and capacity to do almost everything for him flooded me with awe—I spent those nine months trying not to be bored while not writing a novel that was coming due. (No novelist who recognizes the unholy hardship of writing a novel ever wants to write a novel.) Hey, the proper dose of lager seemed to slacken my body without sapping my mind, and all day long, while I was not-writing my novel and not-feeding my newborn son, I looked forward to those drinks with a religious panting.

I can almost grasp the point of the story.  You have to put yourself in the pants of a writer who is looking for something shocking, something different, something properly narcissistic to write about.  And this topic certainly qualifies:

The time off is intended to let the new dad bond with the baby, to learn how to take care of the baby (so that there are two adults who have those skills), and this extra leave is a new thing in the US.

So what could be more exciting than to write the paternity leave up as an opportunity to wallow in booze?  Because the care of the baby was so totally managed by his mother, his father decided to drink.

It's shocking enough.  Of course, the way most read the story is as implying that paternity leave is just a silly invention and should be abolished.  It causes alcoholism!  The Natural Way is Between The Breast And The Baby and everything else is social engineering.

Yet some research suggests that proper paternity leaves are good for the psychological health of the child.   It can't be a bad idea to have both parents skilled at basic baby care, right?  

I'm not sure what to make of the editorial goal of publishing this piece.  Is the idea that paternity leaves drive fathers to drinking because of biological essentialist theories about who can take care of a baby?  Or is the idea that we shouldn't give paternity leave to drunks because their wives won't let them hold the baby at all?  In any case, most countries which have paternity leaves require them to be taken at a different time than the maternity leave part.  That way the dad is solely responsible for the care of his child.

I can see how that would not have been a good idea in this case.
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Added later:  Two great parodies of this piece.



 

Short posts 1/5/2015: On Funny Economic Theories, Old And Forgotten Rape Kits And Some Art And Literature

1.  Now this is the funniest quote in 2015:

LAUER: We talk about this a lot, we have in the past, will this be the year that Americans see a real raise in terms of their ability to have a good lifestyle?
CRAMER: Yes. Because this is the year where the companies have so much profit that it would be embarrassing if they didn't return it to some of the workers.

That's the financial genius Cramer telling us that the feudal overlords will be ashamed of the money bursting out of their pockets to such an extent that they will give the worker-ants more dead worms to eat!   That's not how economics works, of course (profits belong to the owners and the supply and demand in the labor markets tends to determine wages).  But feudal systems could work like that, I guess.

2.  Analyzing old rape kits makes for good (if expensive) policing.  Those kits are one obvious way of finding serial rapists.  Several US cities are now working through the kits which were ignored in the past and the yield from them is promising:

In Cleveland, which has submitted all of its 4,300 kits for testing, police have opened more than 1,800 investigations, with more than 1,000 still in progress. The local prosecutor's officer has indicted 231 people, a third of whom had at least one previous rape conviction.
More than 50 people have been arrested so far from ongoing investigations after officials in Houston completed testing 6,600 kits.
Memphis, which is only part way through its more than 12,000 backlogged kits, has opened 243 investigations, indicting 36 people.
And a new effort in Colorado saw 24 Codis matches from the first 150 kits tested, according to local media.
Such results suggest other cities and states may have thousands of new cases sitting on their shelves.

What's scary in that story are the cases where the same perpetrator appears to have been involved in several rapes but no name can be attached to him.

3.  And just to leaven the dough:  This older story about fifteenth-century style portraits created in an airplane lavatory (to demonstrate human creativity used in a good way).  Doesn't it make you want to see what could be done with desk implements, say? 

Or if you are more interested in literature and fairy tales, read this article about one group of German fairy tales.  It has feminist stuff in it, among other things.