Snippet Posts, 11/5/15: On the Dangers of Open-Carry Laws And The Early Demise of Poorer Non-Hispanic White Americans

1.  The Colorado shooting rampage touches upon one often-ignored way other people's right to open-carry endangers any potential victim of mass shooters:

Two days before Noah Harpham killed three people in a Colorado Springs shooting rampage, the 33-year-old wrote an incoherent Internet essay post and rambled in a video uploaded to YouTube.

...

Bettis said she recognized the gunman as her neighbor — whom she didn't know by name — and that before the initial slaying she saw him roaming outside with a rifle. She called 911 to report the man, but a dispatcher explained that Colorado has an open carry law that allows public handling of firearms.

Bolds are mine.

This phenomenon isn't limited to just guns, but it's pretty common there.  In this case the police didn't act as rapidly as would have been the case if open-carry had been illegal*.  Whether some of the victims might have been saved under that scenario is unclear.  But worth thinking about.



2.  A new study looks at the death rates among Americans between ages 45 and 54.  It argues that something troubling is taking place among poorer white non-Hispanic Americans in that age group:

The recent divergence in death rates between the United States and other rich countries is striking. Between 1979 and 1999, Case and Deaton show, mortality for white Americans ages 45 to 54 had declined at nearly 2 percent per year. That was about the same as the average rate of decline in mortality for all people the same age in such countries as France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Sweden. (See figure below.) After 1999, the 2 percent annual decline continued in other industrialized countries and for Hispanics in the United States, but the death rate for middle-aged white non-Hispanic Americans turned around and began rising half a percent a year.

The authors, Anne Case and Angus Deaton, note that white Americans still have a higher life expectancy than black Americans, but the difference between black and white mortality rates (as a ratio where 1 would stand for equal rates) has shrunk from 2.09 in 1999 to 1.40 in 2013.

What's driving these results?  Most of the increase in white non-Hispanic mortality rates in this age group is caused by rising death rates among those with the lowest education levels (and probably therefore the lowest incomes).  And the reasons look to me linked to self-harm:

This increase for whites was largely accounted for by increasing death rates from drug and alcohol poisonings, suicide, and chronic liver diseases and cirrhosis.

I've only skimmed through the study so far, but it's worth pointing out that the various explanations Case and Deaton offer are speculative ones, i.e., not something one could directly deduce from the statistics they report.  This doesn't mean that their proposed explanations wouldn't be the correct ones, of course.** But the data is silent about what's causing these changes. 

Case and Deaton didn't find this pattern among older Americans, who are still all enjoying declining mortality rates (as are blacks and Hispanics in the studied age range).  It would have been interesting to see if the pattern would be visible among Americans younger than the 45-54 age group the study analyzed.

I need to spend more time thinking about that study.  The changes look very recent and pretty drastic, and it's hard not think that they have something to do with the economic despair*** of the least educated middle-aged non-Hispanic whites.  But why wouldn't the same economic despair affect the poor non-Hispanic blacks and Hispanics in that age group in a similar manner?

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Edited later to fix a typo and to add the first footnote.  For the sake of clarity.  I was half-asleep because of fatigue when I wrote the original draft.

*  What I mean when I say that this phenomenon is not limited only to guns is this:  The cues the police uses to judge whether a crime might be taking place are different when the cue behavior itself is illegal than when it is made legal.  In the latter case the old cue is no longer workable.  For a non-gun example, think of masked people entering a bank.  That might cause the bank staff to press the alarm button or call the police.  But if being masked is completely legal they cannot do that or at least get help as fast should a bank robbery indeed be in progress.

** Earlier studies have also found an increase in the mortality rates among poorer white men and especially among poorer white women, so it's clear that something is happening among the poorest non-Hispanic whites which requires attention and analysis not only from economists but also from health care researchers.  But what the specific chains of cause-and-effect might be still remains to be researched.

***Caused by the collapse of the housing markets, the most recent recession, the disappearance of better-paying jobs for those with at most a high-school diploma, the way we are being talked to slowly accept no long-term retirement security and so on. 


 

Short Posts, 2/11/15. On Diplomacy And Human Rights, A God In Your Corner and Gendered Work

1.  "Diplomacy" is like sausage-making.  You don't really want to delve too deep into the process.  An example from today's Eschaton post:

President Karimov is not a man with a big, warm heart.  His human rights record is abominable.

Of course human rights in global politics are mostly used like lipstick on a pig:  as an excuse for something else a country wishes to do that's about money and power.

Hmm.  Why are all my nasty metaphors about pigs?  They are smart animals, probably with good ethics, too.  My apologies for that, dear pigs.

2.  Deus ex machina in action:  

Former House Speaker John Boehner says he used "Catholic guilt" to persuade Paul Ryan to run for speaker.

On CNN's "State of the Union" Sunday Boehner said he invoked God to persuade his fellow Catholic from refusing to run for speaker to agreeing to do so.
Boehner says he told Ryan: "'This isn't about what you want to do. It's about what God wants you to do. And God has told me, he wants you to" run for speaker.

I used the "ex machina" term somewhat differently from its usual definition.  That's because it's so very often used to strangle all criticism, to turn the person interpreting god into some god's henchman (or more rarely his henchwoman, given how little power religions give women to have that cellphone connection to the divine powers).  This troubles me a lot, because it makes debate impossible.

Debate becomes a boxing match where in one corner stands a tiny human, in the other corner all the contradictory and sometimes violent commands some religion has collected, gathered, translated and interpreted over millennia. 

In other words, a god, as brought to you by whatever religion we are talking about, and somewhere inside all that religious information there might just be found a command to squash that tiny human who has dared to raise his or her voice (or dared to use that intelligence which presumably the divine powers donated us).

So no, you can't box with gods.  Unless you are a snake goddess or something similar.  And divine powers really don't care who wins a sporting contest, despite all the athletes who thank god after their victories.  Just a general public information statement.

3.  A recent Finnish dissertation argues that we see work as gendered in ways which affect public policies (link in Finnish, sorry). 

For instance, putting money into male-dominated* industries is viewed as good for the economy (think of fixing roads and bridges or giving subsidies to heavy industry or mining), whereas female-dominated* industries (childcare, teaching, nursing) are seen as expense items, something to cut back when times are harder.  Like the extra parsley sprig on the sandwich. Nice if you can afford it but not necessary.

Of course many of the female-dominated industries are in the public sector or at least largely funded through taxes, and that could explain part of the differences in attitudes.  But it's still true that hiring more teachers or nurses during recessions would raise their taxable income and thus government tax revenues just as well as hiring more road workers or bridge builders would.

So I think there's more to this kind of thinking (which I saw in action during the last US recession; lots of talk about roads and bridges). 

Another reason could be in our tendency to "see" more clearly the concrete products of work rather than the impact of services. 

But it may also be the case that traditional gender roles would make it easier not to notice that caring for children or the sick or the elderly is productive work and deserves payment, because traditionally most of it was done by women outside the formal labor markets.

The author of the dissertation also notes that these tendencies (and the lack of good measures for the outputs of female-dominated industries) could cause pressure for the return of more traditional gender roles if recessions raise labor demand for men but lower it for women. The breadwinner is, after all, most likely to be the spouse who has the highest salary.

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*These terms refer to the numbers of workers in the industry.  If the majority of them are men, for example, then the industry is male-dominated.

On Ivy And Other Pests

The previous post shouldn't have been published because it doesn't say anything useful.  But the work I was doing on it had sent long strands into my mind with all sort of auxiliary roots, and I couldn't pull it out without posting. Well, not without going "ouch."  Like brain ivy.

About ten years ago I bought a lovely little tray of ivy babies.  They were shyly lifting their charming leaves towards me at the nursery, wanting to be adopted, wanting a good home.  And I obliged.  

That's because I had read in a gardening book (one of those highbrow artistic ones) that the ivy would provide a lovely cover for the very ugly fence that came with Snakepit Inc.  Wasn't I clever?

Now fast-forward to the time a few months ago.  See the ivy-covered fence?  See how it groans under the ivy?  And yes, those tall vertical green things are trees.  In fact, all that green is ivy.  The green spilling into the neighbors' lots, that's ivy, too.  And the green thing that looks like a leaning bicycle, that is ivy, too.  Oh, and a bicycle.  Under the ivy is a bicycle.  I must have left it out for a week or so... 

It's not that I haven't fought the ivy over the years, because I have.  But the fight is unfair.  I have two hands (sorta), while the monster has as many roots as it cares to throw out.

OK.  That was making excuses.  You might be glad to hear that the ivy is now gone.  It took a lot of people, gadgets, tools and time though no herbicides.  I will still need to police it for probably another hundred years, because stuff is simmering underground.  But right now things look tidy, and I even found several large sacks of organic fertilizer, a watering can and other sundry items.

Ivy is a useful metaphor* for many things on the Internet, in politics (mind those cute-looking baby politicians, don't take them home) and inside my head.

The lessons I've learned from ivy are many, including the need for objective research before one goes wild over anything, the desire to make those who write about the ease of ivy in the garden to come and stand in my garden for a day (to enjoy a slow strangulation death), the fact that something which looks good, thrives well and doesn't get sick probably will take over the world, and the fact that all things might be acceptable in their proper environment but thugs when let loose outside it.
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*Especially in the way the roots of stuff are so often all over the place, hard to find, hard to eradicate and in how an innocent little theory, apt for its initial use, spreads into this monster which threatens to take over the universe.  But also how research into a topic tends to follow leads which branch all over the place, with tiny extra roots in fertile soils.

Where Echidne Complains About Blogging. Or Researching the Ben Fields Case.

I've been researching the Ben Fields case.  Others have talked about the way black students may be punished more harshly at school than white students (other things being equal*), about the apparent aggressive past  of deputy Ben Fields, about the pedagogical choices available and not available to the teachers in this case and, obviously, about the out-of-proportion violence Fields used against a teenage girl.  Some have also argued that the girl should take some responsibility for her own behavior (refusing repeated orders or requests by teachers and an administrator).

But then, of course, she is sixteen and Ben Fields is an adult.  And yesterday I read in the New York Daily News that the girl had recently lost her mother and is now in foster care.  Something like that could explain aggressive behavior at school, so it is relevant.

Today, however, the reference to the girl's mother's death has been removed from the New York Daily News story.  It seems, based on other sources, that it was the girl's lawyer who gave conflicting accounts.  The New York Daily News now says that the girl lives in a foster home, but this source notes that it isn't clear if this is the case.  But her mother and grandmother are both alive, in contradiction to earlier news.

None of this matters anywhere as much as tossing a teenage girl on the floor and letting her then slide across the room.  Still, I wish journalists took enough time not to disseminate inaccurate information just because of the 24/7 news cycle.

More seriously, I also wish that this country could have a real conversation about what good teaching requires in resources, how we should put more resources into schools which cater for more troubled children and how we should avoid turning everything into a police state.

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*See here  for a reference to a study where the authors state that it controls for the actions of the students.

An Oldie: My Statistics Series

Came across it while searching for something else.  I wrote it nine years ago for the single purpose of helping people to understand opinion polls and some research findings. 

It's not bad (though very limited, like visiting NYC for a week and then making deductions about the US), so you might want to look at it if you need help with means, medians and margins of error.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6

That series also demonstrates a common problem with my writing:  I get tired towards the end.  I should have added a long example with careful explanations.  But I just went on to something more interesting...

Still, it's one opening to the wonderful land of statistics.

From My Can't-Believe-This-Is-True Archives: Harassment in Gaming, Killing Planned Parenthood and Other Issues

1.  The South by Southwest convention cancels a planned panel on harassment in games ("Level Up: Overcoming Harassment in Games") because of threats of violence at the event. 

The ethics of that decision are weird.

Did the organizers think:  We can't talk about this problem because of the problem itself?  Or:  If you threaten us we shall cave in, to maintain apparent peace, at whatever hidden cost to those who are commonly harassed in games?  Or even:   Our real audience didn't like that panel so we canceled it?

You figure that one out, always remembering that we were told  the infamous Gamergate wasn't at all about misogyny but about ethics in game journalism.

2.  It's the legal hunting season for Planned Parenthood by all forced-birthers who wish to take it down.

Texas looks for ways to deny women on Medicaid access to Planned Parenthood clinics, including the ones who don't perform abortions, stating that there are lots and lots of alternative sources of gynecological care for poor women in Texas.

And the next select committee will be on Planned Parenthood.  That's like the replacement for the Benghazi committee!  A war-on-slutty-women committee.  Those are needed to toss fresh meat into the cages in which the Republican Party keeps the forced-birthers.  The political costs of doing so are very low for that party.  That the costs might be very high for poor women who have no real alternative sources for gynecological care matters not at all.

3.  A list-post like this should have at least three things.  Otherwise it looks like a twins post.  But I have too many candidates for the third item, yet none of them is quite correct in the level or type of its irrationality.

For instance, comparing these two sentences given to two individuals in two different states for roughly the same type of crime (rape) could lead one to that scratch-your-head-until-bald-if-not-yet land.  But the situations require a more mature discussion than this post allows, and not only because the cases are not in the same state.

Or take the funny joke Maine's Republican governor Paul LePage blurted out about us wimminfolk not being able to do anything but spend the money of their hard-working husbands, and then put that together with the information that it's governor LePage's wife, Ann LePage, who takes care of his family accounts.

Those kinds of jokes are a dime a dozen (with a few freebies thrown in), and the paradox in them isn't even worth mentioning.  Likewise, the belief that women are terrible drivers thrives even when insurance statistics tend to show the reverse.

That stuff is in the air, my sweetings.

The Benghazi Hearings. Popcorn Time.

I was feeling cruddy yesterday so spent the day in bed watching the hearings until I fell asleep (for sixteen hours and now I'm bright-eyed and bushy-tailed again!).

It was better than a horror movie!  Great fun, indeed.  All Republicans put on their vampire masks and went at Hillary Clinton, all Democrats put on their Superman outfits and defended her.  The contents of the debate, however, were really really stupid crap.

And I'm not saying that because of partisanship.  I very much wanted to understand the complaint the Republicans had.  But it kept shifting, from this person Sidney Blumenthal, to e-mails, to this person Sidney Blumenthal, to absence of e-mails and so on.  Even many conservatives found the questions in the hearings embarrassing.

I missed the last few hours of the hearings (having a Viking-dream instead), so what I leave you with was one round of questioning by Congressman Peter Roskam (R-Illinois):

Representative Peter Roskam, Republican of Illinois, accused Hillary Rodham Clinton of using Libya as an opportunity to burnish her credentials as secretary of state and establish a “Clinton Doctrine.”
In a fiery exchange, Mr. Roskam read a series of emails between Mrs. Clinton and her staff members that he said showed how they were trying to shape the narrative surrounding America’s Libya policy and present Mrs. Clinton in a positive light.
“You were thinking about credit for you, isn’t that right?” said Mr. Roskam, before reading a message from her confidant, Sidney Blumenthal, in which he said that she needed to become the public face of Libya’s political transition.
Mrs. Clinton said that she was proud of the role she had, but that ultimately President Obama made the final decision on Libya. She said it was not unusual for someone in her position to explain foreign policy to the public.
Mr. Roskam disagreed, saying that Mrs. Clinton was being self-serving.
“Let me tell you what I think the Clinton Doctrine is,” he said. “I think it’s where an opportunity is seized to turn progress in Libya into a political win for Hillary Rodham Clinton.”

That part remains etched in my mind because of the viciousness of Mr. Roskam, not because of the obvious question of what all that has to do with whatever the hearings were supposed to be about.  Roskam's voice grated with red-hot hatred, his tone was "J'accuse,"  and his eyes burned with red fire.

It was sooooo good!

Or would have been very good if all this had taken place in Terry Pratchett's fantasy world, Diskworld.  But when it takes place in the country which still is the most powerful in the world, well, you need lots and lots of popcorn to quiet your nervous stomach.

Should Feminism Care About Hillary Clinton Or Other Powerful Women?

Should feminism be at all concerned about rich, white (in the US), educated and relatively powerful women and their problems?   Aren't those women already on the top rungs of the societal power ladders?  Didn't the second wave of feminism mainly benefit them, perhaps at the expense of working class women and women of color ( in the US black women)?  And doesn't all this mean that feminists might spend their effort better than by defending, say, Hillary Clinton when she runs for the US presidency?   After all, she is a woman of privilege.

That paragraph is my attempt to summarize (with a squirt of apple cider vinegar) some of the arguments presented in this National Journal article, about why young feminists might feel ambivalent about Clinton's running or about any powerful women out there (at least white powerful women in the US).  Examples from the article:

Fem­in­ism came to mean something very dif­fer­ent from girl power. And Hil­lary Clin­ton came to look like the sym­bol of an older gen­er­a­tion of wo­men more con­cerned with fe­male em­power­ment—in par­tic­u­lar, with white, middle-class, Amer­ic­an fe­male em­power­ment—than with broad­er is­sues of so­cial and eco­nom­ic justice.

….

To young wo­men like Sylvie Ed­man, a 20-year-old stu­dent at the Uni­versity of Mas­sachu­setts, Am­h­erst, Clin­ton em­bod­ies “cor­por­ate fem­in­ism,” which Ed­man defines con­cisely: “It’s em­power­ing wo­men who are already power­ful.” Clin­ton and Sheryl Sand­berg, the Face­book COO and au­thor of Lean In, are of­ten name-dropped in this con­text; while they ex­per­i­ence sex­ism, the think­ing goes, they’ve been able to dare greatly be­cause of their race and class—while be­ing helped along the way by work­ing-class wo­men and wo­men of col­or who didn’t have the same op­por­tun­it­ies.

——

Aye­sha Sid­diqi, the 24-year-old ed­it­or-in-chief of the on­line magazine The New In­quiry, says that this range of con­cerns should be no sur­prise. “Fem­in­ist is­sues,” she says, “are no more com­plic­ated than the is­sues of people’s lives.” But that philo­sophy makes young wo­men’s views of Clin­ton—and her cam­paign’s ef­forts to gal­van­ize them be­hind her—very com­plic­ated in­deed.

The issues I'm grappling in this post are complicated.  They begin with the question what feminism is.  

Is it an activist movement, focusing on social justice,  which needs to define whom it is trying to help first, in order to best use the limited (very limited) resources of money and time the movement has?

Or is it a theoretical way of analyzing the world, taking apart power structures and then putting them back together, using history, psychology, sociology, political science and plain hard thinking to understand how being defined as a woman or a man affects our lives, paying attention to how class, race, age and other characteristics influence those effects?

Or is it both?   Or even an overall ideology, a large box into which someone puts all the concerns about justice and how societies should be organized?  Almost like a religion?

And what about the idea that feminism should be concerned with all oppressed groups, in the way one young woman defines it in the linked article:

The 17-year-old Viqueira and her high school friend stood off to the side in a small lounge, look­ing like they were dressed for a reg­u­lar day of school. They’d taken the train in from Maple­wood, New Jer­sey. “To me, fem­in­ism isn’t only about want­ing equal­ity for all genders,” Viqueira told me later, “but want­ing and ad­voc­at­ing for the equal­ity of all op­pressed groups, which can and do in­ter­sect.”

What happens if some of those oppressed groups really really want to oppress some of the other oppressed groups?  Which oppressed group would then be prioritized?  What is the role of being viewed as a woman in this kind of feminism?

The background to all these questions are the theories of intersectionality on one hand and of kyriarchy on the other.

The Market Gods In Education

This post on Eschaton  made me think of the way the market gods are usually worshipped*  among conservatives, except when it comes to education.  There the conservatives look at the  situation cross-eyed, arguing BOTH that the markets should provide the remedy** AND that it's fine to cut teachers' retirement benefits and pay and to demonize teachers with no effect at all on how many people want to become teachers or what the quality of their preparation might be.

But anyone who has taken even one economics course (the most dangerous amount to take, by the way, is one course) knows that if you lower the monetary benefits of a job and also make it psychologically less appealing you are going to get a drop in the numbers of people who want to do it.  That's where we seem to be heading right now.

The expected market response to a drop in the supply of teachers would be a rise in average salaries.  The snag in education markets is that the demand side (those who hire teachers) tends to consist of various public sectors, and when the politicians in power (Republicans, say) refuse to pay teachers enough all sorts of alternative tricks are attempted.  Those includes outsourcing most everything.  Somehow that's supposed to work like a magic pill, creating schools where students are well taught by minimum wage teachers.

To properly write about the markets for education takes more space and time than one post can command.  But as a very short summary, the characteristic of basic education itself*** make it a poor candidate for unregulated private markets and also explain why education is frequently provided in not-for-profit settings.  At the same time, those who plan to work in the field do respond to market initiatives: pay, benefits, hours, reputation etc.

There is no miracle pill which could be force-fed to schools which are in trouble.  Those schools, the ones serving unprivileged children with many problems, need much more resources and attention than other schools.  Indeed, a logical system would pay the teachers in at-risk schools a lot more than the average teacher pay.  -------
*I want to write it with two ps, because it sounds more like adulation that way.

** The remedies, such as charter schools etc., have serious problems when cream-skimming (picking the students most likely to succeed) is a real possibility and when the more expensive students (those with more trouble) can always be returned to the public schools which must accept them. Voucher proposals assume that all parents have the same geographical access to the same spread of school quality.  It also assumes that parents can judge how good the schools are.  Finally, the voucher programs can also suffer from the cream-skimming problem and from the difficulty public schools have in not being able to refuse certain students.

***Some aspects of education which make markets less able to produce good results (especially without that not-for-profit status and government regulation etc.):
-  Many of the benefits from basic education fall not on the students and their families but on the overall society.  That part has a public good aspect, and private markets tend to under-produce those types of benefits.
-  The final quality of education, the "product," if you like, is created in cooperation between the students and the system teaching them.

Because of the intimate involvement of what we'd call "the customers" in the production process of education, it matters that children enter the system with very different preparations, family backgrounds, levels of deprivation and so on.

An apparently good education outcome could be caused by not good teaching but by hand-picking students who have few problems and are well prepared.  Likewise, an apparently poor education outcome could, in fact, disguise great teaching efforts, covered up by the very large prior deficiencies of the students.

These aspects make it hard to judge how good an education a particular institution gives.  To take an example from higher education, sure, Harvard University is a great place to get your degree.  But some part of its greatness surely comes from the way it picks its students.

- Finally, to measure and compare the outputs of educational institutions is very difficult.  That's because ideally we'd need some multi-dimensional indicator which could capture all the relevant before/after changes in a student.  We don't have such an indicator, and almost all the short-run proxy measures (eg. test scores) suffer from being very partial and from being rather easily influenced in ways which might not correlate with the real quality of education we wish to measure. 

Because it is hard to measure the output of education "firms," unscrupulous individuals could exploit that to short-term benefit by funneling money out of the schools or by using money in ways which don't help the actual quality of education.  That risk is somewhat greater in for-profit firms than in not-for-profit firms because the latter don't have shareholders as such.

Today's Recipe

Make a risotto.  Use real Arborio rice.  While you are busy using two hands adding the boiling water and stirring vigorously, use your third hand to clean some mushrooms with a darker-color hat, chop them up and fry them in some olive oil with chopped garlic (need a fourth hand here), rosemary, sage, thyme and ground black pepper. Deglaze the mushroom mess with a tiny amount of port.  This is very important.

You need a few more hands but figure that one out yourself.

Combine the two.  Add some grated Parmesan cheese and if you have it (I was given a bottle), drizzle a tiny amount of truffle oil on your plate.

To die for, it was.  And you can skip the part of the salad-making where I grated some finger in the carrots.  It's high in iron so that was okay and adds a nice color.

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I'm sure this recipe already existed but I didn't know about it.  Well, I knew about the finger-grating, because I have done that before.  Next time I make this one I will organize the mushroom stage to happen before the risotto dance stage.

Housekeeping...

Sometimes it's very hard to write anything at all.  Sometimes life intervenes, kicking the carefully-ordered piles of plans onto the floor. 

Sometimes Brother Death comes calling and gathers someone close into his dark arms,  sometimes Sister Sickness visits (and visits and visits) someone close, demanding more and more cups of tea and nursing help, and sometimes that crazy great-uncle in the attic, The-End-Of-The-World-As-We-Know-It starts hammering the ceiling with his cane.  And sometimes all those things happen at the same time.

Then it's hard to write.

Four Observations on the First Democratic Primary Debate

The first Democratic party presidential debate was last night.  I watched it and all. 

First observation:  The debaters all acted like adults!  That's refreshing, given that they are competing for the chance to steer the largest bus on earth either straight into the abyss or away from it.  Not all such debates have been between adults.

Second observation:  The way the "judges" rate these debates is very much like looking at a horse's teeth before buying it, to judge its real age. 

Only the way Anderson Cooper managed that was by thinking of the nastiest possible questions and then seeing how the candidate would cope with the situation. 

That those nastiest questions came straight from the Republican playbook may be just a coincidence (and I might be Marie of Rumania), but the fact is that I learned more about Benghazi and Hillary Clinton's e-mail scandal than I ever really wanted to know.  I also learned that Bernie Sanders is a socialist (gasp!), except that he's not the kind of socialist the insinuation meant.  He's more like Norway/Denmark/Sweden type of red-hot commie.

Third observation:  It's pointless to ask anyone the Syria question.  There is nothing that anyone can profitably say about the situation there.  Should we arm a dictator who slaughters his own people?  Or should we arm some "moderate" Islamist group which would act just like ISIS if they were in power?  Or perhaps the guns should be scattered around like candy for the kids? (Or how about the inane proposal of arming the Kurds but in an apolitical way???  Except that the Kurds only want to fight for the Kurds (against Turkey and currently against ISIS), not clean up Syria and Iraq.  That wasn't in the debate but demonstrates the impossibility of doing anything non-sectarian and non-religious and less violent about the situation).

Fourth observation:  If you watched the debate with left-leaning friends or even checked what the Internet is saying you quickly found out that the candidate provoking by far the strongest negative feelings among progressives is Hillary Clinton, despite the fact that she is also the Democratic forerunner.

The reasons for that are complicated and would take a book to analyze, ranging from her long presence in American politics, the fact that she used to be the First Lady, the nepotism question in US politics (the Bushes vs. the Clintons), her past mistakes, the fact that the press never liked the Clintons, and then also the fact that what's inside her underwear looks different from what we are used to assume politicians carry there. 

Rebecca Traister wrote about some of those issues in Elle magazine, and an earlier article by Molly Mirhashem discussed the complicated questions of identity among young feminists and how those made them less eager to support Clinton's campaign.

So it's not just the progressive bros who might have trouble with Hillary Clinton, given that she is white and wealthy and privileged.  But then, of course are all the four men who shared that stage with her last night.

I have much more to say on that fourth observation in the near future.

Today's Hilarious Political Utterances: Charles Koch, Ben Carson and Timothy Egan

A little bit of laughter, however sarcastic, keeps a goddess in top form.  And I'm sure it works for you, too.

1.  Let's begin with Charles Koch.  The defining characteristic of Mr. Koch is that he is Very Rich.  The other defining characteristic of Mr. Koch is that he uses his enormous wealth to influence the US politics, naturally in the direction which works best for Mr. Koch.

So what did Mr. Koch say in a recent interview?  This:

Mason asked, "Do you think it's good for the political system that so much what's called 'dark money' is flowing into the process now?"
"First of all, what I give isn't dark," said Koch. "What I give politically, that's all reported. It's either to PACs or to candidates. And what I give to my foundations is all public information. But a lot of our donors don't want to take the kind of abuse that I do. They don't want these attacks. They don't want the death threats. So they aren't going to participate if they have to have their names associated with it."
"But do you think it's healthy for the system that so much money is coming out of a relatively small group of people?"
"Listen, if I didn't think it was healthy or fair, I wouldn't do it. Because what we're after, is to fight against special interests."
"Some people would look at you and say you're a special interest."
"Yeah, but my interest is, just as it's been in business, is what will help people improve their lives, and to get rid of these special interests. That's the whole thing that drives me."
"There are people out there who think what you're trying to do is essentially buy power."
"But what I want is a system where there isn't as much centralized power, where it's dispersed to the people. And everything I advocate points in that direction."

Now unscrew your eyes, rinse them, and put them back in the normal way.  Then remember that Mr. Koch, together with his brother, has spent a lot of money opposing efforts to combat global climate change and efforts to get Americans health insurance.  Because people who will die when the earth finally boils over are special interest people!  Well, at least they won't get health care during that final struggle if our Charles has his way.

The Beta Boys

The Background:  

The USAToday quoted the term, "the beta boys," when writing about the grudge letter the Umpqua Community College (UCC) mass murderer (who killed nine people) left behind to "justify" his butcherings:

The rambling document left behind, and believed to be written by the gunman, lamented an isolated life with little promise, the official said.
The contents and tone of the document, the official said, tracked the often desperate and depressed writings from members of a loosely affiliated group known as the "beta boys." The official said members associated with the group share profound disappointment with their lots in life and the lack of meaningful relationships.

Emphasis is mine.

It is possible, though not likely (1), that the UCC killer posted about the massacre a day before it happened on an anonymous 4Chan thread, to some considerable support, applause, admiration and jokes (2).

Then last Friday an anonymous 4Chan poster threatened further college massacres for the following Monday in the Philadelphia region, calling them a "Beta rebellion:"

“I plead to thee, brothers! We only have but one chance, one spark, for our revolution. The United States will soon condemn us to the status quo forever, and soon after, the United Nations. Don’t let our one chance at writing history slip away. Martyr yourself for the cause or support those who have the courage to do so. We have the chance to make the world a better place for betas everywhere.”

That threat didn't materialize.  But the FBI is investigating the messages at that 4Chan site.  It is important to note that these Internet support groups for the "betas" may not be directly connected to the mass killings.  At the same time, the concept of "beta boys" deserves closer scrutiny, and so do all the sites which serve up this concept as an ideology and an excuse.


What are "the beta boys?"

To answer that question we need to put our wading boots on and enter the intellectual sludge in some of the shallower ponds of the Guy Lands on the net:  the homes of some extreme Men's Rights Activists and Pickup Artists.

We have to learn their "alphas and betas" theories:  That human men can be divided into alphas, successful, powerful and handsome men, who get all the women, every single one of them, and betas, the ordinary guys or the losers, who get no sex at all.  This idea is taken from wolf packs, except that the leaders of wolf packs are not the kind of alpha males the manosphere believes in, but the parents or grandparents of the pack, both the alpha female and the alpha male.

But never mind that.  This Manosphere theory now exists as its own justification.  It drives the instructions Pickup Artists give to their followers (act like an alpha and you get lots and lots of pussy, however unwilling that pussy really is), and it also drives the despair of many troubled young men, who have been taught that the blame for their social isolation, lack of a sexual partner and pretty much everything else is caused by Others, especially by women who are all going after the few alpha males, and by those (mostly imaginary) alpha males.

Why are "women" (some detested pile of all womanhood, but really meaning only sexually appealing young women) rejecting as much as eighty percent of all men (based on some of the sites I visit, numbers of that size, however impossible they actually are,  are routinely flouted)?  Because of hypergamy, the tendency for women to marry socially upwards, of course!

So the completed theory is stitched together from some flawed early research about wolf packs, a lot of rage and an iffy concept from evolutionary psychology. (3)

As American As Motherhood And Apple Pie?

How about criminal charges for pregnant women or for women who after delivery test positive for some banned substance?  Indeed, take the idea of fetal endangerment a step further, and tests for nicotine, alcohol and so on might also become a routine part of delivery, with all sorts of ominous consequences for the women with positive traces of those substances. And if we could devise a test which could tell if the fetus had had proper access to classical music and Einstein's relativity theorem, one day pregnant women could be tested for possibly endangering a fetus by starving its intellectual environment!

That's argumentum ad absurdum, sure, but before you judge me too harshly, read this story about the state of Alabama possibly secretly testing women in maternity wards for illegal drugs.  Then read this story about Amanda Kimbrough's actual prison sentence, caused by what seems to have been a stillbirth.

The Victims in the Umpqua Community College Shootings

The names which matter in this latest of so very many massacres, all enabled by the easy access to guns, are these:

Lucero Alcaraz, 19, of Roseburg, whose sister posted on Facebook that she won scholarships to cover her college costs
Quinn Glen Cooper, 18, of Roseburg, whose family said he loved dancing and voice acting
Kim Saltmarsh Dietz, 59, an outdoors lover who was taking classes at the same time as her daughter
Lucas Eibel, 18, of Roseburg, who was studying chemistry and loved volunteering with animals
Jason Johnson, 33, whose mother told NBC News that he successfuloly battled drug abuse and was in his first week of college
Lawrence Levine, 67, of Glide, an assistant professor of English at the college
Sarena Dawn Moore, 44, of Myrtle Creek
Treven Taylor Anspach, 20, of Sutherlin
Rebecka Ann Carnes, 18, of Myrtle Creek

It is these names which should become famous, it is these names which should be remembered when someone mentions this latest of frequent mass killings in the US.
 
This also matters:

Authorities confiscated 13 weapons associated with the shooter, six at the sight of the killings and seven at his apartment, Celinez Nunez, assistant agent in charge at Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, told reporters Friday. Nunez said all the weapons had been purchased legally by the shooter or members of is family.

And it matters that other countries, despite having their fair shares of angry, disturbed individuals, don't have the same massacre statistics by private individuals as the US. 

The difference comes from much easier access to guns here, from much greater support for the right to bear arms, from a far greater willingness to pay the price for that "liberty."*  When even the deaths of small children in Newtown, Ct., didn't look too high a price for that "freedom," more deaths of  adults will make nothing change.  This is reflected in the frustrated comments of the president.
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*I can't help thinking, after reading many of the comments threads attached to articles about the UCC massacre, that far too many Americans think this carnage is the watering of the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants and patriots which Thomas Jefferson mentioned.

Carly Fiorina And The Planned Parenthood Videos

Carly Fiorina and the Planned Parenthood (PP) videos.  The harvesting of baby parts.  The humongous profits PP makes from harvesting baby parts!  The need to close down all PP clinics because all they do is lure women in so that they can harvest baby parts to make money!  And watch the videos to find how horrible abortions really are!

That's one take on the Planned Parenthood videos.  It's also not the truth, but never mind that part, because none of this has anything to do with truth, not even truthiness, as the most recent round of debate shows you.

I haven't written about this topic.  The main reason is that truth in this context is utterly, entirely and wholly irrelevant.  The point of the videos, much doctored and edited, is to shut down all PP clinics, and the Republicans are doing pretty well pretending that they are going to get there.

Of course they might not quite want to get there, because the existence of PP is an important part of their vote-getting campaigns:  If they succeed in gutting almost all access to abortions, those forced-birthers might go on a political diet and no longer turn out at the election booths!  The bloody meat women's issues offer them needs to be kept available.

But in any case, pointing out all the errors in Fiorina's statements about the videos doesn't matter.  When something is not about the truth in the first place, truthiness works just fine.  It has the advantage of keeping the opposition busy trying to get those boots on.*

Have I ever mentioned that PP shouldn't fall for every trap the forced-birthers weave?  It's not required in any law I'm aware of, and it gets awfully awfully boring.
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*From here.

What To Read on Women, Monday, 9/28/15

1.  This long piece on what happened to someone who didn't want to report a rape to the police but was encouraged to do so anyway.

2.  This NYT health article on cancer during pregnancy, because of its last
paragraph:

It remains to be seen if doctors will be swayed by the study’s findings. Dr. Cardonick, who maintains a registry of cases of cancer in pregnancy, has heard of a couple of “sad cases” where “a patient was denied cancer treatment during pregnancy, and died soon after the baby was born, because there was no confidence that cancer treatment during pregnancy would be tolerated by the fetus.”

Bolds are mine.

If those sad cases are true, someone else denied a pregnant woman potentially life-saving treatment.  Because she was pregnant.

The rest of the article provides useful information, however.

3.   On the European refugee/migrant crisis and average gender role expectations among the refugees vs. the receiving population and how those different expectations might clash, given that most of the recent refugees/migrants come from countries with much more traditional gender roles  than those prevailing in their new host countries in Western Europe*:

Actually, I found nothing written about this by anyone who isn't a rabid right-winger.  Maybe I just didn't search hard enough?

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*  The largest source countries for asylum-seekers in Finland, for example, are Iraq, Somalia and Afghanistan.

Given that the refugees are fleeing war, not mistreatment because of their gender equality views, it's likely that their views match the average in their countries of origin (adjusted for social class, religion, rural vs. urban origin etc.).  To assume that all refugees are already fully aware of the average norms prevailing in their new host country seems unwarranted to me, even arrogant and Euro-centric.

Saudi Arabia to Head a UN Human Rights Council Panel

Remember my friendly alien from outer space?  The one who tries to make sense of earth-people values and norms and customs?

Suppose I told this alien (possibly of no biological sex or of what's called race in loose human parlance) that human rights are supposed to be something earth's countries, or at least some of them, really care about.  How, then, would I explain this piece of news?

Last week’s announcement that Saudi Arabia — easily one of the world’s most brutally repressive regimes — was chosen to head a U.N. Human Rights Council panel provoked indignation around the world. That reaction was triggered for obvious reasons. Not only has Saudi Arabia executed more than 100 people already this year, mostly by beheading (a rate of 1 execution every two days), and not only is it serially flogging dissidents, but it is reaching new levels of tyrannical depravity as it is about to behead and then crucify the 21-year-old son of a prominent regime critic, Ali Mohammed al-Nimr, who was convicted at the age of 17 of engaging in demonstrations against the government.

Then there's of course the obvious problem of women's rights, or rather, lack of such rights in Saudi Arabia.  Greenwald doesn't mention that part.  Maybe because it's too obvious. 

Greenwald's piece continues by linking to an interview with a US State Department spokesperson, Mark Toner.  You should read the interview.  I bet you don't know whether to cry or to laugh.  That is, if you actually care about human rights.

If you only care about oil, well, then the interview is pretty understandable.  You have to say something to defend this bizarre choice, to hide the fact that the powerful defend those who have something material they want.

I feel sorry for the job Mr. Toner had there.  But this particular farce puts into rather clear light the question how much human rights, including women's rights, actually matter in the top games those powerful boys (and a few gals) play with our lives.

The Pope Speaks. Echidne Whines.

If you didn't watch Pope Francis' speech to the US Congress you can read it here.  It looks like* the lefties and liberals liked it, the righties and conservatives, not so much.  There wasn't enough on the control of the vaginas or the defense of traditional marriage (with male dominance) for the latter, while the former liked the references to caring for the poor, accepting immigrants,  and the need to fight climate change.

I liked the caring tone of the speech (perhaps because that was missing in the speeches of the last few Popes and because religions in my view should be caring), and you must be a brand new reader here if you don't know that my views on income inequality, wars and climate change agree with what Francis said.

On the other hand, my eagle eye did not miss the quick references to what the conservatives wanted to hear, about the sanctity of human life (to be read as opposition to abortion though Francis segued from that to urging a global ban on capital punishment) and the  reference to the importance of "family" (a word which means very different things to different ears in the audience, one of those meanings being opposition to same-sex marriages**).

Still, the Pope honored three men and one woman as examples of great Americans!  Girls got included!

That reference was to Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement.

One aspect of the speech looks problematic to me.  That is Francis' plea for people to combat climate change, when it is combined with his church's anti-contraception stance.

That's because all people on earth ultimately want the western standards of living.  To achieve those without destroying the planet in the process requires global commitment to smaller family sizes.***

It's a bizarre feeling to write about the three big Guy Religions (Christianity, Islam and, to a lesser extent,  Judaism) for someone like me, because once you have seen the missing women in many religious hierarchies (which decide religious women's proper roles, their right to use contraception etc) you can't stop seeing them.

But if you point out that omission you sound whiny, right?  Why can't Echidne rejoice over this Pope?  Why can't she be content with all the good words that come out of his mouth? ****

My answer to that one I have learned from women's history:  If you don't demand your rights you won't get them, ever.  So someone needs to keep up the whining.



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*  Based on surfing in various places, not on proper research.

** And the link between women's roles and the family.  The Catholic Church is as big on motherhood as the American fundamentalists and much of Islam (check the Iranian constitution, for example).  Those references to "motherhood" mean more than urging women to give birth.  They also mean that women should focus on the family and that when women's rights and their family duties clash it is the latter which should win. ---  As an aside, it is almost always family vs. women's rights in these religious debates, not family vs. men's rights, because the traditional view of family places women firmly and almost entirely in only that context.

***  The alternative ways to save the environment are simply not practical:  Most people will not accept a minimal lifestyle just so that there could be both a healthy globe and more people.  The idea that rich countries should cut back their consumption to much lower levels will not fly politically, the idea that poor countries should just stay consuming little will not fly politically, either, not to even mention the ethical problems in that.

The only realistic approach to me seems to be to cut back on the overall global population.  If we don't do it through birth control, then it will happen through resource wars (Syria began that way).  And yes, I'm aware that the global population growth rate may have slowed down.  But the population numbers which can be sustained in a world where everyone has a good standard of living and where the environment is also taken care of is probably lower than whatever the current numbers might be.

The Catholic Church's anti-contraception stance makes keeping the planet healthy much harder.

**** Or I guess I could just pack up my bags and surrender to the view that the Guy Religions just don't believe that women and men should have equal rights.