The Trickster God And The Yearning For A Political Savior in American Politics

The following two stories are intended for the pleasure (?) of those who like to spice their political meals with mythology, fantasy and literature.

First, the recent events in Virginia politics should trouble all of us, but there's extra trouble for those who prefer Democrats to run that state but who also don't want to condone or ignore allegations of sexual violence or the use of racist imagery by their "own" politicians.

Let's start by summarizing (1) those events for anyone who hibernates in the winter or isn't properly obsessed with American politics:

On February 1st, the conservative Web site Big League Politics published a photo from the medical-school yearbook page of Governor Ralph Northam. In the photo, from 1984, one man wears blackface and another wears a Ku Klux Klan robe. Northam initially apologized for appearing in the photo, though he didn’t say which of the two men was him.

The next day, at a press conference, Northam insisted that he wasn’t in the picture, after all—though he confessed that, at some point in 1984, he had worn shoe polish on his face (“I don’t know if anybody’s ever tried that, but you cannot get shoe polish off”), in order to resemble Michael Jackson at a dance contest.

Soon afterward, Big League Politics reported on the existence of a private Facebook post in which a woman appeared to accuse the state’s lieutenant governor, Justin Fairfax, of sexual assault at the Democratic National Convention in 2004. Fairfax, who would become governor if Northam were to resign, denied the allegation; the woman subsequently came forward to reiterate the allegation in her own name. 

Two days after that, the attorney general, Mark Herring, who is also a Democrat, and currently second in the line of succession to be governor of Virginia, admitted to wearing blackface at a party during his college years—he was in costume, he said, as the rap musician Kurtis Blow.

Get it?  If Northam resigns, Fairfax would be the governor, and if Fairfax then resigns, Herring would be the governor.  What happens if all three resign?

The new governor would be the speaker of the Virginia house of delegates, the Republican Kirk Cox!

And there you have the Democrats' dilemma:  Those who want to see all three men resign would then have to accept a Republican Governor for Virginia!  That just might have even worse economic and social consequences for African-American men and for all women in the state of Virginia.

Reading about this made me think of the Trickster, a common mythical archetype in many cultures:

Tricksters are archetypal characters who appear in the myths of many different cultures. Lewis Hyde describes the trickster as a "boundary-crosser".^[1] The trickster crosses and often breaks both physical and societal rules. Tricksters "...violate principles of social and natural order, playfully disrupting normal life and then re-establishing it on a new basis."^[2] 

A Trickster god, the joker that he is (2),  would adore the dilemma I have described above, and might even willingly create it, because the resulting chaos and confusion allows us to learn something important, something which cannot be learned while staying safely inside the boundaries decreed by our particular political conventions.

The joke the Trickster makes in the Virginia case is the bitterly hilarious juxtaposition of the types of behaviors Democratic and Republican politicians, respectively,  are sanctioned for.  What is rewarded among the Republicans (think of the sexist and racist Trump in the White House) is sanctioned among the Democrats.  But in this case sanctioning the latter would directly reward the former!

That outcome is to teach us an important lesson, in a rather painful manner, as is the custom of the Trickster gods and goddesses.

Second,  while following the overall political conversations about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, I noticed how she triggers weird responses not only from the political right, but to some extent also from the political left.

The latter are not nasty jabs at her or attempts to find a mote in her eye and then call it a beam (3), but almost the reverse:  They reflect a desire to see her as the lone savior, the new hope for the country,  the heroine who will all alone fix a broken political system.

Some lefties saw Barack Obama in that manner before he was first elected.  Even then I doubted the wisdom of putting all one's political eggs in one basket, especially as that basket was carried by one single human being.  What I feared was the chance that when someone is elevated in such a manner, the first misstep that person makes will cause the pendulum to swing to the other extreme.  And all humans make missteps.

Now, I like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.  She is smart, media-savvy, and assertive.

But she is also still inexperienced, and she will make mistakes.  We should expect some mistakes, because they are part of how we learn.  Those who elevate some politicians to demigod status will, however, have great difficulty coping with any newbie errors she might make.  The incentives, then, are to deny that the mistakes even happened.

And that's a understandable reaction, given what the political right will do with them.  But still.  It's not a good idea to hand over our political salvation to any one person.

All this reminded me of the late and great fantasy writer, Terry Pratchett.  In several of his Discworld books he has his characters talk about justice.  In Reaper Man, Death (an anthropomorphic death, a skeleton in a black cloak) says this:

There’s no justice. There’s just us.

Many interpretations of that statement are possible, but my own has always been this:

If we want justice we need to create it, Justice is not found in the bricks of the courthouse walls or in some separate god or demigod of justice.  Justice and injustice operate through the acts of us all. 

And so does political salvation.


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(1)  These issues are listed here in time order, but they differ in their ultimate consequences.  Fairfax is accused of something criminal, sexual violence, and a second woman has come forward to accuse him of rape during their college years.

(2)  Mostly the Trickster is depicted as male, though there are also female Tricksters, among the Japanese kitsune, for example.

(3)  I plagiarize the Bible there to show how female politicians tend to be treated in the media.  A recent example is The Case Of Kirsten Gillibrand And The Chicken.

 

On Mean, Mean Political Bosses

The rumor-mill tells us that Senator Amy Klobuchar is a mean, mean boss.  A bitch, in fact.  I remember reading the same about Hillary Clinton in the past. 

On the other hand, we all know that Our Dear Leader, one Donald Trump, appears to be the boss from the hottest hell.  The difference between his case, and that of, say, Klobuchar, is that nobody attributes Trump's meanness to him being a man but just to his character.

This is not quite so true when we talk about possibly* mean female bosses.  Though the media coverage of such cases is currently a bit fairer than it was, not so long ago,  it is still extremely hard to evaluate the meanness of a boss without also taking into account what the underlings' expectations are.  Those expectations are likely to vary depending on whether the boss is a man or a woman.

In general, we still expect women to be kinder, gentler and more democratic bosses than men**. 

This matters.  Suppose that we have two bosses, one male and one female, who are objectively equally nasty.  But because the female boss is expected to be nicer, probably unconsciously, her nastiness looks more glaring, more hurtful and just plain nastier.

Several takes on Amy Klobuchar's possible bitchiness also mention surveys about the meanest bosses in the US Congress.  The variable that measures meanness in those surveys is staff turnover, and we are told that the departure of senior officials is weighted more than the departure of lower-level staff.

While the actual survey findings vary, depending on the time period, female politicians' offices are over-represented (compared to their percentages in the House and the Senate) among those with highest turnover figures over longer time periods.

These surveys have some problematic aspects:

For instance, an office could have a high turnover not only because underlings run away from a mean boss, but also because underlings leave to climb upward in various political organization. 

The former is what the surveys purport to measure, but they can also be measuring the latter.  Without knowing where those who depart are going and why they are leaving, we cannot really tell if a high turnover is due to a boss who is mean or a boss who is supportive of the underlings' career aspirations.  Or for some of the other reasons I discuss here.

Then there are the variations caused by the fact that a politician's staff turnover rate depends on where we are in that politician's term.  Though at least one of the articles I link to reminds us not to draw conclusions about the high last-year staff turnover rates of those politicians who are retiring, given that their staff all need to find new jobs, I also believe that slightly similar considerations might apply to the beginning of a politician's first term.

That's the time when politicians first meet all their new staff and when the staff meets the politicians, and neither side might know yet if the matches are good.  I would expect a greater first-year turnover, and then a much reduced turnover when the working arrangements have settled down and both sides know what to expect.

The surveys would be improved if they controlled for that time factor***. 

Ideally, they should also control for what happens when a politician faces a particularly difficult time, with scandals (real or created) or a fall in support and so on.  Many staff members might then depart, in order to save their own careers (the Trump effect?).  To the extent female politicians are judged along a harsher scale, in general, such difficult times could appear more common for them, and that could explain some part of any sex difference in the mean bosses surveys.

The above comments are examples of the kinds of variables we should control for before we draw any conclusions about whether men or women are worse political bosses.  That's because such comparisons should be between male and female politicians in as identical circumstances as possible.  If those circumstances are not identical, then what we attribute to gender might, in fact, have other causes.

I have no idea how or if those survey results would change with proper standardization.  Neither can I speculate on the possibility that because politics has not been an easy area for women to enter, those who in the past had the tremendous willpower and fighting spirit to have succeeded in it  might not be the least demanding of bosses at this stage of our societal evolution.

My main point is, rather, that unless we can control for the underlying and gendered expectations about how male and female bosses are supposed to behave, the net we use to fish for mean political bosses is also likely to catch not only the truly mean bosses, but also many female bosses who would not be deemed mean if they were male.  

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* I use the qualifier "possibly" here not because I wouldn't believe that there are mean female bosses (there are), but because of the way we might use a different scale in measuring what "mean" means when it comes to female and male bosses.

As an aside, I believe that true meanness of the mean-boss type is not a sex-linked characteristic.

**  This comes about because of an interesting problem: 

The traditional gender stereotypes we apply to men do not clash with what is expected from being a leader, but the traditional gender stereotypes we apply to women do clash with what is expected from being a leader.  The latter means that women in leadership positions must walk a tightrope between not being found effective enough leaders and not being found properly feminine.

One way of solving that dilemma, probably unconsciously, is to start expecting that female leaders lead in more feminine ways, in more supportive and more maternal ways than male leaders.  One small-sample study found that women surveyed in the study expected female bosses to be more supportive and empathic than male bosses.

A maternal leadership style can work for some women.   But to expect it from all or most women may be the reason why female leaders who do not follow that style are very easily labeled as abrasive or mean bosses.

*** And if they carried out a few statistical significance tests about the differences between turnover rates. 

Trump's State of the Union Speech

The actual state of the union in the US is dire if by "union" we mean a general, if vague, belief in the existence of an implicit contract between the government and its citizens or agreement about the actual contents of such a contract.  The state of the union from that angle is in the divorce courts, because the Republicans and the Democrat desire quite different types of governments.

Yes, I know that this is not what the SOTU speech is all about.  But I baked a delicious lemon-almond tart and had a wedge while watching our Supreme Leader deliver the speech.  The tart was sweet yet tart and it made my worldview too benign for a sharp criticism, especially of a speech which certainly was not written by Trump or the Rasputin behind his throne, Stephen Miller, but by someone capable of writing rousing speeches not intended to directly frame one half of the country as the Real Enemies of Trump.

The transcript of the speech can be found here, and here are the major corrections to Trump's statements.  They are fairly fundamental ones and well worth learning about.

An Ode To Butternut Squash

Such bliss!  What a rush,
When the hardy sage meets
the sweet butternut squash.

A bad pome in praise of food.  I feel like writing a post in the cookbooks-by-divines series, one which does not include blood sacrifices and other similar god and goddess foods (eyeballs or arms or burnt offerings in general or even manna).

I love butternut squash.  This is a fairly new love in my life, acquired in this promised land of all pumpkin-seeming things (Trump, too).

Butternut squash is cheap, it's pretty, it's delicious yet unassuming,  and it's good for you.  Its only negative is the very hard skin (which would be useful as an armor to be worn surfing online, but a hazard when it faces me and my largest knife, given the lack of a flat bottom on the squash).

I buy several squashes at one go, halve them along the long axis and then roast them in the oven, cut sides down in a pan coated with some olive oil.  When they are done (375 degrees Fahrenheit), I scoop out the innards and freeze most of them.  That way I have many beginnings for luscious butternut squash meals ready for later.

You could go fancy on those meals and make a butternut squash lasagna with sage.  It's delicious.  It's also a lot of work.  I make it sometimes for parties, but usually I turn the squash innards into a spaghetti sauce with garlic, lots of fresh chopped sage* fried in butter, salt, pepper and perhaps a little vegetable broth or milk or something else if the sauce is too thick.

But my favorite is a butternut squash soup, served with dark bread and some cheese.  I use half a squash (innards), half a chopped onion, two cloves of garlic, about eight turns of a nutmeg mill and some black pepper.  The onion and garlic are stewed in butter or olive oil until the onion is limp and transparent.  Add one to two cups of vegetable broth and a teaspoon or so of honey, and then blend it into a lovely orange smoothness.  Makes enough for two people or one very hungry one.  If you prefer it milder, use partly milk, partly vegetable broth for the liquid.

It's excellent, I think, though do be careful if you use a separate standing blender for the blending.  If you fill it with hot soup, it doesn't help to wear oven mittens to keep the top down or to have two tea-towels between the mitts and the blender lid, and it doesn't matter how hard you press down on the lid:

You will experience an explosion in the kitchen, and if the soup is very hot you might also get lots of little demon-freckles all over your face and neck from the burning.

Don't ask me how I know that.  Wiser minds tell me that blending the hot soup in several small portions avoids the explosion.  Or use an immersion blender.  Or just go nuts with a big fork or spoon inside the saucepan, chasing all lumps, if you have nothing better to do with your life.
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* Or frozen sage.  Dried is not quite the same, because it's the fresh sage who married the butternut squash.  I buy one potted sage every spring (if the old one didn't overwinter), plant it in a sunny spot in the garden and harvest it all summer long and into the fall. 

Backsliding in Women's Rights? Two Examples.

Two recent items about women's rights possibly going backward made me think of the process I go through when grieving after the death of someone who meant a lot to me.

That process is like a circular staircase.  You start at the bottom of it and pretty much go around in a circle, to reach the next level, and then you keep climbing the staircase of, say, grief.   You both climb higher and face the same painful questions again.

I'm not sure what's at the top of that staircase, but during the climb it often feels as if one has come back to the starting point, walked around a circle.  It's not true because the new circle of grief is on a higher level.  We see the loss from a new perspective and we are a little more removed from it.

After that philosophical opening, the actual items which provoked it may seem mundane (which does not mean that they are not important). 

The first is the partial return of a practice restaurants once used as lot: That of either refusing to serve women who entered the establishment on their own (or even in groups as long as the group included no men) or seating them somewhere hidden, such as by the kitchen swing door or next to the toilets.

The reason for that discriminatory practice was that women on their own were assumed to visit restaurants only as sex workers looking for clients, not as customers wanting to have a meal or a drink.

How To Write About Politics In The Era Of Chaos

I am publishing fewer post on this blog.  The reasons are many and complicated (including does a falling tree in the woods make a sound if nobody is listening?), but one which I'd like to talk about today has to do with the current climate in American politics, the climate in political writings, the resulting online quarrels and the information included or not included in social media, such as tweets.

This Trump era is ruled by the God of Chaos (1), not only in the United States, but globally.  He is having a hell of a time, riding his war chariot through mobs everywhere!  Few notice that he is a) the god of chaos, not of order (he does disguise well (2)), and b) that he has harnessed the horses to his chariot with their butts forward.

And far too many worship at his altar.

He hates nuance so we drop nuance from politics.  He adores anger (causes a lot of chaos and breakage) so we work all day long to get very angry.  He prefers emotions to facts so we learn to think with what we believe are our guts, even if the feeling might be just indigestion from too many hamberders.

He detests facts and is far too impatient to read long articles or research the truth in someone's statements.  And because we are learning that he is the strongest god of this moment, we, too, learn to hate research and reading and the kind of careful thinking which the God of Chaos finds more boring than watching Trump's hair being dyed.

And lest you think that I only talk about the American right-wing here, the God of Chaos is very good at convincing all of us that the best way to serve righteous causes is through the tools he loves:

Anger, accusations, building stronger walls to keep the in-group members in and the out-group members out, public purity examinations and purity policing to make sure that all the in-group members should be allowed to remain inside the walls.

Walls, whether physical conceptual, serve to keep some out and some in (3).  But they also strengthen the smell of civil war in the air:  That various factions regard other factions inside the same country as the real enemies, not as disagreeing compatriots.

Walls become fortifications and ramparts, information becomes propaganda.  Propaganda cannot have nuances, so nuanced treatments go.  No propaganda will include all evidence, unless all evidence supports the arguments of the propagandist's side, so the evidence we will be offered in political debates will be at most partial, at worst false.

Because it is war, we sometimes unquestioningly ally with distasteful causes and beliefs, as long as that alliance hurts our most hated enemies more than it appears to hurt the integrity of our own value hierarchies.

***

This I cannot do.  Indeed, I cannot play the game the God of Chaos referees, because I know, exactly, what he tries to achieve.  But I also truly cannot play that game.

It's not because I am the last upright, neutral and analytical writer standing (though of course all that goes without saying (4)).  It's because I am bad at the games of chaos, have no talent for the kind of emotional writing that works in chaotic politics, and when it comes to anger, well, you really don't want to make goddesses, even minor snake goddesses, angry.  They tend not to regulate the resulting hurricanes and tornadoes very well.

In short, I am working through this dilemma and hope that it will be resolved soon, one way or another.
 
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(1)  He has to be a guy god because Jordan Peterson, the right-wing prophet worshiped by lots of young conservative men, insists that chaos is female, and that all right-thinking young men should rise up against her.  So it's salutary to correct that belief (wink).

Now why the God of Chaos could become the dominant divine of this era (at least temporarily) probably deserves a separate post which would cover climate change,  globalization and outsourcing and their nasty effects in some countries, the financial markets bubble and its wealth-killing effects for the not-so-rich, increasing global income inequality and the vast human migrations with the social upheavals they cause.

But note that if Almost Absolute Chaos were to rule, there would be strong pressures to replace him with the God of Absolute Control.  That replacement (sometimes in response to just the fear of chaos, not actual chaos)  is how we get fascist states and the kinds of theocratic states where I, for one, would have very few rights.

Chaos and order are not necessarily theoretically linked to right-wing or left-wing political goals or characteristics, though the right has a stronger preference for traditional power hierarchies as a form of order.

But Trump, a right-winger,  happily  sows chaos, and rigid order has certainly been applied, from above, in communist societies.

In practice widespread desire for order is more likely to result in right-wing fascism or extremely conservative theocracies, however.

(2)  The reality might be more complicated.  Just as in politics, the extremes, order and chaos, might be the end-points not of a line but of an almost-completed circle.  It's easy for certain kinds of extremists to jump over that little break in the circle and to end up at the other political extreme.  Likewise, it's possible that extreme chaos is much closer to extreme order than we like to think.  Balance in all things is the proper alternative to both extreme chaos and extreme order.

(3)  Despite Trump's weird border wall fixation, walls are not necessarily bad and have their uses.  Remember this before you go and break down the fence that keeps the neighbor's angry bull in his pasture.

(4)  This is a joke.  Honest.  

The Economics of Health Insurance. Three Stories.

The New York Times has posted a piece on the possible impact of Trump Care [sic] on how many people have health insurance:

The number of Americans without health insurance plunged after Obamacare started. Now, early evidence suggests, it’s beginning to climb again.

New polling from Gallup shows that the percentage of uninsured Americans inched up throughout last year. That trend matches other data suggesting that health coverage has been eroding under the policies of the Trump administration.

This early evidence must be treated as tentative, for reasons that have to do with Gallup's changing methods of polling people and because other sources are not (yet) showing a similar drop in the number of insured people.

On the other hand, the policies of the Trump administration are, of course, specifically intended to cut back on enrollment in Medicaid. for instance, and from that angle the results wouldn't be too surprising.

I like that NYT piece, because it doesn't treat us as grumpy and hungry children, demanding to be fed with the right political messages.  It's nuanced, points out several ways in which the findings can be interpreted, and explains what kind of data we should seek in the future.

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I broke a small bone in the table of my foot last summer.  Because of the high costs of my health insurance policy (it's the largest monthly expense in my budget), I first seriously considered not going to see a physician:  I wasn't sure if I could afford my share of the costs from my remaining monthly budget.

Remember that what we in the US call health insurance is only partial insurance and leaves us with some out-of-pocket costs, and remember that it's hard for the patients to predict how large those end up being, given that the insurer has power to refuse some items and leave paying for them to the insured person.

This experience made me think more about how buying health insurance both makes a person poorer and reduces the final prices of health care at the point of care.  (Those of you who like economics might want to think about how the conventional analysis of the income effect and substitution effect of a price change might be useful here, once we allow for the extra income change from buying a health insurance policy.  There are two income effects now.)

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Sarah Kliff talks about the way emergency rooms price their services in this Vox interview.  If you find reading the interview hard going, welcome to the club.  Studying the way hospitals charge for their services can be a truly nightmarish experience for anyone trying to use routine economic models for that*.

One obvious reason is that the patients might not even have the kind of price information which is required for those models to work.  Take "the facility fees,"for one example:

These charges, known as “facility fees,” are the price that patients pay for walking in the door of an emergency room and seeking service. Nationally, these fees are kept secret. Patients only learn their emergency room’s facility fee when they receive a bill after the visit.

So.  It's impossible to react to a price when one is not told what it is! 

Conservatives who advocate "free market" economics in health care tend to skip over problems of that sort, as they skip over the problems that local monopoly power of hospitals in many areas causes, as they skip over the lack of information most consumers have about what care is necessary and what care is of sufficient quality, and as they skip over the serious theoretical problem of the sellers in health care not only selling the product but also telling the buyers what they need to buy.**
 

The pricing patterns of hospitals and their emergency rooms link to health insurance.  

 

Consider the case of someone who is brought to an emergency room unconscious or too confused or in too much pain to think clearly.  This person may have private health insurance which only covers in-network services, and while the hospital itself may be in the network, it may employ providers who are not.  There's no way for someone in that condition to scrutinize the small print in their health insurance forms or to walk around checking which emergency room doctors or other specialists are in the network and which are not.

 

This could mean that someone with insurance is not, in fact, someone with insurance when the final bills come in for the emergency room and possible later hospital care.   

 

From a Vox article from last May:

Vox’s database shows that patients are especially vulnerable to these surprise bills when out-of-network doctors work at in-network hospitals.

“It does happen quite a lot in the emergency room,” says Christopher Garmon, an assistant professor at the University of Missouri Kansas City.

Garmon published a study last year that found as many as one in five emergency room visits led to a surprise bill from an out-of-network provider involved in the care.

“When somebody is out of network and the patient knows that, they can avoid those providers,” Garmon says. “Here, it’s very hard for patients to know this is going to happen.”

Garmon found that surprise bills are the most common in emergency room visits where the patient is ultimately admitted to the hospital for further treatment. Twenty percent of those patients end up with an out-of-network bill, often from specialists such as anesthesiologists and pathologists.

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*  The models are not completely useless, but to determine how they relate to the real-world patterns of hospital pricing can be excruciatingly complicated once we take into account how much information is hidden from the consumer side of the market, the monopoly power of many hospitals, their not-for-profit status (what do the try to optimize?  and how does that goal affect their pricing principles?) and the possibility that they compete mostly in perceived quality rather than in price.

** It's not that sellers are out there defrauding buyers out of all their money, but that the health care markets have special arrangements to safeguard the relatively uninformed buyers.  Those special arrangements, such as the agency relationships between providers and patients, licensing and the self-regulation of the medical profession, all tend to have side-effects which are not pro-competition.




 

 

When The Shoe Is On The Other Foot. The Social Media Response To The Covington Students Incident.

Here is an example of a "when the shoe is on the other foot" story (1).  I use the term in roughly the same sense as I use the term reversal:  to gauge whether everyone can equally engage in certain behaviors and what happens when we switch the players' identities or their general circumstances.  Do we still approve or disapprove of what is happening?  And if not, why not?

The story is this: The Covington Catholic High School, an all-male private school, sent a contingency of students to yesterday's March for Life in Washington, D.C.  Other marches took place in Washington on the same day, including the Indigenous People's March. The clash of marches allowed something disgusting to happen:

They were Catholic high school students who came to Washington on a field trip to rally at the March for Life.

He was a Native American veteran of the Vietnam War who was there to raise awareness at the Indigenous Peoples March.

They intersected on Friday in an unsettling encounter outside the Lincoln Memorial — a throng of cheering and jeering high school boys, predominantly white and wearing “Make America Great Again” gear, surrounding a Native American elder.

Mary Oliver, RIP

The poet Mary Oliver died on Thursday at the age of eighty-three.  The New York Times obituary addresses her poetry, her popularity among readers and the way critics have disagreed about the quality of her poems.

My favorite is The Forest, part of a longer poem, published in her New And Selected Poems. Volume One.  I believe that it reflects

...that what lay beneath her work’s seemingly unruffled surface was a dark, brooding undertow, which together with the surface constituted a cleareyed exploration of the individual’s place in the cosmos.

The Forest

At night
under the trees
the black snake
jellies forward
rubbing
roughly
the stems of the bloodroot,
the yellow leaves,
little boulders of bark,
to take off
the old life.
I don't know
if he knows
what is happening
I don't know
if he knows
it will work.
In the distance
the moon and the stars
give a little light.
In the distance
the owl cries out.

Tammy Bruce's Ode To Traditional Masculinity

Tammy Bruce, a guest on Fox & Friends, a right-wing political television show, gave such a brilliant example of everything that can go wrong when we debate concepts such as femininity and masculinity that I am going to dedicate a whole post to her utterances. (1)

Short Posts 1/10/19. Trump's Shutdown as a Game of Chicken, Higher Marginal Income Tax Rates And The Flu

1.  I believe that Trump sees his government shutdown as a game of chicken.  The big problem for a narcissistic man is that he is playing it against a woman, Nancy Pelosi.  He can't lose, because then he would lose face.  And, possibly, other parts.  That the shutdown causes real suffering to many is not something Trump can relate to, sigh.

2.  His immigration speech the other day was an odd one.  He read it quite fluently, if we ignore the sniffing, and what he read was clear enough.

Wonder who wrote the speech?  Stephen Miller is one possible guess, but Miller (the fascist architect of the current immigration policies) would never include the bits about emotions and the heart and all that crap, because he doesn't know what those things might be.  Neither would Trump, of course, so I smell a new speech writer.

As an aside (because truth now is just an aside in these debates), the speech was based on two major factual errors which this Vox piece spells out.

It was also based on the familiar be-very-very-afraid trick which the Republicans have successfully exploited for a few decades now.  What's hilarious is that we are told to be very very afraid of migrants from South America (foreigners bring disease and crime and cost us money and jobs), but not of some very powerful foreigners, such as Vlad (the Impaler) Putin, though the latter has most likely caused a lot of damage to this country (and democracy) by his shenanigans.

3.  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez' suggestion that annual incomes above ten million dollars should be taxed at marginal tax rates rising to seventy percent created the expected reactions from the wealthier pundits of the right.

Sean Hannity, in particular, worried about all the toys that he and his friends might lose if her awful proposal actually became reality:

SEAN HANNITY (HOST): Now she wants to confiscate what would be the equivalent, if you lived in her state of New York, of 85 cents of every dollar. Well that means the rich people won't be buying boats that they like recreationally, they're not going to be taking expensive vacations anymore and they probably won't be investing their money in America anymore because it won't be profitable for them.

Hannity doesn't understand marginal tax rates!  Ocasio-Cortez' proposal would tax incomes above, say, ten million dollars per year, at a higher tax rate, not all the income that someone who makes more than ten million dollars per year earns.

If the seventy-percent top rate was applied to income above ten million dollars, the first dollar that would be taxed at that rate would be the first someone earns after already having earned ten million that year.  The dollars earned earlier would have lower marginal tax rates.

So it wouldn't be true that the effect would apply to "every dollar," as Hannity argues.

Hannity's argument in that above quote is something he elaborated on later:

You know, and people got mad at me, they said, "Hannity, you were talking about, well, rich people won't buy boats" -- no, rich people won't go to restaurants, because they won't have the money. Rich people won't invest in companies, that means they're not going to hire people.
Rich people are not going to remodel their homes, they're not going to build new homes -- who benefits? The contractor, the electrician, the plumber, the -- the carpenters, they're the ones that benefit, when rich people spend money on their homes.

This is the old assertion that rich people are job creators, and if they are not allowed to keep a lot of their money then they will stop creating jobs!  So trying to tax high incomes is no different from shooting ourselves in the foot (feet?).

But reality is quite a bit more complicated than assuming that jobs come only from the consumption and investment of the very rich.

One complication is that the marginal propensity to consume is probably a lot lower for the very rich* than for the rest of us, and this means that raising the top marginal tax rates would not cut the consumption by the very rich as much as Hannity fears.  This means that fewer jobs would be lost.

A second complication, and one which links to the previous one, is that Hannity's argument doesn't take into account the additional tax revenues Occasio-Cortez' proposal would create.

They would not just vanish into the empty air, but would ultimately  be spent or invested, preferably in the domestic economy, and the individuals whose paychecks, say, will rise because of that might also decide to remodel their houses, go out for a meal, or buy a small rowing boat.

Those individuals are likely to earn less, on average, than the folks who make more than ten million per year.  This means that their marginal propensity to consume is going to be higher, the demand for goods and services will rise**, and new firms might be created to take advantage of that demand.  They are also many more in numbers than the super-rich.

Whether raising the top marginal tax rates would produce enough money to finance various governmental policies is, of course, an empirical question, and to answer that properly requires actual research.  Sean Hannity's arguments are not that.***

4.  The iatrogenic illness I caught in December from my general practitioner turned out to be something more than just a bad head cold.  I spent about two weeks in the zombieland where the "me" that usually exists seemed to have gone to sleep, replaced by a zombie Echidne with no creativity except in making long lists of what hurt and where.

I think I had the flu, given the symptoms, but perhaps because I did get vaccinated the way it passed was odd.  Usually the flu symptoms start, one's condition deteriorates quite rapidly in the next day or two, the illness reaches its peak and then recovery takes place at some fairly constant daily rate.

But my most recent experience was nothing like that.  I felt the same level if discomfort and pain every single day, until, suddenly I woke up almost completely healthy.

But weak and feeble.  I made the mistake of trying some rather strenuous exercise on Monday and almost fainted.  So this is the long explanation why my research for this post might have mistakes I don't spot.
-------
*  This is just a fancy way of saying that how much someone would spend out of the "marginal dollar," the "last" dollar added to your most recent paycheck depends on how big your paychecks are.  The bigger they are, other things constant, the smaller the percentage of that dollar people will spend.

** Thus, the poorer people are also job creators, because they consume goods and services in the marketplace and thereby become the customers that firms need to, say, expand their hiring of workers.

*** The real, hidden, arguments against higher marginal tax rates view them as governmental theft.  Those arguments are based on the belief that the rich truly deserve their higher incomes because they work so much harder than the poorer people and/or because they are so much more creative and productive than the poorer lot.

Should the rich have inherited their position, the argument just moves back one generation and maintains that the income was initially earned by hard work and great genius and those who created it had the right to pass its fruits to their children.

This way of thinking doesn't ask how the enterprises of the wealthy, for example, have benefited from public infrastructure investments, the creation of the Internet, the tax-payer subsidized education of the workers of those enterprises and so on.  Instead, it assumes that the wealthy earned their higher incomes with zero help from anyone else.

The Hillarization of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Not Going Well.

The attempts to Hillarize* Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are wonderful to watch.  The right-wing apparatus tries everything they can think of, but the usual approaches don't work quite as well with her as they work with older women, largely, because she is too young to have a lot of life history which can be mined for any minor infraction.

So the (hidden) focus now seems to imply that she has stepped out of the proper role of attractive young women which is to be eye-candy while staring adoringly at older powerful male politicians.

That's the best way to understand** why the right-wingers think that a video of her dancing while in college would matter or that her old nickname (Sandy) would matter.  Those things are supposed to embarrass her now because they are the types of things eye-candy-hotties are expected to do.

This Boston Herald opinion piece is a good example of the way Ocasio-Cortez is currently being Hillarized.

But she has learned the lesson from the past and refuses to silently accept the Hillarization.  We shall see if it works, though I hope that it does.

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*  "Hillarization" is my cumbersome term for what the right-wing media did to Hillary Clinton over several decades by creating a loudspeaker which spewed nonstop information and misinformation about her perfidies and her sins, whether real or imaginary.

This approach creates the impression that something must be very wrong with a woman who receives such long-term treatment, even if actual data didn't support that conclusion.  Because all this worked so well with Hillary Clinton, it is now applied to other female Democratic politicians.

An important aspect of the Hillarization of female politicians is that the sins deemed important in the process are much milder and even insignificant if they applied to a male politician and that they are frequently about the kind of subtle violations of gender roles which would only matter when the object of criticism is a woman.

**  It's not the only way.  Some argue that the right-wing tries to label her as unauthentic, another device that the Hillarization process utilizes.  But I find the "eye-candy running wild when it's supposed to stay put and silent" theory the clearest explanation for what the right-wing tries to accomplish.

Likable Enough? On The Hillarization of Elizabeth Warren.

Did you know that likability is a tremendously important characteristic in American politics?  Politicians shouldn't run if they are not likable.  It's not possible to win, say, the presidency if a politician is not deeply likable:

In one of his first tweets of the new year, President Donald Trump attacked retired four-star Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal after he criticized the President on Sunday.
"'General' McChrystal got fired like a dog by Obama," Trump tweeted Tuesday morning. "Last assignment a total bust. Known for big, dumb mouth. Hillary lover!"

Oops.  I forgot to specify that likability is a tremendously important characteristic in American politics, but mostly for female politicians.  Hillary Clinton struggled with her likability rating.   Sure, she had experience and brains.  But she lacked that something — je ne sais quoi — that all charismatic politicians must have.  Trump has it in shitloads! 

It's being likable.

Drat.  I veered off the script again and forgot that male politicians don't have to be terribly likable.  Their likability rating is measured differently, because it's base value (zero point) is set far lower than the equivalent base value for female politicians. 

A guy is likable enough if he doesn't decapitate babies on television with his bare teeth, pretty much. 

But from a gal so much more is demanded!  She must not remind any man of his nasty female ex, she must not remind anyone of their angry mother, she must not remind anyone of the cold bitch at the bank who refused their mortgage applications. 

She should be warm, empathetic, sympathetic, but not emotional or weepy.  As an aside, she should also be attractive, but not blatantly sexy, strong, but without a grating voice or any shrillness or hectoring, and she should always place other people's needs ahead of her needs.  If she fails in that then she is overly ambitious and unlikable.

Sigh.  All this is because of the sex roles almost all of us have grown up with.  Women, as a class, are expected to demonstrate certain characteristics.  Leaders, as a class, are expected to demonstrate a different set of characteristics. 

These two sets don't quite coincide.  Powerful women must walk a tightrope strung between two end-points, one having to do with traditional female characteristics which make a woman likable but certainly not a public leader, and the other having to do with traditional leadership characteristics which make a woman powerful, but not necessarily likable:

It is widely accepted that women should be nurturing, deferent, kind and warm. Men, in contrast, are valued for being confident, in control and outspoken. The problem for women is that the qualities essential to being a successful leader, such as assertiveness and directness, are contrary to predominant norms of femininity. Because of this, women leaders are often penalized. They may be disliked by their colleagues, or their communication style critiqued, which can result in their being fired or missing out on important promotions or assignments.

Walking that tightrope can be pretty tricky*.

Why this outburst from me?  Because Elizabeth Warren has thrown her hat in the ring concerning the 2020 presidential races, and the almost-instant response has questioned her likability:

The anti-Elizabeth Warren narrative was written before the Massachusetts senator even announced she was exploring a presidential run.
She’s too divisive and too liberal, Washington Democrats have complained privately. Her DNA rollout was a disaster — and quite possibly a White House deal-breaker. She’s already falling in the polls, and — perhaps most stinging — shares too many of the attributes that sank Hillary Clinton.

In the year of the woman, it adds up to one unwelcome mat for the most prominent woman likely to be part of the 2020 field. But it also presents an unmistakable challenge: How does Warren avoid a Clinton redux — written off as too unlikable before her campaign gets off the ground?

Bolds are mine.

The whole linked article is fun to read!  Korecki suggests that Warren shares too many attributes which sank Hillary Clinton, without noticing the most obvious of those shared attributes, their female sex.  She then gives a quick nod to the possibility that worrying about Warren's likability might be a sign of sexism, but then decides that "fair or not," Warren must overcome the wariness her candidacy is met with. 

I found all that hilarious, probably because the alternative reading of Korecki's work here would have left me despondent**.


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*  And the trickiness might differ, in complicated ways, between, say, white and African-American women.

** Both because she herself is adding bricks to the structure of Warren's supposed unlikability and because she appears unaware of the literature telling us that powerful women tend to suffer an unlikability penalty.

The Global Gender Gap Report, 2018

The World Economic Forum has published an annual global gender gap report since 2006*.  Four sub-indexes are aggregated to get an overall measure about average differences between men and women in four areas:  economic participation and opportunity, health and survival, educational attainment and political participation.

The index has its problems.  For example, the health sub-index does not measure reproductive choice**.  But it also has certain advantages.  It compares countries with others of roughly the same income level, and because it has been published for over a decade, it lets us analyze progress (or lack of progress) over time.

The 2018 results are out.  Progress has not completely stalled, but it's very very slow.  At this rate the global pay gap between women and men, for example,  would take 202 years to close.  The largest gaps are found in political participation and economic participation and opportunity.  The remaining gaps in health and educational attainment are relatively small.

The ten most gender-equal countries, based on the aggregate index, are largely the ones you would guess to be found there, the Nordic countries.  Iceland leads the pack, followed by Norway, Sweden and Finland.  Nicaragua comes in fifth, Rwanda sixth, then New Zealand, Philippines, Ireland and Namibia.

The ten least gender-equal countries, based on the aggregate index are, starting from the tenth from the bottom and ending with the worst: Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Mali, Democratic Republic of Congo, Chad, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan and Yemen.***

United States comes fifty-first in the overall rankings.  This is a slight drop from the previous year, partly due to the Trump effect!

The United States (51) moves down two spots compared to last year. It records some modest improvements on the Economic Opportunity and Participation subindex—particularly with regard to wage equality for similar work—but a directional reversal in education and virtually no change on the Political Empowerment subindex, which stands at its lowest level since 2007, due, in particular, to a significant decrease in gender parity in ministerial level positions.

Bolds are mine.


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*  For a few posts of mine about the earlier reports, check this for 2009,  this for 2015, this for 2016 and this for a link to the 2017 report.  I have written more posts on the reports but Blogger will not allow me to search very far back in my archives.

** The Philippines, for instance, would probably drop from the top ten if reproductive health care services were included in the health sub-index.

*** There is an urgent need for much stronger feminist activism inside Muslim countries.  They tend to be the majority among the ten least gender-equal countries in this index, and this year is no exception.

As an aside, I checked if Yemen's position was caused by the horrible war raging there.  That does not seem to be the case as Yemen was also in the last position in the rankings of 2009, 2015 and 2016. 

Season's Echidne Greetings

I have an iatrogenic illness.  Caught a bad head cold from my physician during a routine well-goddess-check visit.  Later I coughed so hard that I put my lower back out.  Now I slowly crawl and slither around the Snakepit Inc. hissing and swearing and planning a major malpractice suit.

The silver lining  to this depressing cloud* (other than the money I'm going to win in court for pain and suffering and for looking utterly ridiculous) is that I cannot vacuum even one single room. Or cook.  Or clean.**

I shouldn't whine and moan.  Other people have it so much worse.  They are not me, for one thing.

Anyways.  I wish you all wonderful end-of-year holidays in loving and peaceful company with a temporary amnesia concerning the fact that we are all tied to the seats in a bus careening toward the chasm while its driver yells gleefully "Look, Ivanka!  No hands!"



  

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*  Because of the mortar-like substance in my sinuses, coffee tastes like burned straw and chocolate — my beloved chocolate — tastes GRAY.

**  All that traditionally female party-work which doesn't count as real work but which often means that one feels like after a marathon when the festivities are supposed to begin.

A Trump Lament

This late fall and early winter have been difficult for me, and it shows in the paucity of my literary output here.  We are now almost two years into the Trump Era, and each day Trump acts more deranged.  To document all his daily atrocities would sound like constant repetition, so I have not done so.  Besides, I knew all this would happen on that election day in 2016.  And so did you, because if you read here you are clever.

The true pain I feel is not about Trump, but about the acts of millions of Americans who voted* for a man with no brains and no relevant training, no understanding of how the government works, no values except  a huge need for self-gratification, and  no experience except in shady business deals.  Enough Americans preferred a completely untrained carnival barker with a giant but fragile ego to the other candidate: the Crooked Woman.

My pain is of two sorts: First, I have lost my virginal trust in democracy, and desperately struggle to regain it.  Second, I have concluded that almost any woman who might run for the presidency of the United States will be treated to the distorting mirrors -treatment that Hillary Clinton received from the right-wing over decades and will become a Crooked Woman, Cruella de Ville, by the time she might be in a position to run.  And we will, once again, hear people say "but of course we would vote for a woman, not just that woman!" 

Anyway.  Trump is currently throwing several simultaneous temper tantrums** and those have consequences.  Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has resigned over Trump's sudden decision to withdraw American troops from Syria, and possibly also over Trump's impulse decision to withdraw around 7000 US troops from Afghanistan where the Taliban (with medieval values about women's rights and about gays and Lesbians)  is currently gaining ground.

I use the words "sudden" and "impulse" in the above paragraph, because withdrawing troops without letting your allies prepare for such a withdrawal is very stupid and thoughtless, and because withdrawing troops without carefully thinking about what all the negative consequences might be is criminal.***


------

*  Though James Comey certainly had an impact on the election results and though the Russians may have influenced them, too, it's still the case that all those Trump-voters bear the real responsibility for the Trump Reich.

**  This is familiar to anyone who has dealt with a two-year old, though most two-year olds don't hold the lives and livelihoods of millions of people in their tiny hands.  

***  I am all for peace.  But it's incredibly naive to assume that the kinds of sudden troop withdrawals Trump has decided upon would result in more peace.  The vacuum that leaves behind will be filled with something, possibly a revival of ISIS in Syria. 

Depending on how the local geopolitics in the area work the outcome could be more bloodshed, more war and more suffering.  Then there's the interesting question of possible influence from Turkey or our pal Vlad on Trump's decisions.  He is incapable of understanding the local political games in that area.

Or put in another way: Suppose that a pillar is propped up by a complicated framework of supports.  If you wish to remove one of those supports, you should first figure out what its removal will do.  Will the other supports be strong enough to keep the pillar upright?  Or will the pillar fall?  And if someone else recommended that you withdraw that support, what would they like to see happen?  Do they want the pillar to stand or to fall?  Which outcome is in your interest?

What All New Right-Wing Authoritarian Movements Share: The Wish To Cancel Feminist Gains.

Peter Beinart has written a piece for the Atlantic Monthly on what ties together the various forms of right-wing authoritarianism we see rearing its ugly heads (it has many) all over the world.  He begins by noting the usual explanations for the rise of Trumpism, and argues that they fail to explain why similar authoritarian movements are cropping up in several countries:

The problem with both American-born story lines is that authoritarian nationalism is rising in a diverse set of countries. Some are mired in recession; others are booming. Some are consumed by fears of immigration; others are not. But besides their hostility to liberal democracy, the right-wing autocrats taking power across the world share one big thing, which often goes unrecognized in the U.S.: They all want to subordinate women.

Bolds are mine.

Beinart fails to include movements such as ISIS (a religious form of right-wing authoritarianism) which share in exactly the same goals, once we understand the resistance to feminist gains to be something that is judged from different starting points.

The ISIS jihadists want women put back to the least possible level of personal power, and that level is lower than what, say, the prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, can currently achieve (by stopping the funding of gender studies in universities and by encouraging Hungarian women to have lots of children* ) or what is happening in Brazil or in Russia or in Poland or in the Philippines or now, it seems, even in Italy.  But all these movements share the attempt to shrink the sphere within which women are allowed to move, act and live.

And of course I agree with Beinart on what all the right-wing dictatorships share:  The urgency of women's re-subjugation.  After all, I have written the very same arguments on this blog more times than I can remember.  I even agree with one possible remedy to all this:  A fairer division of chores and power at home.  Beinart writes:

Over the long term, defeating the new authoritarians requires more than empowering women politically. It requires normalizing their empowerment so autocrats can’t turn women leaders and protesters into symbols of political perversity. And that requires confronting the underlying reason many men—and some women—view women’s political power as unnatural: because it subverts the hierarchy they see in the home.

Women can't fully participate in the public sphere if they are to bear the whole burden of childcare, cleaning, laundry, household management and the kind of emotional management of relationships and party-organizing work women have traditionally done with respect to the wider kin of both partners.  We need more equal sharing of those chores if we wish to see more equal sharing of work outside the home.

It might also be the case that seeing women in powerful public roles might work to dismantle the traditional hierarchies at home.

And Beinart is correct in the need to normalize the presence of women not only in the labor force in general, but also in positions of economic, social and political power.  That normalization may happen when the percentage of women in a field reaches some critical number, say, thirty**.  Below that, new female entrants (employees, graduate students, freshman politicians) are first viewed as women, and only after that as individuals with their own qualities.  Above that the sex of the person is no longer the first thing others notice.

Where I might disagree with him is in this:

I don't think the central role of women's re-subjugation is just an almost accidental consequence of women being fairly rare in public life and especially in positions of power or of the recent histories in various countries. 

The authoritarians don't want women in the public life, because women are viewed as a fertility resource in the authoritarians' plan for world conquest or similar slightly more modest plans, not as full human beings,  and because the authoritarians wish to keep women doing all the unpaid*** work women have traditionally done so that the society doesn't have to share in it or really pay for it.

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* The juxtaposition of these two is not an accident.  Women are to be steered back into the family and away from any uppity ideas feminism might awaken in them.

**  This estimate is based on an early book by Virginia Valian (Why So Slow).  More recent estimates may be different.

*** Depending on the country, women may also be expected to do low-paid work in  the labor market.

Work done at home is not, of course, truly unpaid because those who do it get at least bed and board, but there is no explicit contract about how care work at home should be remunerated.

Thus, the outcome depends not only on the kindness and fairness of the partners, but also on their relative power balance.  That, in turn, can be turned to the disadvantage of women by laws which fail to punish intimate partner violence or which make divorce difficult or which allow the noncustodial parent not to pay child support.  This is especially the case if work in the labor market is made harder for women to do, which leaves them vulnerable in bad marriages or other long-term relationships.

These are the kinds of changes right-wing authoritarians tend to support.  Note what happened to domestic violence laws in Putin's Russia, for one example.  Beinart's article gives more examples from several countries.

As a total aside, it's fascinating how decades of socialism or communism didn't do much for women's liberation.  This is pretty clear when one studies the "post-liberation" changes in Russia, Poland, Hungary and so on. 

My take on that is this:  Communism never really tried to change men's roles.  This gave the women in the system two very long work-days and never really challenged traditional gender norms at home or social sexism or misogyny,  partly, because the assumption was that women were already completely equal outside the home.

And Disappearing People, Though Only Statistically Speaking

(The title is a pun based on my previous post about how feminists are disappearing men).

When I first came to the US I found the reporting of election results fascinating.  A presidential candidate who got sixty percent of the vote, say, had totally pwned the opposition, had rolled over it!  The country was unanimous!  And from that point onward, the other forty percent was ignored until the next election campaigns began.

I always assumed that this way of looking at large groups of people and their behavior was because of the two-party system and the winner-takes-all principle, and it makes some sense from that angle.  After all, the winner now has the power to speak for all.

Still, the people who voted for the losing candidate persisted in existing, probably persisted in disagreeing with the winner, but they no longer quite counted.  For instance, should the new president make some international move that was almost everywhere viewed as bad, all American voters would be blamed for that move.  Not just those voters who supported him.

There must be a name for this odd disappearance of people, right?  It's common enough and not only in politics. Here's one recent political example I spotted on Twitter*:

I can speculate on the possible reasons for these types of disappearances, or false generalizations, if you wish.  For writers they simplify arguments and make them stronger.  No need to add all those weasel words: some, the majority, a few!  The style of writing benefits from that strength.

Activists can use the generalizations to increase tribal feelings among their own supporters, both by arguing that all the insiders feel the same (right) way and by arguing that all the outsiders consist of a coherent group bent on destroying the insiders**.

But this phenomenon seems to be deeper in our psyches than that.  I see it working in both racism and sexism, in the fear of immigrants and even in the loathing of Republicans by Democrats and vice versa.

I can speculate on the reasons for the ease with which we slip this generalization jacket on, and so can you.  The more interesting question is why it almost always goes unchallenged.

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*  I didn't pick that tweet because it would be wrong in some fundamental way (I fully agree with the gist of its meaning), but mostly, because it is otherwise a neutral example.  Had I used gender, race, religion or ethnicity in my example I would have woken up emotions I don't want to come and participate in this discussion. 

In any case, I have committed the very same types of generalizations I discuss in this post.  It seems to be the way our minds tend to go if not forced to go in another direction.  It's quick, it makes a more cumbersome point (that the majority of Nebraskans voted for Trump and may have shot their own foot) in a clear and easy-to-absorb manner.   And what may be more important, it feels right even though it is not.

** (Added later)
This may not be a pure benefit to activists, because that usage can also increase the tribal feelings of those the activists attack, and in particular the tribal feelings of the percentage (whether large or small) which does not agree with whatever the whole group is accused of.  Ironically, using the false generalizations might even make them less false, if people feel their opinions are simply ignored and other opinions stamped on their foreheads.  They might then just go with that.

The Disappearing Men

Tucker Carlson, one of the right-wing pundits slowly slipping and sliding from mere misogyny and general bigotry to white nationalism and worse, had a guest on who was very concerned about feminists trying to disappear men:

HEATHER MAC DONALD: Feminism has ambitions to take over civilization and when that happens you can say goodbye to civilization. They’re trying to disappear males.

I really must check what's in the basement freezer.

Just kidding. 

I don't have a freezer in the basement.

Mac Donald seems to be just another right-wing hit-woman shooting, off the hip at the very idea of women's rights.  Here's what she wrote in November about the accusations against Brett Kavanaugh:

It is feminist narcissism to put flimsy accusations of teenage impropriety ahead of a lifetime of achievement in the law. The priorities look like a revenge attack on a civilization deemed too male.

Now link her more recent statement (further above) that we can all say goodbye to civilization if people like Echidne "take over" (boo!) and that November statement that civilization is deemed too male.  If I dared to guess, I would say that our Heather thinks civilization is what men have created, all on their own.

Except that this contradicts with her take on the allegations that Kavanaugh had sexually attacked a teenage girl while he himself was also a teenager.  Mac Donald blames the current permissive sexual mores for what might have happened:

The results were not pretty: the male libido, free to act as boorishly as it wanted; females getting drunk to reduce their innate sexual inhibitions, unprotected by any default assumptions against casual premarital sex. Whether a 17-year-old Brett Kavanaugh took advantage of this putative sexual liberation, many other teenagers have, and in so doing, merely followed the new script for sexual relations.

So let me get my head straight: 

Civilization is important, civilization is probably created by men and feminists try to tear it apart.  But the male libido is a rude bastard,  intent on being boorish and in need of constraints, while the female libido is a fainting Victorian maiden whose corseted body is built out of innate sexual inhibitions.

It's so weird it's almost fun.








  

The Hillarization Of Female Politicians: Fun For The Whole Pundit Family

"Yell loud enough at a female leader and eventually she’ll go away. Convince her that her disappearance is necessary for the party, and soon everyone will get to return to the avuncular comfort of a dude like Joe Biden."  Monica Hesse wrote that in a late November Washington Post article about the attempts to oust Nancy Pelosi as the incoming House Majority Leader.

It's not the amount of yelling that the powerful female politicians get that is the problem, in my opinion; it's the type of yelling they tend to receive.  Anything is grist for the attack mills, and not just the policies that the politician favors or has accomplished or has failed to accomplish.

It's everything else, too, from what type of a person the woman's husband might be via how her voice sounds to others to how she dresses, and even how frequently she gets told that she should exit politics or not run* for the sake of the common good. 

The tilt in political coverage I address here is more quantitative than qualitative (though it's the latter, too):  Some male politicians may also get criticized for, say, their clothes, but not as often and not for the same reasons.  The men are criticized for the political tactics they used and how those backfired, as well as for the policies they pursued.**

On top of that criticism female politicians also elicit a different type of scrutiny, one which tries to find the hidden worm in the superficially perfect-looking apple, which tries to find something that is very very wrong in her basic values or her basic competence.

The worm MUST be there, for why otherwise would we find her so unauthentic, her voice so grating, her ambition so calculating?

And once the worm has been found, it is turned into a boa constrictor and then that boa constrictor is turned against the politician herself.

Add to that my impression that for female politicians the rules about making mistakes, in general, are different.  One strike and you are out.  There are no excuses for, say, youthful failings, no real recovery from one error of judgement or one misstep.

I call all this by the awkward term "Hillarization," for fairly obvious reasons (the decades-long campaign against Hillary Clinton).  The US right is particularly good at committing Hillarization on female Democrats it dislikes, but the phenomenon is not completely tied to one party.



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*   That Boston Globe article is not the only negative Warren piece that has been published in the last few days.  All the others are about Warren's DNA debacle.

Unless something is going on behind the curtains of power that I am unaware of,
so many different journalists choosing to write about Warren almost simultaneously is odd, given that the DNA test stuff happened well over a month ago and was thoroughly discussed then.

There's also something odd about the argument that because of the DNA debacle, Warren should now utterly forget about running for the presidency in 2020.  She had her one chance and spoiled it!

Compare this to, say, Ted Kennedy's career after the Chappaquiddick incident which cost Mary Jo Kopechne her life.

I am not defending what Warren did, and neither am I demanding that nobody criticize her.   But I strongly suspect that her ethical and moral failings and/or her lack of judgement would be covered less fiercely and less frequently if her name was not Elizabeth but, say,  Elliot.

**  And, of course, for actual crimes and such, though the 2016 presidential campaign taught all of us that "journalistic balance" can mean redefining crimes differently for male and female politicians.  It didn't really matter what scandals were revealed from Donald Trump's past; certain august newspapers would publish them and then publish yet another rehash of Hillary Clinton's emails.  Just to show that they are measured, objective and balanced.

Short Posts 6/12/18. Ice Swimming, The Kindness Of Women, And Online Warfare

1.  It's the Finnish Independence Day today.  Wave a little Finnish flag for me.

Here's a nice winter pastime popular among some really weird Finns (coughmybrotherandsistercough).

2.  All cultures (pretty much) expect women to be kinder, more empathetic and more inclusive than men.  It's codified in our subconscious gender norms*.  And all cultures (pretty much) criticize and even punish women who deviate from those norms more harshly than they would criticize or punish men acting in an identical manner.

I was thinking about that yesterday when a few right-wing newspapers asked if Hillary Clinton snubbed Donald Trump at George H.W. Bush's funeral.  Even those newspapers concluded that she had not done so, and that the occasion required a dignified and aloof demeanor from everyone.  But they did ask the question about a female politician who was repeatedly called a "nasty woman" and a "crooked woman" by Donald Trump and who is still the target of "lock her up" shouts at Trump rallies.

In any realistic scenario Donald Trump should have been snubbed by most reasonable people.

The online harassment of women who give their opinions publicly might be a partial reflection of those same gender norms (though some of it may be based on a different ancient gender norm:  that women should be silent in the public sphere). 

When Jill makes a controversial comment it looks more controversial than had Jack made it, because of how we interpret the two names.  She both says something that upsets others and violates gender norms while he only does the former.

I spot this subconscious gender norm working away quietly in all sorts of online conversations, even among feminists.  Women are supposed to be kind.**

3.  Speaking of online communications, this article argues that we are now engaged in not hot war or cold war but in warm information war.  Whatever you might think about the geopolitical arguments in the article, it's certainly true that nuanced conversation is close to impossible on Twitter, and that its algorithms rewards wrath speech and quick, nasty comebacks.  It's also pretty cheap and easy to introduce a lot of chaos in social media.  This makes establishing facts harder work than it has to be.

The following pyramid is a good reminder of the higher levels online debates could take:

4.  This is a hilarious take on diversity in tech.


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*  Whether these are partly innate temperament differences or not is not probably something that can be studied with the tools we have right now. But I'm completely sure that they are strengthened and magnified by the way we are brought up, and in particular by the kinds of behavior which are given positive or negative feedback by parents, peer groups and other authorities, and how that approval and disapproval varies by the sex of the child.

** I am not arguing for random unkindness, of course.  Neither am I arguing for some kind of a permission to just rant and rave without any consequences.  My point is that the rules differ between men and women, and that makes criticism a riskier field for the latter.

Making Murka Great Again. The Fate Of The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

This is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau now, under the leadership of Trump appointee Mick Mulvaney:

One year after Mulvaney’s arrival, he and his political aides have constrained the agency from within, achieving what conservatives on Capitol Hill had been unable to do for years, according to agency data and interviews with career officials.
Publicly announced enforcement actions by the bureau have dropped by about 75 percent from average in recent years, while consumer complaints have risen to new highs, according to a Washington Post analysis of bureau data. 
Over the past year, the agency’s workforce has dropped by at least 129 employees amid the largest exodus since its creation in 2010, agency data shows.
Created by Congress to protect Americans from financial abuses, the bureau under Mulvaney has adopted the role of promoting “free markets” and guarding the rights of banks and financial firms as well as those of consumers, according to statements by Mulvaney and bureau documents.

Bolds are mine.

Mulvaney has also stated this:

“We don’t just work for the government, we work for the people,” he wrote in an “All Hands” email later that month. “And that means everyone: those who use credit cards, and those who provide those cards; those who take loans, and those who make them.”

It's as if there was a government organization called The Sheep's Protection Agency, and suddenly it was run by someone who wanted it to work to promote the interests of not only the sheep but also the wolves and coyotes which eat them.

Short Posts, 12/4/18. Dante's Inferno Misread, Hate Crimes, Another Measure of Gender Gap in Earnings And Mueller Dancing

1. This is beautiful

In the middle of the journey of our life
I found myself astray in a dark wood
where the straight road had been lost sight of.
How hard it is to say what it was like
in the thick of thickets, in a wood so dense
and gnarled
the very thought of it renews my panic.
It is bitter almost as death itself is bitter.

Dante's Inferno Canto I, translated by Seamus Heaney 

I first misread the top two lines in that translated bit of Dante's Inferno as:

In the middle of the journey of our life
I found myself in an ash tray in a dark wood.

So it goes.  That reading is more appropriate for me, and not only because of my warped sense of humor.

The Demographic Representativeness of the 116th Congress

This table* about the demographics of the 116th Congress is fun to analyze:

 

To see what it tells us about how representative the new Congress is, let's compare it to the population proportions of various demographic groups in it.  The last column gives the overall totals, and the third and fifth give the totals by the two parties.

Starting from the total percentages column, it's clear that among the larger groups women are quite seriously underrepresented, that blacks are represented in proportion to their population percentage (though these data don't let us see if this is true separately for black women and black men), and that Hispanics, as a group,  are also quite seriously underrepresented**.

The more fascinating columns to study are of course the party percentage columns.  Those reveal that the Republican Party really is the party of white men. Only seven percent of Republican Congress critters are women,  non-Hispanic whites are ninety-five percent of the total,  and the figures for all racial or ethnic minorities are as tiny as fly specks.  That the black representation matches the black population percentages overall is because the Republican under-representation is compensated for by relative numerical over-representation in the Democratic Party.

May I use this opportunity to, once again, complain about the diversity concept.  If you look at the rows in that table they show diversity, right?  There are wimminz there and all sorts of other demographic groups are represented.  So all is good.

But many of the table percentages are not the same as the population percentages of various groups***.   The system is clearly not representative of the country.  The diversity concept does not reflect that. 

In a sense "diversity" is not about fairness in the same manner as fair representation is.  Why it's so popular might be because it can be used by both sides for their own purposes.  Those who don't really want to see fair representation can add a couple of tokens to various committees, and, presto, diversity is achieved and complaining voices are silenced.  Those who fight for the rights of a numerically very small marginalized group may be able to get it over-represented by using the diversity argument.

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*  My apologies for not crediting the creator of the table.  I copied it in this form from somewhere online.  If you know the name of the creator(s) please let me know and I will add the acknowledgement.

**  Once again, this table doesn't show Latinos and Latinas separately.

Note, also, that the Hispanic category is the one where the comparison of Congress percentages to population percentages are less useful.  This is because roughly one third of all individuals in this category were first generation immigrants in 2013. 

It takes time to become integrated into a culture, including seeking a political career.  A better comparison for the overall statistical representativeness of this group might consist of the population percentage of Hispanics who are at least in the second generation in the US (though that would be a very rough guide, too).

*** Depending on the context in which we examine diversity, the correct comparison might not be to population percentages but to, say, the percentages of people in various demographic groups who have been trained for certain jobs and so on.  Still, in all those cases the goal is to see if the system works fairly.

Natalie Wynn Responds to Jordan Peterson

Heim Yankel in the comments directed me to a Lawyers, Gun and Money post which, in turn, directed me to the following YouTube response to Jordan Peterson, the new right-wing professor/prophet.









The response is by Natalie Wynn.  She nicely interrogates the chaotic enemy that Jordan Peterson has decided to battle with.

If you would like to learn more about Peterson's views about women and feminism, I recommend (because I show what's wrong with his arguments) my earlier post about the Channel 4 interview which began Peterson's meteoric rise in our collective consciousness.  I still also recommend my book review of his self-help book from that womanly angle.  Read at least the third and final part.

As an aside, Wynn calls certain young men "neckbeards."  Here's one of my ancestors with an actual neckbeard: