On the Death of Sir Terry Pratchett

Sir Terry Pratchett, an English fantasy writer of humorous and gently sarcastic works,  has died at the age of sixty-six.  He is the creator of Discworld, an imaginary planet which is a flat disc standing on the shoulders of four giant elephants which in their turn stand on the shell of an even more giant turtle.

The turtle is swimming through space towards an unknown destination, and with the turtle swim all creatures Pratchett has peopled his world with: gnomes, trolls, dwarfs, vampires, werewolves,  humans of various types, from powerful witches to funny wizards, melancholy policemen and even a benevolent dictator whose degree is in assassination studies.

While those creatures are carried on to nobody-knows-where, they live their lives, love, hate, steal, help, perform magic, fight wars, pollute their environment, educate their children and practice politics.

In short, they are very much like us here on earth, except for not being like us at all.  Even their politics has a familiar tone:  their gods bicker with each other and play dice games with the creatures, cultures clash, prejudices flare up and are sometimes resolved, wars begin for no good reason at all and are waged ineffectively and stupidly, and at the end of every life there is Death, an anthropomorphized figure with the dark cowl, the skull head and the scythe.

Pratchett's Death wishes to be human.  In one of the books he temporarily adopts a human son and ultimately ends up with a half-human granddaughter (one of my favorite figures in the books).  Death likes a good strong curry (does it just go through his ribcage?) and has strong opinions about the most humane way of harvesting his people.

Death is ultimately just.  That aspect of his personality can be seen in the battles against the auditors of the universe, an odd (infinite?) group of identical creatures without hearts but with an extremely strong urge for tidiness,  order and proper hierarchies.

The creatures of the Discworld are anything but orderly, and so sometimes face the wrath of the auditors who would prefer a silent and quiet planet.  Death refuses to be cowed by the auditors.  He takes the part of his people, his harvest, helped by various individuals of the planet and also the secret weapon which is chocolate.

You may see why I love Pratchett's books.  They have everything:  Political jokes, parables to our world's history and myths, and chocolate.  They even have empathy, compassion and realistic female characters, drawn with skill and often equipped with power.

But mostly I love the books because they are based on a deep thirst for justice and fairness.  Neil Gaiman has written about the anger of Terry Pratchett, the kind of cold and glorious rage which can fuel writing about injustices. 

In one of Pratchett's books a character states: "There is no justice.  There is just us."  I read that as telling us what our role in the collective sense should be:  To create that missing justice and fairness, to make it, so to speak,  the unknown destination of the giant turtle carrying our Discworld.

David Brooks' Moral Measles

How is that for a post title?

David Brooks, a conservative columnist for the New York Times, has recently gone on (and on) about values.  Values are things which Brooks believes conservatives have and liberals do not have.  It's not that everybody has values, nope.  Or, rather, some people have bad values and other people have good values.  Good values are about family and sacrificing oneself for the sake of order and hierarchy (though the sacrifices are mostly expected of women).  Good values are firmly conservative, bad values are firmly liberal.

That's the first thing you need to know about Brooks and his writings.  The second thing is the manner in which he appears to approach science:  He starts from the conclusions he wishes to draw, then goes backwards until he finds a study or a book which supports those conclusions, then he ignores all other evidence and writes his piece by beginning with the study he likes, implying that it's accepted wisdom by all and then writing how it results in his conclusions.

This pattern is visible in his latest column which is about the good values of rich people and the bad values of poor people.  If only poor people had better values, they, too, could be rich people!

Well, not quite.  But they'd be a lot less trouble to the rich people that way.

IS And Women. Part 2: Sexual Slavery And Rape of "Non-Believers"

It all began last summer.  In August,  news from Iraq noted that IS had attacked villages inhabited by Yazidis, an ethnically Kurdish group with a religion which combines elements of Zoroastrianism and ancient Mesopotamian religions (1):

The gunmen had surrounded the village for more than a week, refusing to let residents leave and saying they had limited time to save themselves by converting to Islam.
When that time ran out, fighters from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria stormed in, killing the men and rounding up the women and children, a survivor and Iraqi officials said Saturday.
The extent of the killings on Friday in Kocho, a tiny, isolated village in northern Iraq that is home to members of the Yazidi sect, remained unclear on Saturday night. Some officials said they believed that at least 80 people had died, although no one had been able to visit the site to assess the damage.

Later in the same article we learn that though most adult men were killed, the fate of most of the women and children remained unclear:

It remained unclear what had become of the village’s women and children. Mr. Khidr said he did not think they had been killed, but had been rounded up and taken somewhere else.
Mahma Khalil, a Yazidi leader and a former Parliament member, said he had received reports that they were taken as prisoners to the nearby town of Tal Afar.

Other news (impossible to independently verify) told of women who were found naked and tied after IS attacks, apparently repeatedly raped by the terrorists.

Soon, however, we learned what happened to all those captured Yazidis:

They were taken into slavery (2).  Their expected destiny differed by gender and age.  The young boys would be turned into IS jihadis (3) by religious education and brain-washing, the older women would perhaps become general household slaves and the young women and girls would be used to satisfy the sexual needs of the IS fighters.

At the time I'm writing this the total number of Yazidi women and children captured by IS is thought to be in several thousands, though precise numbers are difficult to get.  Some of the captured remain in Iraq, some have been taken to Syria (or even further, given the aspect of sexual trafficking in IS-created slave markets).

Some appear to have been given to individual IS fighters right after the killing of the Yazidi men in various villages, as war booty,  some have been assigned to the IS movement, to be further distributed among fighters, and some young women seem to have been placed into brothels near Mosul in Iraq.  Further trading of the slaves takes place in markets in both Syria and Iraq.

The rest of this post looks deeper into this particular hell.

Female Serial Killers And Evolutionary Psychology

Washington Post has a summary of a new study on American female serial killers.  Its headline is "The surprising but curiously logical differences between male and female serial killers." 

Astonishingly, those differences don't seem to include the vast difference in the numbers of male and female serial killers, at least the ones who are caught.  Well, the summary doesn't mention that.

The study uses evolutionary psychology to explain why female serial killers have apparently different motives for killing and different modi operandorum (m.o.s).

Thus:

Although female serial killers, like unhappy families, are each horrifying in their own way, Harrison found some striking similarities among her subjects. Most of them came from fairly mundane backgrounds, their primary weapon was poison, and nearly all of them killed people they knew, often their own family members. By comparison, most victims of male serial killers are unknown to their murderer.
“Female serial killers gather and male serial killers hunt,” Harrison said. “That was very interesting to me, as an evolutionary psychologist, that it reflects kind of ancestral tendencies.”

Harrison also saw evidence of evolutionary influences in what drove women to kill. While most murders by male serial killers tend to involve sex in some way — a 1995 study found that male serial killings are characterized by a desire for domination, control, humiliation and sadistic sexual violence — women are more likely to kill for money or power.
“It struck me that women would kill for resources, which was their primary drive in the ancestral environment, and men kill for sex,” she said.

 Bolds are mine.

That's really neat!  At first glance it's simple and somehow fitting.  But then I started thinking more about all that gathering vs. hunting and resources vs. sex business, and I realized that it's far too simple, even simplistic.

The reasons are pretty obvious, in my view. Take that gathering vs. hunting distinction:

First, we don't actually have information on the exact division of labor in some presumed ancestral era of evolutionary adaptation.  Did the men go out every single day to hunt, without fail?  Did the women never go?  When the berries were all ripening at the same time, did the men just hang out somewhere telling stories or where they out hunting? What if hunting was sporadic?  Who hunted small animals and fished?  What if men gathered, too?  One study of more recent gatherer-hunter societies found that most of the calories the tribe consumed came from gathering, and that suggests to me that men gathered, too.

Second, it's hard to see why one form of serial killing is like gathering and one form like hunting.  Gatherers probably had to walk long distances (and, indeed, the usual assumption is that the evolutionary adaptations happened in small nomadic family groups so everybody moved).  That the female serial killers were more likely to know their victims doesn't make their form of killing like gathering, or at least I cannot see why that would be the case. 

The only way I can imagine such a semblance is by thinking of the victims of the female serial killers as staying put in one place, so that the killer "harvests" them.  But the victims of male serial killers might also stay in one place where he goes to kill them?

I'm confused on that, especially given that I haven't read the original article (forty dollars).

Third, the differences between male and female serial killers in the US from 1821 to 2008 cover a lot of years when certain types of women, "respectable ones," just didn't go out alone that much and probably not at all late at night.  Couldn't it be equally likely that female serial killers selected their victims on the basis of access to victims or opportunity, as defined by the gender norms of the society?

What about the motives of resources vs. sex?  To remind you, this is the relevant quote:

Harrison also saw evidence of evolutionary influences in what drove women to kill. While most murders by male serial killers tend to involve sex in some way — a 1995 study found that male serial killings are characterized by a desire for domination, control, humiliation and sadistic sexual violence — women are more likely to kill for money or power.
“It struck me that women would kill for resources, which was their primary drive in the ancestral environment, and men kill for sex,” she said.

 Bolds are mine.

How do domination and control (assumed male traits) differ from power (assumed female trait)?

What Harrison probably refers to in those primary drives is the Evolutionary Psychology (EP*) argument that women look for resources in their male mating partners while men look for youth and health (fertility) in their female mating partners.  I've written about the problems with that simplified theory before.  If evolutionary adaptations indeed happened when our prehistoric ancestors lived in small family-based nomadic tribes, the form resources would take is quite different from a fat bank account or even from a barn full of grain.

Indeed, the resources a person "owned" were probably embodied.  Women would have looked for young, healthy, strong and skilled men to father their children.  When you define resources from that angle the choices of men and women begin to look more similar.

Even if we ignored that and the long history of women not having equal access to resources through inheritance and the labor market (which would increase the relative number of women who would take to crime to get them), there's a logical problem with the basic argument.  In the EP story it is men who are assumed to want to acquire resources so that women will then choose them to have sex with.  In other words, men, too, would want to have resources.

So why don't male serial killers have that goal, you might mutter?

But they do!  If we define a serial killer the way the WaPo summary suggests (anyone who kills three or more people with a “cooling-off period” of a week or more between each murder), the Chicago gangsters of the 1930s would qualify and so would today's Mexican drug lords.  In fact, many types of criminals kill serially for resources.

Perhaps the study defined a serial killer differently.  But if it did, it may have overestimated the types of murders based on desire for domination and sadistic sexual violence in the overall count of serial killings carried out by men.

Then there's the intricate question about the meaning of this evolutionary explanation:  Do the researchers argue that men kill for sex because that is an evolutionary adaptation?  It cannot be the case, because killing the woman you have just raped makes passing any genes to the next generation impossible.

Or is the idea that these patterns are distortions of evolutionary adaptations?  If so, why have they survived?

I am asking that question seriously, given that some Evolutionary Psychologists seem to look for an evolutionary advantage in suicides, say.

Granted, Harrison left the exact meaning of all that open in the interview WaPo quoted.  But she does argue (without proof as there can be no proof) that looking for resources was the primary drive for women** in the unspecified ancestral environment, and contrasts that with men's drive for sex.

It's not that those theories aren't interesting.  But there are alternative theories*** not based on simple evolutionary hypotheses and there are probably even more complicated (and realistic) evolutionary psychology hypotheses.

The topic of the study, horrendous as it is, is also thought-provoking.  Why are men so much more likely to be sexual serial killers than women?  Why are there many times more male serial killers than female serial killers?  Are there ethnic or racial differences in the total numbers of serial killers, in the percentages of male serial killers and of female serial killers?   And to what extent is it meaningful to apply evolutionary hypotheses to those types of serial killers who clearly should be discussed under the title abnormal psychology, psychopathy and so on?

Sigh.  My apologies for not spending money on the article itself.  Should anyone desire to donate the price to me I promise to read it and amend anything in this post that needs amending.
----

*I use capital letters for the weird kind of evolutionary psychology which I most often criticize on this blog.  I should stress that I'm not criticizing Dr. Harrison's arguments themselves but the manner in which they are reported in the WaPo summary.

** In one sense the primary drive of everyone is for resources (necessary for survival), if we define those to include getting food and water as often as needed.  But I think Harrison means something different here.

***The impact of social norms on the opportunities for murder, the impact of body strength differences on the choice of the instruments of murder and on the types of victims selected.  The victims should be weaker than the killer which limits female serial killers more than male serial killers.

 

IS And Women. Part 1: The Rules For Sunni Muslim Women

What would life be like for a woman living in the imaginary caliphate IS* is creating or trying to create?  What rules would women have to follow?  What is life like for women who today live in the area under IS rule?

These are the questions I wish to tackle in the first and second posts of my series on IS and women.  This post, the first one, will address the terrorists' plans for Muslim women, or at least the kind of Muslim women (Sunni or perhaps only Salafi) that its clerics view as proper believers, as opposed to non-believers, a term which covers all non-Muslims and possibly even Shia Muslims.  The second post will cover the treatment of those female "non-believers."

I try to answer the three questions I posed above with three sets of available information:  First, the concept of sharia law the IS clerics advocate, second the evidence we have from the guidelines the women's wing of IS, the Al Khanssaa Brigade, has provided and, third, the news (1) about how women are treated by IS in the areas it occupies in Syria and Iraq.

Reading Suggestions for 3/3/15

I'm working on my ISIS and women series.  It's turning into a long epistle and won't have ready-baked parts to be served today, even though I have been writing for hours and hours and hours.  Perhaps you would like to read some of the pieces below instead?  While waiting, that is.

Katha Pollitt reviews the movie Fifty Shades of Gray and makes the necessary connections to such social values as are visible in many old-fashioned corset-ripper romance novels and so on.  I'd add the impact of the three Abrahamic religions into the pot and then stir.  And stir.

This piece has such a neat title: There are more men on corporate boards named John, Robert, William or James than there are women on boards altogether, that it's worth reading just for that reason. 

But ultimately that doesn't tell us anything except that men are a lot more likely to be found on corporate boards than women and John, Robert, William and James are common male names.



Public Policy Polling (PPP) has a new survey out on the opinions of Republicans.  The file has lots of interesting tables for the political geeks and nerds, and not only about possible presidential candidates.

Ferguson, Missouri is back in the news.  Its Police Department has been accused of using racially biased methods of law enforcement.

Finally, and just for the fun of it, this story about a near-death experience.  It may be made up, who knows, but so is much else online.

Caturday

I post cat pictures on Eschaton.  All the cats are stolen cats (posted with the permission of their humans) as I have none.  Here is the latest old and dignified lady cat enjoying some rest and warmth:

What I need to learn from cats is their ability to relax while being ready to pounce.  Anyone who is hooked to the Internet and its various battles and arguments needs to have that ability, the lissom cattiness of relaxed readiness.

Wouldn't it be wonderful to be able to jump on top of houses, too?

This about crows is also quite wonderful for inducing relaxation.

Introduction to A Series Of Posts About Women And ISIS

Since last August I have collected material on the news, pseudo-news, opinion pieces and deeper articles about the terrorist movement which is called by various names (IS, ISIS, ISIL, Daesh) and which currently holds large land areas in Syria and Iraq.   My archives are now crammed with stories, my brain is now crammed with various theological and quasi-theological explanations about men and women as well as with arguments concerning local, colonial, global and religious politics.  If I don't write any of that out my head needs to hire an external storage space.

Hence this series which I introduce here.  The goal I had from the very beginning is to study IS (the acronym I choose to use for its brevity) from the angle of how it regards women's proper roles, how it plans to control women and what those plans tell us about the more patriarchal cultural rules concerning women.

Irony Is Dead: Scott Walker, Wisconsin Protesters and Terrorists

Scott Walker, Governor of Wisconsin,  knows how to deal with terrorist organizations such as ISIS/IS/Daesh.  After all, he managed to control the wild hordes of protesters in Wisconsin!:

Asked how he would handle the Islamic State group if elected president, Walker said, "For years I've been concerned about that threat, not just abroad but here on American soil."
"If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the world," he said.

How does one write satire in a world like this?

Walker is also very eager to make an own-goal by doing the bidding of ISIS:

"We need a president, a leader, who will stand up and say we will take the fight to them and not wait 'til they bring the fight to American soil," he said. "We need to show the world that in America you have no better ally and no greater enemy."

Some fraction of the leadership of ISIS aims at creating a global religious war (which will produce the desired end times), and Walker would oblige them.

All this would be utterly hilarious if it wasn't so very dangerous.

White Privilege in Australian Buses. A Look At An Audit Study.

Ian Ayres' opinion column in the New York Times is about an audit study carried out in Australia.

I love audit studies, because they are a way to control for all the alternative explanations to pure discrimination in consumer and labor markets.  Here's why:

An audit study uses trained individuals to play the role of, say, a car buyer or a job seeker.  The trained individuals are all given the same rules about how to behave, what to ask for and how, how to negotiate and, when relevant, they are also provided resumes etc. of equal value.  The goal is to have these individuals differ in only the characteristic the study is interested in, such as race or gender or both.

If it turns out that the tester's chances of getting a job interview or a good price on a second-hand car indeed vary by race and/or gender, we have ruled out that something else caused the apparent correlation.  Well, we have ruled it out if the audit study was well designed.

The flaw in audit studies is that they cannot continue for years and years, which means that they cannot tell us much about how people are rewarded in their jobs, whether they are promoted purely on the basis of merit, say.  But they are pretty good for measuring potential gender and/or race discrimination against job seekers or car buyers or renters of apartments.

To Praise Saunas. Or Not?

A recent study from Finland suggests that saunas might have the ability to reduce mortality from heart disease:

A study from Finland found that men who use saunas frequently are less likely to die from heart disease. Men's risk was even lower when they visited saunas more often in a week, and when they spent longer periods of time in a sauna each session, the researchers reported.
The findings could cause cardiologists to reconsider commonly held concerns about exposing heart patients to the heat present in a sauna, said Dr. Paul Thompson, medical director of cardiology at Hartford Hospital in Hartford, Conn., and a member of the American College of Cardiology Sports and Exercise Cardiology Council.
"As a cardiologist, I have discouraged patients from using a sauna, from concerns over heat putting demands on a person's cardiovascular system," Thompson said. "Maybe we shouldn't be so restrictive with our patients."

I'd be careful about changing the recommendations too soon.  That's because the role of saunas in Finland is very different from someone in the US suddenly beginning to steam themselves regularly.

Saunas are a weekly custom in Finland.  Almost every single Finn has been in sauna thousands of times by the onset of middle age (and the men in the study were aged between 42 and 60).  The effects might be quite different for someone with no experience in löyly-taking suddenly beginning hour-long sessions of sweating.

I have not read the original study, so I assume that it controls for the initial health status of the men and how much exercise they take in general.  If not, the correlation could be caused by those factors:  Healthier men exercise more and take more saunas, too, and often the sauna is enjoyed after rigorous exercise.  I'm also pretty sure that the Finnish guidelines have also warned heart patients to abstain from sauna.

Still, the findings are thought-provoking.

I love sauna!  Love it, love it, love it.  When I'm in Finland I take one every night, and I miss it here (a hot bath is not a substitute, though I tried).  Some of my fondest childhood memories are running out into the snow bank with my sister to make naked snow angels and then back into the heat of the sauna.

The after-effect does feel quite a bit like having just had a good workout.  A singing of the happy cells of the body, if you like.

Ban Them Books!

1.  In Mosul, Iraq, the Islamic State is burning books:

Residents say the extremists smashed the locks that had protected the biggest repository of learning in the northern Iraq town, and loaded around 2,000 books — including children's stories, poetry, philosophy and tomes on sports, health, culture and science — into six pickup trucks. They left only Islamic texts.
The rest?
"These books promote infidelity and call for disobeying Allah. So they will be burned," a bearded militant in traditional Afghani two-piece clothing told residents, according to one man living nearby who spoke to The Associated Press. The man, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he feared retaliation, said the Islamic State group official made his impromptu address as others stuffed books into empty flour bags.

2.  In Denver, Colorado, a group of students walked out in protest because of this:

Hundreds of students walked out of classrooms around suburban Denver on Tuesday in protest over a conservative-led school board proposal to focus history education on topics that promote citizenship, patriotism and respect for authority, providing a show of civil disobedience that the new standards would aim to downplay.

3.  And in Oklahoma, Advanced Placement history courses are seen as fighting god and American exceptionalism:

Oklahoma Rep. Dan Fisher (R) has introduced “emergency” legislation “prohibiting the expenditure of funds on the Advanced Placement United States History course.” Fisher is part of a group called the “Black Robe Regiment” which argues “the church and God himself has been under assault, marginalized, and diminished by the progressives and secularists.” The group attacks the “false wall of separation of church and state.” The Black Robe Regiment claims that a “growing tide of special interest groups indoctrinating our youth at the exclusion of the Christian perspective.”
Fisher said the Advanced Placement history class fails to teach “American exceptionalism.” The bill passed the Oklahoma House Education committee on Monday on a vote of 11-4. You can read the actual course description for the course here.

I don't aim to compare the Islamic State with American conservatives by putting these news in one list (they are certainly not the same or comparable in horrible violence), but to point out the shared string in the violin concertos: 

What is taught to children matters very much to certain political and religious groups.  Books are powerful!  Books may need to be banned or burned!  Education matters greatly as the Boko Haram (Western Education Is Forbidden) terrorist movement in Nigeria has noticed and as the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan also knows.  And as Malala Yousafzai knows.  Hitler knew all about this, too:

Ignorance is a powerful weapon which makes education also a powerful weapon.  Hierarchical systems fear the idea of widespread democratic education, and they are correct in that fear.

I understand that our views of history or religion may clash, that utterly neutral information is impossible, even in school books.  But the approach to cure that problem is to let the different arguments duke it out when the children are old enough to follow debates of that sort.

On Altar Girls at the Star of the Sea Catholic Church in San Francisco And Other Related Topics

I missed this January event in San Francisco.  A Catholic church there, the Star of the Sea,  decided to stop allowing girls to be altar servers.  Existing girls who are serving can continue but new ones will not be accepted.

Imagine how you would feel if you were one of those "mistake, oops" girls!  To allow them to continue doesn't patch up the rejection.

But it's all perfectly fine, because there are parents in the congregation who like the idea of boys-only (in a church of male-priests-only) and because the priest behind this "innovation," one Joseph Illo, argues that the change is great for male bonding and makes sense as being an altar server could be the first step to becoming a priest and -- duh -- girls cannot become priests ever.  The logic is beautiful and very clear and in my divine opinion backwards.

The same Joseph Illo raised a few feathers more recently:

The Rev. Joseph Illo recently banned the use of altar girls at school and parish Masses at Star of the Sea, a decision opposed by some parents and staff.
Illo also upset families when he decided that non-Catholic students could no longer receive blessings during Communion, a decision he reversed after complaints from the school community.
And this week, parents revealed that Star of the Sea students as young as those in second grade received a pamphlet about confession late last year that referred to sexual topics such as sodomy, masturbation and abortion.

That was a mistake, Illo said Wednesday.
“Among the 70 items for reflection, some were not age appropriate for schoolchildren,” Illo said in a statement. “We apologize for this oversight and removed the pamphlet as soon as this was brought to our attention by the school faculty in December.”

You want to know what those pamphlets contained?

They asked questions such as, “Did I perform impure acts by myself (masturbation) or with another (adultery, fornication and sodomy)?” and, “Did I practice artificial birth control or was I or my spouse prematurely sterilized (tubal ligation or vasectomy)?” as well as, “Have I had or advised anyone to have an abortion?”
Riley Brooks, an 11-year-old student at the school, explained how he and his sixth-grade classmates responded to the material: they were “really grossed out.” “There was something about masturbation,” Brooks told the Chronicle. “Pretty sure abortion was on there, but I can’t remember. And sodomy. I don’t know what that means.”

Put all that together and Illo, a presumably celibate man in power inside a church which assigns most power to celibate men,  comes across as someone who just may have a slight problem with women and women's sexuality.  The irony in that is more than I can quite absorb.  

And no, I don't really care what theological arguments could be used to support his views because the game in all three major Abrahamic religions* is rigged against gender equality, what with their roots in two-thousand-year old shepherding tribal communities.  The gender roles literalists find supported in the Bible and in the Koran are those that were deemed appropriate in such tribal settings by those who had the power to leave us their words and thoughts.

These backward steps are not unheard of (though Illo's church is currently the only one in the archdiocese of San Francisco which is not going to let girls mess up things any longer).  The Southern Baptists, for example,  decided to get rid of female pastors in 1980s, though a few individual churches may still have them.

These occasions of backwards-sliding need to be noted.  Otherwise we will see more of them.

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*In their most extremist forms, naturally. 

The Lesser Cut of Meat Speaks Up

Do you like jokes?  Do you have a sense of humor?  Probably not if you are a feminazi who uses armpit hair to make nets into which innocent misogynists stray, all the while staying straight-faced and glum.

But South Carolina State Senator Thomas Corbin (Republican, of course), he's a guy with a sense of humor!   I may have to explain his humor to those of you who are humor-deficient.

Begin with the context:  South Carolina Senate has only one female Senator, Katrina Shealy.  The rest are guys.  Within that context, Sen. Corbin directs stomach-hurtingly funny jokes of these types at Sen. Shealy:

Indignant at Corbin’s rank sexism, Shealy asked him where he “got off” making such remarks.
“Well, you know God created man first,” a smirking Corbin replied.  “Then he took the rib out of man to make woman.  And you know, a rib is a lesser cut of meat.”

He's a funny guy.  He even apologized for his comments, in the most masterful of ways:

After The State reached out to him for comment, Corbin said he’d stop, even though he claimed Shealy also teased him for being overweight and balding. They were both elected to the state Senate in 2012. “If it bothers her, I’ll quit joking around with her,”

That's what is called a non-apology (bolds are mine).

Then go looking for the excuses for these jokes (in a professional context, mind you), and you will find several, beginning with this:

“He makes comments like that all the time to everybody – including Senator Shealy,” said one legislative aide who spoke to FITS.

Are comments like that insulting jokes or specific sexist comments about women?  Assume it's the former.  Then the excuse is that the guy is just a general asshole, not explicitly just a sexist asshole.  It happens to be the case that his assholiness takes the form of sexism when the target is a woman.  It takes other forms in other cases, right?

Suppose that is true.  There's still a difference making cracks about all women vs. individuals.

 The second excuse is that Sen. Shealy also made jokes about Sen. Corbin's looks:

After The State reached out to him for comment, Corbin said he’d stop, even though he claimed Shealy also teased him for being overweight and balding.

The third one is that everyone laughed and laughed and laughed:

“We were all joking and laughing,” Corbin told The State. 

There you have it.  It was friends making slightly nasty jokes about friends, having fun while doing it, and if you don't agree you are a humorless asshole yourself.

Humor IS tricky, of course.  What is acceptable between friends who know each other well is a different kind of teasing than what is acceptable in a public setting or between individuals who don't know each other well.  When a joke falls flat the common defenses are exactly those listed above:  You did it, too!  You thought it was funny!  We laughed!  Well, if you can't take humor I'll stop!

But you know what?  It's not stupid jokes which ultimately matter, even when they consist of punching down, even when they consist of pinning the joke on, say,  a history of women's subjugation and the stories we tell about it as something hilarious.   What matters is what the jokes tell about Sen. Corbin, his likelihood for representing the women of South Carolina with proper respect and honesty.  That's what matters.

Incidentally, the way to check the "you have no sense of humor" counterargument is to have a large reservoir of reverse sexist jokes.  Just make a few of those to someone like Sen. Corbin and then accuse him of being a humorless sourpuss when he doesn't laugh.  Which he will not.

 

A Belated Valentine From Me

To all of you.  May you always have chocolate cake and moments of sheer happiness.

And may you never be snowed in for three weeks in a row as this area of the country is experiencing (chews on walls), may you always remain sharp thinkers with loving hearts.

Is that enough smooching for you?

If not, have a look at this needlepoint I didn't bid at Goodwill online auctions though I thought about it (click on it to make it bigger):

The needlepoint looks like a copy of a painting or an etching and has a definite Victorian flavor.  It could even be Victorian.  The man in the picture is carrying his bride against a background of fantastic nature.  His arms look too long, his legs are very very muscular, and his feet about three times as long as her little slippers.  The red cheeks on both of them are wonderful!

All that and the hairstyle and clothing of the man suggests something in the early Victorian period for the original which was used to create the needlepoint.

Then to the sociological commentary which is obligatory on this here blog:

Needlepoint was something which gained much popularity during the Victorian era, what with the renewed emphasis on separate spheres  for middle-class women and men and the myth of those women as the "angels of the house," responsible for the care of the stressed men once they returned home after a hard day's work. 

In reality more affluent women had suddenly a lot more time on their hands.  That was partly solved by the Victorian fad of excessive house decoration, the creation of little tablecloths for every surface, the working of anti-macassars* and so on.  Needlepoint was particularly popular because it adds up more rapidly than most types of embroideries and because of the inventions in textile dying which allowed a much greater scope for the color effects visible in the above piece than was the case earlier.

I have no idea if the artist creating this work lived in the Victorian era.  But that's the flavor the work gives me.  But mostly it's really fun in all sorts of odd ways.

It's fun to think how future generations will view our ways of depicting lovers and which sociological aspects (eg hairstyles, makeup, exaggerated body proportions) will draw their attention.

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*These can still be found in flea markets and yard sales.  I have quite a few!

Short Echidne Thoughts on the Business of Blogging

1.  You know all those times when you need to complete an action online by clicking either "continue/publish/next/agree" button or its opposite, which is usually "cancel" or "delete" or "back?"

Please, kind developers, standardize the relative locations and colors of those buttons.  For instance, always have the "cancel" button on the right or the left of the other button, preferably in red or some other eye-catching color.  Do that EVERYWHERE.

You can guess why this has gotten my goat.  Granted, to double-check the location of the two buttons doesn't take very much of my time, but when you add up all the time all the net users spend on that, well, we just might have figured out how to get to relative world peace with those days and years.

2.  Brand.  That's not the hot iron mark on cattle ears (poor things).  It's what I'm supposed to have for this blog.  Like a mission statement, it's part of the business speak invading all sorts of areas.  If you don't have a brand people don't know what they are going to get and your message is not strong. 

Here's where my dark side enters.  I will NOT do whatever I'm supposed to do.  I have no idea why but I was like that inside the egg.  So I struggle with myself about the necessity of having a brand and other similar topics (such as developing a Twitter presence!  like a ghostly specter in the distance, howling away?), and the more I struggle the more scattered my topics and the worse my writing.

It could be an inner demon.  I may need lice treatment against those!

3.  Content producer.  That's another red flag waved at my inner bull (why not an inner angry cow?).   It sounds like an industry selling beautiful gift wrap and bows and -- only as an afterthought -- something to stuff into the box.  It could be shredded newspaper as long as it gets lots of clicks which produce lots of advertising revenue.

I understand why all that happens.  But I'm not some fu**ing content producer.  If you don't get my ire, suppose that mothers and fathers were routinely called child producers.

All that is grumpy writing.  The real reason is that I have to go out there, and out there consists of snow, snow and more snow.  If you never hear from me again remember that I loved you.

How To Create Strong Female Characters in Books, Movies and Games

What makes a female character in writing or in films "strong?"  Is it the ability to kick butt?  Chuck Wendig notes that butt-kicking ability is neither necessary nor sufficient.  A character is  more than a pawn on a chess board only when she has agency, an inner landscape which is not completely outer directed, a role more significant than merely justifying why the male hero does whatever he will do in the story.
 

Many “strong female characters” feel like something ripped out of a video game. Or worse, they feel like toys — objects that look tough, hold guns, wield swords, have karate-chop arms, but are ultimately plastic, posable action figures. Empty and maneuverable, they go where you tell them to go because they’re just devices.

Alison Bechdel coined the Bechdel Test, which asks if the story (or an overall body of storytelling) features at least two women who talk about something other than a man.

Gail Simone talks about the “Women in Refrigerators” problem, where women and girls inside comic books are used as fodder — raped, killed, or otherwise excised of power through violence (and often to make a male character feel something). The only power these women have in the story is to be damaged enough to motivate the story or the male characters in it.

Kelly Sue DeConnick talks about the “Sexy Lamp” test, which says, if you can replace the woman in the story with a sexy lamp and it doesn’t affect the story outcome, well, fuck you, that’s what.

I liked that quote.  I have long used the beer-barrels-and-ham-hocks test* when reading the most misogynistic type of evolutionary psychology (which I call Evolutionary Psychology or EP, to distinguish it from the more sensible kind of scientific inquiry, ep). 

Just replace any reference to women or "females" in the article by beer barrels and ham-hocks, and if everything else stays consistent and nothing makes you start giggling, then women or "females" in that study are assumed to have had the same agency as barrels of beer on cuts of ham.

The linked post makes a wider point (or so I read it).  It's not that we need to have all female characters in art be "strong,"  just as we don't need to have all male characters be that way.  The same goes for being all good or all bad. 

Real people are complicated mixes of strengths and weaknesses, and the more one-dimensional we make them in stories the more we start leaning on simple myths:  The damaged but valiant hero with big muscles but not much brain, the bitter but ultimately good anti-hero, the endlessly sacrificing/admiring/caring wife or mother or girlfriend, the woman-as-mobile-tit-carrier and so on.

Those myths often offer women up in a particularly impoverishing ways. defined by their relationships to the hero of the story, the mother-girlfriend/wife-whore trinity.  That, in turn, means that just a handful of those roles is sufficient for most action stories, and that being a girlfriend becomes a role equivalent to being one of the seven guys with different jobs and personalities.  This is probably one of the reasons why there are more jobs for male than female actors.

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*Copyrighted here by me!

The Drip-Drip Theory of Getting Fitted Into Gender Roles

That may not be the real name of the theory which is about the completely hidden part of acculturation to gender roles, the part which is invisible.  Other parts can be extremely visible (such as direct gender discrimination, religious rules about sex roles or examples like this intersection of race and gender in the treatment of black girls in US schools), but even those who are not subject to the avalanches of openly gendered rules may have been subject to the drip-drip experiences.

This is the idea that we are all slowly, slowly being filed down to a shape that will fit the hole the society has deemed acceptable for us, from childhood onwards. Those drip-drips are tiny events, not necessarily important in themselves, but as water dripping ultimately hones down a stone into a smooth pebble a continuous "rain" on us can have significant effects on the shapes we will take.

As an example of this, consider this study from Israel:

Beginning in 2002, the researchers studied three groups of Israeli students from sixth grade through the end of high school. The students were given two exams, one graded by outsiders who did not know their identities and another by teachers who knew their names.
In math, the girls outscored the boys in the exam graded anonymously, but the boys outscored the girls when graded by teachers who knew their names. The effect was not the same for tests on other subjects, like English and Hebrew. The researchers concluded that in math and science, the teachers overestimated the boys’ abilities and underestimated the girls’, and that this had long-term effects on students’ attitudes toward the subjects.
For example, when the same students reached junior high and high school, the economists analyzed their performance on national exams. The boys who had been encouraged when they were younger performed significantly better.
They also tracked the advanced math and science courses that students chose to take in high school. After controlling for other factors that might affect their choices, they concluded that the girls who had been discouraged by their elementary schoolteachers were much less likely than the boys to take advanced courses.

It's possible that all the teachers did was anticipate future developments (though what works against that is the absence of the reverse bias in English or Hebrew, areas in which girls are expected to do better than boys).  I have not read the study itself to see how well the controlling of other factors worked.  But even if that is the case, the drip-drip theory is likely to tilt things further in the anticipated direction.

When you put that one drop into the pail gathering them at the root of your feet things start looking different.  By the time you reach maturity you have been filed and sanded and honed by hundreds of similar small events.  Some of them you will remember, most of them you have forgotten or never knew about.

It's crucial to point out that the people doing the honing or filing are almost always totally unaware of what they are doing.  Any one of us could be holding that file or sandpaper.  One observation study* of a Finnish daycare center  found that the caregivers paid more attention to boys than girls, helped boys first (in dressing, say, which is not necessarily good for boys) and expected more sharing and controlled behavior from girls than boys.  Dolls were assigned to girls first and cars to boys first.

When the caregivers involved in the study found out the results they were shocked.  All those drips were unconscious, created by the way the society had filed and honed them in the earlier rounds.

None of this is an argument for a hundred-percent environmental theory of gender roles.  But it is important to notice that the societal effects are often of the type discussed in this post and may be as invisible as gentle summer rain.

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*Link in Finnish, sorry

On Religion, Islamic Terrorism and Islamophobia

If groups such as ISIS/Daesh and alQaeda have any very long-term religious objectives those seem to resemble the end times ideology of extreme right-wing US Christians.  In the former case the equivalence may not be to end times but the end of all religions except a certain type of Islam.  That era will be preceded by a global war between Muslims and the various types of infidels, and Islam will win, which provides a warped type of incentive for both extreme Christians and terrorists to root for that final war and perhaps even aid its arrival. 

For ISIS "infidels" cover everyone who is not an extremist Salafi and/or Wahhabi type Sunni Muslim, preferably more extremist than what the Saudis have managed to achieve.

Here's the thing:  Those are by far the most extremist movements in Islam which have any wider support.  Most Muslims are not Salafis or Wahhabis and most Salafis or Wahhabis are not terrorists, either.

But the roots (the code-book, if you like) of the current Islamic terrorism is very much in those two movements. They both view the few centuries after Mohammad as demonstrating everything that is necessary for the correct Islamic way of life.  They are both based on literal interpretations of the Koran and other sources, with the assumption that the messages are literally correct and can never be re-interpreted for new times or practices.  They frown upon the idea of contact with non-Muslims and they are extremely strict and narrow in terms of the allowed spheres of life for women and inflexible in their demands of male custodianship of all women.

Wahhabism used to be limited to Saudi Arabia.  The outflow of money from that oil-rich country to the rest of the world has spread Wahhabism.  This is a purposeful strategy:

Wahhabi mission, or Dawah Wahhabiyya, is to spread purified Islam through the world, both Muslim and non-Muslim. ^[224] Tens of billions of dollars have been spent by the Saudi government and charities on mosques, schools, education materials, scholarships, throughout the world to promote Islam and the Wahhabi interpretation of it. Tens of thousands of volunteers^[161] and several billion dollars also went in support of the jihad against the atheist communist regime governing Muslim Afghanistan.^[162] 

Still, it's crucial to understand that the total number of Salafis or Wahhabis is very low when we count all the different Islamic sects in the world, and we should be extremely careful not to confuse terrorists with Salafis or Wahhabis in general and especially careful not to assume that every single Muslim is a terrorist.

Food Stamps As Democratic Bribes To Buy Votes

Fox News' Stuart Varney explains how the president buys votes with food stamps. 

You should watch the video at the link (I couldn't get it to embed). 

In it Varney explains how the US cannot afford food stamps or any things from a long list of government "handouts" (which, by the way, includes health care for the poor and social security payments for the elderly). Then he explains that these "handouts" are paid by the tax payers, thus suggesting that those getting them never were or are taxpayers themselves.  Think about that division of people into two groups.  One gets all the undeserved benefits, one pays for all of them.  That the retired, for example, paid towards social security all their working lives is irrelevant.

And "we" cannot afford all these handouts!  "We" must take out loans to pay for them.  For Varney that "we" does not include the people on the "handouts."

I liked listening to Varney, because he is so good at triggering the anger and fear of the conservatives.  Someone is getting something for nothing and I am not!  

The logic is also fun to watch.  First Varney argues that the recession is over so why aren't people coming off food stamps (and "we" cannot afford those food stamps as "we" don't have the money but in fact we (as the government) should have the money if the recession is over).  But then he argues that two-thirds of Americans don't think the recession is over!

Gotcha, he mutters.  But of course there's the possibility that this recovery from the recession is another one of those weird ones where all the gains go for a small group of people on the top of the income distribution.  Varney tries to stuff to contradictory arguments down our throats:  Either there's no need for so many food stamp recipients anymore or there is, but Obama is to blame in both cases.

If you step a little back from these thoughts you could well ask why "we" cannot afford social security or Medicaid or food stamps but can afford a military system three or four times as expensive as the next largest military force on this earth.

Or you could ask why the government can afford to give "handouts" to corporations but not to individuals.

But then you would get depressed. 

Instead, let's ask if giving a lot of food stamps indeed makes people vote for Democrats.  That's a silly sentence.  To answer that we would need to control for the incomes of the potential voters and what the two parties actually propose to do for the affluent and the less affluent and so on.

Still, it's unlikely that food stamps work as money to be paid for Democratic votes.  That's because a) the highest percentages of people on food stamps tend to be found in Republican-voting states and b) because the poor are much less likely to vote than the more affluent.