Meanwhile, in China

Authorities are planning to relax the one-child policy. The current policy, combined with the 'preference for sons' (or the 'dislike towards daughters') has resulted in a skewed gender profile:

A study published in the British Medical Journal in 2009 found that China has some 32 million more boys than girls under the age of 20.

What are the consequences of a future with lots of 'excess' men? Here different articles appear to disagree. Some argue that those men just won't find wives:

The need for more children to care for parents, plus a gender imbalance that will leave tens of millions of men without wives, are two arguments for a relaxation of the one-child policy

Some expect a darker future for those scarce women:

"The sharp rise in the number of men of marriageable age who fail to find wives will become a big hazard," Tian Xueyuan, deputy director of the Population Association of China, told the China Daily newspaper.

"It will increase incidences of women being bought as wives, as well as abduction and trafficking, and prostitution and pornography," Xueyuan said.

This is one of those topics where gender-reversal really makes a difference. So let's flip the genders and think of some country where many more girls than boys are born. What would our concerns be in that situation?

Would we write about the girls not being able to find a husband when they grow up? Perhaps. But I'm pretty sure that we'd also write about the power this scarcity would have put in the hands of those boys when they grow up. They can pick and choose! They can set their own terms for marriage! They can take multiple wives!

Now go back to the original treatment and notice that neither article suggests any benefits to the scarce girls or women from this situation. Rather, they might be kidnapped! Women in general might be trafficked!

This reversal is useful because it opens our eyes (well, mine, at least) to the power imbalance which is mostly ignored in the kinds of discussions where economists, say, talk about the markets for marriage and who gets the best marriage contract. Those suggest that the scarcer partners will wield extra power.

That's not how reality turns out. Scarcity is not seen as conveying women more power.

What's going on here is pretty obvious. Yes, the Chinese have a 'preference' for sons, but most societies still look at the problem and its remedies through a male lens or monocle. This is not necessarily wrong, in terms of reality, but it serves to remind us that China is still a patriarchal country.

A Piece of Heaven

Paul Gonsalves. Tip from QuentinCompson.

And it smells of autumn today!

This Insane World

It is the Three-Ring-Circus, on most days, and people are far from rational. Ever since my return from vacation I have struggled with the meaning of this blog, whether it serves any useful purpose at all, whether I live too much in my head and too little in those other parts (gonads?) which appear to rule much of our public discourse and even international political events, whether I am wrong in picking the topics I pick, whether I'm just fighting the windmills while the sand in my hour-class keeps falling through.

None of that is exactly new, as those of you know who have followed my whining and griping over the years. But the long time off writing did give me a bit of a culture shock. I see more clearly what the hooks in popular stories are, what people want to discuss and which solutions do not work because they require some type of wider rationality, rationality over and above one's own little concerns, one's own fears of being ignored, one's own ambitions and needs.

Let me give you an example, other than the obvious Koran burning one: Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi's trip to Europe, to see his old pal, Italy's Prime Silvio Berlusconi. The two have a lot in common. For instance, in a sane world neither of them would be running a country. And in a sane world they wouldn't be allowed closer than two miles from any young woman.

But we do not live in a sane world. Hence this:

Libyan leader Col. Moammar Gadhafi, who holds increasing sway in the Italian economy, upset some Italians by urging conversion to Islam during a three-day visit to the predominantly Roman Catholic country.

Col. Gadhafi held a series of private meetings on Sunday and Monday with some 800 Italian women and a small group of young men organized by a hostess agency and paid for by the Some women who took part in a meeting Sunday told reporters the Libyan leader lectured them on Islam, and then presided over a ceremony in which, they said, a handful of women converted to Islam. The attendees, who were paid to attend the meeting, left carrying bound copies of the Quran that they said were gifts from Col. Gadhafi.

The meetings have become a ritual accompanying Col. Gadhafi's frequent visits to Rome since the signing of a "friendship" accord in 2008. Rome then pledged €5 billion ($6.37 billion) to Tripoli as reparations for Italy's decadeslong occupation of Libya that ended in the 1930s.

It is unclear exactly what purpose the meetings with young women serve. The women are recruited by Rome-based casting agency Hostessweb, and are paid for by the Libyan government, said Alessandro Londero, the agency's president. Mr. Londero, who also attended the lectures, said the Libyan leader addressed the women "a bit like a prophet," urging them to convert to Islam.

Set aside the religion business which has been criticized elsewhere. Notice, instead, the way women are treated here. These are young women, based on the pictures I saw, and they were hired from a casting agency. Not just any woman could walk in! They had to be eye-candy! Such contempt for women is so familiar to us that our focus stays on Gadhafi's capers.

But Berlusconi treats women as his personal vagina collection, too. Is this something worth pointing out? And if I do point it out how does it make a difference? After all, Berlusconi and Gadhafi run countries!!! Yet they both confuse women with ice-cream cones or chocolate boxes and we gently slap their fingers for that while letting the underlying allowing continue.

Is it helpful to point that out, to dig under the surface in that way? Or am I the only person not pleased with just staying on the surface, discussing the Question Of The Day, the one that fires people up?

It's not that my approach is somehow better or that the Questions Of The Day weren't important. But what I have tried to do is not common, even among feminist writers, and now I wonder if it's me that is the insane one.

Reading Saletan

William Saletan is better known to me as the guy who really knows how many reproductive rights women should have so mostly I don't read him.

But his piece on the reactions to Terry Jones' plan to burn Korans and the response from various Muslims deserves some discussion. Saletan writes:

Two days ago, hundreds of Afghans gathered in Kabul to denounce the United States for burning the Quran. They torched American flags, chanted "Death to America," and carried signs calling for the death of President Obama. Some of them hurled rocks at U.S. troops. A student in the crowd said of the planned Quran burning: "We know this is not just the decision of a church. It is the decision of the president and the entire United States."

He's wrong, of course. The Quran burning is the brainchild of a Florida minister and his tiny fundamentalist church. It has been condemned by the White House, the State Department, the commanding U.S. general in Afghanistan, Christian organizations, and countless Americans. But when clerics in Egypt denounce the incendiary plan, we feel the heat. When thousands of Muslims rally against it in Indonesia, they do so outside our embassy. When an imam in Kabul threatens retaliation, he casts a shadow on all of us: "If they decide to burn the holy Quran, I will announce jihad against these Christians and infidels."

This is how it feels to be judged by the sins of others who destroy in the name of your faith. You're no more responsible for 30 Christian extremists in Florida than Muslims are for the 9/11 hijackers. Yet most of us, when polled, say that no Muslim house of worship should be built near the site of the 9/11 attacks. In saying this, we implicitly hold all Muslims accountable for the crime of the 9/11 hijackers.

The points he makes are both excellent and bad ones. The excellent bits are easy to see: What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. That may well be a very good lesson to learn, on both sides of this stupid religious warmongering debate.

What's bad about that post are two things: First, many of us have been neither geese nor ganders but perhaps ducks or gulls, some species of birds which was not inappropriately generalizing in the first place, in either direction. Saletan confuses the issue by ignoring that, preferring a plunge into false dualism.

Second, that false dualism becomes "them" vs. "us" in no time at all, even if his other message is about avoiding false generalizations. Check out Saletan's links. Only two of them can be interpreted as trying to pour oil over the roiling waters. He could have linked to many more dignitaries doing exactly that.

A Heavy Dose Of Economics

1. I recommend this book review on the causes of the imploding financial markets worldwide. It can be heavy going at places but it's worth it. Think of it as your daily dose of bran and yogurt from feral goats. Good for you, ultimately, if you survive it.

Note that I might not agree with everything that review concludes, but it's a very good survey of many of the issues and it leaves us hanging, waiting for Part 2 with the solutions. Life does that, too. Leaves us hanging, waiting for the solutions.

2. This post is fascinating on the intersection of ethics and basic economics teachings and how the latter seem* to affect students who take only the prep levels of economics courses.

Sadly, the better stuff is in the later courses. Most introductory economics courses focus far too much on the competitive market model, the one with the Marshallian scissors of supply and demand, the one where all information is known to everybody, the one where very many sellers meet very many buyers exchanging money for some simple commodity which everyone can completely understand and evaluate.

It's very, very wrong to apply that model as a picture of reality. It's taught as a starting point (unless you are being taught by a wingnut), something to use as a basis for comparisons later on when the models get more realistic and less clear-cut.

Also note that the basic competitive model doesn't lend itself to the snow shovel example, either, because those sellers have market power, caused by the snow storm which makes getting an alternative and cheaper shovel harder. In thinking about the ethics of all this one should take into account that market power and not apply the normative rules (that the outcome is efficient) which are derived from the perfectly competitive model.

Both of these links are via Eschaton.
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*I write "seem", because students may self-select to courses which reinforce their initial value judgments.

The Lowest Common Denominator

Terry Jones and his congregation of fifty in Florida are getting the limelight attention he so obviously craves by planning to burn Korans. And the world is willing to play along, pretending that this tiny, tiny group of hatemongers is somehow emblematic of the United States. Or maybe not, but he is big enough to cause a giant reaction:

The pastor of a tiny, fringe evangelical church in Florida on Tuesday rebuffed a plea for restraint from Gen. David H. Petraeus, who warned that a plan to burn the Muslim holy book could provoke violence against American troops and citizens overseas.

"Instead of possibly blaming us for what could happen, we put the blame where it belongs — on the people who would do it," Pastor Terry Jones of the 50-member Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Fla., told the Associated Press. "We should address radical Islam and send a very clear warning that they are not to retaliate in any form."

Jones also said he was still praying over his decision and hinted that he might change his mind. "We understand the general's concerns and we are taking those into consideration," he told WOFL-TV in Orlando.

A coalition of Muslim, Christian and Jewish leaders held a news conference in Washington on Tuesday to condemn Jones' statements and other slurs aimed at Muslims nationwide.

"The threatened burning of copies of the Holy Koran this Saturday is a particularly egregious offense that demands the strongest possible condemnation by all who value civility in public life and seek to honor the sacred memory of those who lost their lives on Sept. 11," said a statement by religious leaders organized by the Islamic Society of North America.

Religious leaders warned that Muslims overseas would interpret extremists like Jones as reflecting mainstream American attitudes toward Muslims. In Afghanistan on Monday, protesters made a point of wrapping an effigy of Jones in an American flag before burning both the effigy and the flag.

I understand the seriousness of the situation, I do.

What I don't understand why we can't all grow up, why nobody points out that this Terry Jones represents FIFTY people and not the United States of America, and why we can't have a conversation between cultures to explain that this guy is like one grain of sand on a very long beach and that religious extremists are NOT to be interpreted as representatives of mainstream opinions on either side.

Meanwhile, in Congo. May TRIGGER.

New evidence of the use of rape as a weapon of war has emerged. The details are disgusting:

The additional sexual attacks, in an area called Uvira and other regions of North and South Kivu, came to light during Khare's trip. He told council members he learned of 74 cases of sexual violence, including against 21 minors — all girls between the ages of 7 and 15 — and six men, in a village called Miki, in South Kivu. All the women in another village, Kiluma, may have been systematically raped, he said.

Khare said in a community called Katalukulu, 10 women were raped by Congolese soldiers, which he said must "maintain a much higher standard of discipline, good behavior and conduct, and observance of human rights."

Altogether, he detailed new reports of mass rapes on various communities that added up to at least 267.

So both the rebels AND the Congolese army gang-rape (mostly) women as "a weapon of war". How does this work, exactly? Presumably those women are not in the Congolese army and most likely the majority of the victims don't belong to the rebels, either. They would seem to be innocent bystanders whose rapes are then turned into "weapons of war."

But is it war if the victims are mostly civilians on neither side of the battle? I'd call it something else: hate crimes against women.

These rapes are in the news because the U.N. admitted to a failure in how it has handled the case:

The United Nations today admitted that it had "failed" to prevent the systematic rape of hundreds of women in the Democratic Republic of Congo this summer by rebel forces, and then failed to go public with the information on the mass atrocities committed over four days.

The U.N. said more than 500 systematic rapes were committed in eastern Congo since late July, more than double the number that had been previously reported.

"Our actions were not adequate, resulting in the unacceptable brutalization of the population of the villages in the area. We must do better," said Atul Khare, a senior official in the U.N. peacekeeping operations, which had troops as close as 10 miles from some of the assailed villages.

Well, yes. But surely the Congolese rebels and soldiers should do better, too?

Few topics make me as angry as this one, and here is why:

The top U.N. official to prevent sexual violence, Margaret Wallstrom, quoted one raped woman as describing that the victims had been "forced to live through something like never before."

...

Describing how common rape is in the country, Wallstrom said that some Congolese women have concluded that "being gang raped by many men is normal for a woman."

Sure. It's all in a day's work: Get up, fetch the water, start the fire, cook the meal, get gang-raped...

A Statistics Lesson. Or A Statistics Lesion?

Here's a survey which would make all dead statisticians turn over in their graves. It's a beauty! Horrible biased and leading questions.

That particular survey may not be of any great importance, but it serves to remind all of us To Check The Questions when we read about the astonishing findings of various polls given fancy names. Before swallowing their findings, that is.

On Raising The Retirement Age For Social Security

They are trying to do that over the pond, too, in France. The proposal there is to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62. The French kinda take things differently, as these pictures from the demonstrations show.

Such demonstrations for such a reason would never happen here. The wingnuts say that it's because the socialist-islamofascist-French-surrender-monkeys are like that and, besides, Europe is dying out, what with all that leisure time spent in godless activities and the wimminz refusing to breed. That last bit about the uppity and selfish women is also the reason why the French need to raise the retirement age.

Which is a very sloppy way of saying that the wingnuts do control the conversation here to some extent and what they don't control the corporations and the protestant work ethic do. And the government budget concerns.

Those budget concerns are a very odd bird. It goes somewhere quietly nesting whenever Republicans are in power. You don't hear a peep from it, even if George Bush The Younger in fact sends money to Iraq by the truck load and that money just disappears. But when the Democrats are in power, the bird suddenly flies around all over the place, peeping and peeping, and so we all naturally must pay attention and tighten our belts and accept a higher retirement age and/or less pension money.

That is a remarkable trick!

Social Security now does seem endangered in its present form because both parties want to fix it. What those fixes are still varies. The Republicans want to privatize the accounts, in order to then disappear the system altogether.

They like the idea of the elderly begging on the streets. Remember that odd government budget bird? Any country in which that focus switch takes place so easily is not a country where enough people are capable of surfing the stock market competently with their own retirement funds. And I haven't even mentioned the recent problems in the financial markets and what those do to private retirement accounts.

President Obama has stated, very firmly, that he will not try to privatize Social Security. Instead, he will cut out bits here and there, to make it all solvent again. How odd it is that wars are not waged on that basis. We could decide to shorten the length of a war when the money runs out, kill fewer people, say, but no. Money for wars will always be found. What's harder to find (must turn pockets all the way inside out) is money for social services or education. Or the care of veterans after the wars.

All this is weird-and-wonderful. The proposed solutions to the Social Security "crisis" are also weird in that certain solutions simply are off the table, from the very beginning.

Removing the gap on the payroll taxes which finance the system is one of those. The current system of financing Social Security is regressive, loaded towards the lower earners. And note that it is only labor income which is taxed to cover the system. Income from investments and such is not taxed at all, which increases the overall regression on the financing side.

Another solution off the table is means-testing those who qualify for Social Security, despite the fact that several industrialized countries do exactly that to balance their books. If the point of Social Security is to serve as a safety net for the elderly, then only those who fall off the tightropes of capitalism really need it. From that standpoint means-testing would be a good idea to make the system cheaper. After all, when we pay insurance for our house or our car we don't demand all the insurance payments back if the house doesn't burn down or if the car doesn't get stolen.

The reason for picking out those two forgotten proposals: removing the payroll tax gap and introducing means-testing is not that they would be the ones I'd necessarily choose but to point out that they are off the table before the table is set, most likely because they share something that has to do with the hidden values underlying the U.S. politics on this question: The system must not begin to look like an income-transfer program between social classes, because such a program would not be supported by the voting part of the population.

But all the proposals on the table also affect the different social classes differently. Raising the retirement age will have much more serious effects on blue-collar workers and workers in the serving occupations where one stands all day long. The physical wear-and-tear in those jobs is greater. A longer working life is harder and more painful and any bout of unemployment is likely to become permanent. Add to that the effects of ageism which all older workers will face and you have something every bit as problematic as those other proposals.

Let Us Sing Of Labor

Today is, after all the day for labor in the United States, though the culture has managed to turn it into the last-day-to-go-to-the-beach-before-schools-start. If I were a suspicious goddess I'd wonder what conspiracy managed to erase any smell of work and workers from these celebrations.

But no conspiracy is needed, unless the American media is viewed as one gigantic conspiracy factory. I bet most American workers don't know that they have the shortest required vacations in the industrialized world, for instance, or one of the lowest unionization rates or the worst provisions of parental leave. Those things don't go very well with the-greatest-country-on-earth thinking.

It is the trade unions I wish to talk about today. They are a dying breed in this country* where the laws are geared towards the prevention of unionization and where the unions themselves have sometimes misbehaved in terms of crime and bigotry.

But the alternative of unionization is for every single worker to be a tiny, tiny fish in the ocean where the corporations act like sharks. The tiny fish could negotiate with a shark, sure! Let's just sit down and discuss better vacation conditions, an actual forty-hour week, more human and humane work places! The shark will understand and listen carefully, too, and then the sprat and the shark can write a labor contract and agree to arbitration in case any misunderstandings crop up later on.

Corporations are not necessarily sharks. But no market will function very well when the workers are tiny particles and the firms much larger ones. The point of the unions is to give workers more negotiating power. Without such collective action workers will get the absolute minimum the political system manages to get them.

Except that the U.S. political system is tied to money. The best democracy money can buy, goes the famous quip, and there's truth in it. The workers are not powerless but they must make up the edge money has by being far more numerous in their political efforts, more disciplined, more persistent. This is hard to do when employers have the upper hand and when even the Democratic Party is half-inclined to be the party of the corporations. Because politicians need money to run.

I sometimes think that what American workers need today is the kind of consciousness raising the second wave feminists practiced. Workers don't really see themselves as workers but as future capitalists, and the individual problems of individual workers are personalized. This leads to a search for purely individual solutions.

Such solutions have their place, but they will not increase the annual vacations of U.S. work force or offer better working conditions for all. For that we need collective action.

Happy Labor Day!
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*Except for professional unions. Those are still strong. It may not be a coincidence that we don't think of, say, the American Medical Association when trade unions are mentioned.

Where Are The Wimminz?

Or: It's a few months to the midterm elections. Do you know where your base voters are?

A new Gallup poll suggests that large chunks of the base of the Democratic Party are not that into the midterm elections:

Earlier this year, President Obama identified women, blacks, and young voters among the groups he highlighted as critical to a voter mobilization effort designed to help the Democrats hold their congressional majority. These groups made up a good portion of the "new voters" who propelled Obama to victory in 2008. However, Gallup data suggest they are not poised to provide the same kind of boost for Democratic candidates this fall. As a result, and because of the extraordinarily keen interest in the elections that conservative Republicans currently display, Republicans overall currently enjoy a 54% to 30% lead over Democrats in "thought given to the election."

Mmm. Have a look at the tables in the original link. Note something weird? The interest levels of the groups "blacks" and "young adults" are lower than in 2010, but the relative gap in interest has almost always existed between "young adults" and "older adults" and between "blacks" and "non-Hispanic whites".

Something different is going on with the female-male interest gap: The interest in the midterm elections women show is quite a lot lower than the interest men show. But this is NOT a return to some pre-existing trend. It looks like something new:





Left-click on the graph to make it bigger.

What is going on here?

It could be that any poll done in late August would have shown a similar gender gap? Note that the earlier polls in that graph were all taken in October or November. Women might have more on their minds at the beginning of the school year than men, what with the former still being mostly responsible for the management of children. All the trend graphs suggest that general interest levels are lower in August, so it's not impossible that we may be just seeing some kind of a typical August gender gap here.

But perhaps not. It could be that the gender gap we see here is a brand new one and something the administration should seriously think about. The group "women" has lots of voters in it, and if those voters stay at home the Democratic goose is cooked even faster.

Finally, perhaps the gender gap is just an artifact of the gap between Republicans and Democrats in interest levels. Men are more likely to vote Republican than women, and Democrats, in general, are more down-in-the-dumps right now.

Either of the last two explanations should serve as a wake-up call for the Democratic Party.
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P.S. These polls should include more detailed breakdowns. For instance, if the level of interest was given separately for women who have school-aged children we might be able to test the first guess I offer above. Likewise, a cross-tabulation of gender and political party membership would let us say something about the third guess.

For Labor Day [Anthony McCarthy]

Been looking for the sequence from The People Speak when Marisa Tomei reads the words of Genora Dollinger and found it in this interview of Howard Zinn by Bill Moyers. The entire interview is well worth the time to listen to it but Marisa Tomei's performance begins about 4:45. It's thrilling. As is Christian Kirk's reading of Susan B. Anthony's refusal to pay the fine when she was convicted of trying to vote, at about 12:30.

Craigslist stops pimping under protest (by Suzie)

Craigslist has blocked its adult-services section with a black "censored" bar, with no comment from founder Craig Newmark or CEO Jim Buckmaster. No one's saying whether this is permanent, or just a publicity stunt to generate support. The ads can still be accessed outside the U.S., and Boston Channel reports that Craigslist seems to be "directing content from the old adult services section to the casual encounters section."

Attorneys general for 17 states wrote Buckmaster last month, asking him to remove the adult services. Nonprofits opposed to human trafficking also have protested. Cook County Sheriff Thomas Dart sued last year. The AFP reported his news conference:

"Craigslist is the single largest source of prostitution in the nation. ... Missing children, runaways, abused women and women trafficked in from foreign countries are routinely forced to have sex with strangers because they're being pimped on Craigslist."

An FBI investigation found last year that more than 2,800 child prostitution ads had been posted on Craigslist and a recent nationwide sweep for child trafficking and prostitution netted hundreds of arrests, he added.

The section was called "erotic services" then. Authorities say that's where Philip Markoff met Julissa Brisman, whom he killed, as well as a woman he robbed and another he attacked. He committed suicide last month. On Friday, a man in D.C. pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting four women he met through "erotic services."

Craigslist promised to donate 100 percent of the proceeds of its erotic-services ads to charity. Although it wouldn't profit from the ads, authorities said, the ads still drove traffic to the site. Companies also donate to lower taxes and get good PR, of course. It no longer promised to donate profits after it renamed the section "adult services" and started to monitor it more closely last year. The AIM group reports:

Craigslist was on track to generate almost $45 million in revenue this year from its “adult services” section — thinly disguised ads for prostitutes.

Although the controversy is framed as the First Amendment vs. censors, pro-sex liberals vs. anti-sex prudes who want to control what women do with their bodies, the real issue is business. It just happens to play out on the bodies of women and girls.

Hazel Dickens

The Rebel Girl

Patti LaBelle

Cleaning Woman

From Working, based on the oral history by Studs Trukel

Equality Is The Essential Moral Issue of Democracy. It Can’t Be Both Equal and Unequal [Anthony McCarthy]

It was my intention to write a piece about Ken Mehlman’s official, official coming out, pointing out the fact that he has, actually been outed for most of the past decade. From what I hear, people who knew him, knew he was gay for much longer than that. There are discussions of that available online going back to at least 2004. One of the issues from that time period that interested me, in particular, was the cover up for one of the people in charge of the gay-bashing Bush II campaign, Mehlman, by the prominent gay paper, The Washington Blade. The Blade's editor Chris Crain who had been at Harvard Law school with Mehlman, quashed his own paper's scoop on it. Reporters at The Blade wanted to go with the story, Crain, prevented it. It was Crain who also hired the infamous rent-boy-“reporter”, James Guckert “Jeff Gannon” who had extraordinarily easy access to the Bush II White House and could be relied on to ask the right questions.

As I said, that was the idea, but it kept getting tied up in the various and outrageous attempts of the legitimate media to pretend they hadn’t known what was public knowlege at the time it was most convenient for the Republican Party, in the period when Mehlman was named head of the RNC by the gay bashing Bush administration after he had been head of the 2004 Bush campaign.

In view of the history it’s more than enraging to be told that we have to cut Mehlman some slack, as he tries to make an honest man of himself. Especially when we’re told that by people who were cutting him slack while he was stabbing lesbians and gay men in the back. That’s especially true because he’s clearly a part of the current Republican effort to soften the extremely disturbing images of the Republican hate campaigns of the past two years. As Rachel Maddow pointed out the other night, Haley Barbour’s blatant lying about his and his state’s jim crow past is another part of that effort to soften the image of the party of hate to get the votes of centrist independents who might find voting for the party of bigotry distasteful. I wouldn’t be surprised if Mehlman is providing the same cover for the party of anti-gay hatred, especially given his past activities.

Some of the calls in the mainstream media for understanding and compassion for Mehlman cite his turn around on a few gay issues, such as gay marriage. Some have cited Ted Olsen’s surprising role in the recent challenge in California as well. Speaking as a gay man who has never, in my adult life, hidden my sexual orientation, no, I don’t have to feel compassion for Mehlman, to date, because I understand him all too well. I have seen and known conservative gay men who have always wanted to have it both ways, to be a fully entitled member of the upper class while enjoying their sexual preferences. If he was sincere he wouldn’t be trying to promote the party of hate, the party that still has gay bashing as one of its central organizing tools. He would have left that party as a part of the recovery of his soul.

But there is a deeper, more fundamental reason for these attempts by editorial writers in major newspapers to rehabilitate Ken Mehlman to be rejected. Beneath all civil rights struggle, at the very base of all struggles for rights and democracy there is the core moral value of equality. And equality is not a partial or sometimes thing. You don’t get to carve out an island of privilege for yourself, your family, your social circle or your minority group and have a right to call for everyone to acknowledge that attempt to equalize yourself with a privileged group. There is nothing easier than to be for the civil rights that you and your group are denied as you ignore other inequity. While the Republican Party is using hatred of Latinos, Moslems, the poor the destitute and numerous other groups as their central organizing tactic, I reject the attempt by even the well-intentioned members of the elite to obtain that status for the Ken Mehlmans who they went to school with, who they socialize with and who has access to the centralized power of the political and corporate elite.

As merely a practical matter, associating gay rights with the privileges of the economic elite will make those rights less easy to obtain, they will make them less secure and the target of future right wing political use. It also ignores the fact that many lesbians and gay men are members of other groups at the low end of inequality. There have always been lesbians and gay men who have enjoyed an elite status, despite infrequent occasions when even the most elite members of targeted groups have been victimized. Believe me, poor members of those minorities get it a lot more often.

Equality is the absolutely essential moral value of a democratic government and society and democracy is the only legitimate form of government. Without that equality, as seen in ancient Athens, democracy is only a scheme by the members of favored classes of people to make sure they get theirs. Women, slaves, foreigners... none of them had equal rights under that frequently cited, relatively short-lived and unstable, form called democracy. The fact that it is cited as relevant to our democratic aspirations only shows how using a word to denote distinctly different things over long periods of history can hoodwink even rigorous thought about it.

Modern American democracy reached its apex in the 1960s a result of more equal income distribution and the passage of civil rights legislation . Since then it has been gradually transformed into that kind of phony democracy in which some people are more equal than others, some people are not equal at all. Some gay members of the upper class want to be accepted by other members of that class to which they belong, other gay people who share that attitude want to join the same elite. Some of those well off gay folks are sincerely dedicated to the ideal of real equality, in which everyone is really equal. Some aren’t. Mehlman is, clearly a member of the pro-privilege group or he would reject the Republican Party that is the foremost engine of bigotry and inequality today.

I don’t have any illusions about the moral status of granting privileges to my minority group based on class and the potential of partial equality to function as a privilege instead of a right. I don’t have any respect for people who want the gay members of their economic class to have equal rights as they conveniently ignore the inequality of other groups and within the larger lesbian and gay communities. I especially won’t let Ken Mehlman’s identity as a gay man blind me to his activities in the past or now. If Mehlman wants me to sympathize with him he will have to earn it by working hard to undo the damage to equality and rights that he has done as a member of the Republican establishment, he can’t do that while remaining a promoter of that bunch of thugs.

Brilliant performance. Socialite, backer, "Kate" shows up instead of Lily Tomlin to promote The Search for Intelligent Life in the Universe on a talk show.

Lily Tomlin Appears on Night After Night

I love how the host of the show, Allan Havey, gets into it to the extent that he's annoyed with "Kate" at some points.

OK, just as brilliant,

Lily Tomlin Accepts An Award in 1977

Ten Things Barack Obama Could Do To Save His Floundering Presidency [Anthony McCarthy]

1. Fire Rahm Emanuel
2. Fire Tim Geithner
3. Fire Larry Summers
4. Fire Robert Gibbs
5. Fire David Axelrod
6. Appoint Elizabeth Warren, for crying out loud
7. Fire Alan Simpson
8. Give the House members something they can run on.
9. Stop giving your base the finger. We gave you a bigger mandate than any of your recent predecessors had. WE are the ones you owe, not the cast of clowns listed above.
10. Act like a president, for crying out loud. If you're just going to send out Gibbs to pretend you're powerless, If you're going to keep this up, step aside and let someone else try.

Rehabbing Mike Tyson's image (by Suzie)

Can you imagine a U.S. senator who chose a convicted rapist to be the best man at his wedding? Neither could some Florida voters. They rejected billionaire Jeff Greene in the Democratic primary last week, in part, I fervently hope, because of Mike Tyson.

Their connection came up after Tyson talked about doing drugs during a 2005 cruise on Greene's 145-foot yacht Summerwind. Greene responded by saying that he didn't allow drugs on his yacht, and that claims were made by disgruntled employees and journalists out to get him. Tyson defended Greene, saying he partook only on land.

Many people poked fun, as did Gail Collins, who describes the yacht as "the Levi Johnston of boats."

The government of Belize says Summerwind tore up a part of a national coral reef with its anchor, but Greene denies knowing anything about it. The yacht went to Cuba, apparently breaking the American embargo. Greene says that was just for emergency repairs, and, anyway, he spent the downtime visiting Cuban synagogues. ...

Clearly, the Summerwind has a life of its own, cruising around the globe, burning 50 gallons of fuel an hour, throwing orgies for B-list celebrities while Greene is home reading. It played host to Lindsay Lohan, who Greene claims he’s barely met. It took Mike Tyson on a Black Sea cruise that culminated in a drug-and-sex romp in Amsterdam, but Greene was only around for the part where they visited an 11th-century monastery in Ukraine.

On this cruise, a woman in Sardinia accused Tyson of sexual assault, but police said they found no evidence to substantiate her allegation. This has been little reported. The same link, plus this one, note that women have accused Tyson of sexual assault and battery before and after his rape conviction in 1992.

In the primary campaign, kudos to Jim Stratton of the Orlando Sentinel for recognizing the gender angle of Greene's friendship with Tyson. In other words, it turned off some women.

Greene spokesman Paul Blank said Monday that Greene “obviously doesn’t condone or agree with” all of Mike Tyson’s behavior and that the candidate is “a strong supporter of all efforts to curb domestic violence. ... You only need to watch Jeff interact with his 83-year-old mother to see that he has enormous respect for women.”

That put Greene ahead of the politicians who beat their elderly mothers. Regarding Greene’s choice of Tyson as his best man in his 2007 wedding, the spokesman said Greene “believes in redemption” and was “trying to help somebody when they were hurting.” Redeem has different meanings: A person can redeem himself or be redeemed. Why do men like Greene or James Toback, who directed the documentary "Tyson," feel compelled to redeem this rapist?

I didn't see "Tyson" when it came out last year, but the reviews remind me of "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired," another rapist apologia released in 2008. A NYT interview refers to Tyson's "foibles" and "mistakes." Tim Arango writes that Tyson no longer feels threatening. Tim, what if you were a woman interviewing him alone as he talked about his desire to dominate women?

The film premiered at Cannes, where Tyson "got something close to a hero's welcome," according to Andrew O'Hehir. Of the movie critics on Rotten Tomatoes, 85 percent liked the film, with some finding Tyson honest and sympathetic. I wonder how that made Desiree Washington feel.

He did three years in prison for raping her. On the Internet, there's one hateful comment after another about her. In 2004, Tyson said he hated her so much that "now I really do want to rape her." In the documentary, he calls her “that wretched swine of a woman.” He continues to deny raping her. "His reasoning: He’s raped before and knows the difference," notes reviewer Jaime Lowe. Tyson is championed by his old friend, Toback, a sleazy schmo who has used movie-making to attract young women.

I look forward to the documentary on women who have accused prominent men of rape -- international celebrities such as Polanski and Tyson as well as others with power and money -- and the effects that has had on their lives.

Stephen Hawking On God [Anthony McCarthy]

Someone has asked me what, as a religious person, my reaction to Stephen Hawking’s reported recent declarations on God is. I haven’t read his book so I can only react to what’s been reported.

"Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist," Hawking writes.

"It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going."

The public life of Stephen Hawking sometimes reminds me of Olympic figure skating in the United States, something which is, periodically, the topic of the day or even week, only to then go into eclipse. In the mean time everyone, even people who have no knowledge of the sport, is supposed to have a strongly held opinion on it. Even if they have no idea why. With Stephen Hawking, it was alien invasion, the time before this.

Hawking's logic on aliens is, for him, unusually simple. The universe, he points out, has 100 billion galaxies, each containing hundreds of millions of stars. In such a big place, Earth is unlikely to be the only planet where life has evolved.

"To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational," he said. "The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like."

The answer, he suggests, is that most of it will be the equivalent of microbes or simple animals - the sort of life that has dominated Earth for most of its history.

The logical response to which is, who knows? There isn’t any way of knowing the first thing about that topic until at least the first example of extra-terrestrial life is verified and studied sufficiently. And, given the distances and the time it would take to travel them, that would be only the first example which we shouldn’t be expecting to get under our analytical tools any time soon. And even that won’t give you any information that can tell you about the next, proximate, example. As of this morning, the likelihood that people will ever have enough information about the prevalence of extraterrestrial life to even come to a crude excuse for an estimate of its probability, would seem to be very remote. You can’t figure a probability of there being any other life in the universe without at least one other example being known. We don’t have that today and so anything that even the very clever Mr. Hawking says on that topic is complete speculation

In view of his statements on the topic, Hawking even venturing so far as to declare an informal probability of it constitutes a lapse of logic on his part. Hawking’s speculation that “other life” could be very unlike ours and exist in environments ententirely different than our biosphere, undermines the argument from the discovery of other planets like ours, at least in terms of probability being applied to it. For all we know our form of life could be unique in the universe. There could be, literally, not a single other terrestrial kind of life anywhere. It is possible that the life on Earth is the first to arise and develop or that it is the only instance in which life will ever arise and develop, that is if Hawking’s cosmology is correct and the universe isn’t in some kind of stable state. So what finding Earth style planets would mean to the question isn’t knowable. Perhaps its due to his habits developed in physics, dealing with objects and systems far, far more simple than organisms and the environments in which they arise, evolve and live, but the simplification in Hawking’s analysis is stunningly inadequate even as scientific or mathematical speculation.

There being, literally, no data on that topic that is known to be relevant to the problem, it is not science, it is not mathematical probability, it isn’t logic. There being no information known to be relevant to the issue, it’s not even an informed guess, it’s a wild shot in the dark, one probably based firmly in Hawking’s personal experiences and preferences and fears.

Personally, I’m in the school that believes life that could survive intelligence and go out into the wider universe would have to be pacifistic or they’d have destroyed themselves before then. I also believe they would have to have a non-acquisitive way of life or their taste in even petty luxury would have destroyed their environment. They would have to be unselfish in a way that, perhaps, only our most sainted figures approach. Perhaps our wanderlust is the product of our irrational need to acquire things we don’t need and the pleasure we get from subjugating and, in many cases, destroying other life. Maybe a form of life with another chemistry or another development wouldn’t find any reason to travel past where they live onward into eons of time while species such as our own uniformly destroy ourselves before we get very far. Being biased, I think the matter of our survival is ever so much more important and interesting than the question of the origin of the universe. Which is unscientific of me, I suppose, though there are scientists who do concern themselves with that unglamorous and, temporarily, inconvenient issue.

-----

Looking on one of the cookie cutter new atheist blogs in preparation of this post, I saw pretty much what I expected to see, Stephen Hawking’s baseless speculation on the subject of whether or not God was “necessary” to the start of the universe cited as a reliable authority on the subject. Which is pretty funny in view of this quotation from an interview with Diane Sawyer.

"There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, [and] science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works."

Why is anyone paying attention to what Stephen Hawkings or most other scientists say about religion except on the basis of their presumed authority? And it’s the flimsiest kind of authority on the topic, based in a reputation gained in an entirely different field of study. As far as I have been able to see, Stephen Hawking has never published a scholarly paper on the subject in a reviewed journal so it’s not even passed that level of testing. Perhaps if he had tried his ideas in that academic realm he might have avoided limiting himself to one, very crude assumption about religious thinking, believing that all of it is as unaware of the vicissitudes of the study of religious questions as he obviously is. Here is just one example of that.

Anyone who has read even a little of the rigorous, formal literature around various religions, would know that the contemporary critics of religion almost never have the slightest knowledge of what serious people have said on the topic. Which is another of the dangers of people who believe their opinions carry the weight of authoritative knowledge and even more so those who take them as authorities when they only confirm their biases.

-----

That a physicist, studying aspects of the physical universe doesn’t find anything except the physical universe is hardly a shocker. The very methods necessary for any reputable publication of science rigorously exclude questions not relevant to address the physical nature of the subject matter. Any part of any presumed supernatural is necessarily excluded from that consideration. You might as well say that due process under the law isn’t logically necessary to the findings. That one predisposed to find confirmation of their atheism in that most un-supernatural realm should believe they have found it is only slightly less surprising. What tops it off is to hear him cited as an authority on the topic of religion in the same blog posts and articles where he condemns religion as the realm of authority based thinking which he claims his own profession doesn’t practice. Clearly he impeaches himself on that point, his sciency fan club only confirms that negation of that proud claim.

In the last few years, in what free time I get, I’ve been reading about epistemology a bit, specifically the epistemology of science. One of the more interesting and, when you think about it, obvious things pointed out in my reading is that all of the apparatus of science, mathematics and logic are formed by us in order to gain a sense of coherency of the world and the universe. Not a single law of science is anything other than the product of human thought. Not a single one of them has been developed except within a realm which excludes everything but what we can discover of the physical universe. I believe that exclusion is based in our experience and the extension of our logic, which, itself, is a means to address our experience of the physical universe. Whether or not it is the result of favorable adaptations in our evolution is a far, far more speculative, and I hold, unanswerable question, but we’ve pointed out the problems with that wildly popular attempt to extend science past the requirements of evidence many times here.

But, as seen in Hawkins’ declaration, the laws of science are habitually held to be an actual, unmitigated, feature of the universe, existing independently of us when there isn’t any way to confirm that. Perhaps if we ever encounter “other life” we will find they have other ways to make sense of it. Our laws are held “to work”, and they generally do within their limits. Integral to the invention and practice of sciences was the strict limitation of what was under consideration at any point in the process and the claims made for it in real world applications *

Part of the predictable response to Hawking’s pronouncements has been people raising questions about our lives and experience of the universe which are, decidedly, not physical in nature. One of those was the question of a purpose to the universe, which is a question that science can’t deal with. The entirely predictable response to that was to declare the question to be nonsense. Well, it isn’t nonsense, it’s as understandable a question as any. That science can’t come up with an answer to it doesn’t change that. It is as much a part of human culture as science is to ask questions like that, to speculate about them, to come up with different answers to it and for our understanding of that purpose to change over time. Mimicking the discontinued philosophical fad of logical positivism to dismiss questions you don’t like doesn’t seem to stop the questions. For which I am very thankful.

It seems to be an emotional need of the new atheists to believe they have disposed of the question of purpose but most people seem to be unimpressed with that artificial substitute for reason. And that’s only one of the questions that we, mere mortals, have about the universe which we find ourselves in. I am more convinced as I see us destroying ourselves, to a large degree with the products of science and technology, that unless we include questions of purpose, justice, rights, morality and other entirely non-scientific features of human thought and culture, that science is inadequate in itself to ensure our continued existence.

We are bound by our own mental equipment, our cultural and educationally established habits of thought and other features of our lives as thinking animals. In no other realm of human activity is this as true as in academic publication and in no part of that does the subject matter run up against the limits of those conditions than in physics. The laws of physics are human explanations to ourselves of what we perceive of the universe. That is a basic feature of those laws. Even the concept of a “law” of science is conditioned in that way. As long as those laws are limited to the address of the physical universe for which they are developed, yes, they often do seem to work, though often within a given context. Therefore, it’s especially surprising to see as subtle a thinker as Stephen Hawking mistakenly believing that they can be extended past that use and into areas which science has not gone and can never go. Even assuming that his theory of the universe stands -- which isn’t anything like a settled question if other equally eminent physicists are to be taken seriously -- they don’t get to what happened before the creation of the universe. Indeed, that question is so opaque that to talk of it as “before” goes beyond what is covered under those same laws.

A passage in the Book of Isaiah that often comes to mind when thinking about this topic, is when God is said to have said, "My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,". Whatever else people have held about God, no matter how much of our limited minds and thoughts and even our crimes and injustices we have attributed to God, even the most anthropomorphic religion holds that God is not a human being. To think that God would be required to follow our laws of science or, indeed, any possible actual mechanisms of a universe created by God, is rather touchingly naive in a way that even the “ignorant goat herders” who are believed by the incredulous to have written the Bible were able to surpass.

In a brief encounter about this on another blog, I pointed out that Stephen Hawking has no more expertise on the question of God than the woman who runs the grain store down the road from me. One of the people who responded to that mockingly refereed to her, someone he didn’t know other than in that passing reference, as an “ignorant church lady”. Well, I know her and she’s far from ignorant and, as far as I remember, hasn’t gone to church since her husband’s funeral. Even if she had, she’d still know as much about the question as any other human being. Somehow, in that response, I think I gained a greater understanding of Stephen Hawking’s declaration and its position in our culture than in all of the other thinking I did about it for this post.

* As is seen all around us, in the destruction of our environment, the pollution of our bodies with synthetic and natural toxins provided by commerce and in hundreds of other ways, this lapse in the scientific oversight of the application of the products of science is anything but an idealistic and rigorous process of considering important issues.

Friday flower blogging (by Suzie)

What are these lovelies?

On Honor in Glenn Beck's World

Watching the video Digby posted today from the big Becksian party in Washington D.C. reminded me that I was going to write something about its theme: Bringing back honor.

What does Beck mean by honor? Here are some dictionary definitions (I took out the ones which seem unlikely):

1. honesty, fairness, or integrity in one's beliefs and actions: a man of honor.

2. a source of credit or distinction: to be an honor to one's family.

3. high respect, as for worth, merit, or rank: to be held in honor.

4. high public esteem; fame; glory: He has earned his position of honor.

10. chastity or purity in a woman.

Who knows which of these he had in mind, if any. But isn't it curious that honor in a woman may mean chastity or purity?

"Honor" is one of those terms which doesn't have to possess an exact meaning. It just has to sound good, to make chests expand and eyes tear up.

Bringing honor back requires a little bit more, of course. One must show that honor, however defined, has disappeared and will now be returned home to the brave and the free. Those, incidentally, are also terms which don't have to possess an exact meaning.

Christina Romer's Farewell Speech

She is leaving her position as chair of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers. The text of the speech is here (pdf).

It is fun and informative to compare the two takes in today's Washington Post, this one and this one. Don't forget to wear your feminist spectacles.

Like Going To Bed With A Cheese-Grater

I thought of that, last night, all on my own*! It's a metaphor for how it feels to spend so much time every day debating on the net. It doesn't hurt much, at first. But after a few years...you are left skinless.

A good thing that I wear scales, eh?
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*Though probably someone has already thought of it. If so, how about having sex with a nutmeg grater?

The Problem, In A Nutshell

Is this:

Democrats in Congress are poised to play a leading role this month in thwarting their party's effort to raise income tax rates on the wealthy.

Tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003 expire at the end of this year. President Barack Obama and Democratic congressional leaders have been eager to extend the breaks for individuals who earn less than $200,000 annually and joint filers who make less than $250,000. Those who earn more would pay higher, pre-2001 rates starting next year.

However, a small but growing number of moderate Democrats are balking at boosting taxes on the rich. Many face electorates that recoil at the mention of any tax increase. Some represent areas that are loaded with wealthier taxpayers. Further, some incumbent senators who don't face voters this fall are reluctant to increase taxes on anyone while the economy remains sluggish.

Without their support, the push to raise rates on the rich probably will fail.

This world looks more and more like Ankh-Morpork of Terry Pratchett's DiscWorld series. Or put in other terms: If I wanted to do a funny parody of tax hikes and Americans, it would be what's going on in the U.S. Congress right now.

Sigh.

Blogging Iz Eazy!

Just saw your skull open with a hacksaw and then use pliers to pick out the juiciest bits, put them on a nice tray and serve!

(That's a slight re-phrasing of the statement about writing being easy: just open a vein and bleed all over the typewriter.)

And did I mention that it's hot? Well, it is.


Some cooling music for you: A jojk/joiku

The Sulky Heat

I have the ac on high, the fan whining and screeching at the maximum revolutions, the door sealed, and it is 84 freedom degrees in the room. The keys make little smacky sounds when my fingers release them and I cannot wear the traditional pajamas (with bunny feet) which everyone knows bloggers prefer.

The heat is sulky, he wears a nose ring and his ridged six-pack belly has glistening beads on it. He has too much long hair on his head. And on his body. The reason for his sulkiness is Earl, the hurricane, doing roundhouse kicks somewhere along the East Coast.

There. I converted all myths into guy terms.

Women In Sudan

This article is well worth reading on the subject of how to get more women into leading roles in the Sudanese political process:

The African Union has declared 2010 the Year of Peace and Security in Africa, and will soon launch the African Decade of Women. What better opportunity to act on these pledges than at the 15th African Union Summit, being held later this month in Kampala, Uganda?

The upcoming referendum in Sudan gives African leadership an opportunity to demonstrate its commitment to improving the lives of women on this continent by ensuring that they actively and freely participate in the referendum.

...

Following April's elections in Sudan, only two of 35 cabinet ministers and six of 42 ministers for state are women. There are no women at the decision-making level in the Darfur negotiations at Doha ­a process that is plagued by problems and proving to be ineffectual. And now there is a conspicuous lack of women in formal leadership positions for the referendum.

Indeed, of the nine people appointed by the Sudanese government to the Referendum Commission, there is only one woman. This is far from the 30 percent advocated for by Mbeki and his Panel, the 25% demanded by the Comprehensive Peace Agreement and well below international standards.

Hmm. It doesn't sound that terribly far from the U.S. standards, she mutters.

Booze and Death

Here's a writeup of a study which suggests that heavy drinkers live longer than those who have never consumed alcohol at all, even after taking into account socioeconomic status and all sorts of other possible explanations for differential death rates. The moderate drinkers were found to live longest, then the heavy drinkers, then the teetotalers.

Studies do generally find that moderate drinking is not bad for your health. But heavy drinking being better than not drinking at all?

Before we all run out to get really, really drunk, I'd like to draw your attention to one possible problem with the study:

The sample of those who were studied included individuals between ages 55 and 65 who had had any kind of outpatient care in the previous three years. The 1,824 participants were followed for 20 years. One drawback of the sample: a disproportionate number, 63%, were men. Just over 69% of the never-drinkers died during the 20 years, 60% of the heavy drinkers died and only 41% of moderate drinkers died.

Having a sample so biased towards men is pretty odd, because it suggests something nonrandom at the initial sampling stage. We'd expect a random sample from the general population to have a little more than fifty percent women.

But there's another reason to carefully scrutinize that paragraph: The initial sampling frame consisted of people who had had outpatient care in the previous three years. I haven't read the actual study so I am not quite sure what it means by "outpatient" care, but I would interpret this frame as meaning that people were selected for the study from a group which came to the attention of the health care system because of ill health or accident.

But consider the groups of teetotalers and heavy drinkers: What sort of reasons might they have to seek outpatient care, reasons which differ by the simple fact that the latter group consumes alcohol?

Perhaps heavy drinkers are more likely to enter care because of an accident? A fall or something similar? Could it be that this sampling frame will over-sample non-drinkers who are not well at the beginning of the study? Or, if you like, over-sample fairly healthy heavy drinkers who contacted the system because of a fall or something else associated with drinking itself?

These are pure speculations from my part, of course. Still, a more representative sampling frame for the study would have been good.

Vote?

Atrios has a post about the rumblings which I, too, have heard on the wide Internets, about some progressives and liberals deciding not to vote at all in the coming mid-term elections, as a way to show their unhappiness with the Democratic Party and its current policies.

This topic always develops into a fervent debate: Should one hold one's nose (the nose of the same one!) and vote for some horrible candidate, so as to keep an even more horrible one (a different one!) out of office, or should one (the one with the nose) stay-at-home, to try to regain some power within the Democratic Party by perhaps keeping them from staying in power.

Philosophical reasons for both stances abound. But the real reason for the stupid question to exist in the first place is the two-party system. There is no way to register one's discontent with the Democrats without also helping the Republicans and vice versa.

A multi-party system gets around this by offering more alternatives, some with platforms much closer to that of the party one wishes to discipline. That, in turn, lets the protest go through without necessarily supporting one's (the one with the nose) political enemies.

We Are Ba-ack!

"We" being the stories about manly strongmen and wimps. This was on Drudge's front page yesterday:





The man on the left is Barack Obama, the man on the right is Vladimir Putin, and the reptile brain implication is that they have a real testosterone-infused killer as their leader whereas we have a guy who wears a bike helmet. Which is sissy.

What we need is a president who will tear off the heads of kittens, with his bare teeth, right on national television! That would be appropriate, just as having a former KGB guy as the president of Russia is appropriate.

These masculinity dreams are really quite hilarious to watch if you forget all that it ultimately means: The desire for a thundering patriarch at the helm of this nation. No woman could ever fill that role.

This links right back to my earlier posts about how men in politics are attacked as being effeminate.

The Twisted Sister? Part III

Finally, the post about the title for this series. When I first read the op-ed something in my brain hooked on the one word 'twisted' and the rest is history, as they say, except that I have to defend the choice.

Here it goes: Sarah Palin accused radical feminists of being twisted sisters. Many 'on the (undefined) feminist left' have accused Sarah Palin of being twisted and no sister, and after writing these three posts I wonder if we should get rid of that 'sister' thinking altogether, or at least bring it to some relevance by focusing on how real sisters behave: They bicker and they fight, sure, but they also support and love each other, at least against an external threat. They are not all the same, not all sisters we'd select, and a sizable number of them are twisted.

So what? I quite like the idea of being a twisted sister myself. But someone not advocating for that whole quarrelsome and fractious and divided sisterhood, is she a sister, too? What does it take, hmh?

The use of 'sisterhood' is symbolic. Symbols are important and unimportant at the same time, one of those paradoxical concepts which you only get if you sit in the Lotus position and go ummmm a very long time.

They are important, because they can trigger a flood of relevant and irrelevant emotions and energies, some of which need to be triggered for proper political work.

They are important when they are absent, in the way positive references to the Firstness of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin were absent in most of the discussions. First woman presidential candidate? PFFT. First Republican female vice-presidential candidate? BWAHAHA. Who cares about that shit (except perhaps for some silly aged feminazis)? Look at how monstrous she is! Look at how stupid she is!

Yet symbols are unimportant if all that there is is the symbolism, such as might be the case with Sarah Palin. They are like fast food with no nutrition. Ultimately mere symbolism is not enough.

The Twisted Sister? Part II

After that preamble, let's dive straight into the Holmes and Traister op-ed. I cannot guarantee a thorough review of it, for reasons I discussed in Part I, but I can probably come up with a few pearls or whatever.

Holmes and Traister's main argument is this:

The left should be outraged and exasperated by all this — but at their own failings as much as Ms. Palin's ascension. Since the 2008 election, progressive leaders have done little to address the obvious national appetite for female leadership. And despite (or because of) their continuing obsession with Ms. Palin, they have done nothing to stop an anti-choice, pro-abstinence, socialist-bashing Tea Party enthusiast from becoming the 21st century symbol of American women in politics.

Everything else in the piece is icing on the cake. Some yummy, all worth tasting, but just icing. This is the cake.

Is it a delicious and nutritious one? I cannot answer that question, because 'the left' remains undefined, and so do 'progressive leaders.' Do these terms refer to political institutions, the progressive media or the commentators on blogs such as Daily Kos, Eschaton and the Democratic Underground*? Is the question here about not grooming enough progressive female politicians or is the question about the support which is given or not given to those women who rise above the general herd of politicians?

Or is it really something more active: The Palin-bashing, done so carelessly by some progressives that it sometimes merges into general women-bashing? Do the Republicans bash the women in their movement as eagerly as some on the left bashed Hillary Clinton during the Democratic Primaries?

Gah. I hate writing so many question marks. They are justified when tackling this topic, however, because they might open up the thinking a bit. I hope.

The above is the most important part of the op-ed and it is about the most important questions. But almost equally fascinating is the idea of Sarah Palin as some type of a proto-feminist:

Ms. Palin, in turn, has been making a greedy grab at claiming feminism as her own. She recently marked the 90th anniversary of the 19th Amendment by expressing her gratitude "to those brave feminist foremothers who struggled and sacrificed, endured imprisonment and ridicule ... to grant future generations of American women a voice." On the same day, she sent out this Twitter message: "Who hijacked the term 'feminist'? A cackle of rads who want 2 crucify other women w/ whom they disagree on a singular issue."

The hijacking accusation goes both ways. Ms. Palin's infuriating ability to put a new twist on feminism — after decades of the word's being besmirched by the right and the left — allows her to both distance herself from and accentuate the movement's maligned reputation. Her new spin, of course, is that she does not support policies that move women forward.

As I mentioned in Part I, nobody seems to define feminism anymore, and that allows one to determine that it's whatever one wishes, pretty much. The definition is up for grabs, my sweeties! Mama Grizzlies seems to be one of Palin's definition:

Ms. Palin has spent much of 2010 burnishing her political bona fides and extending her influence by way of the Mama Grizzlies, a gang of Sarah- approved, maverick-y female politicians looking to "take back" America with "common-sense" solutions.

Sure, the Grizzlies sound somewhat progressive on paper. But from their opposition to reproductive rights to their work against health care reform and labor policies that would empower American women, their ideas are just antiquated clichés dressed up in designer suits. Like Ms. Palin herself, their talk about being "mama bears" and "tough as an ox ... wearing lipstick" simply reduces female candidates' political prospects to maternal worth and sex appeal.

If women are tough as an ox and still wear lipstick they don't need any societal changes whatsoever! They can manage bringing home the bacon, cooking it and then having fertile sex with the Papa Grizzlies, while also fixing everything with common-sense solutions, lullabying several children in their lap while doing all this. That leaves the societal sexisms intact, and assures the fundies that these women would still do their bidding at home.

Holmes and Traister are completely right on Sarah Palin's policies. They are not helpful to women in general. At the same time, the symbolism Palin attaches to herself should not be ignored. Whatever her policies, she gives lip-service to feminism of the past (while trying to stop feminism of the present). That lip-service is important and we see too little of it from 'the left', however defined.






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*It is what I read on the comments threads of many liberal blogs during the Democratic Primaries which made me feel as if someone had tried to assist me in a harakiri, and those emotions cannot stay away when I write about this topic, by the way. But 'the left' here is unlikely to consist of anonymous liberal misogynists of whatever gender.

The Twisted Sister? Part I

When I read this op-ed entitled "A Palin Of Our Own" I wondered how brave I would feel today. Anything about Palin and feminism is incendiary on the blogs, combined with the tremendous difficulty of covering the topic in short soundbites which blog posts ultimately are. It is that difficulty which requires the bravery, because whatever I say will leave too much unsaid and the outcome will be rife for misunderstandings of all types. Every time I start to disentangle the topic in my mind I see the threads going all over the place, and following them would take a book:

What happened to feminism in the Democratic Primaries? Something awful appeared. What made Hillary Clinton the lever that turned over that particular rock hiding various creepy-crawlies? What happened in the 2008 presidential elections and the way women were treated in some of the media and on some otherwise liberal blogs? Was it a mere sequel to the earlier Clinton-bashing, often turning into woman-bashing, with odd twists of sexism by McCain and the other boyz in his team?

Why is Palin still all over the news? Is it because she is incendiary and that's good for readership and advertising revenues? If so, why is she good for those things, what is it that the audience is looking for when reading about her or when watching her? Is any of that relevant for understanding misogyny or the advancement of women in general? How does one juggle the ideas of Palin as the leader anointed by God and Palin as the most stupid blonde ever (without being actually blonde)? Given that these kinds of approaches are always used for one's homies and one's enemies, respectively, how much of the emotions hanging around Palin is about her sex?

What are Palin's actual achievements as the governor of Alaska? Is quitting jobs what we want to see a 'new feminist' leader do? How are the 'new' feminisms defined by those who claim them: The ones on the extreme left and the ones on the extreme right? What is required for a person to be regarded as a feminist? Only acceptance of the idea for her/his own life, while fighting against any change for other women? Only focus on general social justice issues? Something else completely?

Do the two main political parties have real platforms about the role of women in politics? I don't mean mouthwash here, but something real. And if they do, what are those real platforms? Who is it we refer to when we say "the liberals" treat Palin a certain way or the "conservatives" treat Clinton a certain way, or vice versa?

And so on and so on.

Yes, all of that is boring and hair-splitting but the current debate ignores such huge chunks of it, replacing the necessary longer discussions with soundbites which mean different things to different people and do nothing to further the conversation.

More above in Parts II and III, the last with a discussion of what I mean by the title of these posts.

Monday Reading

About the right-wing populism which just met in Washington, D.C.. A most important piece is by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker. She has done loads of work to find out which billionaires are picking up the tab for all those Tea Parties and the general grass-roots conservative populism. Frank Rich wrote about Mayer's piece, too.

Then Wonkette posted this picture from the Becksian events.





It is of no great importance, of course. One guy holding up his home-made sign where he lists "our wives" among all the things that he holds "in memory." But it's always fun to see who is included in that "we" of various signs and meetings and so on.

Betty Carter

Deep Night - What's New


I believe Deep Night was written by Rudy Vallee, who my great-aunt Marion knew as a boy in Westbrook, Maine. She said he was a "nice boy". Of course he was already quite elderly at the time. At any rate, he was the one who made the song a hit.

Betty Carter takes Deep Night places he probably never imagined it going, a good example of jazz improvisation as composition. Her work with the bassist, Curtis Lundy, I believe , is quite wonderful.

[Anthony McCarthy]

Chains Beneath The Frivolity and Flounces [Anthony McCarthy]

Whatever I might think about drag and its relationship with the wider view of gay men, I’m certain that the drag queen role isn’t a good one for women to follow. The paper today informs us that RuPaul has a new program which is based on professional drag queens instructing women on how to be women.

Granted, some drag queens are extremely talented performers and that their act, to be done well, requires both that and a lot of work. Creating and talking yourself into being the embodiment of the post-war feminine mystique is hard work. That’s not news to women. Playing that role and having a real self with a real life was impossible. You can go back into the first wave feminist activism and read that the requirements of elaborate dress, hair and the rest of the mandated accessories of being a respectable woman were an intrinsic part of women's subjugation. And, on top of that, if someone tried to follow those dictates they were then despised for being frivolous, self-centered, idle and artificial. That part of the drag act, the ridicule of the role assigned to women and with it those assumed to have adopted that role voluntarily, reinforces that oppression. I’m unaware of any drag queen who unmockingly imitates smart, competent, women who are engaged in serious, unselfish activities.

I’d guess that RuPaul and his people are looking for a popular TV show, that’s their business. He’s got his incredibly over done drag queen act to work with and, though he does it well, it’s not much to build on. What else can you do with it?

The article in today’s paper makes some oddly myopic assertions about women in show business adopting parts of the drag queen act. It’s not anything new. Mae West’s act was a two-way exchange between her character and drag queens. In the wonderful movie in which she spoofs her own act, Go West, Young Man, she shows that she wasn’t under any illusion about the nature of her character. At least not at that time, later on she seemed to be trapped in it*. In the rarest turn of all, when she went under disguise as a religious revivalist in Klondike Annie, she showed that she was able to step out of it, at least in the movies.

But that was in the movies and on stage. It’s not real life. Real people live in real life.

The story is that when the Stonewall Inn was raided it was the drag queens who were the first to resist. I wasn’t there and have never spoken to anyone who was. Since that is widely reported by people who were there, it’s a laudable act on the part of those who resisted anti-gay oppression. But that doesn’t erase the negative implications of drag and its promotion of oppressive stereotypes for women, and, indisputably, gay men. Living a phony stereotype is oppressive, especially one assigned for the purpose of entrapping victims into oppression. The powerful elite, comprised of straight men, wasn’t going to allow those assigned roles to be empowering. I don’t for one second see adoption of those roles as being empowering, that is a delusion useful to the established order. With this show, with the actual instruction of women by professional drag queens in how to live their act, that promotional aspect isn’t deniable.

Note: I can’t comment on Lady Gaga because my 14-year-old niece has forbidden me to listen to her. I do understand that she has recently made some laudable political statements. For which I am grateful.

* Billy Wilder has said that it was a big mistake to ask her to play Norma Desmond when she was in her 60s because she believed she actually was the role she had perfected in her act.