The Awful Alternatives

Contents:  Racism (lots!), misogyny


The Awful Alternative in the US and Europe would be the Alt Right movement.  You can read all about it here, here, here and here.  As you can see from those sources, the movement is essentially a white supremacist one or at least a white nationalist one.  This depiction seems roughly correct to me:

Bannon’s Breitbart also realized that there was a large online community that naturally gravitated to Trump, a mix of people who saw themselves as far too radical to be accepted by polite society. Among them, conservative suspicions of diversity, inclusion, feminism, and political correctness had metastasized into something much darker.
This was the alt-right, a collection of racists, pick-up artists, men’s rights activists, and other noxious trolls of the internet. There’s no real dogma or central text to the alt-right, and no Buckley figure, though plenty are interested in taking the mantle. It’s a loose grouping with a few unifying figures, such as Trump and the Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos.
It was the openly-gay Yiannopoulos who became the first real alt-right celebrity, and he parlayed his internet fame into a series of speaking gigs that he called the “Dangerous Faggot” tour. His catchphrase is “feminism is cancer” and he first rose to prominence as part of the GamerGate movement, a thing you’re free to Google. He’s also Breitbart’s tech editor and most prominent columnist.*

So I put my waders on and went to the Alt Right sites.  My impression is that the movement is extremely racist, and very openly so, though it also has odd anti-democratic tendencies.

Some of what I read reminded me of my research into the way the theologians of ISIS think,  given that ISIS (and other similar terrorist organizations) can be seen as another awful alternative for Iraq and Syria and even elsewhere:



Democracy is Bad.  Some other source (in the case of ISIS an assumed divine power, as interpreted by the ISIS theologians, in the case of Alt Right the white man writing the stuff) knows better how a society should be governed than the ignorant hordes.

Outsiders are Evil.  ISIS views all who are not extreme Sunni Muslims as infidels, Alt Right views all others except white men as outsiders.  The former can lead to views about the infidels as people who can be killed or enslaved.  The latter leads to views about outsiders which can mean the cleansing of "white homelands" of those who are not white.

The concept of a tribe is central to both ideologies:  For ISIS the tribe consists of only those men who share a certain extremist interpretation of Islam, for Alt Right the tribe consists of only white men who are not Muslims.

The place of women in those tribes is ambiguous:  In some contexts they are part of the tribe (as in the European right-wing arguments about protecting "their" women against rapes by migrants or refugees or in the ISIS arguments about avenging the rape of Sunni Muslim women**), but in most contexts women are viewed as a resource, as something that must be made to do the right thing (which is to obey, to provide sex, but only to the man in charge of a woman, to stay at home, and to have as many children as the overlord deems necessary).***

Belief in Group Inequality.  That women are viewed as inferior in both ideologies goes without saying, and it is also the reason why feminism is so hated by both groups.

But neither are all men regarded as worthy of equal treatment.  ISIS decides the internal ranking of men on the basis of their religious affiliation (though stories I've read suggest that racism also exists in the ISIS-land), whereas Alt Right decides that ranking on the basis of the man's race first and then on the basis of his religion.  It views different races as inherently unequal.****

Rage At The Society, which has failed to  provide what the members of these groups view as their utopia:  a society where they would be the top dogs and where everyone else would meekly obey.  That rage may have different sources, with the ISIS believers finding their justification from religion, say, but both are angry at egalitarianism and human rights.

--

Those comparisons shouldn't be taken too far.  The extreme and sadistic violence of ISIS belongs to a very different category from the net harassment that some members of Alt Right engage in, and despite that skepticism concerning democracy, the Alt Right is not advocating for a violent overthrow of governments or violence, in general, but for a political movement.

It's also likely that the real numbers of the two groups are very different, though it's hard to get firm numbers of the nebulous group which constitutes the Alt Right.



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* More on Yiannopoulos can be found here and here.  He is currently touring American college campuses.

**  Even this might just be about one's property being soiled, rather than about truly seeing the women as members of the tribe, or as an insult to the men in the group.

***  The Alt Right theologians might give women more rights than the ISIS theologians do.  For instance, I read a proposal on one site to make (white) women's right to vote dependent on them already having produced more than 2.1 children.  That's a backwards-pedaling of only a hundred years or so, to the era when women had to be over thirty to vote in some places, whereas the ISIS would take us back 1500 years.

But it's not clear what rights women might be allowed to keep in that Alt Right dystopia.  The same site also had a piece about the perfidy and sluttiness/prudishness of all women:  Women have wanton sex, only not with the right man (the writer). 

Born manipulators, we women are, what with Evolution having made us so.  A flavor of the pickup artists, there:  The false generalizations of the worst examples to all women, the feeling of entitlement to plentiful sex and the rage when it is not forthcoming, as well as the complete disappearance of women as anything but sources of sexual satisfaction and children.

As an aside, note also that most of these right-wing and religious extremist groups really really need to have all women stay at home, away from any public influence and the prying eyes of other men.  That a single wage-earner in each family tends to doom many of those families into poverty, at least in the market economies, seems to be utterly ignored.  But then I didn't see much economic theory on the Alt Right sites I visited.  The movement, if it can be called one, is not about economics at all, not even the small-government Republican economics.

****  Note that this is not the same thing as admitting that different individuals have varying skills, tendencies and intelligence, because the argument focuses on group differences.  All people inside a group are painted with the same wide brush.  Because of this belief in group inequality, equal opportunities for all and other similar concepts are meaningless for the Alt Right men.   Rather, the laws which provide for them are seen as favoritism towards groups which deserve to be treated as inferiors, because they are inferior. 

The Third Debate: The Nasty Woman Won. Did Democracy?

The third presidential debate of the 2016 US election is over.  The nasty woman won it.

Donald Trump called Hillary Clinton a liar several times and a nasty woman  (a more polite form of a bitch) once.  He was able to turn one of the institutions of the democratic process into reality television, a  format for entertaining but not informing the audience, and in his case a format very much dependent on him being  outrageously insulting.

Then he stepped further away from the idea of democracy, and that made me angry.  I have spent enough time watching what happens in countries with dictators to know what the real alternative to this weak and wounded and barely functioning democracy might be, and I don't take Trump's insinuations lightly.

Julia Azari and David Firestone on fivethirtyeight.com make  my point about those insinuations:

When asked whether he would accept a Clinton victory in November, Trump’s ultimate response was, “I’ll keep you in suspense.” I don’t mean to editorialize here, but this is perhaps the most alarming thing I’ve heard a presidential candidate say on a debate stage. In some ways, this is almost as bad — or maybe worse — than Trump coming out and saying he wouldn’t accept a loss. There are two principles at stake beyond accepting the legitimacy of the election system. The first is being honest about one’s plans and stances. The American presidency is not the latest Tana French novel — leaders can’t keep the people in suspense. The second is that presidential candidates cannot cast themselves in the role of investigating elections. Trump can’t do this, Clinton can’t do this. The only answer is that evaluating the fairness of the election is up to the commissions that are appointed to do this, not to the candidates themselves. Regardless of your policy beliefs, this is not how democracy works.

And

The debate is going to move on to standard debate subjects now, but it’s impossible to forget that a truly extraordinary moment just occurred, one that will become the signal clip from this debate and possibly this campaign. A candidate representing one of the two major parties refused to accept the outcome of an American election. Think of the implications of that: Not only does it risk civil violence on the part of supporters who will be similarly encourage to resist an election, but it undermines the most fundamental democratic institution on which the country is based. Imagine the reaction of countries struggling to achieve democracy when a candidate questions whether an American ideal is legitimate. The political system will survive Trump, but the cynicism and doubt sown tonight will take a long time to heal.

Trump says, over and over,  that everything is rigged and corrupt:   Not only the election process itself, not only Hillary Clinton, not only the Democratic Party, but the whole leadership of the United States, the whole global order, and  all of the media.  Indeed, there is nothing that is NOT rigged, except, naturally, one Donald Trump, the bestest, the greatest and  the most honestest and informed presidential candidate ever.

Hearing Trump say that about the election results felt like ice water down my spine.   It made me think of Putin, of Erdogan, of Assad, of Saddam, of earlier dictators, both openly dictatorial and quasi-democratic,  both fairly benign and truly evil, and it made me think of the impossibility, absent democracy, of getting rid of a nasty dictator, except through the shedding of blood.  Whatever the weaknesses of democracy, and those are many, it is the only political system I know of where an unsatisfactory ruler can be deposed of without anyone having to die.

And when democracy functions poorly, the correct solution is to improve it, not to displace it with dictatorships.

And  how about that "nasty woman" statement?  You may have come across this pyramid about how to argue on Twitter:

 


The goal is  to debate as high on  that pyramid as you possibly can.
Few politicians climb all the way to the top of that pyramid in public debates, but I  have never seen anyone stay as low as Trump does.  The sad thing is that he dragged H. Clinton further down on those levels than was necessary, though she never quite sank to Trump's average level.

Much of political commentary consists of analyzing the game, of explaining why pragmatic politicians do what they do, of analyzing the wonderful plots to take power from  those who think differently, through all sorts of unethical-but-legal devices, of discussing the battle for power as if it was a baseball game.  And I get the fun in that, I do.

But I wouldn't write about the topics I cover if I didn't think they mattered greatly.   Democracy matters.  It's a messy system, it's  nowhere near close to giving power to all those who are governed and ruled under the US system, but it's bucket loads better than the other real-world alternatives.  That Donald Trump seems to disagree with that should leave the whole world gasping for breath.

The Posts Not Finished

The ones which sob and moan in the middle of the night when I can't sleep, the ones which I tossed into the deep snow where they wander shoeless and coatless, in cold pain, looking for mama.  The ones which had so much care and work and effort spent on their nursing but which, nevertheless, I cruelly rejected and abandoned.

Those posts.

How does that beginning sound?  I veered off the topic there, because the posts I want to talk about here, the ones never finished, are not of the emotional sob-story kind.  No, they are statistical posts, based on an enormous amount of work by me:  Calculations and spreadsheets and all sorts of other boring yet electrifying crap.

Why these posts have never stepped into the limelight of this humble blog vary.  For example, I worked long on a post about the US Congress, about how representative it is for various demographic groups (such as, say, comparing the percentage of Latinas in the Congress to their percentage  in the US population).

But I gave up on it because of all sorts of tricky statistical problems, such as trying to find out if Latino Congress members are also counted again in the race categories, and if so, what I should do about it.  I got extremely uninformative answers to my queries from those who had compile some statistics I tried to use.

And then I wondered if anyone would be even interested in the findings (which suggest, as one would expect, that white Anglo men are over-represented, but which also suggest that not all minority groups are under-represented to the same extent, or at all, and that women, in general, are under-represented within all racial or ethnic categories).

Then there are the police shootings data, the fatalities among black men, white men and other population groups.  I spent quite a bit of time analyzing the Washington Post surveys for 2015 and 2016, going through their data case by case, calculating all sorts of averages and percentages.

And I may still write up that work.  But when to post it?  The time never appears to be right, because the work I have done is not emotional work.  It doesn't seem fit to post it when yet another black man is killed by the police, because it would sound like an instrument in the orchestra playing a different tune from all the others.  To post it at any other time would limit its exposure.

Then there are all the questions I have about those data sets.  How are they verified?  Why is the race of so many who died not recorded?  Is it because the data comes from newspaper articles?  If so, how many cases are not reported at all or reported wrong?  Whose reports are used when deciding if the killed person* was armed or not?

Finally, the data sets themselves seem to show a lot of short-term variation.  The relative number of Hispanic men killed by the police in 2015 was considerably higher than the relative numbers in the first half of 2016, though the relative numbers of black men killed remained fairly stable**.  It would be good to understand that, and other data characteristics better before writing about the surveys.

So are you sufficiently bored yet?  How about this topic for a post:  Suppose that before you are born you are told that one third of your life will be spent on practicing being dead.  Wouldn't you feel cheated out of all those years?  But we don't think of sleep that way.

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* Those killed persons were, by the way, overwhelmingly men, especially in the unarmed category.

** And how do those who create the data set decide if the killed man was white or black or Latino?  Latinos can be either white or black, too, or can belong to other racial categories.

 

Short posts 10/18/16: Millennial Women Lukewarm for Clinton?, Tamika Cross and Some Fun

1.  This survey of the millennials about the coming presidential election is moooost interesting.  I quote:

Only 47 percent of millennial women support Clinton, and 18 percent support Trump. Another combined 18 percent back either Johnson or Stein.
Among men, 65 percent back Clinton and only 6 percent combined support third-party candidates.

Now parse those differences!  My first thought on them was that the researchers have made a coding mistake on gender.  Studies use a zero-or-one code for the respondent for being female or male, but there's no established rule about which sex you assign to one or to zero.  So a coding mistake is possible, and it would explain the odd findings pretty well, given that they would then look the same as the findings for other age groups (where the support for Trump is always higher among men than among women).

Such a mistake is pretty unlikely in a study of this sort (which would have a lot of double-checking before going public).  Still, I'd like to see similar results from another pollster (given that this poll looks at least like an outlier),  before spending brain calories on possible reasons for the lack of feminist support for Clinton among young women.  Or for greater feminist support among young men.  Or for the idea that there are more young women than young men who dislike Clinton's policies.

2.  This happens:

People across the country were horrified to hear of the way Tamika Cross, a doctor, was treated on a recent Delta Airlines flight from Detroit to Houston. A patient faced a medical emergency mid-flight and the crew asked if there were any physicians on board. Cross immediately signaled to the crew that she was available to help. But according to reports, the flight crew didn’t respond as you might think. They weren’t grateful. Instead, they doubted whether this young African American woman could actually be a medical doctor. They declined her help.

Cross has three strikes against her:  She is African-American, female and young.

Granted, airlines must have policies to be able to tell whether someone actually is a physician when help is sought, and Delta Airlines' answer to Cross's complaint was that out of the three individuals who offered to help only one had acceptable proof of qualifications with him.

But Cross's Facebook post suggested that he hadn't presented those qualifications and that the flight attendant treated Cross in a condescending manner:

A couple mins later he is unresponsive again and the flight attendant yells "call overhead for a physician on board". I raised my hand to grab her attention. She said to me "oh no sweetie put ur hand down, we are looking for actual physicians or nurses or some type of medical personnel, we don't have time to talk to you" I tried to inform her that I was a physician but I was continually cut off by condescending remarks.

...

Another "seasoned" white male approaches the row and says he is a physician as well. She says to me "thanks for your help but he can help us, and he has his credentials". (Mind you he hasn't shown anything to her. Just showed up and fit the "description of a doctor")

 It could be that Cross didn't see the other physician show his credentials (calling card???) to someone.  But it's still likely that we all have stored images of how physicians are supposed to look, how professors are supposed to look and so on, and those stored images will affect that crucial first reaction.  That's part of what economists call statistical discrimination.

3.  This five-day-old video on Trump supporters from the Daily Show is good for a cleansing laugh.  I know that the respondents are not picked randomly, but hearing their arguments is still fun.

 

Where Echidne Dons Her Pseudo-Psychologist's Hat And Then Analyzes the Trumpeteers

1.  I posted below about watching a Trump rally speech last Tuesday.  In fact, I watched it twice, the second time to count the repetition of certain words.  I did it, because repetition can amount to a type of brainwashing, and I wanted to see how Trump does it.

So I watched today's Trump rally speech for the same reasons.  He repeats the word "rigged" six times, if I got the count right, beginning with the media, mentioning Sanders as a victim of this rigging, seguing to the whole process being rigged, and finally coming out with "The whole election is rigged."

That was followed by "the whole thing is one big fix."  Trump then repeated that statement.  "Crooked" Hillary was mentioned at least three times.

That explicit statement about the elections as illegitimate is one step closer to the abyss than he took on Tuesday.

This leaves me very troubled, not only because of the cult-like flavor of what Trump is doing, but also because if his supporters believe in what he says, well, what are they going to do if Trump doesn't win?

2.  Scott Adams, the cartoonist of Dilbert fame, and also the cartoonist of misogynist fame, has a new blog post about the coming election, called The Era of Women.  The gist of the post is that since women are going to vote Hillary Clinton into power, women will be responsible for everything bad that will happen next.

The post is fascinating, and my usual type of analysis would be to note that electing the FIRST female US president, ever, is not the same thing as the monstruous regimen of women, except in the minds of a few,  that electing the FIRST female US president, ever, is not the same as women, as a class, taking all power from men, as a class, and that it most likely means very little change in any of the issues that keeps Adams awake at night.

I would also add that his opinion erases all the men who are going to vote for Hillary Clinton and all the women who are going to vote for Donald Trump, and then I would ask why he can't see the possible election of the first woman to lead this country as a step towards, you know, gender equality, rather than as the obvious total tilting of some imaginary power see-saw to favor the class of women.

I'd finish by asking why it is that Adams, and others like him, can't view individual women and men as individuals in politics.  After all, that is the goal in my value system when it comes to sex, race etc.

But I want to try something different, and that is to see what that post also sounds like to me:

Note the false generalization:  If one woman becomes the president of the United States, then all women are running the country, perhaps the world.

That sounds like the way the mind of someone depressed works:  Everything is SHIT.  Not just some things, but everything.

Note the end-of-world thinking:  The possible election of one woman wipes out any power men may have held.  Perhaps all the men in the Congress, the majority of Congress-critters, will be beheaded?  Perhaps the Catholic Church will have only a Popess and priestesses?  Perhaps all imams and mullahs will now be women?  Every CEO of every large corporation will now be female,  the military will only have girl generals, all television sports will be about rhythmic gymnastics, and every single talking head (and cartoonist!) will be female in this new world.  The earth has cracked open and will suck up poor Scott and anyone who is at all like him.

That, too, sounds like depression.

And so does Adams' attempt to compare men, as a class, to women, as a class, in some odd endeavor to decide which class "deserves" to rule:

Men had a good run. We invented almost everything, and that’s cool. But we also started all of the wars and committed most of the crimes. It’s a mixed record to be sure. Now it’s time for something different, apparently.

I'm not saying that Adams is depressed.  He's more likely to cause depression in others by what he has written.  But I spotted those similarities and then wondered how many of those who participate in the nastiest misogyny sites might suffer from the thought errors commonly associated with depression.





 

"Rigged" and "Corrupt" in Trump-Speak

I watched Trump's Tuesday rally speech, the first speech intended for his base that I've watched.  It left me feeling troubled.

Not because of  all the things he promised:  the eradication of all poverty, the cutting of taxes for all (including a new 15% profit tax for corporations), the annihilation of ISIS, the return of all good jobs to the US (he is going to force Apple to make it's phones at home), the safeguarding of Medicare and Social Security, the rewriting of all trade deals and did I mention cutting taxes humongously?  Also chocolate cake and guns in every pots.  Just kidding about the cake.

His promises can't be fulfilled, but I understand that he is giving the usual politician's pre-election promises, though with no hints about how he might achieve all that, given that he is not yet a divine power, except maybe in his own mind.

His factual errors didn't worry me, either.  I expect those from Trump.  That he believes replacing Obamacare with Health Savings Accounts (which are subsidized saving, not insurance) would somehow make it possible for all Americans to have great quality care for a low price, well,  he probably doesn't know anything about how much ordinary people can afford to save or how much a physician visit or a hospital stay costs.  His proposal would bankrupt people and provide care for only those who are affluent.

I wasn't even that worried because his promises were gendered:  He promised good things to the police, to the fire-fighters, to the military, to the border control and to the veterans.  He promised nothing to the teachers or to the nurses or to those who care for the elderly and the sick.  But that tilt was expected, given who constitute his base.

No.  What made me troubled was this:  Trump kept repeating, over and over again these words:  "rigged" and "corrupt."*

Hillary Clinton is "crooked" (mentioned four times), "a bad, bad person" and "a disaster."   The leadership in Washington DC is corrupt, has "betrayed" Trump's audience and "squandered its wealth".  The Democratic Party is corrupt, its primary was rigged.  The media is corrupt (mentioned twice), and the news are rigged, the media is a disgrace.  The global order is corrupt and rigged (mentioned twice).

And he repeats words such as "destruction," "disaster"  and "criminal", when referring to Hillary Clinton's past or the Obama administration.  He asserts that Hillary Clinton wants to erase all borders around the United States, which sounds like accusing her of treason.

In another context Trump has called Hillary Clinton a devil.

Now put that together and what do you get?  A strong impression that Trump is telling his base that the American political system is all corrupt, all rigged, that the elections will be seen as rigged, too, unless Trump wins.

What is the emotional message Trump sends his adherents?  How should they act after November 9, if Trump doesn't win, if the devil wins, if the crooked person wins, if the corrupt and rigged media caused it, if the corrupt and rigged global order caused it?

That sounds like questioning the legitimacy of these elections.



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* He also repeats the word "unbelievable," as applied to all the wonderful things he will provide this country.  Not sure if that is a Freudian slip.

On The Trump Video

Dahlia Lithwick's initial reaction to the recent Trump video was the same as mine:

After months of controversies over Trump’s personal attacks on women, his racist talk about an American judge of Mexican heritage, his casual slurs of immigrants and a Muslim American Gold Star family, and countless other controversies, it seemed as though the folks who were determined to back Trump saw and understood perfectly well who he was and had accepted it. More maddening, it seemed they just didn’t care.

That’s why, when the story broke on Friday that Donald Trump was caught on a live mic bragging about how he could kiss women—and grab their genitals—without their consent because he was famous, I initially wondered what the news was. Was there anyone alive surprised here? Voters have watched Trump joyfully trash and objectify women for more than a year. Republicans and their leaders have been offered evidence of Trump as an unrepentant pig since the primaries began.

It seemed obvious to her (and to me) that Trump would behave the way the video proves that he behaves, and it still seems obvious to me.

But it clearly wasn't obvious to everyone, including to many Republican politicians who suddenly came out condemning Trump.  Perhaps their different reactions were based on the argument Lithwick makes, that the new furor is about realizing that the "real" Trump was the same as the "performing" Trump?  Or perhaps it is simply because the video gives no slithering room for those who wish to defend Trump?  He said what he said and he was recorded saying it.

Then there was my initial reaction to how many Washington Post headlines* call the Trump video "lewd."  The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the word like this:

1. 2 a :  sexually unchaste or licentious b :  obscene, vulgar
   
   
   
   

I also read the words "crude" and "vulgar" in other contexts, as references to the Trump video, and to his early interview statements about women.  But those words don't quite capture the worst of his opinions, which is the way he appears to describe sexual assaults or at least sexual harassment when referring to what he views as his sexual conquests.

I could write a lewd post without that lack of consent being a part of the story.  That Trump assumes consent, what with being a star whom he assumes no-one can resist,  is not the same as actual consent.  And for anyone who has been sexually assaulted or harassed, often out of the blue, that video is very painful watching.

And right in the middle of writing this post, I see that readers of the New York Times have had similar concerns.

I've seen a lot written about how Trump has normalized utterances in the political discourse of this country which earlier were regarded as being beyond the pale.  That is what makes me worried:  the idea that he might normalize sexual harassment or even sexual assaults.


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* This one, this one and this one, at least.

Should Sports Boycotts Be Used In The Defense Of Human Rights? In The Defense of Women's Rights?

1.  This is what has just taken place:

Iran is the only country willing to host Women's World Chess Championship matches next February, so it has been awarded the competition.

The Iranian law requires that all women, regardless of their religion, must wear Islamic dress which in Iran includes a hijab or a head scarf.  This means that the chess-players from other countries, whether Muslims or not, must also wear the hijab, at least outside the game arenas.

Nazi Paikidze, a Georgian-American International Master and a Woman Grandmaster in chess, has announced that she will boycott the games  because the players will have to wear hijabs (1).  She has also

launched a campaign on Change.org demanding that the World Chess Federation reconsider Iran as a host for the women’s championship.
“These issues reach far beyond the chess world,” the petition says. “While there has been social progress in Iran, women’s rights remain severely restricted. This is more than one event; it is a fight for women’s rights.”
The petition has been signed by more than 3,000 people.
But some disagree with Paikidze’s stance. Mitra Hejazipour, a woman grandmaster (WGM) and the 2015 Asian continental women’s champion, said a boycott would be a setback for female sport in Iran.
“This is going to be the biggest sporting event women in Iran have ever seen; we haven’t been able to host any world championship in other sporting fields for women in the past,” Hejazipour, 23, told the Guardian. “It’s not right to call for a boycott. These games are important for women in Iran; it’s an opportunity for us to show our strength.”

That quote reflects the general question whether sports (and other) boycotts (chess being counted as a sport here) for human rights reasons help or hurt those they are intended to help.

But it doesn't really reflect the extent of inequality Iranian women legally must accept, which goes far beyond an obligatory religious dress code (2).

Even within the limited world of spectator sports,  Iranian women are banned from attending men's soccer or volleyball games.  Within the wider world of international sports the religious dress requirement can make participation extremely difficult for Iranian women (3) or seriously hamper their chances of doing well, given that their competitors are not subjected to the same requirements.

From The "Whose Body Is It, Anyway?" Files. Three Case Studies.

1.  In Poland the ruling right-wing Law and Justice party (PiS) proposed an almost complete abortion ban, with the only exception being the unintended death of the fetus to save the pregnant woman's life.

This is not the first such proposal in Poland, a "staunchly" Catholic country.  The Catholic Church has a finger in every political pie in the country, and would like that finger in every Polish vagina, too,  especially now that PiS,  the party most intertwined with the Church,  is running the government.  To put it plainly, it's time to play the piper for its political support, and that piper is the Catholic Church.

But the proposal was overwhelmingly rejected, despite that "staunch" Catholicism of the country.  Why?

This is why:

Some 100,000 people, mostly women, protested against the proposals in cities across Poland on Monday and appeared to prompt the PiS to swing against the bill, although the party promotes Catholic values.

Prime Minister Beata Szydlo distanced herself from a change to the law and Deputy Prime Minister Jaroslaw Gowin moved to reassure women on Wednesday that a total ban would not get through.
"Abortion will certainly not be banned when the woman is the victim of rape or if her life or her health is in danger," he insisted.

Whether Polish women (or Poles, in general) are especially feminist is unclear to me.  It could be that the protests are caused by an anger at the way the Catholic Church has played party-politics in Poland, as this article suggests.  It could be, but I doubt that, because then the 100,000 protesters wouldn't have mostly been women.

This counts as good news in my books.

2.  In Egypt, a lawmaker called Elhamy (or Ilhami) Agina has proposed that women should have to take a virginity test before going to college:

Agena said in an interview last week that virginity tests were needed to combat the proliferation of informal marriages, known as “gawaz orfy,” between students. Virtually expense free, such marriages have become more popular in recent years because of high youth unemployment and a shortage of affordable housing.
The gawaz orfy is widely viewed as a religiously sanctioned way of having premarital sex, a taboo in mostly conservative and majority Muslim Egypt. Muslim clerics have spoken out against such marriages.
In Egypt, as in other conservative, Muslim countries, a young woman’s virginity is widely seen as a matter of family honor, the loss of which could prevent her from getting married.

Mr. Agena sees himself as the shepherd of the flocks of women-with-vulvas in other ways, too.  For example, he has defended Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) as a useful device to keep that horrible lust for sex under control.  But his take on the value of that practice is somewhat different:

Agena’s comments about women have sparked controversy in the past, including claims that some female lawmakers were not dressing modestly enough.
He sparked an uproar last month by saying that the practice of female genital mutilation, or FGM, was needed to curb women’s sexuality and counterbalance allegedly widespread male impotence in Egypt. He claimed that 64 percent of Egyptian men suffer from impotence, citing increased sales of Viagra.
“If women are not circumcised, they will become sexually strong and there will be a problem,” an imbalance leading to divorce, he added.

Mr. Agena sounds to me as weird as a turnip playing bagpipes.  But a conservative culture can almost be defined by an odd mixture of public-and-private ownership of women's bodies*:

In private, women's bodies belong to their male guardians, the individuals who rule the family.  But in a more public sense women's bodies belong to both their wider kin (that family honor business) and the wider society.  It's that wider society that Mr. Agena attempts to represent when he proposes the sticking of fingers into young Egyptian women's vulvas.

Here's the good news:  Mr. Agena's gentle proposal caused at least some anger in Egypt:

A women’s rights group has filed a legal complaint against an Egyptian lawmaker who called for mandatory virginity tests for women seeking university admission, the Al-Masry Al-Youm newspaper reported Sunday.
It quoted Maya Morsi, head of the state-sanctioned National Council for Women, as saying the complaint demands the expulsion from parliament of Ilhami Agena and a criminal investigation into his actions. She said the lawmaker was harming the reputation of Egyptian women, men and the country itself.

After female law-makers protested Agena's proposal, the speaker of the Egyptian parliament has agreed to refer Mr. Agena to an ethics committee which has the power of expulsion.

But note that the last quote above doesn't talk about the ownership of the female body, only about the reputation of Egyptian women, men and the country itself.  In that sense it is more linked to the concept of honor as dwelling in women's vaginas than it is to the question who owns our bodies.

3.  The US Republican vice-presidential candidate, the Christianist Mike Pence, is also pretty keen on supervising the doings and beings of the female body.  The US Republican presidential candidate, one Donald Trump, of course believes that the ownership of all female bodies belongs to him.
  


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*A more liberal culture has slightly different ideas about who has the right to female bodies, with more women demanding that right to rule their own bodies, while, at the same time, there's that public ownership of such bodies in pronography (spelling mistake intentional).

The idea that families have a say, too, hasn't died out, either.

Heterosexual Women: Pick That Diploma Or Pick That Husband. Your Choice!

The lonely plight of the educated woman is a very old trope in opinion writing about men and women and heterosexual marriage, and I'm not blameless when it comes to writing on that topic, though I tend to write from the other side.

My first blog post on this fascinating topic was 2003.  I quote from it:

1890's: A marriage study concluded that only 28 percent of college-educated women could get married.

1940's: A Cornell University study said that college-educated single women had no more than a 65 percent chance of getting married.
1940's: This Week (a Sunday magazine): A college education "skyrockets your chances of becoming an old maid."
2000's: Sylvia Ann Hewlett, in Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children, (2002):"Nowadays, the rule of thumb seems to be that the more successful a woman, the less likely it is she will find a husband or bear a child."

And more on the same topic can be found in this post, this post and this post.   Also here, here and here. More links can be had inside some of those posts.

So what does the actual data tell us about women, education levels and marriage today?  Two sources I found by quick Googling tell me that

a) in a 2010 study the marriage rates of college-educated women were essentially the same as the marriage rates of women who had some college and the marriage rates of women who only had a high school diploma.  All those were higher than the marriage rates of women with less than a high school diploma.*

and**

b) Historically, college-educated women were less likely to marry.  But beginning with people born in 1955–64, college-educated women became more likely than other women to ever marry.  Recent projections suggest that the educational gap in marriage will continue to widen over time.  Other evidence has shown that higher-earning women are also increasingly more likely to marry.

What made me write about this again, you might ask.  Well, Helsingin Sanomat, the biggest newspaper in Finland published an "opinion" piece on the topic of those poor highly learned women who  just can't catch a husband, possibly because men want to dominate women (evolutionary psychology), possibly because religions tell them to do that (both the Bible and the Quran tell men that they are superior), or possibly because men lack the self-confidence to marry a woman with more education than the man has.  She might want to boss him about!

The piece ends with a lamentation about the need for more children, presumably by highly educated women.

I have always enjoyed those they-sky-is-falling-wimminz-have-degrees! pieces for several reasons.

They are ALWAYS about the impossibility for heterosexual women to find a husband, even though the roughly average numbers of men and women in the fertile years tells us that any vast army of single women would have to be matched by a vast army of single men****.  But these stories are never about the plight of the single men who would want to get married.  That is extremely puzzling.

Well, not really, because the subtext in that opinion piece is to scare women away from higher education, to tell them that if they go to medical school they will sleep only with their stethoscopes or if they go to law school they will sleep only with their law books.  So pick the diploma or pick the husband.

That's how I interpreted the message, what with being an old hand in reading these types of opinions.  But the people commenting on the piece saw the article as man-bashing, and I can see their point, at least on the superficial level, though I strongly disagree about the actual aim of the piece.

The response to the article reflected that man-bashing assumption:  Over half the comments are woman-bashing, in particular the bashing of women with university degrees, who have only learned stuff by memorizing it and repeating it like a parrot, who are fat feminists who hate men, who are arrogant and full of their own greatness and so on.  Another third addressed those comments, so a good fight could be enjoyed by all.  The rest were about the need to have women who are feminine, cook well, and listen extremely well, not these arrogant harpies who have upended traditional sex roles and such.

Sigh.  I should never read the comments.  I know that, but I need a twelve-step program to make me stop reading them.  It's like an addiction.  I close the computer, work away, do tai chi, and then I'm drawn back, as if by a giant magnet, and I have to read them, because some tiny flame inside my heart thinks that they might actually be good ones, this time, though they never have been good ones yet!

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*   These data from the NLSY79 apply to individuals born between 1957 and 1965.   They were interviewed in 2010.  The same study also found that divorce rates were lower for college-educated women than for women with less education.

** This is a direct quote from the article, which also addresses racial and ethnic differences in marriage rates.  Table 3 in the article shows marriage patterns for men and women in different ethnic and racial groups by levels of education and notes the destructive impact of economic disparities on the marriage rates of both less educated blacks and now also less educated whites.

Although the actual percentages differ, more educated men and women were in 2012 more likely to have been ever married (including, of course, being married right now) than men and women with less education, with the exception of educated white women who were equally likely to have ever been married as the less educated groups of white women.

Thus, none of the recent evidence supports the assertion that it is the educated women who cannot find a husband.

***  I haven't bothered translating the piece here.  I can do that if you think it's necessary, but it's time-consuming.   The important point is this:  It seems perfectly fine to publish an opinion piece which doesn't give any data which shows that  the presumed problem (educated women not finding husbands) actually exists.  It doesn't exist in the US, but of course it could exist in Finland.  Or not.  We cannot tell, because the evidence is not provided.

The piece is clickbait, of course, though I am sad that even an august newspaper must resort to that.

Oh, and I forgot to mention the usual comment which states that certain sex roles are "natural."  You can guess which arrangement that might be.  Hint:  It's the arrangement where one spouse is the employer and the other spouse the employee, with power relationships based on that.  It's not the partnership or team arrangement.  

****  Except in the case of polyandry, of course!

Rudy Giuliani and Bob Woodward Talk about Hillary Clinton. I Dissect.

What a scrumptious day for news about the US presidential campaign of 2016 for someone who holds the magnifying glass to the events in order to spot anything sexist.  You know, the kind of stuff which doesn't apply to only one Hillary Clinton but to several billion women on this little globe.

Take the comment of Rudolph Giuliani who used to be the mayor of New York City.  He adores Donald Trump, which is sad in itself, but this is even sadder.  I copied down what he said in praise of Trump, in case you can't be bothered with the video:

Don’t you think a man who has this kind of economic genius is a lot better for the United States than a woman and the only thing she has produced is a lot of work for the FBI checking out her e-mails.

Ooops!  Our Rudy may have experienced one of those sexist moments, where the tongue races faster than the regulating part of the brain.  Or perhaps he didn't really intend to have that little "and" in the sentence*?  Perhaps he meant to compare Trump's economic genius (!!! I'm falling off my chair for laughing so much) to Clinton's e-mail debacle?

The Hot Air site argues that Giuliani only meant to compare that economic genius to the e-mails, and in order to prove that they did a gender reversal:

Just examine the sentence and imagine Hillary Clinton were not a woman. Insert “man” instead:

“Don’t you think a man who has this kind of economic genius is a lot better for the United States than a man, and the only thing he’s ever produced is a lot of work for the FBI checking out his emails?”

Is there anything strange about that sentence when it is reoriented to male-specific pronouns? Of course not.

Yes, there is something strange about that sentence when it is reoriented to male-specific pronouns.  It makes no sense, because of that little "and," once again.  It's still comparing that-economic-genius man to some generic man. just as in the original the comparison is between the Nobel-prize-level thinker to a generic woman, who also has other problems.

Who knows what Giuliani meant.  Still, I'd like to note that I believe an ironing board would be a better president for the United States than Donald Trump.  A ham sandwich would be a better president, and neither would tweet at 3am in revenge for personal slights.

Which brings me to the second hilarious piece of the day:  Bob Woodward, of the Washington Post fame, criticized Hillary Clinton for gloating after her debate victory:

Woodward: "Yeah. She won the debate. I think there's universal agreement on that. I guess Trump would not agree. But she really did. But, you know, that clip shows this kind of self-congratulation, this self-satisfaction. And as we know and as we try to teach our children, when you win something, don't gloat. Humility works. And the problem for her is this feeds the notion that she's in this for herself. You see that. She was overjoyed with what she did. Fine, take a victory lap, but there is — something like that doesn't get dialed back, and it probably should."

Think of the children!  What makes this funny is, of course, the way Donald Trump gloats** and boasts about every single thing:  His fantastic and beautiful corporations, his fantastic and beautiful bankruptcies, his fantastic and beautiful plans to salvage the country etc, and his great political victories.

So does Woodward then logically think that Donald Trump is really in this for himself? 

I don't know, but I suspect that it's the idea of female ambition as deplorable that underlies his analysis of Hillary Clinton's behavior.  Granted, it's tough to draw statistical conclusions from the way one female politician is treated, given that powerful female politicians are as rare as hen's teeth. 

Thus, it's theoretically possible that Hillary is unusually self-centered and ruthlessly ambitious.  But if that's the case, what is Donald???

And why isn't he equally criticized for his clear narcissism?

Nah.  I smell entrenched ideas about the way "good" women are expected to act here: humble, unselfish and considerate.  And then, sadly, ineffective, because humility, unselfishness and politeness are not rewarded in the power hierarchies of this world.

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*  This would fix the problem:

  Don’t you think a man who has this kind of economic genius is a lot better for the United States than a woman who has only produced a lot of work for the FBI checking out her e-mails.

**  Examples can be found here, here, here,  here, here and here.

Friday Silliness

This picture is a fun gender-reversal:

Very few other male politicians could get away with what Trump has been allowed to get away with.  Still, that sentence  "...had five kids by 3 men, was a repeat adulterer" might not hurt a man too much (coughGingrichcough), but it would torpedo the chances of any female candidate.  That, my erudite and wonderful readers, is because of that double-standard about sexuality most cultures in this world still maintain.

Short Posts 9/28/16: The Shimmy Song, Fashion Magazines And What Online Writing Is

1.  This is the Hillary shimmy song.  

Mind you, that shimmying could always be an early sign of leprosy or hoof-and-mouth disease or some other menacing malady.  At least if we believe right-wing long-distance diagnosticians.

2.  An interesting video showing what's left when two women's magazines are denuded of their ad pages.  And of course fashion and beauty advice and even health advice is sold to women on the wider platform of You Are Not Good/Pretty/Healthy Enough, because that is the platform which works.  The industry needs to keep women insecure* but not so insecure that we just go "what-the-f**k, I'm not perfectible, so I'd rather go and enjoy life as I am."

I'm more curious about the poses the models must take in the ads, because those poses are oddly passive, oddly similar to a broken doll tossed across the floor by an enraged (but rich) child, while at the same time the eyes of the models are often half-shut, empty of life, and the lips of the models are slightly open, swollen, as if after some fairly strenuous sex.  Or the few cases where the model appears to be leaping or running or turning pirouettes; all that while walking on stilts.

What are the subtexts in all that?

3.  I have stumbled into some financial insecurity, so I have Googled various types of extra jobs, including online writing (which I'm doing here, essentially for nothing, because I'm a very stupid goddess).  The sites specializing in free lance writing jobs are wonderful places!

Minimum wages are an unheard concept, people should want to write a 6000-word article for the grand total of thirty dollars, and expect someone else's name to be attached to the piece once it is finished, after a month's work.  One job would have required ten blog posts a day, at five dollars per post, with pictures and all!**

Then there's the site where the home page, intended to lure both clients and writers to the site, has truly awful clunky and grammatically incorrect writing.

Now that is a truly bizarre labor market, though it's true that many, many people today write for nothing, and are glad to get into print.  So why would the clients pay for the milk when the cow itself jumps into the oven and turns it on?

That can make a goddess gloomy.  But then I cheered up immediately, because I Googled economic writing jobs, thinking that the extra expertise would up the pay a little.

And it does.  But, my friends, I found that the quickest way to make money in that sub-market is to solve college students' economics homework problems for them or to write their term papers.  Somewhat unethical, wouldn't you say?

Still.  I think I will become a ghost-writer, hovering ominously in the background of the articles while going "BOO!"

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*  Insecurity is also used in marketing products for men, but the role of insecurity in the marketing for women is much more central.

**  The clients or customers appear to have absolutely no idea how long writing takes or how much research is required for it to be any good.  To rely on a market where many on the supply side are willing to work for zero pay doesn't correct this problem, because ultimately those who give it away for nothing will die of overwork and hunger.  And what you get when pay five dollars per post is a post worth less than five dollars.  That's just basic economics.

The First Bigly, Good and Beautiful Presidential Debate

I love Donald Trump's presidential language:

The United States is a mess, the Middle East is a mess, NATO is a mess, and the Americans lose on everything.

But Mr. Trump, he has the great temperament, the winning temperament, and the stamina to steer this country out of all those messes!  He can give us witness testimonials about what a wonderful guy he is, what beautiful businesses he has built (and bankrupted).  Indeed, he is just the greatest.

Now that was important to include in a presidential debate, in case someone in the audience hadn't already learned that Donald thinks he's the greatest thing since grated cheese.

Ms. Clinton, on the other hand, doesn't have the right temperament, doesn't have any business ability, doesn't have judgment.

And luring the wealthy corporations to bring back their money to the United States would be beautiful, beautiful.

Now parse all that for me.  Then ask yourselves if the media wouldn't have found such a language inappropriately fuzzy and inappropriately emotional had it come from the mouth of some other politician. Say, Hillary Clinton.

The whole debate was a hoot, a bit like the sound Hillary Clinton made when Donald Trump told us that she doesn't have the temperament, the judgment or the stamina to be the president of the United States.  Perhaps that attack was based on the Republican code-book of always attacking your opponents at what their strengths are?  Even if they are your own weaknesses?

So who won the debate?  The general agreement is that Hillary Clinton did.  I'm not quite sure what the basis of that judgment is, whether it is that she was better on facts* or future policies, or just the better debater, though I think that she won in all of those categories.

Two parts of the debate stuck to my mind:

First, Trump's insistence that Hillary Clinton, together with Barack Obama, created ISIS.  That, by the way, caused some coffee to be spewed on my screen.

George Walker Bush would be the name that comes to mind if a particular American would be accused of enabling ISIS**, not Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton.   It was our Georgie Porgie who poked a sleeping beehive with a stick and then ran away when the bees woke up.  It was our Georgie Porgie  who sent young Tea Party personnel over to Iraq to create a free market, it was our Georgie Porgie who destroyed the Iraqi army, without apparently knowing anything about the Shia-Sunni quarrels,   and it was our Georgie Porgie who did all that without any understanding of what he got into.

To be quite honest, my research into ISIS, which I used for an earlier three-post series, taught me that the roots of ISIS are complicated, hard to eradicate and that it's quite possible that very few Western politicians really understand the size of the problem.  But surely Trump's utterance serves as the most idiotic one ever.

Second, Trump's inability to properly counter Clinton's references to the way he had treated Alicia Machado, the Miss Universe of 1996.  Trump loves judging women's bodies so much that he's been in the beauty pageant business for years.

The case of Ms. Machado was about her gaining weight during the year she was the ruling Miss Universe.  According to Hillary Clinton, Trump's concern with that weight gain made him call Ms. Machado names:

"And one of the worst things he said was about a woman in a beauty contest -- he loves beauty contests, supporting them and hanging around them -- and he called this woman 'Miss Piggy,' then he called her 'Miss Housekeeping' because she was Latina," Clinton had said.

The point I want to make about all that is this:  Trump knows that Clinton is accusing him of sexism and misogyny (with good evidence, I might add).  So why didn't he prepare for something of this sort to come up in the debates?  Is it because he didn't prepare for the debates at all, what with already being the greatest?  Or is it because wimminfolk really do not matter in his mind?

To be completely fair, I should note that Trump did better in the first fifteen minutes or so, before his ramblings began.  He also brought up one important issue, and that is the way the costs and benefits of globalization fall differently:

The costs of globalization have hit the American working classes much more than they have hit the middle classes or, goddess bless, the very rich (who largely benefit from globalization).  Yet neither party has proposed anything that would truly work to compensate those workers who have lost their jobs in this country (especially in middle age, say), while others are enjoying cheaper foreign goods and services and firms increase their profits by locating abroad.

I credit Trump for stating the problem.  His solutions to it are, however, gobbledygook.  As are his solutions to most everything.

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* Different sites check somewhat different assertions.  Here are a few more fact check sites for you to peruse:  CNN, USA Today,  Politifact.

** The Syrian civil war might have happened even in the absence of the Iraq invasion, and regional and religious politics also pay the role.  But it's also true that some within ISIS are fighting a grudge war against the West, with roots in the early crusades, and that those same theologians see both sides only in terms of religions.  This does not negate the crucial and harmful role Western imperialism and greed for oil have had in creating the current situation.  But no one person, not even Hillary Clinton!, can be seen as the architect of ISIS.

More on the False Equivalence in The 2016 Presidential Elections

Paul Krugman writes about the false equivalence phenomenon in how the media has handled the two presidential candidates:

If Donald Trump becomes president, the news media will bear a large share of the blame. I know some (many) journalists are busy denying responsibility, but this is absurd, and I think they know it. As Nick Kristof says, polls showing that the public considers Hillary Clinton, a minor fibber at most, less trustworthy than a pathological liar is prima facie evidence of massive media failure.

Or put it this way:  We have a spelling bee in the final round of questions. The winner will run the world.  One candidate is asked to spell "huge", the other candidate is asked to spell "prospicience."

Or put it this way:  One candidate's 'errors and flaws' are subjected to a microscope, the other candidate's 'errors and flaws' are viewed through the kind of veil that was used to film romantic moments and happy endings in old movies*.  At the same time, one candidate's expertise and experience are ignored, the other candidate's lack of expertise and lack of experience are also ignored.  That, my friends is not equivalent treatment.

Or put it this way:  One candidate is a racist, sexist turnip-head with no real qualifications for the job he wants, unless one believes that playing a bully in reality television is such a qualification**.

The other is a career politician.

Yet the false equivalency approach means that "Trump being Trump" is accepted as an excuse for the misogyny and the racism, whereas there is no such equivalence of "Hillary Clinton being Hillary Clinton" for anything she does or is accused of doing.

I see some change in the false equivalence approach, to give some in the media credit where credit is due.  But the damage is probably already done.

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* These "errors and flaws" are not intended to be read as being of the same size and/or nature.

**  With apologies to upstanding turnips everywhere.

Mirrors

Glenn Reynolds. On The Self-Harm Caused by Tweeting

My apologies for the quiet on this here blog.  Life and its troubles intervened.

Glenn Reynolds, a law professor ( who therefore should know better) and a conservative pundit, was temporarily suspended from Twitter for this tweet:

Reynolds is not my favorite flavor of the month*.  It's also worth noting that another right-wing pundit has been permanently suspended from Twitter for tweets which cross the line from pretend-performance-art to inciting real hatred toward other people and groups**.

Still,  there's something wider I want to say about this case, something which might matter to others than weird propagandists on Twitter. 

Reynolds defends the above tweet by saying, among other things, that he has sent off over 580,000 tweets, and they can't all be perfect.

But here's the thing:  Every single of those 580,000+ tweets can be saved, every single of them equals etching its message on the tissues of the universe , and every single one will be interpreted by someone as if it resulted from careful, slow and rational thought.

Twitter is a game***, or several games in one box.  There's the sub-game of ganging up on people, threatening people, doxxing people and so on.  There's the sub-game of trying to get people banned when they don't deserve to be banned****, there's the sub-game of sending hordes, small or large, to attack specific individuals.

Now, all those are nasty sub-games.  But the ones we all must play are the games of seemingly chatting with a few individuals while the message goes to the universe, the games of having trouble with the small number of characters allowed for a tweet, and the resulting game of being misunderstood, with various consequences.  There's the game of mixing up opinion with facts, of presenting false evidence in a way which is tough to correct,  and there's the game of taking things out of context.

Or so I think, and that's why I can't understand why people don't plait their fingers or stuff them into mittens or, if all else fails, chew them off, when they get angry while tweeting.  Because nothing good follows from the instinctive reaction of slashing back at someone without even having taken one breath first.


 

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*  A couple of examples of Reynolds' views on women and such can be found in this post and in this one.

** You can read more about the pundit described in that link here and here.

***  I'm not covering here the obviously useful and beneficial aspects of Twitter which are not really games.

***  This does not apply to Instapundit/Reynolds, but I have seen it done on Twitter.

The Dish-Draining Cabinet

This year was the 120th anniversary of the birth of Maiju Gebhard.  I bet you don't know who she was. 

She was the Finnish inventor of a dish draining cabinet/cupboard (though similar inventions were earlier patented in the US by Louise R. Krause in 1932 and Angiolina Scheuermann in 1929).  Here's one picture of what a dish draining cabinet is:

By Jarno Elonen - photo taken by Jarno Elonen, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=602283

The doors close, and the cabinet is right above the sink area.  Note the plastic-covered metal grids which create the bottoms of the racks.  They allow someone washing the dishes by hand to just put them into the cabinet and then close the doors.  No drying is necessary, and, indeed, the everyday dishes can just live in the cabinet, to be taken out of it when needed.

The dish draining cabinet became common in Finnish households, though not elsewhere.  Its industrial production began in 1948 and the plastic-covered metal wire grids were introduced in 1954.  The sizes were standardized in the early 1980s.

The introduction of the dishwasher made the dish draining cabinet less useful, of course.

This story is an example of the era when some women began studying the ergonomics of housework and tried to rationalize and reduce the labor of housewives. 

But I also like it because the dish draining cabinet or cupboard probably didn't cost much more to build than the ordinary kind of cabinet, yet saved labor for years to come (by making drying by hand unnecessary and by saving steps because the cabinet was right above the sink).  It might have even been more hygienic than the practice of drying dishes by hand.

Besides, there's a "duh, that's obviously a good idea!" feeling about the whole thing.

The New Times-CBS Presidential Race Poll. How Are White Men And White Women Planning To Vote?

A new Times-CBS poll suggests that the presidential race is tightening, though it's worth remembering that the questions were asked when Hillary Clinton was receiving even more negative public attention than she usually does.  Here's the summary table from the poll:

Polls are not elections, of course, and direct comparisons with past elections are not without problems.  Still, I decided to look at two rows in that table in order to see how they compare to what happened in the 2012 presidential election and in the 2014 mid-term elections.

Those two rows are the percentages of likely voters who are white women and white men*.  In the above table white men go for Trump 57-33, while white women narrowly go for Clinton 46-45.

What happened in 2012?  Sixty-two percent of white men voted for Romney, 56% of white women did.  Those figures reflect the traditional party split among American whites.  The reasons for that split are many.  In the 2012 presidential election these reasons were suggested:**

Without much doubt, attitudes about race—and even outright racism—played a role, although one that is hard to quantify. But it’s far from the only thing. Income is important. On average, white men and women tend to be richer than non-whites, and voting Republican is strongly correlated with income. (In families that made less than a hundred thousand dollars a year, Obama won by eight points. In families that made more than a hundred thousand dollars a year, Romney won by ten points.) Age is another factor. Whites, on average, tend to be older than non-whites, and older people (male and female) tend to vote Republican in greater numbers. Religion is also part of the story. Most white women, like most white men, are churchgoing Christians, a group that is strongly Republican—especially evangelicals, who voted for Romney by almost four to one. Then there is ideology. Just as there are conservative men, there are conservative women.

The 2014 midterm voting patterns reinforce the above arguments:  Sixty-four percent of white men voted Republican in that election, and so did 56% of white women. 

Is there anything useful we might glean from those comparisons, given that the 2016 numbers come from a poll, that third-party candidates complicate analysis and so on?

I believe that a Trump-As-A-Misogynistic-Asshat*** effect is visible in those findings, especially when it comes to the possible voting patterns of white women this year.  The majority of white women have traditionally voted for Republicans, but that may not necessarily be the case this year.

And the difference is because the man who is running on the Republican ticket this time is a man who doesn't even bother to hide his sexism the way past Republican candidates have hidden it.

But is there an effect from the Trump-As-A-Know-Nothing candidate?  I'm not sure, because I don't have the time to do the kind of digging that would be required to guarantee that the numbers from various years are at least somewhat comparable.   But it looks like there might be one.

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*  Because these are still the largest voter groups and because Trump's support is especially strong among white men.  It's not weak among white women, either, and both these numbers make me sad.  Trump is a racist and sexist egomaniac.  That so many people are fine with that makes me sad and cynical.

**  That paragraph is about the 2012 elections where racism had a more open role to play.  Sexism will take a comparable role in the 2016 elections.

Note, though, that the quoted explanation doesn't quite explain why in 2016 whites without college education might prefer Trump 58-32, whereas whites with college education prefer Clinton 51-40.  The latter group has the higher income.  But the case of one Donald Trump might be exceptional.

**  He is also a racist asshat, a person knowing very little about the job he is applying for, a person who seems unable to contain his own temper tantrums, and a person who just might decide to nuke some country because he had a bad-hair day.  Which is every day of the year.   

Short Posts 9/14/16: On Undecided Voters, Missing Women On Conference Panels and Chelsea Clinton's Mothering Skills

1.  Digby writes about one of the undecided voters profiled in a GQ story.   That particular voter is not given a name in the story, only a profession, which would be politics reporting, so we can't tell if all the undecided people interviewed in the GQ article are men or all but one.  I suspect that the anonymous person is a guy, too,  and white, given the concerns that person has about Clinton and Trump:

I cannot stomach Hillary Clinton. I just can't get with her. Maybe because I know too much. I find so much of her world hypocritical, reprehensible. I think the rest of the country sort of gives her a pass, like, "Oh, she's always been attacked by Republicans, it's not that big a deal, email shmemail!" But I'm like, "WHAT! This is a huge deal."

And then I also obviously struggle with Donald Trump. The things I like about him are: I believe that sometimes you just have to blow shit up to build it again, and I think that a Trump presidency would do that. But just when I sort of get there with him, like, Ohhhhhhkayyyy, he says or does something and I'm like, "No, I can't!" Like saying, "What do you have to lose?" to African-Americans. Like, WHAT? What?
...

Gun to my head, I would probably vote Trump because of my feelings about Hillary, and my—I just want to see what happens. But if I were to talk to you tomorrow, I'd be like, "Ugh! I've gotta vote for Hillary!" 

What struck me about those opinions is the way different classes of people have different amounts of "skin in the game."  If Trump's penchant for nuking other countries would be openly linked to bringing back the draft, perhaps the above opinions would have been different?  The excitement with "blowing shit up to build it again" might have been somewhat more muted if blowing that shit up meant that the person: "politics reporter, Washington DC,  42",  might get blown up as part of the shit or if it was that person's child who would be conscripted and sent to participate in the blowing up.

I could be wrong, of course, but when "shit is being blown up" some people get blown up with it first.  Or some people get their lives made more difficult, their safety endangered, their incomes diminished,  their bodies controlled.  Maybe not people who can be defined as "politics reporter, Washington, DC, 42."  In other words, for some the idea of "blowing shit up" is abstract, for others it is much more concrete.

2.  A new study (which I have not read) is reported to cast more light on the impact of being viewed as a woman or as a man has on who gets a paper accepted at a scientific conference:

The study -- published in the Journal of Language Evolution -- is based on a change in the way paper proposals were reviewed for the Evolution of Language Conference, which takes place every two years and is a premier academic event for those in the field. For the most recent conference, held this year, the organizers switched from a single-blind review to a double-blind review.
In single-blind review, the names of reviewers are not disclosed to those who have made submissions. The idea is that reviewers need not fear offending anyone with frank comments. But the reviewers know who has submitted. In double-blind review, all names are shielded, so that reviewers' identities are protected, but they don't know the identities of those who are being judged.
When the language conference switched to double blind this year, the rankings of paper proposals from women or teams where a woman was the first author saw a gain of 4 percent on the ratings system. The ratings of proposals by men or where a man was the first author saw a 19 percent decline in their ratings.
Further, the study found a gender impact when looking at women and men who had submitted papers under single-blind review to prior conferences and to the most recent conference under double-blind review. Under double blind, the women-authored papers moved up and the men-authored papers moved down in the rankings.

I can make theories about what might have driven those findings*, but, in essence, the outcome looks similar to the one observed once orchestras began auditioning new members using a screen which hid the person's external attributes from the judges but left the music audible:  Many more women were accepted as members.

Certain attributes:  perceived biological sex, race, age, body size etc. can all function as seemingly relevant information to our subconscious judges about a person's skills and abilities, even when the information is not relevant.

It's also possible, of course, that this finding was a fluke one, caused by something having changed over time in the relative quality of the papers women and teams led by women submitted, as compared to the quality of the papers men and teams led by men submitted.  Though I doubt that, and add it here just because I try to be a thorough goddess.

3.  Here's today's fun piece of crap:

The subtext is that Chelsea Clinton might be a bad mother, but it's really tough to make that explicit enough.**  So we are asked:  Is it acceptable for one parent to drop the child off on the first day of school?

Hmm.  Let me think about that one for a minute or two!  Is it acceptable for just one parent to drop the child off on the first day of school if that parent is the mother? 

What percentage of children have both parents drop them off on the first day of school? 

What percentage of children, traditionally, had just their mothers drop them off on that day?  Just their fathers?

Getting that subtext about bad-mothering accusations clear enough is hard if it is done in the context of "parenting," not in the context of "traditional mothering" obligations.   Mmm.

Do weird kinds of journalists follow Trump's wife, sons and daughters around in order to find what kind of people they might be? 
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* But those theories are just idle speculation.  Here are a few examples, for those who are interested: 

It could be that people use academic rank as a signal of how good an article might be, and if women, on average, are less likely to be full professors, then that would hurt them.  It could be that people use institutional affiliation as a signal of how good an article might be, and if women, on average, are less likely to have one of those truly fancy institutional affiliations (Ivy League, say), then that would hurt them.

Or both of these together or in combination of that psychological phenomenon where women at meetings or seminars or conferences may just not get their opinions listened to that seriously, what with being subconsciously viewed as individuals of lesser rank, less powerful to affect the career of someone else,  and therefore safer to ignore when time and resources are short.

**  Imagine if the story was reversed:  Mark Mezvinsky, Hillary Clinton's son-in-law, misses the first day of his daughter's school.  That wouldn't even be a story.  And just as an aside, did Donald Trump take his children to school on their first days of school?

The US Presidential Campaigns as Rope-Dancing

I'm back in the US.  But not completely up-to-date on the presidential elections or  the most incredible, the most frightening,  and the most hilarious debates about who might be the best person to run the still-most-powerful country on earth and which characteristics in that person matter and which do not.

Had someone written a book with a plot based on the 2016 US presidential elections before they began, the proposal would have been deemed far too unrealistic to be credible, though perhaps the way George Bush straddled the horse of freedom in 2000 should have lowered the bar.

And look what George Bush accomplished!  He isn't the only one responsible for the slaughter and chaos that is Middle East today, but he certainly opened the doors for it, strengthened the powers of the most frightening religious lunatics in the recent history, and left the hoof-marks of his apocalyptic freedom-and-know-nothing horse all over the ground there and even in Europe.

See what did lowering the bar buy us before?  I write "buy" because far too many, both among political journalists and the American public, see the election campaigns from the angle of a consumer or a sports critic or an art critic: 

Are we enjoying this reality show?  Are we entertained?   We won't buy if we are not entertained!

That political participation is not consumption goes unnoticed by too many.  We cannot refuse to buy if we believe the quality is too low or the price too high, some president will be stuffed into our shopping basket anyway.

Will it be Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton?  If one sees the presidential campaigning as a circus act, as many appear to do, then these two are dancing on ropes and we, the audience, are judging their performances.  Only, one rope, the one on which Trump cavorts, is stretched about two inches above the ground.  The other rope is stretched high enough for us to see Clinton's knickers should we wish to do so (and should she stop wearing pant suits). 

The New York Times' new ombudsman, Liz Spayd,  believes that the two ropes are stretched on the same height, and if they are not, it's not for the journalists to point that out or to judge the performances any different:

The problem with false balance doctrine is that it masquerades as rational thinking. What the critics really want is for journalists to apply their own moral and ideological judgments to the candidates. Take one example. Suppose journalists deem Clinton’s use of private email servers a minor offense compared with Trump inciting Russia to influence an American election by hacking into computers — remember that? Is the next step for a paternalistic media to barely cover Clinton’s email so that the public isn’t confused about what’s more important? Should her email saga be covered at all? It’s a slippery slope.

 A wobble is a wobble!  Journalists are not judges!

But of course journalists are judges, for how else could they decide when a wobble has taken place or when to report on one having been spotted?

A recent Politico article by Eli Stokols and Hadas Gold  sees the accusations of "false balance"  differently:

With fewer than 60 days left in this campaign, news organizations are still struggling to square their approach to covering two candidates who couldn’t be more different: Hillary Clinton, who adheres to the established rules of engagement, and Trump, a convention-busting, media-dominating nominee with an asymmetrical campaign. The result, Clinton’s advisers lament and news executives admit, is a wide gap in what the public expects — and accepts as credible — from the country’s top two presidential candidates. Trump’s bar is undeniably far lower than Clinton’s. 

But it's not just the news organizations which have trouble in judging the two rope dancers; it's also many voters:

Trump has seemingly withstood the onslaught because so many voters appear wiling to forgive his insulting rhetoric and policy ignorance. That’s certainly been borne out by public and private focus groups.
“We’d show voters stupid things he’s said, and they’d just shrug and say, ‘That’s just Trump being Trump,’” said one Democratic operative who has observed Clinton campaign focus groups. “It was a fairly common response, and it was horrifying.”

It's just Trump being Trump...  And politics is not about what happens after the elections, what happens during those four years, but it's about the show.  Trump is a good showman!  He will be forgiven all sorts of bad things, just as, in my experience, bullies and rude people are sometimes forgiven bad things on the premise that it's just how they are.  Even the "boys will be boys" phrase is similar, referring to something that might be negative, but just can't be changed, because it is How Things Are.

In practice that means Donald Trump, while dancing on his rope barely off the floor, is judged as not having wobbled that much, because he's a guy who always wobbles! 

So.  And the competition, just as a reminder, is about who is to govern the most powerful country on this earth.