Some Speed Blogging, October 18, 2013: On Education in the US

I had to travel last weekend and into late Tuesday.  Not having had much of a real break (even snakes need them), my writing well is running on empty of energy even though there are important topics to tackle.   Perhaps early next week...

What's fascinating about traveling inside the US is that one skips from culture to culture to culture, even over shorter distances.  This is not really one country but a large chunk of a continent, and even houses and streets and nature look different between the lunch stop and the dinner stop en route.  To take a more extreme example, Louisiana and Massachusetts are two different countries in everything but name.

And that diversity may be the reason why the politics in the US is so very violent in tone.

Some of that "diversity" is visible in this article about the percentage of poor students in the southern and western parts of the United States.  I'm not an expert in judging studies about education, but it is certainly true that funding schools largely from local property taxes exacerbates existing income inequalities and passes them on to future generations, and if the majority of children live in poorer areas getting the future workers (including teachers, physicians and nurses) we all need may become more difficult.  I have long advocated compensatory funding:  More money should go to poor areas.

But the paradox of "diversity" that article reflects is perhaps in the fact that the winning political party in the southern areas of the United States is not interested in spending money on education.  Very sad, because they are eating their seed corn by ignoring the long-term negative effects of short-term tax savings.

If You Read Nothing Else Today, Read This

An article by Joseph Stiglitz on global income inequality and what it means to all of us.  A snippet:

Of the advanced economies, America has some of the worst disparities in incomes and opportunities, with devastating macroeconomic consequences. The gross domestic product of the United States has more than quadrupled in the last 40 years and nearly doubled in the last 25, but as is now well known, the benefits have gone to the top — and increasingly to the very, very top.
Last year, the top 1 percent of Americans took home 22 percent of the nation’s income; the top 0.1 percent, 11 percent. Ninety-five percent of all income gains since 2009 have gone to the top 1 percent. Recently released census figures show that median income in America hasn’t budged in almost a quarter-century. The typical American man makes less than he did 45 years ago (after adjusting for inflation); men who graduated from high school but don’t have four-year college degrees make almost 40 percent less than they did four decades ago.
American inequality began its upswing 30 years ago, along with tax decreases for the rich and the easing of regulations on the financial sector. That’s no coincidence. It has worsened as we have under-invested in our infrastructure, education and health care systems, and social safety nets. Rising inequality reinforces itself by corroding our political system and our democratic governance.

I see this as one of the major longer run problems,  right after climate change.  And what is worst about it is that it does, indeed, corrode our chances of democratic governance.

Don't Drink And Rape

That's a clickbait headline if there ever was one.  I'm trying to learn this game, my dear readers, because it IS the game when talk turns to the so-called "wimminz' issues."

Such as the women's astonishing ability to get raped.  Emily Yoffe at Slate has written an article on that, and many responses to her omit the link to reduce its clickbaitiness.  I don't think I can omit the link because I want to look at some direct quotes from the piece.  This makes me sad, as I'm contributing to the game.

At the same time, Yoffe's piece has a few pearls in it, scattered among the pig dung, and I want to spend some time separating the two, if I can.

Let's see what the pearls might be in Yoffe's piece:

She points out that binge drinking is not good for you.  It's not good for your health and it's not good for your safety.  Bad things can "happen" to you if you are too inebriated to take care of yourself, and bad things can "happen" to other people if, say, you decide to get behind the wheel of a car while drunk out of your mind.  Yoffe also suggests that binge drinking can turn you into a rapist, and she certainly states that binge drinking can make you a victim of a rape.  Or perhaps a mugging?  Or a beating?  A theft?

But Yoffe's main argument is about rape and young women.  Here's what she says:

In one awful high-profile case after another—the U.S. Naval Academy; Steubenville, Ohio; now the allegations in Maryville, Mo.—we read about a young woman, sometimes only a girl, who goes to a party and ends up being raped.    As soon as the school year begins, so do reports of female students sexually assaulted by their male classmates. A common denominator in these cases is alcohol, often copious amounts, enough to render the young woman incapacitated. But a misplaced fear of blaming the victim has made it somehow unacceptable to warn inexperienced young women that when they get wasted, they are putting themselves in potential peril.

Bolds are mine.  I use them to point out how Yoffe's foggy writing hides the pearls and covers them up with the pig dung.   We begin with "awful" high-profile cases where a young girl "ends up" being raped.  Note that the active voice is about a girl going to a party.  Then the passive voice takes over and she "ends up" getting raped.  Bad things "happened" to her, because she was drunk and went to a party.

The pearl in her story:  That we should all take care of ourselves and make sure that we are not the slowest zebra in the herd running away from the hungry lions.  The pig dung in the story:  The lions* will still chase the zebras and the slowest one gets eaten.  Yoffe pays little attention to that aspect of the story.

Let's repeat that quote and bold a different part of it:

In one awful high-profile case after another—the U.S. Naval Academy; Steubenville, Ohio; now the allegations in Maryville, Mo.—we read about a young woman, sometimes only a girl, who goes to a party and ends up being raped.    As soon as the school year begins, so do reports of female students sexually assaulted by their male classmates. A common denominator in these cases is alcohol, often copious amounts, enough to render the young woman incapacitated. But a misplaced fear of blaming the victim has made it somehow unacceptable to warn inexperienced young women that when they get wasted, they are putting themselves in potential peril.

Is this truly the case?  That young people are not taught about the dangers of being too drunk to take care of themselves because it would come across as victim blaming?  Or is Yoffe arguing that young men are warned about the dangers but not young women?   Or is this all about the presumed behavior that will trigger a rape event and get a woman (or a man) raped, using the passive voice Yoffe did herself earlier in the quote?

The borderline between "rape prevention" of the kind Yoffe advocates (don't be the slowest zebra) and victim blaming (why did the zebras graze so close to the lions?) is a fuzzy one. 

Think of other examples from different types of crimes:  Should someone parking an expensive car in a poor neighbor be told that doing so was just inviting car theft?  What about a man or a woman wearing large diamond rings and fat gold chains in the subway late at night?  Yet avoiding those forms of behavior probably does reduce a person's chances of getting eaten by the human equivalent of lions.  But we tend not to blame the victims for their "bad choices" after a crime has taken place.  There's something different about rape as a crime, almost a whiff of it being "natural."

I quite like the lions-and-zebras parable (initially suggested by Yoffe herself, in " Sometimes the woman is the only one drunk and runs into a particular type of shrewd—and sober—sexual predator who lurks where women drink like a lion at a watering hole"), because it also serves to show that Yoffe seems to think that rape is either committed by alcohol or that the small percentage of hard-core rapists out there will always be on the lookout for the slow zebras. In either case the onus is on the victims to protect themselves by not drinking too much.  By running faster, really.

So the pearl in the story is that taking care of oneself is an important skill and women and men should both be encouraged to practice that self-love. 

I didn't find a pearl about how we should teach our children to take care of others, too,  to not let a friend get raped or get behind the wheel drunk and so on, and I didn't find a pearl about teaching young people that when an "inexperienced young person is wasted" perhaps we shouldn't see whether that person gets exploited or "ends up" exploiting someone else but instead make sure that they get safely home.

And I didn't find the pearl about the reason why victim blaming matters.  Nothing about the long history of rape victims being blamed for the crime, because of the time of the day they were out, because of the part of the town they were found in, because of the length of their skirts or the visibility of their arms or because they smiled at a stranger or didn't smile at a stranger and so on and so on.  This is not just history, either, but a current undertow in the stream of public debates about sexual violence both in the US and abroad.  If you read enough comment threads on events such as the recent gang rapes in India, you will find opinions which suggest that women, by their very existence anywhere outside their locked homes, are the real cause of rape.

That's what is tricky about Yoffe's arguments.  There will always be the slowest zebra, and teaching zebras how to run faster will not change that.

Which does NOT mean that I advocate getting drunk out of your mind for anyone or that it would be a good way to stay safe.

Finally, to the part of Yoffe's article which is both untrue and pure clickbaiting:  Female binge drinking is the fault of feminism!

The text under the attached photograph says:

Young women are getting a distorted message that their right to match men drink for drink is a feminist issue.

Funny, that.  I've never read a single feminist book which would have advocated binge drinking or matching men drink for drink.  Now who is it that has distorted the feminist message?

 Yoffe says more about this:

I’ve told my daughter that it’s her responsibility to take steps to protect herself. (“I hear you! Stop!”) The biological reality is that women do not metabolize alcohol the same way as men, and that means drink for drink women will get drunker faster. I tell her I know alcohol will be widely available (even though it’s illegal for most college students) but that she’ll have a good chance of knowing what’s going on around her if she limits herself to no more than two drinks, sipped slowly—no shots!—and stays away from notorious punch bowls. If female college students start moderating their drinking as a way of looking out for their own self-interest—and looking out for your own self-interest should be a primary feminist principle—I hope their restraint trickles down to the men.

Knowing your own limits is good advice.  Suggesting that this restraint trickles down to the men is rubbish, because the lure of drinking a lot in college has its roots in very different and more masculine places than whatever the chicks might do.

To summarize, feminism shouldn't be just about how not to be slowest zebra in the herd running away from the lions, and neither should the concept of rape prevention be about that, even though Slate advertises this article by "The Best Rape Prevention: Tell College Women to Stop Getting So Wasted". 

And there's a very real need for us all to teach our children not just how to take care of themselves but also how to take care of others.  At the minimum, we should teach that "don't drink and rape" slogan to the general society.
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*The term "lions" does not refer to all men here.  I use it in Yoffe's sense as some proportion of the male population who she thinks will always predate on vulnerable people.  The term "zebras" should be interpreted as applying to all women and men who are viewed as prey by the "lions."

Y.O.U.N.G.

CONTENTS:  Sexual Violence, Rape


When I read this story about the freshman week events at Leeds University, in England, I remembered something similar happening in Canada this fall.  A chant used in at least two Canadian universities in freshman initiations goes like this:

Students told CBC that the chant — led by a group of SMU orientation leaders during "frosh week" — has been a tradition at the school for years. The video shows a group of men and women saying, "SMU boys we like them young ... Y is for your sister, O is for oh so tight, U is for underage, N is for no consent, G is for grab that a**."
A spokesman for SMU told Global News that the chant differs every year, and this year's version "was more sexually charged than earlier chants" and that it's "certainly the last year the chant will be sung."

 

"Sexually charged???"  Perhaps in the sense that cannibalism is a cuisine.  A 2010 newspaper article casts light on what might be happening to terms such as rape among the young that makes them see it as "sexually charged":

Not long ago, Professor Lise Gotell, an expert on sexual assault law at the University of Alberta, was taken aback to hear her 15-year-old son describe his football team’s crushing defeat as being “totally raped.’’
She wasn’t sure whether to call the coach, or the cops.
“Can’t you just say that you were humiliated? I asked him,’’ she recalls on the phone from her Edmonton office. “He explained that he meant to convey that ‘They turned us into their bitch.’’’
As if that were any better.
“There’s something about this sexualization and the use of rape as a colloquial verb that is really startling,’’ Gotell says. “Culture is a terrain that we should take very, very seriously.’’

The terms and idioms about rape and sexual violence  have been domesticated.  This does not mean that they have been tamed, but that they have been brought into general conversations like wolves in sheeps' clothing.

And the result?  If you watch the YouTube video in the above link you notice that the people chanting about "no means yes" are not thinking about what they chant.  These rape idioms serve to normalize one-sided sexual aggression or violence as simply normal sex, sex as it is supposed to be, sex as it is served to many on some pornographic sites.  Or at least something worth joking about in the sense of sexual titillation.

 For example, in Leeds:

An investigation into a student club night has been set up by Leeds City Council, after it received complaints from a local councillor and individuals. The investigation comes as over 2,000 students sign a petition to close the night down.
The club night, called Freshers Violation is run by Tequila at Mezz club in Leeds. Students on social media have complained about a video posted on the club's Facebook page which, the objecters say, "promoted rape culture".
The video, which has since been taken down, included a presenter asking a student: "How are you going to violate a fresher tonight?" The student replied: "She's going to get raped."
The text under the video, which can still be read on the Facebook page despite the video's removal, reads: "Fu*k me I'm a fresher! Another huge night at Tequila with pole dancers, a violation cage and lots of second and third years seeking out new freshers."

Mmm.  Hard to see how those messages wouldn't  promote rape culture.  After all, these are messages used to lure students into the club.  And notice how the event has the flavor of happening in a "gentlemen's" club! 

But note, also, the fact that all the events I linked to provoked strong and swift opposition and a shutting-down of the phenomena.  Still,  we need to understand much better what causes this idea that rape is at least funny if not what sex should be all about, on the level of popular culture and inside some sub-groups.  What drives this thinking?  To what extent has it become more common?  What are its ties to popular music, pornography, movies?  And what are its consequences in terms of sexual aggression in actual relationships?

The More Things Change... A Quote from Woolf's Three Guineas.

During my flu I read again Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas.  It is a fascinating book, almost oracular at places and much ahead of its time (especially the end-notes*), yet the basic tie-in of pacifism and women's status is, I think, weaker than it should have been to make the argument convincing.

I'm not going to amble on those by-roads, because what I really want to point out here is one of her end-notes, this one.  (Woolf was writing at the eve of World War II):

Even at a time of great political stress like the present it is remarkable how much criticism is still bestowed upon women.  The announcement "A shrewd, witty and provocative study of modern woman," appears on an average three times yearly in publishers' lists.

The author, often a doctor of letters, is invariably of the male sex; and "to mere man," as the blurb puts it (see Times Lit. Sup. March 12th, 1938), "this book will be an eye-opener."  Presumably the need for a scapegoat is largely responsible, and the role is traditionally a woman's.  (See Genesis.)  It is a curious fact that although the "practical obliteration" of her freedom is assured if certain characteristics generally if erroneously associated with aggravated masculinity remain unchecked, the educated woman not only accepts criticism, but if publishers' lists are to be taken as evidence, makes no attempt to return it....

This struck a bell.  Think of all the writing about how women are now supposed to be less happy than in the good old days when they had fewer choices,  think of the (discredited) stories about how educated women can't find partners, think of some of the popular evolutionary psychology studies about the "basic nature" of women as coy and submissive and monogamous and ultimately home-bound, think of the way feminism is blamed for a Pandora's box of evils in this world, ranging from the hookup culture, women's alcohol use, the plight of boys at school, all the way to the destruction of the Western civilization and even its churches!

Gender-reversed articles on similar issues are not so common.  This may be because of the default setting of men as the human beings.  If that is how we view the world, then the sub-group or special group of "women" sticks out like a sore thumb and almost begs for analysis, but such aspects as violence tend to be seen largely as human problems (in, say, stories about crime) and not gendered problems, even if they show a big percentage difference by the perpetrator's sex.   But problems coded as female (however small their actual percentage is)  are treated as if they apply to all women or at least to all uppity women or all poor women and so on.

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*I love footnotes and end-notes in books and always read all of them.  Am I the only person who does this? 

The 2013 Values Voter Summit

This is an annual conservative event in the US where the so-called "social conservatives" get to tell the rest of us which values they are going to force us to follow.  It is also a window those conservatives use to misinform the rest of us on various issues.

The name of the event is fun, in a sick way.  It implies that nobody else has values at all!  And the assumption is that the values espoused in these conferences (the submission of women, death to gayness etc.) are good things, despite the obviousness of anger/wrath as the energy which motivates much of what I have seen.

Here's the funniest quote from this year's Values Summit,  so far:

“Obamacare is, really, I think, the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery…it is slavery, in a way, because it is making all of us subservient to the government.”

It's not ha-ha funny.  It's funny in the sense that it freezes the eyeballs of the reader for a second and triggers those primitive flight reactions.  But then my analytical half or quarter starts immediately wondering whether the same isn't true about taxes or the health care for the elderly or even the fact that we are forced to drive on the right side of the road.

Never mind.  We are talking about a different reality, and that might be OK if the Values Voters didn't have such an urge to make me obey according to their desires which they call values.

Speed Blogging, October 11, 2013. On Mansplaining, Stock Market Shenanigans, How To Deal With Extortionists and Boobs in Politics

A wonderful sermon, this one:

“You know, there are those of us in this society who have told women that there’s a war on them because that cute little baby inside of them, they may want to get rid of it and there are people that are keeping you from doing that,” Carson continued. “And women say, ‘No, no, they’re not doing that to me! No!’ And they get all riled up.”
He added there was obviously not a “war on women” because men give up their seats to pregnant women.
“There is no war on them, the war is on their babies,” Carson insisted. “Babies that cannot defend themselves. Over the past few decades, we have destroyed 55 million of them. And we have the nerve to call other societies of the past heathen.”
“What we need to do is re-educate the women to understand that they are the defenders of these babies.”

The term "mansplaining" * was invented because of statements like this one.  Well, it's not just "mansplaining," in the sense of assuming that one's audience knows nothing and must be schooled, but something even more revealing because Carson himself appears not to have spent any time thinking about the issues at all.  He's waging a war on behalf of the egg-Americans and has blinders on about everything else having to do with women as people.

This is an interesting story about the possible effect of power in the regulation of stock markets:

In the spring of 2012, a senior examiner with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York determined that Goldman Sachs had a problem.


Under a Fed mandate, the investment banking behemoth was expected to have a company-wide policy to address conflicts of interest in how its phalanxes of dealmakers handled clients. Although Goldman had a patchwork of policies, the examiner concluded that they fell short of the Fed’s requirements.
That finding by the examiner, Carmen Segarra, potentially had serious implications for Goldman, which was already under fire for advising clients on both sides of several multibillion-dollar deals and allegedly putting the bank’s own interests above those of its customers. It could have led to closer scrutiny of Goldman by regulators or changes to its business practices.
Before she could formalize her findings, Segarra said, the senior New York Fed official who oversees Goldman pressured her to change them. When she refused, Segarra said she was called to a meeting where her bosses told her they no longer trusted her judgment. Her phone was confiscated, and security officers marched her out of the Fed’s fortress-like building in lower Manhattan, just 7 months after being hired.

  I have no further information on the particular case, but it is certainly true that the overseers were not allowed to do any overseeing for many years.

And here Michael Kinsley argues that the best way to solve the government shutdown by the Tea Party conservatives is for Obama to cave in:

President Obama should give in.

...

He should speak to the nation and say,

...

“The sad truth is that if you don’t care about any of that, it gives you tremendous power over those who do. Perhaps unfortunately, I do care. And I believe the stakes are too high to let this become a testosterone contest. So I have sent a letter to Speaker Bohner, saying that I will agree to a year’s postponement of the Affordable Care Act, if he will agree to a rise in the debt limit that is at least big enough to spare us another episode like this for a year.

What to say about that, eh?  The way to deal with extortion is by giving in to it, I guess.  Or rather, the Tea Party wants to kill the Affordable Care Act, and delaying it by a year gives them more time to kill it.  That is the reason for the government shutdown, as I have mentioned before.   So they should get what they are aiming at, never mind the precedents and never mind the fact that this is redoing elections by other means and so on.  Indeed, democracy itself is unimportant here.

Finally, a piece which elicits no comments from me that could be publicly posted.  It's about boobs and politicians.  You decide what or who the boobs are.
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*Others can act this way, too.

Fox News on Welfare Leeches, Shame and Who Deserves to Leech on the Government

This is such a beautiful piece of television journalism, right? 




Vague insinuations, a carefully picked anecdotal interview, lots of emotional arguments based on...what?  A graph showing the impact of Medicare and Medicaid (health care access for the elderly and some groups of the poor)  on a drop in poverty from the 1960s to 1970s and then no drop (because there were no additional large changes in what makes people poor).  And what do we conclude from this chain of events?

That people have become welfare leeches because there hasn't been any further drops!

The funniest bit of all is the argument that Stossel has paid for HIS government freebies but those "other people", they have not!  What if they, too, paid for it all before they got it?  No investigation into that, naturally.

If we took these folks seriously I would think that Stossel should refuse to use his Medicare.  He is loaded with money, he can afford all uninsured care, and that way he would be less of a leech on the society, right?

Hasselbach then complains about welfare payments beating the minimum wage incomes in many states.  I haven't checked if that is true, but the conclusion Hasselbach draws seems to be that the welfare payments should be lowered.  That assumes, of course, that one can support a family, say, on minimum wages.  Unless you don't care if people survive or not, of course.

And sure, there are people who misuse the social safety net.  The answer to that is to attack the misuse, not the safety net.

What else can we say about that little conversation?  Take the idea of shame.  The panel wants shame back, so that people "accepting handouts" will feel shame.

A great idea!  Let's make sure that this is also true for corporate welfare!  Let's publicly shame all those responsible for the collapse of the housing markets and the financial markets!  Let's publicly shame all those who give money to their friends from the government coffers and who try to bribe politicians into doing their private bidding for them in the public arenas.

If shame is good for one use then it must be good for other uses, too. 

Alice Munro, the 2013 Nobel Laureate in Literature

My congratulations to Munro.  As the linked piece notes, she is a master of the short-story form, and that is a difficult form.

I've read quite a bit of her work.  I'd say that it is about the decisions people make in their lives and the consequences of those decisions.  And it's indeed true that she can put as much into a short story as others cram into a novel, without making the story ungainly or bloated.

I find this news ironic, given my earlier post about the literature professor who refuses to teach either women or Canadians in his short-form writing course.

Limbaugh's Lies. Part 593854756

Rush Limbaugh tells us that the drop in poor white women's life expectancy figures in the United States is because they are now working outside the home:



This is the kind of thing which raises my wrath and then causes hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes in far-away places.  Because had Limbaugh not been so fucking lazy and gormless he would have read through a few of the studies.  Well, probably he is just lying because he knows he can get away with it.

The truth is the other way round:

In May, Jennifer Karas Montez, a social demographer who studies health inequalities, co-authored a study that was the first to investigate how quality of life might be playing a role in the early deaths of female high-school dropouts. Montez found that while smoking accounts for half of the decline in life expectancy among these women, whether or not a woman has a job is equally significant. “Women without a high-school degree have not made inroads in the labor force, especially in post-recession America,” Montez said in an interview. In fact, only one-third of women without a high-school diploma are employed, compared to half of their male counterparts, and nearly three-quarters of better-educated women. When they are employed, Montez said, it is usually in low-wage jobs that offer no benefits or flexibility. Smoking and other destructive behaviors, she added, may just be symptoms of the heightened stress and loneliness experienced by women who don’t graduate from high school.

Bolds are mine.  In short, the poor women who are in the labor force do better than the poor women who are not in the labor force.

On the topic itself, i.e., the question why certain groups of women (especially poor, white and uneducated women) seem to experience a drop in life expectancy, read this earlier post and especially the direct quote in this.

The Meritocracy of Twitter And The Top Layer of White Boyz

Via Amanda, I read this statement about the leadership of Twitter consisting mostly of white guys.  The lack of women has been a Twitter topic for some days, especially because women use Twitter a lot (not me).

As Amanda points out, the piece is a good example of How It Is Done in Anti-Feminism. 

My short summary of it: 

Life is fair but hard for all.  It's harder for women than men, of course,  and of course there are sexists and bigots everywhere, but life is still fair and competition in tech is totally fair and the women who are willing to pay the price men pay get there.  

Of course they have to ignore the sexism and the racism and so on and the fact that their pregnancies are a problem they have to take care of while working harder than everyone else.  But life is fair and the winners got there fairly, just like all other winners.  

That feminists dare to complain about the lack of women in Twitter's leadership just shows that they want something for nothing and really aren't good enough.  All one needs to do is work harder than anyone else, bulldoze through sexism and the assumption that every worker has a spouse at home taking care of children and giving birth to them.

The world of Twitter is a meritocracy and if the top is mostly white men, well, that shows that white men are more talented, work harder and deserve to be on top.

So stop your whining and actually do some work, feminazis.

Another way of looking at the very gist of the piece is that it is based on the assumption of general meritocracy and an accepted view of biological gender differences as something which can safely cost  in money, ambitions and emotional costs mostly to women. 

From these two assumptions it naturally follows that the status quo is the best possible of all status quos, that the women not on top are not as talented and hard-working as the men on top, and that the answer is to strap your baby on your back and your breast pump in your handbag, put on your stilettos and work harder and longer than all the white boyz while regarding any sexism or racism or both you meet en route as just so many gnats to ignore.

If I want a kinder reading of the piece it would be this one:  The author doesn't think she has faced any hindrances due to her gender and believes that she got where she is by her talents and hard work.  She was able to accept the rules of the game and won, and that's pretty rare for a woman!  So she is quite special, too.  And I have no doubts that she is good at her work and that she has the characteristics which let her succeed and that she has worked hard.

But none of that makes the wider questions about where all the women are irrelevant, and it's hard to see how one can make a polite nod to the sexism which enters the room but then pretend that it is powerless in affecting how high a woman climbs.  It also doesn't follow that those feminists who have questioned Twitter's lack of diversity (a word I dislike, as you know, preferring real fairness) are people who want something for nothing or that they wish to have empty tokens of womanhood on those boards. 

And yes, women are not fifty percent of all workers in high tech fields, so it would be unrealistic to expect them to be fifty percent of the top layers.  But surely some percentage higher than negligible would better reflect true talents?

On the Government Shutdown. Who Needs Governments, Anyway?

The government shutdown is a good time to think about the roles of governments.  We get far too many images of the government as a family, especially from the Republicans in the US but also sometimes from president Obama and other Democrats.  Thus, we are told that just like a family the government must live within its means, that there must be belt-tightening during bad times, that a balanced budget each and every year is the ideal for the government just as it is for families.

But of course families borrow money at certain times, for housing, for education and for larger purchases, and families accrue positive net savings at other times.

More importantly, a government is NOT like a family.  It's a government.  It controls military troops, it maintains law courts and police departments, it has an important role to play in coordinating the fight against epidemics and in guaranteeing clean water and safe infrastructure for all.  The environment and its protection need coordination and that coordination needs organizations which have the power to enforce the agreed-upon rules of cooperation.  Those are called governments.

And that paragraph is only about those parts of the government which even the conservatives support.  I'd argue that the role of the government in its insurance aspect (the safety net aspect) is much larger, because such safety nets are necessary under the trapeze artists we are forced to become in the free-market-experiment.  A great entrepreneur might not become an entrepreneur at all in a country where health insurance is tied to working for someone else, especially if she or he has a family and someone in the family is chronically ill.  Poorly fed and poorly educated people are not good workers, and neither are people who spend all their energy in struggling against abject poverty.  In the simplest of all senses, markets need buyers with money and the energy to use for buying.

Note how it's possible to defend the government from the side of the "free market" gods, too.  For markets themselves operate within structures and frameworks which are created by governments.  Even though firms complain about government oversight, in a more fundamental sense it is the government which provides the foundation for those markets to exist and also the rules which stop them from turning into pure anarchy. 

All these long and boring mutterings came about because I was thinking of the role of trust in social and economic interactions.  If you want to eat chicken tonight, you want to be reassured that the chicken won't give you salmonella.  And most of the time it is the role of the government to make sure of that.  Markets won't do it on their own, because fly-by-night firms have an incentive to unload their salmonella chickens on your plate, and because firms have the short-term incentive to cut costs wherever they can do so, and that includes quality control.

So one important government task is to uphold that trust we have, the belief that if I sign a contract to buy a house, on a mortgage, both the house will be turned over to me and the mortgage will be paid by me over time, according to the agreed-upon rules.   That's one narrow aspect of trust which the explosions in the housing and financial markets have reduced.  I now ogle all offers with great skepticism, and I no longer even know where my mortgage is held.  The people who hold it I might not have selected.  Thus, my trust is reduced, and that decreases my willingness to participate in the markets.

I'm sure you can think of other aspects of trust which have similar roots.  Those who believe that governments are so irrelevant that they can be drowned in bath-tubs should have a look at Somalia's recent trials and tribulations.  But there are examples closer to home, and I fear that we may learn more such examples if the government shutdown continues.

None of this means that governments can't be turned to evil or that any amount of government intervention is a good thing, of course.  But there are real and valid reasons for having a fairly large government section in modern societies.

And Another Religion On Women. This Gets Old.

This time it's the  Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints:

Also today, D. Todd Christofferson, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' Quorum of the Twelve, said in his speech that having women at home remains an essential part of society, and he cautioned against blurring feminine and masculine differences. His speech Saturday came during a two-day church conference in Salt Lake City.
Christofferson said women's "moral force" has kept societies on the righteous track for generations. He criticized feminist thinkers who view "homemaking with outright contempt."
He said overlooking the differences between men and women would lead to losing the complementary gifts of the two genders that work in harmony.
Also today, a group of about 200 feminist women were denied entrance to the all-male meeting of Mormon priesthood holders.
The Ordain Women group marched from a nearby park to a standby line at outside the meeting this evening to highlight what they perceive as gender inequality.

Where to begin?   The power is defined by the priesthood holders and they are all men.  The position of the church is defined by them, the terms used are defined by them, and the "proper role" of women is defined by them.  Thus, the idea that feminist thinkers (supposedly) view "homemaking with outright contempt" doesn't make Mr. Christofferson want to do any homemaking himself or to let any homemakers into the priesthood.

Neither does Mr. Christofferson want to let that presumed "moral force" of women have any real impact on his church or on the outside society.   Given that he argues it is women's "moral force" that has kept societies on the righteous track for generations, it is extremely weird that his church has an all-male leadership.

Then there's the fact that historically speaking the ideal that women are at home (not working at anything else but homemaking) and men in the public sector (doing all the work for income) is a fairly recent one.  The idea of one breadwinner per family has probably never been practical for the vast majority of people, and it's certainly not practical today.

But in a different sense Mr. Christofferson is naturally completely correct:  The all-male Mormon church leadership IS dependent on the willing (often unpaid) work of women, and the goodies the all-male church leadership receives in life is also dependent on a certain definition of what "complementary gifts" between the genders might mean.  Thus, women might be given the gift of "moral force" but they are not allowed to exert that, ultimately.

Reading for Oct 7, 2013. On the Affordable Care Act and Who Is Allowed To Judge The Game.

The government shutdown may have been months in planning.  The reason:  The desire to kill the Affordable Care Act (ACA).  The price of that killing is immaterial. 

I don't have any inside information on this, but it should be set against the very common "both sides do it" argument which I keep reading.

Speaking of the ACA, this story made me want to uninstall my brain.  An example:

Collett counts himself among the 29 percent of people who said in an NBCNews/Kaiser poll they are angry about the health reform law. “The issue for me is that it is not the proper role of government,” he said.
Collett, who is married and has 10 children, says the kids are covered by Medicaid, the joint state-federal health insurance plan for people with low income and children who are not covered.
But it’s “absolutely not okay,” that they are, Collett says quickly. “There are a lot of people out there that’ll cry foul."
Collett, whose children are home-schooled, likens taking Medicaid to sending children to public school. He also does not approve of government-funded public schools. “The government is taking your money. They are spending it on things they shouldn’t be,” he says. “Trying to get whatever you can back -- I have nothing against that. You have to at some point try and get your tax dollars back.”

Here's a fun piece of news for you:

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is expected to be one of nine people appointed to the College Football Playoff selection committee. Rice is pegged to join Archie Manning, former NCAA Executive Vice President Tom Jernstedt, former Big East Commissioner Mike Tranghese, and an athletic director from each of the five power conferences, a a person with knowledge of the selection process told USA TODAY Sports. The ESPN College GameDay crew discussed the selection committee this morning at Northwestern, where analyst David Pollack intimated that women are not qualified to be on the committee.


“Now I’m going to stick my foot in my mouth, probably,” Pollack said. “I want people on this committee that can watch tape, that have played football, that are around football, that can tell you different teams on tape, not on paper.” Host Chris Fowler asked Pollack if he was implying that no women should be allowed on the committee, and Pollack said “yeah,” as the rest of the crew disagreed.

Pollack would probably then agree that men shouldn't have anything to do with obstetrics or gynecology, right?

Cromulent Imprecations. On Reading.

Or a Friday-Fun post.  Because of the swine flu (in a snake!!), I've had that flu fatigue which made me re-read old books, the more difficult the better.  You may have had that experience with illness.  The emotional centers must be shut off or they are dead but you still need brain food.

So I read through the Canterbury Tales again (Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote) and then Virginia Woolf's The Waves. 

That latter is one of the hardest books I've read that is worthwhile, and it's also a book I need to read with a dictionary (imprecations! %&@!).  A book which requires several readings (I hated it the first time around.)

She tries to achieve an extremely difficult thing in that book:  to capture the rhythm of life/consciousness and the three-dimensionality of life/consciousness in writing which can only be organized as words after words.  I think she partially succeeds but only with tremendous work from the reader.  Whether a complete success in something like that is even feasible is an interesting question.  Or desirable? 

I also re-read some Jane Austen,  just to piss some people off.  She has been called the writers' writer, and I finally felt that, as opposed to just knowing about it.  Because her genius is in the writing (how every sentence is necessary, how every sentence carries several burdens), she reads terribly in  bad translations.  And because her genius is mostly in the writing, the plot and topics of her books are ultimately irrelevant (though not completely as she is a social critic).  But if you turn this upside down and see Austen as the creator of the chick-lit genre you miss the whole point of her.

Yes, I know that books might be dead or dying, which is too bad for future generations.  They are not just an imperfect way of picturing reality or dreams.  They are a different way of doing that from movies, a way which allows you to set the pace, you to decide on the colors and scents and sounds, and the speed with which events unfold, and you are the ultimate ruler of that imaginary world.  This gives more degrees of freedom to the possible interpretations.

I also read lots of Terry Pratchett's Diskworld while recuperating.  Recommended as escape literature. 

Something Rotten In Denmark. For Pickup Artists

Pickup artists (PUAs) are men who believe in a cartoonish version of evolutionary psychology, where women are coy and need to be persuaded to have sex but want to have it only with something called "alpha males."  Pickup artists view promiscuous sex as a game.  They are the offense, the women are the defense (and the ball or puck), and the goal is to get laid as often as possible.

A courting game for misogynists, really.  And it's a game because the rules require lying and pretending.  It's misogynist because it's a hunt for pu**y, and the stand for it is mostly immaterial.  And it's a game for men who feel cheated by mother nature in their looks, the society in their wealth, the women in their astonishing tendency not to always be available for sex as their underlying feelings of entitlement require them to be.  Hence the need to invent rules to get laid by the reluctant women.

Now one of the better-known PUAs, Roosh, has written about his experiences in Denmark in his series about how to bang one's way around the world.  He seems to have been "cockblocked" by the women in Hamlet's country!  And he believes that the reason is Denmark's excellent welfare state which makes it unnecessary for women to bed unpleasant assholes just so that they can get someone to support them in marriage.

That's not quite how Roosh puts it, of course:

Thirty-three-year-old Daryush Valizadeh, known to his predominantly heterosexual male fan base as Roosh, is a well-known pick-up artist within the worldwide “Seduction Community,” which relies on pop evolutionary psychology to teach the art of getting laid.

...

Pick-up artists believe that all women are the same: submissive, choosier than men when picking sexual partners, entranced by shiny objects. In the Community, players are self-made; most renowned pick-up artists claim they were socially awkward losers until they learned the tricks of the trade. If a pick-up artist hones his “inner game” (confidence) as well as his “outer game” (appearance), he can control his sexual future. When women come with cheat codes, rejection is not an option; if a play fails, the player tweaks his strategy instead of conceding defeat. 

Roosh enjoys middling success as the author of the “Bang” series of travel guides, which trains readers to seduce women based on derogatory ethnic stereotypes. In Bang Brazil, Roosh warns his followers that “poor favela chicks are very easy, but quality is a serious problem.” He vows never to return to the Polish city of Katowice unless forced to “maintain the pussy flow.” Roosh’s predations haven’t gone without recognition. The Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization, included Roosh’s personal blog in a March 2012 report on American hate groups; it quotes an Icelandic feminist group that described Bang Iceland as a “rape guide.” 

But Roosh’s Denmark directory diverges from his usual frat-boy Casanova fantasies liberally seasoned with rape jokes. Don’t Bang Denmark—note the dramatic title change—is a cranky volume that (spoiler alert!) probably won’t help any Roosh acolytes score. Roosh calls it the “most angry book” he’s ever written. “This book is a warning of how bad things can get for a single man looking for beautiful, feminine, sexy women.”
What’s blocking the pussy flow in Denmark? The country’s excellent social welfare services. Really.

And Roosh hates the Danish women he meets:

Danish women “won’t defer to your masculinity,” he writes. “They can fuck you, but no more. What they do have are pussies and opinions you don’t really care about hearing. That’s it.” Advocates of Nordic social democracy should be thrilled to discover a perk of gender-equalizing work-family reconciliation policies: they combat skeeviness.
Roosh comes to the conclusion that women who aren’t as dependent on men for financial support are not susceptible to the narcissistic salesmanship that constitutes phase one: “attraction.” That’s why Roosh fails to advance to the second level—”trust”—without being creepy. Thus “seduction” is almost always out of the question.

Here we come to the interesting stuff.  I repeat, from that quote:

Roosh comes to the conclusion that women who aren’t as dependent on men for financial support are not susceptible to the narcissistic salesmanship that constitutes phase one: “attraction.”

But that refutes his evo-psycho theories about what women want!  If women were hard-wired to go for the dominant growling alpha monkey, then women would do that even in Denmark.  That they do not suggests that dating rules and what appeals to people is also culture-dependent and affected by economic realities.

Roosh's theories are inane, of course, and so is his welfare state theory (which, to repeat, conflicts with his evo-psycho theory).  The reasons why Danish women won't go to bed with a particular PUA are probably far more nuanced.  The way Danes talk to each other, the way women and men talk to each other, the way they date or don't date; all those are affected by culture, history and women's and men's roles over long time periods.

Here's the wider problem with the PUA experiment, even if we somehow lost our brains and accepted the basic misogynistic premises:  There is no way of properly testing the PUA game against alternatives, other ways of seeking heterosexual experiences.  There is no way to prove that acting like a PUA gets a man more pu**y than approaching someone with confidence, humor and kindness, say.  I get that the Cinderella story among the PUAs is a rise from being a social outcast whom women ridiculed to being the one silver-back ape in the group and getting a carpal tunnel syndrome in the p**ck.  But those are anecdotes, Cinderella stories, and attempts to sell books when presented by the authors.

They don't hold looks and personality etc. constant while changing the "game" of the man.

Quiet NIght

Trying to relax myself after a day of fighting shitty computer crap and following shitty political crap and still recovering from a meatspace virus.

Speed Blogging, Oct 2, 2013: On Income Inequality, Tea Party Rage and the Defense of Roman Polanski

Contents:  Includes discussion of child rape.


This is a fascinating post to read and to ponder over:  Are we returning to the nineteenth century economic circumstances?

Samantha Geimer in the UK Guardian argues that we should be more nuanced about the rape of children if the culprit had a horrible life and creates beautiful and moving art and if the victim herself thinks that children should take some responsibility for their behavior.  I don't agree, at least not in the sense that Geimer adopts.   Or rather, the crime remains the crime.  If other factors are to be considered in the sentencing of the criminal, that is a different question altogether.

Kevin Drum  asks where the rage of the Tea Party comes from.  The answers (many in the comments to his post) are both obvious (loss of power and prestige for just being born into a certain group, real loss of income and relative standing, gerrymandering of districts which benefits the most extreme candidates, Fox News and other capitalist-funded populist movements) and elusive (why now?  why no real anger aimed at the out-sourcers, the inequality-creators, the free-marketers? why is the populism right-wing?).

I don't have the miracle answer to this one, but I'd argue that one important straw to carry to the pile is the fact that the Democrats, due to needing the money from the wealthy, stopped being blunt and open about being for the working classes.  They have dropped the unions and now employ euphemisms about that group (working families which sounds like child-labor to me).  So when the right-wing radio began, there were few opposing voices, if any, and all the foaming anger was channeled into the river which tries to sweep out immigrants, minorities and uppity women, to leave the majority of us fighting for the crumbs which fall from the dinner tables of the powerful few. 

Finally, and just for its interest, these historic photographs are fascinating.

Pictures of the GOP Powers-That-Be

One can be found here, about the House leaders.  And then there is this:

Photo by  Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

This is all in the context of the government shutdown, but the problem is much more general.  For instance, 75.6% of the women in the House of Representatives are Democrats and only 24.4% Republicans.  Put in a different way, 29% of the House Democrats are women, only 8.2% of the House Republicans are women.

Similar patterns apply to the Senate, where 32% of Democratic Senators are women, but only 9% of Republican Senators.

The conclusions one can draw from this are interesting. 

One, pointed out by a smart reader in my earlier comments, is that there's not much chance of a gender-equal Congress as long as the Republican Party is the party of (mostly white) men. 

Another one has to do with the question whether the Republican platform really is explicitly anti-women in the sense that this is what is appealing in the party to some voters.  Perhaps there are so few Republican women in politics, because that is what the Republican ideology demands (women at home etc.) so the women don't run or perhaps the women don't get voted in, even if they run, because that is part of the party ideology. 

The causal relationships can run in different directions at the same time, too.  For instance, the Republican War on Women isn't exactly the kind of message uppity women interested in politics like to hear.

What we read in places like the conservative Townhall is that women are not Republicans because women want a Big Government Daddy to provide for them and because women aren't that smart.  So take your pick, I guess.

On The Potential Government Shutdown

I have been mouse-silent on it.   There's not that much to say about a two-year-old's temper tantrums and that's the only good analog I can think of to this tea-party-driven show of power.

Except that the tea-partiers don't have the excuse of very young age and not much opportunity to learn.  So you might as well read this Slate piece about how the press would report the likely shutdown if it was happening in some other country.

Well, there is that continuing resolution the House passed:

Late Saturday night, the House of Representatives passed a continuing resolution (CR) that would keep the government open only if the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is delayed for a year and only if bosses are allowed to make their female employees’ health decisions. The House bill singles out women’s health care for this interference.

Specifically, the House-passed CR would exempt bosses from complying with the ACA’s Women’s Health Amendment if they oppose it for “religious or moral” reasons.   This means that bosses could impose their religious beliefs on their employees, or block their employees’ access to needed women’s health care for vague and undefined “moral” reasons. Female employees and dependents – just like men – are capable of making their own health decisions and must be allowed to do so without interference from their bosses.

It smells a bit like mafia politics to me.  "Nice country you have here.  It would be too bad if something happened to it."

The continuing resolution is naturally about contraceptives, the Catholic Church, and, on a very deep level, about the general conservative sentiment that both sex and its consequences should have large costs  to women.

This applies even to contraception which, by its very nature, will also benefit the woman's male partner. With the exception of the cases where the contraceptive pill is taken for other medical reasons, its subsidized price benefits approximately as many heterosexual men as women, I think*.  But if one wants the woman to pay for sex (by taking care of contraception or by giving birth and then taking care of the child), any kind of subsidy smells wrong.

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*People in long-term heterosexual relationships have roughly the same number of men and women.  Those who have more than one sex partner can be of either sex, and if we consider the fact that protection ten times with ten different partners adds up to protection ten times with the same partner, it doesn't seem unlikely that the benefits of the contraceptive subsidies are ultimately pretty gender-neutral.  All this looks at only those people who wish to avoid pregnancy.  But that's the majority of people most of the time.
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For recent events in all this, read here.