More Music by Nakke The Parrot

Nakke speaks Finnish. A rush transcript:

He begins by counting "two, four, half of six". He then says "good boy Nakke will sing." He then sings the beginning of a children's song: Chomp on, chomp on carrots, from carrots..., chomp on chomp on carrots, carrots get...

Before he whistles the Bridge over river Kwai theme he says again "Now Nakke will sing."

When he finishes, he says "Nacke can!" Then some repeats.

Herman Cain on Abortion: Utterly Mystifyingly Delightful Stuff!

A direct quote from this Republican contender for the presidency of the United States of America:

“I do not think abortion should be legal in this country,” Cain said on Fox today. “Abortion should not be legal. That is clear. But if a family made the decision to break the law, that’s that family’s decision.”

Put that in your pipe and smoke it! It combines the two strands of wingnuttery so very nicely but gets them all confused because Cain forgets that the rule: The government should not interfere in people's lives does NOT apply to women.

The rule for women is: The way your body will be used for reproduction is not up to you to decide. Implying that there should be a family get-together with great-uncle Harry and cousin Wilma voting on law-breaking first is but a very slight attempt to make sure that the pregnant woman has no special powers here.

Occupy Writers

Many writers have signed in support of the Wall Street Occupation. Some have written on it, and I urge you to read those essays and poems. You might wish to begin with Lemony Snicket:

Thirteen Observations made by Lemony Snicket while watching Occupy Wall Street from a Discreet Distance

1. If you work hard, and become successful, it does not necessarily mean you are successful because you worked hard, just as if you are tall with long hair it doesn’t mean you would be a midget if you were bald.
....

I also liked Francine Prose's statement.

Deep Thoughts For The Day

My first deep thought:
Not writing a post on something that is specifically intended to cause nothing but hot air, disagreement and lots of clicks (which bring advertising income) can be a useful commentary in itself.

My second deep thought:
You, my sweet and erudite readers, may not appreciate being told that this space was intentionally left blank.

My third deep thought:
Whoever said blogging was easy (if anyone said it) may have had a point, because not-blogging can be very, very hard.

My fourth deep thought:
You, my sweet and erudite readers, may not appreciate those pains, either.

Wombless Women. More on Subtractive Masculinity.

Suzie's post below made me think of Mandos' comment to my earlier post about Dr Pepper's new "no-women-allowed" advertisement for a diet drink which is supposed to signal masculinity OF the drinker:

Well, I mean, let's name the fear here. The fear is that without subtractive masculinity (great phrase!), men are simply womb-disabled women...

The phrase is not mine, by the way, though I agree it is a good one. It's also the way masculinity truly is defined, as "What Women Do Not Do", and that is why any advances women make are seen as threats to subtractive masculinity. You chip-chip away at the tight boundaries of traditional femininity, and you think you are increasing freedom and fairness, right? But from the point of view of subtractive masculinity you are leaving men less and less space to be men.

Because that space is defined by women not being there or being incapable of being there. Fascinating, is it not? Subtractive masculinity means that every attempt to increase women's rights decreases men's rights in the emotional sense. Everything becomes a zero-sum game! If women win, men lose! And naturally the other way round.

I have finally understood (in the emotional sense) how people in this still-mostly-patriarchal world can honestly and seriously worry about the "end of men" and similar concerns. I thought people writing those stories just wanted to get clicks by being outrageous. But they view masculinity as subtractive. So of course the fact that women's spheres of life have widened must mean that men are worse off! Of course. It does not matter at all that women are still doing worse than men are. Any improvements are encroachments on that holy ground of subtractive masculinity.

This concept also explains much better why the traditionally male blue-collar occupations are so resistant towards any entry by women. The very presence of those women dilutes the masculinity signal that being a roofer or a carpenter or a plumber gives a man. Men build houses, not women. Women clean them. If women build houses, what are men? House cleaners?

There is more to subtractive masculinity than is initially apparent, and that last example demonstrates it. There's no real pressure to expand the definition of masculinity to traditionally female areas of work, such as house cleaning or child care. Subtractive masculinity cannot correct for its losses by chipping away areas from traditional femininity, because women are already in those areas. The only way subtractive masculinity can win more space for maleness is by defining new fields as completely masculine and by keeping women out of those fields.

That last paragraph may not be very well argued because I'm sick. But I think it's important to understand that subtractive masculinity does not function symmetrically, and that on the most basic level masculinity is a more valued though more unstable characteristic than femininity. Masculinity must be fought for, must be achieved, and the basic way that happens is by teaching how men must differ from women (Don't throw like a girl! Boys don't cry!).

I can appreciate the fear subtractive definitions of masculinity could create in boys. They are horribly restricting and unfair, and ultimately impossible to comply with. I can also understand how frightening changes in gender roles can be if masculinity is only seen as What Women Do Not Do. The more areas women enter, the fewer Man-Caves there will be. Hence the need for sitcoms about The Last Man Standing. Or literal Man-Caves in suburban basements.

Finally, to the title of this post: The Wombless Women. That's the reductionist base of the subtractive masculinity. If women can do everything that men can do, what is left for men? They would be but wombless women. I think Ursula le Guin made one of her characters say this in the EarthSea (initial) trilogy, as an explanation why men's magic was superior and more highly valued than women's magic. If men didn't have that extra skill, they would be nothing but inferior women.

The reverse of that reductionist base is naturally that women are their wombs. The most extreme definitions of subtractive masculinity, those supported on the misogynistic sites, advocate allowing women no other role but that of their sexuality, and even that only when it is under total male control. History shows us examples of societies, even some current ones, where women's roles are pretty much constrained to just that minimal biological sphere.

The subtractive definition of masculinity is a truly crappy one. It must go. We could start by pointing out that many areas of human endeavor are human, not particularly male or female. We could support our sons and our daughters in finding healthy bases for self-esteem, and we could work out a concept of masculinity that is not subtractive, as well as a concept of femininity that is not self-mutilating.

Mmm.

Privatize the Profits, Socialize the Losses

That's not meant to be the definition of capitalism. But it is the way American capitalism-gone-haywire operates in the financial markets, and one of the paradoxes those who worship the mythical unicorn of "free markets" never bother to explain.

The most recent example comes from Bank of America:

The short form via Bloomberg:
Bank of America Corp. (BAC), hit by a credit downgrade last month, has moved derivatives from its Merrill Lynch unit to a subsidiary flush with insured deposits, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation…
Bank of America’s holding company — the parent of both the retail bank and the Merrill Lynch securities unit — held almost $75 trillion of derivatives at the end of June, according to data compiled by the OCC. About $53 trillion, or 71 percent, were within Bank of America NA, according to the data, which represent the notional values of the trades.
That compares with JPMorgan’s deposit-taking entity, JPMorgan Chase Bank NA, which contained 99 percent of the New York-based firm’s $79 trillion of notional derivatives, the OCC data show.
Now you would expect this move to be driven by adverse selection, that it, that BofA would move its WORST derivatives, that is, the ones that were riskiest or otherwise had high collateral posting requirements, to the sub. Bill Black confirmed that even though the details were sketchy, this is precisely what took place.
And remember, as we have indicated, there are some “derivatives” that should be eliminated, period. We’ve written repeatedly about credit default swaps, which have virtually no legitimate economic uses (no one was complaining about the illiquidity of corporate bonds prior to the introduction of CDS; this was not a perceived need among investors). They are an inherently defective product, since there is no way to margin adequately for “jump to default” risk and have the product be viable economically. CDS are systematically underpriced insurance, with insurers guaranteed to go bust periodically, as AIG and the monolines demonstrated.
The reason that commentators like Chris Whalen were relatively sanguine about Bank of America likely becoming insolvent as a result of eventual mortgage and other litigation losses is that it would be a holding company bankruptcy. The operating units, most importantly, the banks, would not be affected and could be spun out to a new entity or sold. Shareholders would be wiped out and holding company creditors (most important, bondholders) would take a hit by having their debt haircut and partly converted to equity.
This changes the picture completely. This move reflects either criminal incompetence or abject corruption by the Fed. Even though I’ve expressed my doubts as to whether Dodd Frank resolutions will work, dumping derivatives into depositaries pretty much guarantees a Dodd Frank resolution will fail. Remember the effect of the 2005 bankruptcy law revisions: derivatives counterparties are first in line, they get to grab assets first and leave everyone else to scramble for crumbs. So this move amounts to a direct transfer from derivatives counterparties of Merrill to the taxpayer, via the FDIC, which would have to make depositors whole after derivatives counterparties grabbed collateral. It’s well nigh impossible to have an orderly wind down in this scenario. You have a derivatives counterparty land grab and an abrupt insolvency. Lehman failed over a weekend after JP Morgan grabbed collateral.
But it’s even worse than that. During the savings & loan crisis, the FDIC did not have enough in deposit insurance receipts to pay for the Resolution Trust Corporation wind-down vehicle. It had to get more funding from Congress. This move paves the way for another TARP-style shakedown of taxpayers, this time to save depositors. No Congressman would dare vote against that. This move is Machiavellian, and just plain evil.

Bolding by me. Bank of America tries to shift its crap to American tax-payers and the Fed agrees to it. This is all kinds of wrong. A short summary:

So let's see what we have here.

Bank customer initiates a swap position with Bank. In doing so they intentionally accept the credit risk of the institution they trade with.

Later they get antsy about perhaps not getting paid. Bank then shifts that risk to a place where people who deposited their money and had no part of this transaction wind up backstopping it.

This effectively makes the depositor the "guarantor" of the swap ex-post-facto.

That the regulators are allowing this is an outrage.

Mmm.

How very interesting to have these news and then those discussions about what on earth the Wall Street Occupiers are complaining about, those smelly hippies who should get jobs.

This just in: Men are not the new women (by Suzie)

"Men are the new women" has been making the rounds for a few years. It captures the fear that women are ascending while men are losing ground, and that women will treat men the way men have treated women. New York Times TV critic Alessandra Stanley uses the phrase in describing two new sitcoms:

"Man Up!” is about Judd Apatow-ish men who are treated as children. “Last Man Standing” is a little less humble and more of a backlash against all the man bashing. ... Like so many other men on television these days, the put-upon heroes of “Man Up!” and “Last Man Standing” are victims of a changed economy and a new social order in which men are the new women.

Men have always been the butt of sitcom jokes, but in the days when they really did dominate the weaker sex, they were mocked more for their manliness than their metrosexuality. Husbands like Ralph Kramden and Ricky Ricardo were bossy despots who never quite understood that their wives were really running the show sub rosa. Even henpecked husbands on shows like “According to Jim” and “Everybody Loves Raymond” erred by being blunderingly male: Jim paid his sister-in-law to pick out jewelry he could give his wife; Raymond erased the wedding tape by recording a football game over it.

Nowadays men get on their wives’ and girlfriends’ nerves by not being manly enough. ... [T]here is a faint whiff of hostility mixed in with some of the laughter.

A little hostility? You don't say!

Matt Roush of TVGuide says: "... 'Last Man Standing,' and its companion piece, the abrasive buddy comedy 'Man Up,' are rather single-mindedly obsessed with the notion that manhood is an endangered species."

Men predominate as producers, directors and writers in television. What is their motive to belittle men? Perhaps they are expressing their own anxiety of what it means to be a man these days. They may be catering to the predominantly female audience. When they have male comedians, it makes sense to pair them with a straight woman to set up the jokes. In the older sitcoms that Stanley mentions and the two most recent ones, the message is that women are really more powerful than men. That's a conservative argument against feminism. It's also conservative to laugh at men who "act like women."

This isn't a new social order. This is a backlash.

Occupying public space (by Suzie)

How revolutionary it would be for feminists to occupy a public space day after day.

For centuries in the West, proper women did not go out alone at night. A woman on the street might be presumed to be a woman of loose morals and low class, i.e., prey. I wrote about public spaces on 4/3/09, suggesting that, when people talk of public spaces, feminists should question whether there are some “publics” who cannot use them safely and comfortably, and why.

Feminists have picketed, they have marched, they have chained themselves to the White House fence. Perhaps a reader can give me an example, but I can't think of any time when feminists have camped out in a very public place, demanding their rights, for any length of time.

Occupy Wall Street includes feminists, but its focus is class, not gender. I hope good comes from it. But I also urge feminists to insist that protesters not forget the economic inequities women face as women. Nor should the occupiers forget that women do not necessarily experience public spaces the way men do. For example, some guys are photographing or videotaping the movement's "hot chicks."

No one should forget that progressive men can be sexist, too. The antifeminist Anonymous and accused rapist Julian Assange, the P.T. Barnum of anarchy, support the Occupy movement.

I also am concerned about the 99 percent slogan, which lumps together people in households that take in $593,000 a year or less. Perhaps the guy earning $500,000 a year isn't doing as well as before, but I question how much he has in common with a woman who has spent her adult life among the working poor. A college graduate who can't find a job is in a different position than a convicted felon battling a drug addiction who can't find steady employment. Someone losing his $300,000 home is not the same as someone losing her $50,000 home.

The Great Moral Correction. As Imagined by David Brooks.

In the alternative reality inhabited by David Brooks the vast, silent part of America, the people whose thoughts are interpreted by only Mr. Brooks, has decided for a Great Moral Correction:

Without doing anything about the lack of norms and regulations in the upper stratospheres of financial wealth, those Ordinary People (as explained by Mr. Brooks) are simply deciding to gird their loins and tighten their belts, for moral reasons! They have decided to have fewer children, less debt and, most astonishingly:

Second, Americans are trying to re-establish the link between effort and reward. This was the link that was severed on Wall Street, where so many made so much for work that served no productive purpose. This was the link that was frayed by the bailouts, when people who broke the rules still got rewarded.
In sphere after sphere, strong majorities want to see a balance between what you produce and what you get. The bank bailouts worked and barely cost the government anything, but they are ferociously unpopular because the unjust got rewarded. The auto bailouts mostly worked, but they are unpopular even in the Midwestern states that directly benefited because those who failed in the market still got the gold. Public sector unions are unpopular because of the perception that benefit packages are out of balance.
The third norm is that loyalty matters. A few years ago there was a celebration of Free Agent Nation. But now most people, even most young people, would rather work long-term for one company than move around in search of freedom and opportunity.

All this is utterly hilarious.

First, it is not the case that the workers wanted to end the life-long employment model, and moving around in search of freedom and opportunity has never been something the vast majority of those Silent Americans could do. You were happy to have a job with prospects. It was the firms who wanted easy access to the cheapest possible labor force, whether by getting rid of the older workers or through outsourcing.

In short, it was to the firms that loyalty no longer mattered. But this upside-down aspect of Brooks' writing applies to most everything he says.

Second, how are those Silent Americans trying to re-establish the link between effort and reward, leaving aside the question whether the two were ever linked in some simple and obvious manner, for all Americans? Clearly, it is unacceptable to do this through protests. Those, we are told, are by fringe elements. The Silent American does not protest, does not complain, but simply goes on to re-establish the link between effort and reward, all alone. HOW that will actually work out is left unclear. Unless the Silent Americans really are stock brokers, banksters and politicians, or at least the employers of many, it will have no impact whatsoever.

But the whole column is unclear, until one realizes that Brooks wanted to write a piece which would somehow both acknowledge the current economic disaster AND make every possible policy to change it useless. Or put in another way, in Brooks' world the vast masses of Silent Americans are both utterly helpless to affect anything but also the engines of real change.

This wouldn't be too bad if his evidence actually was about a change in morals. It's not: It's about a change in circumstances which causes a change in behavior. The large amount of pain behind those changes is something Brooks pays no attention to.

Against Medical Marijuana: A civil liberties argument against a humanistic farce (by Skylanda)

In 2007, medical marijuana became legal under a physician’s directive in New Mexico, one of sixteen states allowing some variation of medical use of ­­Cannabis sativa. Since then, regulation of medical marijuana in the state has swung with the political tides: founded and liberalized under former Democratic governor Bill Richardson, then tightening under current Republican governor Susan Martinez, who made a campaign vow to reverse the move toward medical legalization of marijuana altogether.

Caught in the middle of these political tides are the physicians who are asked to make the judgment call as to whether a patient is an appropriate candidate for medical marijuana. Predictably, medical providers fall into largely political camps in the decision whether to engage with the medical marijuana question at all – many refuse to sign the paperwork on an ideological basis, a few will sign any patient’s paperwork out of reverse ideological concerns, and a good number want nothing to do with it simply because they do not want the word to get out that every weed toker in town then come knocking on their door. The guidelines about who can prescribe for which conditions are only marginally helpful: a tangle of specialists needed for one condition, primary providers sufficient for another, and dual requirement from both for yet other conditions. The unifying theme behind these guidelines is that there is virtually no evidence behind a single one of them – to guide what conditions are covered, under what circumstances, and under the guidance of which specialists. In the era of evidence-based medicine, this is problematic.

But this problem is not accidental. Evidence is not a god-given entity; it is a good that must be gathered through clinical trials and observational data and then run through the grist mill of statistical analysis. The dearth of evidence for the safety and efficacy (or lack thereof) of one of the most frequently used mind-altering substances in the United States is due in no small part to a quirk of the way that the Drug Enforcement Agency classifies illicit substances: the schedule of controlled substances under the 1970 Controlled Substances Act. This law attempted to sort out serious drugs (and serious drug offenses) from drugs of more minor import, as well as drugs that have some dual role in both medicine and abuse. Schedule I drugs are the most serious offenders, with high potential for abuse and no role in medicine (they cannot be prescribed under any circumstance and theoretically cannot be permitted for research, though this rule is sometimes not strictly adhered to); Schedule V drugs are minor offenders with widely overlapping medical applications, and Schedule II-IV runs the spectrum between. You may be surprised to know that marijuana occupies a premium spot in the Schedule I category, right beside heroin, GHB, LSD, and ecstasy. You may be even more surprised to find that cocaine and methamphetamines are considered squarely less dangerous than marijuana, in the still-venerable Schedule II category (cocaine is used in some ear/nose/throat procedures; amphetamines are too close to a cluster of ADHD medications to make a useful distinction – thus the placement in Schedule II). Essentially, the DEA is far more vested in eradicating the scourge of marijuana than ridding the streets of methamphetamines and cocaine. (Interestingly, tobacco and alcohol were never rated by the DEA, probably because they are legal substances.)

It is because of this Schedule I placement that the feds take marijuana so seriously, and why state laws legalizing medical marijuana so flagrantly flout federal statute – and will likely eventually force a constitutional read of the issue at the SCOTUS level. (Several years ago, an acquaintance investigated the quandary of what to do with a notoriously brown-thumbed tenant who was producing a substantial quantity of the moldy pot plants in the drafty attic of his old San Francisco Victorian with a questionable grower’s license; in the course of his investigations, the landlord discovered that the city police didn’t care, the state law enforcement office reacted with studied indifference, the local housing authorities told him not to bother to get involved, but that every branch of the feds he contacted simply wanted to know the address so that they could initiate a bust immediately.)

It is because of this Schedule I status at the federal level that there is notably scarce data in the formal literature on the effect of marijuana on chronic pain, PTSD, depression, inflammatory conditions, asthma, palliative care, weight loss associated with cancer and AIDS, and the other conditions for which patients routinely request it of myself and hundreds of other physicians in the states where it is legal. American researchers are critically restricted from effective study of the medical effects of marijuana (except in the purified form of THC marketed as Marinol, marketed as an appetite stimulant and universally panned for its ineffectuality beside the supposed panacea of real marijuana) because forty years ago the federal government declared – in a nearly heroic accomplishment of circular reasoning – that there is no medical indication for marijuana.

And thus we set the stage for the farce that is medical marijuana. In New Mexico, physicians actually have a list of approved indications, which includes chronic pain, inflammatory arthritis, PTSD, glaucoma, painful peripheral neuropathy, and (in an ironic nod to the state’s epic battle with injection drug use) the discomfort associated with hepatitis C. We have no evidence that this substance is effective for any these conditions (nor any evidence that it is ineffective, or that it is harmful, nor that it is ineffective for a long list of excluded conditions), but someone came up with a list of inclusionary and exclusionary criteria, and there we are.

Because it is not produced uniformly and studied legally, I cannot come up with a reasonable dosing regimen at which I can expect results or move on to a different medicinal approach. I know roughly what twenty milligrams a day of Lipitor should do to your cholesterol, and how many milligrams of ibuprofen can reasonably be expected to turn off your headache pain before you risk an ulcer, but I can’t even hazard a guess at how many ounces of Mary Jane should evaporate your back pain, or alleviate your anxiety, or lighten up your mood. Because it is so poorly studied, I cannot give a patient a list of contraindications, side effects, or even long-term dangers (some claim, for example, that inhaled cannabis works well as a bronchodilator for asthma; not only do I find this disingenuous if there is no evidence to back it, there is reasonable cause to suspect that chronic marijuana smoking may be a culprit in emphysema just as well as cigarettes).

Without any kind of dosing standardization or quality control, handing out medical marijuana cards is essentially the equivalent of telling patients to open up a bottle of Jack Daniels, insert a straw, and start drinking until you feel better. Except that instead of properly bottled whiskey, make it the stuff that some guy stilled in an old bathtub out back of his cabin: it may be authentic, but the public health department isn’t exactly looking in to ensure he washed his hands first. (The state of New Mexico does license growers, but they are not inspected and regulated the way the FDA watches over pharmaceutical factories. Indeed, one of the little-spoken health concerns about marijuana is that large-scale illicit growers are not exactly environmentalists: you might be smoking some of the most potent pesticides and fertilizers on the market when you inhale a crop produced under the duress of a growing seasons shortened by the threat of federal surveillance.)

So what then to do with the patients who claim benefit from marijuana in all is chemical glory? Well, I say let ‘em smoke it. Or eat it, or vaporize it, or spread it on their toast in the morning in the form of weed butter. But get me out of the middle of it.

The medicalization of marijuana has been a shrewd and well-calculated move by the pro-legalization crowd to crow-bar the power of compassion for the terminally ill and fatefully traumatized into political capital toward the normalization – and eventually legalization – of marijuana. And fundamentally, I agree with that goal. Many decades ago, this country decided that the social cost of restricting your right to a mildly mind-altering substance was not worth the crime wave that came with trying to enforce temperance; prohibition only serves the task-master of organized crime, and in my lifetime I would like to see the United States of America come to the realization that if drinking a fifth of vodka does not warrant ruining one’s life with a jail sentence and one’s community with organized crime, neither then does smoking a joint.

But I don’t appreciated being used as a tool toward that end. The medicalization of marijuana means that I am forced into the farce of pretending that marijuana is modern medicine. Marijuana is medicine only in the way that opium poppies are medicine: there’s something in there that’s awfully potent, but I wouldn’t feed it to patients straight up if wanted a predictable effect from a set dose – which is the essence of what separates modern medicine from the stuff your great grandma boiled up in her kitchen to treat the neighborhood nose bleeds and fevers. Marijuana is medicine only in the way that that proverbial bottle of Jack is medicine: it sure does something, but as a doctor, I’m pretty sure that is a something I don’t want to be responsible for prescribing.

The medicalization of marijuana means that I spend appointment time with complex patients discussing – ad nauseum – the intricacies of who needs to sign the annual paperwork for their cards for their particular condition, instead of focusing on actual medical conditions. The medicalization of marijuana means that I field a fair number of patients who establish care only to ask for this service (only some proportion of whom are actually ill), who are severely put out to discover that I cannot provide it to them under the current guidelines and who are unafraid to tell me so in angry and explicit terms. The medicalization of marijuana means that I spend public dimes at the community clinic where I work explaining and re-explaining the guidelines and limitations of this program, verifying and re-verifying the changing landscape of requirements which – I think it is only mildly paranoid to suspect – the current right-wing regime in the state may one day use to punish physicians who veer at all from the exacting nature of the program. The medicalization of marijuana fundamentally means a large bureaucratic headache for an issue that I fundamentally feel is none of my business (and as a primary care physician, bureaucratic headaches are something I do not require any more of than I already have). Unless they are troubled by it or using it to an extent that is causing medical or mental health issues, I do not feel that marijuana use by my patients is my business, pro or con – much as a glass of wine with dinner does not concern me.

My only entry in this dog and pony show is as a half-hearted civil libertarian (of the kind that appreciates being left alone if I’m not hurting anyone else, but recoils at the rather horrifying spectacle of Tea Party libertarianism), and a fulltime harm reduction-ist, of the sort that heartily supports needle exchange programs and drug treatment over punishment for those in the throes of addiction. The full legalization of marijuana fits both those bills: get the government out of the business of busting people for a drug that is fundamentally about as harmful as alcohol and tobacco, and take the breeze out of the sails of the organized crime that has been the sole beneficiary (alongside, perhaps, the terrifyingly profitable privatized prison industry) of this late-date Prohibition. But the medicalization of marijuana defeats all these purposes: creating new headaches and bureaucracies without tackling any of the social ills of prohibition. Moreover, medical marijuana disingenuously asks doctors to play the mediator in the age-old cat-and-mouse game between stoners and law enforcement – trying to suss out whose pain is real, who is not just looking for a get-high-no-jail card – a role that I have no aptitude for and even less desire to engage in.

It is high time that the pro-marijuana crowd step up to the plate and aim their efforts at their true goal: legalization. (Or, in the interim, moving cannabis off the Schedule I list to somewhere more reasonable.) And please, spare me being shoe-horned into the middle of your efforts – I appreciate the core sentiment, but I do not appreciate the paperwork, the headache, or being used for purposes that defy the calling of my profession.

Let the ill have their relief and the hedonists have their day. And please: let the physicians practice their craft without pretending that unrefined herbiage is part and parcel of modern medicine.

Cross-posted from my recently relocated and relaunched blog, America, Love it or Heal It.

Music for Friday

Reports From The Womb Wars

Abortions will not be covered under the new health insurance rules if the US House has its way. It probably will not. For that it must wait until a wingnut is, once again, firmly in control of this country.

But what the Republican-controlled House wants is a system where:

Providers that offer abortion coverage would have to set up identical plans without abortion coverage to participate in the health insurance exchanges to be set up under the new law.

....

Under the law, federally subsidized health care plans can offer abortion coverage but they have to set up separate accounts to segregate federal funds from funds that can be used for abortion coverage.
Pitts said these are nothing more than “accounting gimmicks” that won’t stop taxpayer money from being used to fund abortions.

Pitts is being silly, of course. Or not silly enough. Money is fungible, so any money spent on abortion anywhere could be construed as having come from taxpayer money if the person making the expenditures also got, say, a mortgage deductions in taxes. It's all about banning abortion by other means.

Here's the real beauty of the forced-birth thinking:

Democratic opponents were particularly upset about the conscience clause, saying it would lead to pregnant women being denied emergency treatment. “When the Republicans vote for this bill today they will be voting to say women can die on the floor and health care providers don’t have to intervene,” said Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California.
“This bill is putting the religious leaders’ views right there in the surgery room,” said Jon O’Brien, president of Catholics for Choice.
They said it would override the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, which requires that all people have access to emergency services.
Pitts’ office said they were codifying a 2004 amendment to a spending bill that protects doctors who object to performing abortions. It said that there has never been a case where a doctor cited these protections to refuse necessary care and that Catholic hospitals, even with their strict standards, allow doctors to perform necessary procedures that could result in the death of a fetus.

Bolds are mine. Those sentences tell us so-very-clearly what Pitts thinks about the rights of pregnant women to get emergency care: They can just rely on whatever provider's conscience they happen to encounter! No need to codify the rights of the incubators, none at all.

The Anti-Capitalist Argument

I keep hearing various right-wing politicians and pundits state that the Wall Street Occupation is anti-capitalist, as if they were saying that it's against mom and apple pie*. Everyone is supposed to frown upon such an awful act of disrespect against capitalism!

Capitalism has somehow clawed itself up on a pedestal, right next to the Christian God in this country, as something we no longer debate at all. It's not a system we can tinker with. It's a religion.

After all, didn't Ronald Reagan gird himself and ride upon a white steed to kill the dragon of communism? Now we are all capitalists!

Except, of course, that the capitalist system does not mean anything of the sort. Capitalism gone haywire is a pretty terrible system, using child-labor in mines or whatever makes the profits highest possible ones. In its extreme form it barely differs from feudalism, except for the marker of what constitutes the upper classes.

I'm a muddy-middle kind of goddess (the middle naturally defined by me!), and I have never been able to fathom why people would want a world of child-labor in mines or a Banana Republic, unless they are so deluded that they believe in their own divine right to belong to the small group of capitalists. And of course a truly unbridled capitalism would kill off most of the would-be-capitalists, too. It's a winner-take-all system.

What's so bad about mixed economies? They do very well in international comparisons. They combine the best aspects of collective and individual systems.

Though I admit that having a Mixed Economy as the label on a pedestal doesn't sound very exciting.
------
*"Mom and apple pie" isn't exactly a neutral myth, either, as I have stated before. But you get the meaning.

Today's Musical Interlude

More Speech As A Response To Misogynist Speech

I thought of "more speech" as the answer to "bad speech" the other day. It is a common argument for how to fix racist or misogynist speech: Don't stifle it but present alternatives.

In theory it works. Say, someone writes a long screed about how women are nothing but holes to be plugged and should never have power. Then others can write long screeds in the defense of the ridiculous idea that women are people! That will naturally take hours if not days, and will require putting down humongous amounts of evidence that women indeed have done lots of good stuff, as a class.

Given the "more speech" argument, all the time others crawl from the primeval mud and chime in with their ideas of how c**tish women are and so on. A cacophony results. It's a bit like saying that "bad music" should result in "more music", all instruments going on at the same time in the same room.

You are only going to hear the loudest one, most likely give up and go away. Who knows what your final conclusions are on the heinous nature of women in general.

Of course the initial "more speech" response could have been not writing that long epistle with evidence but simply blurting out that men are prickish Q-tips which should be kept in a bathroom cabinet when one does not need them, what with their violent over-emotionality and so on. But that, my friends, is another type of "bad speech." Are we to fight "bad speech" with more "bad speech?"

Or we could tell the misogynist that he should shut up. That, of course, is exactly what one is NOT supposed to do in the "free marketplace" of ideas.

The mature reaction is to ignore woman-haters and their comments. I have been told this many, many times.

This means that my Internet use is like sitting at a public library having low-toned conversations with clever people, while, once every few minutes, some guy with staring eyes walks past yelling "c***s, I hate them." On my blog I ban these visitors. Elsewhere I cannot do so.

It's not just an inconvenience, either. If your neighbor walked around with staring eyes muttering about his hatred of women you might feel the need to do something, to suggest that he gets help, to talk to his family and so on. But the mature reaction on the Internet is to ignore all that.

This troubles me.

Not For Women. That's Dr Pepper's New Diet Drink.

Advertising unisex products for men-only is not a new trick. The British did that with chocolate bars and it worked. But it's not enough to state that a particular product drips with testosterone. What these campaigns mostly share is an explicit statement that women are not allowed to consume the advertised product. The newest example is Dr Pepper's Manly-Man Drink:

Dr Pepper is going out of its way to appeal to men — and potentially offending both sexes in the process. After market research revealed that men eschew diet sodas because they aren't "manly," the soda company decided to launch a 10-calorie soft drink called Dr Pepper Ten that aims to be more masculine. The can is gunmetal gray, and an extensive campaign for the beverage boldly declares that "it's not for women."

Here ya go:





There's a Facebook page for this manly new diet drink, too:

"A Facebook page for the drink contains an application that allows it to exclude women from viewing content, which includes games and videos aimed at being 'manly,'" the story explains. "For instance, there's a shooting gallery where you shoot things like high heels and lipstick, for example."
It's not made clear why appealing to men includes using deadly weapons to destroy symbols associated with women.

So it goes. The video is meant to be sarcastic, I believe, and it's quite funny in that context. But what is not so very funny is that need to exclude women in order for something to be regarded as masculine. Any taint of the girls' cooties makes big guys run, it seems.

Masculinity is defined as subtractive. It's whatever women don't do. That definition is what requires the No Girls Allowed sign. And sure, it's funny and pretty unimportant when it comes to some silly soft drink and how it is advertised. What's not so funny is the nasty underpinnings that are revealed.

Because those same underpinnings apply to other fields of human endeavor. The subtractive nature of the way we define masculinity means that any advances by women into new fields look like shrinking ground for manly men.

The other real danger that lurks behind silly ads like this one is what they bring up from the bottom mud of that large ocean of humanity. When I checked the Facebook page, one of the first comments I read there was a truly disgusting one:

Robert, see its in the woman's cunty nature to btch and whine for no reason. their reaction to this ad is a perfect example why women should only be used as a "plug-gable hole" and never be allowed any power. Women are weak emotionally, intellectually, physically and tend to over-react to everything.

Other comments scolded the writer of this one. But I'm not so sure that having this Facebook page and what is going on there will be good publicity for Dr Pepper.

Those who quite like the ad campaign find it funny and hilarious and point out that there are all sorts of ads aimed specifically at women.

But I'm not aware of actually unisex products which have been marketed to women with the statement that men are not allowed to buy them. It's that exclusionary aspect, having to do with the subtractive nature of masculinity and the resulting fear from any advancement in women's status that is the real problem. That, and the misogyny.

The Poor Traders of Wall Street.

A story:

Did no one but herself notice the poor on the streets of London? she wondered. And again she felt that uncomfortable feeling of isolation as she assumed she was probably the only person in society who did notice. Geoffrey, dear Geoffrey, did have some idea. He had told her that only the other day, the Duke of Devonshire had been visiting a bazaar with his agent and had stopped at a stall displaying wooden napkin rings and the duke had asked his agent what they were for.

"Napkin rings," said the agent. "Middle-class people keep them on the table to put their table napkins in between meals."

Said the astounded duke, "Do you mean that people actually wrap up their napkins and use them again for another meal?"
"Certainly," said the agent.

The duke gasped as he looked at the stall, "Good God!" he exclaimed. "I never knew such poverty existed."

I have read the same story about an English king.

Another story:

Bankers aren’t optimistic about those gains. Options Group’s Karp said he met last month over tea at the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York with a trader who made $500,000 last year at one of the six largest U.S. banks.
The trader, a 27-year-old Ivy League graduate, complained that he has worked harder this year and will be paid less. The headhunter told him to stay put and collect his bonus.
“This is very demoralizing to people,” Karp said. “Especially young guys who have gone to college and wanted to come onto the Street, having dreams of becoming millionaires.”

This (via Eschaton) looks to be a true story and not part of a novel. At least it is reported in a respectable newspaper.

There's much I could write about the article which contained that pearl about How To Become Demoralized, including sharp commentary on this:

That isn’t diminishing lobbying efforts to soften rules mandated by the Dodd-Frank Act, which would reduce risk, curtail proprietary trading and force more transparency in the $601 trillion derivatives market. Large financial institutions have been “exceedingly aggressive at trying to roll back reform” and have largely succeeded, said Greenlight Capital Inc. President David Einhorn, 42, who bet against Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in the months before that firm’s collapse.

But I'm going to restrain myself to just stating that if these efforts have been largely successful then we little people are f***ed.

It's all pretty startling, to realize how blind people are how they come across to us, the little people, how insular these high-fliers truly are and how unaware they seem to be of the rest of the world. Just one final example, suitable for a feminist blog:

Uncertainty didn’t stop some on Wall Street from profiting during the U.S. housing collapse, when Deutsche Bank AG trader Greg Lippmann helped create and profited from a multibillion- dollar market in subprime-based derivatives. He said Wall Street will have fewer exotic products to sell and trade, drawing an analogy to the popular no-reservations restaurant Torrisi Italian Specialties.
“No choosing, great food, low price, no pizzazz,” said Lippmann, co-founder of New York hedge fund LibreMax Capital LLC. “A couple of years ago, the hottest place to go would be someplace that they just spent $5 million decorating and they’ve got three or four models answering the phones. People want stripped-down now.”

On Sentimentality, Frustration and Other Mixed Emotions

The other night a catastrophe happened:

I had no new reading material. So I ended up re-reading Oscar Wilde's De Profundis, and his definition of sentimentality struck me as meaningful:

"A sentimentalist", Oscar Wilde wrote Alfred Douglas, "is one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.

Like having a nice cry while watching a sad movie?

What do you think of Wilde's definition there?

I have always been fascinated by the mixed emotions, or emotions which appear mixed to me. Frustration is a good example: It clearly has aspects of anger in it but also something else, most likely boredom? Or is it just a diluted form of anger? Can those kinds of emotions be split into their constituents parts?

I'm sure wiser minds have written on all this and it's of no real importance. But fun to think about. So what are the parts of feeling that something is "fun"?

Today's Fun Graph

It's this one (via rm-Zlist):

It reminds us of the reason for the slogan "We are the 99%," and it also reminds us of the fact that bad economic conditions do not bite us all equally. Some of us have lots of cushioning for that fall. Others look down into the open maws of a shark.

What the graph does not reveal is the power of those on the extreme right in that graph. Most politicians belong to that income group. Most politicians get their campaigns funded by others in that income group. Most media corporations are owned by people in that group. And those people are cushioned, which explains why they can worry about the federal budget deficits and how on earth we can pay for Social Security in fifty years' time.

Soggy Toast. David Brooks As The Real Radical

David Brooks has chimed in on the Wall Street Occupation movement. He thinks the protesters are soggy-toast radicals who hate Murka and capitalism and that the real radicals look surprisingly like David Brooks.

I love this! It shows how desperate the 1% is getting.

Most of Brooks' column creates straw-people which he then strikes down: The 99% are Not Virtuous! The 1% are Not Nefarious! And this:

They will have no realistic proposal to reduce the debt or sustain the welfare state. Even if you tax away 50 percent of the income of those making between $1 million and $10 million, you only reduce the national debt by 1 percent, according to the Tax Foundation. If you confiscate all the income of those making more than $10 million, you reduce the debt by 2 percent. You would still be nibbling only meekly around the edges.

As Paul Krugman points out, those small figures come from comparing one year's additional tax intakes to all of national debt:

I read David Brooks citing the Tax Foundation this morning, and I thought he must have misread them. They couldn’t possibly have compared one year’s take from higher taxes on the rich with the total stock of debt, could they? They can’t possibly be that stupid, or think that their readers are that stupid, can they?
Yes they did. They actually find that their version of the “Buffett rule” would collect $120 billion a year, which is a seriously significant sum. But they try to make it look small by comparing one year’s revenue with the total debt outstanding.

But isn't it wonderful how Brooks frames the problem: If taxing the rich won't solve all our problems, let's not tax them. They are so few, even if they have most of the wealth in this country! But then taxing me, for instance, would solve even fewer of our problems so let's stop taxing me! And I'm only one single person, too small to matter.

What Brooks doesn't get is that the protests are ultimately about fairness and the way the society has reneged on its implicit contracts, always in the direction of benefiting the 1%.

Working hard will not help you when jobs are outsourced abroad, when collective bargaining is attacked and when all that is left to you is something called "The Right To Work" which gives all the rights to the employer.

Getting an education does not make finding a job that much easier, what with that outsourcing, the cuts in public spending on state levels and the nonexistent consumer demand today. But those student loans still must be paid.

Many middle class families are a few paychecks from being homeless. The security net has frayed and Brooks would like to fray it even more:

The U.S. economy is probably going to stink for a few more years. It is beset by short-term problems (low consumer demand, uncertain housing prices, too much debt) and long-term problems (wage stagnation, rising health care costs, eroding human capital).
Realistically, not much is going to be done to address the short-term problems, but we can at least use this winter of recuperation to address the country’s underlying structural ones. Do tax reform, fiscal reform, education reform and political reform so that when the economy finally does recover the prosperity is deep, broad and strong.

Make no mistake: Brooks means to unravel the safety net when he talks about those reforms. But note how the pain and suffering of people is something he glides over in a few sentences, concluding that not much is going to be done to address that pain and suffering, but that we should use the opportunity to cause even more pain and suffering by altering the system in ways which guarantees it to become permanent.