The Nunes Memo

The Nunes memo was supposed to be a great move in the Republicans' war against the FBI.  I think its release fell flat, for reasons spelled out in several articles which came out after its release, but given the extremely tribal nature of today's American politics, I'm certain-sure that most Republicans found it a real smoking gun (check the comments on that last link!).

I get the importance of any move which could stop the Mueller investigation into the Trump campaign and the Trump administration.  Republicans don't want to go down with the captain of their ship, even if that captain himself drilled the holes in the hull. 

And for the Mueller investigation to stop, Trump needs to get rid of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein:

Rosenstein is key to the Russia investigation because he has the power to fire Mueller, after Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia matter.

But Rosenstein isn't firing Mueller.  If Trump could replace him with one of his own stooges, that stooge could then fire Mueller, and Trump believes that he would then be safe from further harassment.  The release of the memo had the partial goal of making Rosenstein's firing seem more appropriate.

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos: The Eternally Feminine. Part Three Of My Book Review

Anna Maria van Schurman

By Jan Lievens - National Gallery, London, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26861112







Chapter 11:  Masculinity In Peril

If you, dear reader, feel as if I have already written far too much about  how women, the feminine and gender are treated in Peterson's book, fasten your seat belts!

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos: The Eternally Feminine. Part Two Of My Book Review

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz



Playing Hide-And-Seek With Women And the Feminine

Remember how angry the Channel 4 interviewer, Cathy Newman, appeared to be while interviewing Jordan Peterson on this book?  How her questions were almost all about the gender gap in earnings, the scarcity of women on the top rungs of business hierarchies and so on?

I had read ten chapters of the book before I came across what made Newman so angry.  It was the eleventh chapter, supposedly about not bothering children (read: boys) when they are skateboarding, but in reality about the horrors of any attempts to achieve gender-equality.  Because most of the explicit evidence on how Peterson views women and men is packed into that one chapter, my discussion here will also divide into two parts:

This post is mostly about the pervasive atmosphere of the whole book, about the sometimes subtle and often not at all subtle erasures of women's ideas and women themselves from the book, and about the way Peterson assigns sex or gender to abstract concepts.  The next post is explicitly about the material in Chapter 11 of the book.

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos: The Eternally Feminine. Part One Of My Book Review

Fresco showing a woman so-called Sappho holding writing implements, from Pompeii, Naples National Archaeological Museum (14842101892)
By Carole Raddato - Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37880205
 

Introduction

If you are not familiar with professor Peterson, the new guru of conservative men, you might wish to read my earlier post on him.  His shtick is to give therapeutic advice about how to make one's life better, while firmly placing that advice into a politically and religiously conservative (and, in his case, very dismal) worldview.

For example, the advice to clear your desk and to put your life in order is ultimately explained as the first step in the battle for the Being, in the battle of making the world a better place and in the battle against the next totalitarian wave to come, the postmodernist far left wave breeding and multiplying in universities, which will one day kill millions, just as Stalin, Hitler and Mao did.

Professor Peterson himself has stated that his acolytes are ninety percent male (1).  In one interview he explains that by saying that YouTube itself is a male form of online exchanges, and his lectures are on YouTube.  But I see a different reason for his gendered following:  His messages are equally gendered, though not always bluntly.

This book review is an attempt to look at that gendering.  It's not a review of everything his book says, though I begin (in this post) with a more general overview of what I see as his basic organizing principles and main themes in the book. The remaining two posts will cover the book's views about women, biological sex and gender.

Is The Chaos Jordan Peterson's Book Is Intended To Combat "The Eternal Feminine"?

I wrote a post earlier about Jordan Peterson's views and his great influence, especially on men. You should read it if you are not familiar with Peterson's arguments.  In that post I predicted that Peterson would loom large, very soon, among social conservatives.

But I never expected that both Peggy Noonan and David Brooks would already be writing about him!  Peggy loved Peterson's book (which I have not read yet), and didn't seem to notice that its message wasn't exactly intended for her.

David had a more complicated take on Peterson's arguments.  I'd like to single out one quote from him, this one:

All of life is perched, Peterson continues, on the point between order and chaos. Chaos is the realm without norms and rules. Chaos, he writes, is “the impenetrable darkness of a cave and the accident by the side of the road. It’s the mother grizzly, all compassion to her cubs, who marks you as potential predator and tears you to pieces. Chaos, the eternal feminine, is also the crushing force of sexual selection. Women are choosy maters. … Most men do not meet female human standards.”

So.  Chaos is the eternal feminine.  And what is the name of Peterson's book?

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

Now that is fascinating.

Brooks doesn't like everything about this new brutal worldview Peterson espouses:

Much of Peterson’s advice sounds to me like vague exhortatory banality. Like Hobbes and Nietzsche before him, he seems to imagine an overly brutalistic universe, nearly without benevolence, beauty, attachment and love. His recipe for self-improvement is solitary, nonrelational, unemotional. I’d say the lives of young men can be improved more through loving attachment than through Peterson’s joyless and graceless calls to self-sacrifice.

I would agree.

But let's return to the first quote above.  What does it mean that "most men don't meet human female standards?"  Most adult men in this world do marry, right?

And that "women are choosy maters" bit.  I smell  evolutionary psychology behind this way of thinking, the assumption that women are the only ones who are choosing in the mating game, that men either exert no choice, somehow, or that men aren't picky at all, perhaps willing to mate with every single woman around them.  

This sounds like confusing short-term mating (one night stands) with long-term relationships.   It also  smells of the older views that women choose resources while men choose youth and fertility, based on the assumption that such behavior has been hard-wired into us during some postulated Era of Evolutionary Adaptedness (EEA).*  Recent evidence suggests otherwise.


A later PS:  I have purchased the book and have read four chapters this evening.  The treatment of chaos as feminine and order as masculine IS in the book, but Peterson appears to ask the reader to walk the path at the border of the two. 

Labeling chaos and order that way is similar to the Taoist yin-yang circle where the yin is associated with female, darkness, softness and so on and the yang is associated with male, light, hardness and so on.  Peterson readily borrows from all sorts of places, to make the legs for his grand theory, including from evolutionary psychology (with some not-so-great links) and from the patriarchs of the Old Testament to create his how-to-live-today manual.

A review will be forthcoming next week, either here or elsewhere.



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*  The problem with that EEA concept is that its environment is either left unspecified altogether or when it is specified, the assumption is that humans then lived in small nomadic kinship groups.

How does a nomadic kinship group create men who have more resources than what are built into their bodies?  And wouldn't those embodied resources consist of youth, health and strength? In other words, I'd argue that if anything is hard-wired in humans in terms of mating preferences, it would be the preference for youth and health, in both women and men.

An additional — and serious — problem is that we have no actual proof of any human hard-wiring of this type.  Women's historical preference for wealthier men can alternatively be explained by the fact that marrying up was about the only generally available way for women to accrue wealth during those historic eras when women were not allowed to inherit wealth, to own certain kinds of businesses or to attend university as a way up in the society.

The Golden Age of Free Speech. Is That The Online World?

When we argue with someone on Twitter or Facebook, are we engaging in a public debate?  Or a private one?  Is the online world in the public sphere or in the private sphere?  What speech is public and what is private?  Are we now living in the utopia where freedom of speech applies to everyone, where objective markets exist to weigh each idea, then let them box against each other while neutral judges decide the winner?

Courtland Sykes On Women's Rights

Reality is more wonderful than any amount of irony and sarcasm I can cook up on this blog.  Take, for example, this mysterious new candidate for the Senate from Missouri, one Courtland Sykes.  After reading about his views I was sure that he, and his fiancée Chanel Rion, were made-up figures.

But Snopes says Mr. Sykes is real, in any case.

He has the most hilarious opinions about women's rights.  This tweet summarizes his statement:

Here's GOP Senate candidate Courtland Sykes' spectacularly smug, retrograde statement on women's rights and "natures." This is what "tradition" and "benevolent" sexism are all about. Also, who doesn't want to come home to dinner? What an ass. He'll almost certainly win. pic.twitter.com/xTPQVa7MIw

— Still Too Female (@schemaly) January 25, 2018

And retrograde his opinions are, indeed.  He is roughly fifty years too late to argue that point, even when it applies to middle-class white women in this country.

But there IS one group which would utterly agree with him, and that's the most patriarchal school inside American fundamentalism, the school which includes the Quiverful, the school which disapproves of sending daughters to college, and the school which deems the value of women to be in their subjugated service to their husbands at home.  That school, by the way, does NOT believe in any kind of gender equality.

So Courtland (Courtie?) is fully in touch with that part of today's fundie Missourians.

He is also in touch with those manosphere sites where "make me a sandwich, bitch" is viewed as the finest putdown to any woman.  I guess we could put the two arguments about women's innate inferiority together to argue that first God created Adam and then, when Adam wanted a sandwich, God created Eve.  And Eve offered Adam an apple.

Oh my.  I love these kinds of weirdos.  Note the adjectives Courtie uses about feminists: nasty, crazed, with snake-filled heads!

Well, that last part does apply to me.  But wait!  There's more:  When he has daughters he is going to turn them into good housewives, perhaps with a tiny home-based enterprise on the side (would he have to approve it? chastity belt patterns?).

He is not going to let them become "career-obsessed banshees who forego home life and children and the happiness of family to become nail-biting manophobic hell-bent feminist she devils."  You know, like, say, doctors, dentists, librarians, managers, politicians and so on.

Mmm.  Mr. Sykes is very much opposed to Islamic extremism, too, which is funny because the ISIS guys would totally agree with his statement about women's rights.

I also loved the end of that statement where Courtie equates Hillary Clinton's loss* to Donald Trump with a clear sign that Americans want a world where women are sequestered from the public sphere altogether and where their first obligation is to have the dinner ready for their hard-working hubbies at 6pm on the dot.  In other words, the end of any kind of equality between men and women.

I have no idea if Courtie is a viable campaigner.  But his knowledge of feminism is terrible, as is the knowledge that his fiancée demonstrates on her website**.

What's weird about his rambling arguments is that he juxtaposes some sort of a nightmare picture of what he interprets as the results of more equal opportunity in the labor market with a nightmare picture of how he wants women to behave, which only seems to depend on what their husbands or fathers or brothers think is appropriate for them.

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* Remember that Hillary Clinton won three million more actual votes than Trump.  Does that mean the reverse?  That the majority of Americans are perfectly fine with women's leadership and other public roles?

**  The way they both use the term "radical feminism" is utterly wrong.  Courtie's hatred of women-with-careers should be aimed against liberal feminists, and Chanel Rion gets radical feminism totally and completely wrong, too.

Added later:  Remember the Vagenda of Manocide?  This guy seems to have similar primal fears.

Inclusiveness

I have been thinking of the lefty concept of inclusiveness and of the concept of a wide tent in politics in several contexts recently.  What does inclusiveness mean?  Is it just opening the gate or does it require more fundamental changes?

When we aim for inclusiveness, do we simultaneously exclude anything or anyone?  Should Democrats support very pro-life politicians when the party platform is pro-choice?  Does this mean changing the platform? Are pussy hats as the banner of a movement something which excludes people who do not have vulvas from participating in Women's Marches as women?

And who decides the answers to such questions?  Is it the previously excluded people?  Is the decision done by one or two individuals in power?  Or should it be a democratic majority vote that decides the answers?

I have no answers to these question.  Instead, I offer you a  parable which might clarify some of the questions.  I offer it in three modifications, but there are more possible modifications* which might be relevant in some real world situations.

First, a warning:  My parable is truly terrible in one sense: I use two medical conditions, one invented and one real**, as very rough stand-ins for someone being oppressed or mistreated  by the general culture or for someone having minority views and values (such as in the case of being pro-life when the majority in some group is pro-choice). 

This does not mean that there's anything objectively wrong with oppressed groups (defined by, say,  race, sex, gender identity, sexual preference etc), something that would justify the oppression they experience, or that having minority views is somehow objectively wrong. 

I just couldn't make up an example which would otherwise demonstrate the dilemmas we face in equally simple terms.  So read the parable with that in mind, please. 

With that reservation, here are the initial three forms of the parable:

1.  This form of the parable sets out the basic case which applies to the other two, except for the modifications I introduce.

You are the organizer of an amateur oil painting school or club in an imaginary word which looks almost like ours except when I introduce changes.  You currently have one hundred members, and new members are admitted or refused based on your decision alone.

A new member applies for membership.  This person suffers from red-green color blindness.  You decide to accept this member into the school, but because of the red-green color blindness, you also decide to remove all green and red colors from the colors the school uses, because you feel bad that the group would be employing colors which one of the members cannot appreciate.

What is the outcome of this decision?  Note that if you had included the person without any modification of the colors that are used, the only outcome is that a new person has been accepted, but that person cannot enjoy all the colors others can in the school.

By ruling out the use of red and green, you create real equality of access to the arts and you completely include the latest member in the group.

But you are also excluding something by that choice:  The other one hundred students no longer can use red or green in their work.

2.  Assume the basic facts of the previous parable, but now add something new:

People with red-green color blindness in the imaginary world of my example have been treated dreadfully by the general culture.  They have been formally and legally excluded from all arts education where red and green colors are used, and they have been physically attacked by bigots in that culture for being different.  Indeed, some of those bigots are probably among your existing school members.

How does that modification affect your decision to include the new student and to remove green and red colors from the palettes? 

It seems to me that the decision to do all that now has a greater feeling of justice.  Something more is achieved by the simultaneous inclusion of this new student and the refusal to have that person's source of oppression used by others in the group.  In short, the costs and benefits are different in this formulation than in the previous one, where the ignored costs to the initial one hundred members loom much larger.

3.  Let's complicate things even more.  Keep everything from the second form of the parable, but add more details: The weird imaginary world I'm painting here doesn't only have red-green color blindness, but also a problem where the only colors someone clearly sees are red and green.

Individuals who suffer from that are also mistreated by the general society, tend, on average, to have lower status and lower incomes and so on.  And it so happens that all of your one hundred initial students suffer from that condition.

What would your decision about the new student be now?  Suppose that it's the same as in the first form of the parable.  What are the benefits and costs of your decision now?  You are being fully inclusive toward the new student, but you are making the experience of painting worse for your other one hundred students.

Both the new student and the existing students are subject to oppressive acts by the wider culture.  How are you going to evaluate the fairness of this decision, compared to the second version of the parable?

%%%

It's worthwhile to go through these examples by varying the decision-maker.  I used a dictator model in these decisions, but the outcomes might be different if we let the entering student decide what to do or if we used some form of voting.

I think different real-world examples match different forms of my parable, so the conclusions we might arrive at will not always be the same, and of course in the large majority of real-world cases inclusion just means opening the gates.  The goals of the group might change later, in an organic sense, but there would be no specific need to alter them at the outset. 

It's also probably the case that the gains and losses in each form of the parable*** when applied to real-world examples, will vary in different places and at different times.

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*  An interesting modification would be one where the incoming student is clearly more privileged than any of the existing students, has a better eye for all colors and so on.  Would that affect anything about how to include that student or not?

**  I chose the color blindness because my family has so much of it.  I even have one female family member who has simultaneously two different types of color blindness (a very rare event).  The conditions have very little real-world significance and in one sense could be interpreted here as seeing the world differently because of different life experiences.

***  Some costs to the existing group, for instance, could be very minor, almost trivial, while the benefits to the incoming individuals are very large.  The reverse is also possible.  This really depends on specific examples we are using and the whole history behind them. 

And sometimes the losses to the existing group are necessary losses, because what is lost is the very advantage due to oppression.

Short Posts, 1/24/18: Ursula Le Guin, Sex And Traditional Hierarchies, and A Men-Only Charity Dinner in London

1.  Ursula Le Guin died yesterday at the age of 88.  I love her books, both fantasy and science fiction.  Some of them I keep on the Kindle by my bed for those moments when I wake up, heart beating like a jackhammer, out of some nightmare.  Her later writing is so simple and deep, like clear water with iridescent shadows.

The Left Hand of Darkness and the Dispossessed are her most famous works.  My current favorite, however, is her 2011 short story collection The Other Wind.

2.  It truly pays to spar with the other side in political debates, if not out loud, then at least inside our brains.

I benefited from my recent watching of Jordan Peterson's arguments in that sense.  In one of the YouTube videos he asks why the "radical far left" privileges tackling race and sex discrimination* over, say, the discrimination people viewed as ugly might face, or over the bad treatment of individuals on all sorts of grounds.

The answer is fairly obvious once we consider it together with Peterson's arguments that hierarchies are innate for human beings.  Traditional human hierarchies, the kinds where the top positions are reserved mostly for men, were built on both the general exclusion of women from those positions and on the social rules that women exist to carry out the necessary reproductive and support work so that the traditional hierarchy can exist.

Likewise, "outsiders" (including those of other races and foreigners) are excluded from such group hierarchies.  To the extent that they live in the same culture, their role has usually been limited to low-level physical labor, even slavery, or their cultures have been segregated from the mainstream cultural hierarchy.

In other words, Peterson's traditional concept of human hierarchies has historically depended  on the control of women and also of racial and ethnic minorities, when present.   This can be seen in the large number of laws which in the past have been used to exclude, say,  women from certain occupations, higher education, equal rights to inherit property or to own wealth, and so on.  There have been few (if any) laws which ban ugly people from climbing hierarchies, however badly they might be treated on the individual level.

3.  Yesterday's Financial Times  reported on** an exclusive men-only black-tie charity dinner in which all the guests were wealthy men, out for the night to help good causes, eat good food, drink good alcohol and at least grope, if not eat,  pretty women.

How could they grope pretty women, you might ask, given that the event wasn't at all "inclusive" and there were no invited female guests?

The answer:

British politicians, charities and businesses voiced outrage on Wednesday after a report that some of the men who attended an all-male black-tie charity dinner had groped, verbally harassed or propositioned young women hired as servers.

The fallout from the report, by The Financial Times, reached the floor of Parliament, where Jess Phillips, a Labour lawmaker, said, “What happened was women were bought as bait for men, who were rich men.”

...

The Financial Times sent reporters under cover to work as “hostesses” for the Presidents Club dinner and auction last Thursday. The annual ritual for prominent men in business and media, where alcohol flows freely, raised about $3 million this year. The newspaper reported that criteria for the job included being “tall, thin and pretty,” and wearing “skimpy black outfits with matching underwear and high heels.”

Mmm.  Bait for the fishing of rich men.

The New York Times' headline for the article is "U.K.'s Most 'Un-P.C.' Charity Dinner Faces Harassment Accusations."  That is extremely weak tea, that reference to political correctness.

The Financial Times article strongly suggests that the servers were picked on the basis of their sexiness and looks, that they were required to match that expectation in their skimpy dress, high heels and makeup,  and that they were encouraged, in a pimping style, to be available for groping and perhaps more.

But they were paid only for being servers and weren't even allowed to keep any tips they received

Though I guess we could view this dinner as the most politically "incorrect" in that it assumes women's presence at this charity dinner is only desirable in the form of paid fresh sexual bait, and not as equal guests.

Addendum:  The organizer of this event, the Presidents Club, announced today that it is closing down after a day of strong criticism in the British Parliament and the disavowal by the charities the dinner was supposed to benefit.



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*  The lesser treatment of gays and Lesbians shares at least some of the same hierarchy-propping reasons.

** This may be behind the paywall for you, but if not, it's well worth reading, having much more detail.  It states, for example, that the servers were encouraged to drink alcohol, and those who tried to hide in the toilets in order to avoid the gropers were pushed back into the activity.

Meet Jordan Peterson. Or On the Channel 4 Interview About Pay Gap.

Jordan Peterson is a clinical psychologist, a professor of psychology in Canada, and the iconic guru of a new self-improvement movement that has a very large mostly male following (1).

He has come out with a book: 12 Rules for Life.  An Antidote to Chaos.  It is going to sell well. Google tells me that many areas already have men's groups based on Peterson's ideas, and the viewership of his YouTube videos is usually in several hundreds of thousands and more.  The comments attached to the videos are full of gratitude and adoration.  Clearly the advice Peterson gives has helped many, though it seems that it is men his message is aimed at and it is men that it largely seems to truly affect (2).

Andrew Sullivan On What A Woman Is

Andrew Sullivan wrote an ode to manhood about two decades ago.  I still remember it.

His new piece runs along similar lines: There's no patriarchy, biological sex differences explain more of the different fates of women and men in this society than left-feminists pretend to believe (though in secret they admit to such doubts), and the reason Trump won is not that his rival was a female.

Nope.  It was that his (female) rival (or left-feminists) dissed on half the humankind, the half which is male, by criminalizing their innate maleness.  That left the insulted men no other avenue but to vote for Trump and his obvious approval of all sorts of traditional forms of macho behavior.

 Just in case you are still unsure about how Hillary Clinton and left-feminists dis men, Andrew teaches us by doing a reversal on that.  By dissing women, that is:

A long time ago now, I came rather abruptly face-to-face with what being a man means.

....

 You get a real sense of what being a man is from an experience like that, as the rush of energy, strength, clarity, ambition, drive, impatience and, above all, horniness...

So what a woman is consists of lack of energy, weakness, lack of clarity, lack of ambition, lack of drive, patience and, above all, lack of horniness. I hope there's no lack of clarity about all that now.

The above quote, by the way, refers to the time in Sullivan's life when he was receiving treatment for HIV, and part of that treatment decreased his testosterone levels.  The testosterone injections and how he experienced them is what the writes about.

A Perfect Ten? On US Women's Gymnastics And Sexual Abuse.

Lawrence G.  Nassar was the sports physician at Michigan State University.  He was also the physician of the US national women's gymnastic team, and a serial abuser of children and young women, with more than 130 girls and women alleging him of abuse.   His sentencing hearing was held today.

Nassar has abused more children and young adults than Jerry Sandusky in the Pennsylvania State University child abuse scandal, but until now the Nassar scandal has not received the attention it would seem to require, perhaps because the American attention pendulum is swinging back on the #metoo movement.*

Here is how an actual rape culture operates:  It protects the culprits, tells the victims that they are not telling the truth, and enables the continued career of a molester:

Reports of sexual misconduct by Dr. Larry Nassar reached at least 14 Michigan State University representatives in the two decades before his arrest, with no fewer than eight women reporting his actions, a Detroit News investigation has found.

Among those notified was MSU President Lou Anna Simon, who was informed in 2014 that a Title IX complaint and a police report had been filed against an unnamed physician, she told The News on Wednesday.

“I was informed that a sports medicine doctor was under investigation,” said Simon, who made the brief comments after appearing in court Wednesday to observe a sentencing hearing for Nassar. “I told people to play it straight up, and I did not receive a copy of the report. That’s the truth.”

Among the others who were aware of alleged abuse were athletic trainers, assistant coaches, a university police detective and an official who is now MSU’s assistant general counsel, according to university records and accounts of victims who spoke to The News.

Collectively, the accounts show MSU missed multiple opportunities over two decades to stop Nassar, a graduate of its osteopathic medical school who became a renowned doctor but went on to molest scores of girls and women under the guise of treating them for pain.

Bolds are mine.  Do read the whole linked article, to see how very badly the institutions involved in this failed the children and young women.

Today has been the day of victim statements at Nassar's sentencing.  The statements are difficult to read.  Many of the top gymnasts in the country are among his victims, including McKayla Maroney.

In 2016 USA Gymnastics paid Maroney $1.25 million in a private settlement of her abuse claims.  As part of that deal, Maroney signed a nondisclosure agreement which meant that she could have been fined $100,000 for speaking out.  USA Gymnastics decided to revoke that fine, and Maroney was able to speak at Nassar's sentencing.

Such private settlements make sense for individual survivors who may have no idea that they are not the only ones.  But they are yet another way for institutions to protect their powerful insiders and for any abuse or molestation to continue for much longer and with more victims.

I write this full of fury.  It reminds me of the Catholic Church child abuse cases and also those #metoo cases where the organizations clearly protected the abusers.  This, my friends, is rape culture.

Why are so many bystanders willing to protect abusers in such organizations?

The answer to that, I believe, is that there are no financial rewards from taking the side of those who allege that they have been abused, that the institution itself will be damaged by the allegations which can threaten the employment of many inside it, and that telling the appropriate authorities about the abuse will burst the soap bubbles of our lives.

Or, more precisely, the answer is the same which explains why so few walk away from Omelas in Ursula leGuin's short story. 

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*  The Pennsylvania State University case seems to have received more attention, despite the fact that this case has a much higher count of victims.  If I am correct about that, the reason just might be found in the stage of the #metoo public attention pendulum:

It has begun to swing backward, with many stories asking if the movement has gone too far, if the legal rights of the accused are ignored, if fairly innocent men's (read: Al Franken) careers are now destroyed and if, indeed, we now have a witch hunt (though of powerful people, something rare in actual witch hunts).

There's nothing inherently wrong in asking nuanced questions about sexual abuse allegations or about the legal rights of the accused.  The problem, rather, is the way the public attention pendulum in the US seems to swing:  from one extreme to the other, without stopping its swing at the correct position.

The other difference between the two cases is in the sex of the victims Sandusky and Nassar selected.

Fakery. Or On Trump And Truth.

This is a tough time for writers of political sarcasm or even of snark.  Irony, too,  has been banned from entering this country.

How does one write sarcastically about Our Supreme Leader giving out Fake News Awards to the media*, when he himself has been caught in at least two thousand lies during his first year in office?

And note the big difference between those two categories of "fake":  the media largely corrects its errors, but Trump never ever corrects any statement, because it's not possible that he could be wrong.

Never mind that a free press (which Trump is bent on destroying) is absolutely necessary for any kind of democracy.  Without it we get a dictatorship (which Trump already thinks we have).  Even Jeff Flake agrees with me on the dangers of Trump's war against facts and the media.

So I sit here chewing the end of the imaginary writer's pencil, casting gloomy and vicious thoughts in the direction of all those who voted for this bigoted,  incompetent and ignorant narcissist.  This is not because of Trump's policies (though they are horrible, too), but because pulling the lever for him was like picking a brain surgeon for the removal of a malignant brain tumor on grounds having nothing to do with medical skills, rather the reverse.  Choosing Trump was more like insisting that the brain surgeon has never had any kind of training in the field at all.  What's the downside to that, eh, for those who want change at any cost?

Speaking of Trump voters (and we do speak about them a lot), the New York Times has published several letters from the most diehard among them**, the ones who love the chaos we live in and everything that's happening. 

Most of the letters appear to be from capitalists, and of course the Republican tax "reform" is making their wallets fatter.  Two are from supposed long-term Democratic voters (I do love that) who appear to have dropped their brains somewhere en route to the voting booth.  But the one I like the best of all is the first one, from a man in California:

The economy is up, foreign tyrants are afraid, ISIS has lost most of its territory, our embassy will be moved to Jerusalem and tax reform is accomplished. More than that, Mr. Trump is learning, adapting and getting savvier every day. Entitlement reform is next! Lastly, the entrenched interests in Washington, which have done nothing but glad-hand one another, and both political parties are angry and afraid.

Who knew that all it would take to make progress was vision, chutzpah and some testosterone?

Mm.  Well, he did move the embassy to Jerusalem and he did let the top one percent get a giant pay rise***.  This man hopes that the next step will be to strip the elderly of their retirement savings.

But see that testosterone statement?  See it?  Has anyone measured Trump's testosterone?  Obama's?  Yes, I know.  The statement is not about testosterone but about the awful-and-frightening alternative to Trump:  Estrogen.****

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*  It's pretty clear that for Trump "true new" equals "news which flatter him or agree with his views."  

**  I'm fed up with all these weird travelogues about Trump voters.  On the one hand they take a central role while nobody else is asked how they like to live in this fuckin chaos, while nobody profiles African-American women, say, or any other faithful Democratic voter groups. 

On the other hand the stories read a bit like visits to a zoo to view exotic animals.  Either way, we have had far too many of those stupid profiles.

***  The other assertions in that first sentence are highly debatable.  The counterattack against ISIS began a long time before Trump's reign, the economy was in good shape by the end of the second Obama administration, and there's no way of knowing how foreign tyrants feel about Trump (the domestic wannabe-tyrant loves him, of course), whether they are afraid or not.  But ordinary sane people in other countries are very afraid.

****  Just in case I haven't been clear, what the writer argues here is that men (or at least manly men) are better at being presidents. 

Echidne Thoughts on Arrogance, Online Fights And Taking Saunas

1.  My new year's resolution is to become more arrogant.  You know, like most writers out there.

2.  There are very good reasons why I would be a terrible feminist activist and why my activism is largely based on analysis and writing.  I derive zero enjoyment from watching or from participating in  the never-ending battles* about how to do feminism right.  In fact, they frighten me, because I'm a wimpy goddess.

I also believe that clarity is not what comes out of those online fights, but mostly just a lot of name-calling.  Even when the name-calling is deserved, it will not result in the kinds of changes the callers want to see, because humans don't work that way.

Whether analysis produces any more clarity can naturally be debated, but I'm more comfortable with it, even knowing that no analysis can ever be completely neutral and that all analysis is moored to the particulars of the experiences and position of the analyst.   But at least it uses more than a few hundred characters and, ideally, links to sources and, also, ideally, develops each strand of arguments in greater detail. 

Says she, arrogantly.

3.  This New York Times article summarizes many recent papers about the way women fare in the economics profession.  I have not read the original papers, but I did write about the economics jobs site which teems with woman-hating comments.  If you are a young woman entering the occupation**, you will not feel particularly welcomed by many voices on that site.  Then all you can do is hope that your future work colleagues don't hold those same beliefs!

This might be the place for one of my hilarious (?) economist stories.

When I was a student, I won a three-year doctoral scholarship from a private foundation in Finland.  Two men were also awarded one-year scholarships by the same foundation.  There was to be a celebration dinner for the awarding of the scholarships, and because I hadn't yet received the scholarship money and was broke,  I had to borrow both the money for the trip+hotel room and the dress I was going to wear at this festive occasion.  But I was so excited!  And happy!

The celebration dinner went as such dinners usually go.  When we were having the dessert course, the organizer told us that the program for the rest of the evening was a communal sauna!!!

I have to stop here for a moment and tell you that whatever you may have read about the Nordics and their penchant for naked saunas and group sex, communal saunas are not coed between strangers.***   On the other hand, people do usually go to the sauna naked.

So I hear this announcement and look around me and, for the first time, realize that I am the only woman present.  The Echidne-brain went into an overdrive:

(How am I going to cope with this?  There's no way I can take a sauna with all these guys naked.  Why is the organizer doing this to me?  Was he just oblivious?  His face looks like that, stunned, as if he is seeing me for the first time.  But is that the real reason or is he trying to signal me that I'm not that welcome?  Or what? 

Now he proposes that I go first, all on my own, while the guys have beers and network with each other.  But then I have to wait, all on my own, while the guys have a sauna together and network with each other, because  I'm sharing a cab with one of the other scholarship winners to the hotel and I don't have enough money to get one on my own or know anything about the buses and it's late at night.)

I ended up suggesting that I skip the sauna (so that nobody needs to wait for little me!).  The organizer proposed a nearby bar for a nice place for me to wait.  It was the kind of bar where women on their own are viewed as part of the menu.  But I survived.

Was that a hilarious story or what?  A nothingburger?  I'm not sure how I then viewed it, to be honest, but it taught me an important lesson:  My road forward would be bumpier than the roads of the other two scholarship winners, even if I did everything right.  

  

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*  This doesn't mean that the debates wouldn't be about important questions, only that the format of the online debates is almost the exact reverse of what would be required for some progress to come from them.

By "required" I mean putting lots of people into one room for a long period of time, demanding that they listen to all opinions with the willingness to withhold initial judgement and so on, to allow for several rounds of clarifications and questions.

The online format tends to make people more entrenched in their initial emotional stances, perhaps, because it is so very good at the short quips category which rewards anyone able to pull emotional strings of all kinds, from anger to fear and more and because it rewards piling on without it seeming to be piling on.  I also suspect that for some participants the others on the net don't come across as real humans with feelings.

For an example of what I mean, though not a full-blown example, have a look at the comments to this article on Jezebel.  The comments thread does contain a lot of nuance and information which is important for truly interpreting the topic of the article, but reading through it also gives us a large sample of comments about ageism in both directions and of the hurt or anger of people who have been assigned certain beliefs largely because of their age. (Though the article doesn't directly refer to age but to the second wave of feminism, women who were part of the second wave are now considerably older than, say Katie Roiphe.  Even Daphne Merkin might be too young to have been part of the second wave proper.).

**  And even more so if you are a woman belonging to a racial or ethnic or sexual minority, because that site is rife with all kinds of bigotry.

***  Neither are they for sex.  It's far too hot.

Thanks, Senator Feinstein. The Glenn Simpson Interview Transcript

I couldn't sleep last night so I read the transcript of the Glenn Simpson interview, all 300+ pages of it.  Despite its soporific value, I still couldn't sleep!

Glenn Simpson is the co-founder of Fusion GPS, the firm which carried the opposition research on Donald Trump, first for an unnamed Republican client and, after the Republican primaries, for an unnamed Democratic client.  It's his firm that the British Chris Steele, an ex-M16 agent, worked for as a subcontractor.  Steele is famous for the Steele dossier.

Simpson was questioned by the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) published the interview transcript yesterday.

It has some interesting bits, over and above the ones which the Washington Post covers. 

First, where does Trump's foreign income come from?  Simpson states that he found published evidence on Trump's connections to both Italian organized crime and to at least one Russian organized crime figure,  Felix Sater.  But Simpson also established that Trump's golf courses in Scotland are giving a poor return for his investments, and he couldn't establish all the sources of Trump's foreign income. 

Then there is this (p.296):

Second, Steele's interactions with the FBI are fascinating.  He contacted the FBI to "fill them in" on the dossier he had collected and had at least one additional meeting with them.  But then something odd happened (pp 178-179):

Finally, though I am not qualified to evaluate the veracity of Simpson's statements, none of what he says contradicts what I have read in published sources.  The only odd bit (perhaps caused by some legal strategy?) is that he appeared to be very unsure of the exact timing of most events.   But the usual caveat emptor applies.

Daphne Merkin's Misgivings on the #MeToo Phenomenon

Sexual harassment at work is a form of labor market discrimination.  As long as some workers must endure it but other workers (of the same ability and productivity) do not have to endure it, the latter will face less stress at work and are more likely to persevere long enough to get raises and promotions.

Even harassment by a colleague at the same level of work can make the work environment unpleasant and difficult for the target of the harassment.  If the harasser is a boss, the imbalance of power means that the consequences of refusing his (or her) attentions can include revenge, and some of that can take an economic form.

That we are fundamentally discussing job discrimination is an important point when interpreting, say, Daphne Merkin's recent New York Times opinion piece.

And what exactly are men being accused of? What is the difference between harassment and assault and “inappropriate conduct”? There is a disturbing lack of clarity about the terms being thrown around and a lack of distinction regarding what the spectrum of objectionable behavior really is. Shouldn’t sexual harassment, for instance, imply a degree of hostility? Is kissing someone in affection, however inappropriately, or showing someone a photo of a nude male torso necessarily predatory behavior?

My Stable Genius

This post is a response to the following tweets from our Dear Leader

....Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart. Crooked Hillary Clinton also played these cards very hard and, as everyone knows, went down in flames. I went from VERY successful businessman, to top T.V. Star.....

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2018

....to President of the United States (on my first try). I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius....and a very stable genius at that!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2018

Here is my answer:



I am a stable genius, though a girly one so that I cannot say I am a stable genius.  That would be very arrogant.

I stand on a tightrope on one tippitoe, arms raised above my head and twisted into a yoga knot.  I take cube roots out of large numbers in my head and then smile, benignly, at the adoring masses far below my tightrope.  Because I am stable.  And a genius.

I am a stable genius.  I just invented a car with extendable stork legs.  They appear at the press of a button (a very large button, the largest button), and then the car rises far above other cars (like a genius car) and hops over them in rush hour traffic.  The Stork Car can also be parked above other cars in parking lots.

It will be clad in airbags on the outside.  They stop other cars from attacking it, and if any of the bags deflate, poisoned arrows will come out of it, whistling in the air until they find the offending car and its driver.  That is stable, in a world where a dog eats a dog and a man eats a man and yellow hairdos are the sign of great geniusness.

I stand on my hands, doing pushups, while reciting my old blog posts in ancient Sumerian.  That is because I am both stable and a genius.

Every morning I look into my magic mirror.  I ask her: Who is the most stable?  I ask her:  Who is the most genius?  I ask her:  Who is the most divine?  I ask her: Who has the yellowest hair in the best wind-driven shape?

And the mirror stays silent, because it is not a genius.  But I know.  I know!  Only I can know, because I am a stable genius.

Stable geniuses do not have to learn, do not have to listen, do not have to think, because they already know everything!  And the giant pile of all that learning does not teeter, does not shake. It stays stable inside our vast brains.

Donald and I are alone in this agony.  We are the two stable geniuses, and the world does not listen, little people ridicule us, tell us that real stable geniuses don't say that they are geniuses or that they are stable.

But how would those who have little brains know?  How would they know?  Hmh?

Now our divine anger flares and consumes all doubters.  Now our little tweeting fingers get busy!  Now our wrath rains on the unbelievers.

But we shall win at the end, because we are the greatest.  Well, Donald is the greatest man ever.  I am divine, and that is even better, even more stable and even more genius.

The Trouble with Kirsten Gillibrand!

Is the same as the trouble with Hillary Clinton, quite accidentally and for no particular other reason:

The larger question about Gillibrand, though, is whether she is too transparently opportunistic to be a viable candidate after the rejection of another New York politician criticized for basing her positions on supposedly canny calculations rather than on from-the-gut convictions.

That is Ciro Scotti at the Daily Beast.

Criticizing politicians for their policies is to be recommended.  Criticizing politicians a specific way only because they are women is problematic.  For instance, how often have you seen a male politician criticized for selfishness?  Yet here are a few more quotes about Gillibrand:

For Gillibrand, nearly every move seems to be a self-serving playing of the angles. While it’s not surprising to see a politician behave this way, Gillibrand seems to be an especially egregious practitioner of the finger-in-the-wind politics that so many voters can no longer abide.  

...

But one thing seems clear: Those denunciations and their timing were all designed to be right for Kirsten Gillibrand.

So what do we have here?  Gillibrand is selfish.  Gillibrand is not authentic ("canny calculations rather than from-the-gut convictions").  Gillibrand is a weather vane who changes her policies based on what works for her.

When you put all those together it's hard to think of a similar article about a male politician, but several about Hillary Clinton.  As Madeleine Aggeler points out at the Cut:

All politicians are opportunistic; it’s practically a job requirement. But Scotti falls back on the same old, tired, lizard-brained and misogynistic argument that people used against Hillary Clinton: That ambitious women are off-putting.

The sample size is yet too small, but I'm collecting information to see if female politicians, when turning into "too" powerful, get the Hillarization treatment, and what that treatment might consist of.  There is a pattern. 

More Trump Gifts To His Base: A Lump of Coal For Christmas

Coal miners were extensively used in Trump's campaign speeches.  They may or may not have voted for him, but coal mining is what Trump promised to resuscitate in the US:

President Donald Trump spent much of his campaign promising to bring back coal, an industry that he said then-President Barack Obama had demoralized with too many regulations. So in July when Trump declared at a rally that he had created 45,000 coal jobs since the start of his presidency, many coal miners rejoiced.
...

The only problem seems to be that number was nowhere close to true. In fact, since the beginning of Trump's presidency, just 1,200 coal-mining jobs have been created, according to monthly reports by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In fact, the 1,200 coal jobs during Trump's presidency thus far are just 100 more than were created between August and December 2016 under President Obama.

Place all that against this news:  Coal mining deaths are higher in 2017 than in 2016, and the Trump administration is considering these regulatory changes:

Last month the Trump administration brought up for review standards implemented by Barack Obama’s administration that lowered the allowable limits for miners’ exposure to coal dust. MSHA indicated it is reconsidering rules meant to protect underground miners from breathing coal and rock dust — the cause of black lung — and diesel exhaust, which can cause cancer.

So if the coal miners got a lump of coal in their stockings this Christmas, who is it who received real presents? 

The wealthiest one percent of Americans and corporations*. 

Corporations are now people (thanks, Citizens United), and it is the mining corporations which benefit from relaxed health regulations, just as it is the industries which benefit from a rollback of disability rights or from reduced use of fines  to stop negligent nursing homes from harming their residents.

All that red regulatory tape that has now been cut just may have held together the health and well-being of some workers and consumers.  But they are not Trump's real base.

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* As was made very clear with the enormous tax "relief" the richest among us got from the Republican's tax "reform."

The First Conspiracy Theory of 2018: The Storm

Remember Pizzagate?  Something equally tasty is baking in the ovens of the right-wing rumor mills:

A new conspiracy theory called “The Storm” has taken the grimiest parts of the internet by, well, storm. Like Pizzagate, the Storm conspiracy features secret cabals, a child sex-trafficking ring led (in part) by the satanic Democratic Party, and of course, countless logical leaps and paranoid assumptions that fail to hold up under the slightest fact-based scrutiny. However, unlike Pizzagate, the Storm isn’t focused on a single block of shops in D.C., or John Podesta’s emails. It’s much, much bigger than that.

The eye in the middle of this "Storm" is that famous 4chan site where woman-haters, neo-Nazis and similar nice folk get together and chat over tea and biscuits:

On October 28, someone calling themselves Q began posting a series of cryptic messages in a /pol/ thread titled “Calm Before the Storm” (assumedly in reference to that creepy Trump quote from early October). Q claimed to be a high-level government insider with Q clearance (hence the name) tasked with posting intel drops — which he, for some reason, called “crumbs” — straight to 4chan in order to covertly inform the public about POTUS’s master plan to stage a countercoup against members of the deep state. It was, in short, absolutely insane.

Let's see.  Q is supposed to be a high-level government insider.  Q is supposed to have the equivalent of top secret clearance.  Yet Q uses 4chan as the site to which he or she will release extremely secret material.  And Q writes sentences like these:

False leaks have been made to retain several within the confines of the United States to prevent extradition and special operator necessity. Rest assured, the safety and well-being of every man, woman, and child of this country is being exhausted in full.

Rest assured, nobody with high-level security clearance writes that poorly.  On the other hand, I do see that type of writing in the phishing attempts where someone tries to pretend to be from PayPal or "your administrator."

It's very sad that disproving any part of the conspiracy will have no effect on the true believers.  We urgently need better basic education in this country, including the basic rules about how one judges the truth of various assertions.