Ted Cruz on The Condom Wars

Ted Cruz is a brave, brave man.  He has said what no-one else in the Republican Party dares to say:  That there is no Republican war on women!  None.  That it's the Republicans who vote in more and more restrictions on women's reproductive choices is a coincidence, and so is the fact that it's the Republicans who fight tooth and nail against any attempt to disallow gender discrimination in the workplace.  It's also a coincidence that it's the Republican Party who has far fewer women in the US Congress than the Democratic Party.

So many coincidences, and I haven't even had breakfast yet!

The specific message Cruz wants us to take home is that the Republicans don't want to ban people's access to contraceptives.  This is how he put it:

Ted Cruz on Monday offered a spirited defense of Republicans on women’s health issues, accusing Democrats of creating a phony “war on women” based on claims that his party wants to restrict access to birth control.
“The last I checked, we don’t have a rubber shortage in America,” the GOP presidential candidate said during a town hall here, responding to a question about the availability of contraception to women who want it.
“Look, when I was in college, we had a machine in the bathroom. You’d put 50 cents in and voila!” added Texas’ junior senator, who attended Princeton University and Harvard Law School. “So yes, anyone who wants contraceptives can access them, but it is an utterly made-up, nonsense issue.”

See?  Any man can buy condoms in public bathrooms!  Problem solved.

The point, naturally, is that the traditional condoms are not a form of female-controlled contraception*.  A woman cannot protect herself if the man she has sex with refuses to wear a condom.  It's up to him, ultimately, though of course most couples cooperate on contraceptive choices.  Still, Cruz is telling the guys that the Republican Party will let them have as many condoms as they wish.

He's telling something quite different to the gals.  And one of those things is that he hasn't thought about any of this on the deeper levels.  I always find that shocking, the fact that most Republican male politicians don't spend any time thinking about women and their petty issues before opening their mouths.

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*It is those forms of contraception that the weirdest pro-lifers (or forced-birthers) wish to ban:  The contraceptive pill and the intrauterine device or the coil. 

Happy Thanksgiving

I am thankful for all my readers, for all those who have donated money to my chocolate reserves, for all people who are kind, smart and ethical (which covers most of you),  for all people who want a fair, just and peaceful world.

*Raises a toast:  To you!*

On Writing in November 2015

1.  I would never make a journalist.  I can't write the way journalists are expected to write (if I can write at all).  All interesting interviews or long articles in politics weave the ideas into a story with trees, sunrises, hard beds, the smell of exotic cooking, openings which set you into a place and time and which flavor what's to come.

I can't do that.  I dive straight into the swimming pool of ideas and chase them (or they chase me).  That's boring, antiseptic and smells of chloride.  So I tried to do an imaginary interview article with some wingnut governor at his mansion:

There is a sun in the sky, there are trees.  They are vertical.  There is a building with a door and a parking area for my ancient car.  My hands are gripping the worn steering wheel, my cheaply-shod feet walk up the stairs to the office of the governor.  He wears silk pants, his belt has a golden NRA buckle,  dandruff lies gently on his shoulders.  He has eyes and they are aimed at me.  Other people come and go, speaking of Donald Trumpo, with automatic weapons hanging off their belts.

You see, my hands and my feet are in the story to keep me in the story but peripheral,  and to focus on the pants and the belt buckle and the hairy backs of the hands of the governor (not yet mentioned above) is to make him central, to cast a harsh light on him.  All that is to prepare you so that you are ready to dislike his ideas, whatever they might be.  The hint of my ancient car (he can vote!) is to make you side with the poor (i.e. me, though goddesses of course are not poor).  All that can be reversed if you wish to write on the side of the capitalists or fundamentalists or whatever.

2.  The innocence of my archives twelve years ago!  I want that innocence back, that time when writing didn't make me feel that I was hanging my laundry out to dry so that all neighbors could come with magnifying classes to see if the underwear has any stains on it, to see if the shirts have been laundered too many times, to assess the cheapness of my clothes, and the number of rips and tear they have.

The past always looks more innocent, of course, and I'm sure that most people simply admire the astonishing cleanness of my drying laundry!  So.

3.  Sweet potato pie for Thanksgiving.  It is an abomination:  A turnip hiding in a dessert dish.  I always eat only the edges of sweet potato pies, even though doing so is extremely uncouth.  But serving turnip-wannabes instead of chocolate cake is a real crime in my books.  I don't care how traditional it might be.  Stoning people is also traditional and also utterly loathsome. 







 

Women's Curves Explained. Or Wonders Never Cease.

Caitlin Flanagan has written a book review in the Washington Post.  That's not in itself very surprising, but two things about the book review made me go oooh and aaah.

The first one is that the book (The Origins and Power of Female Body Shape),  telling us what women's curves are for (hint, they are for men's benefit the same way a door handle is for the benefit of those who use the door), is by a veterinary scientist, David Bainbridge.   Now, veterinary scientists clearly are experts in the evolutionary theories about women's bodies, clearly.

The second surprising reason is that Caitlin Flanagan seems to be writing from my side of the aisle!  She's even somewhat surprised that Bainbridge comes across as an MRA warrior type. Flanagan is, after all, famous for her hatred of women's rights, a firm proponent of male supremacy in the family and adamant that all women should be housewives.  So kudos where it belongs.  Perhaps Caitlin is seeing the light?  Though she still says this:

“Evolution is not feminist,” he tells us soberly. Neither is he, apparently, which gives the book a refreshing frisson. Most pseudo-scientific books aimed at a female readership (as this one clearly is) are devoted to proving the superiority of women or at least their full equality to men. The “I’m just telling it like it is” tone of “Curvology” is appealing: What dark truths have we been unwilling to face? Read a chapter or two, however, and you discover that “Curvology” merely — and mildly — repeats the assertions of the manosphere: Evolution has caused men to like big breasts, big buttocks and small waists. We know, we know! Didn’t the Commodores teach us long ago that 36-24-36 is a winning hand?

I never quite understand how someone can get a refreshing frisson when preparing to read how she herself will be deemed inferior to the other half of humanity.  I get a chilling frisson wondering what could have happened in her own life to make her so capable of cutting herself away from the rest of the womanhood.

And then there's the idea that the pseudo-scientific books in this field are telling women that they are at least equal to men if not better*:

Did Flanagan read Louann Brizendine's  pseudo-scientific books about the male and female brain, I wonder.  The subtext in those books is much more dangerous than superficial skimming might suggest, because they trot out iffy (sometimes very iffy) evidence, pick certain studies over others and then state that the biological differences between men and women are now (insert today's date, any date) quite understood (and immutable).

Sure, the books might have been marketed on the basis of some weird type of grrrl power (I may be dumb in maths but I'm really really good at personal relationships!), but in their core they are about reinforcing traditional gender stereotypes.  Very much like the old guides that sprouted from John Gray's pseudo-scientific Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus.

Flanagan's review is not about the pseudoscience Bainbridge appears to practice, as the above quote shows, and that is the one flaw in the review.  There's  evidence from several studies that some constant, perfect waist-to-hip ratio isn't a universal ideal, there's  evidence that cultural norms affect which aspects of women's bodies are deemed most erotic and so on.

But inside the weird kind of evolutionary psychology, the kind I use capital initials for, the cult of the waist-to-hip ratio rules untouched.  Mostly because external criticism cannot enter a sealed bubble.


It is that lack of scientific critiques in Flanagan's review which makes me feel the old horrible guilt (like a Jesus-syndrome):  I should immediately go and read Bainbridge's book to tell you everything that is wrong with it.  But life is so very short and the criticism is probably already available in my blog archives.  Besides, Flanagan's final quote from the book makes me want to run screaming right off this planet:

There is exactly one truly happy female in “Curvology,” an unnamed girl who appears in two italicized passages that Bainbridge has dreamed up as a sort of homage to “Clan of the Cave Bear.” We meet her in “the rust-red light of another dawn.” Her family has traded her to a tribe of strangers, which might seem like a raw deal, but her full thighs and round bottom have led to the assurance that “she would be cherished by her new tribe and her man.” Indeed, this man has already planted his seed in her. All this — the human trafficking, the rape, the pregnancy — leads to the deepest delight: “She cupped her breasts in her hands. They seemed to be getting slowly larger ever since the wiggling thing in her belly had appeared. She could not explain why, but this made her laugh out loud.”

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*Just as an aside:  Almost all Evolutionary Psychology (EP, see post above for definition) articles tell women how impossibly inferior we are, and that goes for many of the books which popularize EP, too.   That may be the reason I had to read Flanagan's assertion twice before I got what she meant (the focus on a narrowly tailored concept of pseudo-scientific books aimed at women).  She hasn't evidently spent her time getting refreshing frissons and learning dark "truths" the way I have.  But I guess that whole field of literature consists of pseudo-scientific books aimed at MRAs.

How The Online Debates About Terrorism Go in The US. Where Echidne Grumbles.

US online debates about terrorism, the proper treatment of refugees and other related issues leave me exasperated.  Also sad and angry, of course, given the topics, but the exasperation part should be fixable.

I'm exasperated, because too many people have trotted out  their hind-brains for that thinking purpose.  On the US political right this shows up in widespread fear and hatred of all Muslims (register them!  refuse all Muslim refugees!), on the US political left it becomes a knee-jerk reaction against whatever the right does*, as opposed to actually looking at the issues and the evidence.

This creates some very odd bedfellows among political values and ideals:

Suddenly religious freedom is not the conservative cause it has been in the Hobby Lobby case, for example, but a liberal, lefty cause.  Suddenly the unequal treatment of women (but only in Islam) is a right-wing worry,  not something that would greatly worry liberals or progressives or feminists.  Suddenly the Syrian refugees contain large numbers of hidden ISIS members (the right-wing view) or they are all orphans and widows fleeing the very same ISIS the US conservatives fear so much (the left-wing view).

Reality is nuanced, ambiguous.  It's not good that so many of these debates can't seem to handle ambiguity.

To clarify what I mean, take that last sentence of the preceding paragraph.  The one study that has been done among Syrian refugees in Europe suggests that more of them are fleeing the bombings and violence of president Assad than the violence of ISIS.  This does NOT mean that the refugees who answered the survey in the study would support ISIS or any other militant group in Syria, not at all. But the majority in the survey** see Assad as the culprit in the Syrian civil war, not rising jihadism.

The vast majority of the Syrian refugees are people fleeing unspeakable circumstances, and they need help.  That ISIS would try to infiltrate that group goes without saying.  It's the job of the western governments, including the government of the United States, to weed out as many potential terrorists as possible***.  I think that the job of the rest of us is to learn to deal with the residual ambiguity or to surrender our claim to compassion.

The longer-run job of everyone in power should be to end the wars in the Middle East.  That's what the refugees want, too. 

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*  I don't mean that the left should actually consider those vile proposals, but the automatic response shouldn't be to match "their" demons with "our" angels.  Neither view is realistic of human beings in general.

** I looked at the survey.  It's hard to judge how representative it might be.  If Syrian refugees in Berlin are a random sample of all Syrian refugees in Europe then the study is representative.  On the other hand, if Syrian refugees in Berlin are, say, more likely to come from areas where Assad is in power or fighting over power, then the results might not be representative.

***  The United States has a much better chance of doing this than most European governments, what with the enormous refugee numbers in Europe.  Against that background, the bill passed by the US House and the reluctance of more than half of US state governors to accept Syrian refugees seem exaggerated.






 

The Global Gender Gap Report, 2015

  The 2015  Global Gender Gap Report is out.  It's part of an annual series published by the World Economic Forum, focusing on how equal men and women appear to be globally in employment, education, health outcomes and political participation*.

The top ten countries (with the greatest gender equality measures overall) in 2015 are:  Iceland (1), Norway (2), Finland (3), Sweden (4), Ireland (5), Rwanda (6), Philippines (7), Switzerland (8), Slovenia (9) and New Zealand (10).

Slovenia is a newcomer to that group.   Note that because the reports focus on gaps between men and women, not overall levels of, say, political access, poorer nations can rise high in these rankings.

The bottom ten countries in 2015 are Egypt (136), Mali (137), Lebanon (138), Morocco (139), Jordan (140), Iran (141), Chad (142), Syria (143), Pakistan (144) and Yemen (145). 

Yemen has stayed firmly at the bottom of these rankings for several years.  I went back several years to check what might have happened to Syria's relative ranking, given the civil war that is raging there.  Data on Syria was first included only in 2006 (some partial data), but it does look like Syria has slipped somewhat in the last few years.  Still, with the exception of 2008, Syria's rankings were either in the bottom ten countries or just above that group. 

You can look at the overall index and the four sub-indexes for all the included countries in Table 3 of the report.  That will also give you some ideas about what is driving the above results.  Note that it gives you no idea if any particular ranking in that table is that country's desired outcome.  One might argue that gender equality is so high in the Nordic countries because it IS a desired outcome there.

The United States ranked 28th in the overall index this year.  The report goes into much more detail about the reasons why individual countries, including the United States, moved up or down in the rankings.

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*  Somewhere I have a long post criticizing some of the methodological choices in that series, but, alas and alack, I cannot find it.  This short post from 2009 must suffice instead. 

Still, the gist of my criticism is partly to do with the way the four sub-indexes on gender equality are created and how they are aggregated.  The actual data the reports use consist of a handful or two of easily available statistical indicators (the health index, as an example, uses only two measures).  It's important to keep in mind that those statistics are  the information in  the reports; to end up with the various sub-indexes and the final overall index requires decisions about how to manipulate the initial statistics and how to aggregate them.  These choices are by their very character somewhat arbitrary.

On the other hand, selecting a few widely available statistics and then following how countries do on them over years is not a bad starting point.  It guarantees that the maximum number of countries can be included in the reports.

Birthday Post

Guess how old this blog is in November 2015.  Thanks for the years.

How To Defeat ISIS And Other Fables On Terrorism

Care to read a short story by a Townhall conservative columnist Kurt Schlichter?  The blogs of Digby and No More Mister Nice review this imaginary masterpiece.

It's about what it would take to defeat ISIS, in the dreams of one conservative guy (as in "When I dream I'm a Viking").  The story has all the wish-fulfillment aspects of bubble-gum literature aimed at teenage boys (except for the tits and ass): 

Macho men killing everything that moves (but for the good, of course), refusal to negotiate with any foreign power  (stomp over them), the utter humiliation of liberals (enemies), Democrats (enemies) and anyone opposing easy access to guns in the US (individual citizens successfully kill terrorists in public places but only in Republican states), simplistic scenarios where the hero faces no real obstacles (because of extreme use of military power), unending cheering by the grateful American crowds (who love the rising dead body counts from Iraq and Syria).  And a glorious victory at the end.

What struck me about the story was the glimpse into the id of the writer:  The imaginary Republican tough-guy president in the story fires his wimpy CENTCOM commander and replaces him with a marine called Wildman (!), known for his aggressiveness.  It is Wildman who then goes out to defeat ISIS.

Just think about that for a moment!  Schlichter wants the barbaric hind-brain to take over, along the lines that it takes a barbarian to fight one.  This short-cut bypasses all those parts of brain which take care of higher levels of thinking, ethics and so on.

But it works in the story!  Of course it does.  I always win in my daydreams, too.

Let's see how Wildman manages to destroy ISIS in the story:

The first wave of 12 B-52H’s emptied their bays of 750-pound dumb bombs directly over the heart of Raqqa, followed by a second wave, then a third. Crack Air Force ground crews were waiting back at the base in Saudi Arabia, and rearmament took less than two hours. Then they headed north again. In 24 hours, Raqqa ceased to exist.


The jihadis initially attempted to dig in, believing the Americans would pause to root them out of the urban areas. Instead, the Americans leveled the towns, often using the napalm that had just been reintroduced into the American arsenal, and followed up with infantry. At first, the jihadis tried to hide behind the few remaining civilians but the Americans never hesitated, and ISIS quickly learned that to try to hold ground meant a swift death.

So.  Raqqa has over 220,000 inhabitants.  But in this story worrying about civilian casualties is "secondary."  Will there be a second installment to this story, about the predictable response by most of the Middle East when people there learn that at least 220,000 civilians have died in these attacks?

Well, probably more than that number of collateral damage, because:

Covered from interference by Russian aircraft by a protective screen of F-22s, the B-52s worked their way from urban target to urban target, literally obliterating any ISIS-supporting town in Syria. This supported the Wildman’s strategy of depriving ISIS of any of the vestiges of an actual nation state. The caliphate, to the extent it governed anything, would rule over rubble.

That's pretty cruel, given that ISIS wasn't exactly invited into the towns in Syria it now controls.  It invaded them and killed lots of people.  In this story those civilians still alive would also die.  And of course all this carnage would sprout a thousand ISIS-type organizations.

Literary works don't have to worry about that, of course.  As an aside, I'm not writing about Schlichter's short story because of its interest or relevance, but because my recent reading about terrorism suggests that imaginary stories also fuel many  acts of terror. 

Granted, those stories are filled with religious imagery, not patriotic imagery, but the assumption that extreme violence for "good" is necessary to combat the violence of "bad" is something these stories share.  They also share the macho plot:  The only proper revenge against any past collective humiliations (however distant in time) is violence. And they share that aggregation of everyone "on the other side" as irrelevant collateral damage.










 

Paris. First Thoughts.

Paris bleeds because it is part of a river of blood:  The Russian plane dying in the skies over Egypt, the Hazaras of Afghanistan being relieved of their heads, the suicide bombings in a Shiite neighborhood of Beirut, Libanon.

Or so the propagandists of Daesh or ISIS or ISIL tell us.  Some of those rivers of blood may be from old rivulets, sourced from old racial hatreds (the Hazara massacre), old religious schisms (the Shias vs. the Sunnis, the Muslims vs. the Christians).  But the Daesh river of blood is real and has not yet been dammed.

And its sources are many.  I read my Twitter feed and was told that everything the deranged god-soldiers of ISIS did was caused by American oil politics and Western colonialism, as if those neo-Salafist clerics who designed ISIS had no agency, no way of choosing another form of rebellion but an extreme life-denying religious one, as if the religion they had created for themselves* from what the Saudi Wahhabism supports and funds in this world**  has played no role.  Instead, millions and millions of westerners are equally to blame, for genetic or historical reasons or at least for not voting various politicians out of power. 

I read my Twitter feed and was told that everything the deranged god-soldiers of ISIS did was caused by their religion, that  every single of hundreds of millions of Muslims is just waiting to behead the first infidel they come across.  Once again, as if those neo-Salafist clerics who designed ISIS had no agency, as if millions and millions of Muslims are equally to blame, just because ISIS calls its religion theirs.

And I read my Twitter feed and was told that everything the deranged god-soldiers of ISIS did was caused by western discrimination and racism or by old religious discrimination in various Middle Eastern countries, as if those neo-Salafist clerics who designed ISIS had no agency at all.

Puppets.  ISIS consists of nothing but puppets.  Who holds the strings depends on the tweeter's own prior beliefs, on whom he or she would wish to blame.  There are even some who believe that US has created ISIS on purpose and funds it!

And what was tweeted on Friday night and later, truly reflected the hobby-horses of various tweeters.  Frank Bruni writes and I concur:

Can’t we wait until we’ve resolved the body count? Until the identities of all of the victims have been determined and their families informed? Until the sirens stop wailing? Until the blood is dry?
Or must we instantly bootstrap obliquely related agendas and utterly unconnected grievances to the carnage in Paris, responding to it with an unsavory opportunism instead of a respectful grief?

 Is this the famous death of empathy possibly caused by staring at an inanimate screen while talking to real people?  Is it the masks we wear in cyberspace which allow us to act as if we have mislaid our hearts altogether, as if all that matters is the well-being of whichever group or theory we hold most dearly?  And in counterpoint, is empty sentimentalism or patriotism  the answer we assume if then accused of heartlessness?

It's as if many in social media forgot about the ones who lost the most in those terrorist attacks, whose lives were prematurely discarded, whose pain served a political function, whose personalities were erased, whose families were left with bleeding wounds, perhaps never to close.  In that they appear in agreement with the Daesh who also regarded the victims as less than nothing:  a bit of filth to be sucked up by the divine vacuum cleaner.

The old customs about the immediate aftermath of death serve a function:  Spend some time thinking about the deceased, give support to the family who is bereaved, sit in silence for a while, offer a cooked dish and offer help.

We don't really have a cyberspace version of that respect for the individual.  But surely all the different commentators with their pet issues could wait a day or two before forgetting all about the actual human lives which were ended or permanently mutilated by the terrorists?   


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*  Access to sex slaves from war booty is an ISIS-invented extra benefit, something current Wahhabism doesn't condone.   The men and the older women can be killed in the ISIS religion.  Older women couldn't be killed even in those far-distant times of the prophet, but ISIS adjusts its religion as it sees fit.

**  The source of Daesh as a religious movement is firmly in the countries which fund the petro-dollar Islam, the most fanatic, the most extremist, the most unforgiving type of Islam.  The flavor of religion comes with the clerics and the clerics come with the funding of the mosques everywhere, including in Europe.

The Daniel Holtzclaw Case

The Daniel Holtzclaw trial is in its second week in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.  Holzclaw was a police officer (now fired) who is alleged to have sexually abused* (at least) twelve women and one 17-year-old girl while on duty during the three years of his employment by the Oklahoma police.

What is it that the prosecutors say Holtzclaw did?  They say that he demanded sex** from women by using an extortion tactic:  They say that he targeted poor women with outstanding warrants or who had other reasons to avoid the police.  They say that he then offered to turn a blind eye should his personal sexual needs be catered for.

Holtzclaw was caught when he allegedly used his tactic on a woman who didn't have any outstanding warrants or other reasons to avoid the police, and who went and reported Holtzclaw.

The case has a strong racial flavor:  Holtzclaw's alleged victims were black women, usually middle-aged and poor black women, and Holtzclaw himself is white (with a Japanese mother)***.

What would drive a man to do something like that?  A desire to assault black women?  Picking victims based on the kinds of indicators which would suggest the smallest chance of being caught?  Or both?

I cannot answer those questions, and Holtzclaw hasn't been found guilty yet, so in a legal sense speculation about his possible motives is premature.

But let's think about how gender, race and social class interact in a case like this:  A heterosexual male police officer might target black women, both because they are women and because they are black (at least partly because this reduces the chances of being caught, especially if the women are poor and already in some difficulty with the police).

Thus, the statistical probability that a person becomes the victim of sexual extortion and/or sexual assault by a police officer would be higher for black women than for black men, higher for black women than for white women and higher for poor black women than for wealthier black women (who are less likely to have outstanding unpaid fines etc.)****. 

A rotten police officer of this type could be profiling his victims, seeking those who are least likely to provoke an uproar of any kind.  That his selection would raise the risk of being assaulted by a police officer more for black women than for either black men or white women (or men) is important to understand.  Note that those ending in his net don't have to have had a criminal history or anything similar.  Race and gender become the signals which this man would use.

That's why this problem is not just one about female victims or not just one about black victims.  It's both, and deserves a response which takes those interactions into account.


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*  He is tried on

36 counts, including eight counts of rape. He also faces counts of sexual battery, forcible oral sodomy, burglary, stalking, indecent exposure and procuring lewd exhibition.

**More examples here, here and here.

*** The jury finally selected for the trial is also 100% white.  Oklahoma population is 7.7% African-American, based on this source (which probably under-counts African-Americans because of the definition it uses "Black or African-American alone"), so it's not at all impossible to get an all-white jury, even without manipulation, in some areas of Oklahoma.  But is this the case in the Holtzclaw trial?  Oklahoma City has a higher African-American population (14.0% or more based on this source), so much depends on the catchment area for the jury and whether defense lawyers can bar candidates in the jury pool without giving explicit reasons for that.  My apologies for not knowing the necessary legal issues here. 

Still, an all-white jury doesn't create confidence in those following this trial for possible racial bias.

For more on possible jury biases, read here.

****  That's a very dry way of addressing some of the issues Treva Lindsay writes about.  Or a way to put the extra harassment black women receive into the framework of statistical discrimination.

Today's Very Shallow Thought

My shampoo bottle back label says:  Healthier hair.

I thought hair is dead.  How can it become healthier? 

Will mine rise from the tomb, wave in the air and then strangle all the people around me?  Like the hairdo of Medusa?

In any case it's good for the closing of the scales. 

Some Good News, 11/9/15

1.  Canada's new cabinet has fifty percent those weird types of Canadians who are called women (and more ethnic and racial diversity, too).  Justin Trudeau, the new prime minister, explains that shocking choice of women like this:

“Because it’s 2015.”

Now if anti-feminists are correct, this government should fall on its butt in ten seconds, from sheer incompetence.  But I doubt it will.  Good for Trudeau.


2.  Twelve Irish priests have refused to stay silent about women not being allowed into the priesthood:

“Discriminating against women encourages and reinforces abuse and violence against women in many cultures and societies,” the group said.
A document, issued in 1994 by Pope John Paul II, reiterated the Church’s strict stance on women entering the clergy – and also banned further discussion on the matter by the clergy.
Pope John Paul II’s views on female priests were repeated by his successors, Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis.
A statement from the 12 priests published on the Association of Catholic Priests website read:
“The strict prohibition on discussing the question has failed to silence the majority of the Catholic faithful. Survey after survey indicates that a great many people are in favour of full equality for women in the Church. But it has managed to silence priests and bishops, because the sanctions being imposed on those who dare to raise the question are swift and severe.”

3.  Something better is happening in the "banks are too big to be allowed to fail" category.

I Told You So. Abstinence-Only Education Doesn't Work.

I did tell you so, on this blog, many years ago.  It doesn't work to stop young people from having sex to tell them that sex is icky and disgusting and frightening and that you should save it for the people you love the most.  Indeed, given how teenagers think it's like telling them about something really fun they should try.

Abstinence has never been a policy that works for the majority of human beings.  We could learn that from this awesome thing called "history," but conservatives are very weird about history, so they decided to reinvent an L-shaped wheel again.*

Well, there was also the money motive.  A lot of abstinence-only educators got wealthy from the various governmental blessings of their creed.

In any case, one school using nothing but abstinence-only education for sex has an epidemic of chlamydia, and now the headmaster is trying to rethink this L-shaped wheel:

The superintendent of schools in Crane, Texas is rethinking the districts sexual education curriculum, after learning that 20 of the high schools 300 students have tested positive for chlamydia.
Jim Rummage told television station KFOR, "We do have an abstinence curriculum, and that evidently ain’t working. We need to do all we can, although it’s the parents’ responsibility to educate their kids on sexual education.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention isn't mincing any words, calling the outbreak a health issue of epidemic proportions.

What troubles me about some of the debate of these issues is that there are people who privilege the abstinence-only education over its likely negative consequences.  It's good enough for them that children were told to keep those pants zipped up.  What happens if the command fails might even satisfy those individuals, because the proper punishment for illicit sex is doled out.

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*Reinventing the wheel can make a difference when something essential changes, such as the introduction of brand new materials.  But this is not the case with the abstinence-only education.  If anything, the old reasons for abstinence are weaker today, because there is contraception.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan. Stoning Adulterers. A Gendered Analysis.

The Taliban stoning story in the New York Times is  upsetting on many levels.  It describes the torture and murder of Rukhshana,  a nineteen-year-old woman, and notes that a very important pro-government cleric in Afghanistan both condones the stoning and will lead the team that investigates its legality!  According to  Maulavi Inayatullah Baleegh, a pro-government mullah with lots of power, the stoning of adulterers is necessary:

 “If you’re married and you commit adultery, you have to be stoned,” said the mullah, Maulavi Inayatullah Baleegh, during his sermon at Pul-e Khishti mosque, Kabul’s biggest, on Friday. “The only question was whether this was done according to Shariah law, with witnesses or confessions as required,” he said. “It is necessary to protect and safeguard the honor of women in society, as it was done in the past during the time of the prophet.”

Bolds are mine.  To understand what is being said, note that the word "honor" is used just as it is used in the term "honor killings."  It should also be noted that on paper stoning is illegal in Afghanistan, but as the above quote demonstrates, many regard it as the correct punishment.

It's not a good thing for women, that honor, though losing it is a very bad thing for them.  The honor Baleegh preaches about is the family honor.  In many Mediterranean cultures it was once seen as deposited in the vaginas of the family's women.  Men could do most things they wished, however unethical, but even a raped woman destroyed that safety deposit of the family honor.  So she had to die.  And any adulterous woman certainly had to die.  That's how the family's honor could be defended.

This custom then became ossified in the Shariah, because of the times when it was taken down and because it was then closed for all further adjustment.  That's why the above quote suggests, to me*, a Wahhabist view of Islam, one in which only the oldest traditions must be maintained, one in which the culture and manners from thousands of years ago are ossified as divine law. 

Let's look at the gendered aspects of stoning in the NYT story**:

The governor of Ghor Province, Seema Joyenda, one of only two female governors in Afghanistan’s 34 provinces, said that Rukhshana had left her husband, but only because she had been illegally forced to marry him.

As a child, she had been engaged to a different, much older man. But when she reached marriageable age, she refused the union and ran away with Mr. Gul instead.

“Rukhshana was a pretty girl and had studied until Grade 6,” Governor Joyenda said. “She was literate and pretty, that was why everyone wanted to marry her, but she would not allow herself to be married to anyone against her will.”

Caught and brought back to her village, she still refused the first arranged marriage, so as punishment her family forced her instead to become the third wife of a 55-year-old man. Again, she ran away with Mr. Gul, and again they were caught.

Since Mr. Gul was not himself married, he was given the lesser punishment of 100 lashes and sent home, where a relative said he was still recovering from his wounds. (The relative, reached by telephone, asked not to be named because of fear of Taliban reprisals.) Because Rukhshana, who goes by just one name, was married, the Taliban condemned her to death by stoning.

How would this story have changed had Rukhshana been a man?

First, she (now he) might not have been forced into a planned marriage in the first place.

Second, she (now he) could have used that neat device Shariah has for men, if interpreted in the ossified way:  She could have taken Mr. Gul (now Ms. Gul) in marriage as the second wife.  Presto!  No adultery is taking place.  Case closed. (Note that women cannot have second or third or fourth husbands under Shariah.  All that would be adultery, the women would be stoned, the second etc. husbands would be flogged as they would be deemed unmarried.)

Third,  even if this male version of Rukhshana had already married four women before wanting Ms. Gul, the Shariah would let her (now him) divorce as many of them as instantly and as without cause as she (now he) wished, thus making space for Mr. Gul (now Ms. Gul).  (Note that it's very difficult for women to initiate divorce in most interpretations of the Shariah, whereas men can do so without a reason.)

Neat, eh?  The point I'm making is that the treatment of men and women in the Shariah is inherently unequal in most aspects.  This makes the ossified legal use of Shariah very dangerous for women, and it gives much more scope for married men to avoid being stoned to death for adultery.  Married men can be caught for adultery under the law and stoned to death, sure.  But they have quite a few legal devices for avoiding that.

_______
The "Meanwhile"-series of posts on this blog puts together news about negative events concerning women's rights and status from various parts of this globe.

This post is based on the assumption that the NYT story is correct in its factual assertions.

* More on stoning for adultery in the past can be found here and in the context of Islamic schools of law here. The second source suggests that all important schools interpreting the Shariah agree on stoning as the correct punishment, however, so I may have been overly optimistic in regarding this as a purely Wahhabist interpretation.

**   The victim, Rukshana, died at the age of nineteen by having large rocks thrown at her head.  The rest of her body was buried in the ground.  That made it impossible for her to run away, could she have otherwise done so.

I have read, though I have not been able to verify, that a victim to be stoned will be saved if he/she manages to get out of the hole and run away.  The same context stated that women are buried deeper than men.  This would mean that women are much less likely than men to be able to dig themselves out of the hole. 

The Rising Death Rates of Middle-Aged Non-Hispanic White Americans: More Food For Thought.

Or dental floss to clean your teeth after chewing on the Case-Deaton study, discussed in my earlier post.  Andrew Gelman makes an interesting point about what might drive some small part of the findings (that even though middle-aged people in lots of other countries and among US Hispanics and non-Hispanic blacks still enjoy declining mortality rates, it seems that non-Hispanic white Americans in that age group do not.).

That point is this:  The age group that Case and Deaton studied, the ages from 45 to 54, has not had a constant average age over time.:

But could this pattern be an artifact of the coarseness of the age category? A commenter here raised this possibility a couple days ago, pointing out that, during the period shown in the above graph (1989 to the present), the 45-54 bin has been getting older as the baby boom has been moving through. So you’d expect an increasing death rate in this window, just from the increase in average age.

If you like, the load in the boat containing all 45-54 year-old Americans has been tilting towards the higher end of that span, because of the baby boom effect.

Gelman does some back-of-the-envelope calculations and suggests that the correct death rates for middle-aged non-Hispanic white Americans might not have increased, after all,  but stayed constant.  This is still different than the evidence from other countries or the evidence on American Hispanics and non-Hispanic blacks, because all those groups seem to have enjoyed declining mortality rates.

The question of interest for me has to do with non-Hispanic blacks.  I get that American Hispanics might not show the same baby boom effect if their countries of origin didn't demonstrate a baby boom.  But many European countries (though not Sweden) in this graph should show similar effects to the tilting of the boat of the middle-aged towards higher ages:

The group I'm most curious about in this context is the group of non-Hispanic black Americans.  Didn't they experience the same baby boom effect as non-Hispanic white Americans?  Studying that question could throw more light on the findings.

Why am I harping so much about these details?

When we find something very unexpected and shocking, such as the sudden increasing mortality rates of poor white women (but not of poor black women, say) or poorer non-Hispanic whites between the ages of 45 and 54 (but not of poorer Hispanics or non-Hispanic blacks), we should double- and triple-check all the calculations.  That's because it's hard to make up explanations which would explain those ethnic and/or racial differences.  For instance, poverty-based explanations shouldn't work differently on whites, blacks and Hispanics.

Or put in another way, before we launch all the necessary extra studies about these phenomena we should be more certain that they are real.

One simpler way to describe

Most of these studies are about changes in a ratio, one where mortality is the numerator and where some population measure is the denominator.   It's natural to interpret changes in the ratio as coming from changes in the numerator (such as increasing death rates for poor white women), and that can be the case (and perhaps is).  But before we conclude that, we should make sure that the denominator hasn't changed.

By that change I don't mean quantitative changes* but more the idea that who it is we are counting in the denominator may have changed.  Gelman's point above is an example of that type of a change.  Another similar example is mentioned in this older post of mine, about the rising mortality rates of poorer white American men and especially women:**

Suppose that the group "white people without a high school diploma"  has shrunk not only in proportion to the overall population but in proportion to all whites.  If that's the case, it could be that past studies of similarly defined groups had more people with higher life expectancies in them, but that the most recent group does not, perhaps because education has become more accessible, filtering away first those with minimal risk factors?

That one is about who it is who remains in the "least educated" groups over time, and this could differ between white, black and Hispanic Americans.

So what can we conclude about the Case-Deaton study?  Certainly that the numbers deserve more investigation.

-----
Edited later to add first footnote

* That explanation is a simplistic one, for which my apologies.  The changes in what types of people are included in a certain category (by age, gender, race, geographic area) obviously can affect both the numerator and the denominator.  But my tool should work as a pedagogical one, to remind us that when a ratio changes it's not necessarily (or only) the numerator that is changing.

**One newer study, still in a draft form, suggests that  changes in the distribution of education might not explain the rising mortality rates of poorer white women, but might do it for poorer white men.

Snippet Posts, 11/5/15: On the Dangers of Open-Carry Laws And The Early Demise of Poorer Non-Hispanic White Americans

1.  The Colorado shooting rampage touches upon one often-ignored way other people's right to open-carry endangers any potential victim of mass shooters:

Two days before Noah Harpham killed three people in a Colorado Springs shooting rampage, the 33-year-old wrote an incoherent Internet essay post and rambled in a video uploaded to YouTube.

...

Bettis said she recognized the gunman as her neighbor — whom she didn't know by name — and that before the initial slaying she saw him roaming outside with a rifle. She called 911 to report the man, but a dispatcher explained that Colorado has an open carry law that allows public handling of firearms.

Bolds are mine.

This phenomenon isn't limited to just guns, but it's pretty common there.  In this case the police didn't act as rapidly as would have been the case if open-carry had been illegal*.  Whether some of the victims might have been saved under that scenario is unclear.  But worth thinking about.



2.  A new study looks at the death rates among Americans between ages 45 and 54.  It argues that something troubling is taking place among poorer white non-Hispanic Americans in that age group:

The recent divergence in death rates between the United States and other rich countries is striking. Between 1979 and 1999, Case and Deaton show, mortality for white Americans ages 45 to 54 had declined at nearly 2 percent per year. That was about the same as the average rate of decline in mortality for all people the same age in such countries as France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Sweden. (See figure below.) After 1999, the 2 percent annual decline continued in other industrialized countries and for Hispanics in the United States, but the death rate for middle-aged white non-Hispanic Americans turned around and began rising half a percent a year.

The authors, Anne Case and Angus Deaton, note that white Americans still have a higher life expectancy than black Americans, but the difference between black and white mortality rates (as a ratio where 1 would stand for equal rates) has shrunk from 2.09 in 1999 to 1.40 in 2013.

What's driving these results?  Most of the increase in white non-Hispanic mortality rates in this age group is caused by rising death rates among those with the lowest education levels (and probably therefore the lowest incomes).  And the reasons look to me linked to self-harm:

This increase for whites was largely accounted for by increasing death rates from drug and alcohol poisonings, suicide, and chronic liver diseases and cirrhosis.

I've only skimmed through the study so far, but it's worth pointing out that the various explanations Case and Deaton offer are speculative ones, i.e., not something one could directly deduce from the statistics they report.  This doesn't mean that their proposed explanations wouldn't be the correct ones, of course.** But the data is silent about what's causing these changes. 

Case and Deaton didn't find this pattern among older Americans, who are still all enjoying declining mortality rates (as are blacks and Hispanics in the studied age range).  It would have been interesting to see if the pattern would be visible among Americans younger than the 45-54 age group the study analyzed.

I need to spend more time thinking about that study.  The changes look very recent and pretty drastic, and it's hard not think that they have something to do with the economic despair*** of the least educated middle-aged non-Hispanic whites.  But why wouldn't the same economic despair affect the poor non-Hispanic blacks and Hispanics in that age group in a similar manner?

-------
Edited later to fix a typo and to add the first footnote.  For the sake of clarity.  I was half-asleep because of fatigue when I wrote the original draft.

*  What I mean when I say that this phenomenon is not limited only to guns is this:  The cues the police uses to judge whether a crime might be taking place are different when the cue behavior itself is illegal than when it is made legal.  In the latter case the old cue is no longer workable.  For a non-gun example, think of masked people entering a bank.  That might cause the bank staff to press the alarm button or call the police.  But if being masked is completely legal they cannot do that or at least get help as fast should a bank robbery indeed be in progress.

** Earlier studies have also found an increase in the mortality rates among poorer white men and especially among poorer white women, so it's clear that something is happening among the poorest non-Hispanic whites which requires attention and analysis not only from economists but also from health care researchers.  But what the specific chains of cause-and-effect might be still remains to be researched.

***Caused by the collapse of the housing markets, the most recent recession, the disappearance of better-paying jobs for those with at most a high-school diploma, the way we are being talked to slowly accept no long-term retirement security and so on. 


 

Short Posts, 2/11/15. On Diplomacy And Human Rights, A God In Your Corner and Gendered Work

1.  "Diplomacy" is like sausage-making.  You don't really want to delve too deep into the process.  An example from today's Eschaton post:

President Karimov is not a man with a big, warm heart.  His human rights record is abominable.

Of course human rights in global politics are mostly used like lipstick on a pig:  as an excuse for something else a country wishes to do that's about money and power.

Hmm.  Why are all my nasty metaphors about pigs?  They are smart animals, probably with good ethics, too.  My apologies for that, dear pigs.

2.  Deus ex machina in action:  

Former House Speaker John Boehner says he used "Catholic guilt" to persuade Paul Ryan to run for speaker.

On CNN's "State of the Union" Sunday Boehner said he invoked God to persuade his fellow Catholic from refusing to run for speaker to agreeing to do so.
Boehner says he told Ryan: "'This isn't about what you want to do. It's about what God wants you to do. And God has told me, he wants you to" run for speaker.

I used the "ex machina" term somewhat differently from its usual definition.  That's because it's so very often used to strangle all criticism, to turn the person interpreting god into some god's henchman (or more rarely his henchwoman, given how little power religions give women to have that cellphone connection to the divine powers).  This troubles me a lot, because it makes debate impossible.

Debate becomes a boxing match where in one corner stands a tiny human, in the other corner all the contradictory and sometimes violent commands some religion has collected, gathered, translated and interpreted over millennia. 

In other words, a god, as brought to you by whatever religion we are talking about, and somewhere inside all that religious information there might just be found a command to squash that tiny human who has dared to raise his or her voice (or dared to use that intelligence which presumably the divine powers donated us).

So no, you can't box with gods.  Unless you are a snake goddess or something similar.  And divine powers really don't care who wins a sporting contest, despite all the athletes who thank god after their victories.  Just a general public information statement.

3.  A recent Finnish dissertation argues that we see work as gendered in ways which affect public policies (link in Finnish, sorry). 

For instance, putting money into male-dominated* industries is viewed as good for the economy (think of fixing roads and bridges or giving subsidies to heavy industry or mining), whereas female-dominated* industries (childcare, teaching, nursing) are seen as expense items, something to cut back when times are harder.  Like the extra parsley sprig on the sandwich. Nice if you can afford it but not necessary.

Of course many of the female-dominated industries are in the public sector or at least largely funded through taxes, and that could explain part of the differences in attitudes.  But it's still true that hiring more teachers or nurses during recessions would raise their taxable income and thus government tax revenues just as well as hiring more road workers or bridge builders would.

So I think there's more to this kind of thinking (which I saw in action during the last US recession; lots of talk about roads and bridges). 

Another reason could be in our tendency to "see" more clearly the concrete products of work rather than the impact of services. 

But it may also be the case that traditional gender roles would make it easier not to notice that caring for children or the sick or the elderly is productive work and deserves payment, because traditionally most of it was done by women outside the formal labor markets.

The author of the dissertation also notes that these tendencies (and the lack of good measures for the outputs of female-dominated industries) could cause pressure for the return of more traditional gender roles if recessions raise labor demand for men but lower it for women. The breadwinner is, after all, most likely to be the spouse who has the highest salary.

----
*These terms refer to the numbers of workers in the industry.  If the majority of them are men, for example, then the industry is male-dominated.

On Ivy And Other Pests

The previous post shouldn't have been published because it doesn't say anything useful.  But the work I was doing on it had sent long strands into my mind with all sort of auxiliary roots, and I couldn't pull it out without posting. Well, not without going "ouch."  Like brain ivy.

About ten years ago I bought a lovely little tray of ivy babies.  They were shyly lifting their charming leaves towards me at the nursery, wanting to be adopted, wanting a good home.  And I obliged.  

That's because I had read in a gardening book (one of those highbrow artistic ones) that the ivy would provide a lovely cover for the very ugly fence that came with Snakepit Inc.  Wasn't I clever?

Now fast-forward to the time a few months ago.  See the ivy-covered fence?  See how it groans under the ivy?  And yes, those tall vertical green things are trees.  In fact, all that green is ivy.  The green spilling into the neighbors' lots, that's ivy, too.  And the green thing that looks like a leaning bicycle, that is ivy, too.  Oh, and a bicycle.  Under the ivy is a bicycle.  I must have left it out for a week or so... 

It's not that I haven't fought the ivy over the years, because I have.  But the fight is unfair.  I have two hands (sorta), while the monster has as many roots as it cares to throw out.

OK.  That was making excuses.  You might be glad to hear that the ivy is now gone.  It took a lot of people, gadgets, tools and time though no herbicides.  I will still need to police it for probably another hundred years, because stuff is simmering underground.  But right now things look tidy, and I even found several large sacks of organic fertilizer, a watering can and other sundry items.

Ivy is a useful metaphor* for many things on the Internet, in politics (mind those cute-looking baby politicians, don't take them home) and inside my head.

The lessons I've learned from ivy are many, including the need for objective research before one goes wild over anything, the desire to make those who write about the ease of ivy in the garden to come and stand in my garden for a day (to enjoy a slow strangulation death), the fact that something which looks good, thrives well and doesn't get sick probably will take over the world, and the fact that all things might be acceptable in their proper environment but thugs when let loose outside it.
----
*Especially in the way the roots of stuff are so often all over the place, hard to find, hard to eradicate and in how an innocent little theory, apt for its initial use, spreads into this monster which threatens to take over the universe.  But also how research into a topic tends to follow leads which branch all over the place, with tiny extra roots in fertile soils.

Where Echidne Complains About Blogging. Or Researching the Ben Fields Case.

I've been researching the Ben Fields case.  Others have talked about the way black students may be punished more harshly at school than white students (other things being equal*), about the apparent aggressive past  of deputy Ben Fields, about the pedagogical choices available and not available to the teachers in this case and, obviously, about the out-of-proportion violence Fields used against a teenage girl.  Some have also argued that the girl should take some responsibility for her own behavior (refusing repeated orders or requests by teachers and an administrator).

But then, of course, she is sixteen and Ben Fields is an adult.  And yesterday I read in the New York Daily News that the girl had recently lost her mother and is now in foster care.  Something like that could explain aggressive behavior at school, so it is relevant.

Today, however, the reference to the girl's mother's death has been removed from the New York Daily News story.  It seems, based on other sources, that it was the girl's lawyer who gave conflicting accounts.  The New York Daily News now says that the girl lives in a foster home, but this source notes that it isn't clear if this is the case.  But her mother and grandmother are both alive, in contradiction to earlier news.

None of this matters anywhere as much as tossing a teenage girl on the floor and letting her then slide across the room.  Still, I wish journalists took enough time not to disseminate inaccurate information just because of the 24/7 news cycle.

More seriously, I also wish that this country could have a real conversation about what good teaching requires in resources, how we should put more resources into schools which cater for more troubled children and how we should avoid turning everything into a police state.

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*See here  for a reference to a study where the authors state that it controls for the actions of the students.

An Oldie: My Statistics Series

Came across it while searching for something else.  I wrote it nine years ago for the single purpose of helping people to understand opinion polls and some research findings. 

It's not bad (though very limited, like visiting NYC for a week and then making deductions about the US), so you might want to look at it if you need help with means, medians and margins of error.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6

That series also demonstrates a common problem with my writing:  I get tired towards the end.  I should have added a long example with careful explanations.  But I just went on to something more interesting...

Still, it's one opening to the wonderful land of statistics.

From My Can't-Believe-This-Is-True Archives: Harassment in Gaming, Killing Planned Parenthood and Other Issues

1.  The South by Southwest convention cancels a planned panel on harassment in games ("Level Up: Overcoming Harassment in Games") because of threats of violence at the event. 

The ethics of that decision are weird.

Did the organizers think:  We can't talk about this problem because of the problem itself?  Or:  If you threaten us we shall cave in, to maintain apparent peace, at whatever hidden cost to those who are commonly harassed in games?  Or even:   Our real audience didn't like that panel so we canceled it?

You figure that one out, always remembering that we were told  the infamous Gamergate wasn't at all about misogyny but about ethics in game journalism.

2.  It's the legal hunting season for Planned Parenthood by all forced-birthers who wish to take it down.

Texas looks for ways to deny women on Medicaid access to Planned Parenthood clinics, including the ones who don't perform abortions, stating that there are lots and lots of alternative sources of gynecological care for poor women in Texas.

And the next select committee will be on Planned Parenthood.  That's like the replacement for the Benghazi committee!  A war-on-slutty-women committee.  Those are needed to toss fresh meat into the cages in which the Republican Party keeps the forced-birthers.  The political costs of doing so are very low for that party.  That the costs might be very high for poor women who have no real alternative sources for gynecological care matters not at all.

3.  A list-post like this should have at least three things.  Otherwise it looks like a twins post.  But I have too many candidates for the third item, yet none of them is quite correct in the level or type of its irrationality.

For instance, comparing these two sentences given to two individuals in two different states for roughly the same type of crime (rape) could lead one to that scratch-your-head-until-bald-if-not-yet land.  But the situations require a more mature discussion than this post allows, and not only because the cases are not in the same state.

Or take the funny joke Maine's Republican governor Paul LePage blurted out about us wimminfolk not being able to do anything but spend the money of their hard-working husbands, and then put that together with the information that it's governor LePage's wife, Ann LePage, who takes care of his family accounts.

Those kinds of jokes are a dime a dozen (with a few freebies thrown in), and the paradox in them isn't even worth mentioning.  Likewise, the belief that women are terrible drivers thrives even when insurance statistics tend to show the reverse.

That stuff is in the air, my sweetings.

The Benghazi Hearings. Popcorn Time.

I was feeling cruddy yesterday so spent the day in bed watching the hearings until I fell asleep (for sixteen hours and now I'm bright-eyed and bushy-tailed again!).

It was better than a horror movie!  Great fun, indeed.  All Republicans put on their vampire masks and went at Hillary Clinton, all Democrats put on their Superman outfits and defended her.  The contents of the debate, however, were really really stupid crap.

And I'm not saying that because of partisanship.  I very much wanted to understand the complaint the Republicans had.  But it kept shifting, from this person Sidney Blumenthal, to e-mails, to this person Sidney Blumenthal, to absence of e-mails and so on.  Even many conservatives found the questions in the hearings embarrassing.

I missed the last few hours of the hearings (having a Viking-dream instead), so what I leave you with was one round of questioning by Congressman Peter Roskam (R-Illinois):

Representative Peter Roskam, Republican of Illinois, accused Hillary Rodham Clinton of using Libya as an opportunity to burnish her credentials as secretary of state and establish a “Clinton Doctrine.”
In a fiery exchange, Mr. Roskam read a series of emails between Mrs. Clinton and her staff members that he said showed how they were trying to shape the narrative surrounding America’s Libya policy and present Mrs. Clinton in a positive light.
“You were thinking about credit for you, isn’t that right?” said Mr. Roskam, before reading a message from her confidant, Sidney Blumenthal, in which he said that she needed to become the public face of Libya’s political transition.
Mrs. Clinton said that she was proud of the role she had, but that ultimately President Obama made the final decision on Libya. She said it was not unusual for someone in her position to explain foreign policy to the public.
Mr. Roskam disagreed, saying that Mrs. Clinton was being self-serving.
“Let me tell you what I think the Clinton Doctrine is,” he said. “I think it’s where an opportunity is seized to turn progress in Libya into a political win for Hillary Rodham Clinton.”

That part remains etched in my mind because of the viciousness of Mr. Roskam, not because of the obvious question of what all that has to do with whatever the hearings were supposed to be about.  Roskam's voice grated with red-hot hatred, his tone was "J'accuse,"  and his eyes burned with red fire.

It was sooooo good!

Or would have been very good if all this had taken place in Terry Pratchett's fantasy world, Diskworld.  But when it takes place in the country which still is the most powerful in the world, well, you need lots and lots of popcorn to quiet your nervous stomach.

Should Feminism Care About Hillary Clinton Or Other Powerful Women?

Should feminism be at all concerned about rich, white (in the US), educated and relatively powerful women and their problems?   Aren't those women already on the top rungs of the societal power ladders?  Didn't the second wave of feminism mainly benefit them, perhaps at the expense of working class women and women of color ( in the US black women)?  And doesn't all this mean that feminists might spend their effort better than by defending, say, Hillary Clinton when she runs for the US presidency?   After all, she is a woman of privilege.

That paragraph is my attempt to summarize (with a squirt of apple cider vinegar) some of the arguments presented in this National Journal article, about why young feminists might feel ambivalent about Clinton's running or about any powerful women out there (at least white powerful women in the US).  Examples from the article:

Fem­in­ism came to mean something very dif­fer­ent from girl power. And Hil­lary Clin­ton came to look like the sym­bol of an older gen­er­a­tion of wo­men more con­cerned with fe­male em­power­ment—in par­tic­u­lar, with white, middle-class, Amer­ic­an fe­male em­power­ment—than with broad­er is­sues of so­cial and eco­nom­ic justice.

….

To young wo­men like Sylvie Ed­man, a 20-year-old stu­dent at the Uni­versity of Mas­sachu­setts, Am­h­erst, Clin­ton em­bod­ies “cor­por­ate fem­in­ism,” which Ed­man defines con­cisely: “It’s em­power­ing wo­men who are already power­ful.” Clin­ton and Sheryl Sand­berg, the Face­book COO and au­thor of Lean In, are of­ten name-dropped in this con­text; while they ex­per­i­ence sex­ism, the think­ing goes, they’ve been able to dare greatly be­cause of their race and class—while be­ing helped along the way by work­ing-class wo­men and wo­men of col­or who didn’t have the same op­por­tun­it­ies.

——

Aye­sha Sid­diqi, the 24-year-old ed­it­or-in-chief of the on­line magazine The New In­quiry, says that this range of con­cerns should be no sur­prise. “Fem­in­ist is­sues,” she says, “are no more com­plic­ated than the is­sues of people’s lives.” But that philo­sophy makes young wo­men’s views of Clin­ton—and her cam­paign’s ef­forts to gal­van­ize them be­hind her—very com­plic­ated in­deed.

The issues I'm grappling in this post are complicated.  They begin with the question what feminism is.  

Is it an activist movement, focusing on social justice,  which needs to define whom it is trying to help first, in order to best use the limited (very limited) resources of money and time the movement has?

Or is it a theoretical way of analyzing the world, taking apart power structures and then putting them back together, using history, psychology, sociology, political science and plain hard thinking to understand how being defined as a woman or a man affects our lives, paying attention to how class, race, age and other characteristics influence those effects?

Or is it both?   Or even an overall ideology, a large box into which someone puts all the concerns about justice and how societies should be organized?  Almost like a religion?

And what about the idea that feminism should be concerned with all oppressed groups, in the way one young woman defines it in the linked article:

The 17-year-old Viqueira and her high school friend stood off to the side in a small lounge, look­ing like they were dressed for a reg­u­lar day of school. They’d taken the train in from Maple­wood, New Jer­sey. “To me, fem­in­ism isn’t only about want­ing equal­ity for all genders,” Viqueira told me later, “but want­ing and ad­voc­at­ing for the equal­ity of all op­pressed groups, which can and do in­ter­sect.”

What happens if some of those oppressed groups really really want to oppress some of the other oppressed groups?  Which oppressed group would then be prioritized?  What is the role of being viewed as a woman in this kind of feminism?

The background to all these questions are the theories of intersectionality on one hand and of kyriarchy on the other.

The Market Gods In Education

This post on Eschaton  made me think of the way the market gods are usually worshipped*  among conservatives, except when it comes to education.  There the conservatives look at the  situation cross-eyed, arguing BOTH that the markets should provide the remedy** AND that it's fine to cut teachers' retirement benefits and pay and to demonize teachers with no effect at all on how many people want to become teachers or what the quality of their preparation might be.

But anyone who has taken even one economics course (the most dangerous amount to take, by the way, is one course) knows that if you lower the monetary benefits of a job and also make it psychologically less appealing you are going to get a drop in the numbers of people who want to do it.  That's where we seem to be heading right now.

The expected market response to a drop in the supply of teachers would be a rise in average salaries.  The snag in education markets is that the demand side (those who hire teachers) tends to consist of various public sectors, and when the politicians in power (Republicans, say) refuse to pay teachers enough all sorts of alternative tricks are attempted.  Those includes outsourcing most everything.  Somehow that's supposed to work like a magic pill, creating schools where students are well taught by minimum wage teachers.

To properly write about the markets for education takes more space and time than one post can command.  But as a very short summary, the characteristic of basic education itself*** make it a poor candidate for unregulated private markets and also explain why education is frequently provided in not-for-profit settings.  At the same time, those who plan to work in the field do respond to market initiatives: pay, benefits, hours, reputation etc.

There is no miracle pill which could be force-fed to schools which are in trouble.  Those schools, the ones serving unprivileged children with many problems, need much more resources and attention than other schools.  Indeed, a logical system would pay the teachers in at-risk schools a lot more than the average teacher pay.  -------
*I want to write it with two ps, because it sounds more like adulation that way.

** The remedies, such as charter schools etc., have serious problems when cream-skimming (picking the students most likely to succeed) is a real possibility and when the more expensive students (those with more trouble) can always be returned to the public schools which must accept them. Voucher proposals assume that all parents have the same geographical access to the same spread of school quality.  It also assumes that parents can judge how good the schools are.  Finally, the voucher programs can also suffer from the cream-skimming problem and from the difficulty public schools have in not being able to refuse certain students.

***Some aspects of education which make markets less able to produce good results (especially without that not-for-profit status and government regulation etc.):
-  Many of the benefits from basic education fall not on the students and their families but on the overall society.  That part has a public good aspect, and private markets tend to under-produce those types of benefits.
-  The final quality of education, the "product," if you like, is created in cooperation between the students and the system teaching them.

Because of the intimate involvement of what we'd call "the customers" in the production process of education, it matters that children enter the system with very different preparations, family backgrounds, levels of deprivation and so on.

An apparently good education outcome could be caused by not good teaching but by hand-picking students who have few problems and are well prepared.  Likewise, an apparently poor education outcome could, in fact, disguise great teaching efforts, covered up by the very large prior deficiencies of the students.

These aspects make it hard to judge how good an education a particular institution gives.  To take an example from higher education, sure, Harvard University is a great place to get your degree.  But some part of its greatness surely comes from the way it picks its students.

- Finally, to measure and compare the outputs of educational institutions is very difficult.  That's because ideally we'd need some multi-dimensional indicator which could capture all the relevant before/after changes in a student.  We don't have such an indicator, and almost all the short-run proxy measures (eg. test scores) suffer from being very partial and from being rather easily influenced in ways which might not correlate with the real quality of education we wish to measure. 

Because it is hard to measure the output of education "firms," unscrupulous individuals could exploit that to short-term benefit by funneling money out of the schools or by using money in ways which don't help the actual quality of education.  That risk is somewhat greater in for-profit firms than in not-for-profit firms because the latter don't have shareholders as such.

Today's Recipe

Make a risotto.  Use real Arborio rice.  While you are busy using two hands adding the boiling water and stirring vigorously, use your third hand to clean some mushrooms with a darker-color hat, chop them up and fry them in some olive oil with chopped garlic (need a fourth hand here), rosemary, sage, thyme and ground black pepper. Deglaze the mushroom mess with a tiny amount of port.  This is very important.

You need a few more hands but figure that one out yourself.

Combine the two.  Add some grated Parmesan cheese and if you have it (I was given a bottle), drizzle a tiny amount of truffle oil on your plate.

To die for, it was.  And you can skip the part of the salad-making where I grated some finger in the carrots.  It's high in iron so that was okay and adds a nice color.

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I'm sure this recipe already existed but I didn't know about it.  Well, I knew about the finger-grating, because I have done that before.  Next time I make this one I will organize the mushroom stage to happen before the risotto dance stage.

Housekeeping...

Sometimes it's very hard to write anything at all.  Sometimes life intervenes, kicking the carefully-ordered piles of plans onto the floor. 

Sometimes Brother Death comes calling and gathers someone close into his dark arms,  sometimes Sister Sickness visits (and visits and visits) someone close, demanding more and more cups of tea and nursing help, and sometimes that crazy great-uncle in the attic, The-End-Of-The-World-As-We-Know-It starts hammering the ceiling with his cane.  And sometimes all those things happen at the same time.

Then it's hard to write.

Four Observations on the First Democratic Primary Debate

The first Democratic party presidential debate was last night.  I watched it and all. 

First observation:  The debaters all acted like adults!  That's refreshing, given that they are competing for the chance to steer the largest bus on earth either straight into the abyss or away from it.  Not all such debates have been between adults.

Second observation:  The way the "judges" rate these debates is very much like looking at a horse's teeth before buying it, to judge its real age. 

Only the way Anderson Cooper managed that was by thinking of the nastiest possible questions and then seeing how the candidate would cope with the situation. 

That those nastiest questions came straight from the Republican playbook may be just a coincidence (and I might be Marie of Rumania), but the fact is that I learned more about Benghazi and Hillary Clinton's e-mail scandal than I ever really wanted to know.  I also learned that Bernie Sanders is a socialist (gasp!), except that he's not the kind of socialist the insinuation meant.  He's more like Norway/Denmark/Sweden type of red-hot commie.

Third observation:  It's pointless to ask anyone the Syria question.  There is nothing that anyone can profitably say about the situation there.  Should we arm a dictator who slaughters his own people?  Or should we arm some "moderate" Islamist group which would act just like ISIS if they were in power?  Or perhaps the guns should be scattered around like candy for the kids? (Or how about the inane proposal of arming the Kurds but in an apolitical way???  Except that the Kurds only want to fight for the Kurds (against Turkey and currently against ISIS), not clean up Syria and Iraq.  That wasn't in the debate but demonstrates the impossibility of doing anything non-sectarian and non-religious and less violent about the situation).

Fourth observation:  If you watched the debate with left-leaning friends or even checked what the Internet is saying you quickly found out that the candidate provoking by far the strongest negative feelings among progressives is Hillary Clinton, despite the fact that she is also the Democratic forerunner.

The reasons for that are complicated and would take a book to analyze, ranging from her long presence in American politics, the fact that she used to be the First Lady, the nepotism question in US politics (the Bushes vs. the Clintons), her past mistakes, the fact that the press never liked the Clintons, and then also the fact that what's inside her underwear looks different from what we are used to assume politicians carry there. 

Rebecca Traister wrote about some of those issues in Elle magazine, and an earlier article by Molly Mirhashem discussed the complicated questions of identity among young feminists and how those made them less eager to support Clinton's campaign.

So it's not just the progressive bros who might have trouble with Hillary Clinton, given that she is white and wealthy and privileged.  But then, of course are all the four men who shared that stage with her last night.

I have much more to say on that fourth observation in the near future.

Today's Hilarious Political Utterances: Charles Koch, Ben Carson and Timothy Egan

A little bit of laughter, however sarcastic, keeps a goddess in top form.  And I'm sure it works for you, too.

1.  Let's begin with Charles Koch.  The defining characteristic of Mr. Koch is that he is Very Rich.  The other defining characteristic of Mr. Koch is that he uses his enormous wealth to influence the US politics, naturally in the direction which works best for Mr. Koch.

So what did Mr. Koch say in a recent interview?  This:

Mason asked, "Do you think it's good for the political system that so much what's called 'dark money' is flowing into the process now?"
"First of all, what I give isn't dark," said Koch. "What I give politically, that's all reported. It's either to PACs or to candidates. And what I give to my foundations is all public information. But a lot of our donors don't want to take the kind of abuse that I do. They don't want these attacks. They don't want the death threats. So they aren't going to participate if they have to have their names associated with it."
"But do you think it's healthy for the system that so much money is coming out of a relatively small group of people?"
"Listen, if I didn't think it was healthy or fair, I wouldn't do it. Because what we're after, is to fight against special interests."
"Some people would look at you and say you're a special interest."
"Yeah, but my interest is, just as it's been in business, is what will help people improve their lives, and to get rid of these special interests. That's the whole thing that drives me."
"There are people out there who think what you're trying to do is essentially buy power."
"But what I want is a system where there isn't as much centralized power, where it's dispersed to the people. And everything I advocate points in that direction."

Now unscrew your eyes, rinse them, and put them back in the normal way.  Then remember that Mr. Koch, together with his brother, has spent a lot of money opposing efforts to combat global climate change and efforts to get Americans health insurance.  Because people who will die when the earth finally boils over are special interest people!  Well, at least they won't get health care during that final struggle if our Charles has his way.