On Ursula le Guin

Ursula le Guin is a wonder-ful and wonderful writer.  If you are not familiar with her sci-fi-cum-fantasy work you are in for a real treat.  Her most famous books are The Left Hand of Darkness,  which is about a planet whose inhabitants are otherwise like humans except that they lack permanent sexual differentiation, and The Dispossessed, which asks questions about what is possible in the political and economic arrangements of our lives.

See how great she is?  She's giving you two science-fiction books with weird technology, even higher mathematics and physics, and also a  treatise  on how our societies might look if we didn't have to spend so much time and agony over gender questions, plus a treatise on capitalism, anarchism and communism.

But she might just be most famous for her short story "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas."  If you weren't assigned that in an ethics college course I recommend it for this Fourth of July long weekend*.  In one sense it's a very short short story, in another sense you never get to its end.

My favorites among her books are still the EarthSea series.  If you like Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings you might like Earth Sea.   The latter describes a simpler world, the writing is more elegant and condensed, and its basic ethical frameworks different:  Tolkien applied Catholic ethics to his world, le Guin applied Taoism.

But Earth Sea also has wizardry and dragons and all sorts of fun stuff.

The very latest books and story collections in the series are the best, with writing so honed that it's crystal-clear and sharp enough to cut, each word carefully picked to bear the largest possible meaning, everything superfluous abandoned, to allow the simple stories to be about truly large questions: death, freedom, love, our proper places in the plans of the universe.

I leave you with this quote from le Guin, useful when we try to understand why people often defend their own oppression:

“We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom. We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable.”

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* Wiser voices note that it might not be appropriate for a holiday weekend, being a bit depressing.

Global Confidence in Donald Trump? Hillary Clinton? Vladimir Putin? Recent Pew Research Center Findings.

This table from a recent Pew Research Center survey of global attitudes is a fun one to explore:

Or a frightening one, should Donald Trump become the next president of the United States.  Note that the specific political and economic histories of the surveyed countries matters.  For example, that Greece has very little confidence in Angela Merkel is easily explained.

Another fascinating nugget of information in the survey concerns the difference in the confidence men and women have in Vladimir Putin as a foreign leader:

Men are more likely to have confidence in Putin.  My instant reaction was that this is easily explained by the patriarchal opinions Putin frequently spouts.*

Those will tend to put more women off, because they are bad omens about how he is likely to act when it comes to women's rights and stuff.  On the other hand, his "he-man-rules" demeanor might please some men.** 

A more rigorous exploration of that difference would require studying if belonging to a more right-wing party correlates with greater confidence in Putin and if men are a larger fraction among the members of such parties, but even if the answers to those questions were positive we couldn't rule out my instant reaction as one of the underlying reasons for both right-wing views and the love of one Vladimir Putin.  So.

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*  Not that he is at all alone among powerful politicians in being a sexist asshat.  This 2014 article reminds us of that.

** The stance is shown here:

I love that picture.  It's the most hilarious thing ever.

The SCOTUS On Abortion And Scientific Evidence

A long-standing strategy of the forced-birthers has been to impose more and more regulations on abortion clinics.  These regulations pretend to be about preserving the health of the women who have abortions by stipulating that abortion clinics should be equipped like ambulatory surgical centers, that the doctors working there should have admitting rights to the local hospitals and so on.  The real intent, naturally, is to force abortion clinics to close.  That makes getting an abortion more difficult, at least for the poorer women who can't afford the costs of long travel.

One of the more unsavory aspects of this forced-birth strategy have been the bogus health risk arguments its proponents keep advancing, such as the idea that abortion causes breast cancer (not true) and also the general fear-mongering which tries to destroy the mental health of women who have had abortions, while pretending to care about that very health. 

To put that fear-mongering into a wider context, note that giving birth is much more dangerous, on average, than having a legal abortion in the United States:

A key study published in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology estimated that the risk of a woman dying after childbirth was 10 times greater than after an abortion. The study estimated that between 1998 and 2005, one woman died in childbirth for every 11,000 babies born. That compares with one in 167,000 women who died of abortion complications. Doctors who perform abortions say the most common complications are not bladder issues or problems with reproductive organs -- as some abortion opponents like to emphasize -- but mild infection that can be easily treated.

Now the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) has addressed the question whether strict health regulations of the above type, as used by the state of Texas, constitute an "undue burden" for Texas women seeking abortion.  The 5-3 decision answers that question affirmatively:

The Supreme Court on Monday ruled resoundingly for abortion rights advocates in the court’s most important decision on the controversial issue in 25 years, striking down abortion-clinic restrictions in Texas that are similar to those enacted across the country.

...


The Texas provisions required doctors who perform abortions at clinics to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital and ordered clinics to meet hospital-like standards of surgical centers.

“The surgical center requirement, like the admitting-privileges requirement, provides few, if any, health benefits for women, poses a substantial obstacle to women seeking abortions, and constitutes an ‘undue burden’ on their constitutional right to do so,” Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote for the majority.

The missing scientific evidence about the actual (rather than imaginary) risks of legal abortions mattered in the decision:

Among the evidence undermining the surgical-center requirement, Breyer said, is a finding that early-term abortions have a lower mortality rate — five deaths in a decade in Texas — than childbirth, which the state allows to take place at home, or procedures such as a colonoscopy or liposuction, which do not carry the surgical-center requirement.

Texas could also not show why doctors needed an admitting privilege to a local hospital, Breyer said.

“When directly asked at oral argument whether Texas knew of a single instance in which the new requirement would have helped even one woman obtain better treatment, Texas admitted that there was no evidence in the record of such a case,” Breyer wrote.

In short, why fix something when it's not broken, as the old saying goes.

That's not to argue that abortions has no health risks.  But other similar or larger health risks of various procedures do not provoke the same concern from the Republican politicians of Texas.

One ethicist who is fervently opposed to legal abortions has argued that this SCOTUS decision is just a temporary setback, that all the forced-birth side needs to regain the right to turn abortion clinics into centers of nuclear medicine is to collect stories of harm to women who have had an abortion.

But that wouldn't work, in my opinion,  because nobody argues that abortion has no health risks.  Rather, the question is whether these risks are so large that they require especially stringent regulations, compared to, say, colonoscopy, liposuction or home births.  Those procedures do not  provoke the same urgency  for more stringent regulations, despite having higher mortality risks.





 

Brexit Dreams And Nightmares

Introduction

The option "Leave" beat the option "Remain" in Britain's vote about whether it should stay in the European Union  (EU) or leave it.  And the floodgates opened.

If I were a wiser writer I'd stop right there, because so far I've uttered no opinions unsupported by any evidence:  the kind of analysis I've far too often read about the nightmare or the dream that is Brexit. 

Sure, there are factual articles, too, telling us how Cameron got into this political mess in the first place, what Britain pays to the EU and what Britain receives in return,  and what the various options Britain now has might be. But one reason why so many articles about the Brexit are opinion pieces is that the kind of data we would need for strong conclusions about the vote are very hard to find.

Take the information we might get from exit polls:  To find out the demographics of those who voted Leave and those who voted Remain.  But the Brexit vote didn't have official exit polls.  The ones which exist are private polls.

The private poll I saw was on the Lord Ashcroft site.  Google Lord Ashcroft and you will find that he is a British conservative, domiciled in Belize (to avoid paying UK taxes?), with rather Trumpian characteristics, though without the financial inheritance Trump has.  He also tells us on his site that he was for Leave himself.

This doesn't necessarily make the polls biased or inaccurate, because I doubt that it is Lord Ashcroft himself who carries out the polling.   In any case, his site offers the most comprehensive demographic data on voting patterns that I have been able to find and it is that data I wish to discuss here, with some fairly serious criticisms.

Are Millennial Men More Sexist Than Their Forebears?

Are millennial men (in the US) as sexist as their dads?  That's what Andrea S. Kramer and Alton B. Harris ask in the June Harvard Business Review (HBR).  They begin by setting up the needed tension in the article by proposing that this is not so at all:

Millennials, those Americans now between 16 and 36 years old, are often spoken of as if they’re ushering in a new era of enlightened interpersonal relations. For example, in 2013 Time predicted Millennials would “save us all” because they are “more accepting of differences…in everyone.” That same year, The Atlantic stated that Millennials hold the “historically unprecedented belief that there are no inherently male or female roles in society.” And in 2015 the Huffington Post wrote that Millennial men are “likely to see women as equals.”

They then give us the evidence that the millennial men might  be every bit as sexist as their dads and granddads, maybe even more sexist.

The main bits of evidence are two:

The first is a study published last February which looked at how biology students ranked other students in their class in terms of intelligence and the grasp of the taught material.  The study found that female students ranked other students the way objective measures would rank them, but male students showed a bias which favored other male students as being particularly intelligent and well prepared in the material, even when, say, a female student had the highest grades in that class.  I have written about that study on this blog.

The second bit of evidence is the truly interesting one.  Kramer and Harris:

Millennial men’s views of women’s intelligence and ability even extend to women in senior leadership positions. In a 2014 survey of more than 2,000 U.S. adults, Harris Poll found that young men were less open to accepting women leaders than older men were. Only 41% of Millennial men were comfortable with women engineers, compared to 65% of men 65 or older. Likewise, only 43% of Millennial men were comfortable with women being U.S. senators, compared to 64% of Americans overall. (The numbers were 39% versus 61% for women being CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, and 35% versus 57% for president of the United States.) 

Now that made my hair stand up and my mood plummet!  Back to the patriarchy we go.  Hmm.

I downloaded that 2014 survey, to find out more about it:   How many subjects were interviewed in each age-and-sex category?   Did the survey standardize for other possible demographic differences between the older and the younger men?  How did the millennial and older women compare to each other and the men in their answers those questions?   And exactly what is it the questions asked and exactly how were those questions framed?*

The survey report gives an e-mail address for anyone who wishes to know more about the research methodology, so I gave it a try.  But my e-mail was returned to me with one of those "recipient unknown" messages.  Bitter despair followed, of course, because I couldn't get any answers to those very important questions, so important that they determine how much our hairs should rise and our moods plummet after reading the findings.

But what I did find was this:

Respondents for this survey were selected from among those who have agreed to participate in online surveys. the data have been weighted to reflect the composition of the adult population. Because the sample is based on those who agreed to participate in the panel, no estimates of theoretical sampling error can be calculated. For complete survey methodology, including weighting variables, please contact ..

In ordinary speech, the participants were people who had agreed to participate in online surveys.  That means they were not picked as numbers are in a lottery, which means that they are not a random sample from the general population.   That, in turn, means that we can't use the results to draw statistical conclusions about that general population. All this is hiding behind that 'theoretical sampling error' talk.

Isn't that fun?  Because those who are keen to take online surveys could differ from those who are not keen in other ways, too, we cannot tell if the 2014 Harris poll says something about the millennial men in the US.  All we can tell is that some unknown number of young men in that specific poll answered certain questions, the exact specification of which we are not told, in a certain way.

The two numbers the survey summary gives us is the total sample size, 2047, and the number of full-time or self-employed among those 2047:  889. Both of those apply to people over the age of eighteen.

We could go and look up the statistics for full-time and self-employed people as percentages of all people eighteen and over in the US in the Bureau of Labor Statistics tables, to see if at least the two numbers we are given in the survey seem to match what is going on out there in the bigger population.

I did that for ten minutes.  The data I found was only for full-time employed people and for the groups of those aged sixteen and over or twenty and over.   But even that rough research suggests that the Harris poll people tilt strongly towards those not employed.  It's likely, therefore, that the sample wouldn't look like the population in other ways, too.

None of that means the results can be proved not to apply to the population of young millennial men in the US, just that they cannot be proved to apply to it. 
So where does that leave us?  Asking for a better study, my erudite and sweet readers (all willing to work with female engineers), and restraining ourselves from reading too much into this particular one.


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*  Those questions would matter more if the sample had been a statistically random one, but they still matter for the understanding of the answers.

To address my questions one by one:

-  How many subjects were interviewed in each age-and-sex category?  

This clearly matters.  If the number of young men in the sample was, say, 25 or 50, we would judge the results differently than if it was 250 or 500.  Note that we cannot guess that sub-sample sized from the overall sample size (which is told to us) by using our knowledge about how many people, in general, are of different ages, because the sample is not a random drawing from the population.

 -  Did the survey standardize for other possible demographic differences between the older and the younger men?

This matters, because the HBR article implicitly compares young men to their fathers, thus assuming that the sample of young men in the Harris poll would differ from the sample of old men in the poll only in age, not in the percentages of, say, different ethnic groups in the sub-samples.

To see why these other demographics matter, suppose that in some country immigration has changed the average makeup of the citizens a lot in the last thirty years or so.  Then any apparent change in values we might see might not be a change over time in the same population, but a reflection of the different values new immigrants have brought with them from their source countries.  Those values could be more progressive or less progressive than the 'native' values, depending on the values of the source countries, but we cannot interpret the apparent change in values as meaning that the long-time citizens of that country have changed their values over time.

-  How did the millennial and older women compare to each other and the men in their answers those questions?

This question matters for checking purposes and for the purposes of interpretation:  The HBR article looks at the more sexist attitudes of young men, compared to older men.  That case would be made stronger if we found that young women are less sexist than older women, and it would be made different, and weaker in one sense, if we found that sexism has apparently increased in the youngest population for both men and women.

It's always good to check what the reported percentages might be in the implicit comparison group in any social science study.  If I tell you a made-up finding that 90% of Italian-origin people eat pasta you are unlikely to assume that 0% of other groups eat pasta, because you know about pasta-eating customs.  But in other contexts it's easy to slip into the alternative assumption that some percentages are 0% in the implicit comparison group.  Think of crime rates by race or ethnicity or literacy rates for girls and boys in some developing countries.

- And exactly what is it the questions asked and exactly how were those questions framed?

The importance of this is fairly obvious.  If I asked you when you stopped flossing your teeth you would find that questions enraging.  The way a question is formulated is crucial for the proper interpretation of the answers.  Were the people asked if they would be comfortable working with a female engineer, say, or were they asked if they thought female engineers were less capable, or if the occupation was less gender-apppropriate?  The exact formulation of the question may carry one or more of these types of associations.

Note, also, that Kramer and Harris suggest that the findings might be because young men haven't had exposure to female engineers, CEOs and presidents (hmm).  A question asking about that would have not cost very much and would have made the survey results more useful.  Pilot studies (tiny pre-studies for methodological and question-setting purposes) are useful for making improvements of these types.

More on Donald Trump's Attack Tactics: He Aims At The Mirror.

If the US presidential elections weren't about a pretty serious business (global survival and shit) I'd so enjoy the macabre humor that keeps cropping up!

Well, I think it's macabre.  Your mileage might vary.

Take Trump's political tactic which is a twisted version of the old Republican strategy:  attack the strength of your opponent. It's a twisted version, because Trump first assigns his own political weaknesses to his opponent, then attacks them.  That makes a weird kind of sense, since the relative absence of those Trumpish weaknesses is, of course, Hillary Clinton's strength.

So Trump has for some time called her "crooked Hillary" on Twitter and elsewhere.  Now compare that to the Trump University scam,  or Trump's contractor's use of undocumented foreign workers in the late 1970s and early 1980s, some of whom never got fully paid, and the resulting pensions fund lawsuit in the 1990s which Trump settled out of court. 

The Trump University case is, by the way, partly about racketeering charges against Trump.  Racketeering, as in violating the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act sounds a lot like being accused of --- what's the word I'm looking for? --- crookedness.

Now Trump has questioned Hillary Clinton's religious faith:

Donald Trump questioned Hillary Clinton's faith on Tuesday, claiming there's "nothing out there" about the former secretary of state's religious beliefs, according to a video captured by a conservative minister.

The video, taken by E.W. Jackson, a minister and former Republican nominee for lieutenant governor in Virginia, appeared to show part of Trump's private meeting with evangelical leaders in New York City. Trump went on the attack during the conversation, saying there's no information out there about Clinton's faith.
"Now, she's been in the public eye for years and years, and yet there's no — there's nothing out there,” Trump says in the video. “There's like nothing out there."

That is not just true, that there would be "nothing out there" about Hillary Clinton's religious affiliation.  I have been unable to avoid seeing references to it, starting from the 1990s.

But what I have not seen, at all, are public references to Donald Trump's religion, whatever it might be.  Some Playboy mansion version of the Manly Man Christianity, with perhaps occasional polygyny allowed?  I must admit that imagining the evangelical Christians and Trump as political bed-mates is just delicious.

What can we expect next from the Trump camp?  What kind of an attack?

How about complaining that Hillary Clinton's hairdos are unbecoming?

And Here We Go Again: The US Senate Rejects A Series of Gun Control Measures.

This was expected, of course.  If the 2012 massacre of elementary school children in Newtown, Connecticut, got nothing real done in the US Congress about gun control a massacre of adults certainly won't.

Even many massacres of many people don't seem to get access to guns controlled.  This applies to even assault-type, militaristic weapons with the only apparent advantage that they are pretty efficient at killing many people quickly.  And never mind that they have been the guns of choice in fourteen public mass shootings during the last ten years, half of those since last June.

I despair.  Of course I do, and so do many, many Americans.  But the appeal of guns appears tremendous, the political power of the National Rifle Association (NRA) is huge (huge! I tell you), and no amount of horror seems to make any dent in any of that.  Not vast numbers of people dying in mass shootings, not little children dying because careless availability of loaded guns, nothing makes a dent.

Still, there is something obscene about the re-branding of semi-automatic guns as "modern sporting rifles."  What is sporting about them?  Or are we to assume that hunting humans is now an acceptable form of sports?

I have nothing useful or cheering to say about any of this, and my apologies for that.  But I find it odd that the gun-rights people are so utterly absolutists, so very bent on their need to have open access to truly frightening weapons only good for efficient people-killing, and so very libertarian, given the enormous costs to the society their attitude ultimately causes.

It's as if someone demanded that drivers' licenses should not be required for cars, that any amount of alcohol or drugs is just fine for those driving a car, that people should be allowed to choose whether they drive on the left or on the right and should be allowed to change that choice from day to day or hour to hour, without informing anyone else about that choice, that cars could be routinely left in neutral and running while parked, and when the inevitable deaths of many on the roads would happen, an organization would be created to defend the absolute rights of Drivers Without Restrictions.  And without any insurance for the mayhem they caused.

Given the recalcitrance of the NRA types and the politicians they have acquired, perhaps different approaches are needed.

Remember those enormous social costs the sloppy access to guns causes in the US?  Let's make people who cause them internalize them, the same way obligatory car insurance internalizes some of the costs of poor driving.  Mandatory liability insurance for gun owners is not my idea or a particularly new idea.  But it's a baby step in the right direction, and it could be tailored to the gun one buys so that the buyers of "modern sporting rifles" would face a much heavier insurance bill than the guys of more modest killing weapons.

And what about creating competition for the NRA itself?  A good but apolitical gun owners' organization, one which offers the services gun owners need, might be able to reduce the exorbitant political power of the NRA by pulling away the more reasonable gun people.

Add your own suggestions for things which might work, given the current gridlocked political climate.

 

Grumpy Thoughts About Weird Political Thinking. Or Down The Rabbit Hole.

Writing about general politics, women's issues and gender politics can be terribly grating*, as if one's skin slowly becomes perforated and all the viciousness and the acid and the hatred seeps in.  That's when I go all grumpy and mean-spirited.

Here are a few of my not-so-nice grumpy thoughts, in no particular order of importance.  They are about the various ways we can fall down the rabbit hole.

1.  Nobody becomes an expert in, say, the UK politics simply by assuming that it all works exactly the same as US politics.  I see far too much American Internet commentary where the assumption is that total understanding of the situation in some European country can be established through an American filter.  That is just not true.  There are similarities, sure, but the details matter, differences in political systems and demographics matter, different histories and cultures matter, and nothing makes local knowledge unimportant.

2.  Europe is not one country with one major language and one shared history.  Americans shouldn't treat Europe that way, or assume that all countries in Europe participated in the genocide of Jews or in colonizing other parts of the world.  Or that all European countries are, say, places where gender equality is far advanced and the social safety net strong and firm.

Both of the above points apply even more strongly to countries elsewhere on this planet.  I chose to focus on Europe because the superficial similarities between, say, the UK and the US can be deceptive, leading many not-so-informed Americans to believe that they know more about the events in Europe than they actually do.  The reverse also applies:  Many Europeans have views about the US which are largely based on television series and movies and various stereotypes.

3.  Nuance.  In general.  Oh how I wish it were back in fashion.  Not because I would be a cucumber-sandwiches-and-tea type of goddess, but because reality truly is nuanced.  For example, the motives of the Orlando butcher can be many.  We don't have to insist on finding one single motive for what he did.

And while I'm criticizing the quality of political Internet debates, I also want to notice that snark** isn't really the same as refuting someone's arguments.  It can be fun and it can be deserved, but it's not a refutation. Reasoned arguments take effort, and following (and checking) them can also be hard work.  But the results from them can be greater information and better solutions.

4.  There's a tremendous (and invisible) bias in much of political writing of treating one side in a conflict as being without any agency at all.  It's strongest in political propaganda which wishes to paint some group or country as the evil one and so focuses on the deeds of only those 'demonic' forces, but it's also common in more balanced articles.

For instance, victims are often treated as passive objects of the horrible things which happen to them.  Sometimes this is just the truth, as in drone strikes or terrorist attacks,  but more generally even victims may have some agency, some way of resisting, some way of expressing what they think or believe.  That this is frequently ignored is because it doesn't go with the unconscious plot the writer has in her or his mind or with the way which maximizes the impact of the piece.  I have done that myself, so I know.

But it's lamentable because it twists reality, even if the intention behind that is good.

5.  Linked to that grumbling is this one:  People to whom bad things happen are not necessarily all saints, people who are oppressed may themselves also be oppressors in different relationships or would love that opportunity, and yet we should criticize the bad things which have happened to them.  In short, the goals and desires of various oppressed groups are not necessarily in alignment.  Sometimes those groups fight for the same crumbs off the table of the powerful.  And no, not all powerful people are evil just because they are powerful.

6.  What I wrote in 5. can result in the most exquisite contortions for those social justice activists (say, feminists) who base their activism on supporting the simultaneous total rights of many groups and suddenly find that one of those groups might not support the rights of another one of those groups***.

What to do? I've seen some people just cover their eyes and ears and refuse to engage with the dilemma, though some take sides, ranking one group as the more deserving one, even if it's the  group deemed overall most deserving which happens to be violating some progressive values.  Hence the contortions.

These are avoidable.  The way one does that is by holding onto those progressive values in each case, never mind who violates them, while not dropping the support of equal rights of the violating group to all the other good things.  And to be fair, many writers and activists do exactly this.

For an example of what I'm writing about, consider this:

Some (or many) white working class people in the US**** might be racist, and when they are their behavior should be condemned.  But this doesn't mean that they wouldn't be suffering because of their lower social class and because of the increasing income inequality in the US.  When it comes to those aspects their case should be supported.

It's like blowing bubbles with the chewing gum while riding the tricycle.  Doable, right?  At least if we start from the principles-end and not the victim-end.

7.  Something doesn't have to be true just because it is re-tweeted a thousand times.  I've seen two recent Twitter examples of joyful mass dissemination of terrible data.  Lies, in fact, though not intentional lies in either case, just seriously bad interpretations of the sources the initial tweeters used.  A bit like thinking that the page number in a book has something quantitative to say about what's written on the page it refers to.

Always verify.  That is my motto and I follow it 98 times out of each hundred.  The other two times I get caught by you, my very erudite readers.

And that verification is even more urgent if what is asserted pleases your political side.  That's when you might re-tweet something inane and end up with egg on your face.

Most folks will not verify, sadly, and so the lie still careens around the world while the truth tries to figure out a way to refute it in 140 characters and without getting squished in a Twitter war.

That's an oversimplification, of course.  There are cases where the truth isn't that clear, but that's no excuse for not trying for maximal truthfulness in our political communications.
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*  As in "make America grate again," which misquotes Donald Trump.  But he certainly has raised the level of viciousness in Internet commentary.

**  And neither is hate speech.  That should go without saying.

***  Two fairly recent examples of the kinds of conflicts which might cause those contortions, but don't have to:

1.   African-Americans, especially African-American Protestants, are less likely to support gay and Lesbian rights than white Americans.  In 2016, 57% of whites and 42% of African-Americans support same sex marriage. This average (though shrinking) difference in opinions affected the passing of California's Proposition 8 in 2008, which banned same-sex marriage in California.  The proposition was later ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States, but the majority of both African-Americans and, to a lesser extent, Hispanics, voted for it:

African American voters, who were overwhelmingly in favor of banning same sex marriage (70 percent supported Proposition 8) even as they supported Obama even more heavily (94 percent).  And, to a lesser degree, Hispanic voters followed that same trend -- backing Prop. 8 by a 53 percent to 47 percent margin while giving President Obama 74 percent.

2.    Last New Year's eve's mass sexual assaults in Cologne, Germany,  by men of mostly North African origin, many of them asylum seekers, put quite a few feminists writers between the rock and the hard place:  How does one write about a form of sexual assault which truly is a new one in Europe and which is almost impossible for women to defend themselves against, without inciting more anti-Muslim, anti-refugee and racist bigotry?

It looked to me as if several writers felt that they had to choose which group to support, in some overall sense.  Thus I read, repeatedly, that there was nothing new  in these assaults (not true), and that there's something very fishy when suddenly the European right wing is concerned about sexual assaults and women's rights (exceedingly true). 

That the events in Cologne were used by the right-wing nationalists and racists (a group which is not exactly known for its feminism) for their own purposes counted more in the final feminist scale of things for some writers (not necessarily those I linked to above) than what happened to hundreds of women in Cologne.

Yet it should have been possible to note that the vast majority of refugees or migrants in Europe did not participate in these assaults or others of the same type,  that, indeed sexual harassment and assaults are not exactly unknown in European countries, but that it still is very important to nip mass sexual harassment in its bud.  And none of this matters at all when it comes to defending the general rights and welfare of refugees in Europe or when it comes to fighting against racism in general.

I'm sure there are many other similar examples, even recent ones, but those two are the ones I had jotted down in some detail.

More generally, being a feminist, say, doesn't preclude the possibility that one is also a racist or bigoted about trans-people.

People who do anti-racists work can be sexists (by, say, treating African-American women as invisible while focusing on the treatment of African-American men or just by being the ordinary type of sexists) and a few trans people believe in gender-essentialist arguments (about which types of behaviors should go with which gender identities) which in my opinion are sexist.

Progressives can be bigoted about poor whites in the US South.   In all these cases the trick is to disapprove of the bad behavior and to interrogate any iffy arguments, but not to drop some group from those who are deemed good enough to deserve fair treatment overall.  We all deserve fair treatment.

I'm not exploring these examples from some high-and-mighty pure goddess perch, by the way.  I identify lots of unpleasant bottom mud in my own thinking, including the fact that when I took the Implicit Associations Test my results suggested slight sexism in my own views!  How's that for something to think about? 

Though the associations actually measure stuff we are accustomed to quickly correlating with some other stuff, not necessarily our agreement with those associations.  But still.  All the various -isms are in the air we breathe, in our upbringing, in the religious values we are being taught.  So we should have some small amount of compassion mixed with the stern condemnation when we find others failing the value tests.

****  I picked this example and not one about the white middle class people who can also be racist, because I want the group in my example to be low on the totem pole in some other respect.

What To Read, 6/16/16: Hillary Clinton And Sexism, Donald Trump And The Authoritarian Personality, Whole Foods And Wholeness

Today's date is neat!  6/16/16

This post is in lieu of* a proper (exciting, creative and short!) piece because of my writer's block.  It's about two longer articles, both well worth reading, and about one shorter economics piece, just to make this post into a list.



1.  First, Michael Arnovitz at the Medium gives us his thoughts about the possible role of sexism in the low approval ratings of Hillary Clinton over the ages.

As you may remember, I've asked if an otherwise identical but male clone of Hillary Clinton, with the exact same history, the same policies and the same statements, would have met with exactly the same public treatment and the same approval rates.  For the want of that guy clone we cannot tell.







But Arnovitz tries, by posting the above graph of Hillary's approval and disapproval ratings over time and by arguing that the graph shows this:

So what do we see in this data? What I see is that the public view of Hillary Clinton does not seem to be correlated to “scandals” or issues of character or whether she murdered Vince Foster. No, the one thing that seems to most negatively and consistently affect public perception of Hillary is any attempt by her to seek power. Once she actually has that power her polls go up again. But whenever she asks for it her numbers drop like a manhole cover.

What do you think about that theory?  I find it interesting.  Some years in those trend lines seem to support it, such as her improving ratings when her role was pretty much the oddly traditional one of being the long-enduring woman with the philandering husband or when she quit her presidential race against Barack Obama, thus accepting defeat.

But the earlier reaction to her announcement to run for president in 2008 appears too anemic if the public is reacting to inappropriate power grab attempts by a woman.  That, after all, is the really big attempt to seek power.

In any case, the piece is well worth reading for the historical background it offers.

More on The Orlando Massacre. What Motivated the Killer?

So who was the butcher of Orlando, one Omar Mateen?  What motivated him?

His ex-wife tells us that he abused her, cut her off from her family and friends, didn't like gays.  We get a picture of a domestic abuser with sudden leaps into tremendous anger.

His ex-colleague tells us that he made openly racist comments and also openly misogynistic comments:

Daniel Gilroy, a co-worker at G4S Secure Solutions — formerly known as Wackenhut — told NBC News that Mateen was a "very conscientious" employee who was often early for work and was fascinated by law enforcement.

He was also loud, "very excitable" and racist, Gilroy said.

"He was scary in a concerning way," he said. "And it wasn't at times. It was all the time. He had anger management issues. Something would set him off, but the things that would set him off were always women, race or religion. [Those were] his button pushers." 

Working with Mateen was so difficult that Gilroy said he requested a transfer.

"I needed to be out of that situation," he said. "I described it as being toxic."

Mateen "always referred to every other race, religion, gender in a derogatory way," Gilroy added. "He did not like black people at all. That was mentioned once or twice, but more so was women. He did not like women at all. He did like women in a sexual way, but he did not respect them."

 His father believes that seeing two men kissing was what triggered his anger at homosexuality.

All through these stories are signs of mental instability, of anger management issues, of the characteristics of an abuser or a stalker, even if reported by only a few observers.  Yet Mateen was able to acquire the weapons he used for the massacre, and acquire them legally, and this despite having been investigated for terrorism by the FBI in 2013.  Because the investigations cleared him, he was as able as the next potential mass murderer in the US to buy an assault weapon!

Those are some the ingredients in the stew that made up the mind of Omar Mateen, with the necessary added sprinklings of extremist Islamic thought, the justification he himself appears to have applied to his butcheries by swearing support for ISIS, though whether he actually was a radicalized Muslim, in the sense of deep beliefs,  or whether he just used religious justification for acts he would have committed in any case is not clear.  To me it looks like he had his hatreds all neatly in a row and then looked for some type of blessing for them.*

The political reactions to this stew on the net are mostly predictable, and best understood by looking at what the two sides of the US political aisle are already for or against.  Thus, the right warns us about the dangers of radical Islam (it's everywhere!) but is also against any attempt to regulate access to assault weapons, and somewhat agrees with the extremist Islamic tenet that homosexuality is a deplorable sin, though not one that deserves the death penalty.**  On the whole the US right isn't terribly concerned with the potential for general anti-Muslim bigotry that the talk about religious wars and general Trumpery can support***. 

The left, according to the usual rules, picks the positions that are exactly opposite to those the right has picked.

I am with the left when it comes to concerns about using cases like the Orlando massacre as a justification for making the lives of hundreds of thousands ordinary Muslims more difficult.  That is wrong and must be condemned.

I am also with the left when it criticizes the wanton access to murderous weapons in this country or the money-starved mental health care sector.  And I'm with those who point out that the vast majority of mass killings in the United States are carried out by men and not by women, even though women are equally able to get hold of assault weapons, equally likely to suffer from mental instability, and equally likely to listen to extremist preachers.

Where I diverge from some on the left is in my determination to criticize all religious teachings I disagree with, whether they crop up in Catholicism, fundamental Evangelism or conservative Islam.  I believe the criticism of ideas is crucial, unless we wish our gardens of philosophical and religious ideas to be taken over by the most noxious of weeds.

I also believe that we must very clearly distinguish between criticizing extremist ideas and attacking people who belong to (or nominally belong to) various wider religious groups.  Doing the former and avoiding the latter are both equally important, and we should be able to do both simultaneously.

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*  I have written a rant on the Orlando massacres in another post.  That was my emotional reaction to the use of religion to justify deeds of utter horror, the way a stamp of approval can be applied to the most horrendous of human crimes by interpreting them as merely the ordinary day jobs of god's little executioners, just carrying out god's will.

We must erase that stamp of approval, and the job must be done by the preachers inside the religions and their sects.  Outsiders cannot achieve that erasure, but outsiders can demand it, must demand it.

Though of course it is the need for the label of an 'outsider' which is inherent in many of these religious dilemmas.  Your god or mine?  Let's see which wins.  And yet any real god(s) there might be is (are) silent as the stones are.

**  Seven countries have, at least in theory, a death punishment for homosexuality:

According to the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA) seven countries still retain capital punishment for homosexual behavior: Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iran, Afghanistan, Mauritania, Sudan, and northern Nigeria.^[67][68] In United Arab Emirates it is a capital offense.^[69][11] 

*** This is necessary reading in that context.

Where Is Evil? First Thoughts on the Orlando Massacre.

A continuously updated list of those who died in Orlando, Florida can be found here.


Tell me, you with your holy books*, where is evil?

Is it in the needs of two men I know, men who love each other, who serve each other, who care for each other, but who have also adopted a child whom nobody wanted, who love that child, who tend that child, and that child, he flourishes?  Is it in their small family that I should look for evil?

Or is it in the life of a woman I knew who loved other women?  Is she the Evil One?  Does it weigh so heavily on your scales that her love was for women?  Heavier than her anonymous funding of two college degrees for needy students?  Heavier than all the coins she donated to AIDS research? Heavier than the coffin she paid for to bury a neighbor who had nobody left to pay for her funeral and nobody else left to attend it?

Tell me, you who are so heavy with your religious knowledge, how do you measure evil?  A stone of violence falls into the dark, murky waters, yet you seek ripples elsewhere, seek for borders violated, look for rules broken, even when those rules deserved to be broken, even when that breaking hurts no-one but helps someone to finally breathe fully, to finally be fully human, to even make a willing difference for good.

You measure your evil with a magnifying glass, carry your petty findings to a vindictive god you have imagined into being, while real evil rolls over the landscape of humanity, a dark, menacing cloud of wars and violence. 

And it is that dark, looming cloud you watch with approval and admiration, it is that dark cloud you want to rain down blood and pain, to wipe out those small imaginary crimes you so treasure, because they are not your crimes, because you are not one of the sinners you have defined!

No, your crimes are the declarations you make, the way you choose yourself as the judge, the jury and the executioner, the way you interpret your imaginary warlord god's desires to stomp, to destroy and to keep oppressing those always oppressed, the way you usurp the role of a divine power, interpreting the languages you hear in your head as the commands of your thunder god.

So tell me, you with your holy books, why is some love evil?  This world is dying, its flowers and trees, even the very grass is dying, because of our insufficient love for it, because of our inordinate love for power and for greed and for our tribes,  and, yes, because of our inflamed love for having the exactly correct ancient letters and words obeyed without a question, to silence those questions, to win, for our tribe, for our created gods, for ourselves.
 

It is that lack of love which is killing us all, not the love between two women or two men. 

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*  This 'you with your holy books' is not meant to be a religious person or a person who believes in some divine power.  Those are not the people I address my rant to.

They are the people who gather together all available data about the cultural rules and norms which prevailed two thousand or fifteen hundred years ago, who decide that those cultural norms are some god's everlasting law for all humans and who then decide that those who disagree with these beliefs should be put down because the odd god thus imagined would want it, because that odd god finds pain and blood and the eradication of humans less insulting than loving the wrong person, with kindness and with care.

The 'you with your holy books' is not the person responsible for the massacre in Orlando, Florida, and my rant doesn't argue it or explore the role of mental illness or the role of guns available as freely as candies. 

But anyone interpreting ancient writings literally falls guilty of the crime of abetting, of justifying and of glorifying violence against the innocent, just as anyone interpreting ancient writings literally also falls guilty of the crime of misogyny and the oppression of women.

Reminder To Self. And About Birds.

Self, stop trying to write long and tedious posts just because you feel you should.  They all end up half-finished, gathering dust inside unused parts of your brain, inside your computer and on those odd coffee-stained and torn-up bits of paper.

Oh, hello there!

That was for me.  The long posts were supposed to be for you, my imaginary readers, on topics such as the representation of various groups of Americans in the current US Congress, what's wrong with current feminism according to Echidne, and other equally not-so-interesting topics.   I doubt they will ever be done, because of my stupid tendency of trying to chew more than anyone can digest.

But in any case, tl;dr should be the new slogan of this blog.  Tl;dr means that something is too long and so was not read.

Let's talk about birds.

I have begun gardening again, after a long break.  Hence my permanently black finger-nail linings.  As part of that gardening, I planted a clematis which is an infant, right now, but is one day expected to be a wonderful tall fountain of burgundy silk, frothy lace and inebriating perfumes*.  Think of garden porn.

Anyway, I put up twine for the baby clematis, as a hint about the most likely direction it should climb (up the arch) when it has gotten its root system plump enough, after recovering from the transplantation operation.

But a robin in the nest-building business wanted that twine.  She/he wanted it so much!  I laughed watching the sudden bird helicoptering, the wings going extremely fast while the beak hung onto the twine (which, sadly for the robin, was tied to the archway for the clematis).  I laughed when it backed up, with the twine in its mouth, pulling, pulling, pulling, until it fell on its tiny bird ass.

Then I felt guilty, and went out with about ten pieces of nice soft wool thread for the birds.  I left them right next to the clematis twine.   The robin came back, walked over all that nice wool, and returned to the battle with the clematis twine.

I ended up cutting that twine so that the robin could get it.  She/he later came back for all that wool, too, but only after the clematis twine had been taken.

Somehow I expected that birds would grab string by the middle and fly away with the ends flapping about in air.  But the robin gathered all the twine and threads up very neatly, into little folds, and flew away as if carrying a tiny suitcase.

I want to come back as a nest-building robin.

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*  It's much more likely that the clematis will expire.  But the hope is as big a part of gardening for pleasure as what actually happens.  The strawberries I've eaten in my imagination were mostly eaten by the birds, too.

Quick Election Thoughts

Now this is fascinating:  According to Think Progress (and my own eyes) the official website of the Republican Party has nothing about Donald Trump.  The invisible candidate?

That must feel very awkward for the traditional Republicans. As if someone had stolen your chair, your name and your principles and there's very little you can do, because the thefts didn't break any law.  But attempts to regain all that property would interfere with the idea that votes matter, even in Republican primaries.

That's historic, in a sense, but not so historic as Hillary Clinton's position as the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party.  Because of that woman thing,*
which requires a much deeper post than I can write today.  But stay tuned, as they say.

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*  And that older women thing Joan Walsh writes about, the idea that women's votes somehow don't matter as much once they pass forty or their fuckability sell-by-date, whichever comes earlier. 

I spotted that subtext, too, and even a slight hint that older men's votes don't really count, either,  while following the Democratic primaries.  All votes should count equally.

Still, the  invisibility of older women as anything but grandmothers is in the air we all breathe and it even colors politics.  Though if we get an older woman president, who knows what might happen!

110 Years Ago Finnish Women Won The Vote

On June 1, 1906, 110 years ago,  this happened:

In tiny Finland, then part of the empire of Russia, women won the right to vote in the semi-independent Finnish elections.  The next Finnish parliament (voted in during 1907) had nineteen female members.  Here are thirteen of them:

The biographies (in Finnish, sorry) of those nineteen women make fascinating reading.  They were politically active, some to the extent of later spending time in prison for their political convictions. * They were teachers, journalists, seamstresses and servants.**  They were concerned with the position of women in the Finnish society and sought to improve that position through legislation, but they also had other political concerns.  They made a difference.

Those nineteen women were the world's first female members of parliament.


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* That would be the socialists or communists.  Several of them were imprisoned during the Finnish Civil War and one woman even later.

** The occupations I listed are the ones which had more than one representative.  The women also included a weaver, a farmer's wife, an entrepreneur (who was also one of the founding members of the Social-Democratic Workers' Party!), a life-long feminist activist (Alexandra Gripenberg) and even a woman who was a manager of a bank from 1917 to 1925.  Miina Sillanpää became the first Finnish female minister during the 1920s, was responsible for beginning the organizing of female labor and created a network of homes for unwed mothers.  She has earned a permanent place in Finnish history.

Both Sides Do It! Eric Alterman on the Pretend-Objectivity of Political Journalism

You can read Alterman's June 2nd article here.  It's about the urgent need of political journalists in the US to look for equivalence between, say,  the heinous deeds of Republican politicians on the one hand and the equally heinous deeds of Democratic politicians on the other hand (or vice versa), even when no real equivalence can be found.  In the latter case the demands of pretend-objectivity necessitate the creation of a false equivalence.

I wrote about that at least thrice on this blog:  ten years ago, nine years ago and six years ago.  From the 2007 post:*

A third pattern of interest is the "false equivalence". Suppose that I throttle my neighbor in a fit of temporary insanity, and you once forgot to send a Christmas card to your best friend from college. In the IOKIYAAR world these two deeds would be regarded as equally bad, but only if I am a Republican and you are a Democrat. (Well, your deed might actually be worse, especially if you happen to get Caitlin Flanagan to write it up.) The "false equivalence" treatment is probably the most serious one of the various patterns of IOKIYAAR, because it extends to all debate about issues so that a science debate must give equal time or space for those who don't believe in evolution or in any global warming whatsoever.

Alterman delves into the reasons for the enduring nature of false equivalencies in American political journalism.  My impression is that this is a bigger problem in the US than in, say, the UK, where journalists often assume the role of a slightly hostile interrogator when interviewing politicians.  That role makes providing factual corrections considerably easier for the journalist than the American "he said, she said" model which demands coverage of "both sides," even when one side clearly is preposterous.

Now how to fix that problem?  It can be tricky for the reasons Alterman mentions, but it shouldn't be impossible, given that some other countries don't require their journalists to act quite so servile. 

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* IOKIYAAR is an acronym for "It's ok if you are a Republican".  I hate hate acronyms.  The acronym for that is IHHA.

Yves Smith On the Perfidy of Hillary Clinton. Echidne Reacts.

Yves Smith, famous for running the Naked Capitalism site, does not care for Hillary Clinton, as she most forcefully writes on Politico.  Scott Lemieux, on Lawyers, Guns and Money, has a funny response to Yves.  That's where I found the link to Yves' Politico piece.

You should read both pieces, because my post won't address most of the meat (some rotting, some stinking, some still good to eat) (1) in Yves' column, and Scott does respond to some of them, though not all.

But before I write about what I really want to write about, let me make clear that I share with Yves her concern that the American working class, including the white working class, has been treated like the ugly step-sisters in the Cinderella (2) fairy tale:

The glass slipper of approval and of financial help never fits their large and horny feet, but slips beautifully on the tiny and well pedicured feet of the rich.   The fairy godmother of the Democratic Party waves her magical wand to pretend-help only the poor in other countries (through trade agreements and outsourcing) while blue-collar jobs in the United States slowly disappear down a sink hole, leaving behind dying factory towns where people have nothing to produce except drugs, divorces and despair.

On Female Modesty And Suspension Bridges

Here's an interesting story from the UK Bristol Post, about a woman who is now believed to have designed a suspension bridge in the nineteenth century.  But it starts with a very odd statement:

A BRISTOL mother-of-six has been added to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography with the revelation that she – and not Brunel – designed the Clifton Suspension Bridge.

Doesn't this remind you of the NYT 2013 obituary of Yvonne Brill, the female rocket scientist?   It began with a description of her cooking and mothering skills.  I'm trying to figure out how something of this kind could be used for a male scientist or inventor:

Albert Einstein, the father of three,...

Nah.  It wouldn't work, and not only because I used such a famous scientist as my example.  The reason why it's still done for female scientists and inventors is because most cultures keep defining women solely by their roles within the family (see my post on Erdogan).

So what did Sarah Guppy, the woman who is credited with the design of the Clifton Suspension Bridge, do?

Guppy was born Sarah Beach in Birmingham in 1770 but lived her adult life in Bristol after marrying Samuel Guppy, from a wealthy family which ran a Bristol sugar company.
She had six children, but was almost secretly one of the foremost engineering, inventing and designing minds of the Georgian era. Her inventions and patents, for everything from a new way of protecting ships from barnacles to a device to boil an egg from the steam of a kettle, had to be registered by her husband in the name of 'the Guppy family'.
In 1811 she patented a way of piling foundations to create a new type of suspension bridge, which provided the blueprint for both Brunel's Clifton Suspension Bridge and Thomas Telford's Menai Bridge.
She and her family were close to Brunel – her son Thomas was GWR's principal engineer – and she gave the design and plans for her bridge over the Avon to Brunel to enter into the competition.

Bolds are mine.  One reason for the disappearing women of history is evident in that bolded sentence:  the assumption that ambition and putting oneself forward were unbecoming in a woman.  The linked article notes that, too:

Sarah Guppy first patented the design for a suspension bridge across the Avon Gorge in 1811 and gave her plans to Brunel for free because she was a modest woman who wanted to see them used for the public good.

Mmm.  Female modesty, of course, is still an abiding value in many cultures.*

And so is the view that ambition is unbecoming in a woman.  Hillary Clinton's desire to be the president of the United States is suspect in a way the desires of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are not**.   There's something "unnatural" about it.

But the reverse is the truth, in my not-so-humble opinion.  Ambition is a human characteristic.  For women, however, cultural training has turned it into something they can only demonstrate indirectly, on behalf of their spouses or children or while helping powerless people or animals in dire need for help.

What has not been traditionally acceptable is for women to show ambition for themselves, perhaps because that conflicts with the traditional ideal of the all-sacrificing mother, the Virgin Mary of Christian thought.***

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* The hijab, for example, has been justified on that basis.  Though there are cultures where men's behavior is expected to be modest, too, at least when compared to the American society,  the requirements of modesty are and have always been much stronger for women.  As a rather facile example, just consider what "ladylike" behavior has meant in the past.

All this makes me wonder what the societal advantages of that female modesty ideal might be and who it is who benefits from them.  What would be so bad about values which allow all people some modicum of ambition and also require from all people some modicum of modesty and concern for others?

**  I fully acknowledge that the platforms of the candidates differ widely, that Trump appears to be running on nothing more than the fumes of his own personal ambition, and so on.  But the discomfort with Clinton's ambition does seem to have at least a few roots in those traditional views about how good women behave.

*** Have you noticed that we learn nothing about Mary The Person from the Bible?  She is simply the extreme form of the modest and yielding woman, having no opinions of her own.  A frightening thought, given her position as a role model, at least within certain religious and demographic groups.

More on The Demos Misogyny Study And The Gender Of The Sender

Remember how I ranted about the lack of a written report on the Twitter misogyny study by Demos?  Well, now there IS a written report, of a sort (thanks to AT in my comments for bringing it to my attention).  I quote from the beginning of the report:

The results were presented at House of Commons launch of Recl@im
on 26 May 2016.

Emphasis is mine.

My previous blog post on the study was posted on 26 May, too, so that the report wasn't available then.  What a relief, to be right (goddesses mostly are), for Demos to be right when they told me that there was no report on the 25 May,  and also to now have that report!

Then to the analysis.  I am particularly interested in how the study defined the gender of the person who sent misogynistic tweets, for the simple reason that when I look at the information various people on Twitter give about themselves I'm often unable to deduce their gender from it.


Here is how the report tells us it was done:

It seems that the algorithm uses someone's Twitter handle (or actual name, if used) and the user description people give about themselves on Twitter.  Demos tells us that the algorithm was tested in 2015 against traditional survey questions which allowed them to see that its accuracy was approximately 85%.  But there is no link to that study.

I don't want to sound like a grumpy goddess here, but academics are taught the way to write research reports for a very good reason:  Transparency of methods and the ability of others to go backwards to any sources they wish to study in greater detail.  I can't go and read that 2015 study, because it is not sourced*.

This criticism does not mean that I'm saying the 2015 study doesn't exist or doesn't show what the above quote says it does.  All it means is that I can't access that information on my own and must place complete trust on Demos' say-so.  And note that this 2015 survey or study is crucial.  It's the only information we are given about the accuracy of the method Demos used.

The results section of the current study tell us that when the algorithm was applied to all 213,000 tweets labeled as aggressive (by an algorithm), it gave 48% of the originators as male and 42% as female, and the remaining 10% as
"institution" which seems to also cover any tweeters whose gender cannot be ascertained by the algorithm.  If the latter category is omitted, the breakdown would be 52% female and 47% male.

A sample of 250 tweets was selected for closer scrutiny by a human analyst, with these results:

The report then concludes that the algorithm "slightly over-estimated" the proportion of male tweets.

Which means that the human analyst is assumed to have gotten the gender of the senders right, right?  What does the human analyst base his or her decisions on?  Was that person asked to use the same rules the algorithm uses or just his or her own feelings about what the gender of the sender might be?

The answers to those questions matter.  If the analyst was asked to use the same rules as the algorithm uses, the verification process itself would depend on the accuracy of the algorithm, and that takes us back to the 2015 results.  If the analyst was asked to use some other criteria or just personal feelings, it would still be important to understand what those criteria and feelings might be.**

Once again, I'm asking for a more thorough write-up of the study, because that is necessary for greater understanding of its results.

The report contains some information I didn't get from the various summaries of its findings:  It's possible that specific events in popular culture might have had an impact on the findings:

That seems to be a very good reason not to sample just one short time period in studies of this sort, but, say, to sample one day in each of the preceding twelve months.

Note that none of this is really a critical reading of the study itself, because for that I'd need the 2015 study about the accuracy of the algorithm and more data on how the human analyst classified gender.  Rather, this post is a critique of the way the study is reported.

It is possible that women tweet misogyny at roughly the same rates as men, because both women and men grow up in the same cultures and are taught the same tools of attack against women.  Evidence from various discrimination studies, both about gender and race, suggest that those who belong to the discriminated groups can also be found among those who discriminate against that group.***

At the same time, much more precise studies are required before we can state  something like that.  I'd like such studies to create a sample which amounts to some averaging over time, so that specific events don't influence the likely composition of the hate-tweeters, and to do (or at least show) a lot more work on the question of how to identify the gender of those who send misogynistic tweets.  Finally, a more thorough analysis of the contents of a sample of those tweets truly is needed.  There's a big difference between someone tweeting "You slut, how dare you not like x"  and "I'd like to hate fuck you, you slut."




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*  And no, it's not OK to expect me to spend hours looking for some such study on the net.  It's a courtesy researchers are expected to extend to their readers to give their sources.

**   For example, only pictures, Twitter handles and the description people give of themselves in the user description?  Or also the contents of tweets the person has sent recently?  Or something else?

***  For gender, see this, this and this post of mine.  For race, see this recent study about Airbnb discrimination against African-American renters or hotel guests which found that African-American hosts were not less likely to be found among the discriminating hosts than white hosts.

At the same time, other anecdotal evidence suggests something different about the quality of anonymous hatred.  For instance,  the sample of voicemails the Chairwoman of Nevada's Democratic Party received from various callers shows a gender difference in the type of hostility Lange received.  Likewise, the hate tweets I've seen women receive on Twitter often describe the desire of the sender to commit various sexual (often violent) acts on the recipient, and those acts require a male body.







 

Going Cold Turkey: Erdogan Wants Women To Use No Contraception

That's what the president of Turkey,  Recep Tayyip Erdogan, just said:

Speaking at an educational foundation in Istanbul on Monday, Mr Erdogan said: "I say this openly: We will increase our descendants, we will increase our population.
"Family planning, birth control, no Muslim family can practice such an understanding".

Erdogan really is an Islamist, though of course he is also an egoistic wannabe dictator.  He earlier noted that women are not the equals of men and should, instead,  focus on being mothers of the many.

Even his daughter in 2015  defended the Koran-based rule that sons inherit twice as much as daughters as a good form of gender justice (not gender equality, mind you).*

No, Mr. Erdogan is certainly not a feminist, rather the reverse.  That should have been evident to all from the minute he grabbed power.  As an example, under his reign the "Ministry for Women" was renamed the "Ministry for Family Affairs."

That tells you everything you need to know about how women are viewed by the current Turkish administration.  Indeed, it may be one of the countries in which women's rights are declining, though there are several others.**

But neither is Mr. Erdogan an environmentalist.  One of the best things humans could do to help Mother Earth is not to procreate so much, but in certain minds (such as those of Mr. Erdogan and Mr. Trump)  the short-sighted desire for power and greed outweighs considerations such as the future survival of the human race.***

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*  She interprets the Koranic verse 2:228 which states that men are a degree above women to mean that men have that advantage because they are assumed to financially support women. 

Thus, she sees a divine command where I see  the economics and cultural rules of marriage which prevailed in the Middle East during prophet Mohammed's time, and which were later codified into the Shariah law by a bunch of medieval men.

**  Turkey is an example of a country which would dearly love to curtail women's legal rights, but hasn't  managed to do that, yet.  That may yet happen, given that Erdogan's voter base lives in the conservative rural areas of Turkey where women's rights appear to be a largely abstract and meaningless concept.

*** I have also read that Erdogan fears the higher birth rate of the Kurds inside Turkey and wants to start a population war as well as the usual kind of killing war. 

The New Demos Study On Twitter Misogyny. A Procedural Fail.

Demos in the UK tells us that it has carried out a new study on Twitter misogyny (the hatred of women and girls).  Newsweek headlines its summary of the study findings like this: 

Half of Misogyny on Twitter Comes From Women

Which is interesting.  Another summary tells us a little bit more of the study, such as the words it picked for measuring misogyny: "whores" and "sluts".   That "cunt" was left out is odd.  I would have thought that it would be the very choicest of words to measure woman-hatred.

The  study found 1.5 million tweets with either one or both of the search words "slut" and "whore" during a three-week period.  That sample was then winnowed down by using a Natural Language Processing Algorithm to remove from the original sample all pornographic marketing tweets (which were 54% of all tweets with those words!)*, and all other tweets which do not express anger in the use of those terms.  The remaining 10,000 aggressive tweets are the focus of future analysis, such as the sex of the tweeter.

Now, how did Demos decide if a tweet was sent by a man or a woman?  In my experience few people (at least in politics) tweet under their own name or any normal type of name.  Most people have Twitter handles, and many of those are very hard to attribute to either men or women.  Pictures?  I know several people on Twitter who have the picture of some famous man or woman whose apparent gender is not the same as the tweeter's gender.  And I, for instance, have a picture of embroidered snakes on my Twitter page.

After thinking all that, I was eager to learn how all that was done in the study.  But guess what?  There is no written study anywhere on the wide and varied Internets!

I then e-mailed Demos to ask for the url of the study.  The rapid response I received (thanks, Demos!) told me --  and here comes the fun part! -- that there IS NO WRITTEN REPORT THAT PEOPLE COULD ANALYZE.

That is bullshit.  Absolute bullshit.  Just think about what that approach means for scientific inquiry:  Nobody, but nobody, can tell if you have done the research correctly and nobody, but nobody can post a criticism if your study is a bouquet of nose hairs with dried snot on them.
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* How can we be sure that these tweets aren't based on misogyny?  Do corporations get an automatic pass?

Added later:  That there is no report does not imply that the results are incorrect, only that we cannot tell if they are correct or incorrect.  But a written report is very important.  The reason that researchers write their studies up is so that others can see what they did, how they did it, and also so that others can judge whether the study was done right or not.