So Why Isn't Anything A Big Deal Anymore?

So asks the great bard Charlie Pierce in his latest column about  Comey and Flynn.  Read the column.  I did and then shed bitter tears of venom for not having Pierce's gift of the gab.

Never mind.  Charlie correctly frames* that uncomfortable whole-body itch I've had ever since the horrible elections of 2016:

Publicly expressed "values" are upside down, with greed now dressed as prudence and lies as alternative truth.  The powerful on their sky-high gilded balconies pee on us and we call it rain, carefully analyzing which of us truly voted for a rain of urine (but only if it falls on the Others) or a rain of green Pepe frogs, and which  among us foolishly voted for the status quo in this era when any change is better than none, even change from chronic acne to metastatic malignant melanoma.

Thus we get the Flynn farce and the Comey comedy, the latter with its last or latest act only played today. 

You don't have to be a goddess to see that Comey's decision to publish largely fake facts about Hillary Clinton's emails just a few days before the presidential election was aimed at getting Trump elected, and you would not be normal if you didn't feel that this decision was especially disgusting in the light of what we now know about the simultaneously ongoing  investigations into Trump's possible Russian connections.

And whoever you are it's impossible not to ask why Trump decided to fire Comey today, in a letter which stated:

“While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the bureau,”

It's the timing of the firing which is suspicious, given that Trump has been aware of all pertinent Comey-facts for a long time and, indeed, had praised Comey for having the "guts" to reopen the Clinton investigation right before the elections.

So what could possibly have changed?  And is the answer to that question a big deal or not?  Does Trump protest too much in the above quote?  Was Comey shown the door because he is investigating Trump?  Will we now ever know?

And is that a big deal or not?


Sigh, almost nothing is a big deal anymore**.  It's not a big deal that Trump's administration still includes Sebastian Gorka, a man with pretty clear fascist tendencies.  It's not a big deal that Mike Cernovich -- who once wrote about how truly manly dominant men should go around choking women -- now has a White House press pass.  It's not a big deal that the Rasputin behind Trump's throne, Stephen Bannon, wants to demolish the administrative state.

It's not a big deal that we have a president who loves women the way I love spaghetti with pesto and who changes his wives the way some of us change our cars or our fashion wear, and it's not a big deal that white fundamentalist Evangelicals voted for that very un-Christian president in overwhelming numbers, because the real Christian values for them are not in charity or good deeds but in the control over women.

It's not a big deal that the Russians in 2016 hacked into the voter rolls in several American states.  It's not a big deal that the president of the United States refuses to show us his tax returns or an accurate picture of his health, and it's not a big deal that the Trump corporations are fairly openly trying to benefit from the official position of our Dear Leader.

And it's not a big deal that the countrywide Republican attempts to suppress  voting by people of color and other groups likely to vote for Democrats have been shown to be successful.

Finally, it wasn't anything to get upset about that president Obama's Supreme Court nominee could not get a hearing, for reasons that had nothing to do with the old-fashioned rules of democracy, and it was perfectly ordinary to suddenly find that thousands of our fellow-Americans sincerely believed that a Washington, DC, pizzeria was the den of pederasts, led by Hillary Clinton or at least by someone on her staff.



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* The over-extension of Pierce's  explanation to my own itches should not be attributed to him.

** With two possible exceptions:  Trump's attempts to ban Muslims from entering the United States which has been seen as a big deal by both the courts and by large numbers of protesters, and the killing of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), to be replaced by tax cuts for the rich and higher death rates of the poor.

Is Ivanka The New Hillary?

Nina Burleigh argues so in a recent Newsweek article:  Both Ivanka and Hillary grabbed power in the White House that was not theirs, both protected sexist male relatives, both got to power via nepotism,  both solicited foreign donations to their foundations (evil!), both want poor women to make baskets (start firms), both are cyphers, and both are ethically challenged.

It's not exactly a fun read, that piece, but it's a great example to take apart for the purposes of feminist analysis.

To begin with, the author does not mention the role that Jared Kushner,  Ivanka's husband,  plays in the Trump administration or the role her brothers may play in letting Donald still have his business ventures.  The difference, of course, is that Hillary and Ivanka bear the stain of Eve.

Today's Deep Thought: Class Warfare.

We don't call it a class war when the rich are winning, and that is what's happening right now.

Our Dear Leader and his administration have been busy moving money upward in the income distribution, both with explicit tax cuts tailored to benefit the top one percent the most,  and by the killing of the Affordable Care Act which was funded by an extra tax on the top earning classes.  That tax money now returns to its rightful home pockets.

Keep an eye on what the Republicans in the Congress prioritize, too.  You are going to find that almost everything, with the exception of gifts given to the fundamentalist patriarchs in exchange for their votes, is about moving money up the distribution, either directly or through the killing of those regulations which make such shifts harder in the marketplace.

The Republicans always move money up the distribution, true.  But the current income inequality levels in the United States are already deemed unacceptably high by most Americans.  Yet the progress toward a Banana Republic continues...

The New Republican Health Plan and Pre-Existing Medical Conditions

Does the House Republicans' health insurance plan let people with pre-existing conditions buy health insurance that they can afford AND that covers their actual medical needs, without forcing those individuals to choose between medicines and food?  That's what our dear Leader has promised us.

The answer to that question is most likely NO.  All the noise around it is created to hide that very fact.

To see why, note, first that under this new plan states can ask for three different types of waivers from the ACA regulations, if they can prove that

doing so will reduce average premiums, increase enrollment, stabilize the health insurance coverage market or increase the choice of health plans in the state. One of those waivers applies to pre-existing conditions, allowing insurers to use "health status" -- that is, current health, health history and other risk factors -- to set insurance premiums.

Note how easy it would be to argue for such a waiver!  If you get rid of those people who cost more, of course the average premia of those who remain will go down!  And see how easy it is then for insurers to set premia according to one's existing state of health, a.k.a. based on pre-existing health conditions.

This could result in extreme charges for a very basic health insurance policy, perhaps as much as 

$71,880 extra for a patient with lung cancer, and $17,060 extra for a pregnant woman, forcing many to be priced out of coverage and wind up uninsured. 

The plan proposes that states then create pools for those unfortunate high-risk cases.  Such pools have fared poorly in the past, offering limited coverage at exorbitant prices, and it's unlikely they would fare any better now:

In addition to its poor design, the funding for the invisible risk pool is a drop in the bucket compared to the massive increase in enrollee health care costs as a result of the ACHA. Spread over nine years and across millions of enrollees, we estimate that the $15 billion fund could lower annual premiums by about 1 to 2 percent each year, or roughly $100 per enrollee annually. Because the AHCA substantially reduces subsidies and shifts costs onto consumers, even without stripping protections for pre-existing conditions the average enrollee would still see their total costs rise by more than $3,000 by 2020.

To return to the first sentence in this post:  It doesn't matter that people with pre-existing conditions cannot be denied coverage, if they can be charged almost anything for that coverage and/or if what coverage they can buy does not apply to their actual medical needs.

It's unlikely that the Republican House bill ends up used as the real blueprint, but if that happens the most likely outcome would be that many individuals with pre-existing conditions would be priced out of the insurance markets altogether, and a certain number of them would die earlier than would have been the case under the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare).  Those early deaths are a bizarre way of saving money, and so is a plan aiming at insuring only the healthy against the expenses of illness.

Pre-Existing Moral Conditions. My Political Lament.

Moe Brooks, representing Alabama's fifth Congressional district, is a man with firm moral principles.  Those principles keep him cozy, the way the shell of an escargot does.  A mobile little home of moral self-administration, that's what our Moe carries with him:

In a CNN interview, Representative Mo Brooks, an Alabama Republican, makes the case for Trumpcare in much starker terms: It will free healthy people from having to pay the cost of the sick. “It will allow insurance companies to require people who have higher health care costs to contribute more to the insurance pool that helps offset all these costs, thereby reducing the cost to those people who lead good lives, they’re healthy, they’ve done the things to keep their bodies healthy,” explained Brooks.

An example of someone who has failed to lead a good life, someone who has failed to do the things that keep bodies healthy might be the newborn son of Jimmy Kimmel:

Kimmel noted that before the ACA, also known as Obamacare, was introduced, “if you were born with congenital heart disease like my son was, there was a good chance you’d never be able to get health insurance because you had a pre-existing condition. You were born with a pre-existing condition and if your parents didn’t have medical insurance, you might not live long enough to even get denied because of a pre-existing condition. If your baby is going to die and it doesn’t have to, it shouldn’t matter how much money you make.”

Other people have clearly not led good lives because they have aged, and so deserve to pay for their own health care expenses.  Why should young people have to subsidize such recklessness as aging?

Joe Walsh, the politician who cannot even be bothered to financially care for his own children had this to say about Kimmel's son:

As Joe Walsh, a former congressman, tweeted on Tuesday afternoon: “Sorry Jimmy Kimmel: your sad story doesn’t obligate me or anybody else to pay for somebody else’s health care.” Walsh, by the way, doesn’t even want to pay for his own kids’ healthcare – at one point, he owed $117,000 in child support. Now there’s a guy who truly understands the American values of individual freedom and choice.

Messrs Brooks and Walsh express common conservative values in this context: individuals have the power and the duty to lead "moral" lives and  individuals have the right not to care about or for others in the same society.

To have those values is a pre-existing condition, one which interprets the very concept of "morals" narrowly and selfishly and with a focus on individual rights and responsibilities, one which from the outside looks like an escargot shell or the shield of a turtle:  Something to keep the world out.

How Big Should the Democratic Party Tent Be?

Bernie Sanders and Nancy Pelosi have both suggested that it's not absolutely imperative for Democratic politicians to support reproductive choice, that others should come in from the rain, that the tent of the Democrats is big enough to allow different opinions, including forced-birth ones.

Sanders noted that he is willing to fight for the pro-choice agenda but thinks that when it comes to politicians, "... you can't just exclude people who disagree with us on one issue," and Pelosi said,  while speaking about her own roots, “Most of those people—my family, extended family—are not pro-choice. You think I’m kicking them out of the Democratic Party?”

What a messy paragraph I created there!  That is because the topic is a messy one.
 
For instance, do you see how the question Sanders answers is about Democratic politicians, but Pelosi talks about the ordinary members of the party?  Those are two different issues. 

Or does the paragraph make you wonder if  disagreeing with the Democratic Party's platform on one issue would still be perfectly fine if that issue was rejecting any kind of legally mandated minimum wage?*

And note how  unclear the meaning of a forced-birth Democratic politician remains:  Would that person vote with the fundamentalists on most women's reproductive rights or would that person just express personal forced-birth views while voting for reproductive choice?

Then there are at least two important underpinnings to that whole debate:

First, if the Democratic Party decides to decrease its focus on reproductive choice, in order to attract various groups of possibly mythical unicorn voters**, it will have to come to grips with the essential truth that reproductive rights and full economic participation are linked for women in ways that they are not linked for men, that economic policies might not benefit women to the same extent as they might benefit men if women are not allowed to have control over their own fertility.***

Second, a policy change that might attract new voters to the party might also make other members of the party decide to leave it behind.  I'm not sure if anyone inside the Democratic Party has made any calculations on this fascinating (to me) topic!  It just could be that there would be a Women's March out of the party if anti-women views are welcomed.



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*  Katha Pollitt asks that very question on her careful analysis of the big tent question.  She concludes by asking if pro-choice women, the base of the party as it currently stands, are expected to stand outside the tent, in the rain.

**  They are unicorn voters, because the fundamentalists don't just want a ban on abortions and in some cases even on birth control, but also Biblical laws and almost absolute power to their religions, and the Democratic Party will always offer less than the rabid extremists who now rule the Republican Party.  The racists and sexists won't be satisfied with such stale crumbs, either, because they get press passes to the White House from this Republican administration.

***  To plan one's education and work career requires the ability to control one's fertility.  If women cannot have that control, those in fertile age groups will be the last ones hired or promoted and will be less likely to be given on-the-job training.  That is because under such conditions women, on average,  are statistically less likely to stay employed as long as otherwise equally qualified men, and women, on average, are also more likely to take repeated maternity leaves which are costly to the firms, especially given the traditional norms concerning who it is that is viewed responsible for children.

Children are expensive. Being forced to have many more children than a couple ideally would like will drive poor families into even greater poverty.  That is both because of the expenses of feeding, housing and educating the children, but also because large families cannot as easily afford daycare.  The solution is often for the woman to drop out of the labor force to care for the children.  Ultimately this will affect her retirement income and her lifetime earnings.

Why I Critique the Weirder Kind of Evolutionary Psychology

(This post is about misogyny, contempt toward women. sexual violence and Evolutionary Psychology.  It may not be what you need to read today.)


If you have read this blog for some time you know that I often write about the pseudoscience of the weirder type of evolutionary psychology, the kind I mark with capital letters EP, the kind which is personified by one Satoshi Kanazawa* and his sexist brethren and a few sistren.

There are times when I ask myself if I'm spending too much time wading in those marshes.

But today is not one of those times, because I recently found two references to the kind of EP stuff I so often critique, and both of them came from pretty nasty people.

The first example is Mike Cernovich who has recently been given a White House press pass:

Mike Cernovich is an internet troll, conspiracy theorist, and leading figure in the “alt-right’s” assemblage of modern-day white nationalists and misogynists who has drawn praise and support from President Donald Trump’s closest confidantes. Today, he used a White House press pass to berate reporters at the daily briefing for not sufficiently covering “the violence against Trump supporters.”

Cernovich used to write a sex blog which gave advice to would-be alpha males.  One post advocates choking women, in the bedroom and outside it,  because women really really want to be choked**, and this is because women really really want to be raped, but not just by any guy:

Of course no girl wants to be wolf packed on the D.C. Metro or beaten up. Yet nearly ever romance novels consider healthy dose of a woman being taken against her will. The key is that she is taken against her will by a high value, dominant man who could satisfy her genetic desire for healthy and fit offspring.

Bolds are mine.  Typos are his.

Can you see the slimy footprints of EP in Cernovich's tiny brain?  I can.

The second example concerns a white supremacist who wants white men to harass and ridicule white women in public.  When someone in the comments to the original filth asked if showering ridicule and contempt on women would make it harder for a man to get a girlfriend or wife, the white supremacists stated:

Men who engage in the type of behavior I have outlined here are the kind of men that women desire more than anything. In fact, they are the only type of men they desire. This is evolutionary biology, it is a scientific fact …
Women have exactly zero desire to be “respected” by men who view them as “equals” – women desire to be dominated by men who view them as property.

Bolds are mine.

These examples are vile, but the point they make is important:

If you Google any recently popularized EP article on the perfidy of women or similar topics, the first two pages Google gives you are full of links to misogynistic sites.  EP feeds misogyny, in other words.

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*  I have written so much on Kanazawa that it's not possible to link to everything in this footnote.  You might begin with this summary post.   Or this one.  Or the most recent impact Kanazawa has had on making wife beating acceptable in Russia.

** Yes, this is the man who now has a White House press pass. 

As an aside, see more about erotic asphyxiation, an extremely dangerous practice:

Various methods are used to achieve the level of oxygen depletion needed, such as a hanging, suffocation with a plastic bag over the head, self-strangulation such as with a ligature, gas or volatile solvents, chest compression, or some combination of these.^[6] Sometimes, complicated devices are used to produce the desired effects.^[7] The practice can be dangerous even if performed with care and has resulted in a significant number of accidental deaths. Uva (1995) writes “Estimates of the mortality rate of autoerotic asphyxia range from 250 to 1000 deaths per year in the United States.”^[8] Cases have also been reported in Scandinavia^[9] and Germany.^[10][11] Autoerotic asphyxiation may often be mistaken for suicide, which is a major cause of death in teenagers.^[12] 

And, if anything, it appears to be more common among men than women:

The great majority of known erotic asphyxial deaths are male; among all known cases in Ontario and Alberta from 1974 to 1987, only one out of 117 cases was female.^[6] Some individual cases of women with erotic asphyxia have been reported.^{[16][17][18][19]} The main age of accidental death is mid-20s,^[6][20] but deaths have been reported in adolescents^[21][22][23] and in men in their 70s.^[10][20]

 

Even More Trump Pressies to Women: Teresa Manning

Meet Teresa Manning, the new deputy assistant secretary for population affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services:

Donald Trump has reportedly appointed to a position overseeing the US’s family planning safety net a law professor who once stated that “contraception doesn’t work” and “family planning is something that occurs between a husband and a wife and God, and it doesn’t really involve the federal government.”

This is a gift to the fundamentalists who voted for a serial adulterer who talks about pussy-grabbing, not exactly the kind of man who follows in Jesus's foot steps, right?  And not much of a Christian, altogether.

But the fundamentalists want to control women, and Trump is willing to let Pence's little Christianist sheep have at it.  The way to get women under control is to deprive them of any real chance of controlling their own fertility.

But from another angle Manning's appointment is nothing new:  The tradition, at least since Ronald Reagan, is to set the foxes to guard the hen houses by appointing those who detest the job of some department to run it. 

Hence Manning, someone who doesn't believe in family planning, doesn't believe that contraceptives work and doesn't believe that the federal government should have any function in influencing the number of unplanned pregnancies.

Manning doesn't mention which god she wants to be present at our bedrooms.  If Zeus turned up to advise me on sex I'd tear him to pieces and feed the pieces to swans and cows. 

And Trump's Gifts to the Girls Of The World Keep Piling Up

Added later:  Shortly after I published this post, CNN reported that the program will not be killed, after all.  Probably the power of my critical post?  Nah.

 Original post begins here:


Our Dear Leader in his great wisdom is canceling the program Michelle Obama championed: "Let Girls Learn," aimed at facilitating the education and empowerment of adolescent girls in the poorest countries.  Though some aspects of that program might continue (not betting on that happening), the program itself is now dead.

To cancel all those programs which I see as absolutely necessary for future peace, economic sufficiency in the poorer countries, the prevention of vast migrant floods into the wealthier countries and the reduction of future terrorism* is so short-sighted as to make us blind.

But that's what Trump's white supremacist base desires, I guess.

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* The norms about marriage in some countries where extreme Islamic terrorism finds fertile ground stipulate that a man must earn enough to marry, because a woman should stay at home and should not be educated.  When you combine that with a very real lack of any well-paying jobs for young men, well, they are expected not to have a love partner for sex until they are ancient old men, and alternatives such as terrorism will begin to look more alluring, especially with terrorist organizations such as ISIS who promise those young men as much sex as raping the women of the vanquished or buying sex slaves can give them.

I grant you that this is not the major way in which terrorism is created, but surely women's empowerment and equal partnership in those countries will both reduce the pressures for terrorism and increase economic well-being.

Yet the Trump administration seems adamant to contribute to a situation most likely to result in wars.

Unequal Pay for Equal Work: When Is It Legal To Pay Women Less Than Men For Doing The Same Job?

This is what the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th circuit has recently addressed, in a case about possible sex discrimination in how earnings are set: 

Fresno County, California, schools used a policy of paying its new employees what they were paid in their previous (education?) jobs plus five percent.  That five percent was intended to make changing jobs worthwhile.  One employee, Aileen Rizo, learned in 2012 that she was paid less than her male colleagues doing the same work, and she sued the school district for sex discrimination, based on the Equal Pay Act of 1963.  A lower court ruled for her, but the Court of Appeals overturned that ruling.

And this is where things get interesting:  Can a school district base its salaries on the workers' past salary history?  What does that past history reflect?  And why would the district use that history as almost the only determinant of how much to pay someone?

Trump's Tax Reform Proposal: A Gift Not To His Voters But To Himself And His Rich Friends

Have now been made available in the sense of a page or two of scribbles, without any impact calculations.  The shortness of those pages makes it fast work to conclude that the proposed tax reforms will shift even more money into the well-filled pockets of the top one percent of US earners.

Trump's Gift to the Women of the World: More War, Fewer Rights

Our Dear Leader began his reign by returning the global gag rule, expanded to many more fields.  That will teach those sluts not to avoid their proper roles which is to have as many children as their lords and masters decree, even if that kills them. 

But our Dear Leader is generous, so the women of the poorer countries get a second present:

...Foreign Policy revealed plans by the president to strip all funding from a State Department bureau dedicated to promoting women’s advancement in developing countries. According to documents released to Foreign Policy, Trump’s proposed budget plan would eliminate funding for the Office of Global Women’s Issues by 2018. In order to make room for more military spending, the plan would also eliminate USAID’s budget for working with blind children and 95 percent of funds allotted to the Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs.

This is utterly stupid, even if one is a determined misogynist like Donald Trump.  Too fast population growth rates in poor countries contribute to the migrant floods into Europe, too fast population growth rates in poor countries contribute to periodic episodes of starvation and to local unrest and violence, because the limited land resources cannot adequately support the rising populations, and that causes increased competition for resources.

And not supporting women's education and greater independence exacerbates all the problems that the US has struggled with, including radical Islamism.

As one of those interviewed in the quoted article states:

“It’s clear that women’s empowerment and gender equality are on the chopping block in this budget”

And yet many Republican women voted for him.

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Added later:  Ivanka's projects are intended to be the front which covers what is happening behind the stage where the fundie patriarchs are decimating women's rights.  Ivanka is not wrong, but what she is doing is a bit like dressing a starving and very sick woman in a designer dress while not treating her illness or giving her food.

Meet Rep. Robert Fisher, a New Hampshire Misogynist

1.  Did you know that I have a lackluster and boring personality and a sub-par intelligence? (1)

I didn't know that, either, until I was told so by Robert Fisher, a Republican state representative in New Hampshire who has now been outed as one of the creators of the woman-hating (and popular!) Reddit.com message board The Red Pill.

The Red Pill teaches men to be pickup artists by training them in the skills needed for the Hunting of The Reluctant Pussy and in how to deal with the woman the pussy is unfortunately attached to.  Usually she should treated like an enemy in a war or the way a predator would handle its prey (2).

These dating strategies are truly weird, sadistic, even, but in that alternative Red Pill reality they are necessary because of the terrible feminist-created oppression of pussy-hunters these days:

Feminists have destroyed all good things in life, including the respect for traditional masculinity and for the good old-time marriage arrangements where men could buy lifelong access to pussy (and to housekeeping services), sometimes for as little as bed and board for the hussy.

But what is a man to do now, huh?  Women are no longer desperate enough to marry men like Rep. Fisher just for a pittance, because feminism allowed them to have paid jobs. So the only remedy for Rep. Fisher is to make certain-sure that all women everywhere suffer.

And why should all those billions of women have to suffer?  Ah!  The reason is that Rep. Fisher had a very painful personal experience with a conniving slut, and the pain he felt just had to be turned into generalized misogyny, the hatred of all women everywhere. 
 
I learned all this via The Daily Beast which was able to establish that Rep. Fisher indeed is one of the founding fathers of the Red Pill.  Imagine that!  We have our very own now outed woman-hating politician.

And Rep. Fished does hate women.  Not only do we have sub-par brains and boring personalities, but when he was an eighteen-year old Immanuel Kant wannabe he couldn't find absolutely gorgeous and sexy girls of the same age who would also want to talk about free will and how time travel made it impossible and so on.

This made it clear to Rep. Fisher that women are intellectually inferior, poor things.

With the exception of his mother and his sisters, by the way.  But all other women are vacuous empty-headed wannabe gold-diggers, climbing up one hairy man-thigh after another, in search for the richest man possible.  Rep. Fisher's thighs were not the richest or perhaps even the hairiest, and thus his heart was broken.

He managed to cope with his pain by reading on evolutionary psychology of the most woman-hating kind (3).  That taught him that women are biologically wired to be hypergamous, always seeking a yet richer man (4).  Poor things, we women.  We cannot help our faulty wiring.  After all, we don't even know how to change a flat tire, let alone wiring, but must depend on men for help with that, though men, of course,  never need help with making sandwiches or meals or getting their laundry done or anything else whatsoever.

Rep. Fisher also tells us that modern women are totally free, unlike modern men, because men have to learn the consequences of their actions but women don't have to, given that pregnancy, for instance, has not been shown to be the consequence of having sex without contraception. 

That's what feminism has done to women:  Women take all the good bits and refuse to drop the pussy off the pedestal (2), which is very unfair for those waiting under the pedestal.  At least in the good old days women were oppressed in exchange for chivalry towards the pussy, but modern sluts want that chivalry without paying for it by subjugation.

Only men need to develop their skills and knowledge, according to Rep. Fisher, because women totally know that the optimal waist-to-hip ratio and nubile breasts are sufficient by themselves, and an empty head is the best setting for a nice hairdo.

It's all very sad, of course, but at least those men who agree with Rep. Fisher's intricate philosophical argument can find support at the Red Pill.

Perhaps they talk about the awful risks of false rape accusations (5), the possibility that any avid pussy-hunter with many successful hunts might one day wake up to being accused of some underhand moves, even though those are necessary in the War of the Sexes or the Hunting of the Reluctant Pussy and are never real rape but just the sluts' regrets about having been shown to be sluts.

And in any case, the dark cloud of rape has its golden lining:  The rapist probably had a good time (6).  Just like a sadistic murderer while dismembering his victim, I might add, if pleasure is somehow a sign of things not being that horrible.

But it's the fear of false rape accusations that keeps Rep. Fisher awake at night. The fear isn't strong enough to frighten him off pussy-hunting.  Still, he hates this feminist-governed world where almost any man can find his life ruined by some slut's say-so (7).

2.  The reason I began this post with false statements about my scintillating personality and about my extraordinary brightness, despite the fact that Rep. Fisher failed to mention me,  is to point out one of the very common logical flaws the misogynistic Manosphere uses:

False generalizations.  We are told that "women," as in the "class of all women" are a certain way: stupid, gold-digging, vacuous.  Because I belong to that class it then follows that I share the attributes Rep. Fisher insists on assigning to the group.

In Rep. Fisher's case one or a few women hurt him badly.  Therefore, all women are monsters.  Anecdotal (and unverifiable) evidence is turned into a statement about billions of people.  The arrogance of someone who copes with his own traumas like that!  I used therapy and lots of hard work, but then I'm an inferior creature.

False generalizations are the bread and butter of the misogynists, so I expected no better from Rep. Fisher.  But he also commits several other logical errors, including comparing his own "super-smart" eighteen-year old self to some fuzzy larger number of boring and lackluster young girls without telling us how he picked them.  If it was by their looks alone, well, those don't necessarily correlate with an avid interest in all things scientific.

That would create bias in his sample, but he makes things worse by committing what I call the Hitler vs. Mother Theresa error, though in reverse (it usually is in reverse), where one compares an individual from the top of one distribution to an individual from the bottom of another distribution and then treats the two individuals as if they were representative of their whole distributions.

That's how we get the argument that women are only interested in gossiping and other trivialities, whereas men stare thoughtfully into their beer mugs while contemplating the Big Bang Theory.

Rep. Fisher is also comfortable with picking his evidence on the basis of what he wishes to prove.  Thus, it's men throughout the history, on the Fisher Planet,  who held traditional marriages together and hardly ever strayed or abandoned their children or anything of that sort.  Granted, women had few rights and might have been unhappy, but at least they were barred from hypergamy.

The Manosphere in general loves to employ evidence of that kind, by ignoring all data that works against whatever they wish to prove, or in some cases by just ignoring all data, full stop.  That's one way to create an alternative reality where the Red Pill site now has almost 200,000 subscribers.

Finally, all the anecdotal evidence Rep. Fisher shares with us (or, rather with his fellow-misogynists) is unavoidably colored because we don't know how Rep. Fisher acts with women. 

If his misogyny has hung around for a while he may be extremely unpleasant to meet, and that would make pussy-hunting tougher, even for someone who regards himself an obvious alpha male, entitled to most pussies, and states that he has advertised himself as an alpha, but alas and alack, women didn't like that (8)!

O,  evolutionary psychology, what have you wrought here.  This poor politician has apparently gone around advertising his alpha male status to all those little gold-diggers who, based on his theory, should have been most eager to open their legs for him.

3.  What's going to happen to Rep. Robert Fisher of New Hampshire now?

Who knows.  Who even knows how many worse misogynist we might have straddling various high ladders of power in this Trump Reich?  And who can tell how common Rep. Fisher's declaration of war against women might be?  But Governor Sununu has asked for his resignation.

So far Rep. Fisher has refused.  He tells us that he will not leave his post but will continue working for men's rights.

So it goes.

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(1) The reference to me is a stylistic one, to point out that when Rep. Fisher hates on "women," with the exception of his mother and his sisters, he then by definition hates on me.

(2) The Daily Beast:

The Red Pill borrows its name from a scene in “The Matrix” in which Morpheus offers Neo a choice between two realities: “You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill… and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.”
In manosphere-speak, the rabbit hole is feminism, which the red pill reveals to be a War on Men. In this reality, the “feminine imperative” reigns; masculinity is its victim. As a result of this power struggle, old gender dynamics formerly seen as mutually beneficial, such as marriage, have all but disappeared, but female expectations of a pedestalled life unfairly remain. A common refrain among men’s rights activists is “take the pussy off the pedestal.”
The Red Pill guides men as they become accustomed to this new “reality.” It advocates self-improvement: the importance of diet, exercise, and constant learning. But this community also subscribes to the beliefs that women lack both intelligence and substance, are programed to cheat on their partners, and expire after the age of 30. Its darkest sections are heavy with rape denial and apologia.

(3)  Here's one example of Rep. Fisher's use of evolutionary psychology:

Fisher was asked if he thought it was creepy for a 40-year-old man check-out a 15-year-old’s breast. He responded by saying:
“In my opinion, no. It’s evolutionarily advantageous and perfectly natural.”

(4)  There is no actual proof of any kind of wiring of that sort, of course, and evolutionary psychologists using the argument ignore the very real obstacles that historically made it almost impossible for women to gain resources through any other means but marriage.  Guild laws were against them, most institutions of higher learning didn't admit them, inheritance and other family laws discriminated against them.  No special wiring is needed, in my opinion, to explain why marrying upward would have been a common strategy for women to gain wealth.  What other options did they have, after all?

(5)   It is generally agreed that false rape accusations, including accusations which were not intended to be false, but were deemed to be so, are less than ten percent of all rapes that come to the attention of the police.  But also note that rapists are pretty unlikely to be sentenced to jail in the first place:

According to an analysis of Justice Department data by the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), 46 out of 100 rapes are reported to police, nine are prosecuted, and three of those accused serve jail time.

(6)  The Daily Beast:

In 2008, writing under the username FredFredrickson, Fisher posited that the notion that “rape is bad” was not an absolute truth. He wrote, “I’m going to say it—Rape isn’t an absolute bad, because the rapist I think probably likes it a lot. I think he’d say it’s quite good, really.”

(7)  To inject a little bit of evidence from the other side, I draw your attention to the three articles below.  Before you click on any links you should know that the articles are gruesome and describe extreme types of violence. 

This long-form piece describes a case which at first glance looks like a false rape accusation, until the videos taken by a serial rapist prove that he raped the woman who was not believed.

This UK case is an extremely disturbing one, showing that many among the police also believe that women quite often make false claims about harassment or violence.

This case does not prove that a rape took place, but it seems extremely likely, given the other crimes the man described in it had committed.

The point of this footnote is to remind that real rape or real harassment interpreted as false claims can have truly devastating consequences which should not be ignored, either.


(8)  The Daily Beast:

Elsewhere, he wondered why listing his accomplishments on dates, including his status as a candidate and “high level exec,” was apparently a turnoff to women, despite it being characteristically alpha.

 

Bryce Covert On Reproductive Rights As An Economic Issue

Bryce Covert writes about the false distinctions between "social" or "cultural" and " economic" when political ideas are put into different boxes.  Her context is the recent renewed debate about whether the Democratic Party should support forced birth candidates if otherwise those candidates promote all sorts of yummy dishes on the lefty political menu.

Her point is an important one:  The so-called "cultural" or "social" issues are intertwined with economic issues for all those of us who draw the short stick in the worldview of "social conservatives." 

For instance, if employers or landlords/ladies are allowed to discriminate against LGBT people, well, that has a direct financial impact on that group.  If the forced-birth movement succeeds in making abortion and most woman-controlled forms of contraception illegal, well, that has a direct financial impact on women's ability to control their fertility, to plan their education or their working lives.*

I have always been exasperated by that distinction between "cultural" and "economic" issues in politics, because the former are not about the cuisines, music, art or literature of various cultural groups but partly about which people are allowed to compete in the economic sphere on equal grounds.  To not see that might mean that you didn't draw that short stick in the games the social conservatives play. 

For two extreme examples of the economic impact of cultural or religious rules,  consider societies such as the apartheid era South Africa or today's Saudi Arabia:  The segregation of races or sexes** directly handicaps the less powerful segregated group, because they will be isolated from the ruling powers, the best jobs and the ability to influence societal decision-making.

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*  And also because sex discrimination would become more rampant.  Few employer would be willing to promote or train workers who might have to drop out without any notice because of unplanned pregnancies.  This type of statistical discrimination against fertile-age women as a group is already happening, but it would be far stronger in the forced-birth dystopian world.

**  The latter is a clearer example of cultural or social issues than the former.  You might want to think why that is the case.  I suspect it's because sexism is still a fairly acceptable global value with long and deep roots in religions and essentialist thinking.

The New Abnormal

One bad outcome of the Trump era is its possible impact on future standards for US presidents:  There might be none. 

A president can now be openly racist and sexist, a president can now clearly demonstrate that he knows nothing about the job of being a president and that his general levels of knowledge are minuscule.

A president can now demonstrate signs of extreme narcissism, possess a vocabulary of no more than a few hundred words and explicitly show that he is going to use the presidential throne for personal grift, business profits and lots of time spent golfing. 

A president can refuse to show the American people his tax forms, a president can refuse to let the American people know what his actual state of health might be, and a president can have a proven history of corporate malfeasance.

A president can now appoint white male supremacists as his advisers and he can hand much governmental power to his daughter and son-in-law.  A president can simply refuse to separate his business interests from the job of running the country, and a president can create the opaqueness to keep us from knowing how much his firms benefit from his position.

A president can now give an interview like this one:

AP: Do you feel like you've been able to apply that kind of a relationship to your dealings with Congress as well?
TRUMP: I have great relationships with Congress. I think we're doing very well and I think we have a great foundation for future things. We're going to be applying, I shouldn't tell you this, but we're going to be announcing, probably on Wednesday, tax reform. And it's — we've worked on it long and hard. And you've got to understand, I've only been here now 93 days, 92 days. President Obama took 17 months to do Obamacare. I've been here 92 days but I've only been working on the health care, you know I had to get like a little bit of grounding right? Health care started after 30 day(s), so I've been working on health care for 60 days. ...You know, we're very close. And it's a great plan, you know, we have to get it approved.
AP: Is it this deal that's between the Tuesday Group and the Freedom Caucus, is that the deal you're looking at?
TRUMP: So the Republican Party has various groups, all great people. They're great people. But some are moderate, some are very conservative. The Democrats don't seem to have that nearly as much. You know the Democrats have, they don't have that. The Republicans do have that. And I think it's fine. But you know there's a pretty vast area in there. And I have a great relationship with all of them. Now, we have government not closing. I think we'll be in great shape on that. It's going very well. Obviously, that takes precedent.
AP: That takes precedent over health care? For next week?
TRUMP: Yeah, sure. Next week. Because the hundred days is just an artificial barrier. The press keeps talking about the hundred days. But we've done a lot. You have a list of things. I don't have to read it.

For some background on that health care plan:  Trump told us repeatedly during his rallies that he would abolish the ACA and replace it with some cloud-cuckoo-land perfect plan where everyone would have the highest quality health care for practically no money at all.

Later he told us that "nobody knew health care could be so complicated!"

You know all this, of course.  But that preface is useful when looking at the findings of a recent ABC News/Washington Post poll which aims at finding out what voters think of the president now.

Here's the gist of those findings*:  Even though Trump's approval ratings at this point of his presidency are the lowest of any president since 1945, the majority of Republican voters still like him:

Current politics, moreover, are marked by especially sharp partisanship, a central reason for Trump's comparatively poor rating. Seventy-nine percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents approve of his job performance; just 12 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents agree. Obama at 100 days did better in his base, with 93 percent approval from leaning Democrats, but also had 40 percent from leaning Republicans.

The tribal aspect of voting has never been clearer to me.  And, yes, the Democrats also vote on a tribal basis, but Trump is objectively different from all US presidents in the recent memory:  He is utterly unqualified for the job and something weird is happening under that hairdo of his.

But never mind any of that!  At least he belongs to the right party and wants tax cuts and person-hood rights for egg-Americans.

All this suggests to me that in the future a cheese sandwich would be a viable candidate for running the most powerful country on this earth, as long as the cheese is American cheese and the kind real guys like to eat.

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*  Other findings show similar tribal patterns.  White Evangelical Protestants and white Catholics approve of Trump at rates of 73% and 58%, respectively, for example.

Ross Douthat's Sermon on Religions for Liberals And Echidne's Counter-Sermon

(This post consists of a coleslaw of thoughts.  I'm trying to write myself out of my blogger's block.)


Did you read Ross Douthat's advice in his Easter Sunday column to all those secular liberals (1)?  That they should go back to church, back to their Protestant roots, so that the so-called Mainline churches could be saved?

Our Ross would prefer all of us to join his type of extreme Guy-Catholicism, of course, because that's the only narrow door to salvation, according to him.  But if secular lefties cannot go quite that far, then they should go back to their wishy-washy loving-kindness churches which are currently suffering  from graying and diminishing congregations.

Why Ross would want that I don't know.  I'm guessing that he had a deadline and had to write something appropriate for Easter, because he also states this:

As a conservative Catholic, I have theories about how this collapse reveals the weaknesses of liberalism in religion.

Let me guess:  Ross likes the war or thunder god of the Old Testament and the types of religious rules which ossified the social hierarchies prevalent in Middle Eastern nomadic cultures a thousand or two thousand years ago.  He likes the idea of a ready-made fixed set of divine rules which inconvenience others a lot more than they inconvenience him.  He likes to be told what god wants, by intermediaries who are almost totally old men, both now and through history.

In that he shares with many other fundamentalists.

Foxy Women, Again

 Fox&Friends anchor Heather Nauert has been named the spokesperson of the US State Department (I guess for when there is a State Department, with actual people in it).* 

This is a video compilation of some Fox discussions about the proper role of women in this world.  It is condensed, sure, but it also covers only a small fraction of these kinds of discussions on Fox (I know, because I have followed them!).  You know, the kinds where people earnestly debate the question:  "Are Women People?"

We know what the powers-that-be at Fox News thought about the proper answer to that question:  If those sluts aren't at home serving their children, then they are here to service us.  Or something slightly less nasty, but along the same lines.

I'm pretty sure that being the spokesperson of the State Department isn't the kind of job Fox News believes women should have, what with lacking ambition and having racks and so on.

It's good to keep in mind that Fox News was established in 1996.  We have had almost one generation's worth of arguments of this type, as a preparation for the Trump era where the president of the country can openly hold similar opinions about women, preferring to rank them by their looks and viewing their bodies as something automatically available to all powerful men who are "stars."

The invisible elephant in that history is the muted and scattered response from other media outlets to Fox News' racist and sexist views.  Initially they ignored Fox, the crazy uncle at the Thanksgiving dinner, then they normalized Fox as just one part of the overall media, and then we got the pussygrabber-in-chief.

But at least he is surrounded by pretty women now.
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* This post is not about Nauert herself.  She may be competent for the job, for all I know.  But she comes from the Fox stables where certain views are privileged.

Signs From The Science Marches

Today is the day when people march for science and against Trump's unreality views of the world.

I picked some of my favorite signs:

I don't have the photographer's credit for the top three.  The last one is from here.  More fun placards here.

And one more, added later:

And added even later, because who can resist this one:

Alex Jones. The Conspiracy Theorist Who Has Trump's Ear.

Alex Jones is an American far-right radio pundit and conspiracy theorist.  His website, InfoWars.com, is one of the central factories producing fake news for the white male supremacist movement, politely called the Alt Right.

It's a sign of these unsettling times that the current president of the United States, one Donald Trump,  called Jones's reputation "amazing" in a 2015 interview, promising not to let Jones down.  It's another sign of these troublesome times that Trump appears to get some of his "news" from Jones's fake news factory.

Bill O'Reilly, Sexual Harassment and the Sound of Silence

Bill O'Reilly has been let go by the Fox News, not because he sexually harassed women and had to pay many millions in compensation, but because he got caught, all this became public, and advertisers started to withdraw their loot from Fox.

I'm joyous over the advertisers' boycott.  It shows that the times are changing for the better.  They are not changing fast enough, of course.  As evidence I point at the Pussygrabber-in-chief.

The O'Reilly case made me think of what it means that successful settlements of sexual harassment cases require the accusers to be silent about what has happened:

The end for O’Reilly was set in motion by a scathing New York Times investigation in early April that revealed that he and Fox had settled five allegations of harrassment brought by Fox employees over a 15-year period. The company and O’Reilly paid out $15 million in exchange for his accusers’ silence.

Because of that silence, every new post-settlements victim of O'Reilly could well believe that she was almost the only one, that if she came forward nobody would believe her but that her career would be over.  And because his tendency to sexually harass women was not something we were supposed to know*, new female employees at Fox News might not have been aware of the risks of, say, entering a room alone with Bill O'Reilly.

Indeed, requiring such silence as the price of compensation benefits the serial sexual harassers and hurts any future victims they may one day have.

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*  I don't know if older employees warned newcomers about O'Reilly's penchant for violating women's private space, but even if those warnings existed, the whole scope of his activities may well have been unknown, with the exception of the one earlier case extensively covered in the media.

More Pleasant Reading About Women

More pleasant than my usual topics, that is.  I am passionate in wanting to see a fairer world and that makes me focus on covering work that still needs to be done.  But sometimes it's good to sit back and enjoy the gains we have already won.  Yes, they can be lost, and vigilance in this context is as important as in the context of refusing to normalize Trumpistan.  Still, I hope you enjoy what follows:


1.  Kathrine Switzer participated in the Boston Marathon in 1967 and again this year:

Fifty years ago, a runner officially entered as K.V. Switzer participated in the Boston Marathon. On Monday, she did it again at age 70.

Kathrine Switzer’s marathon in 1967 became historic because she was the first woman to complete the all-male race as an official entrant — her registration as “K.V. Switzer” hid her gender. The race resonated far beyond a footnote in the record books when an official tried to force her from the course after a few miles.

2.  Mother Jones has put together a partial list of women's inventions or other deeds which history later erased or assigned to men.  I have not checked the validity of all of them, but it's a fun list to contemplate in these cold and dark days of the Trump-Putin-Erdogan-etc. era and among much religious fundamentalism.  Religious fundamentalism and dictatorships are not exactly conducive to independent female lives or general equality.


3.   The US women's national team (USWNT) has ratified a new five-year contract with US Soccer:

On Wednesday, U.S. Soccer announced that it had ratified a five-year collective bargaining with the U.S. women’s national team, ending a contract negotiation that’s been in overdrive for over a year, particularly since the USWNT filed a federal complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission charging U.S. Soccer with wage discrimination last March.

The USWNT launched an “Equal Play, Equal Pay” campaign to highlight the pay discrepancy between the women’s and men’s national teams last summer, and while this new CBA doesn’t provide exact equality, it is a significant improvement over the previous deal.

The wage discrimination case that led to the new contract can be read in this Atlantic article.


4.   A 57-year old female astronaut made her eighth space walk last month. 

5.  Some interesting recent "firsts" for women: 

Parliament Square in London, England, will get its first female statue to go with the existing eleven statues of men.  It will be of Millicent Fawcett, a suffragette and a feminist, to celebrate the centenary of British women's right to vote.

Dr. Vera Songwe from Cameroon became the first woman to become the Executive Secretary for  the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA).

Becca Longo became the first woman to win an NCAA football scholarship to play for a Division II team or higher.

Second Lt. Lillian Polatchek:

became the first female graduate of the Army’s Armor Basic Officer Leaders Course, and the first woman to lead a Marine tank platoon.

Cressida Dick will be the first woman to lead London's Metropolitan Police Force.

Trump and Erdogan, Sitting In A Tree

Our Dear Leader has congratulated the Dear Leader of Turkey on the latter's increased dictatorial powers:

Donald Trump has congratulated Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on his victory in Sunday's referendum that gave him sweeping new powers.

The US president's phone call contrasts with concern by European leaders who have pointed our how the result - 51.4% in favour of the changes - has exposed deep splits in Turkish society.
Mr Erdogan has rejected criticism from international monitors who said he had been favoured by an "unequal campaign".
"Know your place," he told them.

"Tyrants of a feather flock together?"  Or is Trump doing realpolitik?

Weekend Reading 4/15/17: White House Easter Egg Roll, Trump as Horsefly And Other Topics

1.  The White House Easter Egg Roll event is really complicated.  Who knew it could be that complicated?

I disagree, however, on the person to be viewed as responsible for the success or failure of the event: the president's wife.  The "job" of the First Lady is a sticky relic from the traditional unequal marriage where the wife is expected to be her husband's employee, without any formal payment scheme, but still full responsibility for stuff like organizing an Easter Egg Roll.  Because it is for the children and children are the women's job?

It's Donald Trump's job.  If he can't do it, he can hire someone else to do it for him.


2.  An interesting take on the metamorphosis of one Donald Trump from a chubby pupa to something with wings.  Presidential wings now that he has dropped the largest non-nuclear bomb ever!  So presidential.  Though I suspect he is a horsefly. 

Anyway, Jonathan Chait argues that Trump has managed to shed everything that distinguished him from your usual Republican politician, except for his "ethnonationalist themes."*  That's courtesy-speech for white male supremacy, my friends, but with the adjustments it's that only for the top white guys.

3.  A few articles remind us of the relative dearth of women in literature and the cinema.  Worth pointing out when the usual conservative argument about women and the STEM fields is that women's interests and talents lie elsewhere.  In literature and the arts, for example.

The reasons for the under-representation of women are complicated and deserve a separate post**.

But the metaphor I think might apply here is that for some the trip to the top involves elevators all the way through the 200 floors, for others it means having to take the stairs between the fiftieth and the ninetieth floor, and yet for others it means having to use ladders on the outside of the building.  People learn about those differences in the relevant industries, so whether some are just not interested in making the climb to begin with is a moot point, because the climb is not the same for all equally talented folks.

4.  Our Dear Leader has privately signed

a bill on Thursday that allows states to withhold federal money from organizations that provide abortion services, including Planned Parenthood, a group frequently targeted by Republicans. 

Why a private signing?  President Trump adores public hullabaloo, after all.  Perhaps making it possible for red states to deprive poor women of reproductive health care isn't something that he wants to be remembered for.  But the Republicans-in-power love the idea of killing Planned Parenthood dead.  Dead as a doornail, even though Planned Parenthood says that only three percent of its services are abortion-related.  Still, who cares about poor women and their needs.

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*  Rick Perlstein makes a somewhat different argument which is also worth reading.

**  A very long post, actually, but I'd like to say a few words here about the second link in part 3 which asks why women so rarely seem to have written the "big books" of popular history.

Clears throat.

You cannot write a famous book if your book doesn't become famous.  You cannot be a path-breaker if nobody follows your path.  So the first problem here is the fact that audiences and reviewers do not regard women writing some gloriously simple and thought-provoking book about, say,  wars as inherently equally credible as a man writing such a book.

Still, there are women who have succeeded in that task of making big books, and even more can be found if we acknowledge the fact that readers have certain pre-existing biases about which topics are important.  Deaths?  Very important, especially if violent.  Births?  Women's stuff, not terribly important.

I may have exaggerated a little there.  But not much.

Then there's the expected reactions.  Mary Beard found out about them when she joined the online conversations and when all the woman-hating trolls found her.  Because sweeping and simplifying arguments are much easier to attack than detailed and carefully documented and nuanced arguments, women, who by now expect harsher criticism, are probably more likely to settle with the latter ones.  But, alas, that's not what "big books" are all about.

Cats

Because they are an Internet tradition.  But before that, here's a message from Franz Kafka:

A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.

His books are a useful lecture series about how to live in a world which doesn't make sense, such as Trumpomania-land.

Drat.  This is supposed to be a cheerful post, so here are the two gentlemen who truly are not bothered:

What Does Trump Know? And Other Rants.

Our Dear Leader knows nothing, and he is utterly unaware of his own ignorance, thinking that such ignorance is widespread among the powers that be. 

Vox gives us one example:

President Donald Trump recounted an absolutely astounding detail about one of his conversations with Chinese President Xi Jinping in comments published by the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday afternoon. Apparently, Trump came into his first meeting with the Chinese leader, in early April, convinced that China could simply eliminate the threat posed by North Korea’s nuclear program. Xi then patiently explained Chinese-Korean history to Trump — who then promptly changed his mind.

“After listening for 10 minutes, I realized it’s not so easy,” the president told the Journal. “I felt pretty strongly that they had a tremendous power [over] North Korea. ... But it’s not what you would think.”

You may have missed Trump's earlier sudden realization that the US health care and insurance systems are exceedingly complex and intertwined:

If there’s one thing almost everybody across the political spectrum knows about health-care reform, it’s that it’s really hard. People who study the issue closely know it. People who don’t follow the issue know. (That’s why lots of smart people don’t follow the issue closely — it’s really hard!) But there is apparently a category of people who did not realize until very recently that the issue is hard, and that category consists of Donald J. Trump, who told reporters today, “It’s an unbelievably complex subject. Nobody knew health care could be so complicated.”

Can I say the Dunning-Kruger effect, at last? 

Dear friends, may we raise a toast in its honor?  After all, there are few other options for knowing-yet-surviving a reality in which the ship of state is steered by someone who both knows nothing and doesn't care that he knows nothing.  Indeed, he doesn't know that he doesn't know.  Hence the arrogance...

Yet sixty million voters chose a know-nothing-and-proud-of-it president.  At least we didn't get a bitch steering that ship of state!  At least all we have to worry about now are possible Russian spies in the administration and the possible start of WWIII.  No email scandals!

What caused this rant?  I talked to a fervent Sanders-fan yesterday, and he argued that Hillary Clinton would have been every bit as evil and bad as Donald Trump has shown himself to be.

Only three possible theories can explain such opinions at this time, given the fact that Hillary Clinton was certainly extremely qualified for the job, intelligent and hard-working; all qualities Donald Trump lacks. 

The first of those theories is spelled misogyny, meaning the fear of any woman in a powerful position.  It may not be the explanation in this particular case, but I do regard the visceral hatred of Hillary-that-bitch-from-hell as fairly good evidence that the lizard brain has a role to play in that anger.

The second theory applies to those voters who are never going to need an abortion, who are never going to be discriminated against in the labor market because of their sex and/or race, who are never going to be delayed at the border or denied entry to the US, who are unlikely to ever need food stamps or public transportation. 

For them there's not that much of a difference between a somewhat centrist Democratic candidate who gave speeches to Wall Street people for money and a candidate whose administration consist of billionaires, alt right (white male supremacist) prophets and possibly even one real Nazi.  It doesn't matter that much to them if the Supreme Court changes its robes into the white robes of the Ku Klux Klan.

Until the date when Trump either starts a major war or Mother Nature calls it quits on us, the fleas in her fur-coat, and calls in the Exterminator.

But until that time certain voter groups have the privilege of ignoring the very real and awful differences between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

The third and final theory, and the one I believe to be the correct in several cases, is that for some psychological reason I don't quite understand many Democrats or lefties are still re-living the primary battles, existing in 2016, unable to move on and accept what is happening today.  

That inability to move forward is not the same as wanting to change the Democratic Party from the inside.  The latter work is valuable, the former is harmful, and it's pretty easy to spot the difference.  Fighting the primary battles over and over again is pointless.  Trying to get better Democratic politicians is not.

Still, we must not stop trying to douse the fire in Washington, DC, while also planning how to build more fire-proof governments.  And we must NOT start to accept the behavior of this administration as the New Normal.  Remember Bannon's promise to dismantle the administrative government?

Deaths of Despair. An Analysis of the Case-Deaton Conference Paper on the Mortality Rates of Middle-Aged Whites.

Introduction

Anne Case and Sir Angus Deaton are two economists of high standing (both are professors at Princeton and Deaton won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2015).  They also happen to be married to each other.  They have recently been famous for statistical analyses of the stopped decline or even increase in the mortality rates for middle-age (and perhaps younger)  non-Hispanic white Americans when those rates are still declining for both non-Hispanic blacks and Hispanics in the United States and for whites in European countries and Canada.  Their first article on the topic came out in 2015, and a Brookings Institute conference paper (or a conference draft) was released only a few weeks ago, in March of 2017.

The latter paper concludes that the increased mortality of middle-aged non-Hispanic whites applies to both men and women and that it is completely attributable to rising mortality among those non-Hispanic whites whose highest education level is a high school degree or less.

It's that 2017 working paper I want to talk about here, and especially the parts of it which cause me to ask questions.  Thus, this post is one of criticisms.(1)

Before I launch into it I want to stress that I admire the contribution Case and Deaton have made by both having the ability to get their message heard in the public conversations and by what they have contributed to the wider epidemiological and statistical literature on the topic of mortality rates and how they change over time.

On that count I have nothing but admiration for their work.  Still, presenting a working paper to the world at large is a little like Coco Chanel presenting a half-finished dress, cut, pasted and pinned together, to the woman who ordered it as the finished couture creation.  Working papers are not subjected to rigorous peer review, and that means that they rather resemble the pieces of the dress basted or pinned together at the first fitting, not the final dress.  In other words, there's work still to be done on the Case-Deaton conference paper and its presentation.

My questions or criticisms fall into three groups.  The first is about general methodological and presentation concerns, the second about the racial and ethnic comparisons as they appear in the Case-Deaton working paper, and the third about the way differences between male and female mortality rates are sometimes ignored, sometimes brought forward in inconsistent ways.