On Baltimore

The city of Baltimore is recovering after demonstrations and rioting this weekend.  The cause of them was the death of Freddie Gray: 

Authorities can't say if there was a particularly good reason why police arrested Gray. According to the city, an officer made eye contact with Gray, and he took off running, so they pursued him. Though he'd had scrapes with the law before, there's no indication he was wanted at the time. And though he was found with a switchblade, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said, “We know that having a knife is not necessarily a crime.”
The police say Gray didn't resist arrest and that officers didn't use force, which seems to be mostly corroborated by video shot by bystanders. Gray seems to shout in pain, and his leg seems injured as officers drag him to a police van. (Someone off camera shouts, "His leg broke and y'all dragging him like that!") Gray also had asthma and requested his inhaler, but didn't get it. Yet it's not the leg or the asthma that killed him. Instead, it was a grave injury to his spinal cord. Gray's family said he was treated for three fractured vertebrae and a crushed voice box, the sorts of injuries that doctors say are usually caused by serious car accidents. The van made at least two stops before reaching the police station, but there's no footage to say what happened during the journey or at those stops.
It's a baffling conundrum. "None of the officers describe any use of force," Deputy Police Commissioner Jerry Rodriguez said. "None of the officers describe using any force against Mr. Gray." And yet somehow Gray was fatally hurt while in police custody.

This case has similarities to other recent and not so recent cases, where an unarmed (or allegedly unarmed) person dies either when arrested or in police custody.  The majority of these cases are about the deaths of black men and the usual way to package the issue is as one of police brutality and racism.

That may be convenient shorthand, as long as we remember that the racism might not necessarily be personal but institutional  and that the brutality might be at least partly defined as the increasing militarization of the police (where the population to be policed then becomes the enemy).

Freddie Gray died.  His funeral resulted in demonstrations which then resulted in riots.  The Maryland National Guard was called in, a state of emergency was declared.

How to interpret all that?

That depends on the interpreter's perch.  The conservative Rand Paul thinks the rioting is caused by lack of morals and fathers:*

As far as root causes, Paul listed some ideas of his own.
"There are so many things we can talk about," the senator said, "the breakdown of the family structure, the lack of fathers, the lack of a moral code in our society."

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes:

When nonviolence is preached as an attempt to evade the repercussions of political brutality, it betrays itself. When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse. When nonviolence is preached by the representatives of the state, while the state doles out heaps of violence to its citizens, it reveals itself to be a con. And none of this can mean that rioting or violence is "correct" or "wise," any more than a forest fire can be "correct" or "wise." Wisdom isn't the point tonight. Disrespect is. In this case, disrespect for the hollow law and failed order that so regularly disrespects the community.

John Angelos, Chief Operating Officer of the Orioles, Baltimore’s major-league baseball franchise, notes the economic inequality and suffering:

That said, my greater source of personal concern, outrage, and sympathy beyond this particular case is focused neither upon one night’s property damage nor upon the acts, but is focused rather upon the past four-decade period during which an American political elite have shipped middle-class and working-class jobs away from Baltimore and cities and towns around the US to third-world dictatorships, like China and others; plunged tens of millions of good, hardworking Americans into economic devastation, and then followed that action around the nation by diminishing every American’s civil-rights protections in order to control an unfairly impoverished population living under an ever-declining standard of living and suffering at the butt end of an ever-more militarized and aggressive surveillance state.  

Here's where the links to economic inequality and poverty matter.  Consider the area of the city of Baltimore which Freddie Gray called home.  These are the statistics applying to that area:

To understand why the demonstrations in Baltimore got out of hand we need to first understand what living in an area with those numbers means, what it does to you over time, and next relate all this to the history of the interactions between the Baltimore police and its black citizens.

None of that means that the riots would have been a "correct" response, as Coates observed in the above quote.  They are a bad response, like shooting at your own leg because the real target is far too high to reach. But so were the riots after the Joe Paterno resignation at Penn State.

The difference is that many others don't now regard all Penn State students as possible rioters whereas they make just that generalization when it comes to certain residents of Baltimore.


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*In this context Rand Paul's own parenting skills do matter.
 

To Help Nepal

You can send funds.  The New York Times gives a list of aid organizations.

I was told that the Lutheran World Federation of Churches is also a good organization to give to.  They have a lot of experience in crisis management, they do not try to convert people to Lutheranism and they seem to work on issues of gender justice, too.

I cannot personally vouch for any of the above, but they are avenues to get your pennies to make a difference.

As an aside, I really want to find a way to give help to the Yazidis in Iraq.  If you know of a way, leave it in the comments, with my thanks.

The Apocalypse And Its Miscreants

So I start this post with the title and have to Google "miscreant!"  That's how directly my posts are channeled from that goddess of snakes who takes me over.

Just joking.  But also linking to the religious arguments about us living in end times.  The valiant butchers of IS (ISIS/ISIL) believe that we are living in end times, and so do many American religious conservatives.  To give you a slightly humorous take, here's Michele Bachmann on that topic:

Former Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) expressed a mixture of condemnation and appreciation toward President Barack Obama for, in her words, bringing the world to end times.
...
“Barack Obama is intent, it is his number one goal, to ensure that Iran has a nuclear weapon," she said. "Why? Why would you put the nuclear weapon in the hands of madmen who are Islamic radicals?"
Bachmann, however, then seemed to approve of the President moving mankind into "the midnight hour."
"We get to be living in the most exciting time in history," she said, urging fellow Christians to "rejoice."
"Jesus Christ is coming back. We, in our lifetimes potentially, could see Jesus Christ returning to Earth, the Rapture of the Church."

What a relief!  I can stop flossing!

The point of this post is that something like "end times" is not an exogenous variable from the point of view of politicians and those active in trying to make them come about.  "End times" can be achieved.  A nuclear war could do it nicely, but so could many other things, such as irreversible changes in the climate.

The reverse of that is that we can delay the "end times" by our behavior.  Sadly, people with certain religious views don't have any incentive to do so, because they have packed their suitcases and have their travel tickets for paradise tightly in one hand while they use the guns with the other.

I haven't read enough on the history of apocalyptic thoughts, but my guess is that there have always been many people who believed that they themselves were living in the "end times."  But I doubt they had quite the same power to push this planet closer to them than some people today have.  While rejoicing over it.

The Preference For Sons in India And China. Look What We got For it!

The Economist has a long and pretty fact-filled article on the consequences of the missing girls in India and China (sex-selective abortions and female infanticide), combined with a few other marriage rules.  Worth reading it.  You can also then read the comments if you wish.

I did.  And then I got a sore stomach, as usual.  The reasons are subtle, a bit like a giant hippo only showing its nose above the surface of the river.  Everyone else writes about the nose, whereas I see the rest of that hippo, the ignored part.

Note that the article very quickly hints at the reason for all this sex imbalance:  It's "preference for sons."  Then it skates off to study how all those abortions and infant killings will soon leave many young men eternal spinsters (why not call them that?) and how that is very bad for the society and men, with more crime and violence and the need for more prostitutes.

The solutions offered both in the article and in the comments are not about that "preference for sons."  If we realize that the same thing could be called "a dislike of daughters" or something much stronger, given that some parents even resort to killing the infant daughter, the disconnect between the problem (women are not valued) and the solutions offered (somehow get more women from elsewhere, say)  becomes as clear as a hippo rising from the river.

The article has other interesting stuff, such as women "marrying upwards" in those countries.  That's the same as men marrying downwards.  Terms matter, my friends.  Because if men marry downwards, it's better that there aren't too many women on the top of the societal ladders.  They will become "leftovers" as they are called in China.

Now, the eternal spinster guys are also given pejorative names, such as "bare branches."  But isn't it fascinating how something which has its roots in the fact that women are not valued results in an article where part of the problem of too many men is that educated women cannot find husbands?  When you would have thought that more women with education (and thus more opportunities to help their families financially) would have been one of the solutions which could raise the valuation of women in general?

I may be nitpicking.  But I have written about this particular slant in the media takes about the missing girls for many, many years.  The problem really boils down, in those articles, to the question of how we can now get those men wives.

That the real problem is in the underlying assumption that all women are good for is being the providers of sex and sons just sorta sleeps under the surface of the debating river.

And  yes, as I have written before, there are reasons for the dislike of daughters.  In a system without good pensions it is the sons who are supposed to take care of their parents, while daughters must be provided with dowries and then they work for a totally different family.  And it is the sons who are seen as continuing the family genes, only the sons.  But all this, based on patrilocal marriage customs, is ultimately and circularly based on women not valued as much.

The Ethics of Journalism 101: Is it OK for NYT and WaPo to use Pre-Publication Opposition Research on Hillary Clinton?

This is an interesting question, even if I write so myself.  The case for your consideration:

The New York Times, The Washington Post and Fox News have made exclusive agreements with a conservative author for early access to his opposition research on Hillary Clinton, a move that has confounded members of the Clinton campaign and some reporters, the On Media blog has confirmed.
"Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich" will debut on May 5. But the Times, the Post and Fox have already made arrangements with author Peter Schweizer to pursue some of the material included in his book, which seeks to draw connections between Clinton Foundation donations and speaking fees and Hillary Clinton's actions as secretary of state. Schweizer is the president of the Government Accountability Institute, a conservative research group, and previously served as an adviser to Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin.

 I see three potentially serious problems with these exclusive arrangements.

First, depending on what newspapers are supposed to have as their objective*, getting opposition research on only one candidate can bias the reporting in the papers.  If conservative muckrakers are more diligent than liberal ones, the American people (how I love to be able to write that!) will be mislead, assuming that the Republican candidates might also have all sorts of skeletons in their mahogany cupboards.

Second, assuming that those at the newspapers know how to judge the research of Schweizer's book may be a form of hubris.  Or at least we should not just be told that there will be experts looking at all the stuff.

Third, and this links to my second point, using a book BEFORE it is published means that the newspapers won't have access to the expert criticisms which follow the publication of a book.  It's as if the book is allowed to hold the stage all alone, when the correct approach would be to wait to see what experts in the field might have to say about it.

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*The naive me thinks that the newspapers should try to be objective, search for as much truth as people can agree on and provide voters with factual information that will help their votes.  Psst, Maureen Dowd, writing about Hillary Clinton with all sorts of sexist terms isn't helpful for voters.

But other objectives are possible.  For instance, to make the most money possible out of gullible readers.

Sam Brownback Likes Some Government Handouts And Hates Others

Don't you just adore governor Brownback?  He's such an extreme believer in his own little right-wing religious fundamentalist reality.  Even though it's Christianist, it's not very charitable.  Or rather, the charity goes to the haves and is removed from the have-nots.  I wonder what Jesus would say about that, hmh?

A few years ago Brownback cut taxes in Kansas something fierce.  Indeed, certain kinds of firms don't pay any tax on their profits!  That's giving the owners of those firms government handouts, in my divine and correct opinion.

But other types of handouts Brownback doesn't like.  His most recent move consists of making absolutely sure that welfare recipients don't spend that grudgingly-offered money on strippers or tattoos but on useful things such as baby diapers:

The measure bars spending relief funds on movies, at swimming pools, or on "cruise ships," as well as at any "jewelry store, tattoo parlor, massage parlor, body piercing parlor ... psychic or fortune telling business, bail bond company, video arcade ... or any retail establishment which provides adult-oriented entertainment in which performers disrobe or perform in an unclothed state."


It also places a $25 daily limit on ATM withdrawals using the debit cards issued to recipients under the state/federal Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program, which is what's left of America's welfare program. That renders the cards useless for major spending, such as paying the rent, but it does mean that users will pile up ATM fees at $1 per withdrawal, plus bank fees.

Note that there is no evidence Kansas welfare recipients are desperately trying to use their welfare checks in the manner described here.  I'd be pretty surprised if such misuse is at all common, given that most recipients are single mothers with young children.

The point of this bill, Brownback tells us, is to get people to go to work!  I haven't checked if Kansas funds daycare for single mothers on welfare so that they can go to work in one of the minimum wage jobs many of them would end up with.  But whatever.  At least they can't get tattoos and massages while taking cruises.

Emily Badger in Washington Post writes about all this with great lucidity.  She points out that the treatment of one group of handout recipients differs from the treatment of all other groups of handout recipients:  They are held to higher moral and ethical standards:

The second issue with these laws is a moral one: We rarely make similar demands of other recipients of government aid. We don't drug-test farmers who receive agriculture subsidies (lest they think about plowing while high!). We don't require Pell Grant recipients to prove that they're pursuing a degree that will get them a real job one day (sorry, no poetry!). We don't require wealthy families who cash in on the home mortgage interest deduction to prove that they don't use their homes as brothels (because surely someone out there does this). The strings that we attach to government aid are attached uniquely for the poor.

And that is because we don't view other forms of government transfers as undeserved handouts.

It's not necessarily bad to limit what welfare payments can be used for.  But when you combine this particular move with Brownback's earlier handouts to much wealthier groups of taxpayers you wonder what type of Jesus his reality has.  If this man is supposedly following in his footsteps.

Terry Pratchett Thoughts. On the Role of the Media and On Citizens as Consumers.

I've been re-reading many of Terry Pratchett's books, in his memory.  I often come across little jewels (or chocolate truffles) of ideas.  For example:

"the public is not interested in public interest."

Which is true.  The reasons for that are many and varied, but it's almost impossible to try to write about topics of public interest on a commercial basis (so send money).

My most recent re-read is The Truth, about the first newspapers in Ankh-Morpork.  Mr. William de Worde starts the very first one, with actual news in it (though also stories about funny-shaped vegetables).  A competitor soon catches on with scandalous stories such as "a woman gives birth to a cobra."

de Worde gets a statement from the king of the area where this miracle-birth was supposed to have happened, at some cost for himself.  The king denied any cobra-human births to have happened.

The response of the readers was that of course the king would deny everything, of course.  In any case, stories about women giving birth to cobras are a lot more fun than stories about politics, say.

All that reminds me of American politics, in a gently ridiculous sense. Weird people writing or nattering about Hillary Clinton's cankles (a term for fat ankles) as if it matters what size ankles a president has and as if we ever otherwise measure the ankles of presidential contenders.  Presidents being judged on the basis of whether we'd like to have a beer with them.

Imagine using that way of judging for picking your neurosurgeon.

All this links in a vague way to a Finnish article I recently came across, on the new approach to citizens as consumers.  This is the part I wish to translate:

Kun on riittävän monta vuotta toisteltu, että kansa tietää parhaiten kaiken, ovat sivistysinstituutiot alkaneet nöyrtyä.
Korkeakoulujen oletetaan palvelevan paitsi liike-elämää ja politiikkaa, myös oppilaitaan, joista on tullut asiakkaita.
Lehdet ovat luopuneet vanhanaikaisesta valistajan roolista ja kyselevät yleisöltä, mikä on tärkeää. Nettiäänestyksissä media tenttaa lukijan mielipidettä asioihin, jotka eivät ole mielipiteestä kiinni: tuliko lama, lämpeneekö ilmasto, tappavatko rokotteet, mitä mieltä jengi.
Asiakkaan rooli voi imarrella meitä hetken, mutta demokratian ja sivistyksen osalta se on tylsä loukku: olemme aina oikeassa, ja siksi meidän ei tarvitse omaksua uutta.

My approximate translation:

When we have repeated for many years that the people (here meant as the audience) know best all the cultural institutions have begun to agree.  Universities are assumed to serve both business and politics but also the students who are now customers.  Newspapers have given up their old-fashioned role as educators and enlighteners.  Instead, they ask the public what is important.  In online polls the media wants the reader's opinions on matters which are not based on opinions:  did we have an economic recession, is the climate warming, do vaccinations kill.  What do you guys think?

The role of a customer can momentarily flatter, but it's a boring trap from the point of view of democracy and culture:  we are always right and that's why we don't have to learn anything new.

What To Read Today on Gender, 4/16/15

1.  This article about feminist foreign policy is worthwhile.  A quote:

Last month, Saudi Arabia abruptly cut ties with Sweden, recalling its ambassador and announcing that it would issue no new visas to Swedish business travelers. The cause, according to Saudi Arabia, was some remarks made by Margot Wallström, the foreign minister of Sweden.

...

On February 11th, Wallström, speaking before the Swedish parliament, stated what may appear to be a few facts about Saudi Arabia: she said that women are not allowed to drive, that their human rights are violated, and that the country is a dictatorship in which the royal family has absolute power. Like representatives of several other European countries, she also criticized the public flogging of the blogger Raif Badawi and later called it “medieval.”
Wallström, whose government recognized the State of Palestine last year, had been asked to deliver a speech at an Arab League summit in Cairo in late March, but Saudi Arabia intervened, and Wallström was disinvited. On March 9th, Saudi Arabia withdrew its ambassador to Sweden, saying that Wallström had “unacceptably interfered” in the country’s internal affairs. The United Arab Emirates followed suit a week later. Due to Saudi Arabia’s diplomatic wrangling, Wallström was also condemned by the Gulf Cooperation Council (which consists of Bahrain, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the U.A.E.), The Organization of Islamic Cooperation, which includes fifty-seven countries, and the Arab League itself. Finally, Saudi Arabia leveled a more serious charge against Wallström: that by commenting on the punishment of public flogging, the Swedish foreign minister had criticized Sharia law and Islam.

There are similar pressures in writing.  How does one criticize beliefs and not people?  And are other people allowed to tell us not to criticize their beliefs?  Should Western feminists be silent about ISIS, because criticizing ISIS so easily is viewed as criticizing Islam, given the discrimination and labeling of Muslims, especially in the West? 

But if Western feminists are silent about ISIS,  what remains of feminism?  How can a feminist write about the forced-birth policies of US conservatives and not write about this?

I'm on Wallström's side in this, and that's why I worry about the argument that her comments are somehow the same as criticizing Sharia law (which is deemed to have a divine origin).

2.  Female chimpanzees are more likely than male chimpanzees to fashion weapons and use them in hunting, according to one study.  I have not read the study, but note the framing, especially in the last paragraph.  Then check how often this particular study is disseminated, compared to the earlier study about how female chimpanzees appeared to shape branches into dolls.  That one was widely disseminated and discussed, along the lines that "we all know the gender roles in humans are innate.  Just look at the chimps!"

I bet this one won't get the same amount of publicity, because it doesn't serve to prop up human gender roles.  As Terry Pratchett states in one of his books, people don't want news, they want "olds:" reinforcement for what they already believe to be true.

In any case, I've written about the gender politics in this field earlier.

3.  Martha MacCallum really really dislikes the idea of a woman's head on US paper money.  There's a movement to get a woman on the twenty-dollar bill, and Bill O'Reilly and Martha MacCallum ruminated on that at Fox News.  O'Reilly asked why everything must be so damn politically correct*, and MacCallum disliked the idea that this movement is all about women.  It would be more interesting, I guess, if it was about melons or papayas. 

Sigh.  The movement wouldn't have to be all about women if the US had had the same number of male and female presidents and if the Founding Fathers had been joined with some Founding Mothers, dear Martha.  Context matters.

MacCallum stated that for her the heads on money are US presidents and a few Founding Fathers, and that statement creates an infinite loop with my previous paragraph.  Or put Abigail Adams on the money.

4.  As many people say on Twitter:  "I can't even..."  That's the term describing utter exhaustion with the silliness that goes on in American politics.  Now that Hillary Clinton has stepped into the ring we are going to have several years hilarious sexism.  And I have this feeling I should write about it. 

Perhaps I will, perhaps I won't, but I can't help lifting up the skirt on the particular commentary of a Texas marketing CEO Cheryl Rios, who believes that women are too hormonal to run a country (even though apparently not too hormonal to run a marketing firm) and that this is why we shouldn't have a female president.  Imagine her hand on the switch which rules nuclear weapons!  She might start a poorly thought-out war!  Gasp!  And gasp!

Enough exclamation marks for you?  In any case, Hillary Clinton probably has calmer hormones, given her post-menopausal stage, than any of the younger guys joining the race.  And quite possibly calmer hormones than the older guys, at least based on what I've observed of her in the public eye over the years.

But if that isn't enough to convince you not to vote for Hitlery** (a conservative pet-name for Clinton), there's also the Biblical argument which is very very logical Rios tells us.  (I've read the Bible and can't recall where the logic in the statements are.  They just tell us that men should rule over women and that women should shut up.)  And if even that won't make you face the facts, well, what will all those sexist countries think of the US if it is run by a woman?  How can we possibly invade them or start reckless wars against them if they won't even respect us because of our gender equality policies?

OK.  That last bit was me pretending to be inside the head of Cheryl Rios.  I got all dizzy and hormonal.

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*  That term is a euphemism for "let's ignore large classes of people" in politics and in business.  It's also shorthand for "here comes the bit where we dis women and/or minorities."  It's a marvelous term!  And a boring one, because it doesn't say WHY the utterer finds something politically correct but in reality completely false and unnecessary and trivial.  It's right-wing code-speak.

**  This post is not about Hillary Clinton as a candidate.  Voters have their own reasons for voting or not voting for a particular candidate.  My focus here (and in the future) is in the kind of statements which are not about Clinton at all but about all women or all women of a particular age etc..  In other words, about sexism and misogyny and the use of extreme stereotypes based on gender.

The Chibok Schoolgirls. One Year Later.

It's a year since Boko Haram, an extremist Wahhabist terrorist group, captured a group of schoolgirls in northern Nigeria.  More than two hundred girls still remain disappeared.  Nobody knows their fate.  Nigeria's president-elect Mr. Buhari:

“Currently their whereabouts remain unknown,” he said. “We do not know the state of their health or welfare, or whether they are even still together or alive.”
The girls were taken late on the night of April 14, 2014, from their state school in the heartland of the Boko Haram insurgency, igniting fears among local officials that the girls would be used as slaves by the group if they were not rescued immediately.
Perhaps as many as 50 of the girls subsequently escaped. The majority remain missing, forced into “marriage” by their captors, forced to cook and do chores for them, or killed by them.

Boko Haram has since butchered and kidnapped an unknown (but large) number of people. From that angle the fate of the Chibok schoolgirls is no more awful than Boko Haram's general policies.  But this particular kidnapping is noteworthy not only for the human lives it destroyed (which is quite possible without killing someone outright).  It's also an example of Boko Haram's political views:  Western education should be banned and girls and women, in particular, should not be educated.  

To kidnap schoolgirls is to make those views into reality.  To turn those schoolgirls into domestic slaves or to force them into marriage clarifies the Boko Haram political stance even more.

Profits As A Reward For Risk Carrying?

Economists often argue that this is the ultimate function of corporate profits:  They reward those who bear the risks, and the losses punish those who made the wrong guesses in the corporate games.  So it's all ethical, right?

Given this, I find the new focus on transferring risks to employees an interesting one.  Logically every step towards workers-as-the-real-entrepreneurs should make it harder to justify high profits, correct?  But I'm not seeing that trend to follow the other new trend, this one, say:

Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is probing chain clothing retailers for their practice of on-call scheduling, which forces workers into a purgatory of not knowing from day to day whether they'll have to report for duty, making something as simple as planning childcare or attending college extremely difficult—if the boss doesn't force you to quit school altogether.

This is not the only example of the new trend.  Corporations are now demanding no risks from what governments might do in the future, for example, as is visible in the trade agreements.

The Beauty of The Female Back. Today's Evolutionary Psychology Study.

A couple of readers forwarded me summaries of an evolutionary psychology study about what angle of lower back men* view as the most beautiful in women.  Thanks for those summaries.

I wasn't going to write about the study, because it didn't beep loudly enough on my freakometer**. 

But then I Googled it and found something fascinating about who quoted it:  The first ten pages of Google gave me a large harvest of pickup artist sites, a few misogyny sites and, in general, lots of tough-prehistoric-guy sites.  Many of those sites summarized the study as being about large butts, which is incorrect, but then misunderstanding studies is more common than understanding them.  What was more interesting is that this study  seems particularly loved by those who do not particularly love women.

That's one fascinating fact.  The other fascinating fact is a comment in one study summary:

Short Funny/Not-so-Funny Posts for 4/10/15. Futurist Ideas of 1930, Labiafaces And Other Weirdness.

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

The Cats And The Dogs And Even The Birds

I had never heard of Saara Suvanto before yesterday.  That is a pity, because she had one of those voices which is an instrument (think of Billie Holiday whose centenary is today or of Odetta or of Janis Joplin).  She died at the age of forty from Type One diabetes and she was blind from her early twenties onwards.

What a voice!  This is an early 1980s song she created and performed.  It's called Kissat ja Koirat ja Linnutkin which means The Cats and the Dogs And Even the Birds.  I have given a rough translation of the words at the end of this post.



The topic of the song was the fear of a nuclear war.  But it applies equally well to global climate change, today's fear.

My translation of the lyrics:

Hey, dad, even the children
they want to blow up in air
All the cats and the dogs and even the birds
none of them will be left in peace.

Hey mom,  they slaughter the children, too
nothing will be left of them
all the cats and the dogs and even the birds
everything they destroy.

Listen to the voice of the child
when you still have time
stop being so  very busy
you restless nomad. 

In the noise the voice
of the innocent child drowns
At night when she/he sleeps
you can hear it clearly

Hey, dad, even the children
they want to blow up in air
All the cats and the dogs and even the birds
none of them will be left in peace.

Hey mom,  they slaughter the children, too
nothing will be left of them
all the cats and the dogs and even the birds
everything they destroy. 

Listen to the voice of the child
when you can still hear it
when the city quiets down
the frailest of voices sing
it is then the turn of the big ones
to join the song
and ? children’s choir
rings over all land

Hey, dad, even the children
they want to blow up in air
All the cats and the dogs and even the birds
none of them will be left in peace.

Hey mom,  they slaughter the children, too
nothing will be left of them
all the cats and the dogs and even the birds
everything they destroy.

Suitable Music For Today

The Fabled Hare

Cat For Friday

This is Iippa, decorating a party table.

She watches programs about squirrels and such on her very own laptop.

Meanwhile, in Indiana

Indiana has recently become famous for its particular version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act which  has been widely criticized as a barely camouflaged attempt to give religious fundamentalists (and the firms they own) more scope to refuse service to people who might try to  order  cakes or flowers for same-sex wedding parties or who might try to renew their contraceptive pill prescriptions and so on.

Others have written about that in great detail.  What struck me when looking at the Indiana law was how it defined the "person" that the new law would provide with restored (refreshed! renewed!) religious freedom:

Sec. 7. As used in this chapter, "person" includes the following: 
(1) An individual.

(2) An organization, a religious society, a church, a body of communicants, or a group organized and operated primarily for religious purposes.
(3) A partnership, a limited liability company, a corporation, a company, a firm, a society, a joint-stock company, an unincorporated association, or another entity that:
(A) may sue and be sued; and

(B) exercises practices that are compelled or limited by a system of religious belief held by:
(i) an individual; or
(ii) the individuals;

who have control and substantial ownership of the entity, regardless of whether the entity is organized and operated for profit or nonprofit purposes.

Remember Hobby Lobby and the "closely held" companies?  This sounds similar, perhaps a child of that decision.  So now companies can be persons, too!

That's the background in my mind for thinking about the case of Purvi Patel, an Indiana woman who has been convicted* of feticide (based on an Indiana law Ind. Code Ann. § 35-42-1-6) and also of felony  neglect of a dependent.

IS And Women. Part 3: The Western Female IS Militants

 Introduction

Meet Zahra and Salma Halane, seventeen-year-old twin sisters from Manchester, England who are not currently living the lives of typical British teenagers.  That's because they left England last June to follow their brother, Ahmed, in joining IS/ISIS/ISIL in Syria.  In the short time since then they have both been married to IS militants and they have also both been widowed.

Zahra's online communications suggest that the twins are members of one of the two women's brigades in Raqqa, Syria, possibly the al-Khansaa brigade, which has the task of policing other women's behavior according to the IS version of sharia.  Violations of the sharia code might mean not being adequately covered (say, missing the obligatory face veil) or being out without a mahram (husband, father, brother or adult son).  Some violations result in floggings.

Here Zahra Halane poses in front of the IS flag while holding an AK-47:

Meet Aqsa Mahmood, a twenty-year old student from a fairly affluent family in Glasgow, Scotland.  She is no longer attending to her studies, because she left Scotland for Syria in late 2013 to join IS:

Since then she has married an IS militant and commented online under the name of Umm Laytt.  Some see her as an online recruiter for IS.  Whether that is her official role or not,  her online site  contains suggestions of help for other women who might wish to join IS as well as explanations for her reasons for becoming a female jihadist.  She appears to live in the Syrian "capital" of IS, Raqqa.  Here she is with two other female jihadists (Umm Haritha and Umm Ubaydah)

These are three examples of the women and girls of IS who have independently joined the terrorist movement and cut their ties to their families and previous homelands.  All three come from the UK, but other women have traveled to Syria to  join IS from countries such as France, Germany, Austria, the US, Sweden, Canada and Indonesia.

Who are these foreign women of IS/ISIS/ISIL?  Why do women and girls voluntarily join a terrorist organization which plans for a caliphate where women's rights would be minimal and their freedom of movement nonexistent?  Why do women and girls voluntarily join a terrorist organization which openly practices rape and sexual slavery of "non-believing" women and children, not to mention the beheading of aid workers and journalists?

A Flu Thought

What does it say about me that the front of the Sudafed box seems to have a line saying Noam Chomsky?

That was Non-Drowsy for those of you who don't have a head full of snot.

This Is Weird. A Press Release from the House Judiciary Committee.

It's full of those moving GIFs which always make me feel as if I'm trying to follow table tennis played very fast by very small mice. 

But that's not what is weird about the communication.  The topic is president Obama and US immigration laws.  And the GIFs:

In a reflection of the racial demographics of House Republicans, all of the GIFs in Wednesday's Judiciary Committee press release depict white people, among them Jennifer Lawrence, Britney Spears and Steve Carell. The vast majority of the 245 House Republicans are white. Seven are Hispanic, and two are black.

Unlike House Republicans, however, the people seen in the GIFs are nearly all female. Only 23 House Republicans, or a little less than 10 percent, are women.
“The Little Mermaid” tells the story of a woman who is part fish and who longs to emigrate from sea to land. In the 1989 Disney film, the mermaid stays on land.

Who is the press release intended to reach?  I wonder and wonder.

And yes, this is old stuff.  My apologies for it.  I got the flu even though I got vaccinated.  

Monopoly. The Game.

Yesterday was the eightieth anniversary of the game called Monopoly.  There's an interesting subtext to the history of the game.  Or a sub-game, if you wish:

Legend has it that Charles Darrow, an unemployed salesman, invented the game in his kitchen in 1930. But the roots of Monopoly actually date back a few more decades, to a game called the Landlord's Game created by Elizabeth Magie in 1903.

The Landlord's Game was meant to be educational, illustrating economist Henry George's belief -- inspired by the Gilded Age -- that property ownership by individuals is inherently unfair. Magie's game was an underground success, leading to a number of offshoots, including the one that Darrow tweaked. Parker Brothers bought her patent for $500 in 1935, closing the loop.

The New York Times recently published an article about Elizabeth Magie and her Landlord's Game as the possible basic source for Monopoly.  I recommend reading the whole piece, because it's a fairly representative case study of the "disappearing women"  phenomenon:

Magie’s game featured a path that allowed players to circle the board, in contrast to the linear-path design used by many games at the time. In one corner were the Poor House and the Public Park, and across the board was the Jail. Another corner contained an image of the globe and a homage to Henry George: “Labor Upon Mother Earth Produces Wages.” Also included on the board were three words that have endured for more than a century after Lizzie scrawled them there: “Go to Jail.”
...

It was a version of this game that Charles Darrow was taught by a friend, played and eventually sold to Parker Brothers. The version of that game had the core of Magie’s game, but also modifications added by the Quakers to make the game easier to play. In addition to properties named after Atlantic City streets, fixed prices were added to the board. In its efforts to seize total control of Monopoly and other related games, the company struck a deal with Magie to purchase her Landlord’s Game patent and two more of her game ideas not long after it made its deal with Darrow.

Magie never really benefited financially from her game, whereas Darrow became very rich indeed.  The reasons why history ended up that way can be many, but Magie's gender certainly would not have helped. 

There's something about the way we (as humans) write history which downplays or erases the contributions of individuals which don't fit the subconscious patterns we have in our minds,* and women working in science or literature have frequently found their work  ignored or reinterpreted for that reason.  Sometimes the erasure is conscious, but often it is not. 

What fascinates me is that often the unconscious or conscious rewriting seems to take place a short time after** the events, not immediately, as if it's the slightly more distant observers who have erased, say, any women from stories of inventions or scientific discoveries or assigned them to the more "natural" helper roles.   That could be because the effect of the unconscious patterns becomes more powerful when the actual individuals are no longer known.

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*The case of Rosalind Franklin is a well-known example of this.

For an example outside gender, consider the case of Sir Edmond Hillary and Tenzing Norgay as an example.  The early recognition went mostly to Hillary, perhaps because Norgay was seen as someone just doing his job whereas Hillary was the white adventurer.

**Time is a relative concept here, and I refer to such things as the evaluation of literary merit of various writers a generation after their work, rather than hundred years later.

And To War, To War We go? On Iran As The Next Target.

Joshua Muravchik has written an opinion piece in the Washington Post about what the United States should do with respect to Iran's plan to acquire nuclear weapons.  Muravchik would like some other people to sacrifice themselves in a war against Iran, because he believes that a war with Iran is the best possible answer to the disagreements. 

Even the title of the piece says that if you are in a hurry and can't read the rest of the column:  "War with Iran is probably our best option." 

The opinion piece is fun to read if you ignore what it's all about.  Muravchik worries about nuclear weapons in the hands of Iran's hard-liners and explains to us why it is imperative to avoid that situation:

What if force is the only way to block Iran from gaining nuclear weapons? That, in fact, is probably the reality. Ideology is the raison d’etre of Iran’s regime, legitimating its rule and inspiring its leaders and their supporters. In this sense, it is akin to communist, fascist and Nazi regimes that set out to transform the world. Iran aims to carry its Islamic revolution across the Middle East and beyond. A nuclear arsenal, even if it is only brandished, would vastly enhance Iran’s power to achieve that goal.

Hmm.  I think it's Saudi Arabia that is financing and spreading the Islamic revolution across the Middle East and beyond, in the form of Sunni Wahhabism.  And Pakistan, a major base for various Islamist terrorist groups, already has nuclear weapons.  Some suggest Pakistan has a deal with the Saudis to let them have those weapons if necessary. 

Indeed, though Iran has been an eager beaver at home in propping up the rules and restrictions concerning women*, those pesky critters which just won't stay inside their allotted little cages and therefore rattle the structure of the Islamic revolution, I don't see Shia Islam as a major aspect of today's international terrorism.

The whole opinion piece is probably one of those click-bait pieces.  But it's also a little like that time-honored Tarzan move:  You bang your hairy chest with your fist and ululate, to frighten everyone who happens to be within hearing range in the jungle. 

But that doesn't work when every country in the area is run by their own Tarzans, all banging their chests.  And then you have to do something more or you lose face.

Muravchek's piece made me wonder who the "we" in the title of this post might be.  But it also acutely reminded me of the types of opinion pieces we got after 911, all telling that Iraq is the place the US should invade to find bin Laden who was in Afghanistan etc. 

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*You can download a whole report on the position of women in Iran at that link. 

And More Grumbling

Suppose, just for the sake of an idle example, that you have spent the whole weekend and most of Monday working on post #3 in your series about women and IS.  Suppose that you have twenty footnotes, all with extra links and comments, and that the total length of the post is beginning to approach a small book.

Suppose, then, that it's Tuesday, and you are ready to draw the finishing touches on that post.  You enter the edit mode on this ancient sewing machine called Blogger and start merrily typing away.

You make a mistake, and then use the undo-command to correct that mistake.

Instead of the expected reaction (i.e., mistake corrected), everything written into the draft disappears.  Texts, pictures, footnotes, links, all gone.

What would you do then?  Madly press the undo-command, perhaps?  But because you are a very very stupid goddess you have the auto-save on, and Blogger helpfully saves the empty pages for you.

Well, this happened.  I then spent hours trying to get the post back, but none of the tricks worked.

This is how life teaches you....something.   

Grumbling

Remind me NEVER again to promise a series of long-form posts on any topic whatsoever.  They take ages to write.  AGES!  And nobody probably reads long-form posts because they  now have that Public Service Announcement in their very name which warns potential readers that they are going to be loooong.

This is an explanation for my recent silence on the blog.

On the Death of Sir Terry Pratchett

Sir Terry Pratchett, an English fantasy writer of humorous and gently sarcastic works,  has died at the age of sixty-six.  He is the creator of Discworld, an imaginary planet which is a flat disc standing on the shoulders of four giant elephants which in their turn stand on the shell of an even more giant turtle.

The turtle is swimming through space towards an unknown destination, and with the turtle swim all creatures Pratchett has peopled his world with: gnomes, trolls, dwarfs, vampires, werewolves,  humans of various types, from powerful witches to funny wizards, melancholy policemen and even a benevolent dictator whose degree is in assassination studies.

While those creatures are carried on to nobody-knows-where, they live their lives, love, hate, steal, help, perform magic, fight wars, pollute their environment, educate their children and practice politics.

In short, they are very much like us here on earth, except for not being like us at all.  Even their politics has a familiar tone:  their gods bicker with each other and play dice games with the creatures, cultures clash, prejudices flare up and are sometimes resolved, wars begin for no good reason at all and are waged ineffectively and stupidly, and at the end of every life there is Death, an anthropomorphized figure with the dark cowl, the skull head and the scythe.

Pratchett's Death wishes to be human.  In one of the books he temporarily adopts a human son and ultimately ends up with a half-human granddaughter (one of my favorite figures in the books).  Death likes a good strong curry (does it just go through his ribcage?) and has strong opinions about the most humane way of harvesting his people.

Death is ultimately just.  That aspect of his personality can be seen in the battles against the auditors of the universe, an odd (infinite?) group of identical creatures without hearts but with an extremely strong urge for tidiness,  order and proper hierarchies.

The creatures of the Discworld are anything but orderly, and so sometimes face the wrath of the auditors who would prefer a silent and quiet planet.  Death refuses to be cowed by the auditors.  He takes the part of his people, his harvest, helped by various individuals of the planet and also the secret weapon which is chocolate.

You may see why I love Pratchett's books.  They have everything:  Political jokes, parables to our world's history and myths, and chocolate.  They even have empathy, compassion and realistic female characters, drawn with skill and often equipped with power.

But mostly I love the books because they are based on a deep thirst for justice and fairness.  Neil Gaiman has written about the anger of Terry Pratchett, the kind of cold and glorious rage which can fuel writing about injustices. 

In one of Pratchett's books a character states: "There is no justice.  There is just us."  I read that as telling us what our role in the collective sense should be:  To create that missing justice and fairness, to make it, so to speak,  the unknown destination of the giant turtle carrying our Discworld.

David Brooks' Moral Measles

How is that for a post title?

David Brooks, a conservative columnist for the New York Times, has recently gone on (and on) about values.  Values are things which Brooks believes conservatives have and liberals do not have.  It's not that everybody has values, nope.  Or, rather, some people have bad values and other people have good values.  Good values are about family and sacrificing oneself for the sake of order and hierarchy (though the sacrifices are mostly expected of women).  Good values are firmly conservative, bad values are firmly liberal.

That's the first thing you need to know about Brooks and his writings.  The second thing is the manner in which he appears to approach science:  He starts from the conclusions he wishes to draw, then goes backwards until he finds a study or a book which supports those conclusions, then he ignores all other evidence and writes his piece by beginning with the study he likes, implying that it's accepted wisdom by all and then writing how it results in his conclusions.

This pattern is visible in his latest column which is about the good values of rich people and the bad values of poor people.  If only poor people had better values, they, too, could be rich people!

Well, not quite.  But they'd be a lot less trouble to the rich people that way.

IS And Women. Part 2: Sexual Slavery And Rape of "Non-Believers"

It all began last summer.  In August,  news from Iraq noted that IS had attacked villages inhabited by Yazidis, an ethnically Kurdish group with a religion which combines elements of Zoroastrianism and ancient Mesopotamian religions (1):

The gunmen had surrounded the village for more than a week, refusing to let residents leave and saying they had limited time to save themselves by converting to Islam.
When that time ran out, fighters from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria stormed in, killing the men and rounding up the women and children, a survivor and Iraqi officials said Saturday.
The extent of the killings on Friday in Kocho, a tiny, isolated village in northern Iraq that is home to members of the Yazidi sect, remained unclear on Saturday night. Some officials said they believed that at least 80 people had died, although no one had been able to visit the site to assess the damage.

Later in the same article we learn that though most adult men were killed, the fate of most of the women and children remained unclear:

It remained unclear what had become of the village’s women and children. Mr. Khidr said he did not think they had been killed, but had been rounded up and taken somewhere else.
Mahma Khalil, a Yazidi leader and a former Parliament member, said he had received reports that they were taken as prisoners to the nearby town of Tal Afar.

Other news (impossible to independently verify) told of women who were found naked and tied after IS attacks, apparently repeatedly raped by the terrorists.

Soon, however, we learned what happened to all those captured Yazidis:

They were taken into slavery (2).  Their expected destiny differed by gender and age.  The young boys would be turned into IS jihadis (3) by religious education and brain-washing, the older women would perhaps become general household slaves and the young women and girls would be used to satisfy the sexual needs of the IS fighters.

At the time I'm writing this the total number of Yazidi women and children captured by IS is thought to be in several thousands, though precise numbers are difficult to get.  Some of the captured remain in Iraq, some have been taken to Syria (or even further, given the aspect of sexual trafficking in IS-created slave markets).

Some appear to have been given to individual IS fighters right after the killing of the Yazidi men in various villages, as war booty,  some have been assigned to the IS movement, to be further distributed among fighters, and some young women seem to have been placed into brothels near Mosul in Iraq.  Further trading of the slaves takes place in markets in both Syria and Iraq.

The rest of this post looks deeper into this particular hell.

Female Serial Killers And Evolutionary Psychology

Washington Post has a summary of a new study on American female serial killers.  Its headline is "The surprising but curiously logical differences between male and female serial killers." 

Astonishingly, those differences don't seem to include the vast difference in the numbers of male and female serial killers, at least the ones who are caught.  Well, the summary doesn't mention that.

The study uses evolutionary psychology to explain why female serial killers have apparently different motives for killing and different modi operandorum (m.o.s).

Thus:

Although female serial killers, like unhappy families, are each horrifying in their own way, Harrison found some striking similarities among her subjects. Most of them came from fairly mundane backgrounds, their primary weapon was poison, and nearly all of them killed people they knew, often their own family members. By comparison, most victims of male serial killers are unknown to their murderer.
“Female serial killers gather and male serial killers hunt,” Harrison said. “That was very interesting to me, as an evolutionary psychologist, that it reflects kind of ancestral tendencies.”

Harrison also saw evidence of evolutionary influences in what drove women to kill. While most murders by male serial killers tend to involve sex in some way — a 1995 study found that male serial killings are characterized by a desire for domination, control, humiliation and sadistic sexual violence — women are more likely to kill for money or power.
“It struck me that women would kill for resources, which was their primary drive in the ancestral environment, and men kill for sex,” she said.

 Bolds are mine.

That's really neat!  At first glance it's simple and somehow fitting.  But then I started thinking more about all that gathering vs. hunting and resources vs. sex business, and I realized that it's far too simple, even simplistic.

The reasons are pretty obvious, in my view. Take that gathering vs. hunting distinction:

First, we don't actually have information on the exact division of labor in some presumed ancestral era of evolutionary adaptation.  Did the men go out every single day to hunt, without fail?  Did the women never go?  When the berries were all ripening at the same time, did the men just hang out somewhere telling stories or where they out hunting? What if hunting was sporadic?  Who hunted small animals and fished?  What if men gathered, too?  One study of more recent gatherer-hunter societies found that most of the calories the tribe consumed came from gathering, and that suggests to me that men gathered, too.

Second, it's hard to see why one form of serial killing is like gathering and one form like hunting.  Gatherers probably had to walk long distances (and, indeed, the usual assumption is that the evolutionary adaptations happened in small nomadic family groups so everybody moved).  That the female serial killers were more likely to know their victims doesn't make their form of killing like gathering, or at least I cannot see why that would be the case. 

The only way I can imagine such a semblance is by thinking of the victims of the female serial killers as staying put in one place, so that the killer "harvests" them.  But the victims of male serial killers might also stay in one place where he goes to kill them?

I'm confused on that, especially given that I haven't read the original article (forty dollars).

Third, the differences between male and female serial killers in the US from 1821 to 2008 cover a lot of years when certain types of women, "respectable ones," just didn't go out alone that much and probably not at all late at night.  Couldn't it be equally likely that female serial killers selected their victims on the basis of access to victims or opportunity, as defined by the gender norms of the society?

What about the motives of resources vs. sex?  To remind you, this is the relevant quote:

Harrison also saw evidence of evolutionary influences in what drove women to kill. While most murders by male serial killers tend to involve sex in some way — a 1995 study found that male serial killings are characterized by a desire for domination, control, humiliation and sadistic sexual violence — women are more likely to kill for money or power.
“It struck me that women would kill for resources, which was their primary drive in the ancestral environment, and men kill for sex,” she said.

 Bolds are mine.

How do domination and control (assumed male traits) differ from power (assumed female trait)?

What Harrison probably refers to in those primary drives is the Evolutionary Psychology (EP*) argument that women look for resources in their male mating partners while men look for youth and health (fertility) in their female mating partners.  I've written about the problems with that simplified theory before.  If evolutionary adaptations indeed happened when our prehistoric ancestors lived in small family-based nomadic tribes, the form resources would take is quite different from a fat bank account or even from a barn full of grain.

Indeed, the resources a person "owned" were probably embodied.  Women would have looked for young, healthy, strong and skilled men to father their children.  When you define resources from that angle the choices of men and women begin to look more similar.

Even if we ignored that and the long history of women not having equal access to resources through inheritance and the labor market (which would increase the relative number of women who would take to crime to get them), there's a logical problem with the basic argument.  In the EP story it is men who are assumed to want to acquire resources so that women will then choose them to have sex with.  In other words, men, too, would want to have resources.

So why don't male serial killers have that goal, you might mutter?

But they do!  If we define a serial killer the way the WaPo summary suggests (anyone who kills three or more people with a “cooling-off period” of a week or more between each murder), the Chicago gangsters of the 1930s would qualify and so would today's Mexican drug lords.  In fact, many types of criminals kill serially for resources.

Perhaps the study defined a serial killer differently.  But if it did, it may have overestimated the types of murders based on desire for domination and sadistic sexual violence in the overall count of serial killings carried out by men.

Then there's the intricate question about the meaning of this evolutionary explanation:  Do the researchers argue that men kill for sex because that is an evolutionary adaptation?  It cannot be the case, because killing the woman you have just raped makes passing any genes to the next generation impossible.

Or is the idea that these patterns are distortions of evolutionary adaptations?  If so, why have they survived?

I am asking that question seriously, given that some Evolutionary Psychologists seem to look for an evolutionary advantage in suicides, say.

Granted, Harrison left the exact meaning of all that open in the interview WaPo quoted.  But she does argue (without proof as there can be no proof) that looking for resources was the primary drive for women** in the unspecified ancestral environment, and contrasts that with men's drive for sex.

It's not that those theories aren't interesting.  But there are alternative theories*** not based on simple evolutionary hypotheses and there are probably even more complicated (and realistic) evolutionary psychology hypotheses.

The topic of the study, horrendous as it is, is also thought-provoking.  Why are men so much more likely to be sexual serial killers than women?  Why are there many times more male serial killers than female serial killers?  Are there ethnic or racial differences in the total numbers of serial killers, in the percentages of male serial killers and of female serial killers?   And to what extent is it meaningful to apply evolutionary hypotheses to those types of serial killers who clearly should be discussed under the title abnormal psychology, psychopathy and so on?

Sigh.  My apologies for not spending money on the article itself.  Should anyone desire to donate the price to me I promise to read it and amend anything in this post that needs amending.
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*I use capital letters for the weird kind of evolutionary psychology which I most often criticize on this blog.  I should stress that I'm not criticizing Dr. Harrison's arguments themselves but the manner in which they are reported in the WaPo summary.

** In one sense the primary drive of everyone is for resources (necessary for survival), if we define those to include getting food and water as often as needed.  But I think Harrison means something different here.

***The impact of social norms on the opportunities for murder, the impact of body strength differences on the choice of the instruments of murder and on the types of victims selected.  The victims should be weaker than the killer which limits female serial killers more than male serial killers.

 

IS And Women. Part 1: The Rules For Sunni Muslim Women

What would life be like for a woman living in the imaginary caliphate IS* is creating or trying to create?  What rules would women have to follow?  What is life like for women who today live in the area under IS rule?

These are the questions I wish to tackle in the first and second posts of my series on IS and women.  This post, the first one, will address the terrorists' plans for Muslim women, or at least the kind of Muslim women (Sunni or perhaps only Salafi) that its clerics view as proper believers, as opposed to non-believers, a term which covers all non-Muslims and possibly even Shia Muslims.  The second post will cover the treatment of those female "non-believers."

I try to answer the three questions I posed above with three sets of available information:  First, the concept of sharia law the IS clerics advocate, second the evidence we have from the guidelines the women's wing of IS, the Al Khanssaa Brigade, has provided and, third, the news (1) about how women are treated by IS in the areas it occupies in Syria and Iraq.

Reading Suggestions for 3/3/15

I'm working on my ISIS and women series.  It's turning into a long epistle and won't have ready-baked parts to be served today, even though I have been writing for hours and hours and hours.  Perhaps you would like to read some of the pieces below instead?  While waiting, that is.

Katha Pollitt reviews the movie Fifty Shades of Gray and makes the necessary connections to such social values as are visible in many old-fashioned corset-ripper romance novels and so on.  I'd add the impact of the three Abrahamic religions into the pot and then stir.  And stir.

This piece has such a neat title: There are more men on corporate boards named John, Robert, William or James than there are women on boards altogether, that it's worth reading just for that reason. 

But ultimately that doesn't tell us anything except that men are a lot more likely to be found on corporate boards than women and John, Robert, William and James are common male names.



Public Policy Polling (PPP) has a new survey out on the opinions of Republicans.  The file has lots of interesting tables for the political geeks and nerds, and not only about possible presidential candidates.

Ferguson, Missouri is back in the news.  Its Police Department has been accused of using racially biased methods of law enforcement.

Finally, and just for the fun of it, this story about a near-death experience.  It may be made up, who knows, but so is much else online.

Caturday

I post cat pictures on Eschaton.  All the cats are stolen cats (posted with the permission of their humans) as I have none.  Here is the latest old and dignified lady cat enjoying some rest and warmth:

What I need to learn from cats is their ability to relax while being ready to pounce.  Anyone who is hooked to the Internet and its various battles and arguments needs to have that ability, the lissom cattiness of relaxed readiness.

Wouldn't it be wonderful to be able to jump on top of houses, too?

This about crows is also quite wonderful for inducing relaxation.

Introduction to A Series Of Posts About Women And ISIS

Since last August I have collected material on the news, pseudo-news, opinion pieces and deeper articles about the terrorist movement which is called by various names (IS, ISIS, ISIL, Daesh) and which currently holds large land areas in Syria and Iraq.   My archives are now crammed with stories, my brain is now crammed with various theological and quasi-theological explanations about men and women as well as with arguments concerning local, colonial, global and religious politics.  If I don't write any of that out my head needs to hire an external storage space.

Hence this series which I introduce here.  The goal I had from the very beginning is to study IS (the acronym I choose to use for its brevity) from the angle of how it regards women's proper roles, how it plans to control women and what those plans tell us about the more patriarchal cultural rules concerning women.

Irony Is Dead: Scott Walker, Wisconsin Protesters and Terrorists

Scott Walker, Governor of Wisconsin,  knows how to deal with terrorist organizations such as ISIS/IS/Daesh.  After all, he managed to control the wild hordes of protesters in Wisconsin!:

Asked how he would handle the Islamic State group if elected president, Walker said, "For years I've been concerned about that threat, not just abroad but here on American soil."
"If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the world," he said.

How does one write satire in a world like this?

Walker is also very eager to make an own-goal by doing the bidding of ISIS:

"We need a president, a leader, who will stand up and say we will take the fight to them and not wait 'til they bring the fight to American soil," he said. "We need to show the world that in America you have no better ally and no greater enemy."

Some fraction of the leadership of ISIS aims at creating a global religious war (which will produce the desired end times), and Walker would oblige them.

All this would be utterly hilarious if it wasn't so very dangerous.

White Privilege in Australian Buses. A Look At An Audit Study.

Ian Ayres' opinion column in the New York Times is about an audit study carried out in Australia.

I love audit studies, because they are a way to control for all the alternative explanations to pure discrimination in consumer and labor markets.  Here's why:

An audit study uses trained individuals to play the role of, say, a car buyer or a job seeker.  The trained individuals are all given the same rules about how to behave, what to ask for and how, how to negotiate and, when relevant, they are also provided resumes etc. of equal value.  The goal is to have these individuals differ in only the characteristic the study is interested in, such as race or gender or both.

If it turns out that the tester's chances of getting a job interview or a good price on a second-hand car indeed vary by race and/or gender, we have ruled out that something else caused the apparent correlation.  Well, we have ruled it out if the audit study was well designed.

The flaw in audit studies is that they cannot continue for years and years, which means that they cannot tell us much about how people are rewarded in their jobs, whether they are promoted purely on the basis of merit, say.  But they are pretty good for measuring potential gender and/or race discrimination against job seekers or car buyers or renters of apartments.

To Praise Saunas. Or Not?

A recent study from Finland suggests that saunas might have the ability to reduce mortality from heart disease:

A study from Finland found that men who use saunas frequently are less likely to die from heart disease. Men's risk was even lower when they visited saunas more often in a week, and when they spent longer periods of time in a sauna each session, the researchers reported.
The findings could cause cardiologists to reconsider commonly held concerns about exposing heart patients to the heat present in a sauna, said Dr. Paul Thompson, medical director of cardiology at Hartford Hospital in Hartford, Conn., and a member of the American College of Cardiology Sports and Exercise Cardiology Council.
"As a cardiologist, I have discouraged patients from using a sauna, from concerns over heat putting demands on a person's cardiovascular system," Thompson said. "Maybe we shouldn't be so restrictive with our patients."

I'd be careful about changing the recommendations too soon.  That's because the role of saunas in Finland is very different from someone in the US suddenly beginning to steam themselves regularly.

Saunas are a weekly custom in Finland.  Almost every single Finn has been in sauna thousands of times by the onset of middle age (and the men in the study were aged between 42 and 60).  The effects might be quite different for someone with no experience in löyly-taking suddenly beginning hour-long sessions of sweating.

I have not read the original study, so I assume that it controls for the initial health status of the men and how much exercise they take in general.  If not, the correlation could be caused by those factors:  Healthier men exercise more and take more saunas, too, and often the sauna is enjoyed after rigorous exercise.  I'm also pretty sure that the Finnish guidelines have also warned heart patients to abstain from sauna.

Still, the findings are thought-provoking.

I love sauna!  Love it, love it, love it.  When I'm in Finland I take one every night, and I miss it here (a hot bath is not a substitute, though I tried).  Some of my fondest childhood memories are running out into the snow bank with my sister to make naked snow angels and then back into the heat of the sauna.

The after-effect does feel quite a bit like having just had a good workout.  A singing of the happy cells of the body, if you like.