Lady Justice on Campus: Show Us Your Tits! Or Betsy DeVos on Campus Sexual Assault.

Betsy DeVos, Trump's Secretary of Education,  is planning to rewrite the rules on how sexual assault is to be treated under Title IX on college campuses:

Saying that the Obama administration’s approach to policing campus sexual assault had “failed too many students,” Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said on Thursday that her administration would rewrite the rules in an effort to protect both the victims of sexual assault and the accused.
Ms. DeVos did not say what changes she had in mind. But in a strongly worded speech, she made clear she believed that in an effort to protect victims, the previous administration had gone too far and forced colleges to adopt procedures that sometimes deprived accused students of their rights.
“Through intimidation and coercion, the failed system has clearly pushed schools to overreach,” she said in an address at George Mason University in suburban Arlington, Va. “With the heavy hand of Washington tipping the balance of her scale, the sad reality is that Lady Justice is not blind on campuses today.”

Nope, Lady Justice is not blind on campuses today, but she might be naked, or at least should show us her tits.

Let's leave aside the important question how best to police and prosecute sexual assault on campuses.  Let's, instead, make a note of the most obvious aspect of this speech:

DeVos is doing Trump's bidding and filling his promises to his base.  This move is part and parcel of this administration's war against uppity women.  In that it's linked to what the administration is attempting in the labor markets by making it harder for women and/or minorities to sue employers for discrimination, and in what the administration is attempting to do when it comes to violence against women.  It's also linked to Pence's hoary Christian patriarchal values and his wish for forced-birth rules for women.  These all share a certain sense of "putting women back into their proper places."

Note, also, how DeVos was appointed by a president who openly boasted about pussy grabbing.  In such an atmosphere banners like these meeting new first-year students and their families are just innocent fun and not a symbol of perhaps a certain kind of sexual entitlement:

Finally, note, once again, this common refrain I've seen so many times when the media writes about sexual assault:

Critics of the Obama administration’s guidance to colleges complained that it was unfair to use a standard of proof that was far lower than that used in criminal law, since disciplinary actions and expulsions that result from ambiguous sexual encounters can stigmatize young men long into the future, affecting their educational and job prospects. The critics argued that if sexual assault had, in fact, taken place, it should be a matter for the police.

It is that concern for the future effects on the accused that is the common refrain, and it is not applied to only those who have had "ambiguous" sexual encounters, but even more widely:  to those who have clearly committed the crime they were accused of.

Yet I rarely see similar reminders of the stigmatizing effects of rape on the future of the young women and how that might affect their educational and job prospects, not to mention their mental health, or how such stigma might become even stronger if the perpetrator of the crime walks free (perhaps because his future is more important than hers).

I want to make absolutely clear that falsely sentencing or punishing the innocent is wrong and its consequences dreadful.  But not sentencing or punishing the guilty is not right, either.

Since many rape or sexual assault cases do not have the kind of evidence which every single person would deem sufficient*,  the probabilities of someone being convicted depend on the rules which are used by those judging the cases.  DeVos seems to be proposing to make those rules stricter on campuses, by demanding that the current "preponderance of evidence" rule be replaced by "clear and convincing" standards of proof.

What that might mean in practice is this:

Some of those wrongly accused of sexual assault might not be unfairly punished.  But some actual sexual assault, too, would go unpunished, both because the the evidence did not reach that "clear and convincing" level, even though it might have exceeded 50% of all evidence, and because fewer victims of sexual assault would bother to report the attacks.  Whether such changes would increase the number of sexual assaults on campus is not clear to me.

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*  It really is crucial here to remember that most victims of sexual assault, worldwide, do not go to the police or other authorities, and this seems to be the pattern on US campuses, too.  Thus, it's fairly rare for a random perpetrator to be convicted,  but very strict rules about what type of evidence is viewed as "clear and convincing" reduce the likelihood even further.  — If we call those falsely accused the "false positives" (as in a medical test), then there clearly is a very large number of "false negatives" in the general population. 




 

Short Posts, 9/6/17. On Political Tribalism, Gendered Workers and Geniuses

1.  I have nothing exciting or different to say about Trump kissing the butt of his white male supremacist base by deciding to phase out DACA, or about where the next hurricanes might make landfall.  Indeed, the cyberspace is full of both data, chatter and fake news on those topics.

It is, however,  worth saying a few words about Rush Limbaugh's arguments when he mentions the political uses of the hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Jose, not because old Rush would matter (except in the sense of being a bottle of the most condensed racism, misogyny and plain nastiness), but because there's a wider point I wish to make.

Creating Murderers

A new study analyzing ten murder cases in the US shows that murderers' dads fall into three categories:  anti-dads, ueber-dads and absent dads?  

We must face the question:  Is it bad fathering which creates murderers?  Asking that question might sound sexist, but I assure you it's not, because dads are the role models of their sons, and most murderers are male so were once sons.

So fathers:  Will your child turn out to be a murderer?  Are your fathering skills adequate to prevent that?  Can you sleep well knowing all this?

Okay.  I made all that up.  But not to worry, just reverse the sex of the parent and you will get an actual study!  It's even summarized in the UK Independent:*

After examining 10 murder cases in the US series Murderers and their Mothers, Dr Elizabeth Yardley began to demystify the psyche of killers by looking closely at their maternal relations.
Debunking accusations of sexism by explaining that mothers “matter more” in the making of murderers due to the “inherently gendered nature of society”, she used a blog on the Huffington Post, Yardley explained that care-giving and nurturing connotations can be taken for granted when it comes to motherhood.
The criminology professor and podcaster deems the killers’ mothers behaviour as a contributing factor in their actions.

Isn't it interesting what kinds of studies get disseminated and how?  I have no idea if Dr. Yardley's teeny-tiny sample of ten cases was compared to some random drawing of mothers from the general population**, but I doubt that, if that she thought ten cases is enough to go by and  decided that only the mothers matter when it comes to parenting.

So what are the murderers' horrible mother like?  According to Yardley, they fall into three groups:  Anti-mothers, ueber-mothers and passive mothers.  Ueber-mothers protect their children too much, passive mothers protect their children too little, and anti-mothers come themselves from violent homes and pass the violence on. 

Mothering is a tightrope act!  It's almost impossible to be a good mother, and if you are not, you will create a murderer.  Or a Hitler.  Hitler mentions his mother in Mein Kampf, by the way, noting that she was a stay-at-home mother who dedicated her life to her children.  Probably an ueber-mother?

Which means that WWII is women's fault, as is almost everything in this world since Eve took the apple from one of my people.  Or so they say.

My point in reviewing that particular article about a pretty iffy study is that there's a giant market for articles which blame the Biblical Eve and her daughters, even when it comes to something like murders where the vast majority of murderers are men.
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*  First, a general caveat:  As I can't find the study itself, what I say about it assumes that the summary in the Independent is correct.  If it's incorrect, the shame belongs to the latter newspaper.

Second, note that Yardley doesn't debunk any accusations of sexism; she simply decides to ignore the fathers and their possible roles altogether.   To see why this matters, suppose that a father beats his son all the time, but the mother is passive and does not protect the son.  If the son ends up a murderer later in life, and is entered into a study like Yardley's, the fault is all in the bad mothering.
 
**  I couldn't find anything on the study online, so I can't tell if the mothers of the ten murderers (or in the ten murder cases, as there might be multiple murderers) were compared to mothers in general.  It's possible that the general population of mothers includes anti-mothers, ueber-mothers and passive mothers, and it's even theoretically possible that they might exist in the same proportions as they exist in Yardley's study.  In that case the results would be meaningless.

More specifically, it's possible that the childhood homes of people who later become murderers are very dysfunctional, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the mothers are the  main causal agents for the dysfunctional aspects.  Their behavior could be a response to what the fathers do or the result of complex interplay between the family members.  An inherited tendency toward violent behavior (from either or both parents) is also possible. 

Finally, studies which begin from a murderer and walk backward in an attempt to find causal factors can easily be tinged by the knowledge that the final result of the family's child-rearing was a violent child.  This could color the classifications used for the mothers in Yardley's study.

Partisanship, Propaganda and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. Echidne's Take.

The Harvard study, called  Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election has now produced its final report, and you can download it at this link.


All the 140 pages are worth reading, and I have done so.  When I finished, I lay my aching head on my desk and attended to some creative swearing.  The findings are that bad.
 




Here's the abstract of the study.  I have bolded the most crucial findings, but, honestly, the whole report deserves reading:






In this study, we analyze both mainstream and social media coverage of the 2016 United States presidential election. We document that the majority of mainstream media coverage was negative for both candidates, but largely followed Donald Trump’s agenda: when reporting on Hillary Clinton, coverage primarily focused on the various scandals related to the Clinton Foundation and emails. When focused on Trump, major substantive issues, primarily immigration, were prominent. Indeed, immigration emerged as a central issue in the campaign and served as a defining issue for the Trump campaign.

We find that the structure and composition of media on the right and left are quite different. The leading media on the right and left are rooted in different traditions and journalistic practices. On the conservative side, more attention was paid to pro-Trump, highly partisan media outlets. On the liberal side, by contrast, the center of gravity was made up largely of long-standing media organizations steeped in the traditions and practices of objective journalism.

Our data supports lines of research on polarization in American politics that focus on the asymmetric patterns between the left and the right, rather than studies that see polarization as a general historical phenomenon, driven by technology or other mechanisms that apply across the partisan divide.

The analysis includes the evaluation and mapping of the media landscape from several perspectives and is based on large-scale data collection of media stories published on the web and shared on Twitter.

In ordinary language, with a few additions from my reading of the study, these are the findings worth thinking about:

When Religious Patriarchs Speak On Sexuality And Gender. The Case of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.

The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood* is a group of Evangelical leaders who tell their flocks that the gender roles which prevailed two thousand years ago in nomadic tribal cultures are eternal and decreed by a divine power.

The Council expressed its sour views on gender equality in 1987 in the Danvers Statement, which explicitly states that husbands are the bosses of their wives at home and that men are the heads in the covenant community.  Thus, an eternal and unchanging hierarchy exists, and any attempt to disrupt it is seen as terrible.


Feminism was especially singled out as one rational for the Danvers Statement:

the increasing promotion given to feminist egalitarianism with accompanying distortions or neglect of the glad harmony portrayed in Scripture between the loving, humble leadership of redeemed husbands and the intelligent, willing support of that leadership by redeemed wives;

The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood has obnoxious opinions which are also advocated by Wahhabists in Islam and by the most orthodox strains of Judaism.  The gist of all those is that gender hierarchies are eternal.

Just to make all that absolutely clear, the same Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood has come up with the Nashville Statement which tries to fill in all the gaps in that argument, to keep the hierarchy very clear (and to cause even more suffering, of course):

“The Nashville Statement” was written as a follow-up to that statement [the 1987 one], in response to what the group sees as a growing acceptance of same-sex marriage and transgender rights. The council’s co-founder, John Piper, who is also a Baptist pastor, wrote that the statement addresses the “destructive consequences” of this modern inclusive culture.

I don't see the "destructive consequences" in the statement itself, but I've learned that when conservative patriarchs talk about such destruction, they really mean that someone is gnawing off the rungs of the ladder they have successfully climbed, and they fear falling down.

That so many religious groups advocate permanent gender hierarchies makes the criticism of such beliefs imperative for anyone who doesn't wish to emulate the cultural gender norms which prevailed two thousand years ago.

But progressives, in general, should pay attention to these arguments, too,  because if women are supposed to be subjugated to their husbands*, how can they exert independent power in the labor market?  If a husband has the veto power over everything his wife does, why would anyone trust her word?  And if he can decide when she should withdraw from the labor force, how should employers choose between married women and married men in promotion decisions?  Could we ever have a female president?  And who decides how the income is shared inside families?  Who gets to allocate any government transfer payments inside families?  Whose career needs will be prioritized?

Most Americans do not believe in the Biblical Big Guys' interpretations of their holy texts.  Note, however, that the more "religious rights" are pushed by the Trump administration, the closer we come to these opinions playing a much larger role in the labor market, education and politics.

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*  Specifically, the Council advocates complementarianism:  the view that men are created for one thing and that women are created for another thing, and that when we add the two slices together they create the totality of everything that is.

The problems with that view are many.  Not only are the views in the Bible based on exceedingly ancient gender norms, women and men are not each others' complements in a vast majority of fields of operation and in general  women and men are more alike than they are different.

The approach also supports male headship without any real controls on that (to rule out violence as a way to exert dominance, say) or without any need to demonstrate leadership skills or concerns for those one leads, and the approach doesn't care if in at least some families the wives would actually be more competent leaders than their husbands.

But the deepest problem with that whole approach is the concept of complementarianism when deprived of any concerns for equality.  If I bake a giant chocolate cake, eat almost all of it and give you the crumbs left on the plate, our food intakes were complementary in the sense that we ate the whole cake.  Thus, complementarianism hides inequality and the possibility that the good bits are given to one side in these divine deals.


**  In the ideal fundie world that's how marriage would look like.  There would be no same-sex marriage, no egalitarian marriages, no real choice not to marry at all and still have sex. 


 

Trump Shuts Down An Obama-Era Rule On Pay Tracking By Gender, Race and Ethnicity. Fun!

Another little present from our Dear Leader.  This is a real doozy:

The White House will shut down an Obama-era rule that would have required businesses to track how much they pay workers of varying genders, races and ethnicities according to a new report.
The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that Trump officials will stay the rule, which would have gone into effect in the spring, because it created a burden for employers.
“It’s enormously burdensome,” Neomi Rao, administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, told The Journal. “We don’t believe it would actually help us gather information about wage and employment discrimination.”

The rule would have applied to firms with at least 100 employees.

I adore that last paragraph which I bolded: 

It's enormously burdensome to collect the only kind of data which actually can reveal if a firm discriminates against, say, its female employees in pay!  It's so burdensome that to think about that burden makes me feel as if I'm wearing giant mill-stones as earrings and my earlobes are sweeping the floor below this one!  It's exhausting!

There's no way a worker at that firm could just go to the computer and create a few cross-tabulations of the firm's pay data.  No way.  It's tiring to just think about it.  I need to lie down now.

I hope you got the point.  Getting that data is not at all burdensome.

Then the next bit in that last paragraph:  The administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs doesn't believe that data on pay by sex and race and ethnicity would help in gathering information about labor market discrimination!  

It's probably better to use astrology as the basis of such studies, or we could always simply ask the CEOs of such firms if they discriminate against certain groups of employees.  Yes, that would work!  Those CEOs have no incentive to lie, after all, no reason why they would like to keep their total labor bill as low as possible by paying less to certain employee groups.  And of course real bigots would tell us the truth and smile broadly, revealing their vampire fangs.

Enough, goofy goddess.  More realistically, it's true that such data cannot prove or disprove discrimination, but its absence means that discrimination cannot be proved at all!

Have you noticed, by the way, how the fact that some chore might be a burden is always used in this manner by the Republican Party?  Environmental regulations are a real burden for firms so let's scrap them and trust that future generations evolve into some sort of amphibians which do not need air and so on.  Any kind of labor market fairness is awfully burdensome, too, and it's so much better to assume that certain demographic groups just love to make a little pin money at work.

And Now, Something Completely Different. Fake Simon And Fake Garfunkel Singing About Trump

This is a fun way* to start the day.

Something more chewy will be served later.
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*  Link via Modemocrat.

Harvey As A Metaphor

While following the terrible events in Houston and elsewhere, it occurred to me that this particular hurricane, with its unprecedented and hard-to-forecast behavior and the enormous losses it's causing is also a good metaphor for what has happened to American politics in the age of Trump.

We no longer know which rules apply, we cannot use old prediction models, we are not properly prepared for the damage we are going to suffer, and the levees are breaking.

Those levees are the basic rules of democracy, however flawed, and Trump simply doesn't respect any of them.

Trump's Latest Friday News Dump

Was intended to give the pardoning of Sheriff Arpaio as little coverage as possible in the mainstream media, given that hurricane Harvey was clearly the most important news to cover.  Trump's message would still reach the right people among his Breitbart (white supremacist) base, because they may more attention to Trump's tweets and dog whistles.

Just to remind all of you, what Trump did in pardoning Arpaio was this:

While he is not the first official whose offense involved abuse of public powers—from Nixon on down, others fit that category—his is the first case I’m aware of where someone is pardoned for using state power toward racist ends.

Phoenix New Times provides us a list of the deeds of Sheriff Arpaio.  It's not pleasant reading.

The catastrophe in Texas works nicely to reduce the publicity Arpaio's pardoning would otherwise receive.

Another possibility is that the timing of his pardon was planned to appease that Breitbart base for the simultaneous news that Sebastian Gorka, one of the white supremacist guys in the Trump administration, was let go.

Or Trump might be signaling to his co-conspirators that he will pardon them, so there's no need to make deals in the Mueller investigation etc.

Now I'm firmly in the world where hats are made of tinfoil and conspiracies sprout up everywhere.

Women's Equality Day, 8/28/17. What To Read, A Little Late.

Women's Equality Day was last Saturday, August 28th.  And no, its not a special day set up for 24 hours of gender equality, to be set aside for the rest of the year.

I was busy with my Giant Cucumber Plants and missed the date.  But not to worry!  Here are a few things worth reading on issues relating to gender equality*:

-  Tressie McMillan Cottom  wrote in July about the stolen childhoods of black girls, their stolen innocence and our lack of care for them as children.  I strongly recommend that piece which came out when I was mostly offline.

-  Jill Filipovic writes about the Catch-22, familiar to so many women, which Hillary Clinton faced when Donald Trump decided to stalk her on the debate floor, in front of millions of eyes.  Should she ignore him?  Should she kick him in the fork?  Should she yell at him call him a creep?

She picked the first alternative and ignored him.  But now she is criticized for it.  Filipovic notes that no option available for women in such circumstances is ever quite correct:

When women complain about being harassed on the street, we are admonished to simply talk back to our harassers. When we are beaten up or killed for talking back, people wonder why we provoked our assailants. When we are harassed or assaulted by someone in the public eye, we are presumed to be merely seeking publicity if we come forward. If we decide to speak out only when other women have done so first, then we must be lying, because why didn’t we mention this earlier?

This is familiar to many of us.  Its roots may be in our unconscious assumption that women are ultimately somehow responsible for the harassment they receive, even when that clearly is not the case (such as when Donald Trump breathed down Hillary Clinton's neck).**

-  The UK Guardian writes about a show which is based on "locker-room banter." The cast consists of four women who repeat the tales of men interviewed by the playwright Gary McNair.  It's hard to say whether the stories selected for the show are a random sample or the most extreme ones, but here's an example for you:

“The best thing that comes out of a woman’s mouth is your knob, I would say, aye.” “They’re only good for being in the kitchen … make my dinner then give me my hole, and then go to your bed.” 

Is this locker-room banter?  Just a joke?

If so, Trump's pussy-grabbing boasts might indeed be fairly mild examples of something much more hateful:  a culture of misogyny  —  I fervently hope that men with these opinions are a tiny minority.



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*  All my examples come from fairly privileged places.  Women's lives are much more unequal in the rest of the world and truly dismal in certain countries such as Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia.  Important work remains to be done.

**  Thus, we keep mulling over what Hillary should have done, in response to what Donald did.  We do not keep mulling over why Donald chose to stalk her around the stage in a public debate.  He has been given a weird kind of pass.

 In a related article, Paul Waldman asks if Hillary Clinton has abased herself adequately or not for her loss, and suggests that our thirst for this is at least partly based on the fact that she is a woman:

So again, why were other presidential losers never told to voluntarily submit themselves to a ritual humiliation? I can’t prove to you empirically that sexism is the reason that demand is only made of Clinton, but previous candidates didn’t find their occasional post-election comments greeted with headlines like “Dear Hillary Clinton, please stop talking about 2016” or “Can Hillary Clinton please go quietly into the night?,” or “Hillary Clinton shouldn’t be writing a book — she should be drafting a long apology to America” (that last op-ed began with the line, “Hey, Hillary Clinton, shut the f— up and go away already”). Only Clinton is supposed to beg for forgiveness, absolve everyone else of any sins they committed in 2016, and whip herself until we’re good and satisfied that she has been punished enough

Houston

I'm lighting a thousand candles for Texas.

Digby tells us how our Dear Leader is sternly focused on the catastrophe caused by hurricane Harvey.  Trump takes the opportunity to note that he has the very best people out to help, the greatest, in fact.

To see two catastrophes crash into each other is stunning.

May all in the way of Harvey be safe.  May help reach them soon.

How to send help.

The End of Liberal Identity Politics, Take Two

Mark Lilla, the guy who right after the elections argued that "liberal identity politics" must end before liberalism can rise from the grave (presumably as a zombie) has written a book based on his earlier New York Times article:  "The End of Identity Liberalism."

The book is called The Once And Future Liberal.  After Identity Politics.  Beverly Gage reviewed it for the New York Times.  She was not impressed:

Lilla acknowledges that social movements like feminism and civil rights played important roles in American history, raising questions and insisting on changes that could be secured no other way. At the moment, however, he finds such movements to be counterproductive, sucking energy away from the simple and urgent task of getting more Democrats into office. He disparages Black Lives Matter as “a textbook example of how not to build solidarity,” and dismisses “sex relations, the family, the secretarial pool, schools, the grocery store” (read: women’s issues) as all but irrelevant to serious politics.

It's almost as if Lilla's own identity has blinded him when it comes to certain issues?  Gage finds this a pity, because Lilla could have touched upon some important questions:

How should the Democratic Party balance diversity with a common vision of citizenship? How and where should concerned Americans focus their energies — on social-movement activism, on “resistance,” on electoral politics? How should universities preserve free speech in an age of impassioned conflict? How, for that matter, can Democrats start winning a few more local races? Lilla acts as if there are easy answers to these questions. “We need no more marchers,” he writes. “We need more mayors.” But isn’t it possible that we need both?

Well, the majority of recent anti-Trump marchers have been women, so they cannot possibly have made any difference, right?

I responded to Lilla's original 2016 article in a long (and popular!) blog post which I believe is still worth reading.  Today I want to return to the question if I can find any shared concerns between Lilla and my divine self.

Short Posts, 8/24/17: Trump as the New Bannon, The Death of Empathy And Other Topics

1.  The firing of Stephen K. Bannon is too little, too late, if the intention was to limit the power and influence of white (male) supremacists inside the Trump administration.  It's like waiting until a cancer has metastasized before removing only the very first tumor found.  But white supremacists need not worry, given that Trump still appears to spout all their basic values.

At this point you might think about the rate at which a certain kind of fascist thinking is becoming normalized at the highest levels of the US government.  So.

2.  A science envoy to the State Department, Daniel Kammen, has resigned, as a protest to Trump's clear penchant for racism and sexism and his clear disgust with the core values of a democracy.  The first letters in the paragraphs of Kammen's resignation letter spell "impeach."

Impeachment is unlikely, as long as the Republicans are firmly determined to let Trump cavort on their shoulders, though the hidden message is fun to find.

I'm not sure if resignation is a good strategy in the fight against the Turd Reich, though I get its appeal.  But if all rational people leave the administration, won't things get even worse?

3.  The New York Times coverage of the death of Kim Wall, a Swedish journalist whose mutilated body was found in Denmark, has been criticized by some readers of that paper:

One point that arose was that some commentators in the Scandinavian press and on social media thought this grisly crime eerily evoked a plot from a well-known Danish TV crime series, “The Bridge.” The show is about the span that connects Copenhagen and Malmo, Sweden, the locations in question. (Ms. Wall grew up near Malmo.) In our coverage, we pointed out that comparisons to the series were being made.

Some of our readers called this comparison insulting to Ms. Wall.

Alice Driver, a journalist, wrote on Twitter: “Really poor choice by @nytimes to use the murder of a female journalist to ruminate on Scandinavian thrillers.”

I have read about the case in several European newspapers.  Because I didn't then plan to write on it, I didn't analyze why I felt uncomfortable with the tone of several articles.

A whiff of death porn in the coverage?  A slight tilt toward turning a horrible story where a real person has died into an intellectual puzzle, as if it came from some fictional crime series?  A result of the gradual waning of empathy I seem to spot online whenever people discuss some recent horror, such as a terrorist attack,  where the victims become political chess pawns to be manipulated but not really acknowledged as formerly breathing, living, feeling individuals?

My thoughts are still pretty fuzzy on this.  But sometimes I really dislike my fellow humans' online behavior.

4.  I ate the first cucumber from the two plants in my garden and it was delicious.  To find it under a broad leaf was exciting!  It looked like a real cucumber!  It tasted like one, too.

 

The Most Basic Trouble With President Trump

Far too often I suddenly stop and try to get my head around the fact that sixty-plus million American voters thought this man would be the correct one to give the nuclear keys to.  He was equally incoherent and narcissistic in his pre-election rallies as he is in his post-election rallies (we have never-ending campaigning to celebrate the Dear Leader now).

Let's set aside the many and complicated explanations for Trump's support aside.  Let's instead ask what his election teaches us about the necessary conditions for a functioning democracy (even a limping one). 

What has gone wrong in the last thirty years or so, to allow a clearly incompetent, ignorant and ill-willed man to be elected to run this country?

Consider this parable:

We are passengers in a long-distance bus, going 120 miles per hour in a dark night up a curving mountain lane. The bus is driven by a deranged maniac who only wants to see how fast he can drive and how daringly.  Some passengers are tied to their seats.  Other passengers are free to move,  but nevertheless refuse to disable the driver, perhaps because they savor the idea of the tied-down ones dying when the bus careens into an abyss (never mind that they will be collateral damage), or perhaps because they enjoy the vicious ride or because they believe in their own immortality.*

That was my parable of the power that only the Republicans in the Congress (the passengers who can move in the bus)  have to control Donald Trump (the deranged bus driver).  The rest of us have much more limited power to influence the events.  In particular, we cannot ask to be let off at a safe stop.

I want to stress that this post is not about criticizing the horrible things Trump wishes to achieve, or says that he wishes to achieve.  Those I cover frequently.

It's about something much more limited:  The failure of the electoral system to stop an utterly incompetent man from being elected as the leader of the country, never mind what his policies might be. 

So how can this be fixed?

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*  Or because the alternative would have been a bus driven by a lady, and "everybody" knows that women cannot drive.

Terror in Turku, Finland

An eighteen-year-old Moroccan man, Abderrahman Mechkah,  who had entered Finland as an asylum-seeker in 2016 went on a rampage (armed with at least one large knife) in the center of the city of Turku (Åbo in Swedish) last Friday afternoon, hitting a pedestrian street and a busy market square (a bit like a giant farmer's market).  He may have timed his slaughtering to a time when the streets and the square would be full of people coming home from work and/or shopping.

He killed two Finnish women and wounded eight other people, six of them women and two of them men.  The two men had come to the aid of a victim or tried to stop the butcher.  Thus, they were not chosen from random possible victims.

Thus, authorities in Finland argue that he appeared to target women:

Four other Moroccan men detained over possible links to the Turku attack have co-operated with police but their role has yet to be fully established, Granroth added. The main suspect, who had lived in Turku’s immigration centre after arriving in Finland last year, appeared to have targeted women, police said on Saturday.

One of the attacked women was pushing a baby in a stroller.

The police shot the assailant in the leg* and arrested him.  The police operation was swift and efficient as it had been practiced for quite a while.

The Finnish Security Intelligence Office (SUPO) had received a tip about Mechkah as possibly radicalized early this year, but the tip contained no concrete information about plans and seems not to have received priority.  Mechkah was denied asylum in early 2017, because Morocco is not a conflict zone or near one.**

The latter could be the reason why Mechkah (and his possible associates) acted at this time:  He may have faced deportation for not having left the country voluntarily.

Why choose women as the targets?  A Finnish terrorism researcher, Leena Malkin, notes (source in Finnish) that this may have been intended to increase the shock value of the slaughter, may reflect misogyny, may be based on the assumption that women are less likely to fight back,  or on the view that such attacks shame the men in the target population who have been unable to keep "their" women or children safe.  ISIS*** often targets civilians who are deemed particularly vulnerable, as do many other terrorist groups.

We may get more clarity on the so-called reasons for this attempted femicide later.  But an additional possibility is that Mechkah's extreme Islamist ideology doesn't believe that women should be out and about without male guardians and unveiled.  He might have wanted to create a specific terror in women which would keep them at home, because that is one step toward the kind of world ISIS desires.
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*  According to one eye-witness (source in Finnish)  a young Afghani asylum-seeker who tried to apprehend the assailant, the police had to shoot him as he was just preparing to cut the throat of yet another female victim.

**  The asylum application system has a severe problem in that there's no quick initial examination to decide on which cases are obviously without merit, based on the international agreements on the causes which justify getting asylum.  Note that dire economic need or the search for a better life is not one of those causes.

Individuals from countries which are not conflict zones or known to oppress certain demographic or religious groups can still apply for asylum and stay in the new host country for a longish period of time, even though everyone knows that they will not ultimately qualify for asylum.  Processing those cases,  financially supporting the applicants (and even paying for their return flights in some cases) takes resources away from other needier cases and endangers the compassion local people feel for refugees.   

***  ISIS appears to have added Finland to the list of the crusader countries, though I'm not sure exactly what Finland has done to justify such a placement.  Finland has never had colonies, but was a colony itself and has not sent troops or weapons to the Middle East.  Rather, it has taken in roughly 30,000 asylum-seekers in 2015 alone. 

But it does have a cross on the flag.  And of course the way ISIS reads the Quran justifies the killing of all infidels wherever they are caught, not just in war against Muslims.


 

The Metaphor Of Our Times: Trump Viewing The Solar Eclipse

The metaphor is this picture of our dear Leader watching the solar eclipse:

We are not supposed to look directly at the sun, but our Dear Leader does.  Thus, either he has never bothered to learn that rule or he believes that it is Fake News or he knows the rule, but decided that looking manly and daring and foolhardy is more important than preserving his retinas.

Those three possibilities are the ones journalists frequently use to try to explain Trump's behavior: willful ignorance, defining what he does not like as fake and produced by his enemies, and running on the emotional gases of manly stereotypes while giving his finger to the Democrats and the world at large (never mind the costs).

This is the person who decides when the nuclear button should be pressed.

Economics Jobs Rumors. And Rumors About Sexism.

Justin Wolfers writes about an economics senior thesis in the New York Times.  Most senior theses, even award winning ones, don't get covered in the national media, but Linda Wu's was.

Her research is about the talk at Econjobrumors.com, an online site intended to help young economists find jobs, and her goal is to study gender stereotyping in the academia.  The site is what Wolfers calls an online water cooler, the forums (fora?) are not very strictly moderated, and the users are anonymous.

Wu mined (some of?) the forums for data on how economists there talk about men and women:

Ms. Wu set up her computer to identify whether the subject of each post is a man or a woman. The simplest version involves looking for references to “she,” “her,” “herself” or “he,” “him,” “his” or “himself.”

She then adapted machine-learning techniques to ferret out the terms most uniquely associated with posts about men and about women.

The 30 words most uniquely associated with discussions of women make for uncomfortable reading.

In order, that list is: hotter, lesbian, bb (internet speak for “baby”), sexism, tits, anal, marrying, feminazi, slut, hot, vagina, boobs, pregnant, pregnancy, cute, marry, levy, gorgeous, horny, crush, beautiful, secretary, dump, shopping, date, nonprofit, intentions, sexy, dated and prostitute.

The parallel list of words associated with discussions about men reveals no similarly singular or hostile theme. It includes words that are relevant to economics, such as adviser, Austrian (a school of thought in economics) mathematician, pricing, textbook and Wharton (the University of Pennsylvania business school that is President Trump’s alma mater). More of the words associated with discussions about men have a positive tone, including terms like goals, greatest and Nobel. And to the extent that there is a clearly gendered theme, it is a schoolyard battle for status: The list includes words like bully, burning and fought.

Wu also analyzed the contexts in which men and women were discussed:

This part of her analysis reveals that discussions about men are more likely to be confined to topics like economics itself and professional advice (with terms including career, interview or placement).

Discussions of women are much more likely to involve topics related to personal information (with words like family, married or relationship), physical attributes (words like beautiful, body or fat) or gender-related terms (like gender, sexist or sexual).

Wu's research is interesting, even though results from one anonymous online site cannot be extended to the whole economics profession and even though it's impossible to know whether the sexist commentary comes from a small but productive minority who might not even be economists.

Because I am not well versed with Wu's methods a closer analysis of her paper would not have been productive.  Instead,  I decided to visit the site to see how its members chose to respond to the news that the New York Times had made it (in)famous.(1)

Back From the So-Called Vacation

I am back in the You Es Of Ay, and things have fallen apart here, the center couldn't hold.  The obvious conclusion has to be that it was my absence from the public discourse that caused the collapse.

Just kidding.  The quality of light here is softer than in Finland, filtered through clouds and the humidity.  The weeds in the curb are almost as high as I am, and during the trip back I was selected for a special security check en route, to establish whether I have recently handled explosives.  As if I am not an explosive by my very nature, sigh.  Nothing is unpacked, except for the usual after-a-trip migraine which wasn't exactly helped by my recent chocolate consumption.

Ordinary production on this blog will commence in short order, and I'm pleased to return to it.

Women And American Politics. Fourth Monday.

This is the last post in the series which has largely been about the events during the last year and not an exhaustive treatment of the topic.  I want to conclude with two posts:

The first one is about the odd invisibility of women as voters and as activists in the US political media.  The second one is one example of the way in which female politicians are not invisible:  Not as individuals, but as representatives of their sex and age.*


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* And possibly of race and ethnicity when it interacts with sex, but we still have so few female women of color in politics that it's hard to tell.

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

(I wrote this analysis in April 2017.  It's worth reading (even again!), I think, given the importance of the opioid epidemic in "heartland" America.  For more on the deaths of despair among white women, see this post from 2016.)

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.

The Slow (Possibly) Cricket Song

This one has an interesting effect on my brain.  It calms me down, even right after I have read something utterly preposterous or deeply troubling.

But it's not clear what it is we are hearing in that song.  On the one hand:

Composer Jim Wilson has recorded the sound of crickets and then slowed down the recording, revealing something so amazing. The crickets sound like they are singing the most angelic chorus in perfect harmony. Though it sounds like human voices, everything you hear in the recording is the crickets themselves.
“I discovered that when I slowed down this recording to various levels, this simple familiar sound began to morph into something very mystic and complex … almost human.”

On the other hand:*

Nonetheless, even if the original recording featured nothing other than the sounds of crickets chirping, exactly what was done to those sounds to create the finished piece remains a subject of contention. Critics contend that Wilson didn’t simply slow down a continuous recording of crickets chirping; they interpret his statement that he “slowed down this recording to various levels” and Bonnie Joe Hunt’s reference to Wilson’s “lowering the pitch” several times to mean that he used multiple recordings of crickets, each slowed down by a different amount to produce a specific pitch, and layered them to create a melodic effect sounding like a “well-trained church choir.”

Whatever the source of the music , I find it very relaxing.

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*  YouTube has several other versions of slowed-down cricket song and none of them sound like a church choir or even terribly melodic, though one sounds a bit similar to Wilson's work.  But as Snopes states, it's not clear what the original creator of the piece, Jim Wilson, might have meant by having "slowed down" the cricket song.

Stray Thoughts on Language, August 8,2017

1.  I find a certain linguistic oddity fascinating in the more colloquial online comments about nasty wimminz.  That oddity is common in the so-called manosphere, and it means creating sentences where the term "women and men" is replaced by "women and males" or "females and men" or the sentence otherwise calls one biological sex male/female and the other man/woman.

I don't know the reason for that, but it's extremely common.  So common that when I see that use of the terms I know that misogyny is coming.

2.  The conservatives use the term "elites" in an odd way*.  Whenever a conservative uses that term it will not include, say, the Koch brothers or the owners of Walmart or Donald J. Trump. 

Money has dropped out of that meaning (which is very helpful for the many wealthy conservatives who indeed belong to a moneyed elite), and education has taken its place.  Imagine someone who works a low-wage job, lives in a drafty attic furnished from Salvation Army stores and eats beans and rice every day.  That person is part of the elite, as conservatives define it, as long as she or he has a college degree and as long as that attic is in an urban population center. 

The clues are clear:  A member of the "elites" means "likely to vote for Democrats" and went to school.

3.  "He took me in his arms, and kissed me.  I drowned in his smoldering eyes."
Now take out the "s" in "smoldering".

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*  That's not the deepest way of analyzing the conservative uses of "elites."  Conservatives attempt to associate it with certain liberal or progressive values so that it becomes easier to argue that those values are forced upon an unwilling population who'd much rather have fascism or a feudal system with lots of fundamentalist religion.  Those systems leave the money to the actual wealthy elites, and that is the real base of the Republican Party. 

Women And American Politics. Third Monday.

Today's link is to the long post I wrote after the elections about the meaning of not having a female president.  I think it makes several important points.

If nothing else, it's useful as a reminder of how common gaslighting in American politics is and also how easy it can be to practice gaslighting on ourselves.  Writing that piece helped me to see when it's happening!

The New York Times Boy Opinion Columnists on Women

Well, some of them, the ones who write about women* at all.  That would be David Brooks and Ross Douthat and, earlier, John Tierney.  I want to put those posts together, because the New York Times is viewed as part of the libtard fake news industry, so one might expect fewer of such biased takes on gender science.

But the focus of diversity at the opinions stable of the Times doesn't seem to reach to correcting their coverage of issues pertinent to women.

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* This post is relevant for understanding what writing about women in science and politics often means.

Terry Pratchett As Comfort Reading In The Current Political Situation

One of my escape valves* from the Trump Reich has been re-reading Terry Pratchett's Discworld books.  Several of them offer excellent parables to the American "fake news" phenomenon.

Two examples:

Echidne on Right-Wing Christianity and Politics

I wrote about Ross Douthat's sermon on religion to liberals last April.  In this post I want to understand better why over eighty percent of white Evangelicals voted for Donald Trump last November:

Exit polls show white evangelical voters voted in high numbers for Donald Trump, 80-16 percent, according to exit poll results. That’s the most they have voted for a Republican presidential candidate since 2004, when they overwhelmingly chose President George W. Bush by a margin of 78-21 percent. Their support for Trump will likely be seen as part of the reason the GOP candidate performed unexpectedly well in Tuesday’s election, according to Five Thirty Eight.
White evangelicals are the religious group that most identifies with the Republican Party, and 76 percent of them say they are or lean Republican, according to a 2014 survey. As a group, white evangelicals make up one-fifth of all registered voters and about one-third of all voters who identify with or lean toward the GOP.

The obvious answer to my question is that white Evangelicals overwhelmingly identify with the Republican Party.  But why is that the case?  Most of the sayings of Jesus appear to directly contradict the Republican platform, after all.

A more detailed answer might also tell us why Hillary Clinton seems to be especially disliked by white Evangelicals, why they voted for a heathen womanizer who probably only goes to church when the cameras are present, rather than for the woman who actually is religious.

So let's try this one:

Evangelical support for Trump, a thrice-married, casino-building businessman, was puzzling to some. For instance, leaders like Focus on the Family founder James Dobson who has long opposed gambling, ended up supporting him once he became the GOP Party nominee. Clinton is a churchgoing United Methodist who taught Sunday school and, as a senator, attended weekly prayer breakfasts.
Trump’s support from evangelicals could be explained at least in part by their deep dislike for Clinton. According to a Post-ABC poll in October, 70 percent of white evangelicals held an unfavorable view of Clinton, compared with 55 percent of the public overall who say the same thing.
Clinton has symbolized much of what evangelicals have tended to oppose, including abortion rights advocacy and feminism. As first lady, she is tied to conservative Christian loss of culture war battles during Bill Clinton’s presidency.

Bolds are mine.  I find the importance of opposition to abortion by the right-wing Christians interesting, because the Bible doesn't say anything at all about abortion*.  Yet two interviewed leaders of white and Latinx Evangelical in this article were both very much focused on two issues:  the banning of abortion and support for the state of Israel.**

Others have argued that white Evangelicals, in particular, love Trump because he is Trump:

But Trump and his evangelical supporters think alike in more ways than people realize. Fundamentalist approaches to evangelicalism have long fostered anti-intellectual, anti-rational, black-and-white, and authoritarian mindsets—the very traits that define Trump.

Whichever of those explanations one prefers, it's hard not to wonder if those white (and Latinx) Evangelicals who voted for Trump didn't make a pact with the Christian Devil.  Or if they never read this in their presumed holy book:

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for you are like unto whitewashed sepulchers, which indeed appear beautiful outwardly but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness.

Heh.  That's a bit strong, right?  But despite my severe criticism of various types of fundamentalists on this blog, over many years, I have always on some level assumed that those believers take their religious views seriously, that they walk their talk, and that both the walk and the talk are based on the holy books they tell me they follow.

When the exact reverse seems to have happened, when the votes seem more based on tribal, patriarchal and financial considerations,  but are explained as religious ones, well, it's difficult not to think of whitewashed sepulchers.

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*  Which suggests to me that the link between the dislike of abortions and the dislike of equal rights for women may be closer than is usually admitted.

**  To explain that support, see here.

When Sexism And Bad Evolutionary Psychology Meet. The Russian Case.

I like this post not because of its quality --  it's mediocre -- but because it ties together many of my interests in one bundle (domestic violence prevention, Trump's Russia connection and terrible research joyfully spread online) and even puts a nice bow on it.

Women and American Politics. Second Monday

These three posts are about the influence of gender on the 2016 elections.  This one tells how men and women voted, based on exit polls.  This one and this one analyze the impact of sexism (and racism) on the results.

The results of the 2016 elections did not change the total number of women in the Congress.  Women are still 19% of the Congress and over 50% of all Americans.   So while the Congress became somewhat more racially diverse it stayed put in terms of gender. 

But things could be even worse, of course, and they are inside the Republicans in the Congress:  Roughly ten percent of the Republican Senators and nine percent of the Republican Congresscritters are women.

Incidentally, the US News piece the last link goes to a somewhat unhelpful beginning statement:

But increased diversity in the new Congress is largely around the edges, with women and minorities each making up less than 20 percent of lawmakers.

I blame the concept of diversity for that, because it is essentially undefined.  If we use the concept of fair or proportional representation, then we would expect each minority group to be roughly represented at the same percentages that it commands in the overall US population*, and we would expect the same for women when viewed as a class.  

It doesn't make much sense to lump all minorities together in this context (though it can be useful in other contexts**), because we could have a situation where one minority is vastly under-represented and another vastly over-represented, but pooling all minorities into one group could disguise such developments.

It's also possible that some future Congress will have all minority ethnic and racial groups fairly represented, but mostly by men.  The tendency to lump all the different groups together and then tag them with the label of "diversity" is  really not terribly helpful.  I much prefer "fair representation" to "diversity."
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* With the exception of very small demographic groups.  Some years such groups would be over-represented and some years under-represented, in a somewhat fairer world, so that the long-run average percentage would match the population percentages.

** In, say, analyses of white male percentages in the Congress.  But in many other cases lumping together all the people who don't fall under that label can hide important differences in the reasons for under-representation.

Why I Can't Have A Vacation

Or stay offline for even a week.  It's because I come back to a quite different stage of the demolition derby administration.  Sean Spicer?  PUFF.  Reince Priebus?  PUFF.

Now we have Anthony Scaramucci where Spicer used to throw his temper tantrums.  Scaramucci's fits of rage will be an interesting change to Trump's reporting strategy, though he, too, wants to kill the free press which is essential for any kind of democracy.

And the White House new Chief of Staff is a military man, a real guys' guy looking out for guys as Fox's Brian Kilmeade implies.  All this would be hilarious if only I could move to some other planet!

The circus side-show of McCain running away with all the glory on the AMA vote is also enjoyable.  The Lady Republicans play the character roles while McCain stars.  He saved the day.

In nicer news, I have been gorging on new potatoes.  With dill.  They don't taste the same in the US, so my excitement might not make sense if you have never eaten baby vegetables which grew up under the Arctic summer sun.

What Should Women Wear?

The "correct" answer* to that question would take a book.  Hmm.  Perhaps I should write one?

My archives are full of scattered thoughts on this cultural question:

 - For examples of the disciplining of teenage girls at schools, read this post or
this one.

- For the relationship between pain and female clothing, read this one.

- And for what is "appropriate clothing" (recently addressed again** for female lawmakers and Congressional reporters by Speaker Paul Ryan!),  read this post and then the second half of this post on religiously required female dress.

- I also address the question whether women who say they wear what they want to wear in fact do so, or at least whether that choice really has nothing to do with what choices the society offers women in terms of religious norms, cultural expectations and the brainwashing carried out by the fashion industry and by popular culture.

I  haven't written enough about the fashion industry and the possible chains of influence from popular culture (not necessarily created by women) to what women are told they should wear, or the preposterous patterns of sizing women's clothes*** or the apparent mismatch between what is sold in stores or online and what women in fact wear in real life.

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*  There isn't any one answer, of course.  By "correct" I mean an exhaustive and boring treatise on the gendered dress codes over all eras and all places.  Nah.  It wouldn't be boring.  It would be fun!

**  The rule, which precedes Ryan's rein, bans sleeveless dresses and tops and the kinds of shoes where toes are visible.  Recently Ryan agreed to look at modernizing that rule. 

It would be good to allow men, too, to wear something a bit lighter than a suit jacket with long sleeves.  On the other hand, the rules for men are much simpler, because the messages men's clothing is expected to send are not in conflict with each other the way the messages for women's clothing often are.  Still, comfort and safety in clothes should come before all that messaging, and suits are not the best thing to wear in heat and high humidity.  How about Bermuda shorts and short-sleeved jackets with them for male lawmakers and journalists? 

***  Or the low quality of even some expensive clothing if it's intended for women or girls.  See this post for more on that, but also a more loving take on clothes.

A Horse Is A Horse Is A Horse, Of Course. On The Uffington Chalk Horse.

A fun story about this giant chalk horse carved into the side of a hill in Oxfordshire, England can be read here.  What's new to me in that story is the dating of the football-field-sized pictogram as 3000 years old.  The dating was made possible by a technique called optical stimulated luminescence:

“It was older than I’d been expecting,” Miles remembers. “We already knew it must be ancient, because it’s mentioned in the 12th-century manuscript The Wonders of Britain, so it was obviously old then. And the abstract shape of the horse is very similar to horses on ancient British coins just over 2,000 years old. But our dating showed it was even older than that. It came out as the beginning of the Iron Age, perhaps even the end of the Bronze Age, nearly 3,000 years ago.”

What's most fascinating about the pictogram is that it has required regular upkeep all through its history and that it has received it and still does:

From the start the horse would have required regular upkeep to stay visible. It might seem strange that the horse’s creators chose such an unstable form for their monument, but archaeologists believe this could have been intentional. A chalk hill figure requires a social group to maintain it, and it could be that today’s cleaning is an echo of an early ritual gathering that was part of the horse’s original function.

What Sells in Political Commentary. A Re-Posting.

Originally posted here.

1.  Giving political commentary while being famous for some totally different reason.  People will want to hear what you have to say, even if it makes very little sense:

Tim Robbins and his ex, Susan Sarandon, have certainly made news in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary, with Robbins going to bat for Bernie Sanders on Twitter and Sarandon speaking out against Hillary Clinton and even appearing to suggest she might vote for Donald Trump instead.

Sarandon wouldn't go quite that far in an interview with Stephen Colbert on Wednesday, but she did suggest why she might do such a thing.
"I'm more afraid actually of Hillary Clinton's war record and her hawkishness than I am of building a wall," Sarandon said. "But that doesn't mean that I would vote for Trump."

Sarandon can vote for whomever she wishes, of course.  But comparing Clinton's hawkishness in foreign policy to Trump's immigration policy is comparing apples to oranges.  In reality Trump is hawkier than Clinton and wants to build a giant wall.  Is "hawkier" a word?

This category is overflowing with celebrities who get the microphone even though they haven't done their homework (coughClintEastwoodcough).  Sarandon's comment is just the most recent one.

2.  Have your writing posted under a really shocking title!  Exaggerate!  Promise the moon!  Be very very partisan.

That always works, even when the article itself is milquetoast or interprets data wrong, and it works because many of us just look at the headline (tl;dr)*, but that counts as a click for the advertisers.  And it is clicks which matter.

3.   Keep it short and emotional.  Don't confuse people with too many facts (tl;dr)*  Note that the term "emotional" covers anger.  Anger is the default emotion in politics, but recently fear might sell better.  Be very very afraid!

Indeed, any hind-brain emotion (anger, fear, sexual arousal) will make an article popular.

4.  Avoid everything I do on this here blog.

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* too long, did not read

The Anatomy Of Fake News

My post on the Pizzagate tells the story of one manufactured scandal which spread like wildfire in the right-wing information bubble.  The comments to that post could also be worth reading.

The Pizzagate is a fascinating example of fake news.  It had zero evidence of any crime, but it had the hooks which make a story go viral:  The supposed culprit is someone extremely hated and the supposed crime is about the vilest of all, with the kind of twist (pizzas!) that makes it all memorable.

This post discusses a study about fake news and also my deep thoughts on the whole phenomenon, including the fact that it's more common among the right than the left, though not absent from the left, either.

And to understand the appeal of fake news and the difficulty of using evidence to change someone's mind, read this take on the backfire effect.

Women and American Politics. First Monday

There will be four posts in this series, though I cheat and use old material.

This post is about the question whether "identity politics," including such issues as women's reproductive rights, were what the Democratic Party needs to dispense with if it ever wants to win any elections again.  My take on that topic can be found here. 

The article I respond to in that post was the first of many, so it's useful to stress that I want* the Democratic Party to have a much stronger economic platform, to focus much more on reducing income inequality and on making sure that this country actually offers fair economic opportunities for all.

But that should be doable without dropping general fairness concerns, unless it turns out that Democrats can't both walk and chew gum.  Which would be pretty disappointing.

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* And have written about that many times.  I want single payer health care, for instance, and actually not for only ideological reasons, but because it's the least horrible of all horrible systems that humans have created for financing health care.  I also want a stronger defense of progressive taxes, a better and more egalitarian school system and better benefits for workers, including proper summer vacations. 

Should Single Men Pay For Pregnancy And Delivery in Their Insurance Policies?

The argument that they* should not have to do so will not die.  I have addressed it in great detail in a post from  last March.  It gives you some artillery to take down those types of arguments. 

If nothing else works, simply say that you won't pay for anything you might not biologically need, such as treatment for prostate or penile cancer if you happen to lack those organs, or for anything caused by an activity you yourself do not practice, such as orthopedic surgery after a water-skiing or boating accident if you hate water sports and never go near any lake, sea or river.

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* Or post-menopausal women or any other group not planning to give birth.  For some weird reason the services which people feel shouldn't have to be covered for other people are always services only women need, even though there are services women do not directly need.  Viagra, say.

A Literary Thought About Jane Austen

This story about the favorite books of twenty-five famous women has a fascinating Virginia Woolf quote about Jane Austen:

J.K. Rowling:

“Emma by Jane Austen. Virginia Woolf said of Austen, ‘For a great writer, she was the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness,’ which is a fantastic line. You’re drawn into the story, and you come out the other end, and you know you’ve seen something great in action. But you can’t see the pyrotechnics; there’s nothing flashy.” —Oprah, June 2014

Compare that to Austen's own statement from a letter to J. Edward Austen:

What should I do with your strong, manly, spirited sketches, full of variety and glow? How could I possibly join them on to the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour?

She sells herself short, of course, and probably J. Edward Austen too long, because she worked very hard erasing, editing and rewriting.

That can be seen by comparing her last book, Persuasion, with her earlier ones.  She didn't have the time (having a date with death) to hone and hone and hone Persuasion the way the earlier books were polished, to make the sarcasm subtler and harder to spot (which makes the spotting more hilarious).

Where I Agree With Jennifer Rubin

Not the kind of title I thought I would ever write, but in the Trump Reich things change.  Rubin, a conservative columnist, has written a fairly straightforward piece on the way the Republican Party has brought us much closer to the dawn of a dictatorship:

Let me suggest the real problem is not the Trump family, but the GOP. To paraphrase Brooks, “It takes generations to hammer ethical considerations out of a [party’s] mind and to replace them entirely with the ruthless logic of winning and losing.” Again, to borrow from Brooks, beyond partisanship the GOP evidences “no attachment to any external moral truth or ethical code.”
Let’s dispense with the “Democrats are just as bad” defense. First, I don’t much care; we collectively face a party in charge of virtually the entire federal government and the vast majority of statehouses and governorships. It’s that party’s inner moral rot that must concern us for now. Second, it’s simply not true, and saying so reveals the origin of the problem — a “woe is me” sense of victimhood that grossly exaggerates the opposition’s ills and in turn justifies its own egregious political judgments and rhetoric. If the GOP had not become unhinged about the Clintons, would it have rationalized Trump as the lesser of two evils? Only in the crazed bubble of right-wing hysteria does an ethically challenged, moderate Democrat become a threat to Western civilization and Trump the salvation of America.

Rubin also singles out the demonization of "gays, immigrants, Democrats, the media, feminists, etc" as one of the major tactics of the Republican politicians and writers.

I was reminded of this when I had to look up a reference at the National Review and all the other articles they thought were similar to the one I was reading were really about how horrible women are and especially how horrible feminists are.  National Review online is supposed to be the martini-sipping older gentleman in the conservative coalition, not the rabid rubble-rousing Breitbart.com, but there's not much -- except the strength of the vicious language -- to choose between them.

The Republicans have been appealing to the hind-brain for a long time by creating many groups of "Others" and it is those "Others" who are responsible for all evil in this world, never mind any lack of evidence.

And for what purpose?  To win the game.  It IS a game the Republicans play, and the only object is to win, or at least make the others lose.  That losing seems more central than any actual conservative victory, because the pain of the Democrats is sweet and to watch their humiliation is delightful, even if the conservatives end up suffering at least as much.

So yes, I agree with Rubin when it comes to this particular piece, but she has certainly been an avid player in that game.   If the cost of all that winning is the end of democracy, then, my friends from all sides of the aisle, we are screwed.

Swords, Not Ploughshares. The Republican Love of War.

Military spending is the holy cow of the Republicans.   By July 14, the House Republicans  had passed a bill which would give the military ninety billion dollars more than the six hundred billion dollars Trump had asked.   Imagine that!  The party which sees government waste and duplication in almost all programs is willing to give the military more than the president asked, and appears to want to add "unneeded bureaucracy to the Pentagon" by creating a new military branch for space.

Remember that these are the same House Republicans who have worked very hard to make certain that lots of Americans will lose their health insurance coverage.  Thus, certain types of dangers to life matter to them, while other types do not matter at all.*

It's not hard to understand that paradox. 

Rich people can afford to protect their lives against health risks, even without health insurance, but certainly with private health insurance, while even rich people can't afford their own high-tech military to protect them against possible attacks by hostile foreign powers.  And weapons to kill people with are manly.

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*  It's possible to argue that all economic theories accept that the military constitutes a public good which the government should provide, while only certain aspects of health care (the treatment of communicable diseases and basic medical research) pass through the strictest analytical colander. 

But I very much doubt that the House Republicans are driven by such concerns, because, first, they tend to promote market alternatives in other areas where economic theory demonstrates that they will not work well (such as in many parts of health care), second, because no theory of public goods justifies overspending on the military, and, third, because this is the only public good on which the conservatives are willing to splurge.

The Priceless Views of Tom Price, Health and Human Services Secretary

Tom Price  has given a fascinating interview, this one (the video).

I couldn't believe my ears.  Secretary Price spoke some weird language*, not English, but sadly it is a language we have heard before.  Try to catch him in the utterance of one truth, or even in something that isn't just sad soundbites about how the new health care system will give all Americans their choices back**, away from the nasty Washington, DC, elites.  Those choices, of course, depend on the consumers having enough money to pay for good policies.  If that's not the case, there's always the choice to suffer and even to die of treatable conditions.

That is one frightening interview, especially given this:

HHS Secretary Tom Price gets enormous new power over healthcare standards and even state budgets. The essence of the amended bill’s bait-and-switch structure is the creation of several slush funds to moderate the costs to states of various repeal provisions, especially the drastic cutback in Medicaid funding.

Those slush funds, however, would come under the control of Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price. A known enemy of Medicaid and of expanding healthcare services for women and the needy, Price would have the authority to apportion those funds as he wishes, favoring some states over others because of their politics and policies, for example.

As former Medicare/Medicaid chief Andy Slavitt observes, there are no rules or standards guiding Price’s hand — he could dole out all the money to red states or pull funding from others at will. The money doesn’t have to go to services for low-income people or to replace lost Medicaid funding. He could shortchange states that require health plans to cover abortion — such as California and New York.

“The bill is a giant ‘Trust Tom Price’ bill,” Slavitt tweeted. And even if the money is apportioned responsibly, it’s not enough: The total in the slush funds, Slavitt calculates, would restore barely 10% of the cuts in Medicaid.

That LAT article is worth reading in its entirety.

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* A "feel-good" language, promising everyone a paradise, while the whole proposal will be tax cuts for the wealthy and worse care for older consumers, anyone with pre-existing conditions or anyone currently on Medicaid.

**  The term "choice" in the health care context is almost preposterous.  Very few consumers have the training and skills to determine what kind of care they need, which provider is the cheapest but of acceptable quality, or which health insurance policy best matches their future risk profiles.  Then there's the hidden second meaning of "choice" here, which has to do with withdrawing funding and letting people try to decide how they can avoid medical bankruptcy.