News About Women, 4/11/2019

1.  Katie Bouman had an important role to play in the development of the computer program which made the black hole photograph possible: 

Katie Bouman led development of a computer program that made the breakthrough image possible.
The remarkable photo, showing a halo of dust and gas 500 million trillion km from Earth, was released on Wednesday.
For Dr Bouman, its creation was the realisation of an endeavour previously thought impossible.
Excitedly bracing herself for the groundbreaking moment, Dr Bouman was pictured loading the image on her laptop.
"Watching in disbelief as the first image I ever made of a black hole was in the process of being reconstructed," she wrote in the caption to the Facebook post.
She started making the algorithm three years ago while she was a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

2.  In Sudan, women have had just about enough:

Sudan’s military has overthrown the country’s longtime president, Omar al-Bashir. It’s a huge win for the hundreds of thousands of Sudanese protesters who have taken to the streets for months calling for his ouster — and for the brave women who have been a driving force in the protest movement.

...

Sudan’s public order laws, which control women’s freedom of dress, behavior, association, and education, have led to the oppression and punishment of Sudanese women for years and enabled a patriarchal system to thrive. Girls as young as 10 years old are legally allowed to marry, and girls are frequently forced into marriages with much older men without their consent. Marital rape is also legal in the country.

Yet despite having faced this kind of repression and exploitation for decades — or, perhaps, because of that fact — women have been at the forefront of the nationwide protests since they began in December. Reports estimate that more than 70 percent of the protesters who have gone out into the streets are women, according to the BBC.

3.  Women have also had enough of harassment at Nigeria's street markets.

4.  Meanwhile, in Texas, a Republican state Representative Tony Tinderholt proposed a House bill which would have criminalized abortion and could have opened up

the possibility of prosecutors charging a woman who has an abortion with criminal homicide, which can be punishable by the death penalty under current Texas law.

But then the Republican state Representative Jeff Leach said that he would not allow the proposed bill to leave the House Committee on Judiciary and Civil Jurisprudence he chairs for a vote in the full House.

Still, Tinderholt is unrepentant:

Tinderholt released a statement Wednesday evening defending the bill, explaining that exempting mothers from homicide charges would “treat unborn children differently than other people who are murdered.”

5.  And finally, though not really a news item, the more I read about Stacy Abrams, the better I like her.  She is whip-smart and has great political skills.
 

 

Where Our Supreme Leader Does Spring Cleaning

Out with the old and in with the new!  It's that time of the year, the time to sweep out the cobwebs and to notice that windows might as well be see-through, given that the sun has returned.

And so it is in the White House, where Donald Trump has begun spring cleaning.  Not with a broom of even with a vacuum cleaner*, but simply by barking out commands.

The first one out was Kirstjen Nielsen, who was the homeland security secretary.  She "resigned" yesterday**.   And today several other heads rolled:

Government officials said three more top department leaders were expected to leave soon: L. Francis Cissna, the head of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services; Randolph D. Alles, the Secret Service director; and John Mitnik, the agency’s general counsel.

We get a few glimpses into the hilarious scenes behind the stage.  For instance, Trump wants Nielsen's temporary replacement to be Kevin McAleenan, the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection:

But by law, the under secretary for management, Claire Grady, who is currently serving as acting deputy secretary, is next in line to be acting secretary. The White House will have to fire her to make Mr. McAleenan acting secretary, people familiar with the transition said. Ms. Grady has told colleagues that she has no intention of resigning to make way for Mr. McAleenan.

In ordinary times the deputy secretary of homeland security would have taken over from Nielsen, but Trump didn't have one!  It's all a little like doing spring cleaning in a house where the chairs are nailed to the ceiling, there are no beds to to sleep in, and people have their meals in the toilets.

Here's the part which is not hilarious, but deeply frightening:

"There is a near-systematic purge happening at the nation's second-largest national security agency," one senior administration official says.

United States Citizenship and Immigration Services director Francis Cissna and Office of the General Counsel's John Mitnick are expected to be gone soon, and the White House is eyeing others to be removed.
The President in recent weeks empowered Stephen Miller to lead the administration's border policies "and he's executing his plan" with what amounts to a wholesale decapitation or the Department of Homeland Security leadership, the official says.

The bolds, which are mine,  describe the frightening part.  Stephen Miller is the Rasputin behind the most evil of Trump's immigration policies, including the Muslim immigration ban and the family separation policy at the southern border.  He is a true fanatic, with beliefs politely seen as white nationalist and impolitely seen as openly racist.***

Sadly, Miller is not going to be vacuumed out.  Rather, he will step into the power vacuum all those firings have created, and the maddest of his immigration policies will now become reality.

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* I very much doubt Donald Trump has ever used a vacuum cleaner or a dust rag or cleaned a toilet bowl.  I very much doubt he knows how to make coffee or boil an egg.  But lack of such knowledge doesn't detract from many seeing him as a "man of the people."

**  Trump personally fired her which is unusual.  The reasons for that might be found in the fact that Nielsen has a pussy, but also in the fact that Trump's recent demands were impossible for her to legally follow which made him very very angry.  As is now usual, I guess.

Note that I am not defending the awful things Nielsen did in her job.  Following orders is not an acceptable excuse for the cruel policies at the southern border she enforced.  But Trump wants even crueler policies to be enforced in the future, and that's why this spring cleaning.

*** Miller is also the usual kind of sexist which most Alt Right men appear to be.  Weirdly, that tends not to get much attention, these days.

The Equal Pay Day 2019. Where Echidne Dons Her Economist's Hat And Fixes Mistakes in Beliefs

 The Equal Pay Day 2019 was last Tuesday, the 2nd of April.  It's a day created to remind us how much longer women, on average, must work to earn the same amount men, on average, earned during the previous year.  So last Tuesday was roughly the day when women, on average,  would have caught up to men, on average, in total pay for 2018.

The coverage of the day in social media reveals a great lack of information about the economics of the gender gap in wages.  I saw many false interpretations of what it might mean, and I didn't really see economists chiming in to correct false interpretations.  So I'm going to pick two examples, one from roughly each side of the political aisle, to highlight a few of the central problems.

First example: Everything is Discrimination

This example is picked from what I'd call the left side of the political aisle.  Let's begin by looking at one tweet, picked not for being especially off (many were much more so), but because it highlights a couple of central misunderstandings:

Today is #EqualPayDay but it really only marks how far into the next year white, non-Hispanic women have to work to earn what men earned the year before.  For WOC it’s worse, from 8/22 for African-American women to 11/20 for Latina women. All women deserve #EqualPayForEqualWork pic.twitter.com/lYs8EQDjVB

— Mindy Schwartz 🇺🇸 (@mindyanns) April 2, 2019

The picture in that tweet is fine.  It says nothing that isn't true, on average, though keep in mind that it compares the earnings of various groups of women to the earnings of white men, not to the earnings of, say,  Asian-American men or African-American men.  Had we used some other comparison group, the percentage deficits in the earnings would have changed (1).

But the written information in that tweet has two errors (or one error and one unrelated comment, depending on one's interpretation).

Agnes Varda, RIP

Agnes Varda has died at the age of ninety:

Agnès Varda, a groundbreaking French filmmaker who was closely associated with the New Wave — although her reimagining of filmmaking conventions actually predated the work of Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and others identified with that movement — died on Friday morning at her home in Paris. She was 90.

Her movie Vagabond sometimes still haunts my dreams.  Another reviewer of her work agrees:

That year, one of her most critically and commercially successful films, “Vagabond,” about a dangerously unsettled woman, was released in the United States. I distinctly remember being freaked out by “Vagabond,” which opens on the corpse of Mona (a blazing Sandrine Bonnaire), a drifter who freezes to death in a country ditch. Raw, opaque yet also deeply moving, the film tracks her as she wanders from place to place, person to person, alone and finally unknowable. She’s a startlingly uncommon cinematic creation, partly because she is a woman who says no, including to other people.

Varda said she didn’t know why Mona repeatedly said no, a refusal that ends in death. I see “Vagabond,” in part, as a tough, unsentimental exploration about the limits of radical independence for women, which is perhaps what gives it the autobiographical aspect that runs through her movies.

That whole review is well worth reading, including this little snippet which, to me, speaks of the odd and possibly unintended way women so often end up erased when later history is written:

In the early 1980s, she spoke about being omitted from history books and from special issues of Cahiers du Cinéma dedicated to French cinema. “I was just plain forgotten,” she said. She kept going even if, as she admitted in 1986, with each film she had “to fight like a tiger.”

Such potential erasure is particularly troubling in the field of film directing where women are so very rare.  This post is my tiny contribution to fighting it!

The Sultan of Brunei And Stoning of Adulterers. A Feminist Reminder.

The Sultan of Brunei, with age, seems to have become more and more religiously fanatic and rigid.  He is an autocrat in Brunei, an oil-rich country of roughly 450,000 people on the island of Borneo.  Sixty-seven percent of Brunei's citizens are Muslims*, and in 2013 the Sultan announced that the laws of the country would be made to comply with the sharia.

He introduced the changes in the law gradually from 2014 onward, until from the early April of 2019  the most stringent hudud punishments  are to be applied:

Traditional Islamic jurisprudence divides crimes into offenses against God and those against man. The former are seen to violate God's hudud or "boundaries", and they are associated with punishments specified in the Quran and in some cases inferred from hadith.^[4][5] The offenses incurring hudud punishments are zina (unlawful sexual intercourse such as fornication), unfounded accusations of zina,^[6][7] drinking alcohol, highway robbery, and some forms of theft.^[8][9] Jurists have differed as to whether apostasy from Islam and rebellion against a lawful Islamic ruler are hudud crimes.^[4][10]

Hudud punishments range from public lashing to publicly stoning to death, amputation of hands and crucifixion.^[11] Hudud crimes cannot be pardoned by the victim or by the state, and the punishments must be carried out in public.^[12]

The linked Wiki article goes on to mention that the most extreme punishments were rarely implemented in the past, but that the recent Islamic revival has

...brought along calls by Islamist movements for full implementation of sharia.^[14][16] Reinstatement of hudud punishments has had particular symbolic importance for these groups because of their Quranic origin, and their advocates have often disregarded the stringent traditional restrictions on their application.^[14]

Thus, at least on paper**, the death sentence (by stoning, at least in some cases) will be applied to adultery, sodomy and rape.

Western official reactions have been condemning.  A quick search of the topic "Brunei" today tells me that most media headlines*** on this most recent expansion of sharia-based laws focus on its impact on gays and Lesbians.  And the LGBT individuals in Brunei are, indeed, under a very great threat.

But the law also prescribes a death sentence by stoning for adultery, whether between heterosexuals or not, and this is a greater threat for women than for men:

Campaigners say women are more likely to be convicted of adultery than men because discriminatory laws and customs penalise women more than men for sexual relations outside marriage.

If a man is unhappy with his wife he can – depending on the country – divorce, take other wives or marry another woman temporarily. A woman has few options. She can only divorce in certain circumstances and risks losing custody of her children.

Few Muslim countries agree with the Sultan of Brunei on the use of stoning and amputation as legal punishments.

But family laws governing marriage, divorce and child custody are based on Islamic sharia in several Muslim-majority countries, and in many of those women's testimony in the family courts is worth one half of men's testimony.  In general, women are at a disadvantage when laws are based on sharia, just as women would be at a disadvantage if US laws were based on literal interpretations of the Old Testament. 


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* Thirteen percent are Buddhists, ten percent Christian and the rest belong to indigenous religions or others not specifically mentioned.

It seems that the hudud sentences will not be applied to non-Muslims.  Apostasy, however, also now carries a possible death sentence.  This means that Muslims cannot avoid the reach of the hudud laws for adultery and sodomy by converting out of Islam.

** Some experts believe that the law might not be implemented very often:

Whether the law going into effect on April 3 means that people will actually be stoned to death might be another matter.
“It is highly questionable whether the draconian laws will be implemented. Brunei has had a de facto ban on capital punishment and Brunei does care about its international image,” Harding wrote.
“However, even just having these laws on the books will not help its global image, in addition to being morally abysmal,” he added.

*** Examples:

Brunei's new anti-gay law goes into effect this week. Here's how the world is reacting

Brunei's crackdown on homosexuality: Why Kingdom is implementing draconian Sharia law

Students target Sultan of Brunei over homosexuality law

Mike Pompeo and Trump Administration ‘Concerned’ About Brunei’s Law to Stone LGBT People to Death

OUTRAGEOUS: Brunei On the Verge of Implementing Laws Punishing LGBTQ People With Torture and Death

 

 

 

Christopher Ingraham on the Sex Dearth Among Young Americans

Christopher Ingraham has written some fascinating stuff in yesterday's Washington Post about how often American adults have sex.  With graphs and everything (in the article, not in having sex). 

Here's the first of the two graphs in his article which everyone now speaks about.  It shows that the increased celibacy of Americans (not having sex in the last year at all, where having sex presumably excludes fapping to porn and other forms of masturbation) is driven by increased celibacy among the youngest respondents, those between the ages of eighteen and thirty:

Notice the orange line shooting up like an erection?  And, indeed, the second by-now-famous graph tells us that the celibacy of the young is mainly driven by male celibacy, though young women's celibacy rate is also going up.

So what is the first thing I should do after reading that article?   You guessed it.  It's not immediately ruminating on the possible theories which could explain the above graph.  It's to find out where the data came from and how the results were calculated.

Echidne And Blog Stuff

1.  These cartoons by Karoliina Korhonen are about the introverted nature of native Finns.  If you are an introvert, too, you may like them.

2.  Do you read here for my feminist posts?  Would you still read here if I didn't cover feminist topics?* 

3.  What is the best time of the year for my funding drive for you?  In other words, when can I squeeze the largest number of coins out of your pockets?

4.  Do you have any questions or dilemmas or suggestions about this blog?  If so, use the comments below and I promise to read and answer them.

5.  I don't have finger prints**.  This creates a lot of extra trouble with forms which require finger prints.


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* I may write more about the reasons for these questions later.  They don't mean that I necessarily plan to stop writing about women or feminism.


** It's not because of the snakiness.  My mom has no finger prints.  I have messy ones, like half-prints,  which don't qualify as real ones.  Too bad that I left my bank robbing career so late.  They probably collect DNA now.

Short Posts, 3/25/19. On Conspiracy Theories, Polyandry in Bald Eagles, College Admissions Bribery Etc.

These snippets are from my recent readings.

1.  Given that conspiracy theories (Pizzagate, Perfect Storm) are now an integral aspect of politics, I found this quote from a recent paper surveying the research in the field interesting:

However, research demonstrates that certain political convictions are more strongly associated with conspiracy beliefs than others (Mancuso et al., 2017). van Prooijen, Krouwel, and Pollet (2015) demonstrated that conspiracy beliefs are most prevalent at the political extremes. They found a quadratic effect—that is a “U‐shaped” function— in both the United States and the Netherlands suggesting that conspiracy theorizing is strongest at the far left and right, although stronger on the right. Similar effects have been found in Sweden (Krouwel, Kutiyski, van Prooijen, Martinsson, & Markstedt, 2017). Although it is unknown whether conspiracy theorizing may be a result of political ideology, or vice versa, or both, this research suggests that extremist attitudes may be a consequence of conspiracy belief. On the other hand, Uscinski and Parent (2014) and Uscinski, Klofstad, and Atkinson (2016) suggest that levels of conspiracy thinking are stronger among those identifying as independents or with third parties.

It's interesting that the effect looks strongest at the far right, though the writers of the linked paper note that this could be an artifact of studies mostly focusing on the far right rather than the far left.  Or not, as the case may be.

My guess is that authoritarianism, extremism and the belief in conspiracy theories might be correlated, because they all relieve the individual of the burden to engage in complex and nuanced thought which might ultimately not provide clarity.

Short Posts on Women's Issues, March 22, 2019

1.  The first woman has won the coveted Abel prize in mathematics:

Karen Keskulla Uhlenbeck, a mathematician and professor at the University of Texas, has become the first woman in history to receive the Abel Prize, one of the most prestigious mathematics awards in the world.
The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters announced that Uhlenbeck was the award’s newest recipient on Tuesday.

I report on it, despite how I know the MRAs interpret any advances in gender equality (as encroachments to areas they deem as rightly theirs), because the harmful stereotype of women not being able to do well in mathematics is still very much alive in most cultures.  So it's worthwhile to report on the various "firsts."

The Family Values Boyz: Trump and Bolsonaro

Jair Bolsonaro is the Trump Of The Tropics, an openly misogynist and racist guy who is also the current president of Brazil.  Given that, it was such fun to see the two of them together in the Rose Garden:

But what was perhaps most jarring about Bolsonaro and Trump’s meeting was how closely their worldviews seemed to align. This came across most clearly when Bolsonaro vowed that the US would stand against “fake news.”
“Brazil and the United States stand side by side in their efforts to ensure liberties and respect to traditional family lifestyles, respect to God our creator, and stand against gender ideologies and politically incorrect attitudes and against fake news,” Bolsonaro said Tuesday, through a translator.
His statement, made alongside the US president, was striking, and a direct example of how he ran his campaign and his presidency so far. Bolsonaro and the cabinet he appointed often promote so-called traditional values, and Bolsonaro consistently attacks “gender ideology” — a kind of catchall that refers to LGBTQ rights, feminism, and leftist ideals that he sees as undermining the social order.
Bolsonaro also flings the term “fake news” at his critics, including those in media. He stirs fears over “gender ideology” and berates “fake news” to rally his base and distract from scandals in his administration and his increasingly unpopular agenda; in February, his approval rating fell to about 39 percent.
None of what Bolsonaro said about “gender ideology” received endorsement from Trump — but neither did it get any pushback.

So for Bolsonaro "gender ideologies" is anything that would stop heterosexual men from ruling the roost alone.  In fact, Bolsonaro's use of "gender ideologies" covers even worse shit than that, for in the past he has been openly misogynist.*

The bit about respecting traditional family lifestyles is utterly ludicrous:

We saw two men standing in the Rose Garden, each purporting to defend "family values," each on their third wife, each of those wives younger than the previous one, as if wives were cars to be traded in for a more recent model whenever they look a little bit scuffed.  And I'm pretty sure that neither Trump nor Bolsonaro had much to do with the care of their own children.

 
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* From Wikipedia:

In a public speech in April 2017, Bolsonaro said that he had five children, that the first four were male and that for the fifth he produced a daughter out of "a moment of weakness"

And:

Journalist Glenn Greenwald called Bolsonaro "the most misogynistic, hateful elected official in the democratic world".[124] News.com.au wondered whether Bolsonaro was "the world's most repulsive politician".[121] British news magazine The Economist referred to him as a "radical", "religious nationalist", a "right-wing demagogue", and "apologist of dictators".[125]

Note that it doesn't matter if Bolsonaro's statement about his daughter is a joke.  For it to be a joke, the basis must lie in the implicit assumption that daughters are inferior to sons.  That's what the laughter would be about:  a strongman conceived something inferior.


 

News From The Weird-World. Or The New Political Reality.

Our Supreme Leader is waging a Twitter war against a dead man:

Last weekend, Trump attacked the late senator in several tweets that targeted McCain's ties to the controversial Russia dossier and his vote against repealing Obamacare. He also referred to McCain as being "last in his class" at the US Naval Academy.

On Tuesday, he continued his criticism of McCain, telling reporters at the White House that "I was never a fan of John McCain and I never will be."

If Trump wasn't the leader of what used to be called the free world* before he ran it to ground, this would be the funniest thing since American cheese was invented.

And forty-five percent of registered voters approve the way Trump carries out his job!**  That would be hilarious, too, if we could watch this comedy from another planet.

All humor aside, fighting to get Trump out must be our first priority, if we wish to save democracy and some scraps of the environment.

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*  Whether it was free or not, at least its leaders used to pay lip service to human rights and pushed a little in that direction.  Now our Supreme Leader pushes in the opposite direction and adores dictators.  The new trend toward "strongmen" in this world does not bode well for democracy or for human rights, and Trump is the prime example of that trend.
**  Because almost all the political shit is tribal, these days.  It's as if people are saying "Trump is an asshole, but he is our asshole."

And, sadly, I see that tribalism rearing its ugly head among the Democrats, too, where the primary fights will solidify those nasty tribal borders.  If we don't earnestly try to be less tribal, Trump will win again, because his tribe consists of almost all the Republicans, while the lefty tribes a multitude. 

How To Confuse With A Poll

The new USAA poll finds that

Amid signs that special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian election interference may be near its conclusion, a new USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll finds that trust in Mueller has eroded and half of Americans agree with President Donald Trump's contention that he has been the victim of a "witch hunt."

 Bolds are mine.

Here is the actual question that tells us half of Americans agree with Trump's contention that he has been the victim of a "witch hunt":

Table Q20 Page 1520. President Trump has called the Special Counsel ́s investigation a “witch hunt”and said he ́s been subjected to more investigations than previous presidents because of politics. Do you agree?

Bolds are mine.

Now that question, my friends, is an example of how NOT to frame polling questions.

It is, in one sense, asking agreement or disagreement with  two Trump assertions, the two separated by the word "and."

Suppose you want to answer "no" to the first question and "yes" to the second question.  Well, you can't!  You have to agree or disagree with the whole quote.

But the second question, asking if Trump has been subjected more investigations than previous presidents, clearly has a big part which is true.  He has been investigated more than previous presidents.

Whether someone thinks the reason is in his politics or in the fact that he is a rather corrupt man or both, it's still true that there have been many investigations.

It's not correct to conclude from those answers that half of Americans agree with the first part of Trump's statement, the one about a witch hunt.  The respondents may have chosen agreement to the whole question because there is a truthful bit in the second part.

In sum, that question was formulated very poorly.  It should have been split into two separate questions. 

Born To Be In It, Says Beto O'Rourke. Would That Work For Female Politicians?

Beto O'Rourke has thrown his hat in the Democratic presidential primary ring.  He is a charismatic guy, with the looks of a young Kennedy and the fame of having had almost not lost to the conservative ringwraith Ted Cruz in last year's senate race in Texas.  That's like succeeding in almost baptizing the devil in Hell, I assume.

I have nothing against most of O'Rourke's policies (the ones I know about) so my comments here apply only to what he has chosen to reveal about himself in this presidential race.

Take the Vanity Fair cover he has already scored!  Here it is:

It has everything!  A good-looking guy looking relaxed in jeans, next to a Labrador and a pickup truck.  What's not to like**?   Here's just your "ordinary working class truck-driving guy with his dog", possibly listening to Country&Western music.  Or that's how I would decode the symbolism of the cover.

But the text next to the picture begins to open that Pandora's box I am interested in when I slice and dice gender and sex.

The text says:

Beto's choice.  "I want to be in it.  Man, I'm just born to be in it."  

The "it" in that quote is the campaign for the president of the United States in 2020.

And why not?  I, for instance, strongly feel that I was born to be a goddess.

But saying "I'm just born to be in it" really wouldn't work for female candidates.  I read a thousand online comments about how entitled Hillary Clinton was, how it was "her turn" now and so on.

Many people find women who express personal ambition unlikable.   Being unlikable is worse for female politicians than male politicians, because we expect (in almost all cultures) women to be more likable than men and therefore punish them more severely when they are not.

Then there is Beto's joke about his wife taking care of their three children, sometimes with his help.  He apologized for the joke later** and I don't think it was that terrible a joke.  It would have been perfectly funny in 1956.

Still, I wonder if the situation could successfully be reversed.  Could a female politician go on a campaign trail and joke about her husband taking care of their three children, sometimes with her help, without having her political chances seriously damaged?

I doubt that very much.

Finally, O'Rourke left an online trace of juvenile comments for which he has also strongly apologized.  Those included a few pretty sexist and misogynist comments:

In one text file that was dated to 1989, when O’Rourke was 16 or 17, “Psychedelic Warlord” described a “new creature: THE ULTRA TRENDY.” In an over-the-top sarcastic tone, Psychedelic Warlord declared these “ultra trendies” to be “a cancer that might cause the death of each and every scene across the nation.” Psychedelic Warlord went on to say that many of these “ultra trendies” are female “sluts.”

“ULTRA TRENDIES are usually the ‘scene sluts’ that many of the menfolk admire so. They show up, get drunk with the band, and tell the lead singer, ‘I really like your music. I think it’s a lot like the Sex Pistols. Sooo… you wanna fuck?’” Psychedelic Warlord wrote.

The writer went on to accuse these women of “only” liking the Sex Pistols and the group’s frontman, Sid Vicious, and suggested this affinity led them to enter into abusive relationships.

“ULTRA TRENDY females hook-up with violent boyfriends because, (yeah… you guessed it) ‘He’s so much like Sid Vicious!’” Psychedelic Warlord wrote.

After describing the characteristics of these “ultra trendies,” Psychedelic Warlord offered suggestions for how to handle these people. The ideas included encouraging interactions between the “ultra trendies” and neo-Nazis as well as mocking their appearance.

“Tell the Nazi Skins in your area that this certain ULTRA TRENDY has AIDS. … To kill an ULTRA TRENDY female, show her a picture of what she’d look like without make-up. … Tell him or her that they’re completely ugly,” Psychedelic Warlord wrote.

Now try to do a reversal on that!  I can't even imagine a female politician having anything of that sort in her past, but who knows.  I'm sure, however, that she would not be forgiven for something similar.

None of the above is aimed at O'Rourke, specifically.  Indeed, he has acted beautifully in not belittling his Democratic opponents, and I like the way he is good at thinking on his feet.

But it does point out that the rules, they are different, when it comes to women and men in politics.  The tightrope politicians work when trying to garner public approval is narrower and more frayed for women (and even more so African-American women),  and even the safety net below the female tightrope walkers is full of holes.

That's why women who commit political blunders might not be lifted up again.


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*  Remember John Edwards?  He was once, too, photographed in jeans and next to a pickup truck.  That didn't ultimately work for him.

On The Christchurch, NZ, Terrorist Massacre

I have little of any use to say about it.  I wish peace, if at all possible,  to those who lost loved ones and I wish those who were wounded a speedy return to full health, if possible.

Many terrorist attacks strike at innocent people (people who have nothing to do with any real or imaginary grievances the terrorists have) in places which are supposed to be safe, joyous and peaceful. 

Hence the choice of mosques in this case and houses of worship more generally.  Although those places are also selected so as to maximize the likelihood that the victims will belong to the loathed group alone, the choice also serves to maximize the effect of terror:  Nowhere is safe, the terrorists want all of us non-terrorists to think.

They also want to divide us into thought camps, based on the terrorists' own definitions.  That we must NOT do.  It's the extreme fringes which wage these terrorist wars against each other and, of course, mostly against the rest of us.  We must refuse to participate on either side in their private wars.

Politicians, clerics and media talking heads must take some responsibility when they sow seeds of genocidal hatred on purpose.  We must remember how the radio sowed such seeds in the Rwandan genocide. 

And we must find some way of getting a grip on the online radicalization of what looks to be mainly young men with extremist tendencies, with much more emphasis on not only Islamic radicalization but also the radicalization of white men inside the new white supremacy and ethno-nationalist movements.

All that is weak tea.  My heart is heavy today.



 

Rodrigo Duterte on Putas And Crazy Women. Or The Upside-Down World Of Right-Wing Autocrats.

Rodrigo Duterte, the president of the Philippines, is a silver-tongued song-lark who hates women with a hatred stronger than a thousand suns.  That's why I don't quite get how he can be the president of a country where half the citizens are female.

Duh.  Of course I get how he can be the president:  Deep, deep inside our hind brains we, including women,  are ultimately not that bothered by how women are viewed.  We are used to that.  We drink it in from the culture from almost our first breath.

But Rodrigo doesn't have to dig in his hind brain for nasty slurs about women.  They are right on the tip of that silver tongue:

Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte addressed female police officers and military staff at an event intended to celebrate them earlier this week as “puta,” which translates to “bitch” in English.

While delivering remarks at an event that was meant to honor the Southeast Asian country’s Outstanding Women in Law Enforcement and National Security on Monday, Duterte addressed the overwhelmingly female audience using the profane remark, The Guardian reports. 

He also addressed them as “you crazy women” and lamented women who he said deprive him “of my freedom of expression,” according to the international news agency. 

Duterte also reportedly told the crowd at one point, “I love women.”
“That’s why you see I have two wives. That means I like women,” he continued.*

Does any of that sound familiar to you?  A little Trumpish?  Or like some of the comments of Brazil's right-wing president, Jair Bolsanaro?

Hungary's president Victor Orban, Russia's president Vladimir Putin and Turkey's president Recep Tayyip Erdogan tend not to use such vulgar language when speaking about women, but they, too, are very much invested in getting women back into the kitchen and into their main business of breeding more citizens.  And so are the leaders of ISIS and right-wing white terrorist movements.

The Boyz of Patriarchy.

If you are interested in learning more on this topic, consult my earlier post and the references in it.

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*  That last paragraph is a really common trick among misogynists.  They tell us that they love women roughly the same way I love spaghetti with pesto.

The message is intended to confuse us and it also gives them a little giggle at managing yet another little slur against women while pretending to give a compliment.

The real point, of course, is to remind women of their proper role in life. Rush Limbaugh did that when he said that he loves the Women's Movement, especially from behind.

Tucker Carlson On Women's Primitive Nature

If you have never heard of Tucker Carlson you are very blessed.  He is a conservative loudmouth who, over the recent years, has slipped into white nationalism and a few other foul-smelling ideologies.

But between 2006 and 2011, when our Tucker was but a mere young boy in his late thirties and early forties, he used to call in to a radio show run by a guy...wait...here come the drums... Bubba The Love Sponge!

I love those weird micro-realities.  Don't you?  Imagine talking to Bubba The Love Sponge* an hour a week!

Anyway, in those talks Tucker Carlson took off his polite conservative mask and let his hind-brain run around nekked. You can read the transcript of his comments here, but for my purposes it's enough to say that Carlson really doesn't think women are human beings:

I mean, I love women, but they're extremely primitive, they're basic, they're not that hard to understand.

(Mmm. Bites head off a mouse, spits it into a corner, swallows the rest of the mouse.  Wipes mouse blood off the chin, burps.)

Sigh.  I wasn't going to write about Tucker-The-Fucker, to coin a term of endearment, but I saw too many people express their surprise that Tucker could actually believe in those values that he still preaches.

They though that he's just your basic scam artist who doesn't believe anything he says as long as the golden showers mean coins raining into his bank accounts.

Well, they were wrong.

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* Is he all squishy?  If you poke him in the belly, does he giggle?


 

The Anti-Vaxxers: Irrational Or Rational?

Frank Bruni, an opinion writer at the New York Times, has a good take on what he calls the horror of anti-vaxxers, those who refuse to have their children vaccinated without having valid medical reasons for such a refusal. 

After acknowledging that we have always had the conspiracy theorists, the flat-earthers, and the holders of other nutty theories among us, Bruni views today's anti-vaxxers as an example of wider problem with the refusal to accept facts:

But there are differences now that make the cranks that much more baffling, numerous and pernicious. For starters, they fly ever more stubbornly in the face of sophisticated research and hard-earned knowledge. Beneficiaries of wisdom that prior generations lacked, they toss it away, wasting and mocking progress itself.

At the same time, in many educational circles, there’s as much talk of students’ individual truths as of the truth.

The Hallmark Cards Version of the International Women's Day

The 2019 International Women's Day is today, and it is also being slowly watered down in social media, at least in the countries I access there.  It's becoming a day to give flowers to people whose achievement is that they are women, and to thank them for carrying out their culturally ordained female gender roles*! 

Although there's nothing necessarily wrong in celebrating some demographic group for existing, I am very uncomfortable with any attempt at deifying gender and gender roles (for that way leads to more inequality)**.

I am also uncomfortable with the implicit assumption in this new celebration that all women are identical spoonfuls from the same large homogeneous soup, but also completely different from all men (who are usually not seen as being just spoonfuls from a different but also homogeneous soup bowl.)  Still, if people want to have International Days of flower-giving for all the possible various demographic groups, go for it.

But that was not the intention of the International Women's Day.  Rather, it was intended to be a day which would remind us about the oppression of women, still everyday life in many countries, which would celebrate the advances that have taken place in increasing the equality between men and women, and which would remind us about the enormous tasks still ahead.



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*  Anti-feminists in the US argue that we should celebrate an International Men's Day with equal attention, that having a special day for women but not one that makes men the focus of admiration is a great unfairness.  We should have a day when we celebrate men for fulfilling their culturally decreed gender roles and when we give them flowers and thanks for that.  Or cigars and booze, I guess,  given the culturally decreed gender norms.

And if the International Women's Day becomes just a Hallmark Cards event, that's what is probably going to happen.

But the real reason for the International Women's Day, as intended,  is that in most of the world almost every other day looks a lot like an International Men's Day.  And that is not fair. 


**  This is what happens when the amorphous mass "women" are thanked for all the extra unpaid work they do while also working in the labor force, or when women are thanked for being kind and submissive and caring.  When it is done under the flag of an International Women's Day, with no plan to alter any of the problematic aspects of that division of labor, it serves to "essentialize" gender roles and norms.

In Southern Italy, The Far-Right League Celebrates The International Women's Day...

To honor the International Women's Day, the Italian far-right league in Southern Italy has published a pamphlet with this message:

It was intended to be a dedication to women, but the pamphlet instead takes aim at those who “offend women’s dignity” by impeding their “natural role” of “supporting life and the family”.
It contains a list of six ways in which it says what it calls the natural role of women is harmed, including by “those who claim self-determination that arouses rancorous attitudes towards men” or who support laws that would allow same-sex couples to declare themselves as a child’s parents on some official forms.
The leaflet ends with a message saying that women have “a great social mission to fulfil in regards the survival of our nation”.
Members of the opposition centre-left Democratic party said the flyer “aimed to take women back to the Middle Ages”.

My translation:

The "natural" role of women is to give birth to lots of children for the new Reich, to serve as house-keepers and sexual partners,  and to obey the commands and wishes of their husbands and fathers.

This is hilarious.  The European far right's number one enemy consists of migrants and refugees, a large percentage of whom are Muslim.  One of the main arguments the far right, in general,  employs in opposing Muslim immigration is to point out the oppression of women inside Islam, especially in the teachings of petro-Islam which has become more common in European mosques because of Saudi financing.

Yet the innermost core of their own views about women is almost identical, even if in practice they would allow women a little more freedom*!

The leader of that far-right movement did try to distance himself from the pamphlet's message:

Matteo Salvini, the leader of the League and deputy prime minister, distanced himself, saying he did not support the content. “I’m working for equal dignity between men and women and between fathers and mothers,” he said.

There's that "dignity" code-word again!  The Catholic Church uses it when talking about its treatment of women.  Women should be allowed to keep their dignity!  Whatever the term might mean**, it does not mean equal opportunities for (or equal treatment of) men and women.

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*I have never been able to make logical sense out of the odd political bedfellows our current era contains. 

For instance, the patriarchs of the right share many of the values of the patriarchs of the Islamic right, and that should make them into bedfellows, right?

But instead of that they fight each other.  Because only one group of men can stand on top of the power ladders and have access to all the society's resources, including the bodies of its women? 

At the same time, the left, including the feminist left,  traditionally seen as the supporters of human rights of all types,  should not be in bed with those ideologies which openly advocate fewer rights for women than men, right?

But sometimes that is exactly what happens:  When criticizing specific sexist practices would appear to give support to those who harbor and disseminate anti-Muslim bigotry, or when it could be interpreted as "white saviorism" or colonial oppression, then women's rights tend to lose.

** Play with the word a little and you will find that it can be applied when something is quite unfair. Say someone believes that no woman can do higher mathematics.  That someone could then argue that letting women even try strips them of their dignity as they would falter and fail and look ridiculous.

Period Troubles. And Jokes.

If you, too,  have an infantile sense of humor, you will get a kick from the title of an email I received about the short menstruation documentary which won an Oscar* this year:

Menstrual Equity's Red Carpet Moment

But even funnier is the UK Guardian story about a guy who decided to calculate how many tampons the average menstrual period would require. 

I laughed while reading it, and my laughter was pure.  By "pure" I simply mean that the article is incredibly hilarious to anyone who menstruates or has ever menstruated.  My laughter wasn't hollow, bitter and cynical, and it wasn't even sarcastic.

The story is just so hilarious.  The master calculations:

“So the average period is 10 to 35ml of blood, each tampon holds about 5ml, so seven tampons per cycle,” he began. “Lets be generous and say 10 for those ladies with an extra-juicy uterine lining. Nine periods a year equals 90 tampons max,” he concluded, before going on to refer to a 64-pack of tampons listed for £7.90 plus shipping on Amazon (“Buy two packs, save on shipping”).

Okay.  Let's assume that the periods last five twenty-four-hour days and that seven tampons should be used per cycle.  Let's then figure out how long each tampon should stay inside the vagina if we follow those recommendations.  That would be around seventeen hours per tampon! 

Let's then compare that time to the recommendations about how often to change tampons in order to prevent the toxic shock syndrome, a rare-but-dangerous condition that can be associated to tampon use:

How can toxic shock syndrome (TSS) be prevented?

• Women who use tampons during their menstrual periods should change them often. Tampons should be changed at least every four to eight hours. If the flow is heavy, tampons may have to be changed more frequently.

I do love academic research of all kinds, even the kind of "academic" this example demonstrates.  I'm now going to determine the minimum number of times people need to urinate per day and then I'm going to use that to recommend how to save money by reducing the number of public toilets/bathrooms.  So.
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* The linked article about the documentary makes a few criticisms about how menstruation and girls' access to education in India is treated in it.  That I used that link is not to be intended as criticism of the documentary in itself.
 
But it's true that girls may be kept away from school not only because the facilities don't allow them to care for their menstrual needs, but also for reasons which correlate with menstruation:  Patriarchal societies may view a girl who has started menstruating as ready for marriage, and further education is then not deemed necessary. Or she may be kept at home so that she cannot become pregnant outside marriage.  That would damage both her chances of getting married, the only real career path for most women in such societies, and her family's reputation.

It could be that the lack of facilities for menstruating girls at schools is a direct barrier for their continuing education, but it could also be a consequence, possibly intended, of the overall treatment of children at the point when they enter the relatively constrained roles that are allowed to fertile women. 

In either case, talking about menstrual hygiene needs openly is important.

Does Google Discriminate Against Men In Pay?

Google has carried out its annual pay fairness study since 2012.  The study, which covers 91% of Google's employees, compares total employee compensations while standardizing for job type, job level, performance and location.  Standardizing, in this context, means that those four variables (and perhaps others not mentioned here) are held constant in that analysis.

These studies are then used to give additional pay to some employees who appear not to be paid enough given their job type, job level, performance and location.

The results of Google's most recent study have raised lots of eyebrows, because:

Google has given raises to thousands of men after an analysis of Google's pay structure found that the company would otherwise be underpaying those men relative to their peers, The New York Times reports. The analysis also led to raises for some women.
Google determines annual pay raises in a three-phase process. First, Google adjusts every employee's compensation based on standard factors like their location, seniority, and performance ratings. Managers can then seek additional discretionary raises for their best-performing employees.
Finally, Google performs a company-wide analysis to determine whether these raises are biased in terms of race or gender. If biases are detected, the disadvantaged workers are given additional raises to eliminate the discrepancies.
"We provided $9.7 million in adjustments to a total of 10,677 Googlers," the company said in a Monday blog post describing the results of the equity analysis.
"Men account for about 69 percent of the company's work force, but they received a disproportionately higher percentage of the money," the Times's Daisuke Wakabayashi writes. "Google said it was important to be consistent in following through on the findings of its analysis, even when the results were unexpected."

So what's going on here?  Did we suddenly wake up in the Opposite Reality, where men are the demographic group which gets paid less, even in such a male-dominated field as tech?

Women's Rights in Saudi Arabia And Google

In Saudi Arabia, women must have the permission of their male guardians (father, husband, brother, uncle or adult son) to travel.  A Saudi government app allows those men additional control over their subordinate women.  And Google will not remove the much-criticized app:

Google has declined to remove from its app store a Saudi government app which lets men track women and control where they travel, on the grounds that it meets all their terms and conditions.

Google reviewed the app — called Absher — and concluded that it does not violate any agreements, and can therefore remain on the Google Play store.

Absher is intended to make all sorts of routine government-related tasks easier for Saudis.  But those tasks include, for example, the ability for women's guardians to give or rescind their travel permissions. And Absher allows men to receive SMS alerts if the women under their control try to use their passports.

It also makes it harder for women such as Rahaf Mohammed Alqunun (or Al-Qunun) to run away from their families.  Alqunun fled her family while they were vacationing in Kuwait.  She took a flight to Bangkok, using her passport,  and tried to continue from there to Australia.

Alqunun, eighteen at the time, claimed that her family abused her and kept forcing her to accept an unwanted marriage proposal.  For a while Thai officials tried to deport her back to her family still in Kuwait.  After all, that was the correct procedure under Saudi laws which keep women eternal minors.

But she barricaded herself in her hotel room, fought back, and finally got asylum in Canada.  Other Saudi women trying to run away from their families have not been as fortunate.

The wider questions cases like this one raise are important.  They are about the rights of various cultures to enforce their own values, perhaps even beyond their own geographical borders, about whether human rights are universal values or whether they can vary depending on what particular cultures (or their rulers, more likely) decide they should be,* and what responsibility "outsiders," such as Google here, should bear for the choices they make.

As I have written before, if we respect all cultures as equal and their values as something that outsiders shouldn't comment on, then we wipe out the rights of weaker individuals under oppressive cultures.  The Amish Supreme Court case in the US is one example of an attempt to consider the rights of cultures to thrive vs. the rights of individuals within those cultures to thrive.

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*  And women's rights are human rights.  It's also true that pretty much all cultures on this globe have historically limited women's rights, and in that sense the lack of those rights can well be viewed as part of the heritage of many cultures.  This does not make such limitations worth respecting.

 

Today's Recipe: The Humble Rutabaga Casserole

Called lanttulaatikko in Finnish.  It's a traditional Christmas side dish, served together with similar casseroles or loaf-shaped dishes made out of potatoes and carrots.  But you don't have to be in December to make it.  I usually bake several casseroles at one go and then freeze most of them.

Here is one  lanttulaatikko recipe in English.  It's not quite the one I use, because it includes ginger and does not include freshly ground nutmeg.  Also, though cream is nice, I often use just milk.  But all those are acceptable variations. 

The only real change I would make in that recipe is the time in the oven.  The oven temperature should be 320 F and the casserole baked for an hour and a half.  The low temperature and long baking are essential for the flavors to intermingle and to produce the final flavor.

The rutabaga is called the "swede" in some parts of the world.  In case you happen to live in one of those parts.  Also, the recipe works with turnips, too.

Molasses (not syrup) is the one essential ingredient, whatever else you adjust.

Short Posts, 2/28/19. Or While Trump Clowns, What's Going On Behind The Curtain?

1.  Autocrats and would-be autocrats apparently require unusual haircuts.

 Picture from here.

2.  While Trump takes the front of the world stage by his clowning and keeps our eyes glued to him,  stuff happens behind the curtains.  Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist, is to head the Environmental Protection Agency.  His main goal is to roll back environmental regulations.  This is payback for the energy industry.

3.   Trump's antics also distract us from learning other important news.  For example:

...the Trump administration escalated its war on Planned Parenthood and the women who use it. It released a rule prohibiting Title X, a federal family-planning program that serves around four million low-income women, from funding organizations that also provide abortions. Further, the administration instituted an American version of the global gag rule, barring doctors and nurses receiving Title X funds from making abortion referrals to their patients except in certain emergency situations.

This is payback for the white evangelical patriarchs.

4.  Finally, Trump acting up distracts us from the Michael Cohen testimony. 

Cohen was one of Trump's lawyers and is widely regarded as having been his "fixer."  The testimony didn't include anything I hadn't already heard or read as rumors, but it's fascinating that Trump can so easily create a "hey, look at me clowning here" diversion from the attention it should have received.

Ageism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice?

Ageism is a weird -ism in American politics.  It frequently goes unnoticed, even among the cultural left, and especially when it targets those who are old.

This is weird, because barring premature death,  we are all one day going to be in that group.  Self-preservation would seem to dictate that we would want to eradicate ageism before it hits us, right? 

What brought this topic back (1) to my attention was a recent Vox article (2) studying racism in the online knitters' community.   I quote:

The most common image of knitting is still probably an old white lady sitting in a rocking chair making a blanket (a stereotype that tends to grind modern knitters’ gears, with reason). But even though the stereotypical image has gotten younger over the years, the community is still perceived as very white.

Why does that stereotype (3) "grind modern knitters' gears, with reason?" 

My guess is that it's ageism.  Old ladies are...old (4).  They sit in rocking chairs and they make boring blankets, not exciting fashionable creations.  And they are not online, selling their creations on Etsy.  Young people don't want to be identified with that group.

A different way of thinking about age and knitting is to note that old knitters are often very experienced knitters.

Many of them were taught to knit in childhood, like my paternal grandmother (5).  She could knit anything, without patterns, from sweaters to hats, from scarves to socks  and from gloves to mittens.  She knitted with the intarsia technique and with the Fair Isle technique. She even knitted extremely fine lace for bed linens.  

And yes, toward the end of her life she sometimes sat in a rocking chair, knitting.  But to define her skills by focusing on just that part of her life really would be ageist. 
       
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(1)  An earlier example of ageism in a feminist context is a review of Katha Pollitt's abortion rights book Pro in 2014 by Michelle Kinsey Bruns:

The abortion fight embodies social threats that most directly affect the millennial generation, alongside women of color, low-income women, and childbearing-capable people who don’t identify as women at all. It does them a disservice to designate a Reagan-era messenger to deliver the argument that the rollback of reproductive politics to a pre-Pill status is an urgent, active threat, right now.

Pollitt's answer to that was:

Finally, I have to say I bristle at Michelle Bruns’s characterization of me as a “Reagan-era messenger.”  I’ve had most of my writing life well after Ronald Reagan left the White House, and most of my thinking life too. I guess ageism is the last acceptable prejudice.  Fortunately, life has a way of correcting it.

All bolds are mine.

(2)  I am focusing on the small ageist bit of the article here.  You can read all of it at the link.

(3)  Is this stereotype perhaps based on the actual age-and-race distribution of amateur knitters in, say, the US?   In other words, would the most common type among knitters still be an older white woman (in a rocking chair)?

I found nothing on the race or ethnic group distribution of amateur knitters, and neither was I able to find age statistics on knitters alone.  But  a 2014 Craft Yarn Council online survey tells us the age distribution of those who knitted or crocheted or did both and who participated in that survey (3,178 individuals).  The age distribution of the respondents does tilt to older ages:

Note that an online survey is very likely to underestimate the number of oldest knitters and crocheters.


(4)  And old ladies, of all races,  who knit blankets are, I believe,  also more likely to be poor than wealthy.  Those blankets are probably made out of cheap acrylic thread, not expensive hand-dyed wool.

(5)  My maternal grandmother refused to have anything to do with knitting or needlework or other similar crafts.  A reminder not to generalize in the other direction, either.

Saturday Cat Blogging

This cat is sitting on the terrace with his human.  Not loose in the environment, in other words.  Supposedly the first breakfast outside this spring...

Posting cat pictures is an age-old online tradition on political blogs.  They are the palate cleaner, between various political rants about the sky falling.  So now you know!

Mini-Posts, 2/22/18. On Election Fraud, Loss of Biodiversity, the Opioid Epidemic And The Abuse Of Minors

These mini-posts are an attempt to look at depressing phenomena (political corruption, environmental pollution) from a slightly more positive angle.  I find that I need that in order not to sink into deep nihilistic depression on such issues, to feel that fighting is still worthwhile.  Let me know what you think about Echidne going Pollyannaish.

1.  The North Carolina state board of elections has voted unanimously for a new election in the 9th congressional district.  Why?  Because, for once, election fraud was too obvious to sweep under the carpet*:

Meanwhile, in Oklahoma, Women Are Aquaria

This is a fun story about a proposed bill which is unlikely to pass, even in Oklahoma:

Oklahoma state legislator Rep. Justin Humphrey (R) has sponsored a draconian bill that would require a woman to get the written consent of the fetus’s father before obtaining an abortion.

He has thought deeply about this question, as can be seen in the following quote:
 

Ultimately, he said, his intent was to let men have a say. “I believe one of the breakdowns in our society is that we have excluded the man out of all of these types of decisions,” he said. “I understand that they feel like that is their body,” he said of women. “I feel like it is a separate — what I call them is, is you’re a ‘host.’ And you know when you enter into a relationship you’re going to be that host and so, you know, if you pre-know that then take all precautions and don’t get pregnant,” he explained. “So that’s where I’m at. I’m like, hey, your body is your body and be responsible with it. But after you’re irresponsible then don’t claim, well, I can just go and do this with another body, when you’re the host and you invited that in.”

Bolds are mine, and the bolded sentences are the reason why I write about this proposal even though it is unlikely to pass.  The views Humphrey (R-NoUterus) expresses are common among online pro-life comments*: 

If you don't want to get pregnant, keep your legs crossed.  In other words, don't have slutty sex at all.  Or any kind of sex.

What's fun about Mr. Humphrey's views is what happens when you do a sex reversal on them. 

Suppose he had said to all potential fathers that they pre-know they can make someone pregnant if they enter a relationship (including one-night stands), and that they should be prepared for that possibility by planning for at least eighteen years of child payments before dating anyone or by getting a vasectomy or by demanding a functioning male contraceptive pill.

But pro-lifers don't have those demands.  In the world of those who hold Humphrey's views it's only women who are deemed responsible for pregnancies.  Men can hunt for sex without any limitations.  And I find that weird.

What would happen if everyone started suddenly following Humphrey's rules?  There would be very little recreational intercourse.  Not even Mr. Humphreys could get any!   Married heterosexual couples, say, would only have sex when they wanted to have a child and would stop the minute they have enough children.

That world will not happen, but neither does Mr. Humphrey want that world.  He wants a world where the slutty pregnant women will have no say over whether they will give birth or not**.

I have some sympathy for Mr. Humphrey's worry about men having no say about becoming fathers or not after they have made someone pregnant.  Once we have perfected artificial wombs outside the human body they can have equal say over that question.   But as long as the risks of pregnancy don't happen in their bodies, their power to decide over those pregnancies must be less than the power of the people whose bodies are exposed to that risk.

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*  The pro-life comments tend to fall into two major categories.  One is based on religious arguments, usually from Christianity, even though abortion is not mentioned in the Bible.  The other is based on the implicit assumption that only women are responsible for getting pregnant, that it's all some kind of parthenogenesis, and so nobody else is expected to pay for, say, birth control.

** They lost that right by being slutty, in his world. 

 

The Trumpergency Speech. Or The National Emergency Which Isn't National.

I watched Trump's speech declaring a state of national emergency.  Now I am very tired, even though the emergency he is declaring is not a national emergency.  It's a Trumpergency, a state of great (the greatest!) Trump-anxiety, caused by his inability to get his way through mere temper tantrums.

But that's not what made me tired.  It was taking notes of the speech while desperately trying to understand what kinds of "facts" his assertions might have been based on. 

So while I listened to his speech, I scribbled down key words and phrases: 

Very talented people, extremely well (negotiations with China went), very good relationship (with a North Korean dictator), couldn't be done before by others (repeated boasting about how he has disarmed North Korea), finally the US is respected, phenomenal (North Korea's location), phenomenal US economy created by Trump, tremendous stock market figures created by Trump, wasn't done before by others (fixing the southern border), economy he created going to the roof (!), never done before (China trade deals), nobody else could do it.

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.