More Saturday Night Music

Camille Saint-Saëns - Danse Macabre :






I often think of that as the music of war.

Uber. On "New" Alternatives To Traditional Worker-Employer Arrangements. A Re-Posting

(From last November.  More material has since cropped up about Uber, both good and bad.  See what Dean Baker plans to study when it comes to Uber, and this article about another firm in the so-called sharing economy.)

Go here to read the original post.

From My Classics Archives: The Rotherham Report on Child Sexual Abuse

(This mini-series of classics covers a few of my recent long posts, the ones that required a lot of hard work.  Each of them is of value about the individual phenomenon it covers, but I hope that each of them is also of value in a more general sense.  This post is about criminal gangs which exploit young girls, about the response of local government to that exploitation and about the role cultures play in all this)

Read the original post.

Why Statistics Is Sexy. Or The Need to Distinguish Between Large and Small Numbers. A Re-Posting

(Originally posted here.)

I've always liked statistics as a science  but never thought it hawt and sexy.  Now I wish we could make statistics more sexy (bare more skin?) in order to save more of us from falling into those hidden wolf traps of the net.  They don't have sharpened sticks, those traps (holes in the ground, covered by branches), but they do hurt our understanding in somewhat similar ways.

An example of the wolf trap:  Someone writes on, say, racism or sexism in recent events and then gets attacked by trolls.  Suppose that in one scenario there are five very active trolls hammering at the poor writer, in an alternative scenario there are five thousand such trolls.

The two scenarios are not the same, they don't tell us the same story about the likely number of people "out there" believing whatever those trolls believe.  That's why it's very wrong to argue that the presence of five Twitter trolls in one's mentions means that the troll-opinion is extremely common in the real world.  Yet in the last week I've seen several people take that view of events:  The mere existence of any nasty trolls (and nasty they are) means that those trolls have sizable backing in the world of opinions, ideas and values.

So that is about proportions or percentages.  There will always be people with extreme nasty values, there will always be some who troll.  To unearth a troll comment and then to write about it as if it represents a sizable number of people in the real world is lazy and just wrong.  Even utopia would have a few trolls, hankering for life in hell.

It matters whether 0.1 percent or 60% of Americans believe that broccoli should be banned.  Those who don't get that difference are going to create "the-sky-is-falling" stories, and they are not ultimately helpful.

Add to all that the problem of self-selection, which means that those who comment on any particular incendiary topic are much more likely to be the ones who hold the extreme opposite view of the one any particular writer has used in a piece (broccoli haters, whether 0.1% or 60%, will be much more likely to be in the comments section of your Broccoli Is King article than anyone else).

That's why the comments sections, especially if not moderated, are dominated by angry voices and often opinions better suited to critters who just crawled out of the primeval slime*.  You know, the way any article about gender inequality that focuses on women gets comments from angry meninists.

People who agree with the writer tend not to waste time scribbling that down under the article, and people who aren't that bothered either way tend not to spend time in the comments, either.  The Twitter discussions work on somewhat similar principles, though the fact that people have followers makes them less hostile to the imagined writer here.  But those who hated what you wrote are the ones with real energy to look up your handle and then enter the "discussion."

These two problems I've described above are a) ignoring the actual prevalence of various beliefs  and b) ignoring self-selection on the net.  That double-ignorance can have bad consequences:  We may be misled into believing that a molehill is a mountain, we may initiate much larger angry fights with an imaginary enemy (windmills?) and we may misunderstand the scope of the problem altogether.

A similar problem is born when someone writes an article starting with the planned plot.  Suppose that the plot is how much people hate broccoli.  The intrepid journalist will then go out and interview people.  What if the vast majority of those interviewed aren't bothered about broccoli at all?  That statement will not have a prominent place in the planned story.  Instead, even if it takes a very long time, the journalist will find a few people who reallyreally hate that green tree-pretender among the vegetables, and it is the opinions of those few people that we all will then read.

The next stage (and believe me I've seen this stage recently, though not about broccoli hating) is for people to talk about the vast camp of broccoli haters and mention the opinions of the interviewed few as representative of what that vast camp thinks.

This doesn't mean that anecdotes cannot reflect majority views or the views of an important numerical minority.  But strictly speaking an anecdote, if true, tells us only that one particular person held a particular opinion.  It doesn't tell us how common that opinion is.  For that we need the collection and analysis of statistical data about the whole relevant population (all vegetable eaters in the case of broccoli).

So all this was what has stopped me from writing on various interesting topics yesterday.  Aren't you glad I shared?
-----
*With all due apologies to critters from the primeval slime who are probably charming and empathic ones.

Moltherhood Tuesday 2: On Potential Motherhood And Research Biases in the Field

This late 2013 post talks about a study which, among other things, tells us the reasons why almost all parenting studies are really about women, not about men, and what problems this creates:  Little attention is paid to the influence of fathers, and in some cases the stubborn focus on mothers has delayed research in areas such as Down syndrome and autism.

More recent research shows that the age of the fathers matters about as much in both Down syndrome and autism fields as the age of the mothers, and in some cases more.

But for decades research focused only on mothers.  When I asked one researcher in the field for the reasons he answered:  "Surely the period of pregnancy matters more than the production of sperm." That this  assumption then turned into "let's not study sperm" was something he didn't get.

The more recent emphasis as women always being potentially pregnant is of great concern from a human rights point of view.  The above linked post talks about those issues, too.

Note that I'm not at all opposed to informing people about the potential impact of their choices on their future fertility.  I'm, however, very opposed to the assumption that it's necessary to tell women to view themselves as just temporarily empty aquaria for future fetuses and to maintain that aquarium carefully,  because this gives scope for dramatically unequal lived experiences for men and women, increases the likelihood of further controls on the behavior of women and might even become one of the issues that forced-birthers promote. 

It's also useful to keep in mind that the studies arguing for behavioral changes in today's men and women (presumed to be potentially procreating) are actually done on mice and rats, not on humans.

The only thing I would change in that post now is to note that all men are finally included among the potential parents.  That's because the new rodent studies find effects being passed from granddad rats to grandson rats and daughters.  So now men, too, get to be told that they should eat their spinach, not for their own sake, but for the sake of future generations, whether imaginary or not. And they won't be released from that even by a menopause!

But women are not yet released from the view that they are all pretty much just potential mothers, as this recent post demonstrates.

Research Monday 2: Back to Girl And Boy Brains

You might begin by reading a 2013 post I wrote about an extremely influential study and its reception.  Those argued that we have finally figured out why girls have pink brains and boys have blue brains, and that post is my response to the tidal wave of similar popularizations in all sorts of places.

More about why they were a tidal wave can be learned in this post (which also has useful stuff about Simon Baron-Cohen's work).  And this post talks about one of the many pertinent studies which never get reported at all.  They don't qualify for the tidal wave, because they are not about sex or gender and don't necessarily support innate views of gender.

Finally, Anne Fausto-Sterling writes about the question whether girls innately like pink and boys blue (we know the answer to that, of course, given that the colors were assigned to the genders quite recently).  But more importantly, she notes:

My research shows that, even at a young age, “nature” and “nurture” already interact.3 The first three years of a child’s life mark a period of extraordinary brain development and synapse growth. Like a sponge, the child absorbs everything around it, etching a record of its sensory experiences in its developing neurons. Social and cultural cues children experience during this period can influence their physiological development, establishing bodily patterns that set the stage for later phases of development.
One of my studies focuses on the belief that boy infants are more physically active than girl infants.4 While the babies in the study show no sex-related differences in their own spontaneous activity, we discovered through detailed observation that the mothers interact with the boys in a more physically active way. They move boy infants, help them sit up, and touch them more often than they do girls.
The impact of the mothers’ behavior may go much deeper than just setting cultural expectations – it could actually have biological consequences. While more testing is needed to understand these biological effects, it is possible that the sensory, motor, and neuromuscular systems of boys develop differently than those of girls, at least partly in response to different patterns of maternal handling.
If biological development is influenced by a child’s environment in this way, “nature” and “nurture” are no longer distinct. They are a developmental unit, two sides of the same coin. Rather than talking about nature versus nurture, we should ask: How is nature being affected by certain kinds of nurturing events?(c) And instead of viewing gender as something inherent and fixed, we should understand it as a developmental process involving the ongoing interaction of genes, hormones, social cues, cultural norms, and other factors.5
Moving beyond the nature versus nurture dichotomy allows us to have a more nuanced, accurate understanding of gender.

Saturday Night Music: Clara Schumann

Clara Schumann (1819-1896) - Nocturne in F major Op.6 No.2 from 'Soirées Musicales' :



Clara Schumann was married to the composer Robert Schumann. She had eight children and:

often took charge of finances and general household affairs. Part of her responsibility included making money, which she did by giving concerts, although she continued to play throughout her life not only for the income, but because she was a concert artist by training and by nature. She was the main breadwinner for her family, and the sole one after Robert was hospitalized and then died, through giving concerts and teaching, and she did most of the work of organizing her own concert tours. She hired a housekeeper and a cook to keep house while she was away on her long tours. She refused to accept charity when a group of musicians offered to put on a benefit concert for her. In addition to raising her own large family, when one of her children became incapacitated, she took on responsibility for raising her grandchildren.

Robert Schumann, on Clara's composing:

Clara has composed a series of small pieces, which show a musical and tender ingenuity such as she has never attained before. But to have children, and a husband who is always living in the realm of imagination, does not go together with composing. She cannot work at it regularly, and I am often disturbed to think how many profound ideas are lost because she cannot work them out.

The list of her compositions can be found here.

More Vacation Impressions: On Grrl Painters, Multiculturalism and the Sky

I parked next to a painters' van.  Two house painters in their white overalls got out of it, both young women with long braids.  Not a common sight in the US.  More cultural differences.

The local political topics include a debate about Finnish  multiculturalism and/or its absence.  The latter seems to be* equated with racism.   I haven't studied the various concepts of multiculturalism(s) enough to understand that exact equivalence,  but I'd love to learn how different concepts of multiculturalism solve the contradiction between, say, the goals of gender equality or LGBT rights with the simultaneous acceptance of those cultural-religious values which are built on gender inequality and the desire to criminalize lesbian and gay lifestyles.**

Or am I defining "culture" incorrectly here?  What IS it in the context of multiculturalism anyway?  What happens when "side-by-side" cultures clash in a multicultural society?  Who are the representatives of a minority culture in wider public debates?  The old powerful guys? And is it they who decide what their cultures mean?  Sometimes it looks like that to me
On the other hand, if cultures are defined by excluding those bits I detest (lower status of women etc.), then I'm all for multiculturalism.  Let all flowers bloom!

How's that for a bit of fuzzy thinking and blogging?  The sad thing is  that most every blogging topic requires an enormous amount of silent and boring  research work, and I'm on vacation, so you only get my naive initial thoughts on that topic.  But it's crucial that we discuss and understand the way feminism relates to multiculturalism, and that debate must include the way those concepts are seen from the inside of various cultures, not just from some academic angle.

 The sky.  I can't get enough of the sky.  Why does it look bigger here?  Is it because of the latitude?  Clean air?  Also, I saw a cloud in the shape of a slithering snake today.  To welcome me.

Almost forgot!  Croissants are about 40 cents each, presumably because they are shipped frozen-and-unbaked from the European South in large batches.  They are  then baked here.  The economies to scale must be why the prices are so low.

-------
*  How to define sexism and racism?  The definitions are tricky and often cover many different phenomena, but usually sexism is based on the perceived female gender of its object combined with overall unwarranted negative views about women as a class, and usually racism is based on the perceived race of its object and on negative unwarranted views about individuals of that perceived race as a class.  Note that it doesn't matter if race is not a real biological concept for these purposes.

Having negative views about a culture doesn't seem to me to be the same as racism.  What it is requires a long post on its own.  I should point out here that all cultures have something to criticize and something to praise.  A baseless criticism of a culture, would, however, have some of the flavor of sexism and racism, but it needs its own name.

** Is the US a multicultural society?  For example, do the Christian fundamentalist form a culture which we should respect, along with many others?  Given the cultural values of women's subjugation and opposition to LGBT rights in that culture, what would it mean for me, say, to respect it?

The Ur-Slut and Pay-For-Your-Own Fornication. How Conservatives Respond to Worries About the Hobby Lobby Decision. A Re-Posting

This post is roughly a year old by now, but it still reads well to me as my opinions about the ur-slut question:  the way conservatives view sex as a ballgame where men are supposed to always try for sex while women are expected to defend the "net."  If men get the ball in the goal, then the women are sluts.

But wait, there's more:  The post also describes the ideological background of the Hobby Lobby decision and in general provides a bridge of understanding:  Liberals need to know what conservatives mean by sex (unmarried, wild, carried out by women all on their own), who is not supposed to have it (repeat previous message in parentheses)  and who presumably benefits from unfair government subsidies (repeat previous message in parentheses).

Go here to read the post.

From My Classics Archives: The Day of Retribution. On Elliot Rodger, the Butcher of Santa Barbara

(This mini-series of classics covers a few of my recent long posts, the ones that required a lot of hard work.  Each of them is of value about the individual phenomenon it covers, but I hope that each of them is also of value in a more general sense. 

As an example, I wrote about the murders Elliot Rodger committed as an example of how misogyny intertwines with potential mental illness and how various Internet sites might support those misogynistic attitudes, thus making future massacres more likely.  Thus, the post teaches us something about how misogyny is seeded, watered and tended and what its flowers might look like.  But the basic principles can be applied to white supremacist sites, ISIS sites and so on.)

Read the original post.

Why Price Competition Doesn't Work in Most Health Care Markets. A Re-Posting.

(This is from last December, but everything in it still applies.  Indeed, those conservatives who worship the free-market-gods should know that economists widely acknowledge health care to be the one market where most everything that can go wrong with unregulated markets will go wrong.  That's because of the very nature of the services which are traded.) 

The New York Times has published a good article on the wildly varying prices for diagnostic procedures and the apparent stickiness of those prices at the upper tail of the distribution.  The quickest possible look tells us that the prices are not set based on some kind of marginal cost thinking, as simple market models assume.  For example:

With pricing uncoupled from the actual cost of business, large disparities have evolved. The five hospitals within a 15-mile radius of Mr. Charlap’s home here charge an average of about $5,200 for an echocardiogram, according to an analysis of Medicare’s database. The seven teaching hospitals in Boston, affiliated with Harvard, Tufts and Boston University, charge an average of about $1,300 for the same test. There are even wide variations within cities: In Philadelphia, prices range from $700 to $12,000.

You don't need to know anything more than that to know that the markets are not truly competitive, that consumers are uninformed about the prices (except after the fact when it's too late to shop around) and that the supply side has price-setting power.

In other words, competition doesn't lower prices*.  Rather the reverse, in fact:

Greetings from Yurp

I forgot to put up the usual gone-to-the-beach post, to let you know  that  I'm on vacation.  This time I'm going to write a few posts every week, tho I also prepared a lot of posts for you in July*, just in case I actually go to the beach!

Anyway, here are my first Finnish impressions**:

The sky is very very blue, the clouds are fat three-dimensional sheep, and what's a heatwave here requires a woolen sweater.

Lots of dads out alone with their kids***, running errands, doing the grocery shopping or just having fun.  The difference is significant compared to my usual US location (where dads-with-kids is a weekend phenomenon), and it's probably a cultural difference.

More women delivering heavy parcels to shops, more women driving buses and trucks.  Another cultural difference.

More people, including old people, on bikes everywhere.

Salty liquorice.  I've missed it, though you might not.

________

* This is so that you won't desert me!  I am very insecure.  Also, most of the stuff is pretty good.
** The kind which might be of interest to my sweet and erudite readers.  I haven't had time to learn much about the local politics yet.
*** Unless they are those Swedish male nannies.

Motherhood Tuesday 1. How To Make Being A Mother More Difficult And Other Pertinent Issues

The posts on the next four Tuesdays will be about research and media debates about motherhood.  Not about parenthood, mind you, but motherhood, though there is overlap between the way the two terms are viewed.  It's pretty rare, even today, to have a lot of research on fatherhood.  But some exists, and I talk about the problems about that in a few weeks' time.

Today's topic, expressed in this 2013 post, has to do with aspects of motherhood which are not quite as visible but very much present.  For example, in that post I write:

Something every bit as bizarre applies to fertility.  It struck me forcibly some days ago, and I had to stew the idea for a bit to decide if I'm oversensitive or not.  I decided I am not.
Here's the thought:  If you wanted to make having children as difficult and costly as possible, both in monetary and psychological ways, how would you go about doing it?  I think the answer is that you would follow many of the current policies in the US:  Minimize parental leave, refuse to make allowances for fertility in how the labor markets treat workers (no subsidized daycare, no real flexitime etc.) assume that all childcare will be done by the woman who gave birth to the child, fight to remove subsidized education as a viable alternative and support instead home-schooling, largely done by mothers.
Or think of the literature on child development.  Ninety-nine percent of articles about parenting are about the mothers, and the vast majority of those look at what mothers are doing wrong (not enough breast-feeding, not enough bonding, too much bonding,  too much fatty food cooked for the children, the cooking always assumed to be the mother's responsibility, bad mother-child relationships as the cause of childhood depression etc etc.)  And the later popular-psychology pieces are still very often about bad mothers and how they messed up their children.  Think of the "Mommy Dearest" branch of memoirs.  Think also of the Control Of The Bad Mother movement!  This begins before the child is even born.
Then add the legal rules about what constitutes child neglect (leaving a child under twelve alone in a parked car for a few minutes, say), the persistent media-supported fears about pedophilia, the requirement that middle-class parents (mothers) chauffeur their children from one event to another, how listening to Mozart during pregnancy or watching Little Einstein after it with the baby are necessary parts of child-rearing and if you don't follow them, you are a Bad Mother.  Or a Bad Parent.  At the same time, the wider public spaces are ultimately not child-friendly at all, what with complaints from other plane passengers or other restaurant diners etc.
The restrictions on parental life keep growing, and the guilt (aimed at mothers, in particular)  comes from all directions, including from other mothers in the Mommy Wars.  But to an alien from outer space, whatever gender that creature might be, all this surely looks like an intentional policy to cut back on fertility rates!

The obvious flaw in that last sentence is that the US does NOT want to reduce fertility rates!  The Republicans want more white children, for one thing, and the forced-birthers don't want women to have so much power over whether they will become mothers or not.

At the same time, the actual US policies are largely anti-children and certainly not supportive of parents.

Research Monday 1: On Retractions, Failures To Replicate and Other Bad Stuff

You get a flavor of the problems salivating and short-sighted popularization of "sexy" studies can create from this post.

I strongly recommend reading it, about a retraction of a study which argued that women are more likely to orgasm while having sex with wealthy men, because the failure it describes is a severe one, and that failure is the reluctance of journalists to tell us which studies turned out to be rubbish, especially after those same journalists avidly publicized them.  This means that it is the flawed results which readers of those journalists will believe in.

An example of a possible failure for a study to replicate is discussed in this post.  It's worth noting that NYT's John Tierney popularized the first study in his column, but as far as I can tell he never discussed the second study.  As an aside, John Tierney never found a study about the perfidy of women that wasn't worth publishing!  I have the material for that post but haven't had the time to write it up yet.

Finally, this post is all about the great interest in women's eggs and ovulation, with some pertinent links to what can go wrong in research if only people with the same bias (like the same religion) carry it out.

I keep harping on these problems not because I wouldn't love research.  I adore it!  And that's why I want it to do better.  It's my form of tough love.

Meanwhile, in Colorado, a successful birth control program will not get government funding

This is the program, from a 2014 article:

Colorado's teen birth rate dropped 40% between 2009 and 2013, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment announced this week, in part due to a program that provides long-acting contraception to low-income women.

Colorado's Family Planning Initiative provided funding for 68 family clinics across the state to offer around 30,000 intrauterine devices and implants to young women at low or no cost.

The program was funded by a private donor.

Now you would think that the pro-lifers would love (love!) this program!  It had a large impact on unplanned pregnancies and most likely reduced abortions.  What's not to like?

But the Republican lawmakers  in Colorado refused to fund the program, despite the other benefits it would have conveyed:

Colorado officials say the program saved taxpayers $80 million in Medicaid costs they would have otherwise paid to care for new mothers and their children.

More than one explanation has been proposed for this odd decision (odd from the angle of any sane person). 

Some forced-birthers think intrauterine devices are abortions in themselves, some argue that the government shouldn't step between parents (the rightful owners of their children's sexuality) and their teenage daughters:

Colorado Family Action, which opposed state funding for the program, said using taxpayer dollars would have inappropriately inserted the government between children and their parents.
"We believe that offering contraceptives to teens, especially long-acting reversible contraceptives, while it may prevent pregnancy, does not help them understand the risks that come with sexual activities," CFA said in a statement. "We should not remove parents from the equation — equipping teens for safe sex without their parent's involvement bypasses this critical parental right and responsibility. Parents need to be the primary educator when it comes to sexual education and the primary decision about healthcare choices for their children. Lastly, Colorado taxpayers should not be paying for the 'Cadillac' of birth control for minor children."

Bolds are mine.

That quoted passage makes me almost wordless. 

And that's terrible for a blogger.  The only words I can find about that desire to really really punish teenagers so that they can viscerally understand the risks that come with sexual activities are words which describe the CFA as utter assholes, getting a hard-on from the suffering of others, getting confused about who is the divine power here and so on.

The 'Cadillac' of birth control programs?  Honestly?  Does that statement refer to the fact that IUDs have a very low failure rate as contraceptives?  Should minor children just use withdrawal and praying if they have sex?   Like an old banger birth control program?

A similar comment by one opponent of the program matters, too:

The bipartisan House proposal wanted $5 million in funding to give IUDs to teenage girls. Rep. Lori Saine opposed the House bill, saying the program encouraged more sex.
“So in this scenario, the government is subsidizing sex… because a woman typically doesn’t get birth control to hold hands and watch re-runs of ‘Gilligan’s Island.’”

How might one reconcile all that with the pro-life stance of most Colorado GOP lawmakers?  That teenagers should not have "subsidized" sex but if they do have it they should suffer in appropriate forms.  For teenage girls* that means giving birth to a child they may not be able to support and then having the taxpayers of Colorado support that child.

I'm sitting here pulling all my scales off.  No country in known history has completely managed to stop teenagers from having sex (even when the punishment is being stoned to death), and no abstinence-only program has shown any real effectiveness (except in putting a lot of money into the coffers of the abstinence organizations).

Stories like this one tell me what the real objectives of many pro-lifers are.
------
*Fascinating that it's mostly women and girls who are expected to suffer for having sex.  Men and boys may be caught by having to pay child maintenance but that's an unintended side-effect of the desire to police the sexual behavior of female people.

I'm Not Going to Write About Camille Paglia's New Weirdness

Though you can read about it by following the quote in this post.  Paglia's new weirdness is the same as her old weirdness, an odd view of the world where the men and Camille are the natural predators of sex and that's the normal state of things.

Molly Ivins said in 1991 what needs to be said about Paglia:

“So write about Camille Paglia,” suggested the editor. Like any normal person, I replied, “And who the hell might she be?”
Big cheese in New York intellectual circles. The latest rage. Hot stuff. Controversial.
But I’m not good on New York intellectual controversies, I explained. Could never bring myself to give a rat’s ass about Jerzy Kosinski. Never read Andy Warhol’s diaries. Can never remember the name of the editor of this New Whatsit, the neo-con critical rag. I’m a no-hoper on this stuff, practically a professional provincial.
Read Paglia, says he, you’ll have an opinion. So I did; and I do.
Christ! Get this woman a Valium!
Hand her a gin. Try meditation. Camille, honey, calm down!
The noise is about her oeuvre, as we always say in Lubbock: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. In very brief, for those of you who have been playing hooky from the New York Review of Books, Ms. Paglia’s contention is that “the history of western civilization has been a constant struggle between . . . two impulses, an unending tennis match between cold, Apollonian categorization and Dionysian lust and chaos.”
Jeez, me too. I always thought the world was divided into only two kinds of people — those who think the world is divided into only two kinds of people, and those who don’t.
You think perhaps this is a cheap shot, that I have searched her work and caught Ms. Paglia in a rare moment of sweeping generalization, easy to make fun of? Au contraire, as we always say in Amarillo; the sweeping generalization is her signature. In fact, her work consists of damn little else. She is the queen of the categorical statement.
Never one to dodge a simple dichotomy when she can set one up, Ms. Paglia holds that the entire error of western civilization stems from denying that nature is a kind of nasty, funky, violent, wet dream, and that Judeo-Christianity has been one long effort to ignore this. She pegs poor old Rousseau, that fathead, as the initiator of the silly notion that nature is benign and glorious and that only civilization corrupts.
Right away, I got a problem. Happens I have spent a lot of my life in the wilderness, and also a lot of my life in bars. When I want sex and violence, I go to a Texas honky-tonk. When I want peace and quiet, I head for the woods. Just as a minor historical correction to Ms. Paglia, Rousseau did not invent the concept of benign Nature. Among the first writers to hold that nature was a more salubrious environment for man than the corruptions of civilization were the Roman Stoics — rather a clear-eyed lot, I always thought.
Now why, you naturally ask, would anyone care about whether a reviewer has ever done any serious camping? Ah, but you do not yet know the Camille Paglia school of I-am-the-cosmos argument. Ms. Paglia believes that all her personal experiences are Seminal. Indeed, Definitive. She credits a large part of her supposed wisdom to having been born post-World War II and thus having been raised on television. Damn me, so was I.
In addition to the intrinsic cultural superiority Ms. Paglia attributes to herself from having grown up watching television (“It’s Howdy-Doody Time” obviously made us all smarter), she also considers her own taste in music to be of enormous significance. “From the moment the feminist movement was born, it descended into dogma,” she told an interviewer for New York magazine. “They stifled any kind of debate, any kind of dissent. Okay, it’s Yale, it’s New Haven in ’69, I am a rock fanatic, okay . . . So I was talking about taste to these female rock musicians, and I said the Rolling Stones were the greatest rock band, and that just set them off. They said, ‘The Rolling Stones are sexist, and it’s bad music because it’s sexist.’ I said: ‘Wait a minute. You can’t make a judgments about art on the basis of whether it fits into some dogma.’ And now they’re yelling, screaming, saying that nothing that demeans women can be art.
“You see, right from the start it was impossible for me to be taken into the feminist movement, okay? The only art they will permit is art that gives a positive image of women. I said, ‘That’s like the Soviet Union; that is the demagogic, propagandistic view of art.’ ”
Well, by George, as a First Amendment absolutist, you’ll find me willing to spring to the defense of Camille Paglia’s right to be a feminist Rolling Stones fan any hour, day or night. Come to think of it, who the hell was the Stalin who wouldn’t let her do that? I went back and researched the ’69 politburo, and all I could find was Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, and Gloria Steinem, none of whom ever seems to have come out against rock music.
I have myself quite cheerfully been both a country-music fan and a feminist for years — if Camille Paglia is the cosmos, so am I. When some fellow feminist doesn’t like my music (How could you not like “You are just another sticky wheel on the grocery cart of life”?), I have always felt free to say, in my politically correct feminist fashion, “Fuck off.”
In a conversation printed in Harper’s magazine, Paglia held forth on on of her favorite themes — Madonna, the pop singer: “The latest atavistic discoverer of the pagan heart of Catholicism is Madonna. This is what she’s up to. She doesn’t completely understand it herself. When she goes on Nightline and makes speeches about celebrating the body, as if she’s some sort of Woodstock hippie, she’s way off. She needs me to tell her.” I doubt that.
Bram Dijkstra, author of a much-praised book, Idols of Perversity, which is a sort of mirror image of Sexual Personae, said that Paglia  “literally drags the whole nineteenth-century ideological structure back into the late-eighteenth century, really completely unchanged. What’s so amazing is that she takes all that nineteenth-century stuff, Darwinism and social Darwinism, and she re-asserts it and reaffirms it in this incredibly dualistic fashion. In any situation, she establishes the lowest common denominator of a point. She says, `This is the feminist point of view,’ and overturns it by standing it on its head. She doesn’t go outside what she critiques; she simply puts out the opposite of it.”
“For example,” Dijkstra continues, “she claims, `Feminism blames rape on pornography,’ which is truly the reductio ad absurdum of the feminist point of view. Of course, there are very many feminist points of view, but then she blows away this extremely simplified opposite, and we are supposed to consider this erudition. She writes aphorisms and then throws them out, one after the other, so rapid-fire the reader is exhausted.”
Tracing Paglia’s intellectual ancestry is a telling exercise; she’s the lineal descendant of Ayn Rand, who in turn was a student of William Graham Sumner, one of the early American sociologists and an enormously successful popularizer of social Darwinism. Sumner was in turn a disciple of Herbert Spencer, that splendid nineteenth-century kook. Because Paglia reasserts ideas so ingrained in our thinking, she has become popular by reaffirming common prejudices.
Paglia’s obsession with de Sade is beyond my competence, although the glorification of sadomasochism can easily be read as a rationalization of bondage into imagined power, a characteristic process of masochistic transfer. Dijkstra suggests that the Sadean notion of the executioner’s assistant is critical to her thinking, though one wonders if there is not also some identification with de Sade the Catholic aristocrat.
Paglia’s view of sex — that it is irrational, violent, immoral, and wounding — is so glum that one hesitates to suggest that it might be instead, well, a lot of fun, and maybe even affectionate and loving. Far less forgivable is Paglia’s consistent confusion of feminism with yuppies. What does she think she’s doing? Paglia holds feminists responsible for the bizarre blight created by John T. Molloy, author of Dress for Success, which caused a blessedly brief crop of young women, all apparently aspiring to be executive vice-presidents, to appear in the corporate halls wearing those awful sand-colored baggy suits with little floppy bow ties around their necks.
Why Paglia lays the blame for this at the feet of feminism is beyond me. Whatever our other aims may have been, no one in the feminist movement ever thought you are what you wear. The only coherent fashion statement I can recall from the entire movement was the suggestion that Mrs. Cleaver, Beaver’s mom, would on the whole have been a happier woman had she not persisted in vacuuming while wearing high heels. This, I still believe.
In an even more hilarious leap, Paglia contends that feminism is responsible for the aerobics craze and concern over thin thighs. Speaking as a beer-drinking feminist whose idea of watching her diet is to choose either the baked potato with sour cream or with butter, but not with both, I find this loony beyond all hope — and I am the cosmos, too.
What we have here, fellow citizens, is a crassly egocentric, raving twit. The Norman Podhoretz of our gender. That this woman is actually taken seriously as a thinker in New York intellectual circles is a clear sign of decadence, decay, and hopeless pinheadedness. Has no one in the nation’s intellectual capital the background and ability to see through a web of categorical assertions? One fashionable line of response to Paglia is to claim that even though she may be fundamentally off-base, she has “flashes of brilliance.” If so, I missed them in her oceans of swill.
One of her latest efforts at playing enfant terrible in intellectual circles was a peppy essay for Newsday, claiming that either there is no such thing as date rape or, if there is, it’s women’s fault because we dress so provocatively. Thanks, Camille, I’ve got some Texas fraternity boys I want you to meet.
There is one area in which I think Paglia and I would agree that politically correct feminism has produced a noticeable inequity. Nowadays, when a woman behaves in a hysterical and disagreeable fashion, we say, “Poor dear, it’s probably PMS.” Whereas, if a man behaves in a hysterical and disagreeable fashion, we say, “What an asshole.”
Let me leap to correct this unfairness by saying of Paglia, Sheesh, what an asshole.

A Fluff Post About Me

An arborist pruned the trees which touch Important Wires to the Snakepit Inc, and also pruned the Internet wire. I had about thirty hours without an Internet connection (the backup plan failed for different reasons) which made me realize that I'm addicted to this sh*t!

I missed you all, even though you are invisible critters only existing in my imagination!  I missed even the inane Twitter fights I sometimes follow (with a glass of nectar and some popcorn or while rending my clothes out of grief or anger).  I would have chewed my finger nails if snakes had any, but I certainly slithered around the house trying not to wash windows.

The reason for not washing the windows is that I'm not allowed to.  I still haven't gotten the all-clear x-ray on that pesky broken humerus right below the shoulder bone, though I've mostly mended.  I have a physical therapist who is into good pain (ouch) and stuff, and I follow every rule and train every move.  My right arm now goes vertical with some ease, though it still can't go further back from that vertical position as my left arm can.  They need to match, right?  At the end of the struggle.

The Mystery of ISIS? Where Echidne Adds Her Straws To The Anthill.

Two recent articles ask whether the phenomenon that is the Islamic State or ISIS or IS or ISIL took the Western world by surprise and why.  The first, by "Anonymous" in the New York Review of Books, argues that:

The problem, however, lies not in chronicling the successes of the movement, but in explaining how something so improbable became possible. The explanations so often given for its rise—the anger of Sunni communities, the logistical support provided by other states and groups, the movement’s social media campaigns, its leadership, its tactics, its governance, its revenue streams, and its ability to attract tens of thousands of foreign fighters—fall far short of a convincing theory of the movement’s success.

The anonymous author then explains, in great detail, the reasons why nobody could predict the birth of something as horrible as the Islamic State, and why nobody can truly predict its next success or failure.  The article concludes:

I have often been tempted to argue that we simply need more and better information. But that is to underestimate the alien and bewildering nature of this phenomenon. To take only one example, five years ago not even the most austere Salafi theorists advocated the reintroduction of slavery; but ISIS has in fact imposed it. Nothing since the triumph of the Vandals in Roman North Africa has seemed so sudden, incomprehensible, and difficult to reverse as the rise of ISIS. None of our analysts, soldiers, diplomats, intelligence officers, politicians, or journalists has yet produced an explanation rich enough—even in hindsight—to have predicted the movement’s rise.

A response to that article by Elias Groll in  Foreign Policy partly agrees with "Anonymous," and then adds a different explanation  for the large number of foreign fighters the Islamic State has been able to attract:

But other parts of the essay are marked by the author throwing up his (or her) hands at trying to understand how extreme violence and depravity can in fact be appealing to the group’s recruits. Foreign fighters from around the world have joined the group: Norway, Egypt, Tunisia, France, Yemen, and Canada. Whether in wealthy social democracies or poor dictatorships, the Islamic State has managed to find recruits, leading the author to question theories that “social exclusion, poverty, or inequality” drive people to join the group.

Here, the author seems to want not to understand why violent nihilism can be attractive, almost as if she or he were afraid what she or he might find. “I have often been tempted to argue that we simply need more and better information,” the author writes. “It is not clear whether our culture can ever develop sufficient knowledge, rigor, imagination, and humility to grasp the phenomenon of ISIS.”

But social exclusion, poverty, and inequality exist in both Norway and Egypt, albeit in different numbers. According to champions of that theory of jihadi recruitment, the foreign fighter phenomenon transcends borders because those conditions do as well. Even if our understanding of foreign fighter recruiting is not complete, what we do know gives us some idea of how we arrived at this juncture in history.

I spent several days last winter* reading the Twitter interactions of those who belong to ISIS or wish to belong to ISIS or admire ISIS.  I also spent several additional days reading the quotes from the Koran or the hadiths or the sayings by various ancient theologians in Islam that the ISIS sympathizers especially liked.  It's worth pointing out that all those quotes are very selective**, all supporting a violent approach to the infidels, all taking the idea of an end-times caliphate as immanent, as unavoidable and as showing its beginnings in the Islamic State. 

That experience showed me a side to the "mystery" of ISIS that people whose roots are firmly intertwined with pragmatic international politics might miss:  The role of the more literal or radical interpretation of the Salafist/Wahhabist doctrines in Islam.***

If I understood what I read correctly a belief in the end-times caliphate is as integral part of Islamic teachings as the belief in the final day of judgement is in Christianity.  Even if I'm wrong about that, it's worth thinking about how a young Muslim in, say, Europe, with various frustrations in his own life****, might interpret the call to come and be one of the forefathers of that caliphate, to help build a real counterweight for the Western hegemony in this world, to make it possible for Muslims everywhere to once again hold their heads up high.  And all that is the desire — nay, the command — of the divine power!

Those last sentences are gleaned from my readings.  I saw a lot of references not to individuals being oppressed or treated with racism in, say, Germany or France, but to the treatment of Islam as a faith in the West (the banning of the veil in schools in  France was often given as an example, but some also argue that Islam should be the ruling religion everywhere).

Indeed, for many of the foreign fighters who have joined ISIS the battle appears to be both against the infidel West and against any other sect in Islam except Wahhabism, though Shias are certainly viewed with as great a contempt as non-Muslims.

But all that might only apply to the relatively small contingency of ISIS fighters from Europe and North America.  Many of those foreign fighters come from Saudi Arabia or Tunisia, and their motivations may or may not differ.  The recent and earlier colonialist policies of the West in general and the US in particular  are obviously relevant for the initial anger and frustration, and so is the everlasting Israel-Palestine conflict.

And the reasons why domestic fighters in Syria and Iraq have joined ISIS probably differ from those I have mentioned above.  The Shia-Sunni hostilities are a much more important determinant for Iraqi members of ISIS, for example.

Still, the particular form ISIS has taken (an ultra-religious theocracy with extremely stringent rules) is a pretty clear reminder to all of us that religion is the flag the Middle Eastern rebellions have chosen and that we cannot ignore the Wahhabist version of Islam if we attempt to unravel the mystery that is ISIS.   It's necessary to learn how a religious worldview looks, to spend some time among the fervent believers, to understand what motivates them, and also to understand which aspects of reality they completely repudiate or ignore.

------
* This was for writing my series on the Islamic State and women.   I write about Western women who have joined ISIS here.  (From one angle it's much easier to see why some not-so-religious Western Muslim men might join ISIS as fighters:  Free housing, good income, access to as many women as one wishes (up to four wives, any number of slaves for sex), a Rambo-type hero status in the community, and a promise of a first class ticket to paradise if "martyred."  To see why women join you must read my post.)

**  This one, for example, never crops up.

****  Even in Europe the influence of Salafist/Wahhabist doctrines is growing.  This is probably linked to the funding of mosques all over the world by Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

**** These could be frustrations caused by poverty or racism or something more personal (such as the death of a parent which leads to increased religious searching and then to Salafism).  The anecdotal data I collected on Western women who have joined ISIS does not suggest that they were especially poor, rather the opposite.  Many, if not most, were middle class and fairly well educated.

On the other hand, several of the named terrorists associated with ISIS have had criminal records in the West.  Those records may be a response to poverty or discrimination or they may indicate someone with a violent personality or both.

At the same time, recent immigrants to the industrialized West tend to be poorer than their new host country, on average.  If you add to that the lack of integration in, say, France and the UK, and the general increasing geographic isolation of Muslim immigrants in many European countries you may be creating a situation where the messages from ISIS strike a chord.

Some have also suggested that the European-origin ISIS fighters have a higher percentage of recent converts than would be expected by the overall numbers of such converts.  Perhaps recent converts tend to be more extremist in their beliefs.

Elite Young Women Now Plan For Career Interruptions. So the New York Times Tells Us.

This NYT story about young women planning more career pauses than their mothers has a couple of weird bits, starting with the headline.  That's because the evidence quoted in the piece is predominantly about very highly educated men and women in elite colleges, and I'd be willing to bet  that few of the mothers of those people went to Harvard Business School,say.

But I get the point, of course, and that is to compare generations of women.  One study Claire Cain Miller, the author of the article, cites is about Harvard MBAs from various generations, both men and women.  Miller writes:

A survey of Harvard Business School alumni, released as part of the school’s new gender initiative, found that 37 percent of millennial women and 42 percent of those already married planned to interrupt their career for family. That compared with 28 percent of Generation X women and 17 percent of baby boomers.

As an aside, I couldn't quite figure out what "interrupt" means from the survey report itself (which doesn't include the questions asked). Does it mean only time taken off from the labor market?  Or does it also include choosing to work part-time or picking a more flexible (but probably less remunerative) job?

Similar numbers for men in those cohorts were 13% for millennial men, and miniscule percentages for Generation X men (4%) and baby boomers (3%).

But what's more important than the comparison between the expectations of,  say, women of the boomer generation and millennial women is to ask whether those expectations materialized.  

The data for the millennials is somewhat meaningless for that, given their young average age.  But note that while only 17% of baby boomer women expected to interrupt their careers for family reasons, 56% actually experienced them.  Likewise, 28% of Generation X expected such interruptions but 43% experienced them.

Thus, unless millennial women and men are much better planners than the men and women of earlier generations, those expectations might not predict very much, in any particular direction*.  It's also worth pointing out that female Harvard MBAs  in the baby boomer and older generations  were often path-breakers who had higher career expectations than the women following their footsteps, and this makes straightforward comparisons between the generations trickier.

Still,  the difference in the percentages of millennial women and men who expect to interrupt their careers for family reasons does not bode well for increasing women in various decision-making rules in business (though the much-increased percentage of millennial men over earlier generations expecting career interruptions may presage future changes in the allocation of childcare duties).  That's because the labor markets currently punish those who interrupt their careers and make future promotions much less likely.

The final weird point is perhaps how those above percentages are used.  For instance, the majority of the millennial women interviewed in that study, 63%, are not expecting to interrupt their careers for family reasons.  But that's not news.

The same study could have been used to analyze many other aspects of gender differences in the experiences of Harvard MBAs, too.  Women are doing quite well in some aspects (many more women are now in line management (70% of those interviewed) rather than in staff positions), not so well in other aspects (women are less satisfied with their careers, on average, than men, and some of that appears directly to reflect those thorny decisions about whose career should come first and who should be responsible for childcare and household chores).

But certain topics are prioritized for wider dissemination.  I can't help feeling that they are those topics which tell us that mothers can safely be left responsible for all child-care and all the opportunity costs that entails while the rest of the society can concentrate on other things.  I also very much doubt that we will see a reversal of this article any time soon.  Yet the data exists, including in the Harvard MBA study I quote here.

So are these young elite women** more realistic about their futures than previous generations of women?  Before trying to answer that question it's good to remind ourselves of the lack of true parental leaves in this country, of the basic hostility of the labor market towards any worker who doesn't seem to put the job first and of the very slow change in traditional gender roles at home.

The lack of flexibility and/or its high costs to the workers ultimately hurts both male and female workers on all income levels, especially on the lowest income levels.  I'm not sure that the best response to that is to tell us how a few elite women have figured how to cope with the facts on their own, unless we also have a more widespread campaign to change the underlying obstacles I've described.

-------
*It could be, of course, that expecting such interruptions makes some women choose so-called mommy track jobs.  That, in itself, could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
**The study covers racial and ethnic differences, but by its very nature its focus is on a very privileged group of men and women.

An Autopsy of A Mass Murderer

The coverage of mass murderers, after the massacres they inflict on us, reminds me of a very flawed and partial autopsy*, carried out by the media and also by various experts.

It's as if we open the stomach, check out the liver, the heart and lungs, remove the pancreas and the spleen, all the time looking, looking for why this particular person (well, this particular man) hated humankind or some of its subgroups (people of other races, of other religions, people who are female), why this particular person needed to imitate a deranged and vengeful god, why, why and why.

Is that a spot of racism on the lungs I see? Or a heart full of misogyny (see how dark the clotted blood is)?  And that spleen, see  how mottled it is with extremist thoughts, the objectification and nullification of the humanity of others?  We open the skull and eagerly peer in.  How did this particular murderer  become what he was?  Did he have a violent history?  Did he abuse his wife?  Did he write diatribes on extremist web sites against blacks or against Jews or Muslims against women or the government (as an embodiment of everybody?)?  Did his writings adulate ISIS?  And can you, too, smell the mental illness all over the corpse, notice the metastasized cancer of end-time thoughts, the joy of destruction, the way violence as a way of life is tattooed on that dead skin?

We do all this by interviewing the family and neighbors of the killer, by finding out how he spent his time on the Internet, by combing through his criminal records, his past work history, and then we try to nail our diagnosis to his own words.

In doing that we try to differentiate between mental illness, between extremist political and religious ideas, between those who look to us like terrorists and those who look to us as something else.  Was the murderer's intention to frighten others, were his real victims not those he killed (because they were only tools) but those who watched these autopsies afterwards?  Or did he ultimately not care about his victims, not seeing them as anything but the best place to light up his fireworks or as the proper sacrifices for the vengeful war god to perform?