My Annual Fund-Raising Campaign

Begins tomorrow.  The idea is to get my yearly blogging costs covered, at least when it comes to actual financial costs.  The opportunity costs of my time I mostly donate to the cause.  Well, completely donate to the cause.

You can use the PayPal button on the blog to donate.   Any amount is appreciated.  Don't give if you have little.  Just send warm thoughts in that case.

Conclusions In Search Of Evidence

This statement by Paul Krugman applies to a whole bunch of theories and arguments:

More on the structural unemployment thing. As Mike Konczal points out, there’s something clearly obsessive about the desire to tell a structural story. It’s not just that people keep coming up with new arguments after each successive argument is shot down by the data; it’s the fact that it’s the same people who keep coming up with new arguments, strongly suggesting that they really want to believe it’s structural, and won’t take no for an answer.

Read about the history of the attempts to prove women intellectually inferior in various ways, and you face the same thing.  The conclusions remain, even if specific theories are proven false.  New theories just take their place right away. 

Thus, we move from women's smaller brains (though not all have moved away from that one!) to which half of the brain each sex might use more  to gray matter or white matter to blood flow in the brain to PET scan images and on and on.  Whenever a particular theory has been shown false another theory takes its place and the game continues.  Because it is the game which matters, not the particular theories.

Or rather, those who pursue that game are firmly convinced of the correctness of their conclusions.  All that remains to be found is that missing evidence.  If this piece won't do, then keep searching!

You might argue that these games are to some extent symmetrical, and in Krugman's example they might be among some economists.  But in my example they are not.  One side always plays attack,  the other side plays defense.

On Obama's Same-Sex Marriage Statement

I think it's the right thing to do, of course.   What motivated the statement at this point in time could be worth pondering over. 

My guess is that Obama needs the youth vote and something of this sort is needed to get the young voters energized.  At the same time, those who are firmly opposed to same-sex marriage would most likely not vote for Obama in the first place, because of the other opinions which are bundled with that opposition.

Still, all this is pure guessing.

Meanwhile, in Kansas, Providers' Beliefs Are Protected, Women Are Not

Kansas has that wonderful governor Sam Brownback, our very own Talibani.  I'm sure that he will be glad to sign a bill just passed in the Kansas Senate:

A bill giving more legal protection to Kansas health care providers who refuse to participate in abortions was on its way Wednesday to Gov. Sam Brownback, despite concerns it would limit access to birth control and allow some professionals to block life-saving care.
The Senate approved the “conscience” measure, 23-16. The House passed the bill last month, and Brownback is expected to sign it. The new law would take effect July 1.
Abortion opponents argued that the legislation merely updates decades-old state laws preventing doctors and hospitals from being forced to participate in abortions or sterilizations. They said changes are needed because women seeking abortions can now use drugs to induce them, and health care professionals who oppose abortion shouldn’t face the threat of losing their jobs or being sued if they follow their consciences.
“This is about respecting the rights to conscience and others’ beliefs,” said Sen. Mary Pilcher Cook, R-Shawnee, who opposes abortion. “Let’s protect people’s beliefs.”
The measure extends “conscience” protections to clinics, doctor’s offices and other facilities other than hospitals. People are protected not only from being forced to participate in abortions but from referring patients for abortion services or participating in the prescription or administration of any drug that terminates a pregnancy.
The legal protections extend to any individual or institution that “reasonably believes” that the use of a drug terminates a pregnancy. Some critics said that provision will allow doctors and pharmacists to refuse to prescribe or dispense birth control.
They also said it could allow a doctor to refuse to provide chemotherapy to a pregnant cancer patient because it might end her pregnancy.

A long time ago I read a novel in which a woman was allowed to die of cancer without treatment (not even pain killers)  because she was pregnant.  It was a frightening read for a young goddess because it hammered home the principle of women's unimportance as people in themselves.  But when I had finished the book I could tell myself that it was just fiction.  

Now?  Not so sure anymore, though I hope that this law will not be applied to pregnant women with cancer. 

But this is the part which smells truly off:

Furthermore, critics said, patients wouldn’t know about a provider’s moral objections until the provider refused to provide treatment or dispense a drug – and the provider wouldn’t have to refer the patient elsewhere.

If this is the case then patients would  essentially be trapped.   It's like not listing the additives in some food item in the stores.  At a minimum,  all providers  should be required to list their beliefs openly so that prospective patients can find a provider they are comfortable with.

This is not about protecting the providers' beliefs.  This is about forcing those beliefs on patients who may not hold the same beliefs.

How come do we get these kinds of laws only about abortions?  Logic requires that they should apply to all ethical and religious dilemmas in health care.  Thus,  physicians who are Jehovah's Witnesses should be able to refuse to provide blood transfusions or stay silent about their advisability without anything bad happening to them.  And so on.

Fun With David Brooks

I haven't written about Brooks for a while.  I forgot how hilariously he writes.  His schtick is to zoom right in with a very assertive assertion, demanding that it be taken for truth.  Then he builds sand castles on that assertion.

That's what his most recent macroeconomic column does.  It begins with the assertion of two-types-of-people:

The country is divided when different people take different sides in a debate. The country is really divided when different people are having entirely different debates. That’s what’s happening on economic policy.
Many people on the left are having a one-sided debate about how to deal with a cyclical downturn. The main argument you hear from these cyclicalists is that the economy is operating well below capacity. To get it moving at full speed, the government should borrow and spend more. The federal government is now running deficits of about $1 trillion a year. Some of these cyclicalists believe the deficit should be about $1.4 trillion.
The cyclicalists rail against what they see as American austerity-mongers who resist new borrowing. They really rail against the European ones. They see François Hollande’s victory in France as a sign that, in Europe at least, the pendulum might finally be swinging from austerity to growth.
Other people — some on the left but mostly in the center and on the right — look at the cyclicalists and shrug. It’s not that they are necessarily wrong to bash excessive austerity. They’re simply failing to address the core issues.
The diverse people in this camp — and I’m one of them — believe the core problems are structural, not cyclical. The recession grew out of and exposed long-term flaws in the economy. Fixing these structural problems should be the order of the day, not papering over them with more debt.

Quite lovely!  Except for the fact that the two-types-of-people Brooks creates are his creations:

Just in case you thought that the failure of austerity in the United Kingdom and across the euro zone, and its rejection by voters in France and Greece, might be cause for changing course, David Brooks has a column to tell us otherwise. He says that there are two different arguments going on over economic policy which unfortunately don't intersect.
First, we have the cyclicists who worry about silly things like 25 million people who are unemployed, underemployed or out of the workforce altogether. These people are also likely to worry about the millions of people who are losing their homes and probably also the children of the unemployed, underemployed and displaced homeowners.
Then we have the far-sighted structuralists like Brooks who worry about the long-term. They worry about fixing government deficits and getting us the labor force that we will need in the future.
This is a great division that has considerably less to do with reality than Middle Earth and the Munchkins. What could Brooks possibly be drinking when he thinks that he has identified a group of economists/policy wonks who are only concerned about the cyclical problem of high unemployment and not the structural problems that created them.

Brooks loves to form imaginary groups of people in his columns!  He does that often.  He also puts opinions into the mouths of his imaginary groups and then tells us how the country (according to the creator Brooks) thinks on various issues by moving the lips of his puppets.

Thus, we get the small-town-good-Murkans who are conservatives and care about their families and really know what Murka is all about, and we get the uppity latte-sipping rich people in the east coast ivory towers who know nothing about Murka.   Brooks sets such groups against each other and then interprets the outcomes to his readers.  That the groups are not real or at least omit many other groups is irrelevant.   They are used from the other end:  To support the conclusions Brooks wants to reach.

And in this case the conclusion (once again, not based on any empirical proof) is this:

But you can only mask structural problems for so long. The whole thing has gone kablooey. The current model, in which we try to compensate for structural economic weakness with tax cuts and an unsustainable welfare state, simply cannot last. The old model is broken. The jig is up.

Just in case you didn't get that yet, Brooks repeats it:

Make no mistake, the old economic and welfare state model is unsustainable. The cyclicalists want to preserve the status quo, but structural change is coming.

That's  what the column really is about:  Brooks' personal belief that we cannot afford a welfare state.

But he does not offer any proof for that argument and neither does he map out what his desired alternative world would look like?  Neofeudalism?  A global concentration of a few large firms running everything?  And if the public sector should be shrunk who then will educate those future workers so that their skill sets will match the needs of those multinational behemoths (without teaching them anything that might make them socially belligerent, I presume)?  How would the problem of increasing income inequality and its impact on the society be solved in Brooks' future world?  Gated communities for the rich?   What for the rest of us?

It's perhaps understandable why most of those who argue against the welfare state have little to offer as alternatives.  The history of the nineteenth century Britain, say, suggests that the alternatives of unrestrained capitalism are not pleasant for most individuals. 

I don't know.  Looking at Greece, for instance, makes me think that what we cannot afford, as civilizations, is the demise of the safety net for ordinary people.

Meet Today's Misogynist, Jesse Lee Peterson

 Warning:  Skip this post if you get easily angered and find anger paralyzing or unproductive.

Jesse Lee Peterson was a guest at the conservative Hannity show where Kristen Powers pointed out his misogyny



According to Wikipedia, Peterson runs an organization called The Brotherhood Organization of A New Destiny (BOND),  and at the beginning of the show Sean Hannity told us that he is a member of the board over at the brotherhood.

Here is Peterson giving us a sermon about the perfidy of women. 






Hannity seemed OK with having Peterson on his show.  Indeed, he seemed angrier at Powers for her interruption. 

A quote from the sermon for any of you who might have difficulty viewing the video:

Women cannot handle power. It's not in them to handle power in the right way. [...] I think that one of the greatest mistakes America made was to allow women the opportunity to vote. We should've never turned this over to women. [...] It was a big mistake. [...] And these women are voting in the wrong people. They're voting in people who are evil who agrees [sic] with them who're gonna take us down this pathway of destruction. And this probably was the reason they didn't allow women to vote when men were men. Because men in the good old days understood the nature of the woman. They were not afraid to deal with it. And they understood that, you let them take over, this is what would happen.^[12]

What's the point of this post?  To remind Fox News that it is not nice to coddle woman-haters?  Or to point out that misogynists always view the question of what rights women have as something to do with "them?"  It is "they" who "gave" women too many rights and now it's time to take those rights back?  By what means? 

The Ghost Of Lawrence Summers' Comments on Women And Mathematics

Will forever haunt us.

Or rather, this Chris Hayes show suggests that the scales of unfair science denial are somewhat equated when the conservatives deny climate change and the liberals refuse to discuss racial and gender differences in IQ or innate gender differences in general.  This is what one of the guests,  Jonathan Haidt, says, beginning at about 4 minutes and 57 seconds.  Watch the following few minutes and then note who tries to say something there and does not succeed.

Jonathan Haidt has talked about Lawrence Summers' comments before:

The fields of psychology, sociology and anthropology have long attracted liberals, but they became more exclusive after the 1960s, according to Dr. Haidt. “The fight for civil rights and against racism became the sacred cause unifying the left throughout American society, and within the academy,” he said, arguing that this shared morality both “binds and blinds.”
“If a group circles around sacred values, they will evolve into a tribal-moral community,” he said. “They’ll embrace science whenever it supports their sacred values, but they’ll ditch it or distort it as soon as it threatens a sacred value.” It’s easy for social scientists to observe this process in other communities, like the fundamentalist Christians who embrace “intelligent design” while rejecting Darwinism. But academics can be selective, too, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan found in 1965 when he warned about the rise of unmarried parenthood and welfare dependency among blacks — violating the taboo against criticizing victims of racism.
“Moynihan was shunned by many of his colleagues at Harvard as racist,” Dr. Haidt said. “Open-minded inquiry into the problems of the black family was shut down for decades, precisely the decades in which it was most urgently needed. Only in the last few years have liberal sociologists begun to acknowledge that Moynihan was right all along.”
Similarly, Larry Summers, then president of Harvard, was ostracized in 2005 for wondering publicly whether the preponderance of male professors in some top math and science departments might be due partly to the larger variance in I.Q. scores among men (meaning there are more men at the very high and very low ends). “This was not a permissible hypothesis,” Dr. Haidt said. “It blamed the victims rather than the powerful. The outrage ultimately led to his resignation. We psychologists should have been outraged by the outrage. We should have defended his right to think freely.”

What fun!   I have looked at the extreme-tails hypothesis in a fairly recent post, and it looks quite a bit more complicated than the implicit assumption Haidt seems to have:  That men simply are more likely to always score more in the high tail and the low tail of any particular test distribution.

So what did I write about Summers' comments in 2005?  It took me some time to dig those posts up but here they are:

Part I

Part II

Part III

Hmm.  Those posts still look to me as if I'm discussing the theories Summers presented, to the extent they could be discussed in 2005.  But I guess Haidt didn't refer to unknown weird bloggers when he talks about how the left savaged Summers.   That the right sorta joined in (to defend Summers and to, incidentally,  savage women)  he also ignores.

The overall topic of the Chris Hayes program deserves a completely separate post so I'm not going to address it here, except to note that I sense a certain kind of compromise proposal in the works in Haidt's mind:  Give them the "science" they like and maybe then they will accept the "science" we like!

Perhaps I'm wrong about that.  But my view of research is much more complicated than those that cropped up in the discussion which appeared to suggest that all science (including hypotheses which cannot be empirically tested) is somehow equally reliable, that no scientist has particular prior biases and that every new study is without problems until other researchers point those out.

That self-correcting approach probably works over eons.  It doesn't work terribly well in the short run, and the reason is that theories themselves create those bonded groups.  If a sub-field has only one set of basic theories (such as inside evolutionary psychology) then the criticisms cannot come from inside, and the academic reward structure doesn't provide incentives for outsiders to offer their criticisms.

As a slightly different example, there is no general field of "gender similarities" to counteract the field of "gender differences," as an example.  Janet Hyde has written on gender similarities and has been called biased because of that.    But those who choose to work on gender differences cannot be without prior beliefs themselves and those tend to be of the type which make someone choose to look for differences, not for similarities.

All this is a far cry from the simple arguments that people like some science and hate other science and pick just on that basis, though of course that happens, all the time.   But this does not mean that everything printed somewhere as a study is equally reliable or necessarily problem-free, and it does not mean that Lawrence Summers' utterances about a field he is not an expert in should be regarded as part of scientific inquiry.

Spice Cookies

I found one recipe on the net which looked very similar to the recipe I lost.  It's not the same (I tested it) and a bit sweeter than I like but you might find it worthwhile.  The measures are in deciliters (dls) and grams (g) but my measuring bowls have both cups and dls, and the grams can be estimated if you don't have a scale as they only apply to the butter/margarine and you need two sticks minus a sliver.

Here's the recipe:

Ingredients:

200 g butter or margarine

2 dl sugar
1 tbsp molasses
1 medium egg
2 tsp ground cardamom
2 tsp ground cinnamon
1tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
6.5 dl pastry flour or white flour

Instructions:


Beat butter/margarine with sugar until foamy.  Add molasses and the egg (not the shells!) while beating well.  Mix the spices, soda, baking powder and flour separately and shift into the batter.  Let the final batter rest in the fridge overnight (or at least a few hours).  Roll it into small balls on baking paper and finally use a fork to flatten each ball.  Bake in a preheated oven (225 centigrade, 437 Fahrenheit) for ten minutes.

These are called fork cookies because of that use of the fork.  If the fork sticks, use some flour on it while pressing.  The ideal size is fairly small, I think, so this batch might make a hundred or so?

I added a smidgen of ground cloves to the spices.  This might also work as one of those cookies where you mold the batter into long sticks, freeze them, and then cut out cookies onto a baking sheet when you feel like some.

Why Men Should Not Be Priests

This is a funny list of ten reasons for excluding men from the priesthood.  It was posted several years ago.  Of course the reverse lists are conventional wisdom on the question why women cannot be priests.

The point, of course, is that the reverse list is equally funny or silly but we take it seriously. 

The fishes that swim in the ocean do not think water has a taste.  (I'm trying to make that into a meme about how people are blind to their old cultures and view them as simply obvious.)

Friday Music

Sarah Vaughan and Stardust

Revenge Shags

Louise Mensch is a British conservative politician whose politics are certainly not mine.  She does, however, share my gender and thus the usual trollish commentary on women in the public eye.  That commentary is based on sexuality, looks and the sluttiness or  f***ability of a particular woman.

But there's also more than a hint of true nastiness in some of it:

UPDATE: I’ve just had my attention brought to an article published on Vice.com yesterday titled Question of International Worker’s Day – Hey Crustie, Would you have sex with Louise Mensch? The magazine asked a load of Occupy protesters if they’d sleep with her (the answer was invariably “Yes”) and photographed their responses. As if the premise of the article isn’t disappointing enough, most disgustingly, one of the questions asked was “Would you shag her for revenge?” to which the response was “Yeah, she’s a Tory”. Too vile for words.

What does it mean to shag someone for revenge?  How does that differ from rape?  Or are they the same thing?  I get the impression that they are not the same thing but Googling doesn't give me a definition of "a revenge shag," either.

The point, of course, is that this treatment of Louise Mensch is equally applicable to any woman.  It's not ultimately about her political views at all.  It's about her gender.  That she is regarded as deserving such a treatment, because of her political views or whatever else she may have done does not change the fact that different political views by another woman would lend her equally vulnerable to the same trollery, albeit by different trolls.

A Deep Thought On Capitalism Gone Wild

It has gone wild.

That's the deep thought, and the reason is the demise of state-sponsored communism after the Berlin Wall fell.  Just cast your mind back and that is what happened.  Without the counter-force of communism the capitalists had no restraints and we got what we have now:  A world run as if it is a private corporation, a world run for the benefit of the capital-owners alone.  A privatized world.

It is ironic that communism was what kept the American type capitalism decent.  Without that public enemy the nazguls are free to rob and ravage.

I have always been a supporter of the mixed economy.  They still do much better.  Atrios quotes this, for example:

I asked the Swedish finance minister the other day how they made nationalised banks lend. He said to me: "It's simple. We own them, we tell them what to do and if the directors don't, we sack them and get people who can." That's what me must do.

This approach, my friends, is no longer possible in the United States because those who own the markets also now own the government.
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Added later:  An additional example from today:

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Friday issued a proposed rule governing hydraulic fracturing for oil and gas on public lands that will for the first time require disclosure of the chemicals used in the process. 

But in a significant concession to the oil industry, companies will have to reveal the composition of fluids only after they have completed drilling, not before — a sharp change from the government’s original proposal, which would have required disclosure of the chemicals 30 days before a well could be started. 

Bolding mine.

In Today's Nazgûl News: Scott Walker's Adventures in Wisconsin

From the very first time I saw governor Scott Walker's face, especially his eyes, I knew he was a Nazgûl , one of the ringwraiths from the Lord of the Ring.  The other ringwraiths took over other states at the same time, but Walker is the one who has hogged most of the limelight.

And he has carried his assigned tasks out extremely well!  The great state of Wisconsin has almost been demolished!  In the good news, angry drivers can now have guns in their cars, there's no longer any of that gender-equality crap in state-based equal pay laws,  and the state ranked the first in increased unemployment and job loss misery last year!  

Governor Walker should be proud.  That he is facing a recall battle doesn't matter, because ringwraiths get their funding from their overlords and overladies:

Gov. Scott Walker raised an unprecedented $13.2 million over three months to fight off the recall bid against him, outdistancing his Democratic challengers and driving home the challenge they will have in beating the Republican incumbent.
Crisscrossing the country on fundraising trips, Walker has raised more than $25 million since January 2011 and has $4.9 million in cash on hand - numbers unlike any that have been seen for a political candidate in Wisconsin. Two-thirds of Walker's money came from out of state.
His stores of cash dwarf what his Democratic rivals have raised. But a report filed Monday showed an independent group supporting Democrat Kathleen Falk received $4.5 million, nearly all of it from unions and about a third of it from out of state.
Walker's fundraising is on par with that of second-tier presidential candidates. For instance, Rick Santorum raised $18.5 million between Jan. 1 and March 31, and Newt Gingrich raised a little less than $10 million during that period.
Walker has been able to raise so much because of the national appeal he developed with conservatives after his high-profile fight with labor unions and a quirk in Wisconsin law that allows unlimited fundraising while recalls are pending.

 ....

The Democrats raised little compared with Walker. Falk, a former Dane County executive, raised $977,000 and had $118,000 on hand. Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett raised $831,500 and had $475,500 on hand.
Barrett didn't get into the governor's race until March 30 - 2½ months after Falk - but had nearly $500,000 to start, left over from his recent mayoral campaign.
Barrett is vying with Falk to win the May 8 Democratic primary and take on Walker in the general recall election June 5. Also running as Democrats are Secretary of State Doug La Follette and state Sen. Kathleen Vinehout of Alma.

It is hilarious.  The best democracy money can buy, and most of it from out of state and from a few large donors:

Conservative billionaire Diane Hendricks gave Walker $500,000. Hendricks co-founded Beloit-based ABC Supply, a roofing wholesaler and siding distributor, with her husband, Ken, who died in a 2007 fall.
Her donation was the single largest ever to a gubernatorial candidate in the state and tied the $500,000 given to Walker over recent months by Bob Perry, owner of Houston-based Perry Homes and a chief backer of the Swift Boat Veterans ads against Democrat John Kerry in the 2004 race for president.
"Wisconsin's never seen anything like this kind of money," said Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause in Wisconsin. "This is all to persuade a relatively tiny universe of undecided voters. It'll be the highest cost per voter spent in the history of the nation in terms of the cost of persuading people."
A Journal Sentinel analysis showed that $4.4 million of Walker's money, or a third of the total, came from Wisconsin donors. The rest came from out of state.
Normally, donors can give a maximum of $10,000 to a candidate for governor. But from the time recall petitions are taken out to the time a recall election is called, donors can give any amount.
No fundraising limit was in place for Walker for about two-thirds of the period covered in the latest report. The Democrats had to follow the normal fundraising limits the whole time because they were not the targets of a recall.
In addition to the $500,000 donation from Hendricks, Walker received two $250,000 donations in the latest period. One came from Las Vegas Sands president Sheldon Adelson, a billionaire casino mogul who, along with his wife, put $17.5 million into Winning the Future, a super PAC supporting Gingrich.
Also giving $250,000 was Richard DeVos, the co-founder of the parent company of direct marketing firm Amway. DeVos has been active in the school voucher movement, and Walker last year expanded Milwaukee's voucher program and established a similar one in eastern Racine County.
Five people gave the governor $100,000 each - John Childs of Massachusetts, chairman of private equity firm J.W. Childs Associates; Warren Stephens of Arkansas, chairman of financial services company Stephens Inc.; Robert Kern, founder of Waukesha power-generating firm Generac; his wife, Patricia Kern; and Patrick Ryan of Illinois, CEO of insurance firm Ryan Specialty Group.

So why am I so hard on one poor ringwraith?  Probably because he is so blatant in his goals and so destructive in his achievements, because he looks like a puppet with the strings held in only a few gold-ringed pudgy hands?  Because he makes a mockery out of democracy?

I'm not sure.  And of course I'm kidding about him being a Nazgûl .  Right?

Men's Problems? The Fault of Women, Naturally.

Fraser has written two posts (here and here)  on one of those pieces about what's-the-problem-with-men, the ones which always produce hundreds of misogynistic comments*.  Because the obvious response to any problem about men is to argue that it's really the fault of women.

Thus, if boys have trouble at school it's the fault of schools which favor the way girls learn (never mind that schools were initially created for boys and have used the same learning structures ever since).  If men don't go to college in the same percentages as women, it is the fault of American feminists indoctrination which has turned men off from education and destroyed their self-confidence.  Never mind that the phenomenon is global, that even in Saudi Arabia the majority of college graduates are women.

And if men move back to their parents and spend time playing computer games and watching pron, that, too is the fault of women who don't save themselves for marriage and who don't understand that women must be dependent on men's earnings to deserve marriage.

Do read the comments to the original article, especially if you believe misogyny is nonexistent. One of the comments mentions the stretched-out vaginas of women who have bedded too many men to be worthy for the glorious role of being the commenting asshole's wife.

Pay attention to the fact that those comments were moderated.  This particular one passed moderation.  It presumably is regarded as pertinent to the topic.  Just imagine what the comments must have been like which did not pass moderation!

I'm very curious about the thinking behind the editors who choose these pieces, especially given the misogyny fest they always provide.  Perhaps very few newspapers or magazines regard women as among their customers? 

Nah.  They like this shit.  They like the idea of providing a safe nest for the hatred of all women.  One must, after all, provide a voice for all the haters,  too.  That the misogynists cannot be engaged, that they attack anyone arguing back (however calmly and scientifically),  that the debate degenerates into nothing but name-calling from their part,  none of that matters as much as the click numbers and the advertising revenue.
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*The original article was published in early March.

Squash It Like A Cockroach

Today's child-rearing advice, from a Christianist minister:

"So your little son starts to act a little girlish when he is four years old and instead of squashing that like a cockroach and saying, 'Man up, son, get that dress off you and get outside and dig a ditch, because that is what boys do,' you get out the camera and you start taking pictures of Johnny acting like a female and then you upload it to YouTube and everybody laughs about it and the next thing you know, this dude, this kid is acting out childhood fantasies that should have been squashed.
Dads, the second you see your son dropping the limp wrist, you walk over there and crack that wrist. Man up. Give him a good punch. Ok? You are not going to act like that. You were made by God to be a male and you are going to be a male. And when your daughter starts acting too butch, you reign her in. And you say, 'Oh, no, sweetheart. You can play sports. Play them to the glory of God. But sometimes you are going to act like a girl and walk like a girl and talk like a girl and smell like a girl and that means you are going to be beautiful. You are going to be attractive. You are going to dress yourself up.'

It's a real problem for these folk.  It's all supposed to be essentialist, whether determined by some divine party or the weirder type  of evolutionary psychology.  But at the same time you gotta beat it into the children.  Not to mention the fact that this roaring and yelling gentleman (audio at the link)  usurps the right to define what being male or female might mean.

In the Left Corner: Motherhood. In the Right Corner: Feminism. Let The Fight Begin!

After writing this post I have no patience with mummy/mommy wars, none whatsoever.  Even when they are ignited kindly and carefully as is the case in this New York Times debate series.

I wonder if it would work for you, too?  Go and read my earlier post and then read the installments in that debate.  This one:

The U.S. publication of “The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women” by the French feminist Elisabeth Badinter is getting a lot of attention in the press; indeed, it’s a book club feature on the Motherlode blog in The New York Times.
Is Badinter right? Has women’s obsession with being the perfect mother destroyed feminism? In particular, has this trend of “attachment parenting” been bad for working moms?

Of course attachment parenting (or home schooling, say), by mothers alone, destroys their ability to earn any money for themselves and the bargaining power which comes with that money.  Of course.  Whether that is bad for feminism depends on what one means by feminism.

But the real story is something quite different.  It's based on a few words in that blurb:

"Women's obsession with being the perfect mother."

Such a beautiful group of words!  And not a lie.  In fact, they have a perfectly clear meaning.  But note all those creatures swimming deep below those clear surface waters, deep in the muddy undertow:

It's mothering that requires attachment parenting now, not fathering, whatever we call the philosophy.  It's women who do parenting, not men, and there is one perfect way of parenting.  Only women are obsessed with that perfect way, not the rest of the society!

Nope, you are imagining that continuing commentary of how much children suffer when mother go out to work (latchkeys, juvenile delinquency).   Nope, you have never read warning stories about bad daycare givers.   Nope,  you never read that article worrying about stay-at-home mothers having a glass of wine during the daytime.  Nope, there are no articles about how bad mothering is punished in this country, beginning with the women who are addicted while pregnant.  Nope, you never heard someone tell a story about childhood mishap when the listener chipped in with "And where was your mother?" 

Indeed, if you have imagined any of those things then you are "obsessed" with how to be a perfect mother. 

It's the frame I cannot abide any longer.  The frame is stupid, it is destructive and it makes most everything else into one of those invisible elephants.  I get the utility of asking a few questions about phenomena such as attachment parenting and home-schooling from the point of view of women's rights and lives.  That's not done very often.

But mostly the framing stinks to high heavens.  Like the Mommy/Mummy Wars in general.

What I Learned On The Net And Wish I Had Not...

I picked up Sheri Tepper's Gibbon's Decline and Fall (1996) to look for a specific reference and got stuck re-reading parts of it.  I remembered the way I felt about the book when it first came out:  It seemed exaggerated in ways it did not intend and the misogynists in it came across pretty artificial in the things they said.  Indeed, I was uncomfortable with that book, thinking that it went too far.

But when I re-read some of it recently the statements she put into the mouths of the woman-hating villains in the book sound familiar and natural!  That's because I have now come across them on those "manosphere" hate sites.

This suggests to me that either life imitates art or (which is more likely) Tepper by 1996 had seen enough misogynistic statements to know how they sound.  Given that she worked for a well-known and well-hated women's health organization  the latter is more likely.

Austerity For Some, Bad Macroeconomic Theories For Others

Paul Krugman writes about that austerity business today (as he has done many times in the past).  How austerity could result in an economic recovery requires an extremely odd reading of economic theories. 

How that reading became the mainstream take would be worth a book or two.  How the lessons of the Great Depression could be so completely forgotten, how Maynard Keynes got dropped into the dustbins of history, all that deserves a proper explanation.   But we are not going to get one.

Instead, we will see the general trend of "failing upwards" or at least of "failing in place."  The costs of having been wrong are miniscule, both for the experts and for those popularizing the expert opinions.  It is only now that the costs of austerity are clearer that a few protesting voices are getting prominence.

Remember the "Irish miracle?"  I recall reading about it and trying to understand what might be driving such a miracle, given that Ireland had no unusual natural resources, no greater knowledge basis than other comparable countries and no lower labor costs than, say, Eastern European countries.

I concluded that the miracle was a bubble.  That bubble has now burst, but that's not the whole explanation for countries like Ireland, Greece and Spain.

The austerity politics have made things worse.  Much, much worse.  And countries belonging to the European Union no longer have access to many old macroeconomic tools, such as subsidies for export industries, tariffs on imports or the devaluation of currencies.  They are left with limited tools to cope with giant problems.

Unexceptionalism: A Primer.

That would be the title of E.L. Doctorow's fierce opinion piece in the New York Times.  That the piece appeared in the Times is in itself fairly astonishing.  True voices of the real left (rather than milquetoast centrists) are mostly excluded from all the polite places such as rowdy political commentary and political television shows and the pages of the New York Times or the Washington Post (once great newspapers, the both of them, and I hope they will return to such a status).

The same distinction applies to gender debates.  Those debates can have the most extreme conservative views, sure, but they cannot have a single militant feminist or even an actual liberal feminist (someone who has studied history and theory and so on).

These exclusions distort the debate.  The allowable extremism at the conservative end is much further out than the allowable extremism at the liberal end.  This makes the "center" skip happily rightwards.

Thus, I welcome this opinion piece.  We need these debates wider than they have allowed to be.

But I'm not sure whether I like the idea of American exceptionalism or the exceptionalism of any particular country, because once Americans, say, think of themselves as exceptional then there's nothing that could be learned from other countries! 

The wheel must be reinvented, again and again.  Nope, the fact that single-payer systems work in health care in other countries (Canada, say) is irrelevant, because we Murkans are exceptional! 

Flaming-At-The-Mouth Conservatives

Thomas J. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein have written an opinion piece about the comity chasm between conservatives and liberals and even between Republicans and Democrats in politics. 

I have written about that many, many times, sigh.  But Washington Post has not which makes all this newsworthy. 

The underlying problem was beautifully shown in a cartoon some years ago where two (fairly representative) guests in a political program were portrayed, a conservative and a wishy-washy milquetoast Democrat.  The latter baa-baaed like a sheep but whenever the former opened his mouth, flames spewed out.  And that is how it has been, for a long time.

Mann and Ornstein:

Rep. Allen West, a Florida Republican, was recently captured on video asserting that there are “78 to 81” Democrats in Congress who are members of the Communist Party. Of course, it’s not unusual for some renegade lawmaker from either side of the aisle to say something outrageous. What made West’s comment — right out of the McCarthyite playbook of the 1950s — so striking was the almost complete lack of condemnation from Republican congressional leaders or other major party figures, including the remaining presidential candidates.
It’s not that the GOP leadership agrees with West; it is that such extreme remarks and views are now taken for granted.
We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.
The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

Indeed, those extreme views are taken for granted, but only from the right-wing.  We have slowly slipped into the expectation that rudeness, exaggeration and lies are perfectly acceptable, but only from conservatives or Tea Partiers or others of that ilk.  They are not even seen as rudeness, exaggeration or lies.  Do a few reversals inside your head and all this becomes obvious.

The WaPo opinion piece urges the media to drop their false equivalency games, the ones where each side of the political aisle is portrayed as being equally hostile, equally rude and equally extreme in its views.   Those are like arguing that anyone who has ever had a verbal row with a neighbor over a dividing fence is as bad as someone who beat a neighbor to unconsciousness.

I get the problem from the media point of view, I do.  It's scary to talk back to very rude people, especially if they are powerful and can cut you out, and the false equivalency games make journalists appear neutral.  Except that they are not, because the initial situation is not neutral.

The really fascinating question concerns the underlying reasons for the ideological changes in the Republican Party.  The current party would not accept Richard Nixon but would probably suspect him of membership in the Communist Party.  Are these changes because of Rush Limbaugh and others like him taking over the radio waves?  In short, is the wrath and bitterness that all this reflects manufactured or is it reflective of a real radicalization in American conservatives?

And if the latter, is there anything the Democratic Party could have done to stem the tide?  My guess is that the push for globalization by both parties in the 1990s has something to do with the ability of the hate-mongers to succeed.  Jobs left the country, people suffered, and president Clinton signed NAFTA.  Trade unions have been de-fanged, the median real earnings of Americans have not increased for a long time.  Add to that the collapse of the housing market and the most recent recession.  What is the message for the Democrats to those who struggle?

The Republican messages are about conspiracy theories (do NOT look at the powerful people with money, look at those uppity minorities, women and immigrants)  and ultimately propose feudal solutions which would make things even worse.  Indeed, much (if not most) of the reasons for the free-floating anger among Republican voters is caused by Republican policies.  But those voters are not told that on the radio, and if they watch Fox News they won't hear it on the television, either.