Echidne Thoughts, 23 March 2016: On Terrorism, Group Guilt and Tosca Cakes

I have finally beaten the stomach flu which was especially bad because I had gastritis at the same time.  Let's hope that my writing is now clearer.

1.  The recent terrorist bombings, the last one in Brussels, are always an abundant source for despair about the human race.  I wish recovery for the wounded and peace to those who lost someone their lives meshed with in love and meaning.

The reactions to the events on the Internet are predictable.  Not much focus on the victims as real people, except for the obligatory nod from the politicians, and most political activists I read on Twitter and on political blogs  instantly started working to accommodate these events into the ready-made explanatory diagrams, the ones they already had, the ones which argue that the cause is either evil Islam or evil United States and Western colonialism.

What strikes me about that false dualism is that is impermeable to all evidence which doesn't fit it, that it seems to be unable to accept both-and explanations and also unable to replace appealing simplifications by nuanced analysis.  And both sides remove all agency from the culprits.  They are mere puppets with strings held by either evil mullahs or evil Western capitalists.

2.  The previous thought links to this one:  Sexism and racism and homophobia and other similar concepts owe something to the idea of false generalizations, of picking one experience with a person from the disliked group and then generalizing from that experience to the group, or of picking the worst caricatures of the group and then using those as the proper way to define the group.

Thus, because one woman treated some man very badly, that man now goes around hating all women and taking his revenge on them.  Because in that misogynist's mind all women are like the one woman who hurt him and, therefore, all women are responsible for that hurt.

I now see similar generalizations about all sorts of larger groups tossed about as so much candy to the children.  All Muslims are responsible for the Brussels massacre!  All white people are responsible for Western colonialism!  All men are responsible for rape!

It's important to note that men, as a class, do have power to talk to individual men and make sure that the culture doesn't giggle at rape or accept the idea that rape is somehow manly.   Men, as a class, also benefit from sexism which cuts back on competition in the labor markets and education. 

It's also important to note that Muslims, as a religious group, do have power, and the responsibility,  to ask how their religious leaders work to stop terrorism as a potentially religiously accepted alternative.

And it's important to note that white people who live in those countries who carried out Western colonialism will have benefited from the fruits of that colonialism, if only very indirectly.  Likewise, the institutional structures in the US have benefited white citizens over black citizens during long stretches of its history, and those benefits matter.

But all that is very different from this common spreading of genetic or group guilt.  I get that it makes writing easier and stronger, but when something is incorrect it's just more strongly and more easily incorrect.  Besides, yelling at large groups about their perfidy is just the most perfect psychological way to start a fruitful conversation on important topics!

Not.

And no, it's not really an excuse that some of those groups have much more power than other groups, that it's OK to apply the same tools which are used in sexism and racism if only those tools are used upwards in the social hierarchies.  It doesn't make it right.  Because then the misogynists on their sites will use that argument to bash women.  After all, they think women run the world so they have the right to bash upwards.

What is the solution to this problem?  Be precise.  If a particular person says something vile and disgusting, attribute it to that person, don't attribute it to all people who wear eyeglasses with similar shapes.  Assign guilt to decision-makers who make vile decisions, preachers who preach disgusting messages and those who pay for that preaching with the goal of getting those messages out.  Avoid over-generalizations about individuals.  That does not, however, mean that we shouldn't criticize ideas.  They don't have that kind of human rights protection.

3.  A recipe.  I add that because the whole post is so very miserable!
This is a recipe from my childhood.  It's really scrumptious, but you have to make sure there is not too much cake compared to the icing, so keep the cake surface low.  If you are like me (greedy) you might want to use less cake and more icing than this official recipe tells you.

Tosca Cakes

For the cake, buy:

150 grams of butter
150 grams (1.75 dls) sugar
2 eggs
200 grams (3 dls) flour
1.5 teaspoons of baking powder
0.5 dls milk

Beat the egg and the sugar until foamy.  Add eggs (shelled!), one by one, while beating.  Mix baking powder with flour in a separate container.  Add some milk to the butter-sugar-egg mixture, then some of the flour, and so on, until all is combined.  Mix until smooth.

Prepare a large oven tin.  Line it with baking paper and heat the oven to 200 centigrades.  Pour the batter into the tin.  Bake for 15-20 minutes.  Then add the icing (from below), return the tin to the oven and bake for a further 15-20 minutes.

Let cool to room temperature, then cut the cake into suitable one-person-sized pieces.

For the icing, buy:

150 grams of butter
100 grams of flaked almonds
100 grams (1 dl) of sugar
6 tablespoons of whipping cream
3 tablespoons of flour

Mix all the icing ingredients in a pot capable of going on top of your stove/cooker.   Heat the ingredients together to the point where it is ready to boil but do not let it boil.
Then add to the cake as described above.  You spread the stuff out evenly over the half-baked cake.

If you can't find flaked almonds you could use a spice mill or a food processor to make a rough blend of almonds.  I've done that and it worked fine.

From The "How Religion Keeps Women Subjugated" Files

You could skip this post if you don't want to get angry or despondent.  I'd much rather not write these posts but Echidne, whose avatar I am, insists.  So there you are.

1.  The Nigerian Senate has rejected a gender equality law.  Because it is against religions:

Women's rights activists condemned the Nigerian Senate on Thursday for rejecting a gender and equality law that pledged to eliminate discrimination in politics, education and employment, protect women's land rights and tackle violence against women.
The Gender and Equal Opportunity Bill was thrown out on Tuesday after several lawmakers opposed it on religious grounds.
Some quoted the Bible while others said the bill defied sharia, which is recognized by the constitution in Nigeria - home to the world's largest equal mix of Christians and Muslims.
Activists said the dismissal of the bill demonstrated that the government was ignoring the dangers facing Nigerian women, ranging from sexual assault and abduction to forced marriages.

Bolds are mine.

(Isn't it wonderful that the all-powerful creator of everything wants women to have the same rights as toasters or bicycles?)

2.   In Pakistan, a powerful religious body which advises the government on the compatibility of its laws with Islam last week declared a new Punjab law criminalizing violence against women as "un-Islamic."  Koran verses were cited to support that argument.

(How does one debate a book written over a thousand years ago, when those who quote it reject the possibility that its ideas were based on the norms of that era and instead insist that it is presenting the eternal, never-changing rules of the divine power?)

3. In some countries, religious family advice television shows teach about the Proper Control And Feeding of the Woman:

One can watch hours and hours of these shows, at all times of day from morning to evening prime time. For years, religious clerics have been the primary source of information on marital relationships, and at the core of their teaching is men’s superiority to women. One of the most popular hosts, with millions of viewers, is Mohammad Al Arifi. He presides over a salon format, talking to young men about various issues. In one segment, he explains to men the rules for beating their wives. “Just like you don’t beat a donkey or a camel from its face if you want to steer it in a certain direction, you should not beat a woman from her face,” he said. “There are other areas of her body where you are allowed to beat her from, such as her arms or her legs or back where it does not show to the public.”

Bolds are mine.

(Why avoid showing the bruises to the public?  If beating your wife is just following religious rules, shouldn't those bruises be proudly flaunted?)

These examples are mostly about the use of anti-woman interpretations of Islam (literal readings of extremely old texts by men,  reflecting the opinions of men living in a very different culture and era). 

That's not because Islam would be the only religion capable of being used as a tool to keeping women subjugated.  The religious justifications of forced-birthers in the US and the effects of the Hobby Lobby Supreme Court case remind us of the real danger to American women should the right-wing reading of Christianity become even more politically powerful in this country than it already is.  In short, Islam is over-represented in these examples because anti-woman versions of Islamic interpretations are more politically powerful than anti-woman interpretations of Christianity and Judaism.

This suggests to me that those who work for women's right to be viewed as fully human beings should also work for anything that would raise the profile and power of more liberal and egalitarian versions of all religions.

Trying To Crack The Old Puzzle: Do Women "Choose" Low-Paid Jobs Or Do Jobs Become Low-Paid Because Women "Choose" Them?

Content Warning:  I'm still sick.  Hence the longer words and bad framing and all other things not utterly divine.




A new New York Times article looks at the  findings of several recent studies on this puzzle:

A new study from researchers at Cornell University found that the difference between the occupations and industries in which men and women work has recently become the single largest cause of the gender pay gap, accounting for more than half of it. In fact, another study shows, when women enter fields in greater numbers, pay declines — for the very same jobs that more men were doing before.
Consider the discrepancies in jobs requiring similar education and responsibility, or similar skills, but divided by gender. The median earnings of information technology managers (mostly men) are 27 percent higher than human resources managers (mostly women), according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. At the other end of the wage spectrum, janitors (usually men) earn 22 percent more than maids and housecleaners (usually women).

Bolds are mine.
 
Occupational segregation (1) by sex has long been known to be one important reason why women, on average, earn less than men, on average:  Because many more women than men work in low-pay industries and occupations.  Almost all predominantly female industries and occupations pay less than almost all predominantly male industries, and job titles traditionally associated with women's jobs (say, secretary) pay less than job titles traditionally associated with men's jobs (say, administrative vice president for office work) (2).

Now tease apart that giant knot!  How much of this is because of direct sex discrimination?  How much because of indirect sex discrimination:  The steering of girls into certain fields, the pressures put on boys and girls to have jobs compatible with traditional gender roles at home?  So that boys expect to have to earn more than half of the family's income one day, while girls expect to have to do the bulk of child-care one day?

Or, as the gender essentialists argue, do men just happen to like and thrive in jobs which pay well, whereas women just happen to like and thrive in jobs which do not?   Are men better at asking raises and competing?  Would the same strategies even work for women?

Individuals might steer themselves, too, while not even thinking about it that much.  Young heterosexual men with traditional values or expectations might expect to have to earn enough to provide the bulk of income support for a family one day, with some "junior partner" type financial support from the wife who will do the bulk of childcare and cleaning etc.   Young heterosexual women with traditional values or expectations might expect to need extra flexibility one day, to do the hands-on caring for those future children, and that could lead them into picking flexible careers, even if they are not that well paid (3).

I can make dozens of those kinds of mini-theories, in various directions, but they are not statistical evidence.

One promising way to start teasing the knot apart is by asking what happens when an occupation turns from predominantly male to predominantly female or vice versa.

Why?  Consider this:  Say that an occupation is currently predominantly male and pays pretty well.  Then lots of women enter it.  They can't have entered it because it's one of those flexible-but-low-pay jobs which fit well with parenting:  It isn't one at that point.

But it can become one, at least a less well-paid one, and it looks like the cause is the influx of more female workers (4).  The New York Times article quotes the authors of one study on what happens when women start entering an occupation in larger numbers:

A striking example is to be found in the field of recreation — working in parks or leading camps — which went from predominantly male to female from 1950 to 2000. Median hourly wages in this field declined 57 percentage points, accounting for the change in the value of the dollar, according to Professor Levanon. The job of ticket agent also went from mainly male to female during this period, and wages dropped 43 percentage points.
The same thing happened when women in large numbers became designers (wages fell 34 percentage points), housekeepers (wages fell 21 percentage points) and biologists (wages fell 18 percentage points). The reverse was true when a job attracted more men. Computer programming, for instance, used to be a relatively menial role done by women. But when male programmers began to outnumber female ones, the job began paying more and gained prestige.

It would be fascinating if someone created a very detailed study of the changes in just one occupation over time.  Maybe such a study exists, but I haven't come across one.  I'd like to know the exact point in the tipping process at which average earnings start to drop, I'd like to know the exact point when men start avoiding the field that is turning female-dominated, I'd like to know everything about technological change  in the field during the process.

I'd also love to understand why some occupations  don't seem to result in sex segregation, and how those differ from the ones that are prone to tipping (moving from male-dominated to female-dominated or vice versa).

I hope this isn't quite the mess it looks to me.  To return to the title of the post: It was a sneaky one, because I forced you into accepting a false either-or set of choices.  Both could of course be true at the same time.  But if the New York Times summary of the studies is correct, we should seriously address why jobs become lower-paid when more women enter them (5).

------

(1)  Occupational segregation by sex refers to the simple fact that some industries or occupations have mainly male workers, some industries or occupations have mainly female workers.  It says nothing about the reasons why the industries got that way, it says nothing about how voluntary or involuntary those gendered choices are and it says nothing about the reasons why female-dominated jobs pay less.  All that is a separate question.

(2)  I made up that second job title, but you get the point.  Which is that it's possible to pay someone less by just changing labels. 

(3)  The less-well-paid female dominated jobs are not necessarily more flexible or more compatible with major responsibilities for child-care; an important point which is often ignored by those who argue that women "choose" lower paying occupations for their greater flexibility.  Hospital nursing is not very flexible and neither are female dominated factory or sales jobs.  Teaching is the one exception to that rule.  It's also worth noting that studies suggest men are paid more, on average, even in female-dominated fields and women paid less, on average, even in male-dominated fields.

(4)  Or reverse the same example for an occupation that rapidly goes from at least mixed if not predominantly female to male.  The initial reason for the larger numbers of men entering the field cannot be higher earnings in that occupation in general, if the underlying theory is to hold.

(5)   The quotes around the verb to choose are explained in this post.

I'm too weak and feeble to read through the studies right now.  Want to do it for me? 

Primary Thoughts: Violence And Sexism

Contents Warning:  I'm unwell, feverish and possibly hallucinating.  Read at your own risk.

A couple of off-the-hip (Echidne pulls her guns out) comments on recent events in the US primaries, known now as the Clown Games by most of the sane world*.

First, the Donald.  Donald Trump has lived a protected life, a sheltered life, a life where what he does wrong has no real consequences.  But in the real life, the unprotected kind, bad deeds have consequences, some deserved, some undeserved but nevertheless consequences, too.  And now Donald, at the ripe age of almost-seventy, must learn about those consequences.

Because he had rich and powerful parents he never had to learn the first and basic test we all have to pass as children:  How to play well with others.  Because he got a pass on that, we now have the mature Donald, an arrogant, empty-headed believer in his own godlike status (and no, I didn't come to goddess-status that same way),  a man who believes he can say whatever he wants and that's the end of the story.  His henchmen and henchwomen have not fought back, because he fires (or divorces) the ones who do.  But nobody can control masses of people or public opinion that way.

One of those other life tests many of us have to take at some time teaches us that public statements matter. 

It matters if you tell your acolytes that you would like to punch the protesters in the face.  It matters if you call Latino immigrants rapists, especially without proof that rape rates by Latinos actually were much higher.  It matters if you propose barring all Muslims from entering the United States simply on the basis of faith, not actual plans of terrorism.  It matters if you send tweets like this:

It even matters if you turn the Republican presidential primaries into slug-fests, and that's because you are moving the goalposts on what is acceptable behavior in the public sphere.

Indeed, everything Trump has done has that very effect.  It is true that he is not out there punching protesters or getting punched by them, but he opened the floodgates.  And what flows through them has his name on it, whether he is legally culpable or not.**

Our social contract is a fragile web.  One arrogant rich guy has stuck his stubby fingers through it, and see what happens.

Second, the Hillary.  I saw this bumper sticker over the weekend, slapped on the butt of a plumbing van, next to some-naked-women picture:

My job, as I see it, is to point out sexism in these primaries.  I haven't been vigilant enough on that, partly because I'm sick and partly because the sample size of very powerful women in American politics is exactly one, and samples of size one are not good material for drawing conclusions about the population of all women***. 

But I'm pretty sure that whoever chose that bumper sticker would also have an "anyone but (Elizabeth) Warren" sticker if Warren was running.  The generalized anger at Hillary Clinton serves to let the misogynists join in without being called misogynists. 

Now, how much of that generalized anger**** at Hillary Clinton might be linked to our ideas about how good women act (they are not ambitious) is impossible to determine, and that is because of that sample size of one:  We have one powerful woman in the politics of a giant country.  

And that should cause some concern among feminists, at least.

This take on how critics view Hillary Clinton's use of voice shows another small brick in the way sexism, whether overt or covert, builds walls against women in politics.  Some people notice problems in women's speech when similar problems in men's speech go unnoticed.  Honestly, I had to listen to George W. Bush for eight years and never saw a piece about his talking through the nose.

-----

*  Which probably consists of my readers and a few other isolated individuals.

**  I am not taking away the agency of all those who are doing the menacing or the fighting.  They are naturally the ones directly responsible.  And as an aside, what I saw in videos suggests to me that the perpetrators are mostly if not totally men.

***  Another giant problem women's rarity in politics causes is that Hillary Clinton can now be treated as an avatar for "all women in power" or as a harbinger of the "petticoat rule."  This happens to some extent on both sides.  Misogynists hate her because she is a woman, many women identify with her because they have been treated in similar fashion.  The solution is naturally to have many more women in politics.

****  I get that primaries are heated, that it's perfectly acceptable to dislike Hillary Clinton's past politics or the policies she may have supported and I also get that it can be a rational choice to be opposed to her. 

This post is not about the Democratic primary of 2016.  It is about spotting sexism in that primary, and from that angle I'd argue that those whose hatred is most visceral might not feel the same gut-twisting hatred against an otherwise identical male politician.  And I'd call "anybody but Hillary" pretty visceral.

Friday Cats

Posting cat pictures on Fridays is an old Internet tradition on political blogs. 

Now spend some time thinking about the above sentence!  Humans are very very weird. 

Here are today's cats:

International Women's Day 2016

Happy International Women's Day!  I want all of you to have chocolate in its honor or whatever best fuels your engines, because a fairer world is ultimately better for everybody.

These types of "celebratory" days are funny.  Take Mothers' Day.  It was created as a political day, but fairly soon was emasculated (!!!) or tamed and turned into a celebration of the myth of motherhood and of traditional division of gender in child-rearing.

This is happening to the International Women's Day, too.  In some countries women now get flowers or chocolate on that day!  Like the Secretaries' Day.  And some stupid bloggers start their posts on that day by wishing their readers "Happy International Women's Day!"

But the day was originally meant to highlight all the different ways the world treats women and girls badly, just because they are women and girls.*

And that should still be its purpose:  to increase awareness of what still needs to be changed so that no family will sit silent and bitter after hearing that the new baby just born into it is a girl, so that no little girl is married off before she even menstruates because that's the best alternative in how to manage these unwanted types of children in the striving for a son*,  so that women are not put into boxes of social norms and rules so small that they cannot breathe, so that religions and customs are not allowed to treat women as utensils (forks, knives, spoons), of value only in how they can be used and manipulated by others.

So what are the news I should cover on this day?  There are many important topics:  The child brides of Africa, the treatment (and relative scarcity) of women among the refugees flowing to Europe, the American struggle to maintain reproductive choice in the face of Republican opposition, the ubiquity of sexual violence in many countries and so on.

But rather than address any of those (time and space are limited), I wish to offer you one single example, a very minor one, but one which for me crystallizes both the underlying nature of the struggle women face and the way that struggle is resisted and turned into something quite different.

It comes from Russia and has to do with the new Russian blasphemy law:

Viktor Krasnov, who wrote, "There is no God," on the social network VKontakte in 2014, is on trial in Stavropol, in southern Russia. He is being prosecuted under a controversial 2013 law, known as Article 148, that criminalizes acts that insult people's religious feelings and beliefs, his lawyer, Andrei Sabinin, told Agence France-Presse. If convicted, he faces up to a year in prison or a fine of 300,000 rubles ($4,065).
...

Krasnov told Svoboda he posted his Internet comments after Dmitry Burnyashev and Alexander Kravtsov suggested that women were inferior to men at home. 

Burnyashev and Kravtsov later reported Krasnov to the police, saying he "insulted their religious feelings," according to Radio Free Europe. The online discussion still exists on VKontakte but Krasnov's comments have been deleted.

Bolds are mine.

It's worth noting that the 2013 blasphemy law:

...was introduced after female band Pussy Riot performed a "punk prayer" in the main Russian Orthodox church in Moscow, calling on the Virgin Mary to "drive Putin away," in February 2012.

This case reflects the authoritarian aspect of Putin's administration and the power of the Orthodox Church in Russia.  But on a deeper level it shows how religion is used to keep women oppressed.

------

* When I typed in these two sentences, the goddess stuck out her long fore-fingers and kept changing the "just" in the first sentence into lust, then must, then lust again.  Now let your inner Freudian out on that one!  Or on the fact that in the second sentence she insisted that "son" should be spelled as "sun!"

Trumpeting One's Own Horn. Where Echidne Explains US Republican Politics to An Alien.

As I mentioned below, it is tough to write about the US politics with sarcasm and irony, when politicians themselves go on dick measuring competitions in public debates.  After all, exaggeration is one of the tricks in the sarcasm-and-irony bag, and Donald Trump stole my thunder the other night when he assured the Murkan Peeple that he, indeed, is humongously endowed down there.

Imagine trying to explain what happened in that debate to an alien from outer space, one with great intelligence and understanding of interplanetary ethics differences, but who doesn't have much knowledge about our earthly cultures and customs.

It would go something like this.  Echidne The Professor in the process of explaining:

"Here is one representation of a male human naked.  What Trump talks about is the vertical tube between the legs of the statue, the bit that floats on top of the two spherical objects:

Mr. Trump wants to reassure his voters that his vertical tube is longer (and/or wider?) than some of his critics have argued*.  This makes him well qualified as a world leader."

The alien will then ask what the functions of that tube are:  "Is it used to think deep thoughts?  Can it toss out radiation or shoot nuclear bombs?  Can it smite the enemies?"

I answer:  "No.  It is used by male humans to release liquid waste matter from the body after the liquids have gone through the digestive process which extracts what the body needs from them. The tube is also used as an insemination device in two-sex reproduction.  The male seed comes out of that tube and enters the female human's reproductive channel."

The alien will turn thoughtful, think for several minutes, sigh deeply (I assume oxygen-use by this alien).  Then it will ask: " Is the amount of liquid waste matter proportional to the size of the tube?  Is it a flammable, acid or otherwise noxious substance which can be sprayed on potential foes?  Of military use in that sense?"

My answer:  "As far as I know, the size of the tube has no correlation with the functions it has.  Small tubes and large tubes work with the same efficacy.  Possessors of large tubes do not produce more liquid waste matter or more semen."

The alien throws up what goes for its arms and shakes what can be assumed to be its head.  It asks why the size of the tube would matter at all, given that it doesn't appear to be functionally related to the job of running a powerful country.

Here Echidne gives a longer speech which is deleted here.  But the gist of it is that the length and/or girth comparisons of the tubes among male humans are linked to their competitive drive**, and that the tube, in its more stiffened form when ready for insemination,  is a synecdoche for the whole man.  The bigger the tube, the bigger the man.

But, the alien notes:  "Isn't there a female human running for the leadership of your country?  She lacks a tube.  How will she compete?"

And there you have it.




------
*  I'm told by reputable sources that he uses a wheelbarrow to trundle it around.  Were he to win the presidency, the wheelbarrow would have this insignia on it:

**  An example from another large country and its gung-ho leader.  Note the Moby Dick part:

How Do You Write Political Sarcasm When Reality Is Like This?

CNN, about Thursday's Republican presidential primary debate:

Donald Trump assured American voters Thursday night that despite what Marco Rubio had suggested, there was "no problem" with the size of his hands -- or anything else.

"Look at those hands, are they small hands?" the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination said, raising them for viewers to see. "And, he referred to my hands -- 'if they're small, something else must be small.' I guarantee you there's no problem. I guarantee."

If you are as innocent as I sometimes am, Trump is referring to a hypothetical correlation between the size of a man's hands and his penis.

Yes, he went there.

The Republican primary debate is now about the size of the candidates' penes (most likely the correct plural, not that any one candidate would have more than one of those).

What am I to write about this?  That should there be another debate all the candidates should whip theirs out because the voters need to know?

This Is Beautiful, Just Beautiful. On The Women Of The Supreme Court And Whole Woman’s Health v Hellerstedt

The US Supreme Court is currently hearing oral arguments about Whole Woman's Health v Hellerstedt, a Texas abortion case.  Dahlia Lithwick at Slate has written an excellent piece about those arguments and, in particular, the role of the three female Justices in interrogating the arguments.

This is a case where gender matters, where life experiences matter, where the personal indeed IS political and also vice versa.*

The Texas abortion case is actually two cases:

The case involves a crucial constitutional challenge to two provisions in Texas’ HB 2, the state’s omnibus abortion bill from 2013. The first requires doctors to obtain admitting privileges from a hospital 30 miles from the clinic where they perform abortions; the second requires abortion clinics to be elaborately retrofitted to comply with building regulations that would make them “ambulatory surgical centers.” If these provisions go into full effect, Texas would see a 75 percent reduction in the number of clinics serving 5.4 million women of childbearing age.

Lithwick's Slate article revels in the questions of Justices Ginsburg, Sotomayor and Kagan, questions which really are about the medical risks of abortion, as compared to other medical treatments.  Do read the whole piece.  To whet your appetite, notice how the following exchange nails the party-political nature of these types of cases:

Then it’s Kagan who moves in. Calmly, poker-faced, she asks Keller: “You said that as the law is now … Texas is allowed to set much, much higher medical standards, whether it has to do with the personnel or procedures or the facilities themselves, higher medical standards … for abortion facilities than for facilities that do any other kind of medical work, even much more risky medical work? Am I right?” 

Keller agrees. Then Kagan asks: “And I guess I just want to know, why would Texas do that?” The room erupts. Keller says complications. Kagan says that liposuction actually has greater complications. Keller says Kermit Gosnell. Kagan says nothing that happened in the Gosnell case could have occurred under Texas’ pre-existing regulations. Sotomayor says colonoscopies have more complications. Finally, Keller says, “But legislatures react to topics that are of public concern.” And that is what matters. Not women’s health. Politics.

Bolds are mine.

The bolded concluding sentences may be obvious in this context.  But I've met similar political motivations in my extensive reading of women's health studies, parenting studies and evolutionary psychology explorations into gender and sexuality.  What gets studied, by whom, and what gets popularized, and by whom:  all those aspects appear strongly motivated by traditional gender views and gender politics.

------
*  "Political is personal" follows if the Texas regulations remain in place.  The resulting unavailability of abortions in many parts of the state will directly impinge on the lives of poor women with unintended pregnancies.

Meet Robert Morrow, the Newly Elected Chair of Travis County GOP

The newly elected chair of Travis County Republican Party in Texas tweets:

Robert Morrow has written a book about Hillary Clinton with Roger Stone.  The book is called The Clintons' War on Women, but based on those tweets it's probably an investigation into the weird pornographic dreams of two weird Republican extremists. 

Morrow's twitter page tells us that he likes very large artificial breasts on women, one of his tweets tells us that he confuses himself with a male horse (a stallion):

I was absolutely certain that this was a hoax, but if it is, then wiser minds have been taken by it.  It's real!  Can we be so lucky?  Take out the popcorn and the nectar, put your feet up and prepare to watch the spectacle:  Trump has already had some political coattails!

What on earth is happening to the Republican Party?* 

Maybe it is like the story about  the man who somehow ended up riding a tiger, wondering how to get off its back before the tiger got hungry.  After many fruitless attempts to solve that dilemma the man finally fell off and -- lo and behold! -- the tiger indeed was a bit peckish by then.

A translation:  A party with the real platform of cutting the taxes of the wealthy and of loosening the regulations for large firms doesn't have a very vast voter base, because most people are not wealthy or the owners of large firms.  Rather, most people are going to be fleeced by those age-old Republican goals.  So how can such a party get enough votes to rule?

The answer:  Saddle a tiger!  That tiger is the rest of the Republican platform:  The appeal to fundamentalist theocracy-lovers, racists, sexists, xenophobes, homophobes and war-lovers.  Or, to put more politely, the support of traditional social hierarchies both at home and abroad.

And that tiger, when expertly ridden by the Republican establishment, indeed brought the necessary votes for several decades, even though the Republicans never quite fed the tiger with the bloody meat it desired. 

It was fed sparsely,  to keep the votes coming in the next election and the one after it (abortion is always almost illegal), while the true goals of the Republican Party were mostly achieved.  Hence the increasing incomes of the wealthiest,  the loss of jobs to outsourcing, the collapse of the housing markets and the financial markets, the loosening of environmental and occupational safety regulations and the minimal taxes on non-labor sources of income.

Well, the tiger has managed to scrape off its rider, and the tiger is hunnnngggry for something, anything, to eat. 

The Tea Party phenomenon should have told us that Feeding The Tiger had begun, the support of Donald Trump tells us that we are past the First Course.  What will the Main Course be?  It could even be some of those policies which favor the rich and well-heeled! 

What a wild ride.  A fierce battle for the heart-and-soul of the Republican Party must be taking place, but I can't predict its likely outcome, though I seriously doubt that we will see any moderation in the social conservatism of that party.

One Robert Morrow doesn't make a new morning in America (couldn't resist).  He is a blip in the screen and most likely gone soon.  But the Trump phenomenon will make bigger waves in both domestic and international politics.  And even if I might feel some Schadenfreude while watching the Republican establishment get their comeuppance, the resulting politicaq chaos isn't healthy for anyone.

-------
*  And to the Texas Republican Party, in particular.


 

An Armed Society is a Polite Society

Like this:

A Prince William County police officer was shot and killed Saturday evening on her first day on the street when she responded to a call about a possible domestic matter, authorities said.
Two other officers were shot and wounded.
The slain officer was identified by police as Ashley Guindon

And like this:

The standoff began after David Wayne Campbell called a sheriff's office supervisor Friday morning to say he had done something bad and was suicidal. After hours of negotiations, police tried to flush Campbell out using tear gas. They say that's when he stepped outside and killed himself.
Reed was a neighbor of Campbell. Also killed in the standoff were Campbell's wife of six years, 49-year-old Lana J. Carlson, and her two teenage sons, Quinn and Tory Carlson. Authorities said Monday she adopted the boys from Kazakhstan before she met Campbell.
Campbell had an extensive criminal history, including felony charges.

And like this:

A gunman killed three people in a workplace shooting in Hesston, Kansas on Thursday afternoon, before being shot dead by an officer at the factory where the shooter worked.
The shooter also injured 14 people, 10 critically, until his rampage across several locations ended at Excel Industries, a manufacturer of turf-care products in Harvey County, 35 miles north of Wichita, Sheriff T Walton told reporters at news conferences on Thursday and Friday.
Walton said the shooter was an employee of Excel but declined to identify him or say how long he had worked for the company. The suspect was served with a protection of abuse order about 90 minutes before the attack, Walton said, adding that he believed the order was the trigger for the shooter to attack 90 minutes later.

And like this:

A 14-year-old boy pulled out a gun in a school cafeteria Monday and opened fire, hitting two students, and then ran from the school, threw the weapon down and was apprehended nearby with the help of a police dog, authorities said.

Bullying. The Republican Political Tactic Which Backfired.

It backfired in the form of one Donald Trump.  He is a master bully, fun and vicious, getting all the others to root for him against the victims, making all the others too frightened to stand up to him.

The school bullies can be controlled by the teachers, but what happens when nobody will or can control a political bully?

The answer:  Last night's Republican primary debate, that's what happens. 

And get this:  The other Republican candidates appear not have started their opposition research on Trump early enough to have bags of dirt ready to toss back at his face when he throws his dirt.

But how weak is even that new research?  I found in five minutes of Googling that Trump is currently sued for financial fraud.  Why isn't that on all the political pages of all US newspapers?  It is pretty relevant for voters to know about.

But then nobody inside the establishment believed that Trump would go this far in the process, nobody ever thought that the Republican presidential candidate might, indeed, be the outsider, the multi-billionaire, the man who turned his bankruptcies into victories inside his own mind, the Donald (who doesn't know how the US Constitution works).

Does that remind you of Berlusconi and his Italy?

But back to the topic of this post:  Bullying has been a Republican political tactic for a long time, so long, that the media simply accepts bullying as politics, but only when it comes from the political right.

To see how political bullying works, consider these examples*:

A Republican married family values politician who is caught visiting prostitutes for sex in diapers?  A public apology suffices.

A Democratic politician whose spouse has been guilty of sexual philandering and possibly worse?  Probably her fault (dieuppitybitchdie)

A Republican Supreme Court Justice who spends time with powerful people whose cases are likely to come up in the Supreme Court, and those powerful people belong to an ancient religious men-only organizations?  Well, he perhaps wasn't a member himself.

A Democratic Supreme Court Justice who suggests that Latinas can be wise?  Must keep ethnicity and gender considerations off the court!  (dieracistbitchdie)

We are used to Republican bullying.  We don't see it as anything but an acceptable political tactic, but only for the Republicans.  When Democrats bully they get attacked for it.

Trump went one better than the system, successfully bullying the bully-boys themselves.  That would be hilarious if we were watching a reality television show, not a Republican presidential primary debate.

------
* Comments in the parentheses are my shorthand interpretations and do not necessarily reflect anyone else's reactions.  It's nevertheless true that Democratic women get extra doses of bullying from the Republicans.

The Mars Hill: The Church of Misogyny and Homophobia Which Will Not Die.

Ten years ago I wrote* about Mark Driscoll, a Christian preacher with a new cool thing:  To combine the subjugation of women and the hatred of gays and Lesbians with tattoos and popular music and stuff while going otherwise all Christian.  I then revisited the Mars Hill church two years ago, and wrote:

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

Well, time moves on and with it Driscoll's fortunes.  His old megachurch is now history, but he is starting again in Arizona:

But as Driscoll’s star rose, he was dogged by allegations from church members and pastors as well as from outsiders—of bullying and spiritual abuse, misogyny and homophobia, plagiarism, and misuse of church funds, just to name a few. In 2014, after being asked to submit to a reconciliation plan proposed by the church board he organized, Driscoll quit.

Now, barely a year later and 1,000 miles away, Driscoll is back.

That reminds me of the old Finnish saw:  What would kill an evil one?  God doesn't want him/her** and the Devil is in no hurry.

Mmm.  So I went there. It seems quite likely to me that the devil would appear in preacher's garb.  If you believe in gods and devils and such.  And the Devil would have good laugh after reading about yet another megachurch of that type.

----------

*  My direct quotes indeed are too long.  I shall repent and try to do better from now on.

**  Finnish doesn't distinguish gender in the third person singular, so I have to add that clunky bit in my translation.

I Wanna Punch You In The Face. The Semiotics of Donald Trump.

Donald Trump is a Republican candidate for the presidency of the most powerful country on earth.  And he wants to punch protesters in the face:

Donald Trump said he wanted to punch a protester “in the face” after the man disrupted a campaign rally in Las Vegas on Monday night.
“Here’s a guy, throwing punches, nasty as hell, screaming at everything else, when we’re talking,” Trump told the crowd, although CNN reported the man did not appear to be fighting with security officers.
“The guards are very gentle with him. He’s walking out, like, big high-fives, smiling, laughing,” Trump continued, before saying to loud cheers: “I’d like to punch him in the face, I tell ya.”
The incident was the latest in a string of controversial comments by Trump regarding protesters at his rallies. In November, after a Black Lives Matter protester was beaten and choked after disrupting a rally, Trump appeared to condone the rough treatment.
“Maybe he should have been roughed up, because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing,” he said on Fox News at the time.

He also wants to meet fire with fire when it comes to ISIS/Daesh:

“It brings up something,” Trump said. “Two debates ago, they hit Ted Cruz with a question. … They hit him with a question on waterboarding. They said: ‘What do you think of waterboarding? Is it good?’ And he got all messed up. He couldn’t answer the question. He was a mess, because he didn’t want to say waterboarding was good.
“Now, waterboarding — nothing is pretty –but they are chopping off heads, they are drowning people in steel cages … and they are saying to themselves, ‘Can you believe how weak, how weak and pathetic the Americans are?'” Trump said in a reference to the Islamic State, which has released videos showing the group’s beheading and drowning of prisoners.

The Trump phenomenon is going to be fascinating for some future historians to study, assuming that there will be a future.  A textbook case of the way people vote with their emotions*, and another textbook case of the way celebrities are manufactured and created through the media.

Many Americans believe that they know Donald Trump, because of "The Apprentice," his reality television show.  Many Americans are accustomed to his rude comments, arrogance and lack of manners, because of that same reality television show.  And many in the media simply give him the space to be an arrogant a***ole, "because that's just how Trump is."

Can you imagine what would happen if, say, Hillary Clinton had expressed the desire to punch someone in the face?  Indeed, can you think of any other presidential contestant who would be taken seriously after saying something like that?

Here is a man who recycles his wives (no, it doesn't make him an environmentalist), who brags how good he is at bankrupting firms, and who is currently accused of financial fraud.  It is not that these aspects of his life aren't covered at all; it is just that they would be covered at a very different intensity if the candidate was anyone else but Trump.

What drives all that?  Probably Trump's bombastic demeanor.  He's good for the media, produces lots of clicks and some still hope that he might fade away as a serious contender or perhaps just grow tired of the game. 

And he IS good television!  Almost like a reality show...  He seems to be "a man of the people," despite being nothing of the sort, he seems to be "a plain speaker," uttering all those things that the ordinary guy in the street (well, the kind which votes for Republicans)  emotionally feels (nuke them to the stone age, make America great again) and thinks (that politicking can't be very hard, just kick all those furriners in the butt and close the borders).**

Then the blustering!  Once again, imagine another politician, say,  Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders acting like Trump acts.  We would hear a lot about the female hormones if it was Clinton***, a lot about communism and grumpy grandpa if it was Sanders.   But in the case of Trump?  Well, he is just Trump.  




-----
*  For his actual policies, check this site.

**  And, to be fair to Trump, some of his comments have truth in them.  Globalization has not been good for the American working class, as opposed to the top one percent of the wealthy. It has killed many previously well-paying industries and jobs and in return offered lots of cheap crap from China.  But Trump is on the very top of the one percent, not a man of the people, and what he proposes to do about all this sounds impractical and/or vague.

***  What would the reversal for female hysteria be?  Male testiness? There's no good term for how Trump behaves, but it usually amounts to that fist-waving and belligerence and arrogance.

On John Kasich, Kitchens And Frying Pans

Did I ever write here that John Kasich stood out among the Republican Beauty Contest (aka presidential primaries) participants by actually showing some knowledge in a few areas?  The kind of knowledge that presidential candidates are supposed to have.  Where Iran might be found on the map and other super-important high-level foreign policy knowledge.

That might have made him more dangerous in some alternative reality where people don't vote with their gonads, but it's a real negative for Kasich in our reality.  On the other hand, he scores lots of points with the religious extremists of his party by standing firm for forced-birth everywhere.

That is not new, of course.  In 2014 governor Kasich signed a bill which prohibits rape counselors from telling rape victims in Ohio that abortion is available for them. And now he has signed a bill which defunds Planned Parenthood in Ohio:

Ohio Gov. John Kasich signed a bill Sunday prohibiting the state from contracting for health services with any organization that performs or promotes abortions, blocking government funds to Planned Parenthood.

Planned Parenthood isn't explicitly named in the legislation, but the law will prevent more than $1 million in funding from the state health department from going to the nonprofit to fund programs such as HIV testing, health screenings and prevention of violence against women.

That's our John. 

And this, too, is our John:

The guy who signed a bill defunding Planned Parenthood this weekend was full of himself today.
Speaking at a town hall in Fairfax, VA about his first election at age 26, Kasich said, "We just got an army of people, and many women who left their kitchens to go out and go door to door and to put yard signs up for me all over."

That was in 1978, of course.  The Kasich campaign has responded (link via Wonkette) to those who see Kasich hopping about with one well-shod foot in his mouth by pointing out that in those days the world was different:

So. It was the stay-at-home mothers or wives Kasich talks about in that quote, and, indeed, the labor market participation rate for women aged 25-54 was lower in 1978, somewhere between 55% (1975)  and 64% (1980), probably closer to the latter figure, while the 2014 figure for the same age group of women is 73.9%.

Draw your own conclusions from that.  I concluded that Kasich's 1978 campaign didn't seem to appeal to the majority of women who were then already in the labor market.  And then I point out that Kasich said "women," not "stay-at-home-mothers" or "stay-at-home-wives".  And he said "their kitchens."  Mr. Kasich's foot remains sternly lodged behind his snappers.

Because he is as tone-deaf as almost all Republican politicians.

That took care of the kitchens-part in the title of this post.  What about the frying pans?  Well, this post is a gentle tap from an imaginary frying pan, and Kasich just jumped out of his political frying pan into the fire. 

How A Star Is Born. A Study On Gender in How Biology Undergrads Rate Their Classmates' Knowledge

You can read the whole study here*.  It's an investigation into one type of possible gender discrimination:  Do our colleagues (either at work or at school) take gender into account when evaluating our performance?

The answer, from this study, is intriguing.  The Washington Post summarizes it like this:

Anthropologist Dan Grunspan was studying the habits of undergraduates when he noticed a persistent trend: Male students assumed their male classmates knew more about course material than female students — even if the young women earned better grades.
“The pattern just screamed at me,” he said.
So, Grunspan and his colleagues at the University of Washington and elsewhere decided to quantify the degree of this gender bias in the classroom.
After surveying roughly 1,700 students across three biology courses, they found young men consistently gave each other more credit than they awarded to their just-as-savvy female classmates.
Men over-ranked their peers by three-quarters of a GPA point, according to the study, published this month in the journal PLOS ONE. In other words, if Johnny and Susie both had A's, they’d receive equal applause from female students — but Susie would register as a B student in the eyes of her male peers, and Johnny would look like a rock star.

The researchers used data from three different classes of a fairly introductory biology course with large numbers of students.  In each class, students were asked to pick those of their fellow students (from class rosters) who seemed to show the greatest command of the material that was being taught.  These picks were repeated several times during each lecture series, and constitute the data the rest of the study analyzes.

As one might expect, not every student in those large classes got picked equally often as showing great command of the material.  Certain individuals got many more votes.  The researchers call them "the celebrities."

How does one become such a celebrity?

The objective basis in this context is actually having an extraordinary grasp of the material being taught.  But that is insufficient (and sometimes not even necessary) on its own.

Others also need to learn about that extraordinary grasp, either by observing the class participation of those celebrities, by observing them in the attached lab sessions or by learning about that grasp through friendships and other informal channels.  Perhaps some students tell others that they scored As in their exams?  Perhaps some students are much more vocal during the classes?

The crucial question here is how an impression of someone's excellence is created.  Is it based on just objective facts or is it also affected by various cultural prejudices?  Do students tell each other the grades they are earning?  Is the impression of excellence based solely on class participation, or does it matter who your friends are?  Does it matter if the potential celebrity is female or male?  Does it matter if the student doing the evaluating is female or male?

The study uses two fairly objective measures of someone's actual competence.  They are the student's exam grades and an evaluation of the students' class participation by the professors who taught the three courses.**  Note that the latter variable also measures one of the likely channels through which other students form their opinions.  Someone expressing smart opinions in the class will be assumed to have good command of the material, even if that person's examination grades are private information.

After controlling for those variables, the study finds a residual gender effect:

Results reveal that males are more likely than females to be named by peers as being knowledgeable about the course content. This effect increases as the term progresses, and persists even after controlling for class performance and outspokenness. The bias in nominations is specifically due to males over-nominating their male peers relative to their performance. The over-nomination of male peers is commensurate with an overestimation of male grades by 0.57 points on a 4 point grade scale, indicating a strong male bias among males when assessing their classmates. Females, in contrast, nominated equitably based on student performance rather than gender, suggesting they lacked gender biases in filling out these surveys. These trends persist across eleven surveys taken in three different iterations of the same Biology course. In every class, the most renowned students are always male. This favoring of males by peers could influence student self-confidence, and thus persistence in this STEM discipline.

In ordinary language, guys give other guys extra celebrity points for just guyness.  Gals, on the other hand, don't seem to be*** affected by the gender of the person they are evaluating.

How do we explain this?

The researchers explain their findings as implicit biases:

The finding that a gender bias impacts the perception of millennial students may at first seem surprising, but is supported by work on implicit biases. Implicit biases are unconscious associations that people hold related to certain groups. Across many cultures, STEM is associated with males and not females [26]. Interestingly, male STEM majors in the US hold the strongest associations between maleness and science, while female STEM majors show some of the weakest implicit biases between gender and science [27]. These differences in the gender-STEM stereotypes held may explain why male undergraduate STEM majors nominate more males, but females do not demonstrate this bias. It also helps explain why male faculty demonstrate biases in hiring and mentoring, but many female STEM faculty do not [28].

Bolds are mine.

That explanation makes sense on one level, but it introduces a deeper question:  Why would young men be more likely to hold these implicit biases than young women?   After all,  most male and female students in US universities share roughly the same cultural background and should have the same average implicit biases.****

I pondered this question for some time.  All I came up were these two theorettes (my name for baby theories), assuming that the results of the study hold after scrutiny by those more methodologically aware:

First, all this may have something to do with gender differences in circles of friendship.  Suppose that the way the "celebrities" are determined is in a wider circle of friends.  Suppose, moreover, that men tend to have mostly male friends and women both male and female friends.  If both of those suppositions were true, then the results of this study could follow, because more men than women simply wouldn't know high-performing women in the classes.

Second, it may have the same roots as women's inaudibility in meetings or women's invisibility as potential experts.  I have read about these phenomena and even experienced them myself. 

The usual scenario goes like this:  A woman says something in a meeting at work.  Her comment drops like a stone into still water.  Then, later in the same meeting, a man makes the same comment and it is eagerly discussed or debated. 

This is an actual pattern, but I don't know if it would apply in situations where women are not a small minority of those present.  Neither do I know how that odd invisibility/inaudibility is theoretically accounted for.

I'd love to see this study replicated and also carried out in other academic disciplines.  What the researchers write about may not be a STEM-problem but a more general one.





 



 

-------------
* I have read the study pretty carefully, but should note that the method it uses is not one I am capable of criticizing in any detail.  So caveat emptor.

** Two of the courses had only male professors, the third had one female professor and two male professors.  That most of the "experts" in these courses were men could have had a subconscious male-favoring effect on the student evaluations.  But that effect should have worked equally for both male and female students.

The class participation measure is about outspokenness, not about outspokenness-combined-with-smartness.  This could matter, though I can't figure out how.  Also, the professors' evaluations of students' class participation levels could themselves be biased.  For these reasons the actual grades are probably a better measure of excellence.

***  The exception is the last survey in the course which had three professors, one of them female. Its results show a small and non-significant bias for women to nominate other women.   But the larger bias of men towards nominating men still persists.  As the researchers note, the solution to potential bias probably isn't to introduce opposite bias, however.

****  Indeed, most other theories I can think of slam into that same hurdle.  Take statistical discrimination.  It's a theory which applies to, say, evaluating job applicants when knowledge of their true potential is only partially known. The evaluators may then use more general evidence (either true evidence or just prejudice) about the group the applicant belongs to.  If that group, on average, does better than other groups in the job under consideration, the particular applicant may be given extra points for that group membership.  If that group does worse, on average, then the particular applicant will have points deducted from his or her final assessment.

Statistical discrimination hurts top performers who belong to a group which has lower average scores, because it pulls down their overall assessment.  As the average female grades in the courses the current study analyzed are slightly lower than the average male grades, a statistical discriminator might give top performing men extra points.  But that assumes the students knew the overall average grades in the courses.  I doubt that was the case, and even if those grades were known, the theory doesn't explain why men would adjust their assessment of men's performance upwards but women would not. 

Last Saturday's Republican Debate. A Review.

I finally watched a Republican primary debate!  The one held last Saturday, though I watched it from videos and read it from transcripts after the date.

It's some time since I've visited Wingnuttia and the necessary adjustment to cultural differences* took some time.  Until I was properly adjusted I rolled on the floor, laughing.

After all, Trump IS funny.  He is like that mythological crazy great-uncle in the attic who is let out only for Thanksgiving.  Or like the child who mostly speaks gibberish but once in a while states an embarrassing fact in a loud, clear voice.

But let's scroll the primary debate video to the start.  Into the room and onto the stage walk six men, all in identical suits, four wearing red ties and two wearing blue ties.

I cannot discuss wardrobe mishaps, sigh, because there are no female candidates and because men in politics wear a uniform.  I wish someone had affected a yellow tie so journalists could have written about the advisability of doing that and what it really means about the inner sluttiness of the man.

All the candidates in the race received applause from the audience in the room.  How was that audience picked?  This matters, because they booed later.  A lot, and mostly whenever Trump blurted out one of those "the emperor has no clothes" statement, such as the fact that 911 happened on Jeb Bush's brother's patch.  If the audience was picked randomly among fervent Republicans, the booing of facts makes me more worried than I already am.

Anyway, Ben Carson got the most muted applause, and Donald Trump the next most muted.  I think the establishment candidates got louder cheers, but it could be that in a small audience a few loud voices nominate.

Supreme Irony: On The Empty Seat of Justice Scalia.

The US Supreme Court has an empty seat after the death of Justice Scalia.  Who is going to sit there?  How can that person be found?

The US Constitution tells us:

The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States; he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices, and he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.
He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.
The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.

Bolds are mine.  Get it?  The president shall nominate and then the Senate will vote on that nomination.

But the Republicans have a different take on what should happen. 

It's fun and instructive to see what the six remaining Republican presidential candidates had to say about the nomination of Scalia's successor in the last primary debate.  Here are their opinions on whether president Obama should nominate someone for the bench!

Trump:

I think he’s [Obama] going to do it whether or I’m O.K. with it or not. I think it’s up to Mitch McConnell and everybody else to stop it. It’s called delay, delay, delay.


Kasich:

Here’s my concern about this. The country is so divided right now, and now we’re going to see another partisan fight take place. I really wish the president would think about not nominating somebody.

Carson:

Well, the current Constitution actually doesn’t address that particular situation,..

Rubio:

No. 2, I do not believe the president should appoint someone. And it’s not unprecedented. In fact, it has been over 80 years since a lame duck president has appointed a Supreme Court justice.

Bush:

Of course, the president, by the way, has every right to nominate Supreme Court justices. I’m an Article II guy in the Constitution. We’re running for the president of the United States. We want a strong executive for sure. But in return for that, there should be a consensus orientation on that nomination, and there’s no doubt in my mind that Barack Obama will not have a consensus pick when he submits that person to the Senate.

Cruz:

Well, we have 80 years of precedent of not confirming Supreme Court justices in an election year. And let me say, Justice Scalia...

Get it?  It would be in poor taste and probably against legal precedent for Obama to nominate anyone.  But should he make that horrible mistake, at least the Republicans can simply delay, delay and delay.  Indeed, it is their honorable duty to delay!  It doesn't matter that no single person has actually been named.  ANY candidate by a Democratic president is simply unacceptable.  Beforehand. 

As an aside, I had such fun watching that debate!  I watched it several times, in fact, because I needed the laughs (more about that in a later post).  But isn't it wonderful to learn that there's all sorts of reasons why this particular president shouldn't follow the rules of the Constitution?

It is not just the Republican presidential candidates who are of the opinion that it is acceptable to block the consideration of any nominee president Obama might send to the Senate for confirmation:

Senate Republicans on Monday began to close ranks behind a vow by Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, to block consideration of any nominee to replace Justice Antonin Scalia, who died over the weekend, for the remainder of President Obama’s term.
Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, who faces re-election this year, said in a statement that the Senate should follow what he called “common practice” to stop acting on lifetime appointments during the last year of a presidential term. Senator Patrick J. Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, agreed, leaving nearly every vulnerable Republican incumbent backing Mr. McConnell’s pledge.

There ya go!  This is such a fascinating example of the yearned-for compromises in Washington, D.C., of getting things done in politics, of the willingness of Republicans to work with president Obama, and other related crap.

I cannot get over McConnell's statement:  Only Mr. or Ms. Nobody would be an acceptable candidate for the Republicans in the Senate.  Perversely, it is as if McConnell is doing the nomination here.

It's the Game of Thrones.

The Zika Virus and Microcephaly: A Republican Opportunity To Work Against Abortions!

Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) and Chris Smith (R-N.J.) are two politicians who act like religious patriarchs.  They see their special flocks as consisting of all those wayward women who just don't make the right choices about abortion:
 

Pregnant women in South and Latin America who contract Zika, a rapidly spreading mosquito-borne virus linked to severe birth defects and deformities in babies, should not have access to abortion, Republican House leaders said Wednesday.
"This push for more abortion access is heartbreaking, especially since there are different degrees of microcephaly," Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, said at a hearing about the virus.

....

House Republicans running the Zika virus hearing avoided the issue of contraception and family planning access for women in endemic countries and instead urged women to welcome babies born with microcephaly. Duncan acknowledged that "many women do not have the luxury of simply choosing to wait" to get pregnant, but added that abortion access is not the answer, because many babies born with microcephaly "go on to lead very normal lives."
"Each child is made in the image of God and has inherent worth," he said.
Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) said the U.S. needs to work harder to "ensure that any child born with with disabilities from this or any other infection is welcomed, loved and gets the care that he or she needs." To back up his point, he highlighted the headline of a BBC article published earlier this month: "Microcephaly: 'It's not the end of the world.'"

Talk is cheap, and at rock-bottom prices when it is about something neither of these gentlemen will ever have to contemplate facing.  They cannot get pregnant, and neither are they poor women probably living in a country where getting the care a child with severe microcephaly needs is very unlikely.

That lack of care is not the case with the woman who wrote the BBC article Chris Smith (R-Forced-Birth) mentions.

There are varying extremes of the condition - Laney is towards the end where her brain has a lot more problems, but doesn't make her value any less.
She doesn't walk or talk, and she can't feed herself.
She has a g-button or gastrostomy button directed into her stomach. She is nourished through a feeding machine or a pump we use by hand and she gets all her medications that way too.

Laney's mother has found spiritual rewards and lessons in the care of her  very-much-loved daughter, and that is wonderful.  But Rep. Smith appears to use the case as a general ethics lesson, equally applicable to all women, wherever they live and whatever resources they might be able to harness.

This smacks a lot of the stories the Catholic Church uses to praise women who it deems sufficiently saintly, women who refuse a life-saving abortion for the sake of the fetus and then die, leaving their other children motherless and possibly taking the fetus with them to the land of death.  But at least they were saintly.

I always found those stories frightening, because they seemed to tell me what that church expected of "good women."  Connect those images with the ban on women in any position of power  in the Catholic Church, and it's hard to avoid thinking that all this is based on an ulterior motive not that far removed from misogyny.  Or at least the complete control of women's fertility.

I smell something similar in the statements of those two Republican gentlemen.  It may well be that many babies with microcephaly go on to lead fairly normal lives, but many will not.  And the people whose own lives will drastically change with the birth of a child with microcephaly are the women who give birth to them, not Mr. Duncan or Mr. Smith.

Primary Screams

Know what is very funny?  The personality changes which happen in some of the most avid supporters  during the US Democratic presidential primaries.

I recall the same phenomenon from 2008: 

Suddenly usually thoughtful people who enjoy debating stuff become intolerant of anyone who is not of the body.  Suddenly, only evidence tilting one way is packed into the debating bags.  Suddenly, previously politically agnostic individuals develop that red-hot religious fervor, that intolerance to anyone thinking differently or even suggesting nuances or complications in the tale of the Hero's Ascension.  Disagreement becomes impossible, because it is interpreted as proof that one is not of the body, as proof that one is (gasp!) the enemy.

So does any of that matter?   After all, it's just people advocating for their chosen candidate.

I believe it does, because non-stop advocacy introduces bias into the conversations and because advocacy makes planning for the general elections and the possible responses from the Republicans that much harder. 

For an advocate the goal is that missionary one: to convert others. For an "analyst"* the goal is to understand both the positives and negatives of the candidates and to try to predict what might happen in the general elections.  The latter includes being prepared for the potential Republican attacks.  Advocacy hinders that preparation.
 
--------
*An "analyst" here is not some objective entity, of course, but someone who would prefer a Democratic victory in November.  I couldn't come up with a better term.

  

The New Koch Plan

The New Koch Plan!  It's a re-branded, better-tasting version of the Old Koch Plan which included the following goals:

To shrink the government to its  three pro-billionaire functions: 

a) to protect the billionaires against foreign invaders (allow the military to exist),

b) to  protect the billionaires against domestic robbers and thieves (allow the police to exist)
and

c) to protect the billionaires against legal attempts to get at their money (allow the courts to exist).

To kill all other government functions

a) because they must be financed by taxes and the Kochs do not want to pay those, and/or

b) because they hamper the wild and lawless ("free") pursuit of ever greater profits (so kill  environmental protection, health inspections, worker safety rules and so on),  and/or

c) because they are unnecessary for billionaires.  Billionaires don't need mass public transportation, public schools, old age pensions, unemployment benefits or government subsidized health care, what with being billionaires.

The problem with that old plan is its poor "optics."  It's hard to get non-billionaires to support these billionaire-class identity politics.  So the New Koch Plan has added extra nutrients:  Empathy!  Fighting for a fairer criminal sentencing system!  Keeping poor teenagers from gangs!  Offering translation services and help to Latinos who wish to pull themselves up by their bootlaces by starting enterprises!

Jane Mayer writes about the new flavors of Koch. I recommend that you read the whole piece.  Here's a taste to get you interested:

The Kochs received equally positive press that fall, when, in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, they began speaking publicly about the need for criminal-justice reform. In February, 2015, when Koch Industries joined a bipartisan umbrella group for sentencing reform, the Coalition for Public Safety, the news made the Times. The Kochs were coming together with such avowedly liberal groups as the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank. Among the most surprising of the Kochs’ new allies was Van Jones, a former senior fellow at the think tank, and the head of a criminal-justice-reform group called #cut50. Only months earlier, he had criticized the United Negro College Fund for accepting Koch money, arguing that “few people still alive have done more to promote policies that hurt African-Americans than the Koch brothers.”

 ....

It is true that, at least as far back as 1980, when Charles Koch enlisted David, then a company executive, to run for Vice-President of the United States on the Libertarian Party ticket, the brothers have publicly supported radical reform of America’s criminal-justice system. The platform of the Libertarian Party in 1980 called for an end to all prosecutions of tax evaders and the abolition of a number of federal agencies whose regulations Koch Industries and other businesses have chafed at, including the E.P.A., the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the Federal Election Commission, whose campaign-spending limits the brothers opposed. But the Kochs, as hard-line libertarians, have had goals quite different from those of many of their liberal allies. Their distaste for the American criminal-justice system is bound up in distrust of government and a preference for private enterprise. Until recently, the criminal-justice victims the Kochs focussed on were businessmen who had run afoul of the modern regulatory state—that is, people like them.

The bolds are mine.

Get it?  The new plan builds bridges all the way across the political spectrum, finds partners in the most unexpected places (after funding their praiseworthy activities with what for billionaires would be pocket money),  and creates new shared goals so that the Koch goals (get rid of punishments for rich white-collar criminals) seem to coincide with certain progressive goals (get rid of racism in the sentencing system and the police).

I love it!  I especially love the idea that the Koch Plan needs to be "re-branded," the corporate thinking behind all this ruthlessness, such as this:

Fink was brutally honest about how unpopular the views of his wealthy audience were. “When we focus on decreasing government spending,” he said, and on “over-criminalization and decreasing taxes, it doesn’t do it, O.K.? . . . They’re not responding, and don’t like it.”

But he pointed out that if anyone in America knew how to sell something it should be the successful business leaders in the Koch network. “We get business,” he told the audience. “What do we do? We want to find out what the customer wants, right? Not what we want them to buy!”

It's like putting a picture of a happy cow on the wrapper of a block of margarine when people suddenly want to buy more organic products.

The Koch Plan is gaining power because of the Citizens United decision of the US Supreme Court, the first step towards one-dollar-one-vote in this country.  If you are interested in learning more about dark money in the US politics, get Mayer's book.  An excerpt can be found here.  Do read it to the very end.