The GOP Health Care Plan. Or What Happens If "Obamacare" Is Repealed

Paul Ryan unveiled the Republican Alternative to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in June.  

It consists of a ragtag bag of old ideas the Republicans have offered for decades, with just a few things added that they would keep from the ACA:  Keeping adult children on their parents' health insurance to the age of 26,  and a very modified version of the ban on denying insurance to those with pre-existing conditions.*

But many of the proposals in this "plan" are old hat, too focused on pretending that people can rationally and logically choose among the many complicated and misleading** health insurance policies which would crop up if some form of the Ryan plan became reality.  They are also too focused on trying to find ways to kill both Medicaid (which covers the care for certain groups of the poor and also nursing home care for many elderly) and Medicare (which covers most of the rest of the care for those over sixty-five), and utterly too focused on trying to both reduce the number of people who actually have health insurance*** and on shifting money up in the income distribution, away from the poor and straight into the pockets of insurance companies.

The basic problems the Republicans face when trying to kill ACA, aka Obamacare, are several. 

The first one is that the Ryan plan is no plan at all, as even the conservatives themselves admit. 

The second one is that ACA has been  very successful in getting most Americans covered for health care expenses, and to step back from that could be impossible.  It's always harder to strip away benefits people have become accustomed to than to not create those benefits in the first place.

The third one is this:

On this last point, New York’s Jon Chait explained a while back, “The reason the dog keeps eating the Republicans’ health-care homework is very simple: It is impossible to design a health-care plan that is both consistent with conservative ideology and acceptable to the broader public. People who can’t afford health insurance are either unusually sick (meaning their health-care costs are high), unusually poor (their incomes are low), or both. Covering them means finding the money to pay for the cost of their medical treatment. You can cover poor people by giving them money. And you can cover sick people by requiring insurers to sell plans to people regardless of age or preexisting conditions. Obamacare uses both of these methods. But Republicans oppose spending more money on the poor, and they oppose regulation, which means they don’t want to do either of them.” 

The Republicans' basic approach doesn't work, either, because it is based on  certain simplistic assumptions about the power of consumer choice and the nature of the medical care markets.  Those assumptions might be somewhat relevant to buying tomatoes at a farmer's markets (Are these tomatoes as good quality as those at the next booth?   If so, how do the prices compare?), but have very little to do with both the complicated aspects of buying health coverage and with the lack of information almost all patients have when it comes to determining what care they need and how excellent a particular provider's care might be.

Doctors and hospitals are not tomatoes, and if consumers cannot judge the quality of care then knowing the prices is meaningless, too.   Add to that the fact that consumers know if they want tomatoes or not, but most of us don't know what health care we might require.  That, too, needs a visit to the provider to determine.

Still, Paul Ryan flogged his previous plan (or an earlier version of this plan) under the name The Patients' Choice Act, which we are to interpret as something very different from The Government Forcing Health Care Down Our Throats Act, also known as Obamacare.  Like throwing off our shackles and marching together into the sunset singing the conservative equivalent of the Internationale.

Except that we would be marching not into the sunset but into the places where the uninsured, the high-risk and those too poor to be able to afford health insurance congregate.

The good thing is that we can delay that march by making sure that the Republican Party doesn't have the majority to turn this rickety plan into an even more rickety reality.  We can do that by exerting Citizens' Choice, which is by voting.
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*  Modified, because if I had a pre-existing condition and if I then let my coverage lapse I could be denied new coverage after that or I could be required to pay humongous amounts for it:  The-One-Strike-And-You -Are-Out policy. 

Well, I would be put into a separate high-risk pool then, to be covered by whatever amount politicians would be willing to allocate towards it. Removing high-risk individuals from the marketplace increases the profits of health insurance companies and probably reduces the care those individuals can get because:

By concentrating sick people into these high-risk pools, the premiums are super high — about two times the cost of regular insurance — and the plans typically have fewer benefits and much higher deductibles. At such high costs, people must be subsidized to buy high-risk insurance. This is expensive: The Republican plan calls for $25 billion in funding. And it covers few people. Analyzing a similar plan, the CBO estimated that only 3 million people would be covered. That is a bad deal, especially considering that the ACA has now covered 20 million Americans.

**  The plan would allow the sale of rubbish policies, those which look very affordable but only because when you do get ill they pay for the band-aids and the aspirin, the rest is out-of-pocket. 

It would also encourage the sale of insurance policies across state lines.  Why would this be bad you might ask?  It's not all bad, of course, but there are real negatives to that old plank in the Republican platform:

Critics of the across-state-lines plan worry about negative consequences of letting insurers shop for the state regulator of their choice. Just as many businesses tend to incorporate in Delaware, or credit card companies have headquarters in South Dakota, insurers may end up congregating in whatever state offers the most lenient regulations. That could mean that customers who get sick could be harmed because there are few comprehensive policies available, or because consumer protections are weak when things go wrong.

***  - High-risk people would swim in their poorly-funded pool, which means their insurance coverage would be less than it is now. 

- The Ryan plan strongly pushes increased use of Health Savings Accounts (money consumers save themselves, with tax advantages that make them different from usual savings accounts)  and higher deductibles (the share consumers must pay out-of-pocket before their insurance starts paying for anything within a certain time period, usually a year).  Both these initiatives mean that insurance would pay less and that out-of-pocket costs would be higher, which means less coverage overall.

- The plan would also reduce tax subsidies for those who get their policies through their employers.  That makes health insurance more expensive and less likely to be offered at all, given that the reduction in the tax subsidies is also proposed for the employers who then would have fewer incentives to offer health insurance at all.

- Rubbish policies would be allowed, and consumers who have bought those because they are "affordable"  would find how little coverage they have only after they fall ill.

- If inter-state insurance sales are strongly encouraged, insurance companies might settle in states with the least regulations of their activity, and that could allow them to limit what the policies cover as well as make it possible for the companies to deny payment for more services actually rendered.  All those nice things the ACA requires to be covered would, once again, become optional.

- Finally, the poor would have drastically reduced access to health care coverage, because the Ryan plan's preferred alternative would turn the Federal assistance to states' Medicaid programs into block grants, and block grants are inflexible and drop in value over time:

The CBPP study observes that the real problem with block grants is their inflexibility. When a program is converted from federal funding to block grants, the initial grant is typically pegged to the most recent spending on the program, but there's rarely any mechanism to revisit the funding as conditions change or in light of population growth.
That's why the resources deteriorate over time.

The poor are also much more likely to end up with the rubbish policies, because the initial price tag is much lower, and the Ryan plan's emphasis on more out-of-pocket spending by consumers would hit the poorest consumers the hardest.

Whether the promised (but not quantified) tax credits the plan would offer to those who aren't covered by their employers or eligible for Medicaid would be sufficient the reduce the suffering to the poor is impossible to define, because of that non-quantification.

The 2016 Draft Platform of The Republican Party: Would ISIS Like It?

Every time I get discouraged by the corporate dingleberry-ism of too many politicians in the Democratic Party I try to remind myself what the alternative is:  the Republican Party.   Today the Republicans did that job of reminding me.

That's because they are debating the 2016 party platform, and it looks* to be turning into something very rickety:

Republicans moved on Tuesday toward adopting a staunchly conservative platform that takes a strict, traditionalist view of the family and child rearing, bars military women from combat, describes coal as a “clean” energy source and declares pornography a “public health crisis.”

It is a platform that at times seems to channel the party’s presumptive presidential nominee, Donald J. Trump — calling to “destroy ISIS,” belittling President Obama as weak and accusing his administration of inviting attacks from adversaries.

But the document positions itself far to the right of Mr. Trump’s beliefs in other places — and amounts to a rightward lurch even from the party’s hard-line platform in 2012 — especially as it addresses gay men, lesbians and transgender people.

 

Victorian, the New York Times calls it on social values.  In common parlance, the Republicans want no same-sex marriage, trans people must use the toilets of the biological sex they were determined to have at birth, there will be no abortion for the sluts (naturally)**,  and "traditional" family roles are central. 

Some of this is written in code, so that when "traditional families" are mentioned the reference carries a lot of extra weight to the true believers.  On the surface level it means disapproval of same-sex marriages and single parents, most of whom are women, but the connotations of that term "traditional" are likely to be much wider:  Perhaps it refers to  a family where the wife subjugates herself to the husband's headship, where she stays at home fulfilling her Biblical helpmate role and her biological fertility role, while the husband is the bread-winner and the public face (even in one sense the core) and the ruler of the whole family.

Or perhaps not.  But that is what I smell.

I have heard rumors that the current power struggles inside the teetering Republican Party might be won by the religious fundamentalist faction, and the weirdness of the new platform supports that conjecture.  Also:

Social conservatives in the party exerted significant influence over the drafting and amending of the platform this week, succeeding in almost all of their efforts to add language that pushed the document more to the right.

And what Republicans will probably end up with when they formally vote next week to ratify the platform approved in committee on Tuesday is a text that can seem almost Victorian in its moralizing and deeply critical of how the modern American family has evolved.

The platform demands that lawmakers use religion as a guide when legislating, stipulating “that man-made law must be consistent with God-given, natural rights.”

It also encourages the teaching of the Bible in public schools because, the amendment said, a good understanding of its contents is “indispensable for the development of an educated citizenry.”

Did your hair rise up when you read that?  Mine did.

But something in that quote is truly hilarious, assuming it correctly reflects the draft platform:  That reference to God-given, natural rights would tremendously please ISIS, the vilest of all religious terrorist groups!  They'd love to be in charge of defining what the celestial power*** believes are the natural and divinely-decreed rights of people, they would!  Just like these US fundies love that role.

Still, I doubt that the creators of that platform plan to let extremist Wahhabist religious beliefs to stipulate what laws are being made in the United States, because the weirdos here are Christian ones, or that they want the Koran to be taught in US public schools.  I suspect their hair would rise up if anyone pointed out that their platform is also rooting for those things, because the government cannot promote one religion over others.

This is hilarious within the wider foreign politics context as well:  The Republican Party platform wants to "destroy ISIS" and then offers a bundle of so-called socially conservative goals which ISIS would certainly regard as at least a first small step in the right direction.



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* Some parts of the draft report have been leaked.  Here, for example.  More of its possible contents are available here.  This is a good summary of the way the 2016 draft platform has veered away from mainstream opinions in the US and toward the extreme fringe of the Republican Party.  One snippet from it is worthwhile on this women's lib blog:

On military issues, delegates formally expressed opposition to requiring women to join the draft and rejected language that would have softened the party’s opposition to women serving in military combat roles. But an overwhelming majority of Americans support having women fight in combat and more see improved military effectiveness as a result of the change, according to polls taken in recent years by The Washington Post and the Pew Research Center.

That's really funny, too, because the Men's Rights Activists (MRAs) argue that it is the feminists who don't want women to join the draft or military women to serve in combat roles!  If they are right, then the creators of this part of the platform are feminists.  Except that everything pertaining to women, gender and sexuality in the platform is intended to nail really ancient and patriarchal values to the flag pole forevermore.  Women can't be in the military because they are supposed to be in the kitchen making sandwiches.

** Life News, an anti-abortion website,  loves the draft platform because it is the most forced-birth oriented ever.  They also note this:

Billy Valentine, director of government affairs at the Susan B. Anthony List, told Politico that the new Republican Party language could be “the strongest pro-life platform yet.”
“The life language that came out of the constitution subcommittee is even stronger than the 2012 language,” Valentine said.
Several strong pro-life leaders are in charge of drafting the new Republican Party platform. The Hill reports U.S. Sen. John Barrasso is the chair the Republican platform committee. Barrasso, who represents Wyoming, has a 100-percent pro-life voting record from the National Right to Life Committee. His appointment as chair signaled a strong party commitment to restoring unborn babies’ right to life.
There was some speculation that presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump would attempt to weaken the party’s pro-life position. In April, Trump said he “absolutely” wants to change the current pro-life platform to promote abortions in cases of rape and incest.

***  Their reference isn't to Echidne of the snakes, either.  More's the pity, because I'd run this country exceedingly well.

The First Monarch Butterfly of This Summer

Arrived today.  Monarch butterflies visit my garden every summer, possibly because I have plants from the milkweed family, many suitable weeds and lots of flowers with nectar.  Well, the weeds have flowers.

So I thought that I'd get the certificate for being an innkeeper for the Monarchs.  But that's not what the certificate is for; it's for making the inn and then trying to lure the travelers in.  In any case I love them.

But when I saw the first Monarch caterpillar some years ago

(Picture credit)


I thought I had accidentally eaten magical mushrooms.

It was a rainy summer morning, I had been up late the previous night, and I really needed that first cup of coffee I was sipping when I went outside, only to come face to face with a tiger-snake!  The caterpillar was huge.  And striped black and yellow.

In other news, I have been under the weather, which explains the not-writing business.   Something should be finished by tomorrow.  I'm sure you are happy to hear that.  Heh.

PS:  I ran after the butterfly with my cell phone, trying to catch its selfie, but to no avail. 

Short News Items On Women, 7/7/16; Bricklaying Competitions, Fox News Sexual Harassment And So On.

1.  Shania Clifford, 17, won a gold medal in the SkillsUSA Ohio masonry competition in late April, but she found in May (via Facebook!) that she would not be representing her area in the next stage of the competition, a national level leadership and skills competition.  Instead,  the young man who initially came third in the competition would:

Judges in the masonry program, a field usually dominated by men, originally awarded Clifford first place by a whopping 72 points.
Larry Moore, her instructor, said the scores of the top performers usually vary by only a couple of points, but Clifford’s column for the state competition was exceptional.
“She had the best plumb there,” Moore said. “Two or three corners were perfect.” Plumb refers to how straight a vertical edge is.
Stan Jennings, superintendent of the Scioto County Career Technical Center, was notified by SkillsUSA Ohio that Clifford would no longer be competing. A vague explanation was given: “The scores were inappropriately put in.”
Mike Cowles, director of Ohio’s SkillsUSA, did not return calls seeking comment.
Brittany Halpin, a spokeswoman for the Ohio Department of Education, which sponsors the competition, said in an email, “An error was made during the entry of scores into the final score spreadsheet.”
“This error affected results for several students,” Halpin said in the email, “and resulted in the rankings showing an incorrect winner of the competition.” Halpin added that no errors were made on the judges’ scoring sheets.

The Mason Contractors Association of America, after hearing about this mess, offered Clifford a chance to compete in its national competition next year:

"I figured it'd be a great opportunity to right a wrong," said Tim O'Toole, association spokesman.

Hmm.  I'd dearly love to know more about that error made in entering the scores, especially if there were no errors in the judges' scoring sheets.

My point is this:  It's not impossible that a weird kind of scoring mistake would occur at the same time as another rather unusual event:  A girl wins the masonry competition.  But because I can easily see other reasons than a scoring error which would explain that sudden reversal in the rankings, a more precise explanation about the type of error, how it happened, and which competitors it affected is necessary.

In the absence of such an explanation I'd temporarily go for the sexism explanation: 

Instead of viewing Shania Clifford as just an individual who has studied and worked hard in her chosen field, someone in power may have seen her as a symbol of all womanhood stomping into an area carefully colored male for all times.  And not only that, she beat the guys in their game!  This, my friends, is simply not acceptable.  It is humiliating.

I can imagine someone feeling an existential threat of that type, a threat which must be snuffed in the bud.  Then we get scoring errors to reach the right conclusion, and the day is saved.

Note, also that this is an example of what works to keep women away from the traditionally male blue-collar occupations, so that the Men's Rights Activists can keep telling us that women don't want to do the nasty menz jobs but just want all the nice menz benefits.  What could be more humiliating than to win the competition and then to hear, via Facebook (!), that the victory has been canceled?

On the other hand, the nice gesture of the Mason Contractors Association of America makes me feel more optimistic about the future.  Clifford is a person, not a symbol of any of that wider stuff, and she should be treated with the respect any other competitor receives.

My General Malaise Explained

...while reading John Gray's analysis of the Brexit and related issues (1).

It's this bit in his arguments which gave me that ah-all-is-made-clear moment concerning that niggling dissatisfaction I've felt for a long time when thinking about global political developments:

Larger and longer changes are at work. The course of events over the past decades has not followed any progressive narrative. There is no detectable movement in the direction of internationalism or liberal freedoms. The Soviet Union collapsed only to be followed by an imperial hybrid: a mix of old-fashioned tyranny and illiberal democracy that can command more popular legitimacy than many Western governments. Post-Mao China embraced turbo-charged capitalism, but the long-awaited move to political reform did not arrive and Xi Jinping is reasserting party control. The EU responded to the close of the Cold War with a project of simultaneous expansion and greater integration, a hubristic ambition that has left European institutions weaker than they have ever been. Like the financial elites shown to be so pitifully short-sighted in the early hours of Friday morning, politicians and pundits who bang on about adapting to change have been confounded by changes that they believed could not happen.

Remember Martin Luther King's famous statement about the arc of the moral universe?  This one:  “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” 

Well, he was wrong.

Or rather, he was right, but only to the extent people keep pushing towards justice.  The minute that pressure is removed entropy wins.

I paint with a broad brush there, because not everything in global politics is getting worse.  But the powers which appear to be the strongest are economic ones, having to do with globalization, the rights of capital to cross borders to maximize profits and the rights of workers to do the same so that the capital can enjoy the cheapest possible labor force (2).  

Just consider how capitalism won in China but democracy so far has not and how the rulers of the European Union most resemble a gang of accountants, financiers and economists who view the people of Europe as economic pawns in some giant global chess game, mere economic factors of production (widgets) without cultures or histories.

Indeed, unbridled capitalism appears to be winning.  Even the austerity politics so popular among world's rulers today are a way of re-dividing the economic cake:  

The slices that go to the workers get thinner and thinner, because "we" can no longer afford all those fat social benefits, while the  slabs on the plates of the corporations get bigger and bigger, to tempt them to settle in this  country rather than in some other country, possibly a country where workers never got any social benefits to begin with.

No, I do not like the business-centered flavor of this cake.

The resurgence of religious fundamentalism is another development I dislike.  It may be no accident that we see it rising hand-in-hand with capitalism, what with that "opiate of the masses" aspect of religions (3).  Vladimir Putin in Russia uses the Orthodox Church to prop up his earthly power,  Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey opens a new mosque almost every day, the violence and wars in Iraq and Syria (with many underlying causes) are now explicitly about religious divisions.  Even the US conservatives court religious fundamentalism to prop up their  voting base.

Unbridled capitalism and religious fundamentalism have one thing in common:  They are both hierarchical structures, and both justify those hierarchies as necessary and unavoidable, appealing to either divine or economic "laws".  At the same time, they can live in symbiosis with each other, enabling each other, even enabling the global paralysis when it comes to fighting climate change.

But it's not just the apparent dominance of those developments that have caused my malaise:  It's also the apparent weakness of any opposition movements against them, the lack of any solutions which would tug that arc of moral universe towards justice, even the lack of agreement on how such an opposition movement would look and what it would promote.

I may be overly pessimistic about that.  Still, it's time to start building that opposition movement and on a global level.


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(1)  I'm not addressing Gray's other points in this post though they are interesting (and debatable), too.

(2)  This doesn't mean that people wouldn't voluntarily migrate for the economic benefits.  That's probably the most important long-term reason for all migrations.  Neither does this mean that globalization wouldn't have benefited some of the poorer countries on this earth.

Instead, what I argue here is that the powers-that-be view this migration from the corporate point of view, given the common focus on people as factors of production with no other discernible characteristics.  That, my friends, is the corporate angle.

 (3)  That was Karl Marx. He also wrote:

The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world.

I think that Marx oversimplified the appeal of religion, unlikely to die off even in some communist paradise.

But it's certainly true that many of the dictators in, say, the Middle East and the Gulf have allowed the frustrations of their people to be steered into a religious framework, because it was viewed as less threatening for the dictators themselves and because religion provided an alternative web of social cohesion, one which allowed the economic exploitation to continue.

And so we come to the present time where  ISIL or Daesh can argue that the nations of the West are the "crusader nations," when most of the West these days is secular rather than Christian.  Daesh also re-frames the past evil deeds of  colonial Western nations in that region as something that was  motivated by religious hatred rather than by what actually motivated those deeds:  economic greed and the desire for global political power.






 

On Ursula le Guin

Ursula le Guin is a wonder-ful and wonderful writer.  If you are not familiar with her sci-fi-cum-fantasy work you are in for a real treat.  Her most famous books are The Left Hand of Darkness,  which is about a planet whose inhabitants are otherwise like humans except that they lack permanent sexual differentiation, and The Dispossessed, which asks questions about what is possible in the political and economic arrangements of our lives.

See how great she is?  She's giving you two science-fiction books with weird technology, even higher mathematics and physics, and also a  treatise  on how our societies might look if we didn't have to spend so much time and agony over gender questions, plus a treatise on capitalism, anarchism and communism.

But she might just be most famous for her short story "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas."  If you weren't assigned that in an ethics college course I recommend it for this Fourth of July long weekend*.  In one sense it's a very short short story, in another sense you never get to its end.

My favorites among her books are still the EarthSea series.  If you like Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings you might like Earth Sea.   The latter describes a simpler world, the writing is more elegant and condensed, and its basic ethical frameworks different:  Tolkien applied Catholic ethics to his world, le Guin applied Taoism.

But Earth Sea also has wizardry and dragons and all sorts of fun stuff.

The very latest books and story collections in the series are the best, with writing so honed that it's crystal-clear and sharp enough to cut, each word carefully picked to bear the largest possible meaning, everything superfluous abandoned, to allow the simple stories to be about truly large questions: death, freedom, love, our proper places in the plans of the universe.

I leave you with this quote from le Guin, useful when we try to understand why people often defend their own oppression:

“We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom. We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable.”

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* Wiser voices note that it might not be appropriate for a holiday weekend, being a bit depressing.

Global Confidence in Donald Trump? Hillary Clinton? Vladimir Putin? Recent Pew Research Center Findings.

This table from a recent Pew Research Center survey of global attitudes is a fun one to explore:

Or a frightening one, should Donald Trump become the next president of the United States.  Note that the specific political and economic histories of the surveyed countries matters.  For example, that Greece has very little confidence in Angela Merkel is easily explained.

Another fascinating nugget of information in the survey concerns the difference in the confidence men and women have in Vladimir Putin as a foreign leader:

Men are more likely to have confidence in Putin.  My instant reaction was that this is easily explained by the patriarchal opinions Putin frequently spouts.*

Those will tend to put more women off, because they are bad omens about how he is likely to act when it comes to women's rights and stuff.  On the other hand, his "he-man-rules" demeanor might please some men.** 

A more rigorous exploration of that difference would require studying if belonging to a more right-wing party correlates with greater confidence in Putin and if men are a larger fraction among the members of such parties, but even if the answers to those questions were positive we couldn't rule out my instant reaction as one of the underlying reasons for both right-wing views and the love of one Vladimir Putin.  So.

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*  Not that he is at all alone among powerful politicians in being a sexist asshat.  This 2014 article reminds us of that.

** The stance is shown here:

I love that picture.  It's the most hilarious thing ever.

The SCOTUS On Abortion And Scientific Evidence

A long-standing strategy of the forced-birthers has been to impose more and more regulations on abortion clinics.  These regulations pretend to be about preserving the health of the women who have abortions by stipulating that abortion clinics should be equipped like ambulatory surgical centers, that the doctors working there should have admitting rights to the local hospitals and so on.  The real intent, naturally, is to force abortion clinics to close.  That makes getting an abortion more difficult, at least for the poorer women who can't afford the costs of long travel.

One of the more unsavory aspects of this forced-birth strategy have been the bogus health risk arguments its proponents keep advancing, such as the idea that abortion causes breast cancer (not true) and also the general fear-mongering which tries to destroy the mental health of women who have had abortions, while pretending to care about that very health. 

To put that fear-mongering into a wider context, note that giving birth is much more dangerous, on average, than having a legal abortion in the United States:

A key study published in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology estimated that the risk of a woman dying after childbirth was 10 times greater than after an abortion. The study estimated that between 1998 and 2005, one woman died in childbirth for every 11,000 babies born. That compares with one in 167,000 women who died of abortion complications. Doctors who perform abortions say the most common complications are not bladder issues or problems with reproductive organs -- as some abortion opponents like to emphasize -- but mild infection that can be easily treated.

Now the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) has addressed the question whether strict health regulations of the above type, as used by the state of Texas, constitute an "undue burden" for Texas women seeking abortion.  The 5-3 decision answers that question affirmatively:

The Supreme Court on Monday ruled resoundingly for abortion rights advocates in the court’s most important decision on the controversial issue in 25 years, striking down abortion-clinic restrictions in Texas that are similar to those enacted across the country.

...


The Texas provisions required doctors who perform abortions at clinics to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital and ordered clinics to meet hospital-like standards of surgical centers.

“The surgical center requirement, like the admitting-privileges requirement, provides few, if any, health benefits for women, poses a substantial obstacle to women seeking abortions, and constitutes an ‘undue burden’ on their constitutional right to do so,” Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote for the majority.

The missing scientific evidence about the actual (rather than imaginary) risks of legal abortions mattered in the decision:

Among the evidence undermining the surgical-center requirement, Breyer said, is a finding that early-term abortions have a lower mortality rate — five deaths in a decade in Texas — than childbirth, which the state allows to take place at home, or procedures such as a colonoscopy or liposuction, which do not carry the surgical-center requirement.

Texas could also not show why doctors needed an admitting privilege to a local hospital, Breyer said.

“When directly asked at oral argument whether Texas knew of a single instance in which the new requirement would have helped even one woman obtain better treatment, Texas admitted that there was no evidence in the record of such a case,” Breyer wrote.

In short, why fix something when it's not broken, as the old saying goes.

That's not to argue that abortions has no health risks.  But other similar or larger health risks of various procedures do not provoke the same concern from the Republican politicians of Texas.

One ethicist who is fervently opposed to legal abortions has argued that this SCOTUS decision is just a temporary setback, that all the forced-birth side needs to regain the right to turn abortion clinics into centers of nuclear medicine is to collect stories of harm to women who have had an abortion.

But that wouldn't work, in my opinion,  because nobody argues that abortion has no health risks.  Rather, the question is whether these risks are so large that they require especially stringent regulations, compared to, say, colonoscopy, liposuction or home births.  Those procedures do not  provoke the same urgency  for more stringent regulations, despite having higher mortality risks.





 

Brexit Dreams And Nightmares

Introduction

The option "Leave" beat the option "Remain" in Britain's vote about whether it should stay in the European Union  (EU) or leave it.  And the floodgates opened.

If I were a wiser writer I'd stop right there, because so far I've uttered no opinions unsupported by any evidence:  the kind of analysis I've far too often read about the nightmare or the dream that is Brexit. 

Sure, there are factual articles, too, telling us how Cameron got into this political mess in the first place, what Britain pays to the EU and what Britain receives in return,  and what the various options Britain now has might be. But one reason why so many articles about the Brexit are opinion pieces is that the kind of data we would need for strong conclusions about the vote are very hard to find.

Take the information we might get from exit polls:  To find out the demographics of those who voted Leave and those who voted Remain.  But the Brexit vote didn't have official exit polls.  The ones which exist are private polls.

The private poll I saw was on the Lord Ashcroft site.  Google Lord Ashcroft and you will find that he is a British conservative, domiciled in Belize (to avoid paying UK taxes?), with rather Trumpian characteristics, though without the financial inheritance Trump has.  He also tells us on his site that he was for Leave himself.

This doesn't necessarily make the polls biased or inaccurate, because I doubt that it is Lord Ashcroft himself who carries out the polling.   In any case, his site offers the most comprehensive demographic data on voting patterns that I have been able to find and it is that data I wish to discuss here, with some fairly serious criticisms.

Are Millennial Men More Sexist Than Their Forebears?

Are millennial men (in the US) as sexist as their dads?  That's what Andrea S. Kramer and Alton B. Harris ask in the June Harvard Business Review (HBR).  They begin by setting up the needed tension in the article by proposing that this is not so at all:

Millennials, those Americans now between 16 and 36 years old, are often spoken of as if they’re ushering in a new era of enlightened interpersonal relations. For example, in 2013 Time predicted Millennials would “save us all” because they are “more accepting of differences…in everyone.” That same year, The Atlantic stated that Millennials hold the “historically unprecedented belief that there are no inherently male or female roles in society.” And in 2015 the Huffington Post wrote that Millennial men are “likely to see women as equals.”

They then give us the evidence that the millennial men might  be every bit as sexist as their dads and granddads, maybe even more sexist.

The main bits of evidence are two:

The first is a study published last February which looked at how biology students ranked other students in their class in terms of intelligence and the grasp of the taught material.  The study found that female students ranked other students the way objective measures would rank them, but male students showed a bias which favored other male students as being particularly intelligent and well prepared in the material, even when, say, a female student had the highest grades in that class.  I have written about that study on this blog.

The second bit of evidence is the truly interesting one.  Kramer and Harris:

Millennial men’s views of women’s intelligence and ability even extend to women in senior leadership positions. In a 2014 survey of more than 2,000 U.S. adults, Harris Poll found that young men were less open to accepting women leaders than older men were. Only 41% of Millennial men were comfortable with women engineers, compared to 65% of men 65 or older. Likewise, only 43% of Millennial men were comfortable with women being U.S. senators, compared to 64% of Americans overall. (The numbers were 39% versus 61% for women being CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, and 35% versus 57% for president of the United States.) 

Now that made my hair stand up and my mood plummet!  Back to the patriarchy we go.  Hmm.

I downloaded that 2014 survey, to find out more about it:   How many subjects were interviewed in each age-and-sex category?   Did the survey standardize for other possible demographic differences between the older and the younger men?  How did the millennial and older women compare to each other and the men in their answers those questions?   And exactly what is it the questions asked and exactly how were those questions framed?*

The survey report gives an e-mail address for anyone who wishes to know more about the research methodology, so I gave it a try.  But my e-mail was returned to me with one of those "recipient unknown" messages.  Bitter despair followed, of course, because I couldn't get any answers to those very important questions, so important that they determine how much our hairs should rise and our moods plummet after reading the findings.

But what I did find was this:

Respondents for this survey were selected from among those who have agreed to participate in online surveys. the data have been weighted to reflect the composition of the adult population. Because the sample is based on those who agreed to participate in the panel, no estimates of theoretical sampling error can be calculated. For complete survey methodology, including weighting variables, please contact ..

In ordinary speech, the participants were people who had agreed to participate in online surveys.  That means they were not picked as numbers are in a lottery, which means that they are not a random sample from the general population.   That, in turn, means that we can't use the results to draw statistical conclusions about that general population. All this is hiding behind that 'theoretical sampling error' talk.

Isn't that fun?  Because those who are keen to take online surveys could differ from those who are not keen in other ways, too, we cannot tell if the 2014 Harris poll says something about the millennial men in the US.  All we can tell is that some unknown number of young men in that specific poll answered certain questions, the exact specification of which we are not told, in a certain way.

The two numbers the survey summary gives us is the total sample size, 2047, and the number of full-time or self-employed among those 2047:  889. Both of those apply to people over the age of eighteen.

We could go and look up the statistics for full-time and self-employed people as percentages of all people eighteen and over in the US in the Bureau of Labor Statistics tables, to see if at least the two numbers we are given in the survey seem to match what is going on out there in the bigger population.

I did that for ten minutes.  The data I found was only for full-time employed people and for the groups of those aged sixteen and over or twenty and over.   But even that rough research suggests that the Harris poll people tilt strongly towards those not employed.  It's likely, therefore, that the sample wouldn't look like the population in other ways, too.

None of that means the results can be proved not to apply to the population of young millennial men in the US, just that they cannot be proved to apply to it. 
So where does that leave us?  Asking for a better study, my erudite and sweet readers (all willing to work with female engineers), and restraining ourselves from reading too much into this particular one.


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*  Those questions would matter more if the sample had been a statistically random one, but they still matter for the understanding of the answers.

To address my questions one by one:

-  How many subjects were interviewed in each age-and-sex category?  

This clearly matters.  If the number of young men in the sample was, say, 25 or 50, we would judge the results differently than if it was 250 or 500.  Note that we cannot guess that sub-sample sized from the overall sample size (which is told to us) by using our knowledge about how many people, in general, are of different ages, because the sample is not a random drawing from the population.

 -  Did the survey standardize for other possible demographic differences between the older and the younger men?

This matters, because the HBR article implicitly compares young men to their fathers, thus assuming that the sample of young men in the Harris poll would differ from the sample of old men in the poll only in age, not in the percentages of, say, different ethnic groups in the sub-samples.

To see why these other demographics matter, suppose that in some country immigration has changed the average makeup of the citizens a lot in the last thirty years or so.  Then any apparent change in values we might see might not be a change over time in the same population, but a reflection of the different values new immigrants have brought with them from their source countries.  Those values could be more progressive or less progressive than the 'native' values, depending on the values of the source countries, but we cannot interpret the apparent change in values as meaning that the long-time citizens of that country have changed their values over time.

-  How did the millennial and older women compare to each other and the men in their answers those questions?

This question matters for checking purposes and for the purposes of interpretation:  The HBR article looks at the more sexist attitudes of young men, compared to older men.  That case would be made stronger if we found that young women are less sexist than older women, and it would be made different, and weaker in one sense, if we found that sexism has apparently increased in the youngest population for both men and women.

It's always good to check what the reported percentages might be in the implicit comparison group in any social science study.  If I tell you a made-up finding that 90% of Italian-origin people eat pasta you are unlikely to assume that 0% of other groups eat pasta, because you know about pasta-eating customs.  But in other contexts it's easy to slip into the alternative assumption that some percentages are 0% in the implicit comparison group.  Think of crime rates by race or ethnicity or literacy rates for girls and boys in some developing countries.

- And exactly what is it the questions asked and exactly how were those questions framed?

The importance of this is fairly obvious.  If I asked you when you stopped flossing your teeth you would find that questions enraging.  The way a question is formulated is crucial for the proper interpretation of the answers.  Were the people asked if they would be comfortable working with a female engineer, say, or were they asked if they thought female engineers were less capable, or if the occupation was less gender-apppropriate?  The exact formulation of the question may carry one or more of these types of associations.

Note, also, that Kramer and Harris suggest that the findings might be because young men haven't had exposure to female engineers, CEOs and presidents (hmm).  A question asking about that would have not cost very much and would have made the survey results more useful.  Pilot studies (tiny pre-studies for methodological and question-setting purposes) are useful for making improvements of these types.

More on Donald Trump's Attack Tactics: He Aims At The Mirror.

If the US presidential elections weren't about a pretty serious business (global survival and shit) I'd so enjoy the macabre humor that keeps cropping up!

Well, I think it's macabre.  Your mileage might vary.

Take Trump's political tactic which is a twisted version of the old Republican strategy:  attack the strength of your opponent. It's a twisted version, because Trump first assigns his own political weaknesses to his opponent, then attacks them.  That makes a weird kind of sense, since the relative absence of those Trumpish weaknesses is, of course, Hillary Clinton's strength.

So Trump has for some time called her "crooked Hillary" on Twitter and elsewhere.  Now compare that to the Trump University scam,  or Trump's contractor's use of undocumented foreign workers in the late 1970s and early 1980s, some of whom never got fully paid, and the resulting pensions fund lawsuit in the 1990s which Trump settled out of court. 

The Trump University case is, by the way, partly about racketeering charges against Trump.  Racketeering, as in violating the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act sounds a lot like being accused of --- what's the word I'm looking for? --- crookedness.

Now Trump has questioned Hillary Clinton's religious faith:

Donald Trump questioned Hillary Clinton's faith on Tuesday, claiming there's "nothing out there" about the former secretary of state's religious beliefs, according to a video captured by a conservative minister.

The video, taken by E.W. Jackson, a minister and former Republican nominee for lieutenant governor in Virginia, appeared to show part of Trump's private meeting with evangelical leaders in New York City. Trump went on the attack during the conversation, saying there's no information out there about Clinton's faith.
"Now, she's been in the public eye for years and years, and yet there's no — there's nothing out there,” Trump says in the video. “There's like nothing out there."

That is not just true, that there would be "nothing out there" about Hillary Clinton's religious affiliation.  I have been unable to avoid seeing references to it, starting from the 1990s.

But what I have not seen, at all, are public references to Donald Trump's religion, whatever it might be.  Some Playboy mansion version of the Manly Man Christianity, with perhaps occasional polygyny allowed?  I must admit that imagining the evangelical Christians and Trump as political bed-mates is just delicious.

What can we expect next from the Trump camp?  What kind of an attack?

How about complaining that Hillary Clinton's hairdos are unbecoming?

And Here We Go Again: The US Senate Rejects A Series of Gun Control Measures.

This was expected, of course.  If the 2012 massacre of elementary school children in Newtown, Connecticut, got nothing real done in the US Congress about gun control a massacre of adults certainly won't.

Even many massacres of many people don't seem to get access to guns controlled.  This applies to even assault-type, militaristic weapons with the only apparent advantage that they are pretty efficient at killing many people quickly.  And never mind that they have been the guns of choice in fourteen public mass shootings during the last ten years, half of those since last June.

I despair.  Of course I do, and so do many, many Americans.  But the appeal of guns appears tremendous, the political power of the National Rifle Association (NRA) is huge (huge! I tell you), and no amount of horror seems to make any dent in any of that.  Not vast numbers of people dying in mass shootings, not little children dying because careless availability of loaded guns, nothing makes a dent.

Still, there is something obscene about the re-branding of semi-automatic guns as "modern sporting rifles."  What is sporting about them?  Or are we to assume that hunting humans is now an acceptable form of sports?

I have nothing useful or cheering to say about any of this, and my apologies for that.  But I find it odd that the gun-rights people are so utterly absolutists, so very bent on their need to have open access to truly frightening weapons only good for efficient people-killing, and so very libertarian, given the enormous costs to the society their attitude ultimately causes.

It's as if someone demanded that drivers' licenses should not be required for cars, that any amount of alcohol or drugs is just fine for those driving a car, that people should be allowed to choose whether they drive on the left or on the right and should be allowed to change that choice from day to day or hour to hour, without informing anyone else about that choice, that cars could be routinely left in neutral and running while parked, and when the inevitable deaths of many on the roads would happen, an organization would be created to defend the absolute rights of Drivers Without Restrictions.  And without any insurance for the mayhem they caused.

Given the recalcitrance of the NRA types and the politicians they have acquired, perhaps different approaches are needed.

Remember those enormous social costs the sloppy access to guns causes in the US?  Let's make people who cause them internalize them, the same way obligatory car insurance internalizes some of the costs of poor driving.  Mandatory liability insurance for gun owners is not my idea or a particularly new idea.  But it's a baby step in the right direction, and it could be tailored to the gun one buys so that the buyers of "modern sporting rifles" would face a much heavier insurance bill than the guys of more modest killing weapons.

And what about creating competition for the NRA itself?  A good but apolitical gun owners' organization, one which offers the services gun owners need, might be able to reduce the exorbitant political power of the NRA by pulling away the more reasonable gun people.

Add your own suggestions for things which might work, given the current gridlocked political climate.

 

Grumpy Thoughts About Weird Political Thinking. Or Down The Rabbit Hole.

Writing about general politics, women's issues and gender politics can be terribly grating*, as if one's skin slowly becomes perforated and all the viciousness and the acid and the hatred seeps in.  That's when I go all grumpy and mean-spirited.

Here are a few of my not-so-nice grumpy thoughts, in no particular order of importance.  They are about the various ways we can fall down the rabbit hole.

1.  Nobody becomes an expert in, say, the UK politics simply by assuming that it all works exactly the same as US politics.  I see far too much American Internet commentary where the assumption is that total understanding of the situation in some European country can be established through an American filter.  That is just not true.  There are similarities, sure, but the details matter, differences in political systems and demographics matter, different histories and cultures matter, and nothing makes local knowledge unimportant.

2.  Europe is not one country with one major language and one shared history.  Americans shouldn't treat Europe that way, or assume that all countries in Europe participated in the genocide of Jews or in colonizing other parts of the world.  Or that all European countries are, say, places where gender equality is far advanced and the social safety net strong and firm.

Both of the above points apply even more strongly to countries elsewhere on this planet.  I chose to focus on Europe because the superficial similarities between, say, the UK and the US can be deceptive, leading many not-so-informed Americans to believe that they know more about the events in Europe than they actually do.  The reverse also applies:  Many Europeans have views about the US which are largely based on television series and movies and various stereotypes.

3.  Nuance.  In general.  Oh how I wish it were back in fashion.  Not because I would be a cucumber-sandwiches-and-tea type of goddess, but because reality truly is nuanced.  For example, the motives of the Orlando butcher can be many.  We don't have to insist on finding one single motive for what he did.

And while I'm criticizing the quality of political Internet debates, I also want to notice that snark** isn't really the same as refuting someone's arguments.  It can be fun and it can be deserved, but it's not a refutation. Reasoned arguments take effort, and following (and checking) them can also be hard work.  But the results from them can be greater information and better solutions.

4.  There's a tremendous (and invisible) bias in much of political writing of treating one side in a conflict as being without any agency at all.  It's strongest in political propaganda which wishes to paint some group or country as the evil one and so focuses on the deeds of only those 'demonic' forces, but it's also common in more balanced articles.

For instance, victims are often treated as passive objects of the horrible things which happen to them.  Sometimes this is just the truth, as in drone strikes or terrorist attacks,  but more generally even victims may have some agency, some way of resisting, some way of expressing what they think or believe.  That this is frequently ignored is because it doesn't go with the unconscious plot the writer has in her or his mind or with the way which maximizes the impact of the piece.  I have done that myself, so I know.

But it's lamentable because it twists reality, even if the intention behind that is good.

5.  Linked to that grumbling is this one:  People to whom bad things happen are not necessarily all saints, people who are oppressed may themselves also be oppressors in different relationships or would love that opportunity, and yet we should criticize the bad things which have happened to them.  In short, the goals and desires of various oppressed groups are not necessarily in alignment.  Sometimes those groups fight for the same crumbs off the table of the powerful.  And no, not all powerful people are evil just because they are powerful.

6.  What I wrote in 5. can result in the most exquisite contortions for those social justice activists (say, feminists) who base their activism on supporting the simultaneous total rights of many groups and suddenly find that one of those groups might not support the rights of another one of those groups***.

What to do? I've seen some people just cover their eyes and ears and refuse to engage with the dilemma, though some take sides, ranking one group as the more deserving one, even if it's the  group deemed overall most deserving which happens to be violating some progressive values.  Hence the contortions.

These are avoidable.  The way one does that is by holding onto those progressive values in each case, never mind who violates them, while not dropping the support of equal rights of the violating group to all the other good things.  And to be fair, many writers and activists do exactly this.

For an example of what I'm writing about, consider this:

Some (or many) white working class people in the US**** might be racist, and when they are their behavior should be condemned.  But this doesn't mean that they wouldn't be suffering because of their lower social class and because of the increasing income inequality in the US.  When it comes to those aspects their case should be supported.

It's like blowing bubbles with the chewing gum while riding the tricycle.  Doable, right?  At least if we start from the principles-end and not the victim-end.

7.  Something doesn't have to be true just because it is re-tweeted a thousand times.  I've seen two recent Twitter examples of joyful mass dissemination of terrible data.  Lies, in fact, though not intentional lies in either case, just seriously bad interpretations of the sources the initial tweeters used.  A bit like thinking that the page number in a book has something quantitative to say about what's written on the page it refers to.

Always verify.  That is my motto and I follow it 98 times out of each hundred.  The other two times I get caught by you, my very erudite readers.

And that verification is even more urgent if what is asserted pleases your political side.  That's when you might re-tweet something inane and end up with egg on your face.

Most folks will not verify, sadly, and so the lie still careens around the world while the truth tries to figure out a way to refute it in 140 characters and without getting squished in a Twitter war.

That's an oversimplification, of course.  There are cases where the truth isn't that clear, but that's no excuse for not trying for maximal truthfulness in our political communications.
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*  As in "make America grate again," which misquotes Donald Trump.  But he certainly has raised the level of viciousness in Internet commentary.

**  And neither is hate speech.  That should go without saying.

***  Two fairly recent examples of the kinds of conflicts which might cause those contortions, but don't have to:

1.   African-Americans, especially African-American Protestants, are less likely to support gay and Lesbian rights than white Americans.  In 2016, 57% of whites and 42% of African-Americans support same sex marriage. This average (though shrinking) difference in opinions affected the passing of California's Proposition 8 in 2008, which banned same-sex marriage in California.  The proposition was later ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States, but the majority of both African-Americans and, to a lesser extent, Hispanics, voted for it:

African American voters, who were overwhelmingly in favor of banning same sex marriage (70 percent supported Proposition 8) even as they supported Obama even more heavily (94 percent).  And, to a lesser degree, Hispanic voters followed that same trend -- backing Prop. 8 by a 53 percent to 47 percent margin while giving President Obama 74 percent.

2.    Last New Year's eve's mass sexual assaults in Cologne, Germany,  by men of mostly North African origin, many of them asylum seekers, put quite a few feminists writers between the rock and the hard place:  How does one write about a form of sexual assault which truly is a new one in Europe and which is almost impossible for women to defend themselves against, without inciting more anti-Muslim, anti-refugee and racist bigotry?

It looked to me as if several writers felt that they had to choose which group to support, in some overall sense.  Thus I read, repeatedly, that there was nothing new  in these assaults (not true), and that there's something very fishy when suddenly the European right wing is concerned about sexual assaults and women's rights (exceedingly true). 

That the events in Cologne were used by the right-wing nationalists and racists (a group which is not exactly known for its feminism) for their own purposes counted more in the final feminist scale of things for some writers (not necessarily those I linked to above) than what happened to hundreds of women in Cologne.

Yet it should have been possible to note that the vast majority of refugees or migrants in Europe did not participate in these assaults or others of the same type,  that, indeed sexual harassment and assaults are not exactly unknown in European countries, but that it still is very important to nip mass sexual harassment in its bud.  And none of this matters at all when it comes to defending the general rights and welfare of refugees in Europe or when it comes to fighting against racism in general.

I'm sure there are many other similar examples, even recent ones, but those two are the ones I had jotted down in some detail.

More generally, being a feminist, say, doesn't preclude the possibility that one is also a racist or bigoted about trans-people.

People who do anti-racists work can be sexists (by, say, treating African-American women as invisible while focusing on the treatment of African-American men or just by being the ordinary type of sexists) and a few trans people believe in gender-essentialist arguments (about which types of behaviors should go with which gender identities) which in my opinion are sexist.

Progressives can be bigoted about poor whites in the US South.   In all these cases the trick is to disapprove of the bad behavior and to interrogate any iffy arguments, but not to drop some group from those who are deemed good enough to deserve fair treatment overall.  We all deserve fair treatment.

I'm not exploring these examples from some high-and-mighty pure goddess perch, by the way.  I identify lots of unpleasant bottom mud in my own thinking, including the fact that when I took the Implicit Associations Test my results suggested slight sexism in my own views!  How's that for something to think about? 

Though the associations actually measure stuff we are accustomed to quickly correlating with some other stuff, not necessarily our agreement with those associations.  But still.  All the various -isms are in the air we breathe, in our upbringing, in the religious values we are being taught.  So we should have some small amount of compassion mixed with the stern condemnation when we find others failing the value tests.

****  I picked this example and not one about the white middle class people who can also be racist, because I want the group in my example to be low on the totem pole in some other respect.

What To Read, 6/16/16: Hillary Clinton And Sexism, Donald Trump And The Authoritarian Personality, Whole Foods And Wholeness

Today's date is neat!  6/16/16

This post is in lieu of* a proper (exciting, creative and short!) piece because of my writer's block.  It's about two longer articles, both well worth reading, and about one shorter economics piece, just to make this post into a list.



1.  First, Michael Arnovitz at the Medium gives us his thoughts about the possible role of sexism in the low approval ratings of Hillary Clinton over the ages.

As you may remember, I've asked if an otherwise identical but male clone of Hillary Clinton, with the exact same history, the same policies and the same statements, would have met with exactly the same public treatment and the same approval rates.  For the want of that guy clone we cannot tell.







But Arnovitz tries, by posting the above graph of Hillary's approval and disapproval ratings over time and by arguing that the graph shows this:

So what do we see in this data? What I see is that the public view of Hillary Clinton does not seem to be correlated to “scandals” or issues of character or whether she murdered Vince Foster. No, the one thing that seems to most negatively and consistently affect public perception of Hillary is any attempt by her to seek power. Once she actually has that power her polls go up again. But whenever she asks for it her numbers drop like a manhole cover.

What do you think about that theory?  I find it interesting.  Some years in those trend lines seem to support it, such as her improving ratings when her role was pretty much the oddly traditional one of being the long-enduring woman with the philandering husband or when she quit her presidential race against Barack Obama, thus accepting defeat.

But the earlier reaction to her announcement to run for president in 2008 appears too anemic if the public is reacting to inappropriate power grab attempts by a woman.  That, after all, is the really big attempt to seek power.

In any case, the piece is well worth reading for the historical background it offers.

More on The Orlando Massacre. What Motivated the Killer?

So who was the butcher of Orlando, one Omar Mateen?  What motivated him?

His ex-wife tells us that he abused her, cut her off from her family and friends, didn't like gays.  We get a picture of a domestic abuser with sudden leaps into tremendous anger.

His ex-colleague tells us that he made openly racist comments and also openly misogynistic comments:

Daniel Gilroy, a co-worker at G4S Secure Solutions — formerly known as Wackenhut — told NBC News that Mateen was a "very conscientious" employee who was often early for work and was fascinated by law enforcement.

He was also loud, "very excitable" and racist, Gilroy said.

"He was scary in a concerning way," he said. "And it wasn't at times. It was all the time. He had anger management issues. Something would set him off, but the things that would set him off were always women, race or religion. [Those were] his button pushers." 

Working with Mateen was so difficult that Gilroy said he requested a transfer.

"I needed to be out of that situation," he said. "I described it as being toxic."

Mateen "always referred to every other race, religion, gender in a derogatory way," Gilroy added. "He did not like black people at all. That was mentioned once or twice, but more so was women. He did not like women at all. He did like women in a sexual way, but he did not respect them."

 His father believes that seeing two men kissing was what triggered his anger at homosexuality.

All through these stories are signs of mental instability, of anger management issues, of the characteristics of an abuser or a stalker, even if reported by only a few observers.  Yet Mateen was able to acquire the weapons he used for the massacre, and acquire them legally, and this despite having been investigated for terrorism by the FBI in 2013.  Because the investigations cleared him, he was as able as the next potential mass murderer in the US to buy an assault weapon!

Those are some the ingredients in the stew that made up the mind of Omar Mateen, with the necessary added sprinklings of extremist Islamic thought, the justification he himself appears to have applied to his butcheries by swearing support for ISIS, though whether he actually was a radicalized Muslim, in the sense of deep beliefs,  or whether he just used religious justification for acts he would have committed in any case is not clear.  To me it looks like he had his hatreds all neatly in a row and then looked for some type of blessing for them.*

The political reactions to this stew on the net are mostly predictable, and best understood by looking at what the two sides of the US political aisle are already for or against.  Thus, the right warns us about the dangers of radical Islam (it's everywhere!) but is also against any attempt to regulate access to assault weapons, and somewhat agrees with the extremist Islamic tenet that homosexuality is a deplorable sin, though not one that deserves the death penalty.**  On the whole the US right isn't terribly concerned with the potential for general anti-Muslim bigotry that the talk about religious wars and general Trumpery can support***. 

The left, according to the usual rules, picks the positions that are exactly opposite to those the right has picked.

I am with the left when it comes to concerns about using cases like the Orlando massacre as a justification for making the lives of hundreds of thousands ordinary Muslims more difficult.  That is wrong and must be condemned.

I am also with the left when it criticizes the wanton access to murderous weapons in this country or the money-starved mental health care sector.  And I'm with those who point out that the vast majority of mass killings in the United States are carried out by men and not by women, even though women are equally able to get hold of assault weapons, equally likely to suffer from mental instability, and equally likely to listen to extremist preachers.

Where I diverge from some on the left is in my determination to criticize all religious teachings I disagree with, whether they crop up in Catholicism, fundamental Evangelism or conservative Islam.  I believe the criticism of ideas is crucial, unless we wish our gardens of philosophical and religious ideas to be taken over by the most noxious of weeds.

I also believe that we must very clearly distinguish between criticizing extremist ideas and attacking people who belong to (or nominally belong to) various wider religious groups.  Doing the former and avoiding the latter are both equally important, and we should be able to do both simultaneously.

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*  I have written a rant on the Orlando massacres in another post.  That was my emotional reaction to the use of religion to justify deeds of utter horror, the way a stamp of approval can be applied to the most horrendous of human crimes by interpreting them as merely the ordinary day jobs of god's little executioners, just carrying out god's will.

We must erase that stamp of approval, and the job must be done by the preachers inside the religions and their sects.  Outsiders cannot achieve that erasure, but outsiders can demand it, must demand it.

Though of course it is the need for the label of an 'outsider' which is inherent in many of these religious dilemmas.  Your god or mine?  Let's see which wins.  And yet any real god(s) there might be is (are) silent as the stones are.

**  Seven countries have, at least in theory, a death punishment for homosexuality:

According to the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA) seven countries still retain capital punishment for homosexual behavior: Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iran, Afghanistan, Mauritania, Sudan, and northern Nigeria.^[67][68] In United Arab Emirates it is a capital offense.^[69][11] 

*** This is necessary reading in that context.

Where Is Evil? First Thoughts on the Orlando Massacre.

A continuously updated list of those who died in Orlando, Florida can be found here.


Tell me, you with your holy books*, where is evil?

Is it in the needs of two men I know, men who love each other, who serve each other, who care for each other, but who have also adopted a child whom nobody wanted, who love that child, who tend that child, and that child, he flourishes?  Is it in their small family that I should look for evil?

Or is it in the life of a woman I knew who loved other women?  Is she the Evil One?  Does it weigh so heavily on your scales that her love was for women?  Heavier than her anonymous funding of two college degrees for needy students?  Heavier than all the coins she donated to AIDS research? Heavier than the coffin she paid for to bury a neighbor who had nobody left to pay for her funeral and nobody else left to attend it?

Tell me, you who are so heavy with your religious knowledge, how do you measure evil?  A stone of violence falls into the dark, murky waters, yet you seek ripples elsewhere, seek for borders violated, look for rules broken, even when those rules deserved to be broken, even when that breaking hurts no-one but helps someone to finally breathe fully, to finally be fully human, to even make a willing difference for good.

You measure your evil with a magnifying glass, carry your petty findings to a vindictive god you have imagined into being, while real evil rolls over the landscape of humanity, a dark, menacing cloud of wars and violence. 

And it is that dark, looming cloud you watch with approval and admiration, it is that dark cloud you want to rain down blood and pain, to wipe out those small imaginary crimes you so treasure, because they are not your crimes, because you are not one of the sinners you have defined!

No, your crimes are the declarations you make, the way you choose yourself as the judge, the jury and the executioner, the way you interpret your imaginary warlord god's desires to stomp, to destroy and to keep oppressing those always oppressed, the way you usurp the role of a divine power, interpreting the languages you hear in your head as the commands of your thunder god.

So tell me, you with your holy books, why is some love evil?  This world is dying, its flowers and trees, even the very grass is dying, because of our insufficient love for it, because of our inordinate love for power and for greed and for our tribes,  and, yes, because of our inflamed love for having the exactly correct ancient letters and words obeyed without a question, to silence those questions, to win, for our tribe, for our created gods, for ourselves.
 

It is that lack of love which is killing us all, not the love between two women or two men. 

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*  This 'you with your holy books' is not meant to be a religious person or a person who believes in some divine power.  Those are not the people I address my rant to.

They are the people who gather together all available data about the cultural rules and norms which prevailed two thousand or fifteen hundred years ago, who decide that those cultural norms are some god's everlasting law for all humans and who then decide that those who disagree with these beliefs should be put down because the odd god thus imagined would want it, because that odd god finds pain and blood and the eradication of humans less insulting than loving the wrong person, with kindness and with care.

The 'you with your holy books' is not the person responsible for the massacre in Orlando, Florida, and my rant doesn't argue it or explore the role of mental illness or the role of guns available as freely as candies. 

But anyone interpreting ancient writings literally falls guilty of the crime of abetting, of justifying and of glorifying violence against the innocent, just as anyone interpreting ancient writings literally also falls guilty of the crime of misogyny and the oppression of women.