On the Kavanaugh Nomination And Women's Reproductive Rights. Or Back to the Basics. Post Two.

(The first post in this series  can be found here.  This second post is about the reactions from right-wing religious leaders to the sexual violence or harassment allegations against Brett Kavanaugh, Trump's most recent nominee to the Supreme Court of the United States.)

What The Godly Men Say

What the godly leaders of right-wing Christianists say  about the allegations against Kavanaugh is fascinating when we remember that these statements come from men who view themselves as the leaders of godly people, of god's people.  They represent the people of light and goodness, while others are viewed as the people of darkness and evil.

Here's Franklin Graham, the son of the famous preacher Billy Graham, on why Kavanaugh is not guilty of anything "relevant:"

Well there wasn't a crime that was committed.  These are two teenagers and it's obvious that she said no and he respected it and walked away--if that's the case but he says he didn't do it.  He just flat out says that's just not true.  Regardless if it was true, these are two teenagers and she said no and he respected that so I don't know what the issue is. This is just an attempt to smear his name, that's all.

Notice something interesting about that quote?  Graham hadn't even properly read Blasey Ford's statement!  According to her she managed to escape from the room when Mark Judge, the other boy in the room, jumped on top of Kavanaugh (who was lying on top of Blasey Ford, holding her down), and the pile came apart.  Kavanaugh was never described as having asked for consent or as showing any signs of respect.

That Graham hadn't bothered to learn what Blasey Ford said had happened tells me so much!  What the wimminz say really does not matter to the Evangelical patriarchs.  In any case, it's much more important to get another forced-birth-and-no-gay-sex Justice on the bench. (1)

Another right-wing Christian leader argues that a rape is not a rape if the victim doesn't scream and shout for help:

Rape is having sex with a woman while she screams for help. No scream, no rape according to Deuteronomy 22:23-24. [Christine Blasey] Ford says Kavanaugh held his hand over her mouth so did she scream for help when his hand was elsewhere? After all, it was in a bedroom of a house; surely, one of the other 4 teens could have heard him scream when she bit his hand. Did she bite his hand? Poke him in the eye? Women know instinctively how to protect their honor: screaming, shouting, slapping, spitting, slugging, and stabbing with a finger, pencil, or hat pin. Since she did not cry out or stab him, I will not believe her without a film of the event.”

Bolds are mine.

The argument that a rape accusation cannot ever be verified if the victim didn't scream or fight back very hard is not an unusual one.  It used to be written into the laws of many countries, and still might be the law in some places.

That those who tried to scream and fight back might then have ended in murder statistics (most likely as victims) is not something the above writer worries about.  But then he thinks women have hat pins at the ready in case they need to poke rapists in the eye!

I love the idea that "women know instinctively" how to protect their honor, especially when most cultures discourage girls from learning how to physically fight, but also because this way of thinking comes quite close to "legitimate" rape (2) and the conservative view that only certain kinds of rapes are real:

The victim must be a young virgin, on her way to church, modestly dressed, and the attacker must not be known to her at all.  Even then she probably should have the hat pin ready for stabbing, and it helps if she lost a limb or two in the attack.

So.  Not all Evangelical leaders are quite this outspoken about the irrelevancy of the allegations against Kavanaugh.  Many argued, before last week's Judicial Committee hearings, that both sides must be heard.  But the majority of the right-wing Christianist leaders are willing to pay handball with the demons if that gets an anti-abortion and anti-gay majority on the bench.

The background for all this can be found in the general attitudes about sexuality and about women's rights in the right-wing religious sects (3):

Sandi Villarreal, a former rape crisis advocate while at a Southern Baptist university, told the Fix that some evangelical leaders reject stories such as Ford’s because they disrupt their entire worldview about gender.

“These men tend to brush off the youthful ‘indiscretions’ — of boys,” Villareal said, “Young women, on the other hand, are held responsible for causing boys to stumble or tempting them into sin by the way they dress, how and whether they flirt, really, by virtue of being a woman.”

And, in the context of the #MeToo movement among the Southern Baptists (4):

Within evangelical culture, as I’ve written previously, the idea that women are “supposed” to be the gatekeepers of male sexuality, that male sexual urges are inherently uncontrollable, and the idea that forgiveness is automatically “owed” to any alleged abuser, converge to create a climate in which allegations of sexual harassment and abuse tend to be seen as minor or, at least, forgivable.

Certainly, the evangelical community is already redeeming its own people accused of sexual misconduct during the #MeToo movement. Earlier this month, former Southern Baptist Convention president Paige Patterson — who left his position as president of the Southwestern Baptist Seminary in disgrace after accusations of sexism — returned to public ministry with a pair of sermons that denigrated the #MeToo movement and focused on the problem of false rape allegations.

Patterson chose as one of his first sermons on his return the story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife, i.e., a story about a false rape allegation.  Given that false rape allegations are much, much rarer than those true rape allegations which never result in any kind of sentence to the perpetrator, Patterson's choice tells where his priorities lie. (5)

Forty-eight percent of white evangelical respondents in a recent poll would have Kavanaugh on the bench even if Blasey Ford's allegations were proven to be true.  That's not too surprising, given that the support of white evangelicals for Judge Roy Moore was not affected by the allegations that he, as a younger man, had stalked and groomed (vulnerable) young girls for sex.

None of this is to argue that many white evangelicals wouldn't fervently believe that abortion is murder and that stopping murder matters much more than stopping sexual violence or rape.  But if the Bible is supposed to be their guide in all this it's worth noting that abortion is not mentioned in that book while rape is (6).

Whatever the overall motivations of the above quoted leaders might be, I cannot help concluding that an important motive for them is the defense of the patriarchal power hierarchies among their communities.  Their fight against abortions and their acceptance of sexual harassment and violence neatly fit into the same scenario if that is what motivates them.

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(1)   Just think of the fact that over eighty percent of white Evangelicals voted for a pussy-grabbing president over a (gasp!) woman.  They probably would vote for Devil himself if that would achieve the end of all reproductive choice for women.  (This is the women-as-vessels-and-subjugated-handmaids view in conservative Christianity).

(2)   Todd Akin, a Republican representative from Missouri then,  made that argument in 2012 when he was asked whether abortion should be allowed in the case of rape:

“It seems to be, first of all, from what I understand from doctors, it’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down.”

And the woman instinctively knows how to fight off a rapist without herself getting killed or seriously hurt...

(3)  If you have read my earlier post in this series, you may have spotted that this is the religious version of the sexual ice-hockey game.  It's common not  only in right-wing Christianity but also in conservative Islam.  And probably in other patriarchal religions.

(4)  More can be found in part 5 of this post.

(5)  As an aside, a woman was recently sentenced to two years in prison for allegedly "spreading false news" in Egypt:

An Egyptian woman who made a video alleging sexual harassment has been given two years in prison and a fine on charges of “spreading false news”.
Amal Fathy, an actor and a former activist, uploaded a video to her Facebook account in May detailing how she was sexually harassed during a visit to her bank and criticising the government’s failure to protect women.
Two days after the post, Egyptian security forces entered her home in a pre-dawn raid and arrested her along with her husband and young son, both of whom were later released.
Fathy was subsequently put on trial accused of spreading false news with intent to harm the Egyptian state and possessing “indecent material”. She was sentenced to one year in prison for each charge, and given a fine of 10,000 Egyptian pounds (£430) for making “public insults”.

 In another case a Lebanese tourist visiting Egypt was also sentenced for a similar offense:

Mona el-Mazbouh, a Lebanese tourist who recorded a comparable video during her stay in Egypt, was arrested at Cairo airport and sentenced to eight years in prison in July, accused of “spreading false rumours that would harm society, attacking religion and public indecency”.
Her sentence was later reduced to one year and then suspended, before she was deported to Lebanon in September.

This is how accusations of sexual harassment might be treated in a deeply religious patriarchal society, and right-wing Christianists certainly have such societies as their goal.  The silence of victims is a central part of that plan.


(6) From the standpoint of men in a nomadic herding community a long time ago.  But at least it's mentioned as something deplorable.

My Impressions on Kavanaugh's Answers In Today's Judiciary Committee Hearings

1.  Shouty McShoutyface. 

That was my first impression on Brett Kavanaugh's performance in today's Senate Judiciary Committee hearings:

every woman in this pic tho pic.twitter.com/6Y2SvY4YlU

— Gustavo Luis (@verygooster) September 27, 2018

Had Kavanaugh's first name been Brenda, say, that behavior would have been interpreted as evidence that women are too emotional* to serve on courts.  But it will serve Brett well among the Republican base.  Trump loved it, I hear, and probably so did all the Breitbart-readers.

I, on the other hand wonder if someone that angry could ever evaluate cases having to do with sexual violence, say, with the kind of neutrality and objectivity we ideally would wish to see in Supreme Court Justices. — How has Clarence Thomas decided on cases having to do with women's rights?

Or perhaps Kavanaugh is supposed to represent a particular political faction on the court?   Such as capitalists and fratboys and the fundie patriarchs?   He comes across as a very political operative.

2.  Why did the Republicans questioning Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh hire a female prosecutor as "an assistant?"  Or as an apron, but only for the first part of the cooking show. 

It's because eleven Republican men questioning, probing and doubting Blasey Ford's testimony would look a little bit weird, even perhaps to Republican women.  As if only their men are to decide which claims are credible.

But then if Kavanaugh gets the SCOTUS job, he will be the swing vote to decide on the proper use of women's wombs in a majority decision made out of all men.  Besides,  there are too few women among the powerful Republicans, what with the American Taliban values the party celebrates.

That none of this much matters is an interesting sign of these supposedly #MeToo times.

3.  Whose pain matters?   Kavanaugh expressed great anger at the way he and his family have been treated, suggesting that the questions about his past have destroyed his family.

And that is horrible.  But Blasey Ford's family hasn't exactly been paraded around on rose floats, either.  She has faced death threats and had to move, and I'm fairly certain that coming forward is not going to improve her life or her career.

My intention is not to belittle the pain Kavanaugh and his family have probably felt, but to point out that the families of people accused of all types of crimes feel similar pain, both when the accused persons are found guilty and when they are not, and that victims of sexual violence coming forward to tell their stories face largely negative consequences from doing so.

This has changed  a little because of the #MeToo era, but anyone accusing a famous person will face insinuations about the reports being false and will have her whole life turned over.  And for what?

Perhaps so that others can have justice?  Is this where these particular hearings are heading?  And who is it who is going to get justice?  Is Kavanaugh entitled to a seat on the SCOTUS bench, for example?

I have written very little* about the pain many survivors of sexual violence are experiencing while following the Kavanaugh debates.

Sexual violence can destroy the families of the victims.  It can destroy their dreams about future, their professional careers,  their mental health and their ability to create loving sexual relationships later in life.

But it is my impression that many still worry more about destroying the future lives of those falsely accused of sexual violence than about destroying the future lives of those sexual violence victims who get no justice and are not believed.

4.  The Renate Alumni.

This is a reference to Brett Kavanaugh's high school yearbook page.  He was listed as a "Renate Alumnius:"

The word “Renate” appears at least 14 times in Georgetown Preparatory School’s 1983 yearbook, on individuals’ pages and in a group photo of nine football players, including Judge Kavanaugh, who were described as the “Renate Alumni.” It is a reference to Renate Schroeder, then a student at a nearby Catholic girls’ school.

Two of Judge Kavanaugh’s classmates say the mentions of Renate were part of the football players’ unsubstantiated boasting about their conquests.

“They were very disrespectful, at least verbally, with Renate,” said Sean Hagan, a Georgetown Prep student at the time, referring to Judge Kavanaugh and his teammates. “I can’t express how disgusted I am with them, then and now.”

Any woman knows that the above is slut-shaming.  It doesn't matter for that purpose whether the girl mentioned even knew any of the boys who participated in it.

Slut-shaming is not just a sadistic thing that some immature minds find deliciously funny.  It's also a form of bonding** among the small group of boys who participated in it, and a way to destroy a young girl's reputation. 

It's also another sign of the conservative ideology about sex***: Men are supposed to be on the offense in this ice-hockey game, while women are supposed to be the goalies.

A goalkeeper who repeatedly fails has awarded a giant victory to the boys, and that victory is worth crowing about.  Which is what these boys did.

And at least as as young teenager, Kavanaugh bought into that traditional sexual ideology.  This does not bode well on how he might rule on topics which have to do with women's rights.

Well, that is my take on the Renate Alumni.  But Kavanaugh argued differently in the hearings today:

One thing in particular we’re sad about: one of our good — one of our good female friends who we would admire and went to dances with had her names used on the yearbook page with the term “alumnus.” That yearbook reference was clumsily intended to show affection, and that she was one of us. But in this circus, the media’s interpreted the term is related to sex. It was not related to sex. As the woman herself noted to the media on the record, she and I never had any six — sexual interaction of — at all. I’m so sorry to her for that yearbook reference. This may sound a bit trivial, given all that we are here for, but one thing I want to try to make sure — sure of in the future is my friendship with her. She was and is a great person.

On the other hand, the New York Times tells us something different:

Michael Walsh, another Georgetown Prep alumnus, also listed himself on his personal yearbook page as a “Renate Alumnus.” Alongside some song lyrics, he included a short poem: “You need a date / and it’s getting late / so don’t hesitate / to call Renate.”

So the yearbook reference was clumsily intended to show affection, that "she was one of us?"  I very much doubt that.  She was slut-shamed, and Kavanaugh is not telling the truth here.

And the woman in question seems to agree with me, as she withdrew her support for Kavanaugh's nomination after finding out about the yearbook.




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*  The reason is twofold:  First, there are many, many people already doing the necessary writing.  Thus, and second, what I could offer in that area would just be replicating the efforts of others. My comparative advantage is in more analytical writings about the topic.  But yes, my jaw hurts from all the clinching I have practiced in the recent past and memories sometimes overtake me and bring pain back.

** That male bonding aspect is relevant in much of the bad sexual behavior of some young men (such as street harassment of a woman by a small group of men).  It may even be an aspect of gang rapes, where the role of the rape victim is not that different from the role of a spittoon, though she might be treated with less care.

*** Much more on that can be found in part 2 of my earlier post.

Meanwhile, in Alaska, A Travesty of Justice

The contents of this post include sexual violence.

***

This is what happened in Alaska in 2017: 

A woman was looking for a ride at a gas station.  A man offered her one, but did not drive her to her destination.  Instead, he told her that he needed to pick up something first, drove the car to a dead-end street in a residential area, and asked her step out of the car while he was loading something in the back.

He then pushed her to the ground, told her that he was going to kill her and then strangled her with both hands.  She lost consciousness.

When she regained consciousness, she found that he had ejaculated on her.  According to the detective in the case:

"The man told her that he wasn't really going to kill her, that he needed her to believe she was going to die so that he could be sexually fulfilled,"

This is what happened in Alaska in 2018:

The above case came to court:

On the Kavanaugh Nomination And Women's Reproductive Rights. Or Back to the Basics. Post One.

Over the last week I have started several posts on the Kavanaugh hearings and the various political reactions to the allegations that he sexually assaulted a fifteen-year-old girl when he himself was seventeen and a student at an all-male private school.

I didn't manage to complete any of those posts in one day (because of my still-frail health), but by the next day(s) so much new shit (1) would hit the online fans around this topic that a new post seemed faster than attempting to patch and darn the changes into the earlier draft.  Rinse and repeat. 

For these reasons I am going to do two fundamentals-posts on this topic: This first post begins by taking a few steps back, so as to achieve a wider view on the meaning of Kavanaugh's appointment and the allegations against him.  The second post will zoom in on certain details about the treatment of Kavanaugh's accuser.

Let's begin*.

Why Does My Pesto No Longer Love me? A Culinary Call For Help.

This flu is unusually severe.  Get your vaccinations this year if you have not in the past.  Or get the flu and  feel like something that's drawn through the wood chipper, repeatedly.

I'm slowly creating an actual post in my head, in the few available tiny spaces between the giant snot deposits.  But in the meantime, I have a culinary question for you:

What makes pesto taste worse than Trump's ideas?

I have made pesto for years, from all kinds of nuts and all kinds of herbs.  Some combinations are tastier than others, but all of them have been acceptable.  Except recently.

Five times I have had to throw large amounts of pesto down the sewer because of an extremely strong metallic (or bitter) aftertaste it gives*.  Changing the olive oil has not helped, guaranteeing the freshness of the herbs and the nuts has not helped.

So I suspect the garlic.  I am bigoted toward recent garlic.  In the olden days it was easy to peel, but now it takes me hours to peel enough cloves.  And the cloves seem often to be miniature cloves inside something that initially looks like a normal-sized clove.

Is it the garlic?  Or something else?

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*  I first tried doctoring it with more cheese or more herbs and so on.  Nothing made it edible.  And it's not the cheese that's at fault, because after the first mishap I tasted the mixture before cheese was added.

And the taste is there.  I don't quite know if it is bitter or metallic or salty.  It's a little of all those things, but whatever it is, the message to my taste buds is negative. 

The Trump Show. What's Happening Behind the Curtain?

I know that I'm back in Murka when this is how Our Dear Leader behaves en route to the Flight 93 September 11 Memorial Service in Shanksville, PA:

Actual photo of Trump on his way to  the Flight 93 memorial service. pic.twitter.com/0lNUYXLwBZ

— JΞSŦΞR ✪ ΔCŦUΔL³³º¹ (@th3j35t3r) September 11, 2018

In a sinister way that is reassuring:  He hasn't developed any significant behavioral changes in the last few weeks.  He's still without any empathy or social intelligence...

And what are the wizards behind the curtain doing while we watch The Trump Show?

1.  Well, Betsy DeVos is fixing the problems in how colleges handle allegations of sexual misconduct:

I Am Back, Partly

From my traditional summer trip.  It's not a vacation, but, nevertheless, a change, and it usually refills my writing reservoirs. 

This time, however, I had a long layover during which I was allowed the enervating experience of watching someone hack and hork their lungs out.  I sent a few quick messages to mount Olympus, asking the other deities to make sure that this particular passenger would be sent off in some other plane, to some other reality.

But Zeus, that goat-fucker, intercepted the message, and because he hates my guts (me belonging to the half-monster-type deities* with sharp, divided tongues), he seated that particular consumptive patient right behind me, in the same plane.

And so I'm only partly back, in a state of infirmity and fuzzy thinking.  That thinking suggests that I did, after all, have something to declare:  An infectious cough.

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* And no, Zeus certainly is not a sexist!  Just like Kavanaugh, he was born out of a female creature and just like Kavanaugh, he has daughters.  And so on.

Snakes And Stuff

I found this old embroidery while looking for something else.  It's supposed to be a fallen angel and an experiment in different kinds of embroidery stitches.

Apologies for the poor quality of the photo.

And here's a snake applique.  I have made a lot of them, for some weird reason.

 

Like this one:

The above two are humongous in size, but I have several small ones, too.

This one I use as my gravatar in social media:

The Benefits of Gender Integration At Work

Last March I wrote about a study which demonstrates the benefits of gender integration at work:  It reduces sexist prejudices and increases equality between men and women.

If that is true, then the opposite might also be true:  Gender segregation allows those types of prejudices to thrive.  From that angle the sexism in the tech industry would not be exactly unexpected, because women are a small minority in the field.

A Finnish Poetry Hour. With Music

First this one.  It's a poem by Kaarlo Sarkia and particularly important for everyone who feels gloomy and hopeless.

Then this one.  It's a poem by Marja-Leena Mikkola, about a dancing bear, life, art and love. Especially about love.

Both are set to music and I provide rough translations for both poems.

The Heart And Mind Of The Republican Party, Revisited.

Earlier I wrote a piece about how I see the Republican Party.  It's not based on research but on my own experiences and the opinions those inform.

I recently read that post again and still agree with most of it, except that the problems of the Trump base are putting several of the more traditional type free-market (free-money-for-some) Republican politicians in a real bind, and the same applies to the dilemma of how to accommodate (or not) the increasingly more explicit racism and sexism of the party's new base and of some inside the Trump administration.

Some Republican politicians appear to have made the Faustian bargain.  Paul Ryan might be one of those.*  What he and other free-market Republicans get from Trump is so good** that they are willing to wear blinders and ignore all the Trumpian outrages, Trump's penchant for dictatorship and his groveling adulation of one Vladimir Putin.

I cannot predict how the internal power struggles inside the Republican Party will develop.  But its extreme right wing fringe is currently dragging the party even further to the right, and the impact of such "thinkers" as Stephen Miller inside the Trump administration means that white supremacists/misogynists are emboldened in general.

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* Though he is retiring, in order to spend more time with his teenage children.  Right.  He  is probably retiring because he calculates that Trump, like Humpty-Dumpty, is going to have a great fall, and all the Republican congresscritters cannot put him back together again.  This means that Ryan must wait out the coming catastrophe, after which he can return to Washington as the golden money-boy.

** Like much lower taxes for the super-rich, many fewer regulations to protect the workers or the environment.

 

Statistics Can Be Sexy

As this post from 2014 demonstrates.  Well, perhaps not sexy, but very empowering.  If that post turns you on, I have a whole series about introductory statistics, mostly in the context of understanding opinion surveys.

The Economics of Women And Work. Some Snippets.

1.  Can we prove that sex discrimination exists in the labor markets?  I got asked that question once and this post gives my answer*.  There have been further studies since, but the basic arguments have not changed, which means that reading that post will be good for your weapons arsenal.

2.  Christina Hoff Sommers has argued, most recently on Twitter, that if women really want to close the gender gap in earnings they should change their college major from feminist dance therapy (heh) to electrical engineering.  That it wouldn't work quite like that is something I describe in this post.  And while you are there, read the rest of that series.

3.  I still haven't been able to find a good regression analysis which would allow us to study the interaction effects of sex and race on earnings and so on.  I'm sure that such studies exist, and if you know of one, please leave the link in the comments.  The reason why we need such a study is to see what the relative percentage effects of being black and being female might be on black women's earnings etc (to quantify the effects of intersectionality, if you like).  One study, on the increasing racial inequality on earnings,  suggests that the effect of being female is greater than the effect of being black, though both serve to reduce the earnings of black women, but it doesn't quite do the kinds of analyses I'd like to see.

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*  Similar proof exists for racial discrimination, as this meta-analysis of audit studies shows.  Some of its analyses control for gender and find it non-significant, but I'm not quite sure what that means in the context of comparing different studies, some of which had both male and female fictional applicants and some of which did not.  For a shorter summary, see here. 

The Role of the Media In The Trump Reich

Last September I wrote a post on the Harvard study which analyzed the role of online media in the 2016 presidential elections.  That study tells us what the role of the online media might have been in getting us so much closer to a dictatorship, and I still recommend reading my post for some background.

Whatever the sins, omissions and commissions of that media coverage might have been, currently the most serious problem the press faces is one Donald Trump and his views, expressed in several tweets, that the media is the enemy of the people.

This behavior is typical of dictators who close down any newspapers that criticize the government or even imprison journalists who are not sufficiently adulatory toward the dictator.  Our Dear Leader would love to join that elite group of autocrats!

And a plurality of Republicans seems to agree. A survey conducted by Ipsos and published in early August found that:

All told, 43 percent of self-identified Republicans said that they believed “the president should have the authority to close news outlets engaged in bad behavior.” Only 36 percent disagreed with that statement. When asked if Trump should close down specific outlets, including CNN, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, nearly a quarter of Republicans (23 percent) agreed and 49 percent disagreed.

Republicans were far more likely to take a negative view of the media. Forty-eight percent of them said they believed “the news media is the enemy of the American people” (just 28 percent disagreed) while nearly four out of every five (79 percent) said that they believed “the mainstream media treats President Trump unfairly.”

I wonder what those percentages would have been had Hillary Clinton been the president that those poll statements referred to.  Knowing that would allow us to assess if this new desire for the end of democracy is just the average win-at-any-cost tribalism or if, indeed, a sizable percentage of Americans wants democracy to end.*

While most mainstream newspapers are on Trump's Enemies List, one part of the US media does, however, have a very specific role in the Trump Reich.  Last January Matthew Gertz argued in Politico that Trump uses the conservative media, and, in particular, Fox News, as a source of information for presidenting!

Here’s what’s also shocking: A man with unparalleled access to the world’s most powerful information-gathering machine, with an intelligence budget estimated at $73 billion last year, prefers to rely on conservative cable news hosts to understand current events. 

Alternatively, Fox News now has the role a state-run media organization might have in dictatorships.

So it goes.

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*  Other answers in the survey give me hope that the latter is not the case:

And virtually everyone (85 percent of respondents) believed that “freedom of the press is essential for American democracy” (compared to 4 percent opposed to that statement).

Still, we are left with the dilemma that this belief contradicts the Republican plurality in the above post which would want Trump to have the authority to close down "badly behaving" news outlets.  Those would be the outlets which criticize him, after all, and the press cannot be free if it can be punished for criticizing the president.

And, of course, the continued survival of any kind of democracy also depends on safe election systems.  Right now the belief in their security is totally unwarranted.

Escape Reading. Terry Pratchett's Discworld.

I love re-reading Terry Pratchett as an escape from the Trump Reich and all the other problems of this world, but as this post from last year shows, some of those problems exist on Pratchett's Discworld, too.

This year I've been re-reading Pratchett's Tiffany Aching books.  They are meant for young adults, I think, but the Nac Mac Feegle (the wee free men) are funny enough at any age.

Gendered Coverage of American Politicians' Sins

I wrote about that in March, but the problems in coverage haven't since disappeared*.  It's always useful to make the thought experiment, when reading criticisms of some female politician, of asking if the criticisms would have been the same or of equal intensity had she been a male politician instead.

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* Much of this is caused by the right-wing press, because there are many more Democratic female politicians than there are Republican ones, and the right-wing press attacks Democrats and not Republicans.  But even so, I sense a difference in the intensity when the target of attack is female.

As an aside, the small numbers of Republican women in the Congress is probably caused by the same reasons as the tilted right-wing coverage against Democratic women.

On Combatting False Beliefs

"A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes."

The bottom section (after the embedded comment) of this post gives one example of the kind of research that is needed to even begin interpreting various Alt Right arguments or those that come from the manosphere.  I'm linking to it not because I would somehow be proud of the minimal research I did there, but because it's often the case that to refute lies (such as the ones Our Dear Leader spews out) takes digging time, digging energy and digging skills, and even then not every consumer of political news is willing to read through long explanations.

In other words, truth must button every single one of those small buttons in its hobnailed boots before it can start running after the lie.

Another example of the kind of painstaking work that is required in taking apart fake news can be found in the Harvard study about the impact of the media in the 2016 presidential elections.  It includes a detailed case study covering the media's treatment of the Clinton Foundation (from page 104 onward).  If you read it you will learn how the Clinton Foundation scandal was baked out of nothing but some slightly stale air, but still satisfied the appetites of many on the right.  Interestingly enough, the scandals about the Trump Foundation never achieved similar prominence.

Do 20% of Men "Get" 80% Of All Heterosexual Sex?

That's the kind of belief incel online sites spread:

“OK, we’ve all seen the statistic that in a competitive dating environment 20% of the guys are having 80% of the sex,” reads one post on r/TheRedPill, which goes on to claim, (emphasis theirs):

For every ten girls who are getting laid this week, eight of them are fucking just two guys.

If you’re not one of those two guys, there’s a 75% chance that you’re not getting laid at all. Only 20% of men fall into the category of “not alpha but still getting some”.

The haves and have-nots live in two different worlds. This is not a sliding scale situation where incremental improvement yields incremental returns. You either have more pussy than you know what to do with or you’re incel. There’s very little middle ground.

That’s what the 80/20 rule means. You really, really want to be one of the 20%.

That whole quote is so weird*.  Why does the second principle of the incel sites seem to always be this spreading of doom and gloom "statistics" which prove that nothing can be done, that no woman will ever fuck them, whatever they do?

The first principle, of course, is that the state of involuntary celibacy (being a male incel**) is caused by the disgusting shallowness, lookism and general perfidy of the whole womankind, all billions of us.

And that is the truly dangerous principle, but the second one also produces a lot of grief and suffering among men who probably wouldn't have to be incels if they realized that pussies are attached to real human beings who like to be viewed as people before pussies.  Instead, they are told that Everything  Is Hopeless.

So where did that 80/20 rule come from?  The linked article suggests that it applies the Pareto principle to sex:

One of the most repeated ideas on incel forums is a particular interpretation of the Pareto principle, which theorizes that in many cases, 80 percent of effects come from 20 percent of the causes. In economics, it’s often used to predict power structures (e.g., the richest 20 percent control 80 percent of the income). Replace money with sex, and you’ve essentially got the incel rallying cry.

But I have found no evidence that the Pareto distribution would fit human heterosexual behavior of the kind incels fret about.

And existing evidence on sexual behavior suggests that the reality is much less cruel toward the imaginary 80% of "non-alpha" males in the sexual supermarkets the incels also imagine to exist:

As Rebecca Goldin, a professor of mathematics at George Mason University and the director of STATS, noted, there really isn’t all that much data about who’s having sex with whom and how often. But, she said, “There is some limited data that refutes the poster’s claims, depending on interpretation.”

First off, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 56 percent of women and 59 percent of men have had sex by the time they finish high school. And, as Goldin pointed out, “If the sexually active teen women were choosing a largely overlapping set of young men to have sex with (eight women going with two guys), one would expect many fewer guys to have had sex than women.”

And if roughly the same number of heterosexual women and men are sexually active and you apply the Pareto principle, it would work out to eight women having sex with two men, yet also two women having sex with the other eight men. If it were true that most women were choosing just a few partners, the remaining women would need to have many partners.

“In other words, the statement, ‘If you’re not one of those two guys, there’s a 75 percent chance that you’re not getting laid at all. Only 20 percent of men fall into the category of ‘not alpha but still getting some,’ is not correct,” she said.

Bolds are mine.

Goldin goes on to note that men and women in long-term relationships, such as marriage, might well have more sex (when counted as times per week, say) than those men and women who are not in long-term relationships, partly, because it's much easier to arrange.  But in the incel world sex is sold in some weird supermarkets, not enjoyed in loving relationships.

And that is very sad.  The incels don't need the online sites where they gather***.  They need some real therapy which would allow them to see women as human beings.

That would be the win-win outcome, because it would enable the incels to find loving partners and because it would reduce the amount of online misogyny.


----------
* First is the question where that statistics comes from which the rest of this post addresses.

Second is the question of definitions:

 Two men (out of ten) are assumed to fuck eight women (out of ten) in one week, but the remaining two women are not assumed to fuck the remaining eight men in one week, but only one man each.  This is an asymmetry, probably because it's assumed that the 80/20 rule applies.  But it's unclear if sex is counted in numbers of partners or in numbers of intercourse (or whatever stands in its place)

Third, is the nutty idea that there are only two kinds of heterosexual men:  Those who have more pussy than you know what to do with (freeze and can, of course) and those who have zero pussy for the rest of their miserable lives.  This assumption clearly clashes with any kind of reality I have visited.

Fourth is the question what a "competitive" dating environment might be.  Some sort of a boxing ring? 

Fifth, and most importantly, the whole quote reeks of the view that women are not people but things, like slabs of beef, for sale in the dating supermarkets, and that those slabs of beef should be distributed more fairly among the consumers.

**  The online incels do not care about women, probably because they hate women, so they spend no time worrying about female incels.  As I have written before, women are probably much more likely to be involuntarily celibate than men, because women live longer and are more likely to outlive their partners.

***  As I have written before, the incel online sites resemble those anorexia sites where anorexics met to encourage each other not to eat.  In other words, visiting the incel sites will make the visitors more miserable and less mentally healthy.

Corporations As Luggage

This piece was written for a different purpose, but was never used.  So it wants to have its fifteen minutes of fame here:



Fans of Terry Pratchett's Discworld fantasies  know all about the magical suitcase with many small legs, the Luggage:

 It is a large chest made of sapient pearwood (a magical, intelligent plant which is nearly extinct, impervious to magic..). It can produce hundreds of little legs protruding from its underside and can move very fast if the need arises. It has been described as "half suitcase, half homicidal maniac" (Sourcery paperback p22).

The Luggage will follow its owner, even through brick walls.

This doesn't differ from today's large and mobile corporations.  The more legs governments have legally given them, the faster they can leave any given locality (town, city and even country) and the less they care about the mayhem caused.

Consider the death of a commercial light fixture plant in Sparta, Tennessee.  Esther Kaplan's prize-winning 2014 article  "Losing Sparta" tells us what happened when an old and  profitable plant, essential for the economic and cultural well-being of a small town, was taken over by Phillips, the multinational behemoth:

Then, one morning in November 2010, a Philips executive no one recognized drove up and walked into the plant, accompanied by a security guard wearing sunglasses and a sidearm. He summoned all the employees back to the shipping department and abruptly announced that the plant would be shut down. Though the workers didn’t know it at the time, most of their jobs would be offshored to Monterrey, Mexico. The two of them then walked out the door and drove off. “It was a shock, I’ll tell you,” Ricky Lack said more than two years later. Still brawny in his late fifties, he’d hired on at the plant in 1977, when he was nineteen years old. “My dad worked there,” he said. “Half the plant’s mom or dad or brother worked there. We still don’t know why they left.”

The consequences for Sparta were dire:  Older workers faced  long-term unemployed or part-time or minimum wage jobs.  Marriages failed, ill health increased, and the various levels of government earned less tax revenue and paid out more in unemployment benefits.  But none of this touched Phillips, the suitcase with many little legs. Off it went to Mexico.  Sparta could hardly follow.

In the past, corporations were more bound to a locality.  If they behaved badly, local reputations suffered. If they laid off too many workers, their local sales declined. If their management lived in nearby areas, the public services their families enjoyed would diminish.  If nothing else, the goodwill the firm possessed would diminish. 

Today, these ties are fraying, as we can see in Sparta, Tennessee. In international trade agreements multinational corporations now demand veto rights over the decisions of future national governments.

The  losses to others from what may be gains to multinational corporations don't affect only the workers when plants close or only the towns that join the American Rust Belt.

The 2007-2010 burst of the US housing bubble had many causes, among them the strengthened ability of firms to ignore local knowledge.  If a firm sold many mortgages, ground them up like sausage meat with the good and the bad risks  all mixed, and then sold the  new product in giant new sausage skins to far-distant places, who would ever be able to find the original culprits to the mortgage crisis?  They would not be the ones who ultimately bore the costs of granting too many bad mortgages. 

Compare that to past practices where the mortgage remained with the awarding institutions.  Still in the mid-199s mortgage negotiations with a bank resembled the Spanish inquisition in their thoroughness.  Yet soon after that date I heard of large mortgages given to people I knew couldn't pay them back.  The almost nonexistent regulation of financial markets, the general exuberance of investors, and many other factors played a role in creating the housing bubble,  but the firms' mobility mattered:

On Wall Street, where many of these loans were packaged into securities and sold to investors around the globe, a new term was coined: IBGYBG, “I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone.”

It referred to deals that brought in big fees up front while risking much
larger losses in the future. And, for a long time, IBGYBG worked at every level.

Terry Pratchett's half-homicidal "Luggage" with many little feet is fantasy, but the scope for corporations to leave a place in ruins while following their owners is not.

What next?  Legal personhood for corporations?  Hmm.

Art For The Weekend

In 2011 I wrote a series of posts on four 19th to 20th century female Finnish painters.  I found it still interesting*.  Another Finnish painter of the olden times I like is Hugo Simberg, a symbolist painter.  Here is his Garden of Death, to set a happy tone for the weekend:

Doesn't that remind you of Death in Terry Pratchett's Discworld fantasies?

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*  The Finnish proverb goes:  Who would raise the dog's tail if not the dog himself?
Meaning that one must show self-confidence.  I think I will keep the male terminology in that proverb...

Trump's White Evangelical Base

A WaPo article (from last June) about the politics of various evangelical groups in the US points out something fascinating about the 2016 presidential elections:

...according to Election Day exit polls, 80 percent of white evangelicals supported Donald Trump. Among all other – nonevangelical — whites, 59 percent voted for Hillary Clinton.

I had not seen that difference put so clearly elsewhere.  What it means is that the white evangelicals are an important part of Trump's base. This should be hilarious, given that Trump is anything but a religious man, and because religious people are supposed to walk their talk.  But it could be the case that religion in this context is a tribal marker rather than as a confession of faith.

The linked article suggests that white evangelicals' vote for Trump was driven by their fear of losing racial and religious status.  This may also explain why rank-and-file white evangelicals approve of Trump's refugee policies and dislike immigration in general.

For my take on how that vote might also link to anxiety about gender, see this post.

The Gross Gender Earnings Gap Revisited

I have written about the gross and net earnings gaps* many, many times.  It's the latter which we want to use when looking for possible sex- or race-based (or both) discrimination in the labor market.

That's because the net earnings gap gets as close as observational data can to the ideal where we would compare two individuals, identical in all other characteristics except the one or the ones we study (say, sex, race, age etc.).

It's not exactly the same as that theoretical ideal, but it's loads better than the gross earnings gap which does not take into account differences in education, experience, and other things which affect how much people earn, on average.  In some forms it doesn't even take into account differences in hours, days or weeks worked.

But the net earnings gap does that.  More about it in this post and here.   And that's why the feminist left should not use the gross gap in earnings as the measure of labor market discrimination.

But the anti-feminist right does something worse when it argues that studies have conclusively shown that there is no gender gap in earnings after women's own free-and-voluntary choices are taken into account.   Good studies have shown no such thing, if they sample a proper cross-section of workers.

The studies the right decides to focus on are only about very young workers, just beginning their working lives or careers. Given that the Equal Pay Act of 1963 makes it illegal to pay men and women different wages for exactly the same work, and given that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act makes discrimination in hiring illegal, it's hard** for employers to discriminate against any particular group among brand-new workers.

It's the passage of time*** which allows any possible discriminatory motives to be satisfied.  For example, men and women can be promoted at different rates, irrespective of their productivity and other characteristics, or on-the-job training can be offered to one group but not to the other group etc.

This post discusses one study that has been very popular among the anti-feminists.  You probably notice by now that because it fails to standardize for education it's comparing apples to oranges, even if the results were only applied to the group of young, single, metropolitan workers.  But they have been applied much more widely than that.

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* The gross gap between, say, women and men would be calculated by dividing the earnings of an average woman by the earnings of an average man, preferably both expressed in earnings per hour, week and so on.

The net gap corrects the gross gap for hours worked, education, experience and other relevant factors which affect how much someone works and are mostly viewed as non-discriminatory.  The net gap is what still remains after those calculations are carried out.

**  Not impossible, given that earnings information is usually kept hidden in the US, but harder than it would be without those laws. As an aside, the UK right spreads the same propaganda about the wage gap not existing after women's "voluntary" choices are taken into account.


***   The right-wing argument is that the earnings differences accruing over time are due to women's choices to focus more on their children and less on their careers.  But note that we cannot conclude anything of the sort from the data, because discriminatory effects also accrue over time.

Paper Ballots. The Best Answer For Secure Voting Systems.

First, these hilarious news about hacking voting machines:

This weekend saw the 26th annual DEFCON gathering. It was the second time the convention had featured a Voting Village, where organizers set up decommissioned election equipment and watch hackers find creative and alarming ways to break in.  

...

In a room set aside for kid hackers, an 11-year-old girl hacked a replica of the Florida secretary of state’s website within 10 minutes — and changed the results.

Caitlin Flanagan Loves Jordan Peterson. As Is To Be Expected.

Remember Caitlin Flanagan?  If not, I wrote about her anti-feminism a long time ago, more than once.

Now she has come out in praise of Jordan Peterson, the new prophet which many conservative men follow.  If you are not familiar with Peterson's work, you can get a crash course right on this blog*!

Her ode to Peterson makes for hilarious reading.  She tells us that her teenage son and other young men suddenly had someone to listen to who argued against identity politics:

That might seem like a small thing, but it’s not. With identity politics off the table, it was possible to talk about all kinds of things—religion, philosophy, history, myth—in a different way. They could have a direct experience with ideas, not one mediated by ideology.

Bolds are mine.

I have read (and reviewed) Peterson's little book, and one thing it is certainly mediated by is ideology:  The name of the book is 12 Rules For Life.  An Antidote to Chaos, and Peterson tells us, repeatedly, that chaos is the eternally feminine.  He also tells us that patriarchy has existed for the good of us weak, feeble and leaky women, and he has a whole chapter in his book about masculinity in peril.

Professor Peterson has also wondered, in 2017, if feminists avoid criticizing Islam because they unconsciously long for masculine dominance:

And more recently he has asked:

“Is it possible that young women are so outraged because they are craving infant contact in a society that makes that very difficult?”

 No, Caitlin.  No.  Prophet Peterson is not a non-ideological source ideas (if such a thing even were possible).  His ideology is anti-feminist, based on societal hierarchies** and the belief in natural male supremacy.  His sources are often based on the nuttier kind of evolutionary psychology, and he is a biological essentialist who believes that women would be much better off at home.

In that he shares Flanagan's views, of course, though those views do not apply to Flanagan herself.  And that sharing-of-views explains why she likes Peterson's ideas.***

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*  A few useful posts, in order:  This one introduces you to Peterson and his debating technique, this one talks about chaos as eternally feminine and order as eternallly masculine, and this one is the first post in my book review of Peterson's book.  More right-wing ideas about Peterson are discussed in this post.

** He has become famous for arguing that lobsters have hierarchies, which means that hierarchies are very old and humans also have them.  And the dominant guy lobster gets to mate with all the female lobsters.  What this means about humans he never says out loud,  but you can figure it out!  Peterson's acolytes can now buy t-shirts which say "Top Lobster!"  There's also one which says "White Lobster"...

Of course evolution is much more complicated than just putting some quick equal-sign between lobsters and humans, as this marine biologist points out.

And, as an side, this is a good review of Peterson's book, with a title about lobsters.

***  Peterson's other views are firmly right-wing, too, with a few small variations.  The Alt Right loves him, by the way.   Scott's take on other aspects of the Flanagan piece also covers some of this.
   

 

Short Posts About Women's Issues, 8/10/18.

1.  A Japanese medical school has employed a unique solution to the female dominance in higher education:

A Japanese medical school deliberately cut women’s entrance test scores for at least a decade, an investigation panel said on Tuesday, calling it a “very serious” instance of discrimination, but school officials denied having known of the manipulations.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has made a priority of creating a society “where women can shine”, but women in Japan still face an uphill battle in employment and face hurdles returning to work after childbirth, a factor behind a falling birthrate.
The alterations were uncovered in an internal investigation of a graft accusation this spring regarding the entrance exam for Tokyo Medical University, sparking protests and anger.
Lawyers investigating bribery accusations in the admission of the son of a senior education ministry official said they concluded that his score, and those of several other men, were boosted “unfairly” - by as much as 49 points, in one case.

They also concluded that scores were manipulated to give men more points than women and thus hold down the number of women admitted, since school officials felt they were more likely to quit the profession after having children, or for other reasons.

Note that last sentence.  I have just been reading all those right-wing MRAs and Jordan Peterson types who argue that women really prefer to stay at home with the children.

And if they don't, well, Japan has a second solution  (other than altering test scores) to that one, too:  Make working after having children very difficult for women, due to discrimination against mothers.  

Some Finnish Fun

This cartoon rings such a bell with me.

Why has a socially awkward stick figure from Finland caught on with young people in China's crowded cities? https://t.co/UyQ6lw2zNP

— The New York Times (@nytimes) August 3, 2018

The hat the cartoon stick figure Matti wears is a traditional men's beanie, with associations to Kalevala.  Well, I associate it with that and the playing of kantele.

Brothers Under The Skin. On ISIS And US Alt Right Movements.

 (Sarah Wasko, Media Matters)



The Proud Boys participated in Saturday's fascist demonstration in Portland Oregon, which made me have another look at the principles of such Alt Right movements as the Proud Boys:  Their contempt for women, their adulation of white nationalism/supremacy and their  love of physical violence.

If I replace the "white nationalism/supremacy" bit in the above sentence with "extremist Islam", that amended sentence would also neatly summarize the principles of ISIS.

Both types of movements have strong hate policies and rankings against "outsiders", both movements are willing to use violence, and both movements want to limit women's activity to reproduction, childcare and housekeeping*.  The Proud Boys, for example, say that they adulate housewives**.

Essentialist or religious arguments about women's proper roles as limited to the home are used in all such movements. The sexes tend to be segregated and men rank higher than women.

There are differences, too.  ISIS is a much larger movement and one explicitly based on religious tenets, while the various Alt Right movements are either right-wing Christian or secular,  and much smaller. Estimates about the number of, say,  active Proud Boys hover around six thousand.

ISIS has also been far more violent and far more misogynistic in its actions than, say,  the Proud Boys movement (perhaps because the latter has not had the power to act out its principles).  And in the imaginary global religious warfare the two movements would be on opposite sides.

Today's Bad Poem

Here it is:

The stifling heat
it has me beat
I wish I weren't
made out of meat

Who is Q? Or The Latest Right-Wing Fringe Conspiracy Revisited.

Remember Pizzagate?  That was just a prelude in the genre of truly nutty right-wing conspiracy theories.  Now meet the Storm*, the perfect storm, the conspiracy theory to rule over all right-wing conspiracy theories!

It explains the whole world!  The Las Vegas massacre was an inside job.  The Mueller investigation is just a cover for an actual investigation of Hillary Clinton and other similar vampire bitches and godless commies, and will end with most of the liberal-left in American politics in prisons.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy is alive, leading the conspiracy (and probably cohabiting with Elvis), and any day now Trump will institute a coup which ends the power of the deep state in American politics.  He is protected by the military, because the FBI and the CIA are part of the deep state, and it's the military which will launch the coup on his behalf and on the behalf of all those who believe in the Storm.

MS-13 murdered Seth Rich.  The people ruling the world through deep state in the US  might be the Rothschilds or the Illuminati, depending on the specific nuttiness and bigotry among the hoax creators.  And don't worry, pedophilia, as speculated in the Pizzagate is still part of this vast intertwined explanation and it is still run by the political left and the Hollywood left.

We hear about this wonderfully inane conspiracy theory now, because several people in the audiences of Trump's election campaign rallies (they never end as his need for adulation is a bottomless well) wore t-shirts with a large Q in the front or held up signs saying "We Are Q."

To understand both the roots of this conspiracy theory and to see why it's rubbish, to begin with, we need to understand what Q is.  And for that we need to go back to last October:

And Yet More Tax Relief For The Very Rich?

It still shocks me (though it shouldn't) how blatantly the Republican Party caters for the very wealthiest among us.  The Trump Reich has already lowered taxes for the super-wealthy (and thereby further increased the income inequality in this country).  Now the administration is trying to relieve that terrible tax burden* of the very rich even more:

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) this week introduced legislation that would reduce the amount people pay in capital gains taxes, as conservatives press the Treasury Department to take action on the topic.
The bill from Nunes, a senior member of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, would index capital gains to inflation. He argues that the measure would build off the tax-cut law President Trump signed last year and incentivize investment.
“This bill will continue the tax-cutting trend that began with the tax relief bill last year,” Nunes said in a statement Friday. “This is a common-sense reform that will remove an unjust tax, contribute to economic growth, and help both large and small investors keep more of their own money.”

The bolds are mine.

Note the word "relief" and "tax-cutting" and that silly reference to "small investors."  The truth is that capital gains almost completely accrue to the wealthy:

By dollars, more than 75% of capital gains tax are paid by taxpayers reporting income over $1,000,000. Just over 1% of capital gains taxes are paid by taxpayers reporting income of $100,000 or less. “Therefore,” writes Burman, “the most well-off would reap the largest benefits from a policy change to index the basis of capital assets.”

So what is the "common sense" Nunes sees in this reform?  Probably the idea that people shouldn't be taxed on that part of their capital gains which are due to nothing but inflation.  His bill would index capital gains to inflation.

That's common sense, right.  So how about doing the same when taxing interest income, dividends, earned income and so on?  All those, after all, can also be affected by inflation.

Likewise, if we want coherent government policies about taking inflation into account, why don't we index-link the countable assets thresholds** for those seeking Supplementary Security Income (SSI)?  This was suggested in a letter to the editor in the New York Times. 

And, indeed, my own check of the letter-writer's information showed that the countable asset thresholds were the same in 1989 as they are in 2018 ($2000 for an individual and $3000 for a couple).  Clearly, those thresholds should be index-linked, too, if capital gains are.

What about the contribution to economic growth Nunes sees in his proposal to index-link capital gains?  Well, at least one study suggests that the effects would be at most minor.

Sigh. All this is happening behind the curtain while on the stage capers the clown prince of this country, one Donald Trump.

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*  It's as if the Republican Party is a nurse doing triage at a hospital Emergency Room, and that nurse always prioritizes rich people's slight colds or zits over poorer people's strokes or heart attacks or broken bones.  Real nurses don't do that, but then they are not paid by the Koch and Mercer families for services rendered.

If you want to get why I am angry at all the tax-relief jargon, well, this is why.

** This site explains what these assets are.  For someone to qualify for SSI, that person's countable assets must not exceed the threshold value.

Sharing the Limelight? Women in the Film Industry

The USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative's newest annual study is out.  That study examines diversity of various types in the film industry.  This year's study analyzed both 1,100 films from 2007 to 2017 and one hundred films from 2017 (1).

The main findings of the study are that women's share of speaking roles  has barely budged in the last ten years.  It still hovers around 30%.  But women do far worse behind the cameras than in front of them:  In 2017 only 10.1% of writers and 7.3% of directors were female.  And though women were 18.2% of producers in that year, they were less than one percent of composers.

Scott Pruitt's Resignation Letter And Career As Signs of Non-Normality

Scott Pruitt's resignation letter from the Trump administration was published several weeks ago, but it's preposterous enough to analyze even later.

It's an adoring love letter, one that an abject and fearful underling would send to a dictator who has the power of life and death over that underling.

Here are some snippets:

Truly, your confidence in me has blessed me personally

Your courage, steadfastness and resolute commitment  

I count it a blessing to be serving you in any capacity

 I believe you are serving as President today because of God’s providence. 

Your Faithful Friend,

Scott Pruitt

This, of course, was written by a guy who was looting the EPA while pretending to administer to it.  It's not customary practice to appoint looters to run the government, and it's not normal practice to write resignation letters of the above type.  We should all remember what was normal in the past, because if we forget that, democracy will wither away.

Under a normal administration Pruitt would have been a major scandal.  Under this administration he is just the scandal of one day, and another scandal will turn up the following day.  But do remember that this should not be normal.




 

Greetings From Your Average Opportunist Parasite

That opportunistic parasite, my dear readers, would be me, and probably quite a few of you.

The international Men's Rights conference was held this year in London, England, with some two hundred participants from twenty-four countries.  Paul Elam, the founder of the website Voice for Men, greeted the conference via a video link:

After a speech in which he described women as “opportunistic parasites in the lives of men”, he was greeted to rapturous applause.
“Society piles complete and total responsibility on men for its existence” he said. “Almost all the sacrifice, of blood and sweat and of life that is required to keep the world turning, to keep us living in relative comfort and safety, is male sacrifice. Women won’t do it. Women can’t do it.”

This would be so utterly hilarious* if Elam's woman-hating words weren't aimed at half the humanity, that half which actually reproduces the society, with a lot of sacrifice, blood and sweat, and then also plays as many other roles as it is allowed in keeping that world turning.

But it's not hilarious.  Here is a man spouting an extreme form of misogyny, and the overarching reaction from others is a yawn, a shoulder shrug, or someone muttering that this is just a small group of weirdos so better ignore them. 

No other form of bigotry gets such an out, and no article describing other forms of bigotry would then branch into asking if those forms of bigotry might actually be justified by some unfairness done to the bigots.**

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*  I'm seeing myself as a large snake-like leech, swimming in the societal waters, ready to attach my suction cups to any male who happens to pass by.  Then I'm set for life and no longer need to work for money or beg for pittances by blogging.  And when I have sucked one guy dry I will just move to the next one, with bank accounts full of alimony money and my chocolate reserves high.  

** I don't mean that men wouldn't have any just causes they should work for (though, in fact, feminism works for many of those, too).

I mean that no other group claiming to work for social justice is treated the way these particular men's rights activists are in writing:  The mainstream (first wrote mainsteam) articles usually begin by describing  the activists' red-hot hatred of women but then segue into trying to understand that rage as maybe just a little justified.  An article on, say, anti-semitism would never ever do that. 

On Evidence and US Politics. The M&M Theory

My many flaws do not include irrationality.  If anything, I'm too boringly granola-conscious, brain-addicted and robotic in my writing, and too conscientious not to double-check sources when I write about something*.

So it has been a hard lesson for me to finally understand that rational arguments and proper interpretation of evidence have almost no role to play in American politics which is as tribal as the rooting for a football, basketball or baseball team.

1.  Here's a parable of what I found yesterday while surfing some Trump supporters' Facebook pages:

Think of opening a bag of M&Ms (or Smarties, for some of you) and spreading them out on a saucer.  This is what you would see:

What Is Happening to the Newspapers? The New York Daily News As The Story

The New York Daily News will axe half of its editorial staff.  The basic reason:

Like so many other print publications, the Daily News has battled faltering advertising revenue amid a transition to a digitally centric media landscape. The paper reportedly lost $90.4 million over the last three years.

 The killer of newspapers is the Internet because of two distinct problems it causes for traditional and even digital newspapers:

Trump's Outrages Do Not Matter

Unless they hurt the Republicans in Congress.  As long as the Republican base wants Trump, other Republican politicians will give lip service, reluctantly, against some of the worst of Trumpism.  But they will not act.

The checks and balances have failed.  The executive, legislative and judicial branches of the government are all in Republican hands.  Thus, even though Republican voters are not the majority of Americans, they control everything.

And the role of the press, in a democracy, is severely hampered by a president who calls it the enemy of the people.

Just thought that you want a reminder about the reasons I write such dismal posts, these days, and why they show an obsession on Trump:  I believe in democracy.

Weird Coincidences? Or Does The R Stand For Russia or Republicans?

Are these very weird coincidences or something else?  You decide.



First, on Monday, the US Treasury department

said it planned to end requirements that certain tax-exempt organizations identify their financial contributors on their tax returns.

The decision means groups such as the National Rifle Association, Planned Parenthood, and the AARP will no longer have to tell the IRS who’s giving them money.

This plan would make it easier for dark money to hide. 

Then,  on Wednesday, a Russian citizen, Maria Butina,  was  indicted for working as the agent of a foreign power in the US without registering as one, and perhaps for even spying.  She used the NRA (National Rifle Association) to infiltrate various conservative groups.  Her Russian handler is reported to be Alexander Torshin, a close ally of Putin who used to be a Russian senator.    And:

...the FBI reportedly is investigating whether Torshin illegally funneled money to the Trump campaign through the NRA—which backed Trump with a record $30 million.

There we see a reference to possible dark money, funneled through the NRA.

Another similar pairing caught my eye:

First, we have all been debating if Trump will ever admit that Russia meddled with the 2016 elections, but the rest of us know that Russia did exactly that, and plans to meddle in the 2018 elections, too.*

Then, this happened:

House Republicans plan to vote Thursday on a spending bill that excludes new money for election security grants to states, provoking a furious reaction from Democrats amid a national controversy over Russian election interference.

At issue is a grants program overseen by the federal Election Assistance Commission and aimed at helping states administer their elections and improve voting systems; Democrats want to continue grant funding through 2019, while Republicans say the program already has been fully funded.

The Republicans in the House are acting in a way which might lend itself to several explanations.  But the most obvious one is that they don't want to have the elections monitored too closely, because that would stop some plan which benefits them.

And, perhaps also coincidentally, all this is exactly what Vladimir Putin desires.  His foreign policy aims at causing distrust in democracy inside the so-called Western liberal countries and at creating mistrust in the government among their citizenry.

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* The Washington Post wrote:

Officially, Russia admits nothing about interfering in the 2016 U.S. elections, but Kremlin-controlled state media is not as reserved in its messages designed for internal consumption. Russian state TV hosts brazenly assert, “Trump is ours,” and joke that the U.S. lawmakers traveled to Russia “to make deals with our hackers, so they can rig the midterms in favor of Trump’s team.” They gleefully anticipate that Putin will run circles around “political neophyte” Trump, “educating” him about world events from the Russian perspective.

I don't know if that lawmakers' visit was the one a group of Republicans made over the US Independence Day, but I wouldn't be at all surprised.  The optics, as people say these days, are terrible about making a trip like that on the fourth of July.  But nevertheless, eight Republican Congress critters did exactly that. 

 

How Trump Thinks. My Theory.

 Auguste Rodin:  Thinker



It's impossible for me not to try to understand Donald Trump's mind.  I think it's impossible for a lot of other people, too.  And so I have spent some time making up theories about how he sees the presidency, how he sees the elections and how he sees the press.

These theories do not rule out his narcissism, his megalomania, his unpredictability or his very thin skin, but one, in particular, tends to explain his behavior well. (Let me know what you think.)

Here's the gist of that theory:

Trump's thinking is rigid and concrete and linked to the cult of personality.  He sees the presidency as a dictatorship, and the elections as a way of picking the personal characteristics, beliefs and values of the winning candidate for the nation as a whole,   from that point onward. 

When Trump was declared the winner in November 2016, he interpreted the meaning of this as follows:

Everything he believes is now what America believes.  Because he was already known to hate the European Union when he won, Americans showed that they want a president who hates the European Union, and because he was already known to love Putin* when he won, Americans showed that they want a president who loves Putin. 

Trump doesn't have to learn anything more.  It could even be against the will of the people who wanted what Trump already was.

This theory explains why Trump is so angry with any media criticism and why he equates that media criticism with being an enemy of the country.  The country has  chosen him as the dictator, he and the country are now the same, and to criticize him indeed IS to criticize the country.  Besides, people elected his values, opinions and actions.

The theory also explains why Trump could not anticipate the severe kind of criticism he received after the meeting with Vladimir Putin.  He is now the personification of the country, and any criticism is treasonable, or at least fake news.

Last, but not least, the theory explains Trump's obsession with the 2016 elections.  Now, any president would dislike doubts about his (or, perhaps one day in a thousand years, her) legitimacy, but given Trump's thought patterns, those doubts present an incredible threat to him.  If he didn't win fair and square, then all of what he is was rejected.

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* Now why he loves Putin is a different question.  It could be that Putin has something on Trump, or it could be that Trump simply worships warlords and dictators.

And Then Trump Said:. Or On the Helsinki Meeting And Its Aftermath.

There's a reason
 for treason
and a season, 
too

That's as far as I have gotten with my political ditty for yesterday, to celebrate the Helsinki* meeting (Putin looking like a sleek gray cat playing with a large tufted orange cat-toy, enjoying its squealing and its skittering, moving a firm paw to redirect it when needed).

Now, treason is a strong word to use, a word we should handle carefully, a word like a red-hot rain of doom, not to be splashed over all the Internet in cat-sized letters.  Let's keep the powder dry for the day when it's really needed... 

And if we keep screaming that the sky is falling, who will believe us when it actually does fall?

By the way, did you notice when it fell?  That might have been some time in 2016.  We may not have a proper word for what happened, a word strong enough, but we all felt that seismic shift.

So take it for granted that I was joking about treason in the above paragraphs, or not**.  Besides,  Trump is still loyal to himself and for him loyalty to himself is loyalty to the country  (" l'état, c'est moi").

After the debriefing with Putin, Trump tweeted this:

Our relationship with Russia has NEVER been worse thanks to many years of U.S. foolishness and stupidity and now, the Rigged Witch Hunt!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 16, 2018

And in the meeting itself:

... Mr Trump was asked if he believed his own intelligence agencies or the Russian president when it came to allegations of meddling in the 2016 presidential vote.
"President Putin says it's not Russia. I don't see any reason why it would be," he replied.

Who are you gonna believe?  Your own intelligence agencies or Vlad the Impaler?

This is such fun (of the sinister kind):  Now Trump tells us that he misspoke, 24 hours ago,  and had meant to say he saw no reason why it was not Russia that meddled.

His aides got to him, to get that correction,  though it will be fun to see how long that restraining hold might stick.  Or perhaps (I'm bending over backward to be kind here), Trump decided to wait a full day before correcting a mistake that completely changed the meaning of the sentence, one with great political significance, too?

Trump's antics are like a newly-formed scab on a scratch or a cut.  I can never keep my paws off that scab, even though I know that I shouldn't remove it, just to see what's happening under it. 

But I always do.  And so I write about the Trump Reich when there's no real value in such writing.




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*  Helsinki is pronounced HELsinki, not HelSINKi.  That was the one informative bit in this post.  You are welcome.

**  I'm learning from the master of manipulation here, our Dear Leader.  Meaning is always whatever one means at a particular moment, truth is what makes one feel good, and every opinion and value can change in the blink of an eye.  The later is why other countries love our Donnie:  He keeps things fresh, life exciting,  and people on their toe tips.

And Then The Incredible Offer!

This is such a hilarious time to be alive (in the tragic sense, of course).  Trump traveled to report to his liege-lord (at the Helsinki briefing) and all went well.  Putin even made an incredible offer about the twelve Russians who work(ed) for Putin's government  and who have now been indicted for interfering in American elections in 2016:

Trump said Monday that Putin made an “incredible offer” to allow US investigators work alongside Russian investigators.

“He offered to have the people working on the case come and work with their investigators with respect to the 12 people. I think that's an incredible offer,” Trump said.

I cannot stop laughing.  I sound like a hyena now.   I bet Putin cannot stop laughing, either.