Is the Nightmare Over?

As my computer was down I had time to engage in that antiquated activity: reading stuff on paper pages. I re-read the Onion satire from 2000 on the Bush presidency ("Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity Is Finally Over'"), and as others have said, what is scary about this satire is that it turned out not to be a satire at all, but a very good forecast of what has actually taken place.

If you don't believe me, read for yourself:

"Bush swore to do "everything in [his] power" to undo the damage wrought by Clinton's two terms in office, including selling off the national parks to developers, going into massive debt to develop expensive and impractical weapons technologies, and passing sweeping budget cuts that drive the mentally ill out of the hospitals and onto the street."

If this is satire, it's very weak. Now consider these more detailed predictions:

"During the 40-minute speech, Bush also promised to bring an end to the severe war drought that plagued the nation under Clinton, assuring citizens that the U.S. will engage in at least one Gulf War-level armed conflict in the next four years."

"On the economic side, Bush vowed to bring back economic stagnation by implementing substantial tax cuts, which would lead to a recession, which would necessitate a tax hike, which would lead to a drop in consumer spending, which would lead to layoffs, which would deepen the recession even further."

Both of these predictions have turned out to be true, though Bush is having the tax hikes done through the state taxes rather than the federal ones. I also found this prediction very relevant:

"Bush had equally high praise for Attorney General nominee John Ashcroft, whom he praised as "a tireless champion in the battle to protect a woman's right to give birth"."

Once again, not satire at all. That's the problem with our current administration: it's pretty much impossible to satirize them by using exaggeration. It just won't work. I know this from personal experience: I once tried writing a satire entitled "The American Right's Advice to Mothers". What I came up with would have been regarded as a serious academic treatise by a very large number of right-wingers. This is most depressing, and yet another reason to vote in a Democratic administration come November.

Computer Trouble

I'm having it. Plus tax trouble. Plus the telephone lines to Snakepit Inc. are down. If you call the repair number, you get connected to number inquiries... And Henrietta the Hound is vomiting all over the property. If you call the veterinarian, you get connected to the local bakery.

For all these reasons I'm now A Goddess In Her Wrath and not very good company. All should be fine tomorrow, though, and I should then be back to my usual wordiness. Happy Tax Day to all my American readers!

On Chairs, Spoons and Toasters, OR: What I Saw in A Dream

How do you write a letter to someone who doesn't want to read it? Doesn't want to read it not because you are an enemy, a nuisance or a guilty reminder but because you are a complete nonentity, a thoroughly uninteresting everyday object, a piece of the background against which heroes do their stuff.

How do you write to people who don't plan to pay any attention? How do you get their attention? Should we cry? 'Look, guys, a chair just walked in and cried!' Should our words be weapons? 'Hey man, that toaster just tried to cut my throat!' Should our sentences plead? 'Gee, I could've sworn that spoon just begged me for understanding.'

No. All it would achieve is a small surprise, the astonishment that an inanimate thing suddenly acts and feels. This would be added to the list of supernormal events. It wouldn't make us seem any less of a chair, toaster or spoon; only an uncommon kind, a weird chair, toaster or spoon. Something that, for one fleeting second, might deserve curiosity. But not for long.

How do you touch someone who doesn't believe in your existence? Can it be done?

And if not, is it enough to talk to the other chairs, toasters and spoons? To write 'chair books', 'toaster stories', to be exhibited with the works of other spoons? Is this of value?

Perhaps. If you know that at night the chairs dance, beautifully, on one leg, twirling around the kitchen, leaping over the toasters which tell stories about their lost loves and vanished hopes, while the spoons drum a rhythm from misty worlds full of desperate questions and complicated answers. Perhaps . Isn't this life, too? Isn't this a sort of heroism, a type of victory in the war against dying? Isn't this human, too?

So why bother trying to reach the others? Because they are the sitters on the chairs, the eaters of the toast, the stirrers of the spoons. Because theirs is the kitchen in which we dance, whisper stories, sigh and cry. And because when they see us and say 'Such a comfortable chair, such an efficient toaster, such an elegant spoon. What would we do without you?' they turn away without expecting an answer, without hearing us scream.

Foot Washing in Atlanta

This has to do with Christian traditions. The Holy Thursday foot-washing ritual commemorates the biblical story of Jesus washing his disciples' feet. Archbishop John Donoghue doesn't like to wash women's feet in this ritual:

A Catholic archbishop has banned women from participating in Holy Thursday foot-washing rituals in Roman Catholic churches in Atlanta.
Archbishop John Donoghue of Atlanta issued a letter to all of his parishes stating that only 12 men at each parish should be selected for the ritual, The Associated Press reported.
The ritual represents Jesus washing the feet of his disciples at the Last Supper and is offered to girls, women, and men in most archdioceses or dioceses around the states. This is the second time, however, that Archbishop Donoghue has banned women from the ritual, issuing a similar ban in Charlotte, N.C. 15 years ago.

This exclusion of women is no longer customary in Catholic churches, but maybe Archbishop Donoghue finds women's feet too stinky? Or maybe including women would deviate too much from the 'religious correctness' required in the event? In that case why not exclude all men of non-Semitic or Roman origin, too?

I think John has got it completely backwards (I can call him John, can't I? Calling him my father would be a lot more insulting for him.). The point in the story about Jesus washing his disciples' feet was a reversal: a teacher much above his disciples is doing a very menial task, a task associated with humility. Why exclude anyone then? Unless, of course, John believes that women are much superior to men...

GDP for Econophobes: Fun and Sexy!

I swear. Once you've read this post you can go out and radiate the dangerously sexy aura of someone who knows about economic acronyms. It's a real guy or gal magnet, at least in my experience.

GDP is short for Gross Domestic Product. "Gross" doesn't refer to the ugliness of the term, but to the opposite of "Net", meaning that we don't subtract certain things when arriving at this measure. What these things are will become clear later. "Domestic" means that we will ignore stuff that's produced abroad. Sort of. And Product is a term meaning all the stuff we produce within a year: cars and haircuts, psychiatric visits and cups of coffee. Sort of. For the United States, say, GDP then tries to measure the total amount of goods (physical things) and services that are produced within the United States (whether by foreigners or natives) within one year.

The larger the GDP number, the more is being produced. This has made GDP into one measure of economic well-being, with the idea that a larger GDP means we are better off. But there are also problems with this interpretation: First, the GDP doesn't tell us how many people were involved in producing it. If two countries had the same GDP figures, but one had to support twice as many people than the other, the larger country would clearly be worse off. This problem can be solved by dividing the GDP with the population size of a country to arrive at an average or per capita GDP.

This doesn't solve all the problems yet. Another sticky one has to do with the way we add up the amounts of goods and services produced. How do you add up, say, 20,000 Fords and 1,000,000 bagels? The GDP does this using money: the value of the 20,000 Fords is their price multiplied by 20,000, and the value of the million bagels is the price of one bagel multiplied by a million. Ok. But prices change over time. If bagels or Fords double in price, but we still make the same amounts of them as in the past, the GDP figures would tell us that we now produce more even though that's not true. To solve this problem, GDP is often given in real rather than in nominal terms. This means that the prices used in multiplying the quantity items are standardized to some specific year in the past. For example, we could use 1994 prices of bagels and Fords to multiply the quantities produced both in 1994 and in 2004. Then any difference between the two total GDPs would show if we are indeed producing more today. This works some of the time, but we get into some iffy areas when the products produced today didn't even exist in 1994, so they couldn't have any prices then. There are ways around this problem, too, such as using chain-linked indexes for the prices, but the point is to remember that we value the stuff we produce with its prices, and prices may not always reflect what we want them to. Another example of this is when the prices of some product are severely distorted by a monopoly which charges much more than a competitive industry would. The GDP would record these 'too high' prices as an increase in the GDP.

A third problem with the GDP as a measure of economic well-being is in its gross nature. We produce a lot of stuff just to replace the bits that are worn out. I just made a shower curtain to replace a really old moldy one. How much did my personal economic well-being increase? Well, some, as the new curtain is nicer, but on the whole the change wasn't very large. If we really wanted to use the GDP to measure changes in economic well-being we should adjust it by subtracting all the production that goes to replacing worn-out items. But then we'd have Net Domestic Product, and as economists can't agree on the way to measure wear-out, we don't want to have one of those. Still, keep in mind the gross nature of the figure.

And now we come to the really serious problems with the GDP as a measure of economic well-being.* The first of these is that the GDP ignores the negative effects of economic activity on the environment. If I first produce coal and a lot of pollution, the value of the coal increases the GDP, but the negative value of the pollution is not included. If I then start a company to reduce the pollution I caused, the value of this activity increases the GDP! Say the value of my coal in the market is 1,000,000 dollars, and the extent of my pro-environment activity earns me 500,000 dollars, but the environmental degradation I caused would have a value of minus 3,000,000. The GDP gives my contribution as 1,500,000 dollars whereas it really should be -1,500,000. Of course it's really hard to put a dollar value on the environmental effects, and that's one of the reasons why they are ignored.

This omission of environmental consequences is a serious problem with the GDP. Another equally serious one has to do with the omission of nonmarket output in the GDP calculations. By 'nonmarket output' we mean goods and services which are produced but which are not sold and bought in the markets so that they have no easy prices to use in the calculations. Almost all production at home falls into this category: the production of home-cooked meals, childcare of one's own children, cleaning, laundry and yard-work. If I and my neighbor both do this work for ourselves, none of its value will be entered in the GDP figures. If, on the other hand, I hire my neighbor to do my chores, and he hires me, suddenly both of our outputs are entered in the GDP, which now shows an increase in production, even though no increase actually happened.

Our omission of nonmarket outputs in the GDP figures means that it's very hard to compare two countries by using their GDPs if they have very different patterns of market and nonmarket work. Also, the GDP underestimates women's production drastically, as the majority of household work is done by women. Estimates of the omitted value of nonmarket production vary, but most of them suggest that as much as one half of the total GDP may be omitted in omitting this part of the production.

Ok. Given all these omissions and problems, what is included in the GDP? How do we get the actual figures? To understand the procedure, note that we don't have any readily available measures of production, so we need to sort of deduce the production values from other stuff. Something that is produced today in the United States must go to one of the following uses:
-It's consumed by someone in the U.S. ( either because the person consumes it in a private act of consumption or because the person consumes it as part of government-provided consumption (use of roads, say)).

-It's not consumed right away, but it will provide goods or services that can be consumed in the future (this category includes durable consumer goods such as washing machines and also all investment). Some of this investment goes to replacing worn out equipment.

-It's consumed by someone abroad. This is counted as U.S. exports. But note that U.S. citizens can also consume things made abroad, and we don't want to include this in Domestic Product. What we need to do, then, is to add the value of exports to the GDP, and then subtract the value of imports from it.

So if we can add up the values of current and future consumption and correct this for the foreign influences, we should get a measure of GDP (though with all the problems I talked about earlier). By now you are up to reading the following summary of the included items, I hope:

It is common to see the following equation in economics textbooks:
GDP = C + I + G + NX

Consumption spending (C) consists of consumer spending on goods and services. It is often divided into spending on durable goods, non-durable goods and services. These purchases accounted for 68 percent of GDP in the first quarter.
Durable goods are items such as cars, furniture, and appliances, which are used for several years. (10%)
Non-durable goods are items such as food, clothing, and disposable products, which are used for only a short time period. (20%)
Services include rent paid on apartments (or estimated values for owner occupied housing), airplane tickets, legal and medical advice or treatment, electricity and other utilities. (38%) Services are the fastest growing part or consumption spending.
Investment spending (I) consists of nonresidential fixed investment, residential investment, and inventory changes. Investment spending accounts for 19 percent of GDP, but varies significantly from year to year.
Nonresidential fixed investment is the creation of tools and equipment to use in the production of other goods and services. Examples are the building of factories, the production of new machines, and the manufacturing of computers for business use (15%).
Residential investment is the building of a new homes or apartments. (4%)
Inventory changes consist of changes in the level of stocks of goods necessary for production and finished goods ready to be sold. (Less than 1%)
Government spending (G) consists of federal, state, and local government spending on goods and services such as research, roads, defense, schools, and police and fire departments. This spending does not include transfer payments such as Social Security, unemployment compensation, and welfare payments, which do not represent production of goods and services. (17%)
Net Exports (NX) is equal to exports minus imports. Exports are items produced in the US and purchased by foreigners (12%). Imports are items produced by foreigners and purchased by US consumers. (16%). Currently, the US imports more than it exports so that net exports are negative, about -4% of the GDP.

Got it? The total value of what is produced domestically goes either into what people consume (the first item), or into future consumption (investment, the second item) or into what the government consumes (the third item). In addition to that, we consume some things which are produced abroad (imports) and we produce some things which are consumed abroad (exports). The difference: exports-imports adjusts the other three groups for this, so that we are not omitting production that was consumed elsewhere or including consumption that was produced elsewhere.

Pretty simple, isn't it? Well, I hope so anyway.
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*I'm not covering all the serious problems with the use of GDP as a welfare indicator. See this link for more information.

A Sunday Post

In other words, something light and frothy is called for. Perhaps interior decoration? Tassels, bows and dried flower arrangements? I hate them all.

The problem is that I love to make awful items for interior decoration, yet I can't bear the sight of them. Giving them out as gifts works, but it tends to severely reduce my population of friends. So most of these creations are hidden in the basement where they make a good surface for spider eggs to rest (see post below on spider eggs). I just finished a homemade lamp shade. It has a long fringe and it's bedecked with blue-centered daisies made out of fabric! It was such fun to make, and now I have to hide the thing before breakfast or I lose my appetite. I also have a mini skirt in the basement, made by tearing up several silk shirts and by sewing the fragments on a canvas base. Also several 'ancestor' portraits made out of stuffed fabric shapes, flea market jewelry and so on. They are ancestor portraits for people who don't have ancestors, as well as for goddesses like me who just always existed. The idea is to hang them around the dining room, in massive, dark frames.

That's enough of light and frothy. In reality, I like my buildings stark, with marble and big open fireplaces. If there has to be furniture, it better be as simple as possible, and the only portraits allowed are of my favorite snakes and lovers.

But then I want to make something, and it always involves tassels, gilding and everything I can find at the local flea markets. Do you think I would benefit from some new age therapy? Or would that be too risky, given that seeing a real live goddess might make some therapists cross the border between sanity and insanity? In the wrong direction, I mean, though maybe the opposite is equally likely, and in that case I'd be a benefactress by resorting to medical help.

In the meantime, I have to decide what to do with all my frothy and light art creations when the basement overflows.
How about a lottery for some nice charity? And the winner would get his or her pick of my goodies! Would you buy a ticket for a good cause, say a rest-home for retired goddesses?

Killer Moms

I didn't want to write another feminist rant, but what can you do when the world offers you a topic like this on a salver?
The first two news stories that I saw on the AP Breaking News were about killer moms, with titles like these:

Florida Woman Charged in Death of Her Infant Son; Husband Sought for Questioning

Illinois Woman Convicted of Killing Son in 1989 Now Wants to Raise Her Second Child

The impression one gets from these headlines is pretty obvious: women murdering their children. However, the actual stories are a tiny bit more complicated. Take the Florida story. Here's an excerpt from the body of the article:

A woman has been charged in the death of her infant son, who had burns, bruises and broken bones when he was brought to the hospital unconscious, police said.
Lakyna Anderson, 26, was charged Friday with aggravated manslaughter in the death of 9-month-old Jamarion. She told investigators her husband was responsible for the boy's injuries and that he was watching Jamarion the day he died, according to an arrest report.
Nicklous Anderson, 23, had been found by the state to have abused one of her children previously, although he was not listed as a suspect in the death Thursday of 9-month-old Jamarion, according to Diane Carhart, a spokeswoman for the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office. Police were searching for him Saturday for questioning, Carhart said.

And here's an excerpt from the Illinois story:

A woman convicted of killing her 2-year-old son is now fighting the state of Illinois to be allowed to raise her second child.
In 1989, Sheryl Hardy - then Sheryl McGee Coe - smoked a cigarette while her husband at the time punished her son for soiling his pants by lifting him by his ankles and repeatedly dunking him in the toilet. The boy, Bradley McGee, died the next day of head injuries.

In other words, neither woman was necessarily the murderer of the child in question, and in both cases the women's roles look more like those of someone assisting and abetting a crime, or at least not stopping a crime, than those of the killer, though the Florida case is too open for final judgment. But you'd never get this from the headlines.

And just in case the reader misses the main point: that mothers are held to higher standards than fathers, both articles include a quote from someone making it explicit. In the Florida case:

Authorities said Lakyna Anderson was charged because she left the baby with a man who had a previous history of abuse.

Very bad if she did, but not the same as killing the child. Or it wouldn't be regarded the same if Lakyna was the child's father, I bet.

In the Illinois case we get an even more explicit example of different standards for mothers:

"They tortured this child," said Kip Liles, an emergency shelter parent who cared for Bradley McGee temporarily before his death. "Any mother who sits back and lets her child get abused and does nothing about is just as guilty. People like that should never get a second chance."

There you are. Mothers are held to higher standards.

What Conservative Blogs Say

Or a few of them. I did a tour of this odd land tonight, and decided to pick one topic likely to be on all conservative political blogs to study their approaches. Condoleezza Rice's testimony seemed a topic that would be covered. Here is what three popular conservative blogs say about her testimony:

1. Instapundit:

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Missy Nelson wonders if Time pulled an OJ and darkened Condi's skin for this It looks like they've cranked the contrast up in order to produce an unflattering photograph, but beyond that, who knows? They've certainly demonstrated in the past that they're not above this sort of thing.

Deconstruct that!

2. Andrew Sullivan:

CONDI: What is there to say? We have a frigging war on and the major networks all run this? I have nothing to add. Except to say: we have a war on. We used to win them before we engaged in elaborate blame-games as to who was asleep at the wheel when they broke out.

Deconstruct that!

3. The Volokh Conspiracy:

Hardball" Bingo: Condoleezza Rice is going to testify tomorrow. Many people (myself included) will be interested in what she has to say and have not already made up their minds about her and her testimony. But many others have made up their minds -- notably, the partisan talking heads who populate shows like "Hardball." They already have their talking points in their heads, I'd bet. Moreover, they have better reason than usual to write their scripts in advance: My guess is that there will be few, if any, surprises tomorrow. The short format (ten questioners dividing up 2 hours and 30 minutes) doesn't allow for any person to pursue one line of questioning at length, and Rice is too well-prepared and too poised to say something really stupid.

There was no follow-up by today's date. Deconstruct that!

I'd say that these bloggers didn't think Condi did very well. If Andrew Sullivan believes that Iraq would be a more favorable topic for the current administration, things must be a lot worse for Bush people than I thought from my admittedly much more lefty angle.

Speaking of my lefty angle, I'm not a real lefty (like in communist, for example), or even a born-again one. I'm the balancer of scales: if this country ever turns to the extreme left, expect me screeching and shouting arm-in-arm with Rush and Ann! No, cancel that. There are limits to everything in this world.

Some News from Pakistan

About honor killings:

A young woman from the Sindh Province of Pakistan has appealed to Pakistan's President Musharraf for protection from being killed in the name of "honor." According to IRIN News, Rozina Ujjar was divorced by her husband for standing outside of her house at the same time that a 15-year-old boy passed by. After her husband divorced her a local assembly of tribal leaders declared that the woman was "kari" (subject to honor killing).

The only way I have ever been able to understand the logic of honor killings is to think of someone I once knew whose whole self-esteem was tied with his cars. The cars had to be new and expensive. If they got as much as scratched in the parking lot, he'd sell them off immediately and buy a new one. He saw his own value in the value of his cars. Perhaps the honor killing system works the same way: the reputation of the family is based on the sexual purity of its women. When this purity is suspect, so is the family's honor, and the solution is to get rid of the offending female member. Of course this logic means that women are seen as property, but that view has a lot of historical precedence in most countries of the world.

Pakistan may be trying to do something about honor killings:

A bill specific to honor killings is supposed to be introduced to Parliament that will amend the current Criminal Procedure Code and Pakistan's Penal Code. However, according to the Daily Times of Pakistan, last week women members of Parliament protested against the assemblies for not allowing a debate on the bill.

How to Paint Snake Eggs

You don't, actually. Snake eggs are soft and look more like pebbles or shopping bags than bird eggs. Baby snakes are born with a special tooth for cutting their way out of the egg, and they are very good at self-defense from the moment of birth, so if you plan to go looking for some snake eggs to paint this Easter, plan again. In any case, most snakes in colder climates give birth to live babies.

But you can paint bird eggs, and almost anything will work on this media, even a pencil if you have nothing better. The simplest way to color eggs is to boil them in water with some onion skins added. You get lovely brown eggs that way. But water colors or acrylics work nicely, too, and you can even gild an egg. If you plan to eat the eggs, boil them before painting them. If you don't care about eating them, the eggs stay nicer if you empty them first. Make a hole in each narrow end of the egg, one very small, the other just slightly bigger, and blow in through the smaller hole. The theory is that the white and yolk will come out of the bigger hole. Sometimes this even works. You can then use these holes to put a string through the egg. Then you can hang the egg on a tree branch in your front yard. Or even several eggs.

You could even write important political slogans on the eggs and hang them somewhere where they would annoy politicians and other people your slogans attack.

I'm not going to paint any eggs this spring, but I do have lots of spider eggs in the basement, carefully guarded against the snakes. The baby spiders will be born any day now! I give them names when they are born, and then send them off to fight the good fight in the garden. Some types of spiders carry their eggs with them. They always remind me of harassed shoppers, desperately looking for one more thing while dragging all the other parcel with them. I wonder what happens to them in the winter, the spiders I mean. I suspect that the mother spider dies (having probably eaten the father spider after some satisfactory sex), and that leaves the eggs in charge of my basement. Nature can be very cruel, too.

But that's hard to remember in the spring.

On Iraq

I have not written much about the war and occupation of Iraq, and I'm not going to begin now, but I'd like to explain (if only to myself) why it's a topic I don't address very much.

The main reason for my silence is that there's very little that's funny about wars, and I want to write about funny things. Only twisted and sick humor thrives in the conditions of war, and I find that I can't laught while reading about dead people, people who are now legless and armless, people who are now homeless. War is about death, death of people and animals, of ideas and of places.

Sometimes there's no alternative for wars, or the alternatives are worse than the wars. But I never believed this to be the case in Iraq, and I found the U.S. administration unable to make a good case for this particular war at this particular time. This war was perhaps planned for a long time by the people now ruling the U.S., but if so, the planning appears to have been extremely poor. Iraq is not being 'pacified' or 'made safe for democracy'. It is a chaotic place where the most violent and desperate will win unless the U.S. troop strength is considerably increased, and even then any solution we impose is just that, an imposed solution which will not live once left to its own resources. Maybe the U.S. intentions were not all about oil or world dominance. I don't know. But democracy can't be imposed from above, and trying to do so while killing lots of people isn't exactly endearing the locals to Western ideals.

My second reason for relative silence is in the extreme sadness I feel whenever I try to think about the future for Iraq. The only realistic scenarios I can imagine are Iraq as an American colony and Iraq as a radical fundamentalist country. Neither scenario is one that I'd like to live under, and I doubt that the colony model would win out in the long run. Thus, by intervening in Iraq we have pretty much guaranteed another place like Afghanistan under Taliban, some time in the future, and I don't like such a society at all; if for no other reason than that I believe men and women are of equal worth and should have the same rights. I can't envisage a secular democracy in a country as religious as Iraq, especially given the number of people who are armed and the total historic lack of any real practise in democracy. Even countries with much less challenging problems than the ones Iraqis face have great difficulty with democracy. Just think of Russia. Or even the U.S...

Finally, my fear is that the net effect of the war and occupation in Iraq is to increase the forces of international terrorists, not to somehow make the world safer. Maybe the terrorists are right now concentrating on Iraq, but new ones are being created by the news from there, and the terror will inevitably spread out over time.

There you have it: my excuses for not commenting much on these historic events. I sincerely and desperately wish that my predictions and views are all wrong. I'd like nothing better than to be proved completely mistaken here, and to find, soon, a democratic and peaceful Iraq, with thriving institutions and civil society. But then I'd like the tooth-fairy to exist, too.

Miscellania

My muse has gone cavorting elsewhere. He got some new tattoos, that's why. But this leaves me without anything interesting to write about; only little beginnings of ideas. Here they are, in lieu of anything better:

1. An interesting article on Saudi women here. It seems that many Saudi women would like to work, drive cars and go out without a man's permission. A lively debate has ensued in the Saudi press. I want similar lively debates in other countries: should Republicans be allowed to drive if they refuse to have taxes for roads, should people who fraud corporations be allowed to go for walks without their victims' permission and so on. At least these debates are about something substantial, not about the humanity of some humans.

2. This is a very good site for checking on any lies in the presidential election campaigns. They seem quite impartial.

3. It's spring, and the symbol for all the glory of the spring is the egg. The egg is a perfect thing, without a single seam.
The only way to improve it is to fill it with chocolate. And the most beautiful color in the world is robin egg's blue. However hard artists may try, nature beats them easily. Except perhaps in the chocolate media.

On Bitches and Whores

I used a sleepless night in deep research of the blogoland area that is called 'Comments'. Quite a few blogs have them, mine included, though right-wing blogs for some odd reason tend not to allow commenting very much. Isn't the free exchange of ideas an important part of the free markets -religion? Anyway, I wanted to find out how commenters on political blogs use gender-related language when the topic isn't gender itself. The idea was to see what people do when they are not on their guard about sexism, for example.

The results are interesting, though I must warn you that no statistical significance is implied here, and I'm not going to give you a single mean or standard deviation; just some questions and guesses about what might be going on in this region of the cyberspace. Most of my data comes from reading the comments sections over a period of two days on just a few blogs, and what I say here may have no relevance in any wider sense. Or then again, it may.

What I found was a frequent use of the terms "whore" and "bitch". The term "slut" also appears, though not in any of the quotes I include here. These are all words that describe women who behave against the norms of the society either sexually (whore and slut) or in terms of aggressiveness (bitch), but the way they are used by blog commenters is different:

Who taught these bitches in the White House how to invade and conquer

Of course, these pampered millionare GOP whores threaten to move their teams if the voters don't approve a tax hike to pay for new luxury stadiums

One more time to blogwhore my comparison on Vietnam and Iraq

It's different, because the whores and bitches in these quotes are men, or at least not necessarily women, and the acts of whoring and bitching are defined differently: not as sex-related, but as unprincipled prostitution of ones ideas rather than of ones body and as pure nastiness, respectively. Reading them this way gets more complicated when the topic in the comments also happens to be a woman:

Not only did I get one hour less worth of sleep because of daylight savings or whatever it is last night, I was woken up to the inane blatherings of that worthless whore Cokie Roberts. She said something like ""If Richard Clarke hadn't destroyed Bush's credibility, Bush is actually doing quite well!"

Now she is a Media Whore Emerita and her comments don't have to have any tether to reality,

I can't stand the sanctimonious bitch. She reminds me of the Church Lady from SNL

I find my reading here shifting from the traditional definitions of bitch and whore to the ones that I think the blogoland has adopted. The overall effect is to make me feel that the woman is double-condemned here.

Not all blog comments-sections use whore and bitch in these ways. They can also be used to convey racism, as in this example:

I'll be a good crack 'ho in yo bitchinass blog, honky

What's interesting about this is the way terms denigrating women are used twice as often as terms denigrating race in this short statement, yet the final impact, on me at least, is purely racist. So somehow all these examples take traditionally derogatory female terms and make them into something else.

And now to the really fascinating question: what does this all mean? Is the mainstreaming (if this is mainstreaming) of nasty female epiteths a sign of decreased sexism? If men can be sluts, whores and bitches, too, aren't we all now more equal? Or is the real trend something completely different: the mainstreaming of misogyny under the disguise of this new wider interpretation of the terms?

I truly don't know. What do you think?


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A postcript (April 9). This is a reprint of an exchange I had on the comments-section of Eschaton tonight:
Comment 1:

Person X,
I can smell your cunt.

My comment concerning it:

Person X,
I can smell your cunt.

This I found quite insulting. As if there's nothing worse in this world to be than a woman. Surely you can think of better ways to beat a troll.

Comment 2:

Echidne, grow some fucking cultural literacy, would you? Just google the phrase, add it to your netflix cue, and shut your runny hole.

Interesting....

Meanwhile, in Turkmenistan

President Saparmurat Niyazov of Turkmenistan is a man of some astonishing ideas:

In a televised address at an agricultural academy, Niyazov took note of the gold teeth of the female student who welcomed him.
"Don't take offense, your gold teeth are very beautiful, but you, young people, look much better with white teeth," he said, exhorting them to take better care of their teeth, according to the Interfax news agency.
"I watched dogs when I was young. They were given bones to gnaw ... Those of you whose teeth have fallen out did not gnaw on bones. This is my advice," he said.

My dogs would probably agree, but you just try to take a bone away for them, even if it's for the purpose of keeping your own choppers nice and white.

This is not the only shocking thing Niyazov has done in Turkmenistan:

Niyazov has banned all opposition and controls all branches of government and the media. Golden statues and busts of the president are scattered across the country, and his portrait is on every banknote and coin.

He is also a dear friend of the United States...

The Mrs. Degree

Women's Enews has an interesting article about marriage and highly educated women. Traditionally, more educated women were less likely to be married in the U.S., but this seems to be changing. As the article notes:

In 1980, a woman with three years of graduate school was 13 percent less likely to be married than a woman with only a high-school diploma. By 2000, that gap shrank to less than 5 percent...

More surprisingly, while the general rate of marriage among women aged 40-44 is falling, the most educated women in this age group are actually marrying at increasing rates:

... Rose found an overall decline in the percentage of women between ages 40 and 44 who were married. In 2000, 72 percent were married, down from 81 percent in 1980.
The decline in marriage rates for women in that age bracket is roughly equivalent for more- and less-educated women. Between 1980 and 2000 marriage rates for women with a high-school education declined 5 percentage points to 91 percent. For women with college education, the rate declined by the same 5 percentage points to 88 percent.
Women with three years of graduate school, meanwhile, have bucked the declining trend. For them the marriage rate has actually increased by 3 percentage points, to 86 percent.

What explains this change? One researcher speculates that marriage has become more egalitarian and less about division of labor between the sexes (i.e., about women cleaning and keeping house and about men going out to work).
Would this change affect the desirability of marriage for men and women in the same way? I wonder. It still seems to me that even researchers sometimes assume that all women (whatever their sexual orientation or other values) want to get married, and if they don't marry the reason must be that nobody asked them. I'd like to see a study looking at women's own decision-making in greater detail.

Still, this snippet of news is important, especially given the continuous mythmaking in the media about the unhappily liberated successful women who can't "get" a man or babies. Remember Sylvia Hewlet's lament about the professional barren women? Remember the urban myth that a forty-year old woman is more likely to get killed in a terrorist attack than to get married? Remember that "you can't have it all"? Somehow I doubt that the injection of these new pieces of evidence will have much evidence on this particular anti-feminist enterprise. It's far too ingrained in the so-called liberal mainstream media.

Another Poll... Plus Some Unrelated Ramblings

About Bush's job approval. It has dropped to 49%, its lowest level in 2004. The 'strongly disapprove' category beats the 'strongly approve' category by one percent. Whether these results matter at all is quite a different question. But horoscopes are fun to read, too.

The drop in Bush's job approval probably has something to do with what's happening in Iraq; to hand over power in that country in less than three months' time seems to me to be pure lunacy. No-one asked me, of course. More's the pity.
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Elsewhere, I hear that China has at least eleven million eternal bachelors. Why is that, the BBC News wonders? Could it possibly have something to do with the still prevalent Chinese view that prefers boys to girls, combined with the strict limits on the number of children per family? But the real reason is the low value attributed to girls, not only in China but all over most of the world. Rather than worrying about these eleven million unmarried men, maybe we should worry about what happened to the women who in a different world might have married them.
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And then some really good news, also from BBC! We are going to get Ruport Murdoch for good here in the U.S.! He's moving his headquarters from Australia to New York, so that he can keep a closer eye on all his media outlets here to see how well the brainwashing is going. Aren't we lucky? Or aren't the Australians lucky?

What U.S. Drug Companies Say

That importing cheaper drugs from Canada and other countries would be unsafe, would lower incentives to market generic drugs, and would increase drug prices in other countries. Not very surprising that they would say this; it would have been more interesting if they had pushed for drug importation at any cost.

But are these claims true? The last one probably is, at least in those countries where the government doesn't regulate drug prices. This prediction comes from standard economic theory of a firm which prices the same product differently in two different markets. This is only possible if resale can be stopped, or in our case, if the importation of Canadian drugs to the United States can be stopped. If resale is impossible to stop, the two market prices will become roughly equalized (ignoring the effect of any tariff or tax differences between the countries), and the most likely outcome is that the country with previously lower prices will find them go up. Incidentally, the firms' profits will also decline, which is why they are fighting the drug importation plan.

The Canadian government might not let Canadian prices rise, though. The health care system north of the U.S. border has much more government control over things such as prices, and this makes it harder to predict the impact of drug exportation on the Canadian markets.

The truth of the first claim of the drug companies, that imported drugs would be unsafe, clearly depends on the quality control system that is practised in the countries of origin. It's pretty hard to pretend that Canadian drugs would present any health dangers to American consumers, as long as the sellers use the same system of requiring physician prescriptions before filling orders for prescription drugs. Which they do. Importing drugs from some other countries could be more dangerous. Still, there are ways of insuring the quality of imported drugs (we do it all the time with other imported products), and quality problems exist with domestic drugs, too. Also, if the alternative to imported drugs for some poor American consumers is no treatment at all, the likely unsafety of such drugs should be compared to the unsafety of an illness possibly remaining altogether untreated.

But there are already cheaper alternatives for poorer consumers, say the drug companies. These are the generic drugs, i.e., medications which don't have brand names but do have the same chemical components that make brand name drugs effective. Would importing drugs reduce the incentives to market such generics? Maybe, but the current marketing efforts of generics aren't exactly noticeable, either, perhaps because there is a lot less profit in marketing them.

I think that drug importation should be allowed. Aren't we all now devoted followers of the free markets? Wasn't NAFTA supposed to make all of this continent into one big supermarket? Well, here, finally, is an opportunity for ordinary Americans to benefit from it.

Something I want to Share!

I am worried that I put my readers off by being so divine and perfect. Just to reassure you that my life isn't all roses and nectar, either, I am going to let you into a big secret: I am a Red Socks fan. That's enough of a burden for anyone.

So now you can feel sorry for me and have all sorts of other fuzzy, nice feelings! AND I get more visits. Is this what humans mean by someone having 'social intelligence'?

Right-Wingery 101: How To Interpret Fallujah

Thanks to Atrios, I have finally met Kathleen Parker. She's a right-wing journalist and columnist, and must be a good one. After all, in 1993 she won

>...the H. L. Mencken Writing Award issued by The Baltimore Sun. The judges praised Parker for "singing another note on the subject of family values and following the tradition of H. L. Mencken in attacking ignorance and stupidity with vividness and originality."

The new note on family values she sings is the normal conservative lament. Her Townhall biography reveals the fascinating fact that she had four stepmothers, and this may explain her take on family values: the sins of the fathers and so on. Anyway, I digress.

The reason I wanted to write about Parker is the promise of finding someone on the right who has vividness and originality in the attacks against ignorance and stupidity; someone who would actually be fun to read. Maybe even a new Dorothy Parker. We'll see if Kathleen is one. She's going to be our guide on the question how your average American right-winger interprets the horrible events in Fallujah where four American civilians were killed and their dead bodies then burned, mutilated and hung from a bridge. She's going to teach us how to see the world through right-wing eyes, and she's going to be vivid and original while doing it. What a treat!

Here we go then. She begins thus:

I suppose it would be considered lacking in nuance to nuke the Sunni Triangle.
But so goes the unanimous vote around my household - and I'm betting millions of others - in the aftermath of what forevermore will be remembered simply as "Fallujah."

Wouldn't it be lovely were justice so available and so simple? If we were but creatures like those zoo animals we witnessed gleefully jumping up and down after stomping, dragging, dismembering and hanging the charred remains of American civilians whose only crime was to try to help them.

"To nuke the Sunni Triangle" means to destroy it by using something called weapons of mass destruction, in this case of the nuclear sort. The effect of such 'nuking' would be to kill most living things in the area, as well as all the foetuses still inside their mothers. I thought this was a no-no for Parker.

But she's willing to make an exception in the case of Iraqis, or at least in the case of those Iraqis who happen to live near the ones she describes as zoo animals. It took me some time to connect this zoo story with Fallujah, until I realized that Parker is talking about the Iraqis who participated in the mutilation or cheered it. She calls them zoo animals. Why zoo, I wonder? Who has caged them? Nevermind. What we can conclude from Parker's opening comments is that she thinks a nuclear attack would be a good equalizer for the murder of four Americans, and that it wouldn't really be that terrible, given that some who would be killed behaved in a manner which she thinks would fit zoo animals.

We are also learning that Parker believes millions of others to have the same opinions. These millions must be right-wingers. Ok.

But then Parker rises to the expected high moral level, and tells us that using weapons of mass destruction on the Sunni Triangle isn't really such a good idea; instead we Americans must stay calm:

But keep our heads we must. Calmly we must transcend the primitive lust that compels ignorant others to mug idiotically for cameras.
Our revenge will be in facing down enemies who, though unworthy adversaries, impede the worthy goal of stabilizing a country whose future may predict our own. To retreat now would merely feed the terrorists' appetite for America's immediate failure en route to her ultimate demise.

And who are the primitive muggers for cameras? Perhaps American politicians? Or maybe she means the zoo animals in Fallujah. But 'we' (the American right-wingers?) are not like that: we are rational, cool and logical planners of important military strategies. The most important of these is to guarantee that we don't see the same future in the good old U.S. of A as we would see in Iraq without our military intervention.

I'm not sure what the similarities are supposed to be. Does Parker mean that the American Christian fundamentalists are having similar takeover plans here as the muslim fundamentalists harbor in Iraq? If this is the explanation, how would the American troops in Iraq help? Shouldn't they be brought home to defend us against the much more immediate domestic dangers? Or am I getting all confused here, and Kathleen is just telling us the old Republican story of how the 9/11 terrorists really were Iraqis though everybody knows they weren't?

We then learn that Parker wants the United States to stay in Iraq to avert this horrible American demise. She also wants more international help for all the averting:

We have no choice but to stay the course and fulfill our commitment. That said, it would be nice if the international community would step up to the plate and insist on justice. This isn't just America's war, but America's response to a war that was brought to us.

I thought that the international community had stepped up to the plate over a year ago. Millions of people all over the world protested against the Iraq war, and I suspect that most of them thought their protest were for justice. But Parker sees things differently: the international community should come in aid of the unfairly attacked United States. It doesn't seem to trouble her that 'America's response to a war that was brought to us' meant attacking a country that had nothing to do with the bringing of that initial attack. As far as I know the guilty party was an organization called Al-Qaieda, not the bogeyman called Saddam Hussein. But clearly my way of thinking wouldn't do in the right-wing circles; instead I should view the Iraq war as a logical consequence of the 9/11 carnage and the international community as lacking in proper cooperation if it doesn't occupy Iraq, too.

Parker has more to say in the same vein, but I have covered most bases already (See! I can do baseball analogies, too!) She ends her column by reminding us about the zoo animals one more time:

Still, a well-placed MOAB smack in the Sunni Triangle ... but then, we are not animals. A reel of Rambo will have to do.

There you have it: the proper right-wing views to hold, all presented to you in a vivid and original manner by Kathleen Parker. I think Dorothy Parker was a better writer by far, but Kathleen is quite entertaining in her own way.

Which Conservative Pundit Are You?

Take this test at World O'Crap, and find out!
I am 1/3 Ben Shapiro, 1/3 Jonah Goldberg and 1/3 Ann Coulter. I think the test needs some tweaking...