Not Feeling Well

Which is an explanation for the quiet week on the blog.  I need snoozes like these two are having:

On Sexbots

The New York Times had a story about Matt McMullen, the creator of female robots for sex.  The story in the NYT, and an earlier story about McMullen's work in Vanity Fair, pretty much glide over the fact that these sex dolls are physically meant to be female.  So the story isn't about sex robots for everybody.  The story is about female sex dolls for people who want them female.

That doesn't matter too much, I guess, except in the sense that we have all been trained to not notice the lack of male-looking sex dolls in stories of this type.  That means we can leap into discussing other types of topics about sex robots:  How human they should seem, whether they should talk back, whether they should be made to make sounds as if they are enjoying what's going on.

As an aside, I wonder why robots should be made to look human in the first place.  Does it then follow that we are going to recreate all the power relationships of the human societies inside the world of robots?  The cleaning robot will look female and will act humbly and so on?

But the obvious point of these articles isn't that.  It's the idea of the sexbot as a replacement for having a relationship with a woman made out of meat etc.  McMullen himself states:

“Not everybody wants to be in a relationship, especially an emotionally draining, costly, anxiety-filled one. If a man says, ‘I don’t want to be in a relationship,’ most of the time that’s probably a fucking good decision! And he can order a RealDoll, which will end up being a helluva lot cheaper than the women he was dating! If a man has a hundred or no girlfriends, RealDolls are a good option no matter what.”
A hovering waitress says, “Last call.” Mills orders a beer and returns to a pet peeve. “Women have enjoyed sex toys for 50 years, probably 5,000 years, if the truth be known, but men are still stigmatized! We have to correct that! I want to be the Rosa Parks of sex dolls! Men are not going to sit in the back of the bus anymore!”

Bolds are mine.

I was giggling about that last paragraph, trying to imagine in what sense a dildo, say, is exactly the same as a sexbot which speaks and pretends to orgasm, whatever its user does.  Perhaps we are going to have speaking dildos!  Where's the mouth going to be?

Never mind.  Let's not go there.  As far as I know,  there have been various sex toys for heterosexual men for some time, right?  Not that I'm an expert in the area of sex toys, but creating a life-sized doll which speaks etc. seems a bit different from something you can hold in your hand.

The part I bolded in the first paragraph of the above quote is very informative.  It's the idea that women are expensive sex partners and that they will demand stuff and so on.  A sexbot will do whatever you want and the cost will only be the enormous sum McMullen charges.

This is one of those cases where a gender reversal is useful.  Suppose that the same story was written, but the creator of the dolls was Martha McMullen (with dark-framed angry-looking spectacles), and that all the sex dolls shown in the background looked like men in skimpy underwear or naked, some with beards, some with not and so on.  Suppose Martha made a statement about men being such difficult  sex partners etc., always arguing and pushing their own agendas.  How would various types of readers have reacted to the otherwise same stories then?

Pink Thoughts. Or The Weak Version of the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis

I've never liked pink.  I associate the color with lingonberry porridge which I hated as  a child, because I hate the sour taste of lingonberries.

In Finnish, the way I learned the language, the term for pink was "light red".  Just as there was a "light blue," there was a "light red."  In my mind the two concepts stood in exactly the same relationship to their "master" colors, red and blue:  They were lighter forms of those colors.  They were NOT colors on their own, just as "dark blue" is not a color on its own*.

So what difference does it make if our brains learn the concept of "pink," as a color in its own right or at least with its own clear name, or if our brains learn the concept of "vaaleanpunainen" or "light red?" 

And what happens when the latter case is complicated by the addition of a term deriving from the English pink (pinkki), which the above-linked website states as being only one of the many possible tones of "vaaleanpunainen," even though people colloquially use it to refer to all those tones?

Could it be that pink, as in "pinkki," now rises to a different type of prominence?  Above its previous mate "light blue?"

This is all both idle speculation and great fun.  I should add that I'm not a linguist and that my knowledge of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is negligible.  Still, all this may have implications in more serious matters, even political ones.

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* That's probably a very subjective way of trying to define the feeling I have about pink as a color:  That in English it's on the same level as blue or lavender etc., whereas light blue is not on that level.

Why Women Don't Code. Echidne Answering Comments From Another Reality.

I don't usually write blog posts about anonymous comments elsewhere, but these particular ones are too juicy to miss, because they give us the condensed arguments from anti-feminists as to the reasons why coding is so male-dominated, and thus offer me a chance to respond to those arguments.

The first common argument is that girls just don't like to code.  Here's the current version of it, from Eschaton comments:

Are we really going to pretend that as many women as men want to code? For fuck's sake.

That's worth pondering about.  Note, first, that there was this magical era, about thirty years ago, when computer science students were almost equally likely to be men or women.  Then something changed, and in a fairly short time the field was one for the bros.  This post goes into much more detail about it.

So in a sense it might be true that women don't want to code now, given the work environment they'd meet (with people like the one I quote above probably working there)*.  But there's no evidence that a dislike of coding would somehow be an inherent female characteristic.   If it were, it would have been operating in the early 1980s, too, and I personally suspect that not as many women would be in accounting, say, if the idea of sitting still and staring at numbers or letters wouldn't at all apply to women.

The second common argument is that girls just can't code.  Or:

Right, male and female brains are exactly the same.
Did you know that male and female IQs are the same on average, but that males have more representation on both tails of the bell curve?
Have you considered the implications of this?

This is a bit hilarious, because the extreme upper tail in the IQ distribution seems to be equated with being a coder!  I doubt that, to be honest.  We in the extreme upper tail are not many enough to fill that occupation.

This commentator is saying that guys are smarter (and also more stupid, but that's the other guys, the losers), based on the peculiarity that the results from IQ tests on men show greater variance than the results from IQ tests on women.

I have written about various aspects of the "extreme tail" theory about gender and intelligence many times before. This post summarizes several of the issues:  The gender differences in the extreme tails are getting smaller over time (which suggests that we are not looking at something innate), gender differences in attitudes towards risk (such as likelihood of guessing when the answer is unknown) could create the observed results if men were less risk-averse than women (or played the testing game that way), even if there was no underlying average gender difference in the characteristic under study and so on.

Third, sooner or later this particular conversation turns into a wider one about women and men being innately different In Ways Which Matter (no, men don't have wings and fly and women don't have fins and swim; we are supposed to regard small differences as humongous for the purposes of allocating societal power; and no, differences in aggression etc. do not matter).  This time we get:

OK, let's play make pretend. Yes, women on average are interested in heavy tech, coding, data...
Male and female brains are exactly the same. Oh, except when someone is transgender, then male and female brains are different...

There you go.  As a bonus we get one of the reasons for some trouble between certain feminist strains of thought and certain strains of trans thought.

The research into gender differences in brainz is pretty difficult to do, especially if someone wishes to argue that those differences are both innate and not subject to change.  I've written loads and loads on various studies (start here and here, say), but even if one accepted innately different brains by biological sex (or by gender identity???), that acceptance would not tell us that women can't code or don't want to code.

But it's not the question whether women and men would be equally eager to code if the industry wasn't so broish (and if there was no steering of boys and girls into certain culturally accepted roles) that fascinates me here.  Who knows what would happen in that ideal world?  The point of those comments I analyze seems to be that what exists TODAY cannot be at all improved, because of that assumed innate stuff.  This means that whatever percentage women make out of all coders is the RIGHT percentage.

And just to make everything crystal-clear, the commentator also notes that if there are girls in the industry then they can be found in non-essential roles:

Well, research, data, technical project management are the roles that matter...
I'm sure women are represented in marketing, HR and PR, which are simply less important to the heavy tech companies.

I hope this post didn't infect you with a stereotype threat.


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*See also this post about a study concerning the effect of gender stereotypes in getting access to math-heavy fields.

Lightning Posts, 6/11/15. On Caitlyn Jenner, Syrian Refugees and A Bro With No Ho

1.  These three articles on the sometimes troubled relationship between feminism and the trans movement look a bit like thesis, antithesis and synthesis, but I'm not intending that.  Still, it's best to read them in order, first this one, then this one and finally this one.  I picked these because they are more nuanced than the average diatribes in this area.  Notice the absence of similar debates about cis men and trans men.  Why they are missing isn't clear to me.

2.  Why does Saudi Arabia take no refugees from the war-torn countries of Iraq and Syria (or from Palestine)?  The same appears to be the case for other Gulf states?  I spent some time looking for the answer.  Sure, those countries provide funds, but as far as I can tell they don't offer any shelter for refugees, even though the cultural chasms to be bridged would be considerably smaller there than in, say, Sweden (which does take in a lot of refugees for its size).

3.   Then today's smart Republican comment from Mark Kirk:

During a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on Thursday, the Illinois senator was heard on the live microphone talking about the Republican presidential candidate.
"I've been joking with Lindsey," Kirk was overheard saying. "He's going to have a rotating first lady. He's a bro with no ho."

No comment on that, because I'm in a hurry to bang my head against the garage door.


  

Meet Tim Hunt, A Nobel-Winning Biologist With Opinions On Girls In Laboratories

I love these foot-deep-in-the-throat stories, especially from those people whom the world has coddled and revered to such an extent that they now believe their utterances about everything is of great value.  Not just their utterances about the area of their expertise, mind you, but about everything.  It's a bit like Echidne criticizing opera singers or explaining to you in excruciating detail how to make a perfect souffle.

In other words, a joke.  And Dr Hunt did tell us that he was joking when talking like this at the World Conference on Science Journalists in Korea:

In remarks yesterday before writers, scientists, and engineers attending the World Conference of Science Journalists in Seoul, Hunt stood and after thanking the women journalists “for making lunch," and warning attendees that he had a reputation as a male chauvinist, offered up his groundbreaking ideas on women in the field.
“Let me tell you about my trouble with girls,” Hunt said, according to science journalist Connie St Louis, who tweeted the most disgusting points in his unrecorded speech. “Three things happen when they are in the lab: You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticize them, they cry.” He continued that while he was in favor of single sex laboratories, he didn’t want to “stand in the way” of women.

Mmm.  I laughed, because the joke is so good.  Whether it's the joke Dr Hunt intended is an open question.  For instance, I immediately saw that to avoid those falling-in-love problems we need to separate not only women from men but gay men from all other men and lesbians from all other women.  Put the gay guys with the women and the lesbians with the men!

Sam Brownback's Utopian Experiment Looks To Be Over

Brownback is the fundamentalist Republican governor of Kansas who in 2012 went wild on those popular tax cuts, with the simple-and-flawed idea that if only most firms could avoid paying any state taxes on their profits the Kansas economy would boom*.

The obvious (and completely predictable) consequences were, well, obvious.  The state of Kansas couldn't make ends meet, because of a giant drop in tax revenues.  So what did our Sam do next to balance the shrinking state budget?  He cut expenses, naturally.

The tax cuts favor mostly people who earn more, the expense cuts hurt mostly people who earn less.  Internal income inequality in Kansas grew.  

But those rounds of cutting expenses were not enough to balance the state budget.

Now the Republicans in control of the state must face up to raising taxes, poor things.  For a financial conservative this is like having to pull your own milk teeth with pliers (done that, been there), so the debates are still largely about how to roll more of the tax load on the shoulders of the poorer people in the state.  Sales tax increases??  Grrreat idea, because those taxes tend to be regressive.  To cover that up, let's not tax food.

Of course raising the sales taxes will make purchases more expensive for the consumers in Kansas and that might make them buy less.  This, in turn, would drive many local firms' profits down, having a further negative effect on any remaining state taxes on corporate income and so on and so on.

The debates are still ongoing, but here are some of the proposed tax increases and other changes:

The Kansas Senate passed Sunday what would be the largest tax increase in the history of the state of Kansas.
The measure passed by a 21-17 margin. Kansas Sen. Julia Lynn, who represents Johnson County, Kan., was the deciding vote on the bill.
Details on the $471 million tax increase:
    •    The sales tax increases to 6.55 percent from 6.15 percent.
    •    The cigarette tax will go up by 50 cents each pack, bringing the total tax to $1.29.
    •    The food tax will drop on July 1, 2016. However, it will be 6.55 percent until that time.
    •    Most itemized deductions on state income taxes are repealed.
    •    Reduced deductions for property taxes, charitable contributions and mortgage interest.
    •    There's a property ta
    •    tax lid for cities and counties.
    •    A new school voucher program that will provide tax credits to those who donate funds for private and religious schools.
    •    $24 million on taxes for business owners.

Tax increases are supposed to mean rapid death for American politicians in power, and that is certainly the case in the Tea Party -wing of the Republican Party.  We shall see what happens.  But as I have written before, watching this Nutty Economists' Tax Experiment Gone Wild would be entertaining (beer and pop corn entertaining) if the pain wasn't affecting so many real people.

On the other hand, Brownback was re-elected after he wrecked the state.

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*This is flawed mostly because it ignores the important question about the demand side:  What effect have Brownback's policies had on the aggregate demand by people in the state?  If demand is insufficient, giving more money to firms won't work to create a boom.

The Women's World Cup in Soccer. Sod It?

I'm exceeding myself in stupid headlines.  The reference to "sod" is meant to capture the flavor of a complaint from one player in the cup:

The Women’s World Cup got underway over the weekend and while excitement was high after host country Canada’s thrilling win over China in stoppage time, the start of play has renewed frustrations over the controversial decision to force the women to play on artificial turf in all six venues.
After Sunday’s Norway vs. Thailand game, Norway midfielder Lene Mykjåland voiced her discontent about the short, dry turf, which she said made it difficult for either team to “get a decent tempo and rhythm.” The playing surface was watered using two fire hoses instead of the standard sprinkler system.
When the tournament kicked off Saturday, the temperature of the playing surface was reportedly 120 degrees, despite the fact that it was a pleasant 75 degrees that day in Edmonton. That’s because artificial turf, a combination of rubber and plastic, gets a lot hotter than natural grass. Natural grass, on average, stays 20-30 degrees cooler than its artificial counterpart.

The linked article suggests that on Saturday the temperature of the turf in Edmonton was only a few degrees below the level regarded as unsafe for players, and anecdotal evidence hints that artificial turf makes the game less interesting to watch and possibly more dangerous for the players.  Not a welcoming mix to the participants in the women's World Cup,

Here's the interesting point:  This is the first soccer World Cup which is played on artificial turf.  Does this have any connection to the fact that it's women playing?

That's one of those questions which cannot be answered without detailed data on what went on when the decision was being made.  I think it's unlikely that anyone chose artificial turf to consciously make the women's games look less interesting. 

But that doesn't mean that the idea of saving money wouldn't have looked a lot more doable when the world cup was about women rather than about men.  Men would complain, their many, many fans would complain.  Perhaps the decision-makers were betting that us girls would not?

Today's Frustration

Do you know what is truly annoying?  To write not one but two posts on different topics and then to find out really recent news information (like an hour old) which makes them outdated.  Sure, you can go and edit, just as you can rip a sweater apart and try to patch it into a vest.  But that's agony.

The Christian Family. On Megan Kelly Interviewing the Duggars.

I'm tired and my arm aches after physical therapy.  That's the perfect time to give my opinions on the interview Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar gave about the case of their son, Josh Duggar.  This post has the background and other pertinent comments.  You can watch the interview here.

What I want to write about is not the five cases of molestation themselves or the long time the Duggar parents took before getting their son to something they seem to view as therapy.  Neither do I wish to write about what it means that Josh Duggar sexually touched her sisters and a babysitter.

I want to talk about the tone-deafness of some parts of the Megan Kelly interview, because I have read the same tone-deafness about the Duggar experiment in many, many places recently*. 

First, Kelly repeatedly referred to the Duggars' weird cult as "Christianity."  That's almost like calling the tenets of ISIS " mainstream Islam."

Kelly normalized an extreme cult (the Quiverfull) by equating it with vanilla-flavored Christianity. As if people attacked Duggars' beliefs because they are Christians and not because they are Quiverfull-ers, bent on maximizing the production of children in the marriage,  preaching absolute male authority, practicing social isolation of their children and denying them (especially the girls) proper education.

Second, she let the Duggars get away with the bizarre argument that Josh's behavior is common, because it may be common among families the Duggars know, as if touching your sisters sexually was just an ordinary type of growing pain many boys went through:

Other families have said they had sons who did similar things, they argued.

Kelly didn't question this argument.  I believe that the reason why so many of Duggars' friends have similar problems is that they share the same child-rearing ideology, being in the same cult:

Isolate your children completely by home-schooling them and by not allowing them to date as teenagers.  Then have so many children that the home can offer no privacy.

Then wait and see what happens.

Third, Kelly didn't react when one of the Duggars explained that the experience  made them pretty much sex-segregate their children as a solution to the problem.  No horseplay between brothers and sisters allowed!  So these parents moved from isolating their children in general to isolating their daughters from their sons.

Fourth and finally, although Kelly tried to make the point that the Duggar family's suffering should not be just about how Josh and his parents feel but at least equally about how the daughters feel, she allowed both Michelle and Jim Bob go on for quite a while about their own feelings, how all this made them feel as parents, how the family has suffered and how very minimal the girls' experience was, what with Josh only groping them through clothing and besides, the wenches were asleep.

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*Kelly did ask many pertinent questions and I applaud her for that.  But in general the media takes for granted the argument that the Duggars are a Family Values type of warm and religious family without asking what those values are.

Why do daughters have less value than sons? Why is complete control of all children so necessary?  Why cannot they leave their parents when they grow up?  Why are they not allowed to go to college, especially the daughters?  And few writers note that Jim Bob Duggar is supposed to be the absolute dictator in the family, to be obeyed without any questioning. 

Neither have I seen anyone point out that Michelle Duggar isn't actually a stay-at-home-mother without any income producing activities.  She is a reality show star, but her own definitions are taken at face value in the various write-ups about the Duggars I've recently read.

The Flight of A European Honey Buzzard. Or What Lust/Love Makes Us Do.

My apologies for linking to a parseltongue website, but the story can be understood without getting the language.   It's about a European honey buzzard grrl who has just finished a migration flight from South Africa to her nesting site in Finland (11207 km, 6964 miles), pushed ever onwards by her aching hormones.*

That's my interpretation, not what the serious nature scientists tell in the linked story and earlier versions of it.  The bird, called Päivi by humans (sort of like being called Dawn in English), missed the mating last year, what with all that loitering en route.  This year she almost made the same mistake, but really picked up time during the last few days, averaging during that time  384 km (239 miles) per day!

The assumption is that her old man will be waiting for her at the nesting site.  European honey buzzards appear to be monogamous in the sense of having the same mating partner but not necessarily wintering together. This might be the perfect marital compromise!

I was hooked by Päivi and the site**, rooting for her to make it, noting how she skirted large areas of water except at the final stretch where she chose to fly across the sea (perhaps to guarantee that hot sex bit).  Such a long flight has many dangers, from hunters to exhaustion etcetera, and I'm sure that not all birds make it.

Why fly almost 14,000-mile round trips every year?  Isn't there anything closer to South Africa if plentiful bugs are the requirement for a good nesting site?  Isn't there anything closer to Finland if a balmy climate is the requirement for a good wintering site?  I'm sure that there's a good explanation for this behavior, and in any case the life of hawks is soaring, right?

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*  One of the articles in the series states that the bird's ova start swelling in March and that the total time for mating ceremonies for European honey buzzards is unusually short for birds, so that the females are in real hurry to get the sex started.

**One is not supposed to anthropomorphize other animals but it's fun to do, sorry.  And neither is one supposed to worry that the tagging of the bird might have been why she made it too late last year and almost too late this year.  But I do.

'An Armed Society Is A Safe Society" Quoth Texas State Representative Jonathan Stickland

He's a Republican with a wolf smile:

Texas is now allowing students, faculty and staff over 21 years old to carry concealed weapons on college campuses, including in classrooms and professors' offices.  Delicious, because of the arms race aspect of this:  Imagine being a professor at one of those institutions, familiar with student anger after they receive bad grades.  Now you will feel forced to be armed to your teeth, too!

Does an Uzi fit inside a backpack?

Never mind.  I know that "the bad guys with the guns" won't be stopped by laws, but neither will they be stopped by "the good guys with guns."  Note that the police gets a lot of training with guns and they still hit bystanders when things get murky and  confusing.  Having lots of additional guns in the hands of untrained civilians is not going to make the resolution of mass shootings easier.   At least the Texas lawmakers should have thought about that.

Is an armed society actually safer?  Has Rep. Stickland actually researched his argument?  And if so, how does he explain the vastly greater numbers of gun deaths in the US than in the less armed societies?  Are gun deaths of and by toddlers and suicides from gun deaths counted in his mind?  What about accidentally shooting your neighbors?

Part of the problem, in my view, is that the NRA has turned the ownership of a dangerous and tricky tool into something like a human right without creating the commensurate human responsibility:  To be properly trained in the use of guns, to employ the necessary care in their storage, and to be responsible for the outcomes of all misuse.

Imagine a world where anyone, in almost any condition, and without any training should be allowed to drive an automobile anywhere, including off the roads or on either side of streets.  Then imagine that no car insurance would be required.

That's what the Texas concealed carry law sounds like to me.

Short Posts, 5/29/15: The Maoist/Marxist US Demoncrats, Scott Walker, the Nazgül of Wisconsin and the Hastert and Duggar cases Compared

I'm in my dark humor stage.  That is a contents warning.

1. The funniest headline I've read for a loooong time:

Have Democrats Pulled Too Far Left?

That is guffaw-inducing, snort-causing and just a wonderful example of the Orwellian type of political writing.  The context matters:  This country has unions in their death throes, no real left or actual communists in any meaningful power, and most talking-heads playing Democrats in political television show would have fitted well into the 1970s Republican Party, except for their milquetoast demeanor. 

Forty-five years ago it was a Republican president who signed the executive order for the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, today caring about the environment is a liberal ploy.  Fifty years ago white leaders of American Evangelists were pro-choice.  Today their views would lead to public stoning.   And so on.

So it's the Democrats who have veered further to the left...

2.  Scott Walker, the Ringwraith* governor of Wisconsin, has plans for us wimminfolk.  He is planning to sign into law a bill which would ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, even if the pregnancy was due to rape or incest.

In a different context he told us that ultrasound pictures of fetuses (feti?) are cool, which means that jamming a large scanner into an abortion-seeker's vagina for no medical reason at all is also cool!  But he was misquoted by the lazy lefty media:

“I think they realize, when people actually hear what’s going on and they can’t win on the left on an issue, they exaggerate things, they make things up, and they take them out of context,” he said. “Here I pointed out, as I pointed out before I signed the law, I said, ‘Who’s opposed to an ultrasound?’ They tried to claim it was a certain type, I said, ‘No — our law says that before someone has that procedure, they have to be given access to an ultrasound.’ “

 I thought he was the person signing that law, too?  So he is hiding behind the law that he himself authorized?  The man has guts belonging to a dead whale.

3. The Hastert scandal deserves a much more serious take which I'm not going to write here, but two thoughts want to be expressed right now**.

The first is my boundless admiration of so many people in power who believe they will never have the skeletons in their cupboards rattled by outsiders, that they will never be caught.  What could you possibly hide if you live in public limelight?

Everything, some politicians seem to think, and that's because they are surrounded by their courtiers telling them every day that they truly are the smartest and greatest and most beautiful people of all.  Like the mirror of the evil queen in Cinderella Snow White.

The second thought links the Hastert case to the Duggar case, and the teachings about female modesty in the religious camp.  This quote describes them in a different case from the one involving the Duggars:

The boy wrote that modesty was a “factor” in his actions because it “was not at the level is should have been in my family.”
“It was not uncommon for my younger sibling to come out of their baths naked or with a towel,” he wrote.
He also said his younger sisters acted inappropriately when they wore dresses, saying they “did not behave in them as they should.”
He then said his sisters didn’t realize what they were doing to him because they didn’t realize their “own nakedness,” and it wasn’t taught properly to them. He seems to blame this on his mother, who he says didn’t see the human body as a big deal because she is a nurse.
The boy said he spoke with his mother who had “no idea” how “visual” men are sexually compared to women. He said changes have since been made in his home.
“This was not a major reason for the offending, but it allowed my little sister to be open to what I made her do,” he wrote.
He then wrote, “A different lifestyle, with more modesty, might have prevented what happened.”

But what about the cases involving boys as the focus of sexual molestation or other sexual acts?  Should boys wear long dresses?  Not wrestle in school athletic programs?  Work more on their modesty?  --  The school of victim-blaming has a lot of expansion to do.
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*I call him that because of the nine ringwraiths in Tolkien's   Lord of the Rings, enslaved by Sauron due to their original greed,  and doing his bidding.  Walker, and a group of other Republican governors elected about the same time seem to do the bidding of the conservative ALEC foundation.  I also find this funny and apt.

**They jostle at each other in the gateway of my mind and scream in these squeaky voices:  Take me!  Me first!
 

Thank You

For your generosity and kindness during my fund-drive, and for reading me.

FHRITP

A Canadian reporter, Shauna Hunt, was interviewing some football fans when one fan said to the fan being interviewed:  Fu*k her right in the pus*y (FHRITP), and Hunt could hear it.  You can watch what happened next:





The last man interviewed in that video was fired from his job, perhaps because he never stopped telling Hunt how f**king fantastic it was to blurt out that phrase.  Spocko asks whether firing him is justified, given that the man actually using the phrase just slithered away, for example.  I tend to agree that for low-powered people the same public humiliation that was intended for Hunt should suffice.

Because public humiliation it was, or at least an attempt at that.  It doesn't matter what the offending fan's intentions were (to entertain his mates, perhaps, or just to come across as funny); the outcome for female reporters getting these sorts of"jokes" regularly is a form of humiliation, a gantlet/gauntlet they must run, just to do their jobs:

Fundraising, The Final Day!

You can still give to this blog to cover the costs and the chocolate which fuels my engines.  Thanks to all who have contributed, mwah.  And yes, the final day really should have been Friday but I charge nothing for late payments.

In other news, my humerus bone break is growing callus, the precursor to bone (though it looks like mold in the x-ray pics)*.  It also hurts less, and physical therapy should begin this week.  I'm recording all the monetary information for a participatory study in health care economics! 

Knitting needles are excellent for scratching an itching-and-healing arm in an  immobilizer, but hot weather doesn't help.  Still, recovery is good, and I'm probably going to remain more ambidextrous.

That's my news.  What are yours?

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*Looking at those x-rays made me laugh at the idea that humans are the crown of creation.  Start with a poorly designed rickety framework and then cover it with meat?  Worms are a better initial idea but they need hands and wheels.  Birds are an even better idea, though once again they need hands.

Speed-Posting, 5/26/15: Tanith Lee, Women in Palmyra and Bruce Bartlett on Fox News

1.  RIP Tanith Lee, the master of dark fantasy.  She is one of the writers whose books people recommended to me and whom I read, to the extent the local library would allow, but no more.  Now I regret the fuzzy idea I had of reading more of her some time later.

2.  The Islamic State has taken over the cities of Ramadi in Iraq and Palmyra in Syria.  Among all the horrors that are taking place it's worth noting that it took only about a day after the invasion of Palmyra for IS to start preaching in the mosques that all women must cover their faces or be flogged.

It's not that the orders are to be compared with the beheadings and kidnappings and the general butchering IS is so fond of, but note the central role the control of women has in their ideology.  The orders of proper dress for women couldn't wait until the first round of killings were finished.

Needless to say, there's nothing about the covering of the face in the Koran; only about the covering of the bosom.  But conservative extremist religion always centers on the control of women.   And strict sex-segregation means that women cannot now get adequate health care inside the "caliphate" because male doctors can't treat women and there are too few female doctors and nurses.

3.  Bruce Bartlett has written an article about the self-induced brain-washing (lefty view) or brain-cleansing (righty view) watching Fox News can cause.  You can download the article here.

I read it.  Bartlett gives statistics about the ignorance effect:  In several categories Fox News watchers know less about political events than those who don't watch any news.  But his piece is not original research, and I was left asking why there's a whole television channel for one party but not for the other party.  Also what planet Fox's female commentators come from and whether looking like a Barbie doll is the first requirement.  But obviousle men don't have to look like the boyfriend called Ken, or have tiger-eye makeup.

Watching Fox (which I did a few weeks ago) is initially hilarious.  Then you start feeling you can't breathe, so you start analyzing what is removing the oxygen from the room.  Is it the constant repetitions of the same news, most about the perfidy of Obama or complete fluff?  Or is it the utter absence of news you see covered everywhere else?   Or all the messages crawling across the screen?  If you follow those you wouldn't be surprised to read that Democrats cause cancer.

On the other hand, Bartlett notes that Fox News  may not ultimately help Republicans in elections, because it flames the anger of conservatives and moves them even further rightwards.  Then those same conservatives vote for very extremist candidates in the primaries, and you get the tea-partiers.

It could be the case that we all live in similar ideological bubbles, could be.  But I try to follow news from various outlets and from several countries, and the Fox world stands out as belonging to a different galaxy.

 

Memorial Day 2015

You might like the links in my post for Memorial Day 2013.

This year I'm blocked.  To write about this day in depth requires grave-digging, deep explorations into the reasons for wars, the evaluation of the need for any particular one of them, the meaning of sacrifice, voluntary or possibly not, the concept of "supporting" troops if you are not willing to extend that past bumper stickers, and even deeper dives into the human psyche and the exchanges between groups of humans.

It's easier to pat the soil on those graves and to plant some violets on them.  Or at least to remember.

On The Duggar Ideology: Multiply At Any Cost.

Many have written about the recently revealed child molestation accusations against Josh Duggar, the oldest son of Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar, the Quiverfull parents of nineteen children whose lives are depicted in a now (temporarily?) withdrawn reality show 19 Kids and Counting.

The basic ideology of the Quiverfull movement is well summarized by the description of Kathryn Joyce's book* about the Christian patriarchy cult:

Kathryn Joyce's fascinating introduction to the world of the patriarchy movement and Quiverfull families examines the twenty-first-century women and men who proclaim self-sacrifice and submission as model virtues of womanhood—and as modes of warfare on behalf of Christ. Here, women live within stringently enforced doctrines of wifely submission and male headship, and live by the Quiverfull philosophy of letting God give them as many children as possible so as to win the religion and culture wars through demographic means.

Hence the attempt to maximize family size, even if that might lead to the impossibility of adequately feeding, caring for, or supervising all those children.  They are arrows in the war against the infidels, and the manufacture of the maximum number of such arrows requires the women's submission and compliance.

This is the proper background for interpreting what happened after Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar found that their fourteen-year-old son had fondled the breasts and genitals of minor girls, many of them apparently his own sisters, while they were supposedly asleep.  The son was sent to therapy or perhaps just away for a while, a police officer (later sentenced for child pornography) gave him a stern speech and the girls who were fondled presumably forgave him.

The Duggars apologized for those events:

Back 12 years ago our family went through one of the most difficult times of our lives. When Josh was a young teenager, he made some very bad mistakes and we were shocked. We had tried to teach him right from wrong. That dark and difficult time caused us to seek God like never before. Even though we would never choose to go through something so terrible, each one of our family members drew closer to God.   We pray that as people watch our lives they see that we are not a perfect family. We have challenges and struggles everyday. It is one of the reasons we treasure our faith so much because God’s kindness and goodness and forgiveness are extended to us — even though we are so undeserving. We hope somehow the story of our journey — the good times and the difficult times — cause you to see the kindness of God and learn that He can bring you through anything.

Let me see what's included there:  God's forgiveness?  Check.  What the family gained from the events?  Check.  Josh's "bad mistakes?  Sort of check.

What the daughters went through?

Crickets...

And that's the fundamental problem with the Quiverfull ideology and those right-wing Christian beliefs which suggest that victims of abuse should bear responsibility for it happening, that God may have allowed it because of something the victim did or failed to do.

I stress this ideology, because it is what all the choices** of Duggars are based on and it is ultimately what their reality show is disseminating as a good conservative way of life.
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*I strongly recommend that book, by the way.  Kathryn's work is always painstaking and objective.
**Read that.  It's funny.  Then send me money.

Lock Up Your Women. Advice from Chechnya.

Or from its president, to men in his country and probably everywhere.  It's always educational to realize how very rare gender equality is in this world, of course, though I hate being reminded of that.  But in a slightly different sense this whole story really is about a place where powerful men don't even have to pretend to view women as co-citizens.

Here's what happened:

 Ramzan A. Kadyrov, the pugnacious president of the southern Republic of Chechnya and a close ally of President Vladimir V. Putin, finally had enough Wednesday of social media users’ mocking him relentlessly for seeming to push polygamy.

His solution? Keep women locked up at home and off social media.
“Lock them in, do not let them go out, and they will not post anything,” Mr. Kadyrov said in a video to a sheepish group of men and women who kept their arms folded across their chests and their eyes firmly on the ground during the harangue.

The scene, filmed at what appears to be his government palace and broadcast on local television, was prompted by what Mr. Kadyrov, who has long shown a flair for hyperbole, described as “The Wedding of the Millennium.”

The social media explosion was set off last weekend in Grozny, the Chechen capital, when a 17-year-old bride was married off to a pal of Mr. Kadyrov’s, a district police chief pushing 50 and reportedly already married.



The first report of the betrothal had emerged in late April in the Novaya Gazeta newspaper, which reported that the police chief, Nazhud Guchigov, had ordered the young woman’s parents to hand her over by May 2 or he would take her by force.

After the article was published, Mr. Kadyrov jumped into the action, saying he had investigated the marriage proposal and found both the young bride, Kheda Goylabiyeva, and her family agreeable.

Poor, poor bride.  She looks scared and miserable in her wedding dress, while the thirty years older groom looks, well, determined and expectant.

But wait!  There's more:

Pavel Astakhov, the Kremlin official who is supposed to protect children’s rights in Russia, defended the practice of older men taking young brides. During a radio interview, he suggested that was especially the case in places like Chechnya where women were “shriveled” by the age of 27, looking at that age like most Russian women do at 50.
His remarks prompted another wave of outrage, with hundreds of Russian women in their 20s posting pictures with the hashtag #wrinkledwomen. Mr. Astakhov apologized, saying that women of all ages were “wonderful and delightful.”

Astakhov is the officer who is supposed to protect children's rights in Russia!  I wonder how he was chosen for the job.

Astakhov's apology is worth quoting in full, because it so clearly reflects traditional gender roles and because it shows he doesn't get it at all:

 "Women of any age are splendid and adorable," he writes. "God created Woman so that we could love her, defend her, take care of her, glorify her. A clumsy comparison, a rash word taken out of the context of discourse cannot change my attitude to the Fair Sex. I've loved, love and shall love and respect [them]! I apologize for the mistake I've made!"

Mmm.  Tastes like 1950s America to me.

There are two points to this post:  

First, most of this globe is terrible on gender equity, some places being pure hell (Islamic State) and many others showing the types of values this story demonstrates, or "traditional" values which almost always define women as second-class citizens whose concerns can be fairly safely ignored in most politics.

Second, things are changing, albeit slowly.  Russian women protested the forced marriage of a young girl to a district police chief and the fact that this police officer (!) was breaking the law by already having at least one wife, and they also ridiculed the inanities which leaked out of Astakhov's mouth.  That horse cannot be returned to its patriarchal stable.

Still, isn't the statement "lock up your women"  just utterly delicious?  It's the perfect summary of assumed male supremacy:  The women are yours and you have the right to lock them up.*

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*This doesn't mean that Russian or Chechen men would necessarily think like that. But president Kadyrov clearly does.