Meanwhile, in Afghanistan

Three hundred women protested against the new law for Shias which would require women to 'preen' for their husbands, give sex at least every four days and ask for permission to leave the house (though they can leave without permission if the house is on fire). The counter-protest was three times bigger and included men. Nicholas Kristoff:

I'm awed by the courage of those 300 Afghan women who endured stones, jeers and threats to march through Kabul today demanding a measure of equal rights. As my colleague Dexter Filkins reports, the women were chased and insulted as "whores" by a mob of men and women three times as large. The women were protesting a new law, applying only to Shiites, that obliges women to sleep with their husbands on demand and bars them from leaving the home without their husbands' permission.

It's particularly impressive that many of the women apparently were Shiites — from the Hazara minority — because Hazaras are poorer and less likely to school their daughters. I find Kabul a pretty scary place sometimes, and I can't imagine the guts it would take to be a Hazara woman walking with a banner demanding equal rights through an enraged mob of stone-throwing, spitting fundamentalists.

Yes, it's awe-inspiring courage, indeed. I wonder how many women did NOT march because they knew what they would meet on those streets of Kabul? Then Kristoff goes on to address some tricky issues:

Unfortunately, I'm afraid Zara is wrong: She's not in the majority, at least in Afghanistan. Polls show that men and women alike in Afghanistan mostly don't believe in equal rights. Women are a bit more likely to support gender equality than men, but only a bit more. The best predictor of whether someone favors women's rights in Afghanistan isn't whether the person is a man or woman, but whether the person lives in the city or the countryside. People in the cities are far more sympathetic to equal rights — in other words, it's a sign of Kabul's progress that the demonstration happened at all. It would never have been imaginable in, say, rural Zabul or Kandahar provinces, not least because the women would never have been allowed out of their homes.

I'm enormously impressed by the courage of these women, but I do worry about a backlash. Afghans are very nationalistic, and the women today were denounced as pawns of Christians and foreigners. Remember that during the first Gulf War in 1991, Saudi women held a demonstration to demand the right to drive, and the protest attracted enormous attention. Yet in the end it so antagonized and frightened men that it probably set back and delayed the cause of women's rights in Saudi Arabia. I hope that's not the case here, because Afghanistan can't develop economically and achieve stability so long as girls are kept home and women are mostly barred from the work force.

Do you ever get the feeling that a pair of scissors somehow got landed in your gut and is now snip-snip-snipping away at your innards? I got that feeling after reading the above quote, for several reasons. One of those reasons is that Kristoff is quite right about where the backlash will come from and why. Don't you remember all those writings about how western feminists must shut up about women in other cultures, because it just makes the lives of those women more difficult, what with the history of colonialism and all?

Of course shutting up about those women will leave them without support from other countries, but that's what Nicholas Kristoff is for! (Yes, I'm bitter about that piece he once wrote about the uselessness of American feminist women.) Though it would seem to me that a white western guy writing about these things is even worse than women writing about them. After all, women can be safely ignored in the traditional cultures. But the president of the United States cannot, if he is a guy, at least.

Another reason has to do with the clash of feminism with religion. It crops up all the time, all the time, all the time, and it cropped up in the counter-demonstration to this march in Kabul, too:

Afghan Shiite counter protesters shout slogans in Kabul, Afghanistan on Wednesday, April 15, 2009. The group of some 1,000 male and female Afghans swarmed a demonstration by 300 women Wednesday protesting against a new conservative marriage law. Some counter protesters pelted the women with small stones as police struggled to keep the two groups apart.The banner reads "The private laws are according the bases of holy religion of Islam."

So there you are. That most Afghan women don't believe in the equality of women and men is because they live in a society with none of that stuff and because their religion (or its interpretation) tells them that men are more important than women, with many more rights. Let's not forget that the Taliban is respected by many because of their religiosity.

The third reason for those scissors in my belly has to do with that you-are-damned-whatever-you-do ending to Kristoff's piece. If women protest then the menz (and traditional womenz, too) will get angry and squash them down harder. If women don't protest, then nothing, naturally, will ever change for them. And the women who do protest are partly to blame for the backlash. So what's a girl to do? Speak up or not? Protest or not? Perhaps she should ask very sweetly for a few itty-bitty rights at first. Then things would go so very smoothly. (There was a time when I really believed that, you know.)
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Cabdrollery has more thoughts.

O-Oh

I'm getting the feeling that the adults in the Tea Party movement should stand up and get some of those folks under control.





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link via sekmet

On The Purity Myth

Jessica Valenti has written an interesting book on the American abstinence movement with its Purity Balls on one side and the Girls Gone Wild popular culture on the other hand. I participated in a TPM Cafe Bookclub discussion on the book, but I didn't contribute very much, partly because of still having a bit of a flu and partly because of realizing that I wanted to take the topic international and that wasn't the drift of the conversation at the Cafe.

The Purity Myth is alive in the United States and its supporters certainly grew in power during the Bush era. But the consequences of 'sexual impurity' are much more devastating for women in many other cultures. The merest suspicion of 'sexual impurity' can be a death sentence for women in some cultures and the value of young women is very much connected to their virginity. Virginity is needed for making an acceptable marriage (which may be the only feasible way for a woman to survive), chastity is needed for keeping that marriage. But note that the same requirements don't apply to men anywhere as rigorously. If anything, men are encouraged to pursue 'sexual impurity'(nudge-nudge).

That's the traditional way the game has been set up, in my humble (well not so very humble) opinion. This does NOT mean that (heterosexual) women don't want sex or that all (heterosexual) men are trying to get through those walls of virginity. What it does mean is that the consequences from premarital or extra-marital sex are very different for men and women in traditional cultures. It is mostly the women who get punished. And that's where the roots of the U.S. Purity Myth are found, too.

But western industrialized societies also have a totally different myth about sex, having to do with images of sex from popular culture and the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s, the Playboy magazines and now the Internet porn sites. I'm not sure what this myth should be called, but I'm pretty sure it's a myth, with certain expectations about 'appropriate' forms of sex for women and men, and much of it is focused on male desire and male pleasure. It's between these two myths that I see young teenage girls suspended by the culture, as if they'd have to choose between them and them only.

All this comes across as written by an anti-sex feminist, which I'm not. I'd like those young teenage girls to find their own sexuality, in a society which doesn't tell them that they have to save themselves for marriage or to give blowjobs at the age of thirteen in order to be a good person. Indeed, Jessica's book very much stresses the importance of viewing women's ethical standing on the basis of their whole lives rather than linked to their virginity or chastity.

Meanwhile, in Saudi Arabia

The arranged marriage between an eight-year old girl and a 47-year old man has been declared legal again. The girl's father gave her to a friend as a payment for a debt.

But worry not, the girl herself can sue for divorce once she comes into puberty. I hope that this means the marriage is not going to be consummated until then.

Party On!

Today is the day of the tea parties, the conservative protest against taxes in general and the obvious fascism of the Obama administration in particular, and the parties are getting their due attention from the media (which sort of ignored the gigantic women's rights march in the past), even though numbers turning up are not earth-shattering. But this really is a great hat:





Grover (drown-the-government-in-a-bathtub) Norquist on this important day:

Today is tax day. I just returned from the tea party rally at Lafayette Park. Despite the rain there were about a thousand folks at the Washington rally. Focus was on runaway spending in Washington and the taxes that will follow as a result.

So short are our memories about runaway government spending, especially if it ran abroad to be spent in Iraq!

Here's the NYT on all this partying:

Although organizers insisted they had created a non-partisan grassroots movement, it was argued by others that these parties were more of the synthetic "Game Day Grass" variety, since the occasion was largely created by the clamor of cable news and fueled with the financial and political support of current and former Republican leaders.

Fox News was covering the events and streaming live video as its own commentators Neil Cavuto and Michelle Malkin were headlining the protests in Sacramento, Sean Hannity appeared in Atlanta, and Newt Gingrich showed up at City Hall Park in New York. The web site TaxDayTeaParty.com listed its sponsors, which ranged from FreedomWorks, founded by former House Majority Leader, Dick Armey (R-Texas), Top Conservatives on Twitter, to RNC Radio.com, to the book from Senator Jim Demint of South Carolina, "Saving Freedom," giving his "firsthand account of the unsettling socialist shift."

The idea for these demonstrations grew out of a rant from CNBC commentator Rick Santelli, who on Feb. 19 at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange said that the Obama administration was promoting "bad behavior" and that Americans should protest government in the form of a tea party in Chicago. The clip went viral and spawned a movement, of sorts, and earlier protests, in cities like Cincinnati, Green Bay, Wis., and Harrisburg, Pa.

"Our main goal as far as a national organization — although that's a tough term to use since we wish we were organized better than we were — is just to facilitate an environment where a new movement would be born," Eric Odom, the administrator of TaxDayTeaParty.com, said in a brief interview on Wednesday morning. "We're confident that we'll see taxpayer coalitions at the local level starting tomorrow."

But it was hard to determine from the modest turnouts by mid-day (especially in the rain-soaked East) just how effective they would be. In Boston, which held its protest in Boston Common, near the State House, about 500 people showed up, fewer than the 1,500 that had responded on the internet.

Watertiger has a funny sign from one party.

Bob Herbert Is Worth Reading

This week. Here's a quote that should make you think:

Since Sept. 11, 2001, when the country's attention understandably turned to terrorism, nearly 120,000 Americans have been killed in nonterror homicides, most of them committed with guns. Think about it — 120,000 dead. That's nearly 25 times the number of Americans killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But because we are used to the nonterror type of violence we don't get shocked over all those deaths. They have been happening a long time. Nothing to see here, move on please.

This familiarity-breeds-blindness aspect of crimes may also be the reason for the attention crimes committed by women get in the media. Women commit a small percentage of violent crimes, and this makes any violent crime with a female suspect newsworthy. But then the media focus might make us think that such crimes are more common than they really are.

Lovely

This song from teh British singing talent competition. It would be possible to analyze the whole setup in some detail and certainly there's lots of feminist food for thought in it, but mostly you should just enjoy.

Teabagging

Tomorrow is the day when the conservative anti-tax protests will take place. They are now called tea parties, which is a take on the Boston Tea Party. These current tea parties are just against being taxed, not against taxation without representation.

What strikes me as oddest about these protests is that almost everyone I speak with these days has at least one family member who has been laid off or lost a job, and many people have more than one person in that hole, or the others are being asked to take pay cuts. At the same time, people are not buying, not consuming, and firms go bankrupt. To add to these contracting forces less spending by the government would work wonderfully well if you want to make the record books as the Greatest Depression ever. But I guess it's easier to think very short-term and selfish thoughts in that respect.

A Lovers' Quarrel

An early item on the murder at Henry Ford Community College in Dearborn, Mich., described it like this:

A WWJ reporter on the scene says a male student appears to have shot a woman, then turned the gun on himself at Henry Ford Community College in Dearborn, Mich.

WWJ reporter Pat Sweeney has information that it was a lover's quarrel in which the gunman shot his girlfriend, then himself.

Emphasis mine. Using that term appears to be very bad journalism. Was there evidence of a quarrel? Note that 'a quarrel' is not the same thing as a man walking in and killing a woman with a gun. At least to me it means something different.

I think this term, just like the term 'domestic violence', serve as shorthand for crimes in which you, the reader, are unlikely to be at risk. If a crime is between 'lovers' or domestic in nature then strangers are safe. But the corollary of this is that putting those labels on a crime makes it somehow less important to report on.

From The Diaries of Thad Tough, A Man About The Town.

Dear diarrhea!

Today I joined a health club. Not that my perfect body needs any more exercise than it gets between the black silk sheets of my crowded round bed. But others may benefit from seeing How It Is Done, how a mere machine cannot stop the awesome manliness of my very eyebrows, how all those wannabes can be shown to be warped caricatures of the True Testosterone. It is a favor I'm granting them, to show up at their rinky-dinky little club, to show them a Real Man, I mused while picking my teeth with the thighbone of a liberal effete wimp.

But here's the problem: I arrived at the club, undressed and changed into my G-string. They told me I needed a cup! A cup! Have they not heard of buckets?


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The first installment of Thad's diaries is here.

Affordable Health Insurance Is Within Reach!

Sorry. It's just an ad I saw today, not a real proposal. But it reminded me of the difficulty of defining 'affordable' in this context. A policy could be affordable, in the sense of being cheap, but it might cover very little, or everything you file might be debated by the insurance company.

The ultimate difficulty is of course in defining what it is that the policy is buying for you, what it is that you might one day need (or 'need'), and whether what is written in the policy as covered actually will be covered. As long as these are unclear so is the question of how good the price is. That's just how it is.

This is not to argue that we can never know anything about the policy. Policies which cover only catastrophic care are fairly easy to understand and to evaluate. But those policies usually cover no other care, which means that all routine and non-catastrophe care will come out of your pocket. That may sound like a good deal for the young and healthy, but over the whole insured population it may mean that people delay care (because it's not covered) until indeed more catastrophe care will be needed.

It's interesting to read through an insurance policy, by the way. Take a glass of wine and a nice comfy blanket and settle down for a night or two. By doing this I found out that one policy I had in the past would not cover the care that might be caused by a failed suicide attempt! So one better succeed the first time...

The Effete Political Hack

A Shaolin monk breaks an iron sheet with his head during a performance at a temple in Quanzhou, China


The effete political hack would be me. Someone called me that in the comments to an article or a post I wrote some time ago, and someone else recently thought that my writing style is effete.

But that doesn't work as an insult against a goddess of the girly persuasion, you know. I'm supposed to be effete. That's the whole point behind the insult: someone acting like a woman who is not one. Women are beneath contemplation for these types of insults. So whoever called me effete probably thought that I was a guy god.

Something like the Shaolin monk in the above photograph, breaking iron sheets with his head. That's not effete, right? I must admit that I have never broken iron sheets with my head (I was born with my head already this way), though I did break boards with my hands in my karate dojo. Indeed, many women (and men) like both kicking ass and effete stuff. My guess is that even more women (and men) would like to branch out if they weren't concerned about gender-linked stereotyping.

Oh My

I was reading this article about the happy ending to the Somali pirates hostage crisis and then saw a link to a yahoo discussion thread on the same general topic. Read the beginning of that thread and then the end and you, my friend, shall also go OHMY and then tear off your hair and throw some ashes over yourself, too, because far too many people equate international politics with a pub brawl.

Though it's a funny read, too, that thread, because we are told that everything was Obama's fault but the resolution of the situation was either God's doing or the Navy Seals, not Obama.

I hasten to add that discussion threads are not a representative sample of anything much.

A Treacherous Foundation (by Phila)

The Iowa Supreme Court's ruling on same-sex marriage has upset Matthew J. Franck, because it shows that "feelings and desire" have replaced "moral reasoning...as the basis for judgment of lawful public morality."

What is this taut, elegant, alert "moral reasoning" that has purged itself of mere womanish sentiment? It's not entirely clear, but it seems to have something to do with gay people being a bunch of subhuman perverts who've forfeited any right to ordinary human consideration. Deny that bedrock empirical principle, and tyranny is practically a done deal, according to Franck:

[T]he court's weak argument for same-sex marriage...boils down to this: Because some persons are "sexually and romantically attracted to members of their own sex," and because some of those persons have entered into "committed and loving relationships" with each other, they are entitled to "the personal and public affirmation that accompanies marriage."

From this vantage point, the feelings individuals have for one another are the authoritative wellspring of moral principle. Emotion and desire are certainly important, but without more, they are a treacherous foundation for law and public policy.

I can think of worse ones. And as we'll soon see, Franck can too.

Marriage and family are a moral institution – the teacher of right conduct between the sexes, the school of morality for the young, the founding scene of our moral obligations, the refuge from a wider world where respect for those obligations is a much chancier proposition.

All of this is pietisic gibberish. And even if it weren't, we all know that heterosexual marriages often fail at most or all of these tasks. But that's OK, according to Franck; it's the thought that counts.

These may sound like lofty ideals often unrealized, but that is both the point and beside the point. Society has a profound interest in encouraging the successful formation of marriages and families that point by their nature toward the achievement of these ideals.

So even when heterosexual marriage is a disaster for all concerned, it's still "successful," in that it points towards the ideal of heterosexual marriage. Women may get beaten up or killed, children may be brutalized or neglected, and marriage vows may be broken right and left...but at least certain standards of decency were upheld, and society was spared the literally demoralizing spectacle of Adam and Steve pushing a stroller down the street.

Franck doesn't like civil unions, either, because they "amount to special provisions for a special class of people." For once, we agree: the idea that homosexuals constitute "a special class of people" under the law is absurd. Of course, the same can also be said of heterosexuals, which renders Franck's view of marriage problematic, to say the least.

Or it would, if Franck weren't well aware that The Man Upstairs has already done the hard work of reasoned judgment for us. This intellectual short circuit constitutes his idea of "moral reasoning," and that's exactly what the Iowa court has failed to uphold.

[T]he court is incapable of entertaining the most elementary distinction between matters of theology, faith, and worship, on the one hand, and matters of moral reasoning springing from religious conviction on the other.

After reading this sentence a couple dozen times, and trying to imagine what it could possibly mean, I can't say I blame them. But maybe this next bit will clarify things:

What the opinion calls "religious opposition to same-sex marriage" would more accurately be described as "moral opposition to same-sex marriage springing from religious sources."

A nice distinction. "Religious opposition" sounds downright bigoted. But moral opposition, springing from religious sources...well, that seems harmless enough, doesn't it? Surely there's no harm in denying our fellow citizens rights based on that?

The court, Franck complains, has treated religion as one sentiment among others; this means that "the justices wind up incoherently privileging one kind of feeling over another." And then look what happens:

Those who desire to marry win out over those who desire to "exclude" them from marrying, and that's that.

Well, yeah. That's because "one kind of feeling" is in harmony with the Constitution, and one isn't. Also, religion per se can't be the deciding factor here, because there are religions that take a neutral or affirmative stance on the question.

That said, I love the scare quotes around "exclude." Here we have someone who not only claims that there is a moral right to deny homosexuals rights, but also implies that there's no moral right not to deny them rights. And yet, he presents the logical legal implications of his own position as some ideological imposition forced on him by political correctness. He's not excluding them; they exclude themselves by being abnormal, just as blacks formerly "segregated" themselves by having the wrong skin color.

See, Franck doesn't come before us as a advocate of bigotry or religious persecution. He's simply taking a stand for reasoned judgment — the kind that comes to you as effortlessly as breathing, once you accept the correct political interpretation of the correct religious tradition:

Lost from view is the true ground of our common public morality: reasoned judgment about the natures of things and the good of human persons, families, and communities.

Or as Fred Phelps puts it, without any tedious pretense to intellectualism and rationality, God hates fags. Which apparently seemed to the Iowa court like a treacherous foundation for law and public policy.

"Vote" against "rape" (by Suzie)

         The Huffington Post has an informal (i.e., unscientific) poll going about the rape scene in Seth Rogen's new movie, "Observe and Report." I'm not sure how much good it will do, but why not go over there and vote against the movie. Right now, the winning option is: 

"It's a JOKE people. Get upset about more important things."

         Marcella Chester has a great smack down on this.
         The Huff Post puts date rape in quotation marks. The movie isn't a true story. So, the Post can't be afraid of libel if someone is found not guilty. I suspect the Post doesn't want to bias its readers as to whether the scene depicts rape or not. By using quotation marks, however, it signals its own bias: This isn't real rape.
         Its poll indicates how many people don't understand -- or don't want to understand -- that being raped by someone you know is just as much a crime as being raped by a stranger. In most states, it's rape if someone is too intoxicated to give informed consent.
         Too bad a public service announcement can't run at the beginning of the movie. 

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         ETA: Also see Lindsay Beyerstein's take on the heinous review by Richard Corliss in TIME. 

         ETA2: April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month, btw. Here's a link to The Nation, which discusses a boycott of the movie. One reader explains that the rapist in the movie is supposed to be seen as a bad guy. The problem is, film critics, Rogen and others in the movie are not naming this as rape. 

Unfortunately I Have to Believe In Button Pushers by Anthony McCarthy

An elderly aunt has gone into a sad decline. Part of it is the natural decay of aging, some of which you can’t help. Some of that is exacerbated by a decline in voluntary physical activity. A lot of that is due to depression. Our bodies decline, the cares of life bear down on us. But part of it might be preventable. This poor old soul spends many hours every day sitting in front of the TV watching those phony court shows, the ones that are about as unbiased as a pro-wrestling spectacle. From what I’ve seen, the subject of most of the “cases” are either people too foolish to manage their lives taken advantage of by con men or creeps of some sort or people too stupid to stay out of trouble. There’s almost always a good side and a bad side, and you’re supposed to take one of them. It’s never left to doubt which one.

Like most of entertainment TV, certainly including the cabloids, and talk radio, the entire purpose is to press peoples’ buttons. Deregulated from serving a higher goal, button pushing has become the bread and butter of TV and radio, entertainment, infotanement and “news”. It is an easy way to manipulate people, to attract a dependable audience and to get them to return to get those same buttons pushed, same time, same channel. The audience comes back because they get the simulation of action without having to exert any effort. The button gets pushed and elicits a dull sensation that is gratifying. The audience gets to feel the addictive emotions of contempt and hate, of feeling morally and intellectually superior to the hated bad guy. And they get to feel it every day.

Other time segments of TV and radio consist of variations on the pattern, pushing different buttons in a slightly different pattern to attract other parts of the potential audience. Cable “news” consists of almost nothing but button pushing, providing scant information in between the manipulation of the audiences’ sensations. Their intent is to sell eyes to advertisers so they can push other buttons and get them to open their pockets to them. Secondarily, the “news” networks intention is to manipulate the audience to vote in a way that is more favorable to the corporations’ financial well being, which accounts for the bits of “information” and how they’re chosen.

In his book I Don’t Believe in Atheists*, Chris Hedges talks about the infamous debate that he and Sam Harris engaged in last year. Reading the book and around the web, you can’t help noticing that Hedges has a chip on his shoulder. I don’t blame him. It’s rather stunning how many people breezily dismiss his many years covering the Middle-East, knowing Arabic, having an intimate knowledge of a large part of the Islamic world through hard won and dangerously procured experience. They dismiss his professional expertise in favor of Sam Harris’ drivel, based on such stuff as a misrepresentation of a Pew research poll and his scanty research. If you look for the evidence around the blogs that discussed the “debate” you could see that the Harrisite opinion on the subject might be the predominant view. Sam Harris’ relatively information free assertions are widely accepted and if Chris Hedges mentions that his credentials give his ideas credibility, he is dismissed as an egomaniacal blow hard. It must be particularly galling to someone in Hedges position that those deriding him consider themselves members of the intellectual class.

I think that this is a clear manifestation of how easy and instantaneous button pushing has come to replace rigorous collection of information and analysis for even the relatively sophisticated and educated parts of our culture. And considering what Harris is selling, the buttons he can push and successfully get the desired response among his audience, it is pretty stunning. Consider that Harris has advocated a nuclear first strike against an as yet unrealized ‘Islamic bomb’. A first strike about which he, himself says: “ Needless to say, this would be an unthinkable crime - as it would kill tens of millions of innocent civilians in a single day - but it may be the only course of action available to us, given what Islamists believe. ”

Out of the wisdom gleaned from a misreading of stuff like a Pew poll and the rest of his cobbled together factoids about “what Islamists believe”. Harris is calling for the possibility of committing an “unthinkable crime” which would kill more “innocent civilians” in a day than were killed in the Holocaust. It would be shocking if someone calling for that could get a dozen admirers and yet Harris has many, many more than that. Clearly Harris’ fans who dismiss what Hedges had to say aren’t interested in real information, they’re looking to have their predispositions confirmed and reinforced, their buttons pushed. If it’s that easy to get large numbers of alleged “humanists”** to entertain Harris as a serious thinker on these subjects, the “intellectuals” have no right to look down on the plebs who get led astray by Lou Dobbs and the liars at FOX. Many people have been relegated to permanent cultural oblivion for asserting things that fall infinitely short of mass killing of innocent people.

I think that the seduction of that kind of lazy, comfortable, simple, fiction-fueled, gratification is a real and serious danger. We all have the temptation to fall for it, we are all in danger of those who do. The mildly exciting stimulation afforded by the hatred of a remote other, of the chance to feel morally superior without any effort expended is too seductive to go unmentioned. I think it is the equivalent of Aldous Huxley’s imagined “feelies” in Brave New World. And you don’t have to turn on the TV or radio to get it. It’s all over the web and available “As seen on the NYT Bestsellers List”.

Note: I finally read Chris Hedges book, I Don’t Believe In Atheists last week. Eventually it should be published along with his book “American Fascists” about the real dangers of religious fundamentalism. I agree with his view that these two kinds of fundamentalism are flip sides of one thing, though I think religious fundamentalism poses the more direct political danger due to their greater proximity to power. Anti-religious fundamentalism carries its greatest danger in provoking a reaction against the left, if we get blamed for their excesses. As I’ve mentioned before. .

“I Don’t Believe in Atheists” book had been recommended to me by one of my sometimes antagonists from the blog atheist side of things, just after it was published. As ridiculous and embarrassing as it might seem, this person asserted that Hedges might have copied some of my ideas. It was mentioned that several of the things I’d posted before the book was published had identical points and ideas to some of what Hedges said. I don’t buy that for a second. A few of the posts I wrote before I’d read the book but after it was published have ideas and even themes in common with some of Hedges points. I’m not sure if the e-mail was trying to push my buttons or not. Perhaps they were. Maybe they wanted me to write an outraged post asserting theft, which would only make me seem silly. But the idea is so far fetched and the ideas in common so obvious that it didn’t surprise me that someone else had noticed.

One thing I thought was interesting, we both think that Aldous Huxley might have been on to a lot more than he’s generally credited with. I’m more impressed that he said a lot of these things decades ago.

** I’ve read more “humanists” online worried over Harris’ belief in “woo” than who are worried that he think’s it might be a good idea to kill tens of millions of people as an act of “preemption”.

I think that might also have something to do with why Aldous Huxley isn’t given the serious consideration his record of correct prediction calls for.

Neurodiversity and gender (by Suzie)

               

           In the neurodiversity movement, I appreciate the idea that people think and behave differently, and these differences can benefit the individual as well as society. (Of course, some ways of being don't suit either.)  

         An interesting article in New York magazine quotes Judy Singer, who coined the term “neurodiversity” for the movement that considers autism, Asperger’s and related conditions another way of existing in the world, as opposed to a defect or illness.

"I was interested in the liberatory, activist aspects of it—to do for neurologically different people what feminism and gay rights had done for their constituencies,” Singer said.

          Identity politics often rely on the binary of the privileged vs. the oppressed, and aspects of the oppressed group may be revalued. But it can be hard to value the differences of one group without criticizing, even inadvertently, the differences of another. This site values traits of people on the autism spectrum, including less interest in “small talk.” That phrase has a pejorative connotation. But "small talk" can be good; some people do it to bond, or to pave the way for deeper conversations.
          In the post below, which I hope you read first, I talk about definitions of “neurotypical” and “non-neurotypical.” Some people on the autism spectrum use humor to express frustration with NTs here and here. These put-downs seem to conflict with an essay on neurodiversity from Thomas Armstrong, who says that "what we call disabilities exist on a continuum with normal behavior." In other words, there is no clear demarcation between typical and non-typical.

        Some people link traits of autism and Asperger's to stereotypical male behavior, such as having less interest in the social and emotional needs of others. The most notorious example is Simon Baron-Cohen, director of the Autism Research Centre in Cambridge, who has written on the “extreme male brain.” Here’s an Echidne posts that critiques him. 

        Boys and men are much more likely to be diagnosed on the autism spectrum, although people have questioned whether girls may get misdiagnosed, perhaps because they behave differently. Some people have argued that women with autism and Asperger’s have it worse than men because the women don’t meet gender expectations. Not surprisingly, some men disagree.
      If we truly want to value other ways of being in the world, we need to be careful not to reinscribe stereotypes. To truly respect neurodiversity, we need to give more than a passing reference to women who are diagnosed with mental illnesses in which women predominate, such as depression and anxiety. 

Who is neurotypical? (by Suzie)

           After a recent and heated discussion on this blog, I sought more information on the term “neurotypical,” which began in the autism community for people perceived “as normal in their ability to process linguistic information and social cues.”
           In the previous discussion, some readers seemed to be using NT for anyone who hasn't been diagnosed with a mental disorder or illness. A couple of comments on this thread at Wrong Planet do the same.    
          When many people hear “mental illness,” they think of a debilitating disorder that lasts a long time, as opposed to being “physically ill,” which might last only a few hours. But certain mental illnesses can come and go and come again, or go away forever.
          When I was an undergraduate 30 years ago, I had agoraphobia. It got so bad that I felt sick stepping outside my apartment. My thinking was different from when I did public speaking in high school, and it is different now.
          I also suffer from anxiety and depression, which ebb and flow in my life. When I’m feeling generalized anxiety or a deep depression, my thinking is different. On the other hand, I may feel little anxiety or sadness in regard to something that would bother most people. For example, lots of people feel “scanziety” before scans to see if their cancer has returned. Imaging studies now feel routine to me. As a volunteer, I’ve come to know many people who have died. I appreciate having known them, and I usually don’t feel as sad about their death as many others do.
         Was I neurotypical before I had agoraphobia, non-neurotypical while experiencing it, and then neurotypical again after I recovered? Have I been non-neurotypical since the onset of anxiety and depression, or am I only non-neurotypical when I’m experiencing those moods? Can I still be called neurotypical when my feelings and thoughts differ from the norm?
            If we limit the definition of non-neurotypical to people with neurological disorders, such as autism, what about people who have other such disorders, such as cerebral palsy and multiple sclerosis, who may think no differently from people without those disorders? My head hurts (and that can be a symptom of a neurological disorder).
            The most common usage of “neurotypical” confines it to people who aren’t on the autism spectrum. A friend suggests the definition might be limited to people believed to be wired differently from birth whose brain functioning can’t be changed by drugs. I would be OK with that definition if the word “neurotypical” didn’t imply that I’m typical in how my brain processes information. The label seems to deny that people like me do process cues differently at times. (Why did she say such-and-such? She must not like me! I’m so unlikable! No one will ever like me! My life is worthless!)
            This is a dilemma for me. I don’t feel like I’m neurotypical but I don’t consider myself non-neurotypical all of the time any more than I consider myself mentally ill all of the time. 

Friday flower blogging (by Suzie)

I asked Eileen Kahl, bromeliad curator at the University of South Florida Botanical Garden, what this was, and she talked about it like it was an old friend. It's Aechmea gamosepala. The pinkish thing is the inflorescence, and the tiny blue things are the flowers. It's cold tolerant down to about 26 degrees. It likes light to medium shade. And it multiplies like mad, that rascal.

For Your Eyes And Ears

This audio by Richard Rodriguez about 'women on the move' is interesting. I'm not sure if his conclusions are correct (I think not) but you can decide for yourselves.

The goldfinch (?) above is by 1WattHermit. It took me the growing of cupflowers to realize how the yellow color of goldfinches works as protective camouflage. They are invisible while eating the seeds of the yellow cupflowers.

Today's Funny Video

Via CalculatedRisk.

A Break

A break in the regularly scheduled programming of this blog, that is. We shall return to the usual ranting and raving in a moment.

HiHo, To Work We Go. More Fun Research.

Why the dwarves got into that headline I don't know. Perhaps because I'm angry. Here's a new study popularization to influence your perceptions of chimpanzees (and humans!) forevermore:

Chimpanzees enter into "deals" whereby they exchange meat for sex, according to researchers.

Male chimps that are willing to share the proceeds of their hunting expeditions mate twice as often as their more selfish counterparts.

This is a long-term exchange, so males continue to share their catch with females when they are not fertile, copulating with them when they are.

The team describe their findings in the journal PLoS One.

Get that? It's prostitution they found! But note, very carefully, that we don't actually know what the chimps are thinking, what their intentions and plans are, when they share meat and when they have sex. We don't know if the meat-sharers are just really nice guys, friends even, and if that's the reason why they mate with a particular female more often. Note that what the researchers observed wasn't quite what they wanted to initially observe:

The "meat for sex hypothesis" had already been proposed to explain why male chimps might share with females.

But previous attempts to record the phenomenon failed, because researchers looked for direct exchanges, where a male shared meat with a fertile female and copulated with her right away.

Dr Gomes' team took a new approach. In a previous study, she had found that grooming exchange - where the animals take it in turns to groom each other - happens over long periods, she related. "So we thought, why not meat and sex?

"We looked at chimps when they were not in oestrus, this means they don't have sexual swellings and aren't copulating."

"The males still share with them - they might share meat with a female one day, and only copulate with her a day or two later."

Dr Gomes thinks that her findings could even provide clues about human evolution.

She suggests this study could lay the foundations for human studies exploring the link between "good hunting skills and reproductive success".

"This has got me really interested in humans," she said. "I'm thinking of moving on to working with hunter-gatherers."

Lucky hunter-gatherers. Soon we will learn that humans trade sex for meat, too.

Sometimes words matter a lot. Anyone describing what these chimpanzees do (long-term friendship, it sounds to me) as trading sex for meat should prove to us that this indeed is the case. For instance, there should be examples of a male chimpanzee stopping to donate meat when a female chimpanzee refuses sex or has sex with another male and so on. There should be analysis of all meat donations, even to other male chimpanzees, say, and there should be analysis of whatever else these chimpanzee pairs do together, preferably demonstrating that they don't do anything else together but these two exchanges before they are called such.

To call behavior like this something that humans regard a trade in the marketplace has connotations, and all of those are bad for women.

These Shoes Are Made For Walking...

Samhita at feministing.com posted this photo with just the title "Women As Closet Furniture." Which does apply rather nicely.

But there's much more to that picture. Take the contrast between the vulnerable naked softness of the woman and the hardness and shininess of all the objects piled up on her.

Or notice how the shoes are walking all over her, while she reclines in a position which is servile and at least looks painful.

Or notice the hand that helpfully stretches out to offer a case to the imaginary male owner of all this abundance.

Or notice how it's impossible for her to move and how she appears to have an orgasm and how there's a slight tinge of violence all over the picture.

None of this would matter in a world where all kinds of images of women (and men) were available. Of course pigs fly in that world, too.

Avian Child-Rearing: How Eagles Do It

This video is fascinating. It's a clip from a livecam of a pair of nesting eagles. Three eggs were laid and one has already hatched. The clip begins with the mummy eagle hatching in the nest. The daddy eagle then flies in, deposits another tree branch to build the nest. And then he takes over the hatching. So.
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You can see the baby in this clip which also has an intruder.

Lizard Brain Politics

I have nothing against lizards, nothing, but humans are not supposed to do politics with nothing but their lizard brains, and I see far too much of this going on. International politics is not the World Championships In Dick Measurement. International politics concerns stuff where real people can die, and dicks are not relevant for the discussion.

Thus, it doesn't ultimately matter if George Bush held hands with a Saudi prince and if Obama bowed to one. Adults can do stuff like that without finding their loins endangered, though the acts themselves are always worth analyzing from a more adult angle.

Neither does it matter if Obama doesn't brag and boast enough on his foreign trip. If anything, bragging and boasting after eight years of the same from George Bush left nobody convinced about his penis-size. Rather, it left most foreigners (yes, I know they don't matter for conservatives) angry and wary of this country, and that certainly was part of the problem Bush created. So Obama has to pour oil on the waves. That what he says is regarded as important all over the world should be enough for those who somehow equate their own value with the supremacy of the United States.

But The Beer And The Meat Got Delivered?

A man has been accused of selling his fourteen-year old daughter into marriage for beer, meat and 16,000 dollars. When he didn't get the money (after two weeks), he went to the police to get his daughter back...

A story about the property value of women, sure, but a story about poverty and sadness, too. It's always good to remember that what he did would be perfectly acceptable in many cultures, not a crime at all, just the way daughters are apportioned out in life.

You Know You're An Adult When

You can eat all the crust off the blueberry pie and none of the blueberries and nobody yells at you.

That is, in any case, the way I realized that there are advantages to adulthood.

Hemorrhoid With Eyes

What's with this wingnuts' fascination concerning bottoms? Rush Limbaugh recently said something about anal poisons and now Michael Savage calls Glenn Beck a hemorrhoid with eyes. And with ears, too. It's naturally very funny when the wingnuts fight each other.

But I'm not so sure if we should get all our entertainment from political commentaries, given that they are often about serious matters. This, for instance, is just a little bit frightening, once you get past the laughing stage:





There are many more frightening scenarios, of course (gun shows, say), but somehow the mixing of lies, ignorance, threats and urges to panic isn't ultimately very funny. I'm probably just a humorless feminazi here, sigh.

Who Am I Chatting WIth?

It's an odd medium, this blogging thing. Odder some days than others, sure, but it's always weird in the sense of being a mongrel born from chatting with people on one side and some form of solitary writing on the other side.

I throw out thoughts. And sometimes I get responses. But who is it who reads the thoughts? And when you write on someone else's blog, do you write for a totally different audience? I find myself stilted and blocked when visiting like that, because some part of me thinks of it as visiting another person's home and so the rules of being the guest apply. I can't spit on the carpet or swear. But then perhaps those are my strengths? See what I mean? Probably not, as these thoughts might not interest someone who isn't blogging.

Who is it that we are chatting with? Think of how we converse on this blog, sometimes quite heatedly, think of how we respond to a comment someone else has made, how we have what looks like a conversation between a small number of people. But all that remains in the archives and ten months later someone can come in and read the discussion and leave a comment, like a ghost. Only I most likely see it there. Was that ghost part of the conversation? Where do the dead blog posts go?

And of course most people don't respond to any one post. Do they read? Does not knowing this matter?

Most days I don't think of any of this. Most days I just have lots of fun. But blogging is ephemeral, something that's here and then is not here. What was it that took place and where did it go?

Good News Tuesday

Same-sex marriage is legal in Vermont. That's good news, because it increases fairness in this world.

The Taliban-style law for Shia women in Afghanistan has been dropped after public outcry from dirty-fucking-hippies in the West. That also increases fairness though perhaps not by very much given that most women who would have been affected by the law live the way it would have stipulated in any case. But it's like the first sand grain starting to move from a wall. Or so I hope.

And last but not least (well, least, really): Americans are more optimistic about the economy since the presidential inauguration. This matters, because much of the recession has to do with emotions and beliefs and worry. Worry makes it much, much worse.

Who You Gonna Believe? Nicolle Wallace Or Your Own Ears?

Now that's a difficult choice to make. I'm pretty sure I heard Barack Obama scolding Europeans about their reflexive anti-Americanism, but Nicolle Wallace didn't. All she heard was no bragging about Murka and her exceptionalism. In Nicolle's world one brags a lot about one's own house while visiting other people's houses. That's good manners.

Free Markets Of Ideas

Remember when we were told that the Internet would provide us the ultimate free market for ideas? A place where ideas would don their silver helmets, raise their magic swords and go at each other at the dawn of the New Era, all following the Marquess of Queenberry rules, naturally? A civilized but open struggle! Let the best idea win!

It doesn't look anything like that, does it? Except perhaps for that manly parable I painted, all stirred together from unarmed combat and noble dueling. What mostly seems to have happened is that the ideas cower each in their own corner of the boxing ring, surrounded by their acolytes. Thus, the conservatives stay on their blogs and the liberals stay on their blogs and any visiting consists of trolling raids.

I'm not sure what the impact of that will be on the mythical free market of ideas. Neither am I sure why it seems to be the case that an unmoderated large forum is always ultimately taken over by the extremists and/or the trolls. If the idea of a free market of ideas really worked then we'd have to conclude that it's the trolls and/or the extremists who had the best ideas.

The conclusion I draw from all this is that the cyberspace does not provide a free market for ideas. Of course I could have drawn the same conclusion much more quickly by just checking the list of requirements of a perfectly competitive market against the cyberspace reality, but that wouldn't have made a post.

Monday Morning Muddle Study

Just for the fun of it. Did you know that depressed women give their children unhealthier food? Or perhaps not! Perhaps depressed women force their children to eat well as a control issue? Or both! Yasss...

- We found that mothers who were emotionally unstable, anxious, angry, sad, had poor self-confidence or a negative view of the world were far more likely to give their child sweet and fatty foods. At the same time, there was no link between maternal personality and how healthy a diet the child got in the form of fruit and vegetables, explains psychologist Eivind Ystrøm at the NIPH.

These maternal personality traits fall under a collective name of high negative affectivity (negative emotions). These people often have a lower stress threshold, giving up quicker when faced with obstacles – e.g. in a disagreement – and often experience lack of control of the child.

- I think that mothers compensate for this either by trying to force healthy food into their child or hold the sweet-bag strings extra tightly. Paradoxically, they try to balance poor control by actually using more control. With force and restrictions they increase desire which quickly results in resistance in the form of tantrums which these mothers are also bad at resisting. Also, earlier studies have shown that controlling behaviour among parents is linked with a more sugar-rich diet among children.

And what would be the reason to study this? To give the mothers some help BECAUSE otherwise they feed their children bad foods? Why not give them some help because they themselves deserve it? It's odd how hard it is to justify something like that, isn't it?

But of course I'm being unfair here and the study is probably a whole lot more honest than most of those what's-wrong-with-women studies that I discuss, as it dares to point out some of the complications. Likewise, people in the academia must publish something, and so we get lots of studies. Lots.

School Marm...

Now this is an interesting accusation I've seen used recently: to call someone a school marm as a Bad Thing.

Why is it a bad thing, exactly? Worth thinking about, eh?

Saturday Critter Blogging

A blue heron in flight, courtesy of The Old Man From Scene 24. Click for a larger view. Beautiful.

Why The Dog Looks At You Like That When You Empty The Compost Bucket by Anthony McCarthy

Dog culture is pheromone based.
What stinks to us is to their taste,
To them high art, to us just waste.
Dog culture is pheromone based.

A Note:

I've been taking some courses that I've got to finish this month so I'm going to be posting very lightly in April, if at all.

Anthony McCarthy

Friday News Dump on Women

Compare the two pictures of the new Israeli government. The female ministers have been disappeared in the second one, because it was published in an ultra-orthodox newspaper. Another ultra-orthodox newspaper just blacked out the women. So nobody gets upset and stuff.

In Swat Valley, Pakistan, the Taliban are flogging women publicly, though I think only men are allowed to watch. The video of the flogging of a seventeen-year old girl has surfaced and caused an uproar in Pakistan. The uproar is good, of course, but the event itself is not very good.

For one thing, nobody appears to know what the girl was punished for (though theories include her leaving her home without a male custodian, leaving the house together with a man married to someone else and just refusing the marriage proposal of a local Taliban leader). It seems that there was no court case over her alleged crimes, either. Sigh.

Public places: Which public? (by Suzie)

           (Hang on, this post will travel far afield.)

           A friend traveled across Southern Europe and Northern Africa as a young man. He often was alone as he hitchhiked and slept outdoors. He wasn’t always welcome, but no one bothered him physically. He’s a sweet guy, but he looks mean, and he’s at least 6-foot-5.
          When I said I envied him, he replied that I could have done the same. I told him that it would be different for a young woman traveling alone. That had never occurred to him.
          Learning about yourself and the world while traveling has long been a theme in literature. Although men predominate, women have contributed to this genre. On my bookshelf alone, I’ve got “A Road of Her Own: Women's Journeys in the West,” “Unsuitable for Ladies: An Anthology of Women Travellers” and “Maiden Voyages: Writings of Women Travelers.”
These books often feature white women traveling to “exotic” places, defining themselves against other(ed) people or nature. (In comparison, the Apostate recently looked at traveling as a brown woman.)
        Whatever her color, a woman is likely to find gender matters, in some fashion or another. As I wrote last week about the “Battlestar Galactica” finale, it’s different for girls. When people talk of “public” places – whether it’s a train in another country or your neighborhood park or the Internet – question whether there are some “publics” who cannot use them safely and comfortably, and why.

       Linda McDowell, then director of the Graduate School of Geography at Cambridge University, wrote an excellent book titled “Gender, Identity & Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies." She gives the example of Tomkins Square Park in New York City. In the 1990s, the Leftist position was: Young, upper-class people wanted to clear out those who were homeless, mentally ill or doing drugs so that they (the yuppies) felt safer, and their property values could rise. But this ignored gender. Some women, no matter what their circumstances, may feel less safe in places where groups of men hang out – and for good reason.
        In my high school, there was a hallway with a long bench where guys would congregate, making nasty comments if a girl walked by. The hall served one public but not another. Some boys take this behavior into adulthood. For example: the blow-up last year over men groping women at SF conventions. 

        The Internet has made such harassment easier and anonymous. Echidne has written on the AutoAdmit case here and more recently. The NYT explored the world of trolls, in which men predominate. The dictum is always: Don't let them bother you -- that's what they want. Just ignore them and they'll go away. Once again, women must be the gatekeepers of bad male behavior. 

         Justin Wolfers noted something that newspaper editors have long noticed: Men are more likely to send angry emails, just as they once made hateful calls or sent angry letters. The online version of many newspapers allow comments, most of which would never have been printed as letters to the editors. (Here's an interesting discussion on this topic.) The conversations can be so hateful and downright stupid that I rarely read them -- and I'm a blogger.

         At my former newspaper, a group of readers, mostly men, have infested the comment sections, driving away others. I've heard that smart and articulate readers will win out in this marketplace of ideas. But, no, they just avoid the comments. The online bullies also go after the people who are being quoted in such an execrable way that I don't know why anyone would want to open themselves up these days.

          Which "public" is being served? 

Domestic violence & the economy (by Suzie)

           Florida has seen a 37 percent increase in the demand for domestic-violence shelters, according to a report to the Legislature by the Florida Coalition Against Domestic Violence. If it's happening here, I wouldn't be surprised if it was happening in other states. 
           The Pensacola News Journal suggests some reasons: More people are at home because of layoffs. The recession puts more stress on people. Friends and family members have fewer resources to help victims. Cuts in social services translate into less help. Women stay in shelters longer because it's harder to get a job and move out on their own.
           The newspaper quotes Department of Children and Families Secretary George Sheldon: "It's the worst I've seen in years."

Friday flower blogging (by Suzie)

        I hope you're enjoying springtime (if that's the season you're in). 

Who Is Afraid Of Public Health Insurance?

The Republican Party, that's who. I was reading about Kathleen Sebelius and her confirmation hearing to become the secretary of health and human services, and noticed the focus on the question of a public option in the health insurance markets:

Grassley and several colleagues voiced discomfort with suggestions that legislation include an optional government-sponsored health insurance program. Conservatives worry that a public plan would set unrealistically low reimbursement rates that could undermine the private insurance market.

Conservatives probably also worry that the public option might actually out-compete the private options and then we'd get --- gasp! --- socialism! Or at least socialism the way that term is used in this country which knows nothing about real socialism.

This particular topic gets the oddest comments from the Republicans. Grassley worries that the public option will pay providers too little (or that's how I interpret the 'low reimbursement rate' comment in the above quote), and Olympia Snowe worries that the option is too expensive:

The issue has already emerged as key stumbling block that threatens bipartisan consensus on health-overhaul legislation this year. Many congressional Democrats say that a health bill would have to include a nationwide public-insurance option, while Republicans readily dismiss the concept.

It is unclear if there is room for compromise between lawmakers on the issue. Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine, a moderate Republican on the Finance panel who could prove a major player in debate over health legislation, warned Thursday that a public-plan option "could end up being far more costly" for those seeking insurance.

But if it's too expensive people will not sign up for it. Right?

First Spouses

Shouldn't it be first spice? You know, mouse-mice, louse-lice. In any case, nobody writes 'first spouses', because the spouses of powerful people are overwhelmingly female and thus called wives. If they happen to be husbands they hide from the public eye, because being a first spouse is demeaning for a guy. Really.

Dana Goldstein points out the invisible husbands as a commentary to this picture, which is supposed to be about the spouses of the G-20 bigwigs:





But the two husbands, Néstor Kirchner and Joachim Sauer, are missing. If they were in the picture they'd be ridiculed. Really.

All this reminded me of Darrel Issa's attempt to put some controls on the First Lady:

House Republicans are pressing for a change in federal law that could force Michelle Obama and future first ladies to do more of their policy work in public. But Democrats warn President Obama may take the attempt personally "as an attack on his wife."

The GOP effort is being led by the ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), whose initial salvo was rebuffed recently at a contentious committee markup session. Under Issa's amendment, any government policy group that Mrs. Obama or another first spouse regularly participates in would be subject to a law requiring meetings to be announced in advance and, in most instances, public.

...

"We are trying actually to protect the historic role of the first lady," Issa insisted, repeatedly invoking the "transparency" mantra of the Obama administration. "I believe this is open government at its finest."

...

The video, as recorded by the committee's GOP staff, is after the jump. Discussion of the first ladies' amendment begins at about 10:57.

Note all the references to 'first ladies'. And to 'future first ladies'. The assumption is that first spouses will always be female. Really.

The GOP Budget Proposal And Dishwasher Detergent

I wanted to write about it yesterday because it really is an April Fool proposal but then people might have thought I made it up. Because the Republicans want the stimulus package to be canceled and government expenditure to be frozen for five years!!!! And then to apply something called 'free' stimulus! No, it's not dildoes for all but drilling (drill, baby, drill!) for oil in ANWR. And of course there would be loads of tax breaks for the rich.

It's a very funny proposal, because it consists pretty much of what the Hoover government did to really make the Great Depression great rather than little.

Sounds somewhat deranged to me. So does this post on RedState (a winger blog) about how the conservatives should grab arms to fight a law in Washington state which bans phosphates in dishwasher detergents:

Washington State has turned its residents into a group of drug runners — crossing state lines to buy dish washer detergent with phosphate.

At what point do the people tell the politicians to go to hell? At what point do they get off the couch, march down to their state legislator's house, pull him outside, and beat him to a bloody pulp for being an idiot?

At some point soon, it will happen. It'll be over an innocuous issue. But the rage is building. It's not a partisan issue. There is bipartisan angst at out of control government made worse by dumb bans like this and unintended consequences like AIG's bonus problems.

I couldn't help thinking how a Republican guy would mutter to himself: "This is the straw that broke the camel's back! To the barricades brothers! errr.... What's dishwasher detergent?"

Vanity Fair

Is the new boyz' magazine. Like Playboy. Except that we are supposed to pretend that it's not, because it has real articles. Unless only boyz read real articles.

What irritates me about this is not the use of naked women on the cover. If the magazine openly stated that it's a soft-porn magazine for hetero guys, that would be sort of acceptable. But we are not supposed to notice that. Even though these choices tell us that Vanity Fair is chasing after the young-horny-male demographic. And offer no delicious naked guys.

April Fool's Day

Do you ever read in my archives? I went back to see what I have written on other April Fool's Days. In 2004:

Let's look at something more cheerful instead. First, there are very good news for the mice: they can be vaccinated against the SARS virus. This makes it much more comfortable for them to travel to the Far East. Humans are very kind to the mice; sometimes it seems that almost all medical research has to do with the well-being of our four-legged friends. Can mice take artificial sweeteners without harm to their health? Can we solve extreme obesity in mice? Will Prozac work to keep the mice positive while hunting for the cheese? Large libraries consist of all the crucial findings on Mouse Health.

Too bad that humans are rather different from mice, and that not that many of the mice findings generalize terribly well to other mammals. I'm old enough (very old as humans count!) to remember countless mouse health revelations that ultimately had nothing to do with the health of humans. Still, studying mice is a lot more harmless than some other human activities (except from the mouse point of view).

That wasn't quite an April Fool's post but I did write one of those the following year:

I have been offered a book contract! The book will be all about my life as a snake goddess and the many exciting adventures I've had over the centuries. It will include a "Passion of the Christ" episode where I spill the beans about what really happened. Don't worry, there will still be plenty of whipping.

And sex. They doubled the advance when they heard that I once had a hot one-night stand with Queen Victoria and Prince Albert... Ah, those wobbly little chins bring back such memories. I will also reveal all about Eleanor Roosevelt. That was some hot lady! And Franklin wasn't that bad, either, especially after some moonlight swims. But the rest of their staff was pretty clueless.

Then to the modern era! There are good reasons for the glum face of Laura Bush, and I will spell them out. Twice, just to make sure. I will also explain, in great and explicit detail, why Liberal men are so much better in bed, though the word "liberal" will give you the gist of it.

I did offer to correct all the misconceptions in world history and to tell what will happen next, according to us gods and goddesses, but the publishers were not interested. There's no money in it. Instead, they wanted to know if they could have nude pictures of me on the cover. I said no when they explained that they wanted to make me look like I had sixteen breasts.

Ok. This is an April Fool joke and not a very good one, either. I never went to bed with Queen Victoria!

I recycle these because I wish to reduce my carbon footprint. Or tailprint.

Another Pet Peave

So I wake up this morning, get some coffee and start reading my various e-mail accounts. Except that a major one has changed to a 'new and improved!' format overnight, without any prior warning, and I sit there squeezing my eyes narrow trying to see where it is that I can now check my distant account and where my folders have been placed and why the page looks like fresh snow after birds have hopped all over it.

Every time computer people change something to 'new and improved!', my body memory of the old system is wasted, gone, no longer there. All those lightning-fast, instinctive acts take you exactly nowhere. You have to sit there, with narrowed eyes, and use forefinger pokes. And time passes, your gallbladder rebels, and then you decide and go write a blog post instead. (The graph above tells you the story. In the old system my location was far to the right on the horizontal axis, but the system change dropped me right next to the vertical axis, and the effort and time needed for each mail check increased enormously.)

It's not a big complaint if a change indeed vastly improves the system. But so many of these changes do not improve much anything, yet every single one of them has that relatively lumpy learning requirement, and it looks to me as if the supply side of this market doesn't care about it very much at all.

Which is weird, because the customer is presumably the queen or king, right?

I may just be curmudgeony about this, just as I'm curmudgeony about Twitter. Because of those learning costs and the time requirements and the need to see some value in return for all those. But talk me out of this if you wish.
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Hee! I added a picture to make this blog more alluring. I'm nuts.

The Tilt

While writing "The Egg Made Me Do It" I tried to clarify why the topic angered me so very much. The reason is nebulous and has to do with something that Rose Macaulay pointed out in Mystery at Geneva (1923):

All sorts of articles and letters appear in the papers about women. Profound questions are raised concerning them. Should they smoke? Should they work? Vote? Marry? Exist? Are not their skirts too short, or their sleeves? Have they a sense of humor, of honor, of direction? Are spinsters superfluous? But how seldom similar inquiries are propounded about men.

That's it, pretty much. Women are studied as this humongous pile of womanhood and every single woman is ultimately deemed to be just another spoonful from that pile, with no real individual variation. This is true even when the study curtly admits that 'individual results might vary,' but...

We rarely use this approach with men. To see what I mean, do a reversal on the three horrible crime stories I read yesterday and think how they would have been reported had all the suspected murderers been women. Surely there would have been talk of hormones (testosterone?) and their influence? Discussions about the advisability of feminism? Concerns over a horrible gender-linked crime wave?

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan

Women are 'taken care of':

Hamid Karzai has been accused of trying to win votes in Afghanistan's presidential election by backing a law the UN says legalises rape within marriage and bans wives from stepping outside their homes without their husbands' permission.

The Afghan president signed the law earlier this month, despite condemnation by human rights activists and some MPs that it flouts the constitution's equal rights provisions.

The final document has not been published, but the law is believed to contain articles that rule women cannot leave the house without their husbands' permission, that they can only seek work, education or visit the doctor with their husbands' permission, and that they cannot refuse their husband sex.

A briefing document prepared by the United Nations Development Fund for Women also warns that the law grants custody of children to fathers and grandfathers only.

Senator Humaira Namati, a member of the upper house of the Afghan parliament, said the law was "worse than during the Taliban". "Anyone who spoke out was accused of being against Islam," she said.

Slavery, my dears, under any other name is still slavery. Never mind if it's traditional, never mind if it's sanctioned by one religion or another, and never mind if it's regarded as less important than other geopolitical concerns.

For some odd reason I feel I cannot breathe.
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The posts beginning with "Meanwhile" are my continuing commentary on women's rights all over this planet.

The Egg Made Me Do It!

Am I imagining things or is the British society sexist in an especially nasty way? Here's something I read today about a study concerning the shopping habits of women, those poor emotional creatures:

Women may be able to blame impulse buys and extravagant shopping on their time of the month, research suggests.

In the 10 days before their periods began women were more likely to go on a spending spree, a study found.

Psychologists believe shopping could be a way for premenstrual women to deal with the negative emotions created by their hormonal changes.

Professor Karen Pine will present her work to a British Psychological Society meeting in Brighton later this week.

...

She said much of this could be explained by hormonal changes during the menstrual cycle. And the findings were exaggerated in the women with severe PMT.

"We are getting surges and fluctuations in hormones which affect the part of the brain linked to emotions and inhibitory control. So the behaviour we found is not surprising."

Another explanation might be that women are buying items to make themselves feel more attractive - coinciding with the time of ovulation when they are most fertile, typically around 14 days before the start of a period.

Most of the purchases made by the women were for adornment, including jewellery, make-up and high heels.

Professor Pine said: "Other researchers have found there is an ornamental effect around the time of ovulation."

Did you get it? EITHER women shop carelessly during the last ten days of their menstrual cycles OR they shop carelessly around the time of ovulation which is in the middle of the cycle. Perhaps it would be better to just argue that women shop carelessly? Of course we don't know if men do this, too, because we don't study that aspect of men's hormones.

Professor Pine is one of the authors of a book on women and finance, called Sheconomics. Here's what that book is all about:

Pensions. Equity. Compound interest. Yawn. Yes, financial stuff is all a bit tedious but since there will be no escaping it this year we may as well start getting our heads around it. Ah, but that's just the problem, see. One half of the population apparently finds that easier to do than the other. Women frequently have a mental "off" switch when it comes to financial jargon. They tend to be more frightened of and embarrassed by money, making them less likely to ask for a pay rise. Sometimes they are positively babyish, happily letting men take charge. Their attitude to spending is much more emotionally driven than men's, which is why so many females shop to cheer themselves up. Theirs is a world of illogical priorities where they will happily spend hundreds of pounds on a dress that they will wear once, yet won't buy a small pension.

This is according to Sheconomics, a new book written by Karen Pine, a psychologist, and Simonne Gnessen, a financial coach. If it all sounds a bit patronising or sexist - and, frankly, parts of the book do - the authors, both women, say they know that there are many women who are brilliant with money. But they are acknowledging what research and years of experience bears out: that in general women struggle more to plan for their economic futures than men and and the very language of the financial world tends to alienate them.

Bolds are mine. It's a wonder that two women managed to get a book together, what with all those emotions. It's also a wonder that girls outperform boys at school in the U.K., for example. That would seem to be an utter impossibility in the world Professor Pine inhabits (where the sky is pink and the clouds always cute and fluffy and no man ever feels any emotions about money).

The Mad, Apocalyptic, Tearful (And Rich) Glenn Beck

The New York Times has a piece on Glenn Beck today, called "Fox News's Mad, Apocalyptic, Tearful Rising Star." I'm not sure why I bothered reading any of it but I did, and present you with a few tasty morsels:

The conservative writer David Frum said Mr. Beck's success "is a product of the collapse of conservatism as an organized political force, and the rise of conservatism as an alienated cultural sensibility."

"It's a show for people who feel they belong to an embattled minority that is disenfranchised and cut off," he said.

Joel Cheatwood, a senior vice president for development at Fox News, said he thought Mr. Beck's audience was a "somewhat disenfranchised" one. And, he added, "it's a huge audience."

How is that audience disenfranchised? Does that term now mean 'not getting one's way all the time'? Never mind.

Here's the second morsel:

Mr. Beck says he believes every word he says on his TV show, and the radio show that he still hosts from 9 a.m. to noon each weekday.

...

He added later: "I say on the air all time, 'if you take what I say as gospel, you're an idiot.' "

It makes your head swim, and not in a good way. The only logical conclusion I can draw from those two sentences is that Mr. Beck declares himself an idiot.

Time Travels With Larry

Larry Summers, that is. He's going to take us all back in time. First only a fortnight or so, to his speech at the Brookings Institution:

In a speech at the Brookings Institution think tank, Summers, long considered one of the nation's smartest economists, outlined the factors that led to the economic crisis.

The over optimism that led to a bubble in prices for real estate and other assets which, once it collapsed, set off an economic chain reaction that led to job losses, lower incomes and foreclosures.

"Prices fall. People sell. Instead of an expectation of new buyers, there is an expectation of new sellers. Greed gives way to fear. And this ... fear begets fear."

Breaking the "vicious cycle" was something only the federal government acting decisively could do, Summers said.

"We need to do what's necessary to get us out of the crisis we inherited," Summers said "... This was not a set of economic processes that would simply automatically fix themselves if you didn't act."

Bolding by me. Are you ready for the next flight backwards? It will be a decade, this time, all the way to 1999. Here's Larry Summers then, commenting on the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 (which was all about keeping bankers and brokers separate so that they wouldn't breed banksters):

''Today Congress voted to update the rules that have governed financial services since the Great Depression and replace them with a system for the 21st century,'' Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers said. ''This historic legislation will better enable American companies to compete in the new economy.''

Read the whole 1999 article. It's worth it for a few bitter laughs.

I don't think that you should say you've inherited something from yourself. Well, maybe in the Buddhist sense of no permanent self, but not in the sense of Larry Summers of 2009 and Larry Summers of 1999. He should take a bit more responsibility for this smelly kettle of fish, given that he was one of the original cooks. And now he's been invited to cook for us again...
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Phila found the 1999 article.