The Birka Viking Warrior Burial. A Female Warrior Or Not?

Archeologists in Sweden have had a new look at a very famous Viking-era burial in Birka, Sweden.  The grave goods in the burial are many and associated with warfare:

a sword, an axe, a spear, armour-piercing arrows, a battle knife, two shields, and two horses, one mare and one stallion; thus, the complete equipment of a professional warrior. Furthermore, a full set of gaming pieces indicates knowledge of tactics and strategy...

Thus, the grave has always been interpreted as a warrior grave, though some researchers in the 1970s suggested that the bones of the buried warrior demonstrated female characteristics.  This new study applies both osteology and DNA sequencing and argues that the results show that the grave was that of a tall woman who had died in her thirties.

It's fun to Google this topic.  Many of the headlines one finds that way state that "a Viking warrior was a woman" or that "new research that women were Viking warriors" or that the "debate about whether women were Viking warriors" has been ignited.  Some criticisms of the study argue that no such conclusion can be drawn from the findings.

And of course we can't draw such conclusions about the possible gender roles of the Viking era from one single grave, and neither can we draw any such conclusions about the ancient world, in general, even though several other recent findings argue that  women have been buried with weapons and stereotypically male tools in other parts of Europe and Asia, too. As if they had been warriors, that is.

Let's take a step back and ask the following question:  Suppose that you find an ancient grave, the bones in it are female, and the grave goods consist of pots and pans and weaving tools.  What would your conclusions about that ancient person's role be?

Most of us very readily accept that she cooked and wove fabric, that her grave goods described her job during her life.  Very very few would bother wondering if we really can make such a conclusion. 

So why is it so much harder to apply the same logic to the Birka warrior grave?

The answer is an easy one.  The example I made up agrees with our prior expectations, our understanding of history and our biases, if you will, whereas the Birka example does not.  Yet we don't know, exactly,  how men and women in the Viking-age Sweden divided chores between them.  Some women (how many we can't tell) may indeed have been warriors, and a few women may have been the kind of military leaders Elizabeth I of England was, which could have been reflected in how they were buried.

We cannot be certain, of course.  At the same time,  it's long been customary* to sex ancient burials by the included grave goods, so that if cooking and weaving implements (or jewelry) were found to be in the majority, the grave was assumed to belong to a woman, while weapons and the kinds of tools which code male today were used as the basis for designating a particular burial male. 

These rules used the gender roles that prevailed in the archeologists' own cultures, or had recently prevailed in them, but even after knowing that it can be difficult to see that in-built bias they contain.

All that is worth keeping in mind when reading this criticism of the study, too:

Writing on her blog, University of Nottingham professor of Viking studies Judith Jesch says, "I have always thought (and to some extent still do) that the fascination with women warriors, both in popular culture and in academic discourse, is heavily, probably too heavily, influenced by 20th- and 21st-century desires." Today, many of us are eager to find examples of woman leaders in the past who are just as badass as our woman leaders today. And that might lead to misunderstanding history.

That's a bias worth keeping in mind.  But so is the opposite bias I discuss above.

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** Especially when no bones etc. survived.

Random Thoughts on Facebook

Isn't Facebook wonderful?  In a few short moments you can check on all your friends, learn what they had for dinner or lunch and see how they look in their Facebook pictures, as compared to real life.  There's practically no need to ever talk to anyone outside the cyberspace, as is easily seen by noticing how people having dinner together are all staring into their own cell phones.  Mmm.  Alone together.

I'm not particularly fond of Facebook for all sorts of reasons, some personal but some political.  Among the latter is the fact that Facebook is almost a worldwide monopoly in social media, that it's policies about advertising and news dissemination affect millions and millions, yet it's not viewed as a regulated utility or even held accountable in any meaningful legal sense.  It doesn't have to check that the news it transmits are factual, and what can be posted on Facebook depends on what Facebook decides can be posted*, including Russian ads (fake news) intended to affect American elections.

We are still living in the lawless Wild West era (as depicted by movies) of online communication, and one day, perhaps, regulations will specify the rights and responsibilities of such "platforms" as Facebook and eBay and other cyber-firms which insist** that they are simply technical tools when it benefits them, which insist that they are marketplaces when it benefits them, and which insist that they are firms when that benefit them.  But only social media firms will have to face the question whether they are direct political players or not.  Right now one man, Mark Zuckerberg, wields enormous power over what information those who consume their news in the social media receive.

All this is uncharted territory.

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* Users can ask for certain pages to be removed, and Facebook will decide if that happens or not.  Past campaigns by various organizations (including feminist ones) may have succeeded in making Facebook moderation a little better when it comes to outright hate speech, but it's not that difficult to open a new page when the previous one has been closed.

Then there are ghastly videos of murders and such.  The New York Times wrote this last April, in the context of covering one murder posted on Facebook:

Now Facebook is facing a backlash over the shooting video, as it grapples with its role in policing content on its global platform.

It is an issue that Facebook, the world’s largest social network, has had to contend with more frequently as it has bet big on new forms of media like live video, which give it a venue for more lucrative advertising.

Note the reference to "lucrative advertising."  That's the firm-version of Facebook, the one which tries to make sure that you can't avoid seeing ads when you check what's happening with your friends and family.

Note, also, that Facebook moderates some postings only because it decided to do so.

**  The cyber-firms are usually all of those things.  We don't have a very good understanding of how such behemoths should be regulated or treated, what the long-run consequences of their power might be and so on.
 

Hillary Clinton, Get Thee Into The Wilderness!

I adore the coverage of Hillary Clinton's new book about the 2016 elections!  To see why, first read this piece "Hillary, Time To Exit The Stage."  Then read this fun piece, along (somewhat) similar lines: "It's Time For Hillary Clinton To Gracefully Bow Out of Public Life, Along With All Other Women."

The demands that Hillary Clinton pack her suitcases and gets a one-way ticket to the heart of the sun are psychologically interesting.  Why not just ignore her book if she so annoys particular journalists or readers?  And if she is as unpopular as Doug Schoen writes in the first article I link to, why would it matter what such an unpopular ice queen from vampire hell might scribble?  Go for a walk or bicker about something else in politics, Doug.

On Pornography And Misogyny: Questions.

The UK Guardian interviews two film-makers, David Simon and George Pelecanos,  who have created a new TV drama on the impact of porn in the US.  A few snippets:

Simon continues: “There was always a market for prostitution, and even pornography existed below the counter in a brown paper bag, but there wasn’t an industry; that had yet to find its full breadth in terms of the American culture and economy, but we all know what was coming.
“It’s now a multibillion dollar industry and it affects the way we sell everything from beer to cars to blue jeans. The vernacular of pornography is now embedded in our culture. Even if you’re not consuming pornography, you’re consuming its logic. Madison Avenue has seen to that.”

...

Pornography “affected the way men and women look at each other, the way we address each other culturally, sexually,” he says. “I don’t think you can look at the misogyny that’s been evident in this election cycle, and what any female commentator or essayist or public speaker endured on the internet or any social media setting, and not realise that pornography has changed the demeanour of men. Just the way that women are addressed for their intellectual output, the aggression that’s delivered to women I think is informed by 50 years of the culturalisation of the pornographic.”

The bolds are mine.

An interesting hypothesis, and one which I would dearly love to see properly studied*.

I have earlier written about one of my great fears:

That many teenagers get their "sex education" from porn which may be contemptuous of women, which may be violent or even outright misogynistic.  Even at its most innocent level, porn is not meant to be the depiction of real human relationships.  It's fluff candy for its consumers, intended for masturbation, and since the majority of its consumers are heterosexual men, the women acting in porn naturally pretend to ultimately like everything the men in porn do to them, however much they initially resist. 

Now I have been given a second possible fear about the false lessons that can be learned from misogynistic porn, sigh.**

Pelecanos, the second film-maker that was interviewed in the piece,  suggest that the way men talk to each other about women has changed in ways which don't seem completely random:

Pelecanos, 60, thinks about the two sons he raised and the conversations he overheard when their friends came to the family home. “The way they talk about girls and women is a little horrifying. It’s different from when I was coming up. It’s one thing what was described as locker-room talk, like, ‘Man, look at her legs. I’d love to…’ – that kind of thing. But when you get into this other thing, calling girls tricks and talking about doing violence to them and all that stuff, I’d never heard that growing up, man. I just didn’t.

Is that change because of pornography, or because others say similar things online and it then becomes acceptable, perhaps even a male bonding device?  These explanations don't have to be mutually exclusive, of course.  Those who consume the most misogynistic pornography may go online and menace women, and then that infection spreads to others.

I never enjoy writing about this topic, because the debate that usually follows tends to veer to all sorts of pornography, not just the clearly misogynistic type, and because it seldom distinguishes between private consumption choices and possible negative externalities.  Also because I get called a prude and told that I can rip the porn out of someone's cold hands only after they are dead and so on.

Yet it is only the possible harmful externalities (effects on third parties, other than the producer and consumer of a particular piece of porn) of woman-hating pornography that I want to address in this post, the possibility that   

"Even if you’re not consuming pornography, you’re consuming its logic. Madison Avenue has seen to that.”  

We need more studies of those possible externalities, because if they exist and if they are large, well, then we women are f**ked.


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*  That would be a difficult endeavor, but not impossible.  We could, for instance, collect data on people's pornography consumption, on their online trolling behavior and its contents and on their general views about women.  There's a chicken-and-egg problem that needs to be solved, though.  See ** for more on that.

**  There are several possible theories, in addition to any direct impact of violent, misogynistic or demeaning porn on cultural views about women.  For instance:

1.  It could be that those who view misogynistic pornography do so, because they already hate women and get turned on by seeing violence done on women, say. 

That misogynistic online speech seems to be a growth industry does not have to mean that the levels of misogyny in the society are rising because of the widespread consumption of online pornography. After all, those consumers who choose to consume it have chosen a particular type of pornography, presumable because it excites them.

Thus, there might have been a large pool of hidden misogyny which is now breaking out on the surface, given that online opinions are mostly anonymous and usually don't result in social sanctions.  In short, we may be inadvertently validating the expression of misogynistic views by letting them go unchallenged.

2.  Something else may have changed during the most recent decades, and that "something else" may be the reason why we observe more open misogyny.  One possible candidate for that "something else" is the considerably improved position of women in the society and the general backlash which has resulted (the MRA movement etc.).  In that sense the campaign of Hillary Clinton and the advances women have made in politics could trigger dormant fears of women "taking over everything!" and also  desires to re-define women's roles as less powerful.  Sexual objectification is one way to get there.

3.  Finally, there might be no connection between the consumption of misogynistic pornography and the extent of expressed misogyny.  It's hard to measure how common the latter is, in any case, because just a small group of very busy trolls can leave their scat on several online sites.  A good study might be able to help us here.

Lady Justice on Campus: Show Us Your Tits! Or Betsy DeVos on Campus Sexual Assault.

Betsy DeVos, Trump's Secretary of Education,  is planning to rewrite the rules on how sexual assault is to be treated under Title IX on college campuses:

Saying that the Obama administration’s approach to policing campus sexual assault had “failed too many students,” Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said on Thursday that her administration would rewrite the rules in an effort to protect both the victims of sexual assault and the accused.
Ms. DeVos did not say what changes she had in mind. But in a strongly worded speech, she made clear she believed that in an effort to protect victims, the previous administration had gone too far and forced colleges to adopt procedures that sometimes deprived accused students of their rights.
“Through intimidation and coercion, the failed system has clearly pushed schools to overreach,” she said in an address at George Mason University in suburban Arlington, Va. “With the heavy hand of Washington tipping the balance of her scale, the sad reality is that Lady Justice is not blind on campuses today.”

Nope, Lady Justice is not blind on campuses today, but she might be naked, or at least should show us her tits.

Let's leave aside the important question how best to police and prosecute sexual assault on campuses.  Let's, instead, make a note of the most obvious aspect of this speech:

DeVos is doing Trump's bidding and filling his promises to his base.  This move is part and parcel of this administration's war against uppity women.  In that it's linked to what the administration is attempting in the labor markets by making it harder for women and/or minorities to sue employers for discrimination, and in what the administration is attempting to do when it comes to violence against women.  It's also linked to Pence's hoary Christian patriarchal values and his wish for forced-birth rules for women.  These all share a certain sense of "putting women back into their proper places."

Note, also, how DeVos was appointed by a president who openly boasted about pussy grabbing.  In such an atmosphere banners like these meeting new first-year students and their families are just innocent fun and not a symbol of perhaps a certain kind of sexual entitlement:

Finally, note, once again, this common refrain I've seen so many times when the media writes about sexual assault:

Critics of the Obama administration’s guidance to colleges complained that it was unfair to use a standard of proof that was far lower than that used in criminal law, since disciplinary actions and expulsions that result from ambiguous sexual encounters can stigmatize young men long into the future, affecting their educational and job prospects. The critics argued that if sexual assault had, in fact, taken place, it should be a matter for the police.

It is that concern for the future effects on the accused that is the common refrain, and it is not applied to only those who have had "ambiguous" sexual encounters, but even more widely:  to those who have clearly committed the crime they were accused of.

Yet I rarely see similar reminders of the stigmatizing effects of rape on the future of the young women and how that might affect their educational and job prospects, not to mention their mental health, or how such stigma might become even stronger if the perpetrator of the crime walks free (perhaps because his future is more important than hers).

I want to make absolutely clear that falsely sentencing or punishing the innocent is wrong and its consequences dreadful.  But not sentencing or punishing the guilty is not right, either.

Since many rape or sexual assault cases do not have the kind of evidence which every single person would deem sufficient*,  the probabilities of someone being convicted depend on the rules which are used by those judging the cases.  DeVos seems to be proposing to make those rules stricter on campuses, by demanding that the current "preponderance of evidence" rule be replaced by "clear and convincing" standards of proof.

What that might mean in practice is this:

Some of those wrongly accused of sexual assault might not be unfairly punished.  But some actual sexual assault, too, would go unpunished, both because the the evidence did not reach that "clear and convincing" level, even though it might have exceeded 50% of all evidence, and because fewer victims of sexual assault would bother to report the attacks.  Whether such changes would increase the number of sexual assaults on campus is not clear to me.

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*  It really is crucial here to remember that most victims of sexual assault, worldwide, do not go to the police or other authorities, and this seems to be the pattern on US campuses, too.  Thus, it's fairly rare for a random perpetrator to be convicted,  but very strict rules about what type of evidence is viewed as "clear and convincing" reduce the likelihood even further.  — If we call those falsely accused the "false positives" (as in a medical test), then there clearly is a very large number of "false negatives" in the general population. 




 

Short Posts, 9/6/17. On Political Tribalism, Gendered Workers and Geniuses

1.  I have nothing exciting or different to say about Trump kissing the butt of his white male supremacist base by deciding to phase out DACA, or about where the next hurricanes might make landfall.  Indeed, the cyberspace is full of both data, chatter and fake news on those topics.

It is, however,  worth saying a few words about Rush Limbaugh's arguments when he mentions the political uses of the hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Jose, not because old Rush would matter (except in the sense of being a bottle of the most condensed racism, misogyny and plain nastiness), but because there's a wider point I wish to make.

Creating Murderers

A new study analyzing ten murder cases in the US shows that murderers' dads fall into three categories:  anti-dads, ueber-dads and absent dads?  

We must face the question:  Is it bad fathering which creates murderers?  Asking that question might sound sexist, but I assure you it's not, because dads are the role models of their sons, and most murderers are male so were once sons.

So fathers:  Will your child turn out to be a murderer?  Are your fathering skills adequate to prevent that?  Can you sleep well knowing all this?

Okay.  I made all that up.  But not to worry, just reverse the sex of the parent and you will get an actual study!  It's even summarized in the UK Independent:*

After examining 10 murder cases in the US series Murderers and their Mothers, Dr Elizabeth Yardley began to demystify the psyche of killers by looking closely at their maternal relations.
Debunking accusations of sexism by explaining that mothers “matter more” in the making of murderers due to the “inherently gendered nature of society”, she used a blog on the Huffington Post, Yardley explained that care-giving and nurturing connotations can be taken for granted when it comes to motherhood.
The criminology professor and podcaster deems the killers’ mothers behaviour as a contributing factor in their actions.

Isn't it interesting what kinds of studies get disseminated and how?  I have no idea if Dr. Yardley's teeny-tiny sample of ten cases was compared to some random drawing of mothers from the general population**, but I doubt that, if that she thought ten cases is enough to go by and  decided that only the mothers matter when it comes to parenting.

So what are the murderers' horrible mother like?  According to Yardley, they fall into three groups:  Anti-mothers, ueber-mothers and passive mothers.  Ueber-mothers protect their children too much, passive mothers protect their children too little, and anti-mothers come themselves from violent homes and pass the violence on. 

Mothering is a tightrope act!  It's almost impossible to be a good mother, and if you are not, you will create a murderer.  Or a Hitler.  Hitler mentions his mother in Mein Kampf, by the way, noting that she was a stay-at-home mother who dedicated her life to her children.  Probably an ueber-mother?

Which means that WWII is women's fault, as is almost everything in this world since Eve took the apple from one of my people.  Or so they say.

My point in reviewing that particular article about a pretty iffy study is that there's a giant market for articles which blame the Biblical Eve and her daughters, even when it comes to something like murders where the vast majority of murderers are men.
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*  First, a general caveat:  As I can't find the study itself, what I say about it assumes that the summary in the Independent is correct.  If it's incorrect, the shame belongs to the latter newspaper.

Second, note that Yardley doesn't debunk any accusations of sexism; she simply decides to ignore the fathers and their possible roles altogether.   To see why this matters, suppose that a father beats his son all the time, but the mother is passive and does not protect the son.  If the son ends up a murderer later in life, and is entered into a study like Yardley's, the fault is all in the bad mothering.
 
**  I couldn't find anything on the study online, so I can't tell if the mothers of the ten murderers (or in the ten murder cases, as there might be multiple murderers) were compared to mothers in general.  It's possible that the general population of mothers includes anti-mothers, ueber-mothers and passive mothers, and it's even theoretically possible that they might exist in the same proportions as they exist in Yardley's study.  In that case the results would be meaningless.

More specifically, it's possible that the childhood homes of people who later become murderers are very dysfunctional, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the mothers are the  main causal agents for the dysfunctional aspects.  Their behavior could be a response to what the fathers do or the result of complex interplay between the family members.  An inherited tendency toward violent behavior (from either or both parents) is also possible. 

Finally, studies which begin from a murderer and walk backward in an attempt to find causal factors can easily be tinged by the knowledge that the final result of the family's child-rearing was a violent child.  This could color the classifications used for the mothers in Yardley's study.

Partisanship, Propaganda and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. Echidne's Take.

The Harvard study, called  Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election has now produced its final report, and you can download it at this link.


All the 140 pages are worth reading, and I have done so.  When I finished, I lay my aching head on my desk and attended to some creative swearing.  The findings are that bad.
 




Here's the abstract of the study.  I have bolded the most crucial findings, but, honestly, the whole report deserves reading:






In this study, we analyze both mainstream and social media coverage of the 2016 United States presidential election. We document that the majority of mainstream media coverage was negative for both candidates, but largely followed Donald Trump’s agenda: when reporting on Hillary Clinton, coverage primarily focused on the various scandals related to the Clinton Foundation and emails. When focused on Trump, major substantive issues, primarily immigration, were prominent. Indeed, immigration emerged as a central issue in the campaign and served as a defining issue for the Trump campaign.

We find that the structure and composition of media on the right and left are quite different. The leading media on the right and left are rooted in different traditions and journalistic practices. On the conservative side, more attention was paid to pro-Trump, highly partisan media outlets. On the liberal side, by contrast, the center of gravity was made up largely of long-standing media organizations steeped in the traditions and practices of objective journalism.

Our data supports lines of research on polarization in American politics that focus on the asymmetric patterns between the left and the right, rather than studies that see polarization as a general historical phenomenon, driven by technology or other mechanisms that apply across the partisan divide.

The analysis includes the evaluation and mapping of the media landscape from several perspectives and is based on large-scale data collection of media stories published on the web and shared on Twitter.

In ordinary language, with a few additions from my reading of the study, these are the findings worth thinking about:

When Religious Patriarchs Speak On Sexuality And Gender. The Case of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.

The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood* is a group of Evangelical leaders who tell their flocks that the gender roles which prevailed two thousand years ago in nomadic tribal cultures are eternal and decreed by a divine power.

The Council expressed its sour views on gender equality in 1987 in the Danvers Statement, which explicitly states that husbands are the bosses of their wives at home and that men are the heads in the covenant community.  Thus, an eternal and unchanging hierarchy exists, and any attempt to disrupt it is seen as terrible.


Feminism was especially singled out as one rational for the Danvers Statement:

the increasing promotion given to feminist egalitarianism with accompanying distortions or neglect of the glad harmony portrayed in Scripture between the loving, humble leadership of redeemed husbands and the intelligent, willing support of that leadership by redeemed wives;

The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood has obnoxious opinions which are also advocated by Wahhabists in Islam and by the most orthodox strains of Judaism.  The gist of all those is that gender hierarchies are eternal.

Just to make all that absolutely clear, the same Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood has come up with the Nashville Statement which tries to fill in all the gaps in that argument, to keep the hierarchy very clear (and to cause even more suffering, of course):

“The Nashville Statement” was written as a follow-up to that statement [the 1987 one], in response to what the group sees as a growing acceptance of same-sex marriage and transgender rights. The council’s co-founder, John Piper, who is also a Baptist pastor, wrote that the statement addresses the “destructive consequences” of this modern inclusive culture.

I don't see the "destructive consequences" in the statement itself, but I've learned that when conservative patriarchs talk about such destruction, they really mean that someone is gnawing off the rungs of the ladder they have successfully climbed, and they fear falling down.

That so many religious groups advocate permanent gender hierarchies makes the criticism of such beliefs imperative for anyone who doesn't wish to emulate the cultural gender norms which prevailed two thousand years ago.

But progressives, in general, should pay attention to these arguments, too,  because if women are supposed to be subjugated to their husbands*, how can they exert independent power in the labor market?  If a husband has the veto power over everything his wife does, why would anyone trust her word?  And if he can decide when she should withdraw from the labor force, how should employers choose between married women and married men in promotion decisions?  Could we ever have a female president?  And who decides how the income is shared inside families?  Who gets to allocate any government transfer payments inside families?  Whose career needs will be prioritized?

Most Americans do not believe in the Biblical Big Guys' interpretations of their holy texts.  Note, however, that the more "religious rights" are pushed by the Trump administration, the closer we come to these opinions playing a much larger role in the labor market, education and politics.

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*  Specifically, the Council advocates complementarianism:  the view that men are created for one thing and that women are created for another thing, and that when we add the two slices together they create the totality of everything that is.

The problems with that view are many.  Not only are the views in the Bible based on exceedingly ancient gender norms, women and men are not each others' complements in a vast majority of fields of operation and in general  women and men are more alike than they are different.

The approach also supports male headship without any real controls on that (to rule out violence as a way to exert dominance, say) or without any need to demonstrate leadership skills or concerns for those one leads, and the approach doesn't care if in at least some families the wives would actually be more competent leaders than their husbands.

But the deepest problem with that whole approach is the concept of complementarianism when deprived of any concerns for equality.  If I bake a giant chocolate cake, eat almost all of it and give you the crumbs left on the plate, our food intakes were complementary in the sense that we ate the whole cake.  Thus, complementarianism hides inequality and the possibility that the good bits are given to one side in these divine deals.


**  In the ideal fundie world that's how marriage would look like.  There would be no same-sex marriage, no egalitarian marriages, no real choice not to marry at all and still have sex. 


 

Trump Shuts Down An Obama-Era Rule On Pay Tracking By Gender, Race and Ethnicity. Fun!

Another little present from our Dear Leader.  This is a real doozy:

The White House will shut down an Obama-era rule that would have required businesses to track how much they pay workers of varying genders, races and ethnicities according to a new report.
The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that Trump officials will stay the rule, which would have gone into effect in the spring, because it created a burden for employers.
“It’s enormously burdensome,” Neomi Rao, administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, told The Journal. “We don’t believe it would actually help us gather information about wage and employment discrimination.”

The rule would have applied to firms with at least 100 employees.

I adore that last paragraph which I bolded: 

It's enormously burdensome to collect the only kind of data which actually can reveal if a firm discriminates against, say, its female employees in pay!  It's so burdensome that to think about that burden makes me feel as if I'm wearing giant mill-stones as earrings and my earlobes are sweeping the floor below this one!  It's exhausting!

There's no way a worker at that firm could just go to the computer and create a few cross-tabulations of the firm's pay data.  No way.  It's tiring to just think about it.  I need to lie down now.

I hope you got the point.  Getting that data is not at all burdensome.

Then the next bit in that last paragraph:  The administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs doesn't believe that data on pay by sex and race and ethnicity would help in gathering information about labor market discrimination!  

It's probably better to use astrology as the basis of such studies, or we could always simply ask the CEOs of such firms if they discriminate against certain groups of employees.  Yes, that would work!  Those CEOs have no incentive to lie, after all, no reason why they would like to keep their total labor bill as low as possible by paying less to certain employee groups.  And of course real bigots would tell us the truth and smile broadly, revealing their vampire fangs.

Enough, goofy goddess.  More realistically, it's true that such data cannot prove or disprove discrimination, but its absence means that discrimination cannot be proved at all!

Have you noticed, by the way, how the fact that some chore might be a burden is always used in this manner by the Republican Party?  Environmental regulations are a real burden for firms so let's scrap them and trust that future generations evolve into some sort of amphibians which do not need air and so on.  Any kind of labor market fairness is awfully burdensome, too, and it's so much better to assume that certain demographic groups just love to make a little pin money at work.

And Now, Something Completely Different. Fake Simon And Fake Garfunkel Singing About Trump

This is a fun way* to start the day.

Something more chewy will be served later.
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*  Link via Modemocrat.

Harvey As A Metaphor

While following the terrible events in Houston and elsewhere, it occurred to me that this particular hurricane, with its unprecedented and hard-to-forecast behavior and the enormous losses it's causing is also a good metaphor for what has happened to American politics in the age of Trump.

We no longer know which rules apply, we cannot use old prediction models, we are not properly prepared for the damage we are going to suffer, and the levees are breaking.

Those levees are the basic rules of democracy, however flawed, and Trump simply doesn't respect any of them.

Trump's Latest Friday News Dump

Was intended to give the pardoning of Sheriff Arpaio as little coverage as possible in the mainstream media, given that hurricane Harvey was clearly the most important news to cover.  Trump's message would still reach the right people among his Breitbart (white supremacist) base, because they may more attention to Trump's tweets and dog whistles.

Just to remind all of you, what Trump did in pardoning Arpaio was this:

While he is not the first official whose offense involved abuse of public powers—from Nixon on down, others fit that category—his is the first case I’m aware of where someone is pardoned for using state power toward racist ends.

Phoenix New Times provides us a list of the deeds of Sheriff Arpaio.  It's not pleasant reading.

The catastrophe in Texas works nicely to reduce the publicity Arpaio's pardoning would otherwise receive.

Another possibility is that the timing of his pardon was planned to appease that Breitbart base for the simultaneous news that Sebastian Gorka, one of the white supremacist guys in the Trump administration, was let go.

Or Trump might be signaling to his co-conspirators that he will pardon them, so there's no need to make deals in the Mueller investigation etc.

Now I'm firmly in the world where hats are made of tinfoil and conspiracies sprout up everywhere.

Women's Equality Day, 8/28/17. What To Read, A Little Late.

Women's Equality Day was last Saturday, August 28th.  And no, its not a special day set up for 24 hours of gender equality, to be set aside for the rest of the year.

I was busy with my Giant Cucumber Plants and missed the date.  But not to worry!  Here are a few things worth reading on issues relating to gender equality*:

-  Tressie McMillan Cottom  wrote in July about the stolen childhoods of black girls, their stolen innocence and our lack of care for them as children.  I strongly recommend that piece which came out when I was mostly offline.

-  Jill Filipovic writes about the Catch-22, familiar to so many women, which Hillary Clinton faced when Donald Trump decided to stalk her on the debate floor, in front of millions of eyes.  Should she ignore him?  Should she kick him in the fork?  Should she yell at him call him a creep?

She picked the first alternative and ignored him.  But now she is criticized for it.  Filipovic notes that no option available for women in such circumstances is ever quite correct:

When women complain about being harassed on the street, we are admonished to simply talk back to our harassers. When we are beaten up or killed for talking back, people wonder why we provoked our assailants. When we are harassed or assaulted by someone in the public eye, we are presumed to be merely seeking publicity if we come forward. If we decide to speak out only when other women have done so first, then we must be lying, because why didn’t we mention this earlier?

This is familiar to many of us.  Its roots may be in our unconscious assumption that women are ultimately somehow responsible for the harassment they receive, even when that clearly is not the case (such as when Donald Trump breathed down Hillary Clinton's neck).**

-  The UK Guardian writes about a show which is based on "locker-room banter." The cast consists of four women who repeat the tales of men interviewed by the playwright Gary McNair.  It's hard to say whether the stories selected for the show are a random sample or the most extreme ones, but here's an example for you:

“The best thing that comes out of a woman’s mouth is your knob, I would say, aye.” “They’re only good for being in the kitchen … make my dinner then give me my hole, and then go to your bed.” 

Is this locker-room banter?  Just a joke?

If so, Trump's pussy-grabbing boasts might indeed be fairly mild examples of something much more hateful:  a culture of misogyny  —  I fervently hope that men with these opinions are a tiny minority.



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*  All my examples come from fairly privileged places.  Women's lives are much more unequal in the rest of the world and truly dismal in certain countries such as Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia.  Important work remains to be done.

**  Thus, we keep mulling over what Hillary should have done, in response to what Donald did.  We do not keep mulling over why Donald chose to stalk her around the stage in a public debate.  He has been given a weird kind of pass.

 In a related article, Paul Waldman asks if Hillary Clinton has abased herself adequately or not for her loss, and suggests that our thirst for this is at least partly based on the fact that she is a woman:

So again, why were other presidential losers never told to voluntarily submit themselves to a ritual humiliation? I can’t prove to you empirically that sexism is the reason that demand is only made of Clinton, but previous candidates didn’t find their occasional post-election comments greeted with headlines like “Dear Hillary Clinton, please stop talking about 2016” or “Can Hillary Clinton please go quietly into the night?,” or “Hillary Clinton shouldn’t be writing a book — she should be drafting a long apology to America” (that last op-ed began with the line, “Hey, Hillary Clinton, shut the f— up and go away already”). Only Clinton is supposed to beg for forgiveness, absolve everyone else of any sins they committed in 2016, and whip herself until we’re good and satisfied that she has been punished enough

Houston

I'm lighting a thousand candles for Texas.

Digby tells us how our Dear Leader is sternly focused on the catastrophe caused by hurricane Harvey.  Trump takes the opportunity to note that he has the very best people out to help, the greatest, in fact.

To see two catastrophes crash into each other is stunning.

May all in the way of Harvey be safe.  May help reach them soon.

How to send help.

The End of Liberal Identity Politics, Take Two

Mark Lilla, the guy who right after the elections argued that "liberal identity politics" must end before liberalism can rise from the grave (presumably as a zombie) has written a book based on his earlier New York Times article:  "The End of Identity Liberalism."

The book is called The Once And Future Liberal.  After Identity Politics.  Beverly Gage reviewed it for the New York Times.  She was not impressed:

Lilla acknowledges that social movements like feminism and civil rights played important roles in American history, raising questions and insisting on changes that could be secured no other way. At the moment, however, he finds such movements to be counterproductive, sucking energy away from the simple and urgent task of getting more Democrats into office. He disparages Black Lives Matter as “a textbook example of how not to build solidarity,” and dismisses “sex relations, the family, the secretarial pool, schools, the grocery store” (read: women’s issues) as all but irrelevant to serious politics.

It's almost as if Lilla's own identity has blinded him when it comes to certain issues?  Gage finds this a pity, because Lilla could have touched upon some important questions:

How should the Democratic Party balance diversity with a common vision of citizenship? How and where should concerned Americans focus their energies — on social-movement activism, on “resistance,” on electoral politics? How should universities preserve free speech in an age of impassioned conflict? How, for that matter, can Democrats start winning a few more local races? Lilla acts as if there are easy answers to these questions. “We need no more marchers,” he writes. “We need more mayors.” But isn’t it possible that we need both?

Well, the majority of recent anti-Trump marchers have been women, so they cannot possibly have made any difference, right?

I responded to Lilla's original 2016 article in a long (and popular!) blog post which I believe is still worth reading.  Today I want to return to the question if I can find any shared concerns between Lilla and my divine self.

Short Posts, 8/24/17: Trump as the New Bannon, The Death of Empathy And Other Topics

1.  The firing of Stephen K. Bannon is too little, too late, if the intention was to limit the power and influence of white (male) supremacists inside the Trump administration.  It's like waiting until a cancer has metastasized before removing only the very first tumor found.  But white supremacists need not worry, given that Trump still appears to spout all their basic values.

At this point you might think about the rate at which a certain kind of fascist thinking is becoming normalized at the highest levels of the US government.  So.

2.  A science envoy to the State Department, Daniel Kammen, has resigned, as a protest to Trump's clear penchant for racism and sexism and his clear disgust with the core values of a democracy.  The first letters in the paragraphs of Kammen's resignation letter spell "impeach."

Impeachment is unlikely, as long as the Republicans are firmly determined to let Trump cavort on their shoulders, though the hidden message is fun to find.

I'm not sure if resignation is a good strategy in the fight against the Turd Reich, though I get its appeal.  But if all rational people leave the administration, won't things get even worse?

3.  The New York Times coverage of the death of Kim Wall, a Swedish journalist whose mutilated body was found in Denmark, has been criticized by some readers of that paper:

One point that arose was that some commentators in the Scandinavian press and on social media thought this grisly crime eerily evoked a plot from a well-known Danish TV crime series, “The Bridge.” The show is about the span that connects Copenhagen and Malmo, Sweden, the locations in question. (Ms. Wall grew up near Malmo.) In our coverage, we pointed out that comparisons to the series were being made.

Some of our readers called this comparison insulting to Ms. Wall.

Alice Driver, a journalist, wrote on Twitter: “Really poor choice by @nytimes to use the murder of a female journalist to ruminate on Scandinavian thrillers.”

I have read about the case in several European newspapers.  Because I didn't then plan to write on it, I didn't analyze why I felt uncomfortable with the tone of several articles.

A whiff of death porn in the coverage?  A slight tilt toward turning a horrible story where a real person has died into an intellectual puzzle, as if it came from some fictional crime series?  A result of the gradual waning of empathy I seem to spot online whenever people discuss some recent horror, such as a terrorist attack,  where the victims become political chess pawns to be manipulated but not really acknowledged as formerly breathing, living, feeling individuals?

My thoughts are still pretty fuzzy on this.  But sometimes I really dislike my fellow humans' online behavior.

4.  I ate the first cucumber from the two plants in my garden and it was delicious.  To find it under a broad leaf was exciting!  It looked like a real cucumber!  It tasted like one, too.

 

The Most Basic Trouble With President Trump

Far too often I suddenly stop and try to get my head around the fact that sixty-plus million American voters thought this man would be the correct one to give the nuclear keys to.  He was equally incoherent and narcissistic in his pre-election rallies as he is in his post-election rallies (we have never-ending campaigning to celebrate the Dear Leader now).

Let's set aside the many and complicated explanations for Trump's support aside.  Let's instead ask what his election teaches us about the necessary conditions for a functioning democracy (even a limping one). 

What has gone wrong in the last thirty years or so, to allow a clearly incompetent, ignorant and ill-willed man to be elected to run this country?

Consider this parable:

We are passengers in a long-distance bus, going 120 miles per hour in a dark night up a curving mountain lane. The bus is driven by a deranged maniac who only wants to see how fast he can drive and how daringly.  Some passengers are tied to their seats.  Other passengers are free to move,  but nevertheless refuse to disable the driver, perhaps because they savor the idea of the tied-down ones dying when the bus careens into an abyss (never mind that they will be collateral damage), or perhaps because they enjoy the vicious ride or because they believe in their own immortality.*

That was my parable of the power that only the Republicans in the Congress (the passengers who can move in the bus)  have to control Donald Trump (the deranged bus driver).  The rest of us have much more limited power to influence the events.  In particular, we cannot ask to be let off at a safe stop.

I want to stress that this post is not about criticizing the horrible things Trump wishes to achieve, or says that he wishes to achieve.  Those I cover frequently.

It's about something much more limited:  The failure of the electoral system to stop an utterly incompetent man from being elected as the leader of the country, never mind what his policies might be. 

So how can this be fixed?

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*  Or because the alternative would have been a bus driven by a lady, and "everybody" knows that women cannot drive.

Terror in Turku, Finland

An eighteen-year-old Moroccan man, Abderrahman Mechkah,  who had entered Finland as an asylum-seeker in 2016 went on a rampage (armed with at least one large knife) in the center of the city of Turku (Åbo in Swedish) last Friday afternoon, hitting a pedestrian street and a busy market square (a bit like a giant farmer's market).  He may have timed his slaughtering to a time when the streets and the square would be full of people coming home from work and/or shopping.

He killed two Finnish women and wounded eight other people, six of them women and two of them men.  The two men had come to the aid of a victim or tried to stop the butcher.  Thus, they were not chosen from random possible victims.

Thus, authorities in Finland argue that he appeared to target women:

Four other Moroccan men detained over possible links to the Turku attack have co-operated with police but their role has yet to be fully established, Granroth added. The main suspect, who had lived in Turku’s immigration centre after arriving in Finland last year, appeared to have targeted women, police said on Saturday.

One of the attacked women was pushing a baby in a stroller.

The police shot the assailant in the leg* and arrested him.  The police operation was swift and efficient as it had been practiced for quite a while.

The Finnish Security Intelligence Office (SUPO) had received a tip about Mechkah as possibly radicalized early this year, but the tip contained no concrete information about plans and seems not to have received priority.  Mechkah was denied asylum in early 2017, because Morocco is not a conflict zone or near one.**

The latter could be the reason why Mechkah (and his possible associates) acted at this time:  He may have faced deportation for not having left the country voluntarily.

Why choose women as the targets?  A Finnish terrorism researcher, Leena Malkin, notes (source in Finnish) that this may have been intended to increase the shock value of the slaughter, may reflect misogyny, may be based on the assumption that women are less likely to fight back,  or on the view that such attacks shame the men in the target population who have been unable to keep "their" women or children safe.  ISIS*** often targets civilians who are deemed particularly vulnerable, as do many other terrorist groups.

We may get more clarity on the so-called reasons for this attempted femicide later.  But an additional possibility is that Mechkah's extreme Islamist ideology doesn't believe that women should be out and about without male guardians and unveiled.  He might have wanted to create a specific terror in women which would keep them at home, because that is one step toward the kind of world ISIS desires.
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*  According to one eye-witness (source in Finnish)  a young Afghani asylum-seeker who tried to apprehend the assailant, the police had to shoot him as he was just preparing to cut the throat of yet another female victim.

**  The asylum application system has a severe problem in that there's no quick initial examination to decide on which cases are obviously without merit, based on the international agreements on the causes which justify getting asylum.  Note that dire economic need or the search for a better life is not one of those causes.

Individuals from countries which are not conflict zones or known to oppress certain demographic or religious groups can still apply for asylum and stay in the new host country for a longish period of time, even though everyone knows that they will not ultimately qualify for asylum.  Processing those cases,  financially supporting the applicants (and even paying for their return flights in some cases) takes resources away from other needier cases and endangers the compassion local people feel for refugees.   

***  ISIS appears to have added Finland to the list of the crusader countries, though I'm not sure exactly what Finland has done to justify such a placement.  Finland has never had colonies, but was a colony itself and has not sent troops or weapons to the Middle East.  Rather, it has taken in roughly 30,000 asylum-seekers in 2015 alone. 

But it does have a cross on the flag.  And of course the way ISIS reads the Quran justifies the killing of all infidels wherever they are caught, not just in war against Muslims.


 

The Metaphor Of Our Times: Trump Viewing The Solar Eclipse

The metaphor is this picture of our dear Leader watching the solar eclipse:

We are not supposed to look directly at the sun, but our Dear Leader does.  Thus, either he has never bothered to learn that rule or he believes that it is Fake News or he knows the rule, but decided that looking manly and daring and foolhardy is more important than preserving his retinas.

Those three possibilities are the ones journalists frequently use to try to explain Trump's behavior: willful ignorance, defining what he does not like as fake and produced by his enemies, and running on the emotional gases of manly stereotypes while giving his finger to the Democrats and the world at large (never mind the costs).

This is the person who decides when the nuclear button should be pressed.