Is Even One Mass Killing By Guns Proof That Gun Control Does Not Work? Day Two of Fund-Raising Week.

Why would the shooting deaths of seven people (six of them apparently killed by the seventh in what is so quaintly called domestic violence) in Australia (far away) end up on the pages of  the New York Times?  And why were those same deaths trending on Facebook in the US?

The answer, my friends, lies in Australian history about gun control and what that stricter gun control history could teach Americans:

The deaths represent the worst mass shooting in Australia since 1996, when a gunman killed 35 people in Port Arthur, Tasmania. That event was the catalyst for a significant strengthening of the country’s gun laws an ambitious gun buyback program.

American proponents of gun control, including former President Barack Obama, often point to Australia’s strict regulations and few mass shootings as a guide to limiting such events in the United States. But in the hours after the shooting in Osmington, those who oppose such strict regulations pointed to the tragedy as proof of gun control’s limits — prompting many Australians to argue against that conclusion.

It's not just the limits of gun control that was pointed out in various Facebook posts.  Rather, many used this awful killing in Australia as proof that gun control doesn't work at all.

I get that when people argue politics they often use dirty weapons and illogical tricks and do not care.  Finding even one mass killing as proof that gun control does not work would be such an illogical trick, because the correct comparison would be to juxtapose the Australian and US historical statistics about mass killings, the availability of guns and so on, and then use those properly controlled comparisons to see how many excess mass killings by guns the US might have because of its much laxer gun policies*.

But it's not at all uncommon to find people, in general,  using individual anecdotes to try to prove something about statistical averages.  All an individual anecdote can prove, if true, is that at least one such event happened.  It tells us nothing about average propensities. 

Similarly, many people simply assume that their circle of friends, acquaintances and relatives are representative of all Americans, and that this allows them to judge the validity of various statistical averages which pertain to the whole country.  But very few of us have a random sample from the whole country among our acquaintances.

Many also ignore the "all other things constant**" part of various comparisons in studies and in how to interpret various news items.   Here's one example of that (scroll down), but it also applies much more widely.

For instance, when progressives and liberals want to see if people from different demographic groups are treated equally fairly in, say, jobs, the people to be compared should be similar in other relevant ways except their demographic group memberships.  That could include education and work experience, as one example, unless unfair earlier treatment has caused those to differ between demographic groups.

And this post (go down to 4.) discusses a few other fairly common (but interesting) interpretation problems.

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*  Note the question I asked there.  If our question is about general gun deaths then the answer may be more complicated, because most gun deaths are not mass killings but individual murders or suicides.

** The ceteris paribus assumption of economics, say, where our goal is to get as close as possible to analyzing a question in such a way that the only variable allowed to differ is the one we wish to analyze.  We can literally hold other variables constant in laboratory studies and some audit studies, but in most observational studies the control is achieved (if only partially) through statistical methods of analysis. 

Time To Pay The Piper

That would be me, the piper, and this is the beginning of my annual fund-raising week for this blog and its expenses.

You can donate via PayPal, as explained in the left column, or if you wish to use other means (such as would be needed in shipping a Maserati or the property rights to a solitary island with a lighthouse or emeralds), kindly send me an e-mail.

If you don't have money don't worry.  If you do have money, though, please consider contributing.  My blog has a unique voice, right? 

My warmest thanks to all my readers.  Here's a picture of one of my plantings which nature decided not to sabotage:

Is Anger An Emotion in Politics? The Answer Is Gendered.

In late April I read that the White House Chief of Staff John Kelly had called women more emotional than men:

The report also includes accusations that Kelly made comments that belittled female staffers, saying women are more emotional than men and bristling in private about the accusations made against Rob Porter, the former White House staff secretary who was forced out after his ex-wives accused him of domestic violence.

...

But the Trump administration isn’t exactly denying the accusations of sexism. The unnamed White House officials who pushed back on the report said Kelly is a “gentleman” who won’t let men curse when “a lady is present,” and one spokesperson broadly defended the idea that women are more emotional than men (without confirming that the chief of staff said it).

I have written about that old saw many times before*.  It has been one of the handiest little tools history has used to keep women in their place.

It's usually presented in a slightly different package which says that women are more emotional and men more rational.  In that version emotions and rationality are assumed to be mutually exclusive, and if women, indeed, are more emotional then women must be less rational and should not have any important decision-making positions.   

Such as being responsible for the care of infants and small children, I guess.

But I digress.  One reason why the particular belief will not die is that certain emotions are not seen as emotions.  Anger is one of them, but only if expressed by men**.  Thus, this example, from the US House, is not viewed as an example of irrational emotional outbursts:

Two lawmakers on Tuesday evening erupted into a shouting match on the House floor over Speaker Paul Ryan’s firing — and then reinstatement — of the House chaplain, reigniting a contentious religious fight the Wisconsin Republican hoped would fade.
No. 4 House Democrat Joe Crowley (D-N.Y.), who is Catholic, and Rep. Tom MacArthur (R-N.J.) got up in each other’s faces on the House floor and squabbled over the merits of a special investigation into the dismissal. The exchange was so heated that some lawmakers and aides watching worried they’d come to blows, though Crowley’s office said that was never going to happen.

I'm having fun with this post, because the current US president is obviously the most rational and least emotional of all presidents this country has had!  Just consider his decision to scrap the Iranian nuclear agreement.

Most people are not denying that Trump is both emotional and irrational; it's just that this has no effect on our general gendered beliefs about rationality and emotions.  The male examples of emotional behavior do not "stick" to create stereotype changes.

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*  This is a good recent Twitter thread on the topic.  The most salient point for me is that those emotions which are coded female are seen as a weakness while those emotions coded as male are seen as strength.  But this has zero to do with rationality, and being callous is not exactly a desirable characteristic in leaders.

** Anger in women is certainly regarded an emotion and frequently an irrational one.  Just think of the stereotype of "an angry black woman."






  

Why Wages Do Not Rise In Times of Labor Shortage. The Hairy Fruit Dilemma.

New Zealand is wringing its imaginary hands over the tough problem of how to get more people to work harvesting the national fruit, the kiwi:

Kiwi fruit work is physically demanding, commands minimum wage (NZ$16.50 an hour) and requires workers to relocate on a temporary basis, making it an unappealing employment option for many New Zealanders, including those living on welfare benefits.
...


Kiwifruit Growers Incorporated chief executive Nikki Johnson said the problem of filling seasonal vacancies forced growers to appeal for government assistance.
Demand for kiwi fruit has surged worldwide - particularly from China - with 19% more of the fruit produced this year and half still waiting to be picked on the vine.

There are 6,000 unemployed people in the Bay of Plenty region, and 1,200 workers needed on kiwi fruit orchards immediately.

Managing director of fruit company Apata, Stuart Weston, told Radio New Zealand raising payrates would not make a difference and the situation was “dire”.

The bolds are mine.

The Renegade Thinkers of The Intellectual Dark Web

Bari Weiss of the New York Times tells us that there are renegade thinkers hiding in the intellectual dark web (or perhaps just in the intellectual darkness).  That's because the mainstream media will not allow them to be heard.  Hence you have never heard of Camilla Paglia or Jordan Peterson or Steven Pinker or Sam Harris!*

Ladies, Housewives! The Founder of Proud Boys Speaks To Us.

Ladies, are you ready to find out what Gavin Innes,  the founder of Proud Boys, yet another misogynistic organization, thinks of you?

The guy is hilarious.  A little dense, too, but being a Proud Boy is very hard work as you shall soon learn.

Here's the start of Gavin's statement:

Ladies, housewives, we love the work you do. We venerate you. We love that you cook and clean, sure, that doesn't take that long. We love that you produce babies with your body then shape them and nurture them. We chide that, we don't have the patience. It's incredible the way you shape a home, you shape a family, you end up shaping a community.

A translation:  Women are of value only as housewives who cook and clean, but that doesn't take long at all.

And sure, women are also of value for giving birth to children and then for bringing them up.  But that doesn't take long at all, either!

And no woman ever has been in the labor force (!).  The labor force is where the Proud Boys are, because, as you will find out, it is they who created the world in which you (ladies, housewives) are just these rather pointless crappy and lazy appendices (though naturally worthy of veneration for the role biology and gods have decreed for you).

More from Gavin:

But it's not as hard as man's work. And that's fine. We don't mind getting our hands dirty. We don't mind losing our hands. We have way more workplace fatalities than women do, and we designed that system. By every metric, men have it worse, including rape, when you include prison. But that's our structure. We made that. And we're fine with it, as long as you keep using that magic baby machine that blows our minds. As Ann Coulter said, right-wingers are the only ones that see women as celestial.

I adore this!  The work the celestial beings, aka women, perform is only housewifery and child-rearing, but it's not as hard as man's work (and takes very little time).

Men get their hands dirty!  Changing diapers/nappies is like inhaling chocolate in comparison!  No woman ever got her hands dirty cleaning or washing clothes or cooking meals or while changing the bed sheets of an elderly patient in a nursing home.

And men don't mind losing their hands (or lives) in workplace accidents, as long as it's clear that men's work is harder and therefore men deserve to outrank women in the society.*  But at the same time men are worse off than women, by every metric, including rape, even though Gavin is completely wrong on that.**

+++

I find the various patriarchal movements fascinating.  They can be ranked in the order of their misogyny: 

Incels are probably the most woman-hating of all groups, because they openly talk about death for the womankind,  but many other manosphere groups, such as pickup artists, come close.

Then there are the Proud Boys who plan to bring back the proper kind of patriarchy where Men are Men And Women Are On Pedestals (so that the men can look up their skirts and so that women can't move) Though Also To Be Despised.

Next comes Jordan Peterson Boys' Own Therapy Movement, based on the view of the world as an eternal fight between chaos (the eternal feminine***) and order (the eternal masculine), where hierarchies are both natural and to be welcomed, and where women's biology holds them back from climbing any of those hierarchies, what with the pregnancies and those babies hanging from their backs.

Peterson is a gateway drug to both the Alt Right in general and the misogyny sites in particular.

These guys tell us that they are going to take the world back.  So it goes.

Most normal people, men or women, don't live in that world and might not be familiar with it.  Hence these missives from me.

-----------

* Innes' arguments are the common ones the manosphere uses.  I have often read there that men deserve to earn more than women, because men are more often found in the really dangerous occupations. 

Never mind that the higher earnings of men are not because of those few dangerous occupations (fishing, say), but because stockbrokers, financiers and software programmers etc. earn so much.  And never mind that women are pretty actively kept out of the dangerous occupations traditionally coded male, such as fishing.

Finally, never mind that the one very dangerous occupation where women are the majority of workers, prostitution, is not counted in those dangerous-occupations statistics, because in most countries it is not a legal occupation, even though the exchanges in the sex work market are supposed to be mutually consensual.

Note, also, that there is no law which stipulates that men must pick the dangerous occupations.  If everything about sex differences in the labor markets is choice, as conservatives argue, then men are choosing the riskier jobs.

And, as a complete aside, if we accept Innes' inane idea that women only work at home then all domestic abuse ending in death should be seen as a workplace fatality.

** I have written a long post about this common argument in the manosphere: That if we include prison rape, then men are raped more often than women.  It is not true, and my earlier post explains why that is the case, with data and all.

It's also worth pointing out that the rapists in prison rapes are rarely women.

*** This is not just a symbolic choice.  Peterson's book is patterned around the assumption that women are a chaotic force which men must control.  To see how he does that and where he goes wrong, you can do no better than reading my three-part review of Peterson's book.  It begins here. 


 

Echidne's Short Sunday Sermons

1.  When ISIS commits attacks of terrorism, no Western pundit suggests that perhaps we should give ISIS what it demands.  When incels commit attacks of terrorism,  some pundits and opiners suggest exactly that.  Weird, that.


2.  This NYT piece on cultural appropriation made me wonder if it is a mere accident that many of the little people (people who are not public individuals or owners of vast corporations or powerful politicians) Twitter decides to take down have been young women*.

The NYT case is about someone wearing a prom dress taken from another culture's traditions.  An earlier Twitter case I followed had to do with two white women starting to sell burritos after  acquiring (or stealing) the recipes from women in Mexico, possibly without compensating them.  That enterprise was rapidly closed down, but the Taco Bell, a giant corporation, doesn't seem to be accused of cultural appropriation, even though it was started by a white Anglo man called Glen Bell.

And last year a young German woman studying biology decided to live in the Finnish wilderness on her own, to experience nature first hand.  She fished, gathered lingonberries,  planned to eat insects and cooked with an open fire.  The owner of the forest where she stayed had given her permission.

A local television station broadcast a story** about her experiment.  It resulted in tremendous social media rage in Finland**.  The woman was threatened with rape and violence, so that she would really learn to understand who owns the Finnish culture and the Finnish forests, and various writers in social media tried to find out her exact geographic location.

The topic of cultural appropriation is an important one, of course.  But it should be addressed with proper nuance.  Social media in general and Twitter in particular are not good at nuance.

3.  Enough with the grouchy sermons.  Go out and talk to the trees.   Or even better, listen to them. They are doing their job to keep our world going. 

-------

* A writer at the Guardian seems to wonder about something slightly related:  That fairly ordinary young people get severely chastised in social media.

Those individuals may benefit from various privileges, including racial ones or the privilege of belonging to the locally powerful cultures, but they don't have public power.  And the relative anonymity of social media doesn't let us compare the overall privileges of the individuals on various sides in these quarrels.

It's also worth noting that women of all races and from all ethnic groups tend to be attractive targets for social media anger, for many reasons that you can figure out.  One of them is certainly the lower likelihood of violent or wrathful responses from the targeted women which makes such attacks low-risk for those who practice them.

**  These sources are in Finnish.  The farmer who had given the German woman permission to stay in her forest argues that the hate comments came mostly from young people.

Dandelions

Are delicious right now in the Northern hemisphere.  My yard is completely natural, with no memory of pesticides (a wild jungle!), so I gather the leaves of baby dandelions, clean them and eat them.  The smallest make a nice salad, with a refreshing tang.  The slightly larger ones I parboil and then fry with garlic and olive oil.

Your mileage might differ.

The roots of dandelions can be roasted to make a coffee substitute if you are that way inclined.  The yellow flowers themselves can be picked, with the stems attached, and then woven into a crown or a necklace.  The white seed-heads are among the most beautiful shapes in nature.

Did that make you feel better about the incredible virility of dandelions and their ability to overtake any bare patch of soil they see, including your flower and vegetable beds?

Here's an old embroidery of mine.  The flowers are not dandelions but you can pretend they are, so that the next time you walk outside you will feel yourselves observed.

Short Posts, 5/2/18: Blaming Women, What-People-Say Scandals and The Truthiness of Untruths

1.  Did you know what really made the Golden State killer Joe DeAngelo into a serial killer and a serial rapist?  Try to guess.

The Weird And Wonderful World of Sex Inequality. And How Robin Hanson Would Fix the Incel Problem.

Remember the economist Robin Hanson and his proposal that being raped is less harmful than being cuckolded, provided that the rape victim is first drugged and then will never know about rape? (1)

Hanson has now proposed a new and fascinating solution to the blue balls (2) of online incels, the "involuntarily celibate" men who gather together on sites where the sufferers not only comfort each other but also recommend revenge at the world in the form of mass violence and rapes, and who call women subhuman.  That new solution is the redistribution of sex!:

One might plausibly argue that those with much less access to sex suffer to a similar degree as those with low income, and might similarly hope to gain from organizing around this identity, to lobby for redistribution along this axis and to at least implicitly threaten violence if their demands are not met. As with income inequality, most folks concerned about sex inequality might explicitly reject violence as a method, at least for now, and yet still be encouraged privately when the possibility of violence helps move others to support their policies. 

(Sex could be directly redistributed, or cash might be redistributed in compensation.)

The Girl And The Dancing Bear. Or Echidne's Poetry Translation Hour

I haven't done these poetry hours for several years.  The song below is based on a 1976 poem by a Finnish poet Marja-Leena Mikkola.  The poem (which I only learned about yesterday) is so popular in Finland that it lent its name to a Finnish annual poetry award (Tanssiva Karhu).

The poet has stated that she'd prefer to leave the interpretation of the poem to the reader, but that it can certainly be seen in several ways: as a description of real love* and as an ode to the importance of art in dark and dismal times.

I have provided a rough** translation of the poem below but without any attempt at trying to make it rhyme.





When the girl stepped in the wide halls
of her father's house 
she did not know
what was heavy
and what was light.

Then she was taken to the fair
- without care she was, 
without a hat she was -
and there she saw a dancing bear
among the grimacing clowns

And all she had to do then
to know
what was heavy
and what was light,
was to look into the eyes of
the leaping bear.

She forgot her father and mother
she forgot her childhood
and she hid herself among
the traveling clowns.

From then on she walked
with the bear,
From then on she slept
by the bear,
she shared with the bear her bread,
the cold, the hunger and work.

And the bear, the bear danced
when the girl beat on a drum,
and just like the sun eats of the moon
she ate of the bear's heart.

The road ran on, the years passed,
and still the clowns  they were clowning,
and in the midst of the fire and smoke
cheerful music rang.

But the bear at last grew weak,
and it fell on its side,
and it never rose again 
but slowly spoke:

"O, a light we have carried
into these years
of iron and of wrath,
we bore the light to a dark era
while taken for clowns.

The one who walks
the circus road
so long and broad,
that one knows 
what is heavy
and what is light.

The one who rules my heart
must cut it in two with a knife,
for my only crime has been
my bottomless love for her."

Now the mandolins cracked
now the clowns grew quiet
The girl took a knife in her hand
and the spectators paled.


When red drops ran
from the lips of the bear,
it looked at the girl and
said these final words:

"My love for you was like
a trip which has arrived.
Now the drum of my heart is quiet.
O, take it into your hands." 


This tale is old,
and already covered by
the most voiceless dust.
The girl herself doesn't remember
and even she has been forgotten.

------
* Which I needed as an antidote after having read one economist's proposal about how to reduce the "sex inequality" problem in the United States which,  in his view quite understandably, results in threats of violence. The solution (which I will address later) would probably require some kind of force to be applied to women reluctant to part with all that sex they are hoarding or spending on Trump and other top alpha males only.

**  It's pretty bad.  I changed the word "market" to "circus" in one place because the connotations are different in English.  But I couldn't find a good translation for "ilveilijät".  It's roughly the same as clowns but more sinister, about making scary faces and so on.

Friday Thoughts, 4/27/2018: Kevin Williamson's Pregnancy, Trump's Latest Rant and Obligatory Veiling in Iran

1.  Kevin Williamson, the conservative writer who believes that abortion is first degree murder and deserves to be punished as such, is a gift that keeps on giving.

Kevin believes that a fertilized egg is a human being.  Suppose, just as a thought experiment, that someone violently attacks him and inserts a fertilized egg in his abdomen.  Suppose, also, that the necessary changes are made so that the fertilized egg can now use Kevin as its nutrition and as the place where it will grow to a much larger size, finally pushing its way out with considerable pain, discomfort and even the risk of death for Kevin.

Never mind that the whole process is traumatizing, never mind that the raped Kevin would be in pain and shock, never mind that others would be deciding about his life, his health and even about his possible death.   Kevin would not want an abortion, because it is murder.

Or might he change his mind?

I have no idea if Kevin has made such a thought experiment.  But even if he has done so, a thought experiment it would remain.  The questions he pontificates about will never touch his right of self-determination, because nobody can forcefully grow human beings inside him.  Yet I don't see the necessary humility in Kevin's writings, the kind which should be obvious to anyone who actually doesn't have skin in the game in that awful sense.

Perhaps our Kevin makes an exception to his abortion-is-murder rule for rape victims?  But that would be illogical.

2.  This video (about Trump phoning in to the conservative Fox and Friends show) must be great fun to watch from some other planet.  It's a snapshot of the mental state and emotional concerns of the most powerful man on earth:



3.  Many Iranian women have protested the obligatory veiling laws of the Iranian theocracy in the early months of 2018.  This opinion piece, published more than a month ago, clarifies some of the issues which are poorly covered in Western feminist writings.*

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* The reasons for that poor coverage are very complicated, but include the argument that those who share the genetic background of the colonizers of Middle Eastern countries shouldn't center their own views about gender equality, acting, perhaps, like ideological colonizers, but should give center stage to women who live in the colonized countries in defining what feminism means for them.  Given the colonizing and racist history, the advice is theoretically excellent. 

But in practice trying to follow it has serious negative side-effects: Women in very patriarchal cultures are not likely to get their voices heard, unless those voices agree with the patriarchal values.  So sometimes the overall effect is a certain type of selective silence among Western feminists.  The scant coverage of ISIS and its treatment of women (which is horrendous by any yardstick) is one example of that silence.

The Incel Sites As Breeding Ground For Terrorism

Elizabeth Barrett Browning begins her Sonnet 43 with this line:

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

If we replace "love" with "hate" in that line we are well on the way to understanding the misogynist sites, because misogyny on those sites comes in all possible flavors.  So many, indeed, that journalists must occasionally explain to those  who are blissfully unaware of the existence of those sites what "incels" might want or what "Pickup Artists" think of women or what "the return of the kings" might mean.

On the Online Incel Movement

Rumors, as yet unverified by the Toronto police, suggest that the Toronto van killer may have acted out of misogyny.  This is based on a now-removed Facebook post, attributed to the killer:

Some argue that the post could be a 4chan hoax.  We shall see.  But even if it is not, understanding what the incels are and what they believe is both necessary and very unpleasant.  This Twitter thread gives the basic outlines of the hate movement.

And a hate movement it is.

For those of you who wish to know more about Elliot Rodger, "the Supreme Gentleman," I recommend my long post on him, written right after the multiple murders of innocents Rodger committed in Santa Barbara.

Trump's Choices: Pruitt and Pompeo

Trump's choices of people (the best people, the bigly people)  for his administration are always worth a laff riot or two.  Or would be, if we were watching this show from another planet with lots of nectar and manna and popcorn and beer.

Just consider what Scott Pruitt, the EPA administrator, may have been up to.  The New York Times published a long list of accusations a week ago, and they make charming reading even if some of them are not true.  To give you just one example:

Lawmakers have argued that the Morocco trip, during which Mr. Pruitt promoted natural gas exports, was inappropriate since the E.P.A. plays no formal role in overseeing gas exports. The trip cost about $40,000, according to agency records, with the flights alone costing $17,000.

Pruitt is the proverbial fox guarding the chicken coop. There's a report that he encouraged the National Mining Association to ask Trump to withdraw from the Paris climate change agreement.  Remember that the guy is supposed to guard our environment.  Then down a gallon or two of nectar or beer.  That's the way to survive this upside-down world.

For a second example of Trump's weird choices, take Mike Pompeo's nomination as the secretary of state.* 

I'd prefer we didn't take that choice, of course, given that the guy seems to  really dig Rapture** and that the secretary of state can actually increase the likelihood of Rapture coming, in this case by seeing the global politics as a holy war between extreme Islamism and, I assume, extreme Christianism.

Pruitt and Pompeo are good examples of the two important groups among the Republican politicians:  The Money Boyz and the Godbotherers.  Both get what they want.

------
* His nomination is out of committee because Rand Paul flipped his vote on that!  Had he not flipped, Pompeo would have been the first candidate for the secretary of state position who didn't get a favorable recommendation from the committee.   (This footnote has been corrected for an earlier error where I called Rand Paul Paul Ryan.  I always confuse the two names. My bad.)

** For those lucky enough not to know about the Rapture Christians, here's a nice and relaxed take on the history of the concept. 

You know that Rapture has taken place when you see piles of clothing lying on the ground and your fundamentalist neighbors have disappeared into heavens.  (I assume that you will not be among the Raptured if you read this blog.)

That's the time to steal all their belongings, for at the next stage you and I and all other sinners will be eradicated in a fiery storm of punishment from the loving fundamentalist Old Testament god who made all of us in his own image.

Once we have been incinerated, the Raptured will be returned to earth which will become a blissful eternal paradise.

It's that last bit which gives Rapture-believers the incentive to try to end the world now rather than later.

Weekend Reading, 4/20/18: Black Maternal And Infant Deaths, Capt. Tammie Jo Shults And Richard Cohen on Reverse Discrimination

1.  This is an excellent and upsetting article on the high black maternal and infant death rates in the United States.  The problem is not a new one, but not much seems to have been done about it.  Recent research has been able to rule out poverty, lack of access to prenatal care and different levels of pre-existing health problems as the only explanation that would matter.  Something else also matters, given that affluence, good access to prenatal care and high education levels do not seem to equalize the white and black maternal or infant death rates.

The first article I link to suggests that the combination of racism and sexism might be that missing explanation, both in the way black women have to live with both of those and in the way the health care system treats them*.

This is a problem we, as a country, must solve.

On Babies in the Senate And On Child Care Expertise

It can be enlightening to  read two or more random news stories one after the other.

Today, for instance, I first read the story about Senator Tammy Duckworth's infant daughter, Maile Pearl Bowlsbey, and the rules in the US Senate which until now have barred children from the Senate floor:

Short Posts 4/18/18: On Sean Hannity, James Comey and The End Of Online Privacy

These are "breaking the silence" posts.  Sometimes the political events of the day or of the week are like a smorgasbord with too much hard-to-digest food, and then I am like Buridan's ass:  I cannot choose what to write about but dither in silence.

1.  What to say about the journalistic ethics of Sean Hannity, the Fox News pundit, who has pontificated on the witch-hunt against Donald Trump* and against Trump's lawyer, Michael Cohen, when we learn that Hannity himself is Cohen's client?

I guess he has no journalistic ethics, because an ethical journalist would have recused himself from covering issues with such personal connections.

The American politics now resembles the fights between fans of different sports teams:  It doesn't matter what the facts are, it doesn't matter what bad things your side may have done; all what matters is to win at any cost, and your side is always right, by definition. 

Well, that's what I see from the right-wing.  Not so sure about what the left-wing is doing when they are not carrying out circular firing squads or practicing being invertebrates.

2. And then Comey and his book.  Comey the Saint, Comey the Satan, Comey the Pure, Perfect and Perfidious. 

I do not care for Mr. Comey, for reasons that Hecate describes very well here, and I am pretty sure that whether the original impetus came from the New York's office of Trump-loving FBI boyz or from somewhere else in the organization, an important subconscious bias against women in power fueled much of the Hillary-hunt.

Which, by the way, is still continuing.  Hillary must be put into prison.  Well, our Dear Leader tweets about the need to jail all sorts of private people.  That's how he uses the bully pulpit the presidency offers:  To attack his private enemies in bouts of narcissistic rage.

3.  Here's a missive from our dystopian future:  Facebook was/is planning to help people with a new initiative to combine medical data with Facebook data:

Facebook's pitch, according to two people who heard it and one who is familiar with the project, was to combine what a health system knows about its patients (such as: person has heart disease, is age 50, takes 2 medications and made 3 trips to the hospital this year) with what Facebook knows (such as: user is age 50, married with 3 kids, English isn't a primary language, actively engages with the community by sending a lot of messages).
The project would then figure out if this combined information could improve patient care, initially with a focus on cardiovascular health. For instance, if Facebook could determine that an elderly patient doesn't have many nearby close friends or much community support, the health system might decide to send over a nurse to check in after a major surgery.

 ...

Health policy experts say that this health initiative would be problematic if Facebook did not think through the privacy implications.
"Consumers wouldn't have assumed their data would be used in this way," said Aneesh Chopra, president of a health software company specializing in patient data called CareJourney and the former White House chief technology officer.
"If Facebook moves ahead (with its plans), I would be wary of efforts that repurpose user data without explicit consent."

I find this proposal equally hilarious and enraging.  Sure, we all know by now that what Facebook makes its money from is the private information users put online and the private information of other users they interact with.  But to sell that information to doctors and hospitals, especially without explicit consent?  And information which is aimed at one's friends and acquaintances, not at one's health care providers?

The example in the above quote is an inane one, by the way.  The health care professionals are supposed to ask patients preparing for surgery if they have someone at home or someone who can come in for a few nights, or if they need a visiting nurse. 

That is my experience, in any case.  To try to figure out something like that from Facebook posts is a total crapshoot, because people don't always tell the truth in social media.  As someone recently said, people put their best face forward to their friends in Facebook and their worst face forward to strangers on Twitter.

I also immediately thought of someone who might post a picture of a bacon breakfast on Facebook, a few weeks after heart surgery, and then the avenging health care angels would swoop upon him or her.

Finally, the system is supposed to be anonymized.  But depending on the particular medical conditions and particular geographic areas it can be possible to identify specific individuals from such data.

All this is spying if there is no consent.

It's also an interesting example of the way information about us, the users of the Internet, has become one of the major commodities that are traded online, without any of the money flowing into our pockets.  So who has the property rights to that information?

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*  I have met witches, and you, Donald Trump, are not one.  For one thing, witches have a lot of training and knowledge. 

Besides, the real witch-hunts were arranged against people with very little social and no political power:  Old women without relatives who had land the neighbors wanted and so on.

Paul Ryan's Farewell

Paul Ryan is retiring*.  He is currently the Speaker of the House of Representatives, he is fairly young and he doesn't look ill**.  He states that he wants to spend more time with his family.   But that excuse is believed only of female politicians.

Why is he really retiring?  His party is in power everywhere, his party can do anything they wish, including ignoring democracy, and his party is now responsible for everything that happens.  Why wouldn't Ryan want to be one of the most powerful macho men in the universe?  Why wouldn't he want to create the kind of fundamentalist-capitalist paradise his people dream about, a mixture of the power of the almighty conservative god and the power of the almighty dollar?

Nobody is willing to say why he is really retiring, or at least taking a break,  at this point in time.  It could be that he needs to isolate himself from Donnie the Deranged for a year or two, before running again to take Donnie's throne.   He could watch from far the collapse of the Republican Party in the midterms and then get back in the saddle.

That explanation assumes something which may not be true:  That Trump is too deranged for a sufficient number of former Republicans who might therefore vote for a Democratic candidate even in safe red districts.

But the reverse explanation is equally possible:  He may have been told that he will not win another term because his voters have become so extremist that they are now holding arms or merging with the Alt Right.  Yes, perhaps the pretty extreme Paul Ryan is now not deranged enough for the new Trump Party.

The capitalist wing of the Republican Party and the fascist-religious wing of the Republican Party might be fighting for supremacy.  Ryan is the scion of the former, and other than as a source of all the funding,  the appeal of a party which works only for the one percent may be dying.  That appeal is replaced by something pretty frightening:  A party for Aryan men and the families they rule.

Okay.  That last paragraphs was courtesy of my own private nightmares.  But not knowing the exact reason why so many rats are leaving the sinking ship is worrisome.  Is it because the ship indeed is sinking?  Or is it because the current rat population is replaced by a more voracious and meaner population, driving away the old incumbents?

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*  This post is entirely based on my own amateurish but divine opinions.  It's fun, for a change, to write something which does not involve an eternity of tedious research first.

**  On the other hand, he does look like a cute Mickey Mouse:

Spring Is In The Air

In the Northern hemisphere.