Short Posts, 6/25/15: A Response To Tim Hunt, Women in Iran and KIng v. Burwell

1.  This is a hilarious response to Tim Hunt's concerns about women in STEM laboratories (see here for my earlier take on what he said).

2.  Meet Nasrin Sotoudeh, a very brave female activist in Iran.  From the files of sexism in sports, Iran has also decided not to let women watch men's volleyball games:

According to women inside Iran who are campaigning to attend the matches as spectators, Iranian authorities reneged on promises that they could attend and restricted ticket sales to men three days before the opening match on Friday, June 19. Security forces took up positions around the stadium, inspected approaching cars at checkpoints, and diverted women away. In flyers, political hardliners compared women spectators in stadiums to “prostitutes.”

Iranian authorities have banned women and girls from stadiums hosting football matches for decades, but only recently extended the ban to volleyball—in flagrant violation of the principle of gender non-discrimination in sports.

 I don't get the "prostitutes" argument.  Is the idea that the women will get all sexually excited from seeing semi-naked men playing volleyball?  Would male veiling help?  General modesty in male dress?  Or is modesty a one-sided game, where women are expected to always play defense and men offense?

3.  In a week of more good news than usual, this is probably the best news for Americans:

The Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in King v. Burwell is not simply a victory for the Obama administration — and for the millions of Americans who depend upon the Affordable Care Act for their health coverage. It is a sweeping, crushing blow for conservatives who seek to use the courts to undo what President Obama and a Democratic Congress accomplished. “In a democracy,” Chief Justice John Roberts implicitly scolds the activists behind this litigation, “the power to make the law rests with those chosen by the people.” He then offers a broad statement to future judges called upon to interpret the Affordable Care Act: “Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them. If at all possible, we must interpret the Act in a way that is consistent with the former, and avoids the latter.”

Justice Scalia's dissent was withering.  He was vewwy, vewwy angwy.   SCOTUSCare, indeed.

The Invisible Elephants In Online Debates: Lack Of Nuance, Odd Couplings And The Impact of Online Propaganda

It's almost a truism that online debates (say, on Twitter) lack nuances, and usually I just accept that and slither on.  But on some days I get sick of it all.

Then I grumble, in my silent room, to an audience of zero, that it's not "both sides do it" if the number of those deeds is ten million on one side and ten on the other side.  Or rather, the "both sides do it" argument doesn't make the two sides equally at fault.

Neither is a mass murder equal to punching your neighbor in a quarrel over a tree on the border of your lots.  Yet if you take that parable to political writings you spot several examples where the difference in the severity of what has been done is utterly ignored. 

When I really get going in my sermon I point out to the interested walls that numbers do matter.  If some policy is going to hurt, say, half of all Americans, and another policy is going to hurt one American in every ten thousand, the two are not the same in their total numerical consequences.

A more nuanced conversation would allow that and would also look at the severity of the consequences for each individual, to come to a proper conclusion about how, for instance,  the resources of activist movements should be allocated.  At a minimum it would open the discussion to more relevant details.

Finally, after a sip of of water, I tell the empty room that it's a very good idea to ask this simple question:  Compared To What?, when people tell us about the high rates of something (criminality, illness etc.) for one group of individuals (check the rates for the other groups before getting all excited) or about the health risks of some treatment or non-treatment.  For an example of the latter, those who talk about the health dangers of the contraceptive pill or abortion usually don't tell us how high the dangers of getting pregnant and giving birth might be.

All those aspects are invisible elephants, stampeding over the logic of the debate.  But if you point them out you get stampeded!  It's not fun, even for someone who slithers fast.

Short Posts, 6/24/15: On Online Harassment of Women, Good News About Health Care Coverage And Good News About Repro Rights

1.  This video (at the link) by the comedian John Oliver on the online harassment of women is worth watching.

2.  Some very good news about the increased health insurance coverage of Americans since the introduction of the Affordable Care Act:

3.  And another bit of good news about reproductive rights:

Judge Jerry Smith is a deeply conservative judge. He once voted to allow a man to be executed despite the fact that the man’s lawyer slept through much of his trial. He’s a reliable vote against abortion rights. And he once described feminists as a “gaggle of outcasts, misfits and rejects.”
So when Judge Smith writes an opinion protecting women’s access to birth control, even when their employer objects to contraception on religious grounds, that’s a very big deal.

Read Ian's full story at the link.

Nigel Short: Men are Just Better At Chess And Driving.

Nigel Short is a chess champion.  That makes him an expert in most everything, certainly the person to argue that there are so few women in professional chess because men are simply better at chess.

An example of his arguments:

In April, Mr Short, originally from Leigh, near Wigan, but now living in Greece, told the magazine New in Chess that men were simply better at things like chess and driving, while acknowledging that his wife had “a much higher degree of emotional intelligence than I do”.

Ah, so sweet.  When Short makes equal allegations about chess and driving as things men simply do better he fails to look at the statistics on car accidents.  If I was as lazy about research as Nigel seems to be I'd point out that the only fair condensed interpretation of those statistics is that women are better drivers than men.

But because I'm not that lazy,  I'd have to point out that we need to control for lots of stuff when comparing female and male drivers, including the average number of miles driven per various time units and so on.

Short doesn't do any of that thinking for driving (where he ignores the actual evidence and goes by his prejudice) or for playing chess (where he ignores all the myriad reasons  which exist to explain why fewer women than men play chess or why fewer women than men play professional chess, except for the one that men might simply be innately better at chess).

On The Aftermath of the Charleston Massacre

Reading about the massacre of nine innocent people in Emanuel AME Church, Charleston,  last week,  made me physically too sick to write about it (given that I was already feeling poorly), but I followed the coverage, both in the official media and on Twitter.  And fierce coverage it has been, with many beautiful and important articles.

Attempts, mostly by Republican politicians,  to make the actions of the killer be about something else than the hatred of black people, failed miserably.  Dylann Storm Roof's  motivation was clearly what he himself reputedly told his victims*: 

"you rape our women and you’re taking over our country"

 He has been quoted as stating that he wanted to start a race war.

All that should be in the foreground of the discussion, just as misogyny should have been kept (and perhaps was kept) in the foreground in the Eliot Rodger case.

But both cases also shared other aspects:  Easy access to guns made the numbers of dead people much greater, the online hate sites helped in the radicalization of both killers and the acts also shared a flavor of terrorism, depending on how terrorism is defined.

Not Feeling Well

Which is an explanation for the quiet week on the blog.  I need snoozes like these two are having:

On Sexbots

The New York Times had a story about Matt McMullen, the creator of female robots for sex.  The story in the NYT, and an earlier story about McMullen's work in Vanity Fair, pretty much glide over the fact that these sex dolls are physically meant to be female.  So the story isn't about sex robots for everybody.  The story is about female sex dolls for people who want them female.

That doesn't matter too much, I guess, except in the sense that we have all been trained to not notice the lack of male-looking sex dolls in stories of this type.  That means we can leap into discussing other types of topics about sex robots:  How human they should seem, whether they should talk back, whether they should be made to make sounds as if they are enjoying what's going on.

As an aside, I wonder why robots should be made to look human in the first place.  Does it then follow that we are going to recreate all the power relationships of the human societies inside the world of robots?  The cleaning robot will look female and will act humbly and so on?

But the obvious point of these articles isn't that.  It's the idea of the sexbot as a replacement for having a relationship with a woman made out of meat etc.  McMullen himself states:

“Not everybody wants to be in a relationship, especially an emotionally draining, costly, anxiety-filled one. If a man says, ‘I don’t want to be in a relationship,’ most of the time that’s probably a fucking good decision! And he can order a RealDoll, which will end up being a helluva lot cheaper than the women he was dating! If a man has a hundred or no girlfriends, RealDolls are a good option no matter what.”
A hovering waitress says, “Last call.” Mills orders a beer and returns to a pet peeve. “Women have enjoyed sex toys for 50 years, probably 5,000 years, if the truth be known, but men are still stigmatized! We have to correct that! I want to be the Rosa Parks of sex dolls! Men are not going to sit in the back of the bus anymore!”

Bolds are mine.

I was giggling about that last paragraph, trying to imagine in what sense a dildo, say, is exactly the same as a sexbot which speaks and pretends to orgasm, whatever its user does.  Perhaps we are going to have speaking dildos!  Where's the mouth going to be?

Never mind.  Let's not go there.  As far as I know,  there have been various sex toys for heterosexual men for some time, right?  Not that I'm an expert in the area of sex toys, but creating a life-sized doll which speaks etc. seems a bit different from something you can hold in your hand.

The part I bolded in the first paragraph of the above quote is very informative.  It's the idea that women are expensive sex partners and that they will demand stuff and so on.  A sexbot will do whatever you want and the cost will only be the enormous sum McMullen charges.

This is one of those cases where a gender reversal is useful.  Suppose that the same story was written, but the creator of the dolls was Martha McMullen (with dark-framed angry-looking spectacles), and that all the sex dolls shown in the background looked like men in skimpy underwear or naked, some with beards, some with not and so on.  Suppose Martha made a statement about men being such difficult  sex partners etc., always arguing and pushing their own agendas.  How would various types of readers have reacted to the otherwise same stories then?

Pink Thoughts. Or The Weak Version of the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis

I've never liked pink.  I associate the color with lingonberry porridge which I hated as  a child, because I hate the sour taste of lingonberries.

In Finnish, the way I learned the language, the term for pink was "light red".  Just as there was a "light blue," there was a "light red."  In my mind the two concepts stood in exactly the same relationship to their "master" colors, red and blue:  They were lighter forms of those colors.  They were NOT colors on their own, just as "dark blue" is not a color on its own*.

So what difference does it make if our brains learn the concept of "pink," as a color in its own right or at least with its own clear name, or if our brains learn the concept of "vaaleanpunainen" or "light red?" 

And what happens when the latter case is complicated by the addition of a term deriving from the English pink (pinkki), which the above-linked website states as being only one of the many possible tones of "vaaleanpunainen," even though people colloquially use it to refer to all those tones?

Could it be that pink, as in "pinkki," now rises to a different type of prominence?  Above its previous mate "light blue?"

This is all both idle speculation and great fun.  I should add that I'm not a linguist and that my knowledge of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is negligible.  Still, all this may have implications in more serious matters, even political ones.

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* That's probably a very subjective way of trying to define the feeling I have about pink as a color:  That in English it's on the same level as blue or lavender etc., whereas light blue is not on that level.

Why Women Don't Code. Echidne Answering Comments From Another Reality.

I don't usually write blog posts about anonymous comments elsewhere, but these particular ones are too juicy to miss, because they give us the condensed arguments from anti-feminists as to the reasons why coding is so male-dominated, and thus offer me a chance to respond to those arguments.

The first common argument is that girls just don't like to code.  Here's the current version of it, from Eschaton comments:

Are we really going to pretend that as many women as men want to code? For fuck's sake.

That's worth pondering about.  Note, first, that there was this magical era, about thirty years ago, when computer science students were almost equally likely to be men or women.  Then something changed, and in a fairly short time the field was one for the bros.  This post goes into much more detail about it.

So in a sense it might be true that women don't want to code now, given the work environment they'd meet (with people like the one I quote above probably working there)*.  But there's no evidence that a dislike of coding would somehow be an inherent female characteristic.   If it were, it would have been operating in the early 1980s, too, and I personally suspect that not as many women would be in accounting, say, if the idea of sitting still and staring at numbers or letters wouldn't at all apply to women.

The second common argument is that girls just can't code.  Or:

Right, male and female brains are exactly the same.
Did you know that male and female IQs are the same on average, but that males have more representation on both tails of the bell curve?
Have you considered the implications of this?

This is a bit hilarious, because the extreme upper tail in the IQ distribution seems to be equated with being a coder!  I doubt that, to be honest.  We in the extreme upper tail are not many enough to fill that occupation.

This commentator is saying that guys are smarter (and also more stupid, but that's the other guys, the losers), based on the peculiarity that the results from IQ tests on men show greater variance than the results from IQ tests on women.

I have written about various aspects of the "extreme tail" theory about gender and intelligence many times before. This post summarizes several of the issues:  The gender differences in the extreme tails are getting smaller over time (which suggests that we are not looking at something innate), gender differences in attitudes towards risk (such as likelihood of guessing when the answer is unknown) could create the observed results if men were less risk-averse than women (or played the testing game that way), even if there was no underlying average gender difference in the characteristic under study and so on.

Third, sooner or later this particular conversation turns into a wider one about women and men being innately different In Ways Which Matter (no, men don't have wings and fly and women don't have fins and swim; we are supposed to regard small differences as humongous for the purposes of allocating societal power; and no, differences in aggression etc. do not matter).  This time we get:

OK, let's play make pretend. Yes, women on average are interested in heavy tech, coding, data...
Male and female brains are exactly the same. Oh, except when someone is transgender, then male and female brains are different...

There you go.  As a bonus we get one of the reasons for some trouble between certain feminist strains of thought and certain strains of trans thought.

The research into gender differences in brainz is pretty difficult to do, especially if someone wishes to argue that those differences are both innate and not subject to change.  I've written loads and loads on various studies (start here and here, say), but even if one accepted innately different brains by biological sex (or by gender identity???), that acceptance would not tell us that women can't code or don't want to code.

But it's not the question whether women and men would be equally eager to code if the industry wasn't so broish (and if there was no steering of boys and girls into certain culturally accepted roles) that fascinates me here.  Who knows what would happen in that ideal world?  The point of those comments I analyze seems to be that what exists TODAY cannot be at all improved, because of that assumed innate stuff.  This means that whatever percentage women make out of all coders is the RIGHT percentage.

And just to make everything crystal-clear, the commentator also notes that if there are girls in the industry then they can be found in non-essential roles:

Well, research, data, technical project management are the roles that matter...
I'm sure women are represented in marketing, HR and PR, which are simply less important to the heavy tech companies.

I hope this post didn't infect you with a stereotype threat.


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*See also this post about a study concerning the effect of gender stereotypes in getting access to math-heavy fields.

Lightning Posts, 6/11/15. On Caitlyn Jenner, Syrian Refugees and A Bro With No Ho

1.  These three articles on the sometimes troubled relationship between feminism and the trans movement look a bit like thesis, antithesis and synthesis, but I'm not intending that.  Still, it's best to read them in order, first this one, then this one and finally this one.  I picked these because they are more nuanced than the average diatribes in this area.  Notice the absence of similar debates about cis men and trans men.  Why they are missing isn't clear to me.

2.  Why does Saudi Arabia take no refugees from the war-torn countries of Iraq and Syria (or from Palestine)?  The same appears to be the case for other Gulf states?  I spent some time looking for the answer.  Sure, those countries provide funds, but as far as I can tell they don't offer any shelter for refugees, even though the cultural chasms to be bridged would be considerably smaller there than in, say, Sweden (which does take in a lot of refugees for its size).

3.   Then today's smart Republican comment from Mark Kirk:

During a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on Thursday, the Illinois senator was heard on the live microphone talking about the Republican presidential candidate.
"I've been joking with Lindsey," Kirk was overheard saying. "He's going to have a rotating first lady. He's a bro with no ho."

No comment on that, because I'm in a hurry to bang my head against the garage door.


  

Meet Tim Hunt, A Nobel-Winning Biologist With Opinions On Girls In Laboratories

I love these foot-deep-in-the-throat stories, especially from those people whom the world has coddled and revered to such an extent that they now believe their utterances about everything is of great value.  Not just their utterances about the area of their expertise, mind you, but about everything.  It's a bit like Echidne criticizing opera singers or explaining to you in excruciating detail how to make a perfect souffle.

In other words, a joke.  And Dr Hunt did tell us that he was joking when talking like this at the World Conference on Science Journalists in Korea:

In remarks yesterday before writers, scientists, and engineers attending the World Conference of Science Journalists in Seoul, Hunt stood and after thanking the women journalists “for making lunch," and warning attendees that he had a reputation as a male chauvinist, offered up his groundbreaking ideas on women in the field.
“Let me tell you about my trouble with girls,” Hunt said, according to science journalist Connie St Louis, who tweeted the most disgusting points in his unrecorded speech. “Three things happen when they are in the lab: You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticize them, they cry.” He continued that while he was in favor of single sex laboratories, he didn’t want to “stand in the way” of women.

Mmm.  I laughed, because the joke is so good.  Whether it's the joke Dr Hunt intended is an open question.  For instance, I immediately saw that to avoid those falling-in-love problems we need to separate not only women from men but gay men from all other men and lesbians from all other women.  Put the gay guys with the women and the lesbians with the men!

Sam Brownback's Utopian Experiment Looks To Be Over

Brownback is the fundamentalist Republican governor of Kansas who in 2012 went wild on those popular tax cuts, with the simple-and-flawed idea that if only most firms could avoid paying any state taxes on their profits the Kansas economy would boom*.

The obvious (and completely predictable) consequences were, well, obvious.  The state of Kansas couldn't make ends meet, because of a giant drop in tax revenues.  So what did our Sam do next to balance the shrinking state budget?  He cut expenses, naturally.

The tax cuts favor mostly people who earn more, the expense cuts hurt mostly people who earn less.  Internal income inequality in Kansas grew.  

But those rounds of cutting expenses were not enough to balance the state budget.

Now the Republicans in control of the state must face up to raising taxes, poor things.  For a financial conservative this is like having to pull your own milk teeth with pliers (done that, been there), so the debates are still largely about how to roll more of the tax load on the shoulders of the poorer people in the state.  Sales tax increases??  Grrreat idea, because those taxes tend to be regressive.  To cover that up, let's not tax food.

Of course raising the sales taxes will make purchases more expensive for the consumers in Kansas and that might make them buy less.  This, in turn, would drive many local firms' profits down, having a further negative effect on any remaining state taxes on corporate income and so on and so on.

The debates are still ongoing, but here are some of the proposed tax increases and other changes:

The Kansas Senate passed Sunday what would be the largest tax increase in the history of the state of Kansas.
The measure passed by a 21-17 margin. Kansas Sen. Julia Lynn, who represents Johnson County, Kan., was the deciding vote on the bill.
Details on the $471 million tax increase:
    •    The sales tax increases to 6.55 percent from 6.15 percent.
    •    The cigarette tax will go up by 50 cents each pack, bringing the total tax to $1.29.
    •    The food tax will drop on July 1, 2016. However, it will be 6.55 percent until that time.
    •    Most itemized deductions on state income taxes are repealed.
    •    Reduced deductions for property taxes, charitable contributions and mortgage interest.
    •    There's a property ta
    •    tax lid for cities and counties.
    •    A new school voucher program that will provide tax credits to those who donate funds for private and religious schools.
    •    $24 million on taxes for business owners.

Tax increases are supposed to mean rapid death for American politicians in power, and that is certainly the case in the Tea Party -wing of the Republican Party.  We shall see what happens.  But as I have written before, watching this Nutty Economists' Tax Experiment Gone Wild would be entertaining (beer and pop corn entertaining) if the pain wasn't affecting so many real people.

On the other hand, Brownback was re-elected after he wrecked the state.

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*This is flawed mostly because it ignores the important question about the demand side:  What effect have Brownback's policies had on the aggregate demand by people in the state?  If demand is insufficient, giving more money to firms won't work to create a boom.

The Women's World Cup in Soccer. Sod It?

I'm exceeding myself in stupid headlines.  The reference to "sod" is meant to capture the flavor of a complaint from one player in the cup:

The Women’s World Cup got underway over the weekend and while excitement was high after host country Canada’s thrilling win over China in stoppage time, the start of play has renewed frustrations over the controversial decision to force the women to play on artificial turf in all six venues.
After Sunday’s Norway vs. Thailand game, Norway midfielder Lene Mykjåland voiced her discontent about the short, dry turf, which she said made it difficult for either team to “get a decent tempo and rhythm.” The playing surface was watered using two fire hoses instead of the standard sprinkler system.
When the tournament kicked off Saturday, the temperature of the playing surface was reportedly 120 degrees, despite the fact that it was a pleasant 75 degrees that day in Edmonton. That’s because artificial turf, a combination of rubber and plastic, gets a lot hotter than natural grass. Natural grass, on average, stays 20-30 degrees cooler than its artificial counterpart.

The linked article suggests that on Saturday the temperature of the turf in Edmonton was only a few degrees below the level regarded as unsafe for players, and anecdotal evidence hints that artificial turf makes the game less interesting to watch and possibly more dangerous for the players.  Not a welcoming mix to the participants in the women's World Cup,

Here's the interesting point:  This is the first soccer World Cup which is played on artificial turf.  Does this have any connection to the fact that it's women playing?

That's one of those questions which cannot be answered without detailed data on what went on when the decision was being made.  I think it's unlikely that anyone chose artificial turf to consciously make the women's games look less interesting. 

But that doesn't mean that the idea of saving money wouldn't have looked a lot more doable when the world cup was about women rather than about men.  Men would complain, their many, many fans would complain.  Perhaps the decision-makers were betting that us girls would not?

Today's Frustration

Do you know what is truly annoying?  To write not one but two posts on different topics and then to find out really recent news information (like an hour old) which makes them outdated.  Sure, you can go and edit, just as you can rip a sweater apart and try to patch it into a vest.  But that's agony.

The Christian Family. On Megan Kelly Interviewing the Duggars.

I'm tired and my arm aches after physical therapy.  That's the perfect time to give my opinions on the interview Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar gave about the case of their son, Josh Duggar.  This post has the background and other pertinent comments.  You can watch the interview here.

What I want to write about is not the five cases of molestation themselves or the long time the Duggar parents took before getting their son to something they seem to view as therapy.  Neither do I wish to write about what it means that Josh Duggar sexually touched her sisters and a babysitter.

I want to talk about the tone-deafness of some parts of the Megan Kelly interview, because I have read the same tone-deafness about the Duggar experiment in many, many places recently*. 

First, Kelly repeatedly referred to the Duggars' weird cult as "Christianity."  That's almost like calling the tenets of ISIS " mainstream Islam."

Kelly normalized an extreme cult (the Quiverfull) by equating it with vanilla-flavored Christianity. As if people attacked Duggars' beliefs because they are Christians and not because they are Quiverfull-ers, bent on maximizing the production of children in the marriage,  preaching absolute male authority, practicing social isolation of their children and denying them (especially the girls) proper education.

Second, she let the Duggars get away with the bizarre argument that Josh's behavior is common, because it may be common among families the Duggars know, as if touching your sisters sexually was just an ordinary type of growing pain many boys went through:

Other families have said they had sons who did similar things, they argued.

Kelly didn't question this argument.  I believe that the reason why so many of Duggars' friends have similar problems is that they share the same child-rearing ideology, being in the same cult:

Isolate your children completely by home-schooling them and by not allowing them to date as teenagers.  Then have so many children that the home can offer no privacy.

Then wait and see what happens.

Third, Kelly didn't react when one of the Duggars explained that the experience  made them pretty much sex-segregate their children as a solution to the problem.  No horseplay between brothers and sisters allowed!  So these parents moved from isolating their children in general to isolating their daughters from their sons.

Fourth and finally, although Kelly tried to make the point that the Duggar family's suffering should not be just about how Josh and his parents feel but at least equally about how the daughters feel, she allowed both Michelle and Jim Bob go on for quite a while about their own feelings, how all this made them feel as parents, how the family has suffered and how very minimal the girls' experience was, what with Josh only groping them through clothing and besides, the wenches were asleep.

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*Kelly did ask many pertinent questions and I applaud her for that.  But in general the media takes for granted the argument that the Duggars are a Family Values type of warm and religious family without asking what those values are.

Why do daughters have less value than sons? Why is complete control of all children so necessary?  Why cannot they leave their parents when they grow up?  Why are they not allowed to go to college, especially the daughters?  And few writers note that Jim Bob Duggar is supposed to be the absolute dictator in the family, to be obeyed without any questioning. 

Neither have I seen anyone point out that Michelle Duggar isn't actually a stay-at-home-mother without any income producing activities.  She is a reality show star, but her own definitions are taken at face value in the various write-ups about the Duggars I've recently read.

The Flight of A European Honey Buzzard. Or What Lust/Love Makes Us Do.

My apologies for linking to a parseltongue website, but the story can be understood without getting the language.   It's about a European honey buzzard grrl who has just finished a migration flight from South Africa to her nesting site in Finland (11207 km, 6964 miles), pushed ever onwards by her aching hormones.*

That's my interpretation, not what the serious nature scientists tell in the linked story and earlier versions of it.  The bird, called Päivi by humans (sort of like being called Dawn in English), missed the mating last year, what with all that loitering en route.  This year she almost made the same mistake, but really picked up time during the last few days, averaging during that time  384 km (239 miles) per day!

The assumption is that her old man will be waiting for her at the nesting site.  European honey buzzards appear to be monogamous in the sense of having the same mating partner but not necessarily wintering together. This might be the perfect marital compromise!

I was hooked by Päivi and the site**, rooting for her to make it, noting how she skirted large areas of water except at the final stretch where she chose to fly across the sea (perhaps to guarantee that hot sex bit).  Such a long flight has many dangers, from hunters to exhaustion etcetera, and I'm sure that not all birds make it.

Why fly almost 14,000-mile round trips every year?  Isn't there anything closer to South Africa if plentiful bugs are the requirement for a good nesting site?  Isn't there anything closer to Finland if a balmy climate is the requirement for a good wintering site?  I'm sure that there's a good explanation for this behavior, and in any case the life of hawks is soaring, right?

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*  One of the articles in the series states that the bird's ova start swelling in March and that the total time for mating ceremonies for European honey buzzards is unusually short for birds, so that the females are in real hurry to get the sex started.

**One is not supposed to anthropomorphize other animals but it's fun to do, sorry.  And neither is one supposed to worry that the tagging of the bird might have been why she made it too late last year and almost too late this year.  But I do.

'An Armed Society Is A Safe Society" Quoth Texas State Representative Jonathan Stickland

He's a Republican with a wolf smile:

Texas is now allowing students, faculty and staff over 21 years old to carry concealed weapons on college campuses, including in classrooms and professors' offices.  Delicious, because of the arms race aspect of this:  Imagine being a professor at one of those institutions, familiar with student anger after they receive bad grades.  Now you will feel forced to be armed to your teeth, too!

Does an Uzi fit inside a backpack?

Never mind.  I know that "the bad guys with the guns" won't be stopped by laws, but neither will they be stopped by "the good guys with guns."  Note that the police gets a lot of training with guns and they still hit bystanders when things get murky and  confusing.  Having lots of additional guns in the hands of untrained civilians is not going to make the resolution of mass shootings easier.   At least the Texas lawmakers should have thought about that.

Is an armed society actually safer?  Has Rep. Stickland actually researched his argument?  And if so, how does he explain the vastly greater numbers of gun deaths in the US than in the less armed societies?  Are gun deaths of and by toddlers and suicides from gun deaths counted in his mind?  What about accidentally shooting your neighbors?

Part of the problem, in my view, is that the NRA has turned the ownership of a dangerous and tricky tool into something like a human right without creating the commensurate human responsibility:  To be properly trained in the use of guns, to employ the necessary care in their storage, and to be responsible for the outcomes of all misuse.

Imagine a world where anyone, in almost any condition, and without any training should be allowed to drive an automobile anywhere, including off the roads or on either side of streets.  Then imagine that no car insurance would be required.

That's what the Texas concealed carry law sounds like to me.

Short Posts, 5/29/15: The Maoist/Marxist US Demoncrats, Scott Walker, the Nazgül of Wisconsin and the Hastert and Duggar cases Compared

I'm in my dark humor stage.  That is a contents warning.

1. The funniest headline I've read for a loooong time:

Have Democrats Pulled Too Far Left?

That is guffaw-inducing, snort-causing and just a wonderful example of the Orwellian type of political writing.  The context matters:  This country has unions in their death throes, no real left or actual communists in any meaningful power, and most talking-heads playing Democrats in political television show would have fitted well into the 1970s Republican Party, except for their milquetoast demeanor. 

Forty-five years ago it was a Republican president who signed the executive order for the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, today caring about the environment is a liberal ploy.  Fifty years ago white leaders of American Evangelists were pro-choice.  Today their views would lead to public stoning.   And so on.

So it's the Democrats who have veered further to the left...

2.  Scott Walker, the Ringwraith* governor of Wisconsin, has plans for us wimminfolk.  He is planning to sign into law a bill which would ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, even if the pregnancy was due to rape or incest.

In a different context he told us that ultrasound pictures of fetuses (feti?) are cool, which means that jamming a large scanner into an abortion-seeker's vagina for no medical reason at all is also cool!  But he was misquoted by the lazy lefty media:

“I think they realize, when people actually hear what’s going on and they can’t win on the left on an issue, they exaggerate things, they make things up, and they take them out of context,” he said. “Here I pointed out, as I pointed out before I signed the law, I said, ‘Who’s opposed to an ultrasound?’ They tried to claim it was a certain type, I said, ‘No — our law says that before someone has that procedure, they have to be given access to an ultrasound.’ “

 I thought he was the person signing that law, too?  So he is hiding behind the law that he himself authorized?  The man has guts belonging to a dead whale.

3. The Hastert scandal deserves a much more serious take which I'm not going to write here, but two thoughts want to be expressed right now**.

The first is my boundless admiration of so many people in power who believe they will never have the skeletons in their cupboards rattled by outsiders, that they will never be caught.  What could you possibly hide if you live in public limelight?

Everything, some politicians seem to think, and that's because they are surrounded by their courtiers telling them every day that they truly are the smartest and greatest and most beautiful people of all.  Like the mirror of the evil queen in Cinderella Snow White.

The second thought links the Hastert case to the Duggar case, and the teachings about female modesty in the religious camp.  This quote describes them in a different case from the one involving the Duggars:

The boy wrote that modesty was a “factor” in his actions because it “was not at the level is should have been in my family.”
“It was not uncommon for my younger sibling to come out of their baths naked or with a towel,” he wrote.
He also said his younger sisters acted inappropriately when they wore dresses, saying they “did not behave in them as they should.”
He then said his sisters didn’t realize what they were doing to him because they didn’t realize their “own nakedness,” and it wasn’t taught properly to them. He seems to blame this on his mother, who he says didn’t see the human body as a big deal because she is a nurse.
The boy said he spoke with his mother who had “no idea” how “visual” men are sexually compared to women. He said changes have since been made in his home.
“This was not a major reason for the offending, but it allowed my little sister to be open to what I made her do,” he wrote.
He then wrote, “A different lifestyle, with more modesty, might have prevented what happened.”

But what about the cases involving boys as the focus of sexual molestation or other sexual acts?  Should boys wear long dresses?  Not wrestle in school athletic programs?  Work more on their modesty?  --  The school of victim-blaming has a lot of expansion to do.
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*I call him that because of the nine ringwraiths in Tolkien's   Lord of the Rings, enslaved by Sauron due to their original greed,  and doing his bidding.  Walker, and a group of other Republican governors elected about the same time seem to do the bidding of the conservative ALEC foundation.  I also find this funny and apt.

**They jostle at each other in the gateway of my mind and scream in these squeaky voices:  Take me!  Me first!
 

Thank You

For your generosity and kindness during my fund-drive, and for reading me.

FHRITP

A Canadian reporter, Shauna Hunt, was interviewing some football fans when one fan said to the fan being interviewed:  Fu*k her right in the pus*y (FHRITP), and Hunt could hear it.  You can watch what happened next:





The last man interviewed in that video was fired from his job, perhaps because he never stopped telling Hunt how f**king fantastic it was to blurt out that phrase.  Spocko asks whether firing him is justified, given that the man actually using the phrase just slithered away, for example.  I tend to agree that for low-powered people the same public humiliation that was intended for Hunt should suffice.

Because public humiliation it was, or at least an attempt at that.  It doesn't matter what the offending fan's intentions were (to entertain his mates, perhaps, or just to come across as funny); the outcome for female reporters getting these sorts of"jokes" regularly is a form of humiliation, a gantlet/gauntlet they must run, just to do their jobs:

Fundraising, The Final Day!

You can still give to this blog to cover the costs and the chocolate which fuels my engines.  Thanks to all who have contributed, mwah.  And yes, the final day really should have been Friday but I charge nothing for late payments.

In other news, my humerus bone break is growing callus, the precursor to bone (though it looks like mold in the x-ray pics)*.  It also hurts less, and physical therapy should begin this week.  I'm recording all the monetary information for a participatory study in health care economics! 

Knitting needles are excellent for scratching an itching-and-healing arm in an  immobilizer, but hot weather doesn't help.  Still, recovery is good, and I'm probably going to remain more ambidextrous.

That's my news.  What are yours?

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*Looking at those x-rays made me laugh at the idea that humans are the crown of creation.  Start with a poorly designed rickety framework and then cover it with meat?  Worms are a better initial idea but they need hands and wheels.  Birds are an even better idea, though once again they need hands.

Speed-Posting, 5/26/15: Tanith Lee, Women in Palmyra and Bruce Bartlett on Fox News

1.  RIP Tanith Lee, the master of dark fantasy.  She is one of the writers whose books people recommended to me and whom I read, to the extent the local library would allow, but no more.  Now I regret the fuzzy idea I had of reading more of her some time later.

2.  The Islamic State has taken over the cities of Ramadi in Iraq and Palmyra in Syria.  Among all the horrors that are taking place it's worth noting that it took only about a day after the invasion of Palmyra for IS to start preaching in the mosques that all women must cover their faces or be flogged.

It's not that the orders are to be compared with the beheadings and kidnappings and the general butchering IS is so fond of, but note the central role the control of women has in their ideology.  The orders of proper dress for women couldn't wait until the first round of killings were finished.

Needless to say, there's nothing about the covering of the face in the Koran; only about the covering of the bosom.  But conservative extremist religion always centers on the control of women.   And strict sex-segregation means that women cannot now get adequate health care inside the "caliphate" because male doctors can't treat women and there are too few female doctors and nurses.

3.  Bruce Bartlett has written an article about the self-induced brain-washing (lefty view) or brain-cleansing (righty view) watching Fox News can cause.  You can download the article here.

I read it.  Bartlett gives statistics about the ignorance effect:  In several categories Fox News watchers know less about political events than those who don't watch any news.  But his piece is not original research, and I was left asking why there's a whole television channel for one party but not for the other party.  Also what planet Fox's female commentators come from and whether looking like a Barbie doll is the first requirement.  But obviousle men don't have to look like the boyfriend called Ken, or have tiger-eye makeup.

Watching Fox (which I did a few weeks ago) is initially hilarious.  Then you start feeling you can't breathe, so you start analyzing what is removing the oxygen from the room.  Is it the constant repetitions of the same news, most about the perfidy of Obama or complete fluff?  Or is it the utter absence of news you see covered everywhere else?   Or all the messages crawling across the screen?  If you follow those you wouldn't be surprised to read that Democrats cause cancer.

On the other hand, Bartlett notes that Fox News  may not ultimately help Republicans in elections, because it flames the anger of conservatives and moves them even further rightwards.  Then those same conservatives vote for very extremist candidates in the primaries, and you get the tea-partiers.

It could be the case that we all live in similar ideological bubbles, could be.  But I try to follow news from various outlets and from several countries, and the Fox world stands out as belonging to a different galaxy.

 

Memorial Day 2015

You might like the links in my post for Memorial Day 2013.

This year I'm blocked.  To write about this day in depth requires grave-digging, deep explorations into the reasons for wars, the evaluation of the need for any particular one of them, the meaning of sacrifice, voluntary or possibly not, the concept of "supporting" troops if you are not willing to extend that past bumper stickers, and even deeper dives into the human psyche and the exchanges between groups of humans.

It's easier to pat the soil on those graves and to plant some violets on them.  Or at least to remember.

On The Duggar Ideology: Multiply At Any Cost.

Many have written about the recently revealed child molestation accusations against Josh Duggar, the oldest son of Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar, the Quiverfull parents of nineteen children whose lives are depicted in a now (temporarily?) withdrawn reality show 19 Kids and Counting.

The basic ideology of the Quiverfull movement is well summarized by the description of Kathryn Joyce's book* about the Christian patriarchy cult:

Kathryn Joyce's fascinating introduction to the world of the patriarchy movement and Quiverfull families examines the twenty-first-century women and men who proclaim self-sacrifice and submission as model virtues of womanhood—and as modes of warfare on behalf of Christ. Here, women live within stringently enforced doctrines of wifely submission and male headship, and live by the Quiverfull philosophy of letting God give them as many children as possible so as to win the religion and culture wars through demographic means.

Hence the attempt to maximize family size, even if that might lead to the impossibility of adequately feeding, caring for, or supervising all those children.  They are arrows in the war against the infidels, and the manufacture of the maximum number of such arrows requires the women's submission and compliance.

This is the proper background for interpreting what happened after Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar found that their fourteen-year-old son had fondled the breasts and genitals of minor girls, many of them apparently his own sisters, while they were supposedly asleep.  The son was sent to therapy or perhaps just away for a while, a police officer (later sentenced for child pornography) gave him a stern speech and the girls who were fondled presumably forgave him.

The Duggars apologized for those events:

Back 12 years ago our family went through one of the most difficult times of our lives. When Josh was a young teenager, he made some very bad mistakes and we were shocked. We had tried to teach him right from wrong. That dark and difficult time caused us to seek God like never before. Even though we would never choose to go through something so terrible, each one of our family members drew closer to God.   We pray that as people watch our lives they see that we are not a perfect family. We have challenges and struggles everyday. It is one of the reasons we treasure our faith so much because God’s kindness and goodness and forgiveness are extended to us — even though we are so undeserving. We hope somehow the story of our journey — the good times and the difficult times — cause you to see the kindness of God and learn that He can bring you through anything.

Let me see what's included there:  God's forgiveness?  Check.  What the family gained from the events?  Check.  Josh's "bad mistakes?  Sort of check.

What the daughters went through?

Crickets...

And that's the fundamental problem with the Quiverfull ideology and those right-wing Christian beliefs which suggest that victims of abuse should bear responsibility for it happening, that God may have allowed it because of something the victim did or failed to do.

I stress this ideology, because it is what all the choices** of Duggars are based on and it is ultimately what their reality show is disseminating as a good conservative way of life.
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*I strongly recommend that book, by the way.  Kathryn's work is always painstaking and objective.
**Read that.  It's funny.  Then send me money.

Lock Up Your Women. Advice from Chechnya.

Or from its president, to men in his country and probably everywhere.  It's always educational to realize how very rare gender equality is in this world, of course, though I hate being reminded of that.  But in a slightly different sense this whole story really is about a place where powerful men don't even have to pretend to view women as co-citizens.

Here's what happened:

 Ramzan A. Kadyrov, the pugnacious president of the southern Republic of Chechnya and a close ally of President Vladimir V. Putin, finally had enough Wednesday of social media users’ mocking him relentlessly for seeming to push polygamy.

His solution? Keep women locked up at home and off social media.
“Lock them in, do not let them go out, and they will not post anything,” Mr. Kadyrov said in a video to a sheepish group of men and women who kept their arms folded across their chests and their eyes firmly on the ground during the harangue.

The scene, filmed at what appears to be his government palace and broadcast on local television, was prompted by what Mr. Kadyrov, who has long shown a flair for hyperbole, described as “The Wedding of the Millennium.”

The social media explosion was set off last weekend in Grozny, the Chechen capital, when a 17-year-old bride was married off to a pal of Mr. Kadyrov’s, a district police chief pushing 50 and reportedly already married.



The first report of the betrothal had emerged in late April in the Novaya Gazeta newspaper, which reported that the police chief, Nazhud Guchigov, had ordered the young woman’s parents to hand her over by May 2 or he would take her by force.

After the article was published, Mr. Kadyrov jumped into the action, saying he had investigated the marriage proposal and found both the young bride, Kheda Goylabiyeva, and her family agreeable.

Poor, poor bride.  She looks scared and miserable in her wedding dress, while the thirty years older groom looks, well, determined and expectant.

But wait!  There's more:

Pavel Astakhov, the Kremlin official who is supposed to protect children’s rights in Russia, defended the practice of older men taking young brides. During a radio interview, he suggested that was especially the case in places like Chechnya where women were “shriveled” by the age of 27, looking at that age like most Russian women do at 50.
His remarks prompted another wave of outrage, with hundreds of Russian women in their 20s posting pictures with the hashtag #wrinkledwomen. Mr. Astakhov apologized, saying that women of all ages were “wonderful and delightful.”

Astakhov is the officer who is supposed to protect children's rights in Russia!  I wonder how he was chosen for the job.

Astakhov's apology is worth quoting in full, because it so clearly reflects traditional gender roles and because it shows he doesn't get it at all:

 "Women of any age are splendid and adorable," he writes. "God created Woman so that we could love her, defend her, take care of her, glorify her. A clumsy comparison, a rash word taken out of the context of discourse cannot change my attitude to the Fair Sex. I've loved, love and shall love and respect [them]! I apologize for the mistake I've made!"

Mmm.  Tastes like 1950s America to me.

There are two points to this post:  

First, most of this globe is terrible on gender equity, some places being pure hell (Islamic State) and many others showing the types of values this story demonstrates, or "traditional" values which almost always define women as second-class citizens whose concerns can be fairly safely ignored in most politics.

Second, things are changing, albeit slowly.  Russian women protested the forced marriage of a young girl to a district police chief and the fact that this police officer (!) was breaking the law by already having at least one wife, and they also ridiculed the inanities which leaked out of Astakhov's mouth.  That horse cannot be returned to its patriarchal stable.

Still, isn't the statement "lock up your women"  just utterly delicious?  It's the perfect summary of assumed male supremacy:  The women are yours and you have the right to lock them up.*

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*This doesn't mean that Russian or Chechen men would necessarily think like that. But president Kadyrov clearly does.

Fundraising Day Four. On Fox News As The Alternative To Me.

You got yesterday off from my whining!  And tomorrow is the last day.  Thanks for your contributions to this blog.  Not only the financial ones!

My arm is still broken, but it doesn't hurt much.  I will find out tomorrow what happens next.

Staccato writing...  That and conciseness are my trademarks, together with a measly vocabulary.

I was going to write about The Endangered White Guys Television which is Fox News.  Even their woman-dominated program is called Outnumbered!  But instead of a long rumination on that topic, let me just quote from Media Matters for America:

Fox's Tantaros: "The Last Acceptable Form Of Discrimination In This Country Is Against White Men"

Fox Host To Actresses Suffering Pay Discrimination: "Be Grateful" You Get To Star Alongside Famous Men

Andrea Tantaros: "I Do Think There's Different Wiring Between Men And Women, Where Women May Want To Go Have Kids And Stay At Home"

Fox Business' Gasparino: "Overt Feminization Of Our Culture" Has Created A Situation Where "Men Are Becoming Women"

And that's just in the last ten days or so!  I could go on for a long time about the illogicality of being "wired" to stay at home (what happened to those nomadic hunter-gatherers who evolutionary psychologists believe were the group for all that wiring?  or are we back in the 1970s cave-wife cartoons?) and the awkward juxtapositioning of "natural" sex roles with the idea that men are now becoming women (heh).

See what you get if you don't support this blog?

#SayHerName

Is trending on Twitter.  It's about the Black Lives Matter movement, only this time about Black Women's and Girls' Lives mattering.  The overall context is complex, having to do with the lost childhoods of black girls, racist versions of sexism and sexist versions of racism, income inequality, wings cut short before the time to fly and much more.

But it is also about the way the police treats black women and about the way that treatment doesn't quite produce the same protests as similar outrages experienced by black men.

I don't have statistical data on the gender distribution of those who are killed by the police, or the underlying data on contacts with the police by men and women of all racial and ethnic groups, but even if men die more frequently in the hands of the police, it still looks like their individual cases get more coverage and more protests.  For example:

It is clear that #BlackLivesMatter struggles to generate as much concern for the safety and welfare of black women as it does for black men. The death of Natasha McKenna in the Fairfax County jail is a case in point.

McKenna, who suffered from mental illness, was shocked four times with a Taser stun gun by a sheriff’s deputy. She was in coma for several days before she died. A “Students March for Natasha McKenna” was supposed to have been held earlier in May to protest her death, which was ruled accidental. But the march has been postponed because of a lack of participation.
A meeting to discuss ways to drum up more interest in the march was scheduled for Tuesday in Fairfax City. More than 300 were invited on Facebook. Only 35 have confirmed, with 26 saying maybe.

We must do better.

Today's Research Popularization Fail

Several summaries of a study about online dating attracted my beady eyes recently.  The study, supposedly telling us that more groomed dating photographs  affect heterosexual men and women differently, looked useful grist for my mill.  For instance:

Researchers at the University of Connecticut conducted an experiment to determine how people judged each other based on their online dating profile photos. They presented 671 volunteers with a single photo that was either casual or enhanced and of a man or a woman. Researchers reported that men were less likely to trust women who posted an "enhanced" photo with good angles, good lighting and make-up.
But that didn't stop the men wanting to date those women anyway, said lead study author Rory McGloin, a communications professor at UConn.
"They thought she was more attractive, they wanted to go on a date with her ... but they didn't trust her," McGloin said.

On the flip side, women found men with enhanced photos to be more trustworthy, according to their findings, which is set to be presented at the International Communication Association annual conference later this month.

Bolds are mine, and they are very important bolds.

Suppose that I tell you my research shows that hats created from aluminum foil really do keep Fox News from corrupting your brain.  Suppose that I tell you I tested this with hundreds of individuals.  But nope, you CANNOT see the research paper, even though all you have is my word about the results!  After all, I'm going to read it aloud to some colleagues in a few weeks!

I'm not accusing the researchers of making anything up.  But to popularize a paper which nobody can get hold of is extremely bad manners.  Even unethical, because of this:

Let's say that some paper popularized this way turns out to be utter rubbish (such as my tinfoil study).  When the criticisms come in, the popularizers are no longer at all interested in correcting their earlier messages, so readers are left believing in lies.  Here's one example of a retracted study which was widely popularized, but its retraction got no publicity.  More examples here.

For the sake of completeness I should mention that I asked Mr. McGloin for the paper by e-mail.  That was ten days ago, but if I get his answer I will write more about online dating and mating.

Fundraising Day Two. Flat Heels, Ties Or Codpieces?

I bet you wonder if this begging thing ends soon...  I'm using the donations to partially gauge readership etc., to learn if I should go on or not.  That's today's knot to unravel.

The instructions for giving are in the left column.

The rest of the title has to do with this story:

The Cannes Film Festival is reportedly not allowing women into screenings if they’re wearing flat shoes. I’m not sure I could’ve come up with a better metaphor for sexism in the film industry if I was really, really trying. If you wrote this into a novel about sexism in the film industry, it would seem heavy-handed. “Too much,” your editor would say. “Tone it down.”

Flatgate erupted on Twitter this week after several women were apparently turned away from a red carpet screening of Cate Blanchett’s new movie Carol because they were in the demon flats.

So I lean back and ask if this is any different from men having to wear ties (does the Cannes Film Festival require that?) or visible codpieces, perhaps with tassels (that could be fun)?

The main difference is that high heels have possibly serious health consequences for their wearers (you could even fall and break your humerus!  though I fell barefooted), and unless ties are so tight as to strangle the wearer, my other examples do not.  And the rule, if real, discriminates against women who already have health problems which make heels impossible to wear.
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Added later:  Three guys plan to wear high heels in solidarity.

The Regrets Of History. By David Brooks.

Brooks' newest column is on the inexplicable and illogical Bush decision to invade Iraq, because of bin Laden who was known not to be there and because of oil, naturally.  If we believe Brooks, history is HARD to learn:

Which brings us to Iraq. From the current vantage point, the decision to go to war was a clear misjudgment, made by President George W. Bush and supported by 72 percent of the American public who were polled at the time. I supported it, too.
What can be learned?
...

The Iraq war error reminds us of the need for epistemological modesty. We don’t know much about the world, and much of our information is wrong. A successful president has to make decisions while radiating hesitancy, staying open-minded in the face of new evidence, not falling into the traps that afflict those who possess excessive self-confidence.

Time to tear out whatever hair we might have left.  The whole fiasco was a fiasco, decisions made by politicians who acted like they had never read about the history of Iraq, the arbitrary nature of the country, the Sunnis and the Shias and the Kurds.  For goddess' sake, Bush sent out freshly-hatched AynRandians to build Free Markets there!

As I said (repeatedly), it was a fiasco, and nothing Brooks wrote makes it any less so.  It's NOT the case that those in power can just make up policy as they go (well, it worked in Russia..).  That's a high school student essay level work.  And no, it doesn't make any difference if the majority of Americans supported the invasion, because they were not the experts who needed to be heard.

Then Brooks, the eternal optimistic preacher, tells us that the farce, the fiasco, was at least a partial success.  Ask what people fleeing Ramadi think of that!  Sadly, you can't ask the opinions of all those who died because of the invasion.

ISIS would probably exist even in the absence of the Bush invasion, because its real breeding grounds were in Syria. But surely the American invasion and the removal of Sunnis from power prepared the fields in Iraq for its seeds of religious fanaticism, cruelty, slavery and extreme Saudi-type patriarchy, the harvest to be watered with blood.

Fundraising Day One. The Price Is Right.

I traveled a bit last week, surfing through living-rooms where Fox News provides the only reality one can trust and the only '"news" one can rely on.  Frightening experiences!  The world looks very different when half the news on other channels are missing and the remaining ones are blown out of all proportion.

But on television I was really affected by this show:  The Price Is Right. 

To participate in it you have to suffer from St. Vitus Dance whenever you see a waffle-iron or a toaster.  Or move by making only rabbit jumps and squeal a lot.  It's a quiz show, and the attraction to the viewers just might be how silly people can be made to act for some money.

Or perhaps not, and now I feel mean and heartless. But surely better programs are affordable in a country which spends enormous sums on its military?  Now I can't help thinking of the US military being governed by squealing and jumping generals.

Speaking of money, the official fundraising for this blog has begun.  Thanks to all who already gave and thanks to all whom I'm mesmerizing here to give.  As always, don't feel bad if you can't give.  I value all my readers.

An Oldie But Goodie: Why Would Walmart Hire Any Men If Women Are Cheaper And Equally Productive?

This is the "aha! got you there!" argument I often hear from those who believe that firms couldn't possibly discriminate AND remain profitable.  After all, a firm which could save on its labor costs by not discriminating would make higher profits, right?

The shadow side of that argument is naturally the assumption that women are worse workers and deserve lower pay.

A response to all this can be found in this post.

It's worth reading if you often engage with people making the above argument.

First Convict the Perpetrator. On True And False Rape Accusations

Anti-feminists and MRAs frequently write about the fear of false rape accusations, the idea that a man's life can be ruined just on some woman's say-so.

Those  stories and Twitter messages see false rape accusations as a giant problem, perhaps amounting to half of all accusations!  That the best studies suggest rates much, much lower* doesn't make the smallest dent to the edifice of "known knowns" created in that alternative reality of manosphere,** because outside information is ignored there.

Given all that, I found this story about a sexual assault conviction fascinating:

Baltimore jury convicted a man Friday who had been acquitted in four previous sexual assault trials, a win for prosecutors who revived the discarded case in a bid to secure an elusive conviction.

Nelson Bernard Clifford, a convicted sex offender, was found guilty of two counts of third-degree sex offense. While the counts individually carry a maximum sentence of 10 years, prosecutors say Clifford faces an enhanced penalty — up to life in prison — because of prior convictions.

Prosecutors said that on Sept. 30, 2007, Clifford broke into a woman's home in the Barclay neighborhood, tied her hands with a belt and sexually assaulted her. Clifford also was found guilty of theft for stealing the victim's laptop and $45, prosecutors said.

Bolds are mine.  Get it?  This is the gist:

Clifford had gone to trial four times since 2010. In each case, the women said he broke into their homes and bound and attacked them. Each time, he took the stand and claimed that the encounters were consensual, and was acquitted of the most serious charges.

If this "perfect" type of sexual assault by a stranger  has such a hard time getting convictions,  what are the chances in cases where the victim knew the perpetrator? 

The specific reason why the legal system favored Clifford seems to be the inadmissibility of prior evidence in Maryland:

Prosecutors were dealt a setback before the most recent case, after trying to enjoin it with another to show a pattern. Clifford allegedly attacked a woman and stole her phone, which was left behind at the scene of a second attack four days later. But Chief Judge Alfred J. Nance ruled the cases be tried separately. On the witness stand, Clifford acknowledged leaving the phone behind, but jurors had no idea it was stolen from another alleged victim.

What makes this example crucial in the false-accusations context is this: Based on the way MRAs use the concept the three women who lost their cases against Clifford would have been counted among those falsely accusing someone of sexual assault.  After all, the court found for Clifford in each case.

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*  The best estimates are between 2% and 8% of all rape accusations. 

**  And fascinating theories about the reasons why men should be the revered bosses of women, both viewed as classes.  For instance, I recently read that women should make sandwiches to men, because men built the cities (and presumably gave them freely to those women who made them sandwiches), and it takes a lot of sandwiches to build a city.

That's a good example of the nuttier manosphere arguments.  Note the view of all men as builders of cities, the view of women's contributions to civilizations as zero, the omission of who built the men themselves and so on.

It's in the same family as arguments that all women should make all men sandwiches because certain men died in the wars.  It's not the dead warriors who deserve the sandwiches, but anyone with the same y-chromosome.

Then never mind that women have been banned from the military, in the past had little say over whether countries would go to war or not,  and still face sexual harassment in construction jobs.

But none of that matters, because the point of those arguments is not gender equality but the perpetuation of male supremacy.

  

The Conservative War Against Teachers. Or How To Shoot At Your Own Foot.

US conservatives have an odd schizophrenic angle to the power of markets:  They are all-important (godlike, even), and must not be meddled with in finance, for instance, but when it comes to teaching professions those same markets can be totally ignored.  Indeed, the conservatives like a command economy there, as in "We command, teachers obey."

The point I've made before is that conservatives shouldn't completely ignore markets in their attempts to behead the political power of all teachers' unions.

To give you an example, cutting back on teachers' retirement benefits means cutting back on their total compensation packages.  In Chicago, for instance:

The district, which says it is wrestling with a $1.1 billion deficit weighted with pension payments, wants to save millions of dollars by having teachers pay more into their pension fund. The district wants to end a long-standing agreement that limits teacher paycheck deductions for pensions, the union said.

That CTU said the result would be a 7 percent cut in take-home pay for members. The union also says health care premiums could take another 3 percent under a district proposal.

What do you think a seven-percent compensation cut would mean for the supply of new teachers?  Remember that they must invest in a college degree which is not getting cheaper, even as the financial pay in the occupation declines.

Here's the answer:

The number of students interested in becoming educators continues to drop significantly—From 2010 to 2014, the number of ACT-tested high school graduates interested in education majors or professions decreased by more than 16%, while the number of all graduates who took the ACT increased by nearly 18%.

Those who express interest in teaching tend to score lower in all areas except English than those who express no such interest.

This is another case of short-sighted politically motivated dinners where the politicians happily eat the seed corn to make sure that the Democrats don't get today's bread.

The topic matters for women's employment.  Traditionally*, teaching has been one of the few areas which has allowed an easier combination of childcare duties with paid work (getting home at the same time as the kids, being at home during their vacations).  The lower pay, compared to other jobs which have similar college investment requirements, has been acceptable because of that flexibility.  But if the pay keeps going down further we will see a drop in the supply of teachers and the quality of the incoming teachers.

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*In the bad-old days US women had three somewhat wide job paths into middle class earnings.  They were teaching, social work and being a secretary.  See what is happening to teaching, then read what is happening to secretarial jobs, and the importance of opening the IT jobs to more women looks pretty clear.

Mothers' Day Political Thoughts

1.  The political respect for motherhood is a bit like buying one of those "I Support The Troops" bumper stickers (made in China and very cheap) and then voting against any veterans' benefits.

2.  That's why the myth of the all-sacrificing female parent as the sole caregiver of children is so popular!   A special day once every year and no need for paid parental leave!  Because mothers are intended to self-sacrifice, so nobody else will have to.  This is an extreme example of how a proper mother should spend her life.  Note the guilt, note the need to erase all other parts of one's personality, and then note that all this is internalized:  The job of parenting belongs solely to mothers and its cost is pretty much everything else.

3.  That's the shadow side of basic libertarian* thinking, too, which stinks of Nietzsche.  If the Übermensch is to be mostly free (free!), then the Untermensch cannot be.  Someone must wipe the butts and wash the diapers, but having done so will always count against the person in the labor market.  You must take time off to be a Good Mother but you will be punished for taking that time off.

4.  None of this means that fathers of children wouldn't be expected to take responsibility for their children.  But traditionally that responsibility coincides much better with a person's other goals in life:  You can advance in your career, get promoted, satisfy some of your ambitions, and nobody asks who is minding your children or how they cope with your absences.  Granted, the monetary consequences are not good for either mothers or fathers who take time off from the labor force.  Still, we expect less hands-on care or presence from fathers and guilt them much less for the choice to continue working hard.

5.  The problems of the mythologically decreed Supermom, working mostly on her own, are much exacerbated for some groups of women of color and for poorer women.  Staying at home is not an option if you are the breadwinner of the family or if the earnings of two adults are necessary, good quality daycare may be unaffordable. Those single mothers who  qualify for government assistance are often viewed as parasites sucking the blood of upstanding taxpayers.

This provocative story is by a black woman who chose not to have children because she knew she was expected to do it all on her own.

6.  The bumper sticker view of motherhood in this country means that the US is one of the few countries where maternal mortality rates are rising, and also one of the few industrialized countries where there is no nationwide policy for paid maternity leave, not to speak of paid paternity leave.  

Though the reasons for the former are complex, they clearly intersect with poverty and race.  The latter we may thank the conservatives and corporations for.  You may have heard that paid parental leave would handicap American corporations which have to compete against foreign firms.  Possibly even firms located in countries which already have paid (and long!) parental leave.  Gasp.

7.  These points are about political thoughts about motherhood, not general or philosophical thoughts.  Thus, they are not intended to negate the wonders of parenthood or to imply that the respect for individual mothers wouldn't be real.  But politicians are not meant to focus on the latter.  They are meant to create the support systems which parenting requires.  And in that sense this country gets a failing grade.

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* This libertarian angle crops up in the onus put on individuals rather than the wider society:

Rather than making the environment safer and healthier for children, the onus is put on the parents, and especially on mothers, beginning from pregnancy:  Mercury in tuna?  It's your responsibility not to eat it while pregnant.  No sidewalks for school children to use to walk to school?  It's your responsibility to drive them, and when they get fat from lack of exercise, that, too, is your responsibility.  And we won't even ask the question what a parent without a car should do.

The counterargument is that people shouldn't have kids if they cannot do all that.  But children are the next generation and will become the future caregivers, doctors, dentists, farmers and so on;  the people who will one day take care of the old people that even today's young and childless libertarians turn into.  This shared aspect of the value of children is one reason why the society should support good parenting.