A Rant On Kavanaugh And Other Pertinent Issues

(This post is a rant.  If you come here for careful analysis (my usual metier), it can be safely skipped.)

Mr. Shouty McShoutyface (Brett Kavanaugh) is now going to be a (Republican accessory) Justice on the Supreme Court of the United States, helping to put the bitches back in the kitchen, the gays back in the closet,  and the money back into the pockets of capitalists.

Aren't you relieved that we narrowly avoided the horrible catastrophe of having that  Crooked Woman™ with her email scandals run this country?  With her paid speeches to Wall Street billionaires, too!  And she acted so entitled!  Not like our Brett at all.

Thank God for Donald Trump, the second coming of Christ (or so it seems, based on some things I have read on the Christianist sites).  He expressed the proper manly concern about how horribly Kavanaugh has been treated.

President Trump: “It’s a very scary time for young men in America when you can be guilty of something that you may not be guilty of. This is a very difficult time.” https://t.co/SJWR7w1n2h pic.twitter.com/z5hQq8giLQ

— CNN (@CNN) October 2, 2018

Is that clear to you now?  It's our Dear Leader speaking, and he, if anybody, knows all about sexual assault accusations.  All the ones against him are false (1), naturally, and fake news.  Because when you are a star they let you do anything to them, grab them by the pussy and more.

But yes, it is a scary time for all those young men who now have to worry about what might happen when they go out with a woman.  Does that sound eerily familiar to any of you, my smart and erudite readers?

And another interesting message from our Dear Leader:

President Trump says today: “You have a lot of women that are extremely happy. A tremendous number of women. Because they’re thinking of their sons, they’re thinking of their husbands and their brothers, their uncles, and others. And women are I think extremely happy.”

— Yamiche Alcindor (@Yamiche) October 6, 2018

Would it then follow, I wonder, that "a tremendous number of men in this country are extremely sad?  Because they are thinking of their daughters, they're thinking of their wives and their sisters, their aunts, and others?"

Nah.  He means that the sluts lied about Kavanaugh and cannot be trusted anyway.

 *

The Republicans now control all the previously (2) separate three branches of the federal government (first spelled that coverment, as in "cover for getting all the money"), so they and Trump will get their way on everything, at least until the midterms.  

Speaking of Republicans, I adored the statement Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) made about the reasons for the dearth of Republican women in the Committee:

“It’s a lot of work - maybe they don’t want to do it,” Grassley said, explaining why there aren't more women on the Senate Judiciary Committee. “My chief of staff of 33 years tells me we’ve tried to recruit women and we couldn’t get the job done.” https://t.co/UxFJMsOFV0

— Tim O'Brien (@TimOBrien) October 5, 2018

Chuckie is sooo smart!  Of course all us girls want to lie back on velvet cushions, eat bonbons all day and then go out to the mall with hubby's credit card.  Of course!

That's, by the way, one of the recurring themes on meninist sites: Either women are fat, lazy bitches staying at home while spending the hard-working man's money OR they are out there, in the labor force, even though they are incompetent, stealing the jobs rightfully belonging to the MRA guys.

But no, Grassley didn't mean that.  He's probably too old to spend time on those hate sites (3).  He just has never had to bother his pretty (?) head about the reasons why there are so few female Republican politicians in power.  So he blurted out the first excuse he could think of:  The little ladies don't want to get their hands dirty or their nail varnish chipped.

Then he walked it all back, of course, what with the need to have at least a few white women still voting for his party.  You gotta respect women, even if you don't think they are quite as good as men.

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(1)  I am not making fun of those who have been falsely accused of some sexual crime.  That is a horrible and devastating event.  Probably almost as devastating as having been, say, raped, going to the police,  and then finding out that many people don't  believe the rape happened, and that some of those disbelievers will harass the victim, call her a slut or a whore, accuse her of ruining the life of some upstanding man, and try to chase her out of the town.

In other words, it's important to keep in mind that false accusations of rape, say, while quite devastating, are rare while sexual violence is not that rare.  Times have always been scary for those who are most likely to become its victims, but Trump is not concerned about that.


(2)  Because the judicial branch is now part of the legislative branch.  Activist judges are the new black, because they are now Republicans, and it's OKIYAR.



(3)  And not only the weird manosphere sites.  If you look up the definitions of feminism or feminist in Urban Dictionary, you will find that every single one of them has been written by a misogynist.  Here, for example, is the definition of a male feminists.  It comes directly from the meninist doctrine (do read the example conversation!):

Most often, the males who vociferously support feminism fall under the beta positive or beta negative category within the male social hierarchy. They usually patronize the feminist ideology simply to elevate their status in women's eyes, even though stridently feminist men are almost always found explicitly on the internet (similar to the "white knight"). Regardless of the numerous hypocrisies and double-standards endorsed by most sources of feminism, the male feminist will leap to his armchair, a dedicated keyboard warrior, to defend women against the horrible "profanations" and "vulgarities" people make towards the delicate and faint-hearted damsel in distress.

Person: "Women are clearly less intelligent than men."
Male feminist: "Bro, you're just a sexist douchebag. Lmao, like, go back to the 17th century."
Person: "But under today's equal opportunity, men still dominate every scientific and political field in the entire world."
Male Feminist: "HAHA wow - hey women, not all guys are like this. I'm a man, and I can assure you that not all men are sexist. P-please validate my pathetic existence.

Dig! But Not Where The Bodies Might Be Buried.

That's my interpretation of FBI's Kavanaugh review.  Trump asked the White House counsel Donald F. McGahn II to let the FBI investigate anything they want.  Not so fast, responded McGahn:

Mr. McGahn, according to people familiar with the conversation, told the president that even though the White House was facing a storm of condemnation for limiting the F.B.I. background check into sexual misconduct allegations against Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, a wide-ranging inquiry like some Democrats were demanding — and Mr. Trump was suggesting — would be potentially disastrous for Judge Kavanaugh’s chances of confirmation to the Supreme Court.

It would also go far beyond the F.B.I.’s usual “supplemental background investigation,” which is, by definition, narrow in scope.

This is all popcorn-worthy.  So is the interesting and novel question about the integrity of the current Supreme Court.  

I guess if being cut from a whole cloth is integrity, then we have it.   But on the whole  (heh) the judicial branch is today merging with the executive branch.

Three Further Echidne Thoughts on the Kavanaugh Debacle

1.  Mark Twain is supposed to have apologized for a long letter by saying that he didn't have the time to make it short.  That's something I can identify with.  My series about the Kavanaugh hearings, with a focus on getting back to basics, is growing longer and longer, because my thoughts about the basics are still unripe.

But the true message of the first two posts in that series might be this:

Republicans want women to have only procreative sex, while men should have access to any amount of recreational sex they may desire.

The planned restrictions on abortions and even contraception are intended to satisfy the theocratic fraction in the Republican base, and that fraction wants to make it very hard for women to have equal opportunity.  Not to be able to control one's fertility is a necessary for women's second class status.

But the side-effect of that goal is to make recreational heterosexual intercourse less available for men, too, because restrictions on abortions and contraception* will make intercourse much more expensive for women, and it takes two for that particular kind of tango.

None of this is visible in the current Kavanaugh debates, except indirectly, in the arguments that "boys will be boys" and so on.  It is, however, visible in the wider debate about abortion, extramarital sex and so on.

2.  Matt Lewis, a CNN commentator, made a statement which many others have made.  It's about the presumption of innocence and due process and so on.  Here's Lewis:

Brett Kavanaugh is being tried in the court of public opinion right now. His political future hangs in the balance, and I do think that we have these two competing values right now. Either you believe the women or you believe in the presumption of innocence. You really can't do both. I think it's mutually exclusive. And I do -- and by the way, I think that most of the time women are telling the truth. But not always. There are cases like the Duke lacrosse case, there‘s several examples where people do lie. I fear that we are headed in a direction where, if you've got a big TV show coming out next week, or a book's about to drop, or you're about to get elected to something --
BALDWIN: Sure. 
LEWIS: -- anybody could lodge a charge against you. And if we just assume that you're guilty, that could torpedo your chances. I don't think we want to live in a country like that either.

First, the court of public opinions is not the kind of court in which the concepts of "due process" and the "presumption of innocence" are defined.  The court of public opinions crucified Hillary Clinton over a period of three decades, for instance.  It's not an objective court for anyone.

Second, Kavanaugh is applying for a job from which it's almost impossible for him to get fired, and in that job he has tremendous powers of affecting the lives of all Americans, including women.  It's relevant to examine his history, to find out what his biases might be.  Indeed, I would argue that we want the most ethical and unbiased people on the Supreme Court.

Third,  if we take Lewis seriously in his argument that you either believe "the women or you believe in the presumption of innocence," then someone will always be sentenced in that court of opinions.  Those who believe Blasey Ford and the other accusers think that Kavanaugh is guilty.  Those who believe that he is innocent think that Blasey Ford is making a false accusation.  So she is then found guilty in the court of public opinions.**

I have always interpreted the plea "to believe the survivors" as meaning that the statements of women who come forward must be listened to carefully and taken seriously.  Those whose job it is to hear them should not have prior biases against all women and should not behave disrespectfully or prejudge the cases. This has not always been the case among the police or the prosecutors, and that's what needs to change.

Fourth, it's awkward, for the purposes of this discussion, that people  judge Kavanaugh's guilt or innocence at least partly on the basis of party politics.  This means that it's the Republicans (who don't want women to have reproductive choice in the first place) who keep bringing up the concept of false rape accusations, the way Bret Stephens does in his New York Times column today:

A few moments have crystallized my view over the past few days.

The first moment was a remark by a friend. “I’d rather be accused of murder,” he said, “than of sexual assault.” I feel the same way. One can think of excuses for killing a man; none for assaulting a woman. But if that’s true, so is this: Falsely accusing a person of sexual assault is nearly as despicable as sexual assault itself. It inflicts psychic, familial, reputational and professional harms that can last a lifetime. This is nothing to sneer at.

The second moment, connected to the first: “Boo hoo hoo. Brett Kavanaugh is not a victim.” That’s the title of a column in the Los Angeles Times, which suggests that the possibility of Kavanaugh’s innocence is “infinitesimal.” Yet false allegations of rape, while relatively rare, are at least five times as common as false accusations of other types of crime, according to academic literature.

Since when did the possibility of innocence become, for today’s liberals, something to wave off with an archly unfeeling “boo hoo”?

So.  The study Stephens links to finds the prevalence of false rape accusations to be 5%, based on the assessments of police officers***.  That's pretty rare, and it's a statistical average from one study.

But in the Kavanaugh case more than one woman has come forward to accuse him of sexual violence or sexually improper behavior.  What is the probability that all those accusations are simultaneously false?

3.  That angry Kavanaugh face we saw in the Judiciary Committee hearings is the face of the next Supreme Court Justice.  Will Kavanaugh be unbiased on the bench or will he take his revenge out on all American women?  My impression is that Clarence Thomas did just that.
 
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*  See my second post in the series for more evidence that an anti-contraception future might be in the offing for poor women dependent on Title X programs.

**  And this is a major reason why women who have been raped don't come forward.  In the worst cases coming forward amounts to yet another rape:  of one's reputation.

***  The study includes in the false allegations all cases where the accuser retracted her or his accusation.  But those may not always be actual cases of false allegations.  This is an example of a case in which a woman retracted a rape claim but when the (serial) rapist who raped her was finally caught after another rape, he was found to have a video of raping the woman whose claim was retracted.  In other words, claims may be retracted for reasons other than that they actually were false.



 

And What Else is The Trump Administration Up To? On the Environment, Immigration And Contraception

The focus on Brett Kavanaugh is understandable in current American politics, because he is a biased* political Republican activist and would use his position in the Supreme Court to serve only the purposes of the Republican Party.  All this is hilarious (or would be if we were watching it from some other planet where Trump&co don't matter, except as entertainment), because it's the Republicans who have always been preaching against "activist judges."  But now it's just such an activist judge they are trying to force-feed to the country.

Still, it's worth our while to learn what other damage the little busy termites in the Trump administration are achieving while we are all watching the Kavanaugh show:

On the Kavanaugh Nomination And Women's Reproductive Rights. Or Back to the Basics. Post Two.

(The first post in this series  can be found here.  This second post is about the reactions from right-wing religious leaders to the sexual violence or harassment allegations against Brett Kavanaugh, Trump's most recent nominee to the Supreme Court of the United States.)

What The Godly Men Say

What the godly leaders of right-wing Christianists say  about the allegations against Kavanaugh is fascinating when we remember that these statements come from men who view themselves as the leaders of godly people, of god's people.  They represent the people of light and goodness, while others are viewed as the people of darkness and evil.

Here's Franklin Graham, the son of the famous preacher Billy Graham, on why Kavanaugh is not guilty of anything "relevant:"

Well there wasn't a crime that was committed.  These are two teenagers and it's obvious that she said no and he respected it and walked away--if that's the case but he says he didn't do it.  He just flat out says that's just not true.  Regardless if it was true, these are two teenagers and she said no and he respected that so I don't know what the issue is. This is just an attempt to smear his name, that's all.

Notice something interesting about that quote?  Graham hadn't even properly read Blasey Ford's statement!  According to her she managed to escape from the room when Mark Judge, the other boy in the room, jumped on top of Kavanaugh (who was lying on top of Blasey Ford, holding her down), and the pile came apart.  Kavanaugh was never described as having asked for consent or as showing any signs of respect.

That Graham hadn't bothered to learn what Blasey Ford said had happened tells me so much!  What the wimminz say really does not matter to the Evangelical patriarchs.  In any case, it's much more important to get another forced-birth-and-no-gay-sex Justice on the bench. (1)

Another right-wing Christian leader argues that a rape is not a rape if the victim doesn't scream and shout for help:

Rape is having sex with a woman while she screams for help. No scream, no rape according to Deuteronomy 22:23-24. [Christine Blasey] Ford says Kavanaugh held his hand over her mouth so did she scream for help when his hand was elsewhere? After all, it was in a bedroom of a house; surely, one of the other 4 teens could have heard him scream when she bit his hand. Did she bite his hand? Poke him in the eye? Women know instinctively how to protect their honor: screaming, shouting, slapping, spitting, slugging, and stabbing with a finger, pencil, or hat pin. Since she did not cry out or stab him, I will not believe her without a film of the event.”

Bolds are mine.

The argument that a rape accusation cannot ever be verified if the victim didn't scream or fight back very hard is not an unusual one.  It used to be written into the laws of many countries, and still might be the law in some places.

That those who tried to scream and fight back might then have ended in murder statistics (most likely as victims) is not something the above writer worries about.  But then he thinks women have hat pins at the ready in case they need to poke rapists in the eye!

I love the idea that "women know instinctively" how to protect their honor, especially when most cultures discourage girls from learning how to physically fight, but also because this way of thinking comes quite close to "legitimate" rape (2) and the conservative view that only certain kinds of rapes are real:

The victim must be a young virgin, on her way to church, modestly dressed, and the attacker must not be known to her at all.  Even then she probably should have the hat pin ready for stabbing, and it helps if she lost a limb or two in the attack.

So.  Not all Evangelical leaders are quite this outspoken about the irrelevancy of the allegations against Kavanaugh.  Many argued, before last week's Judicial Committee hearings, that both sides must be heard.  But the majority of the right-wing Christianist leaders are willing to pay handball with the demons if that gets an anti-abortion and anti-gay majority on the bench.

The background for all this can be found in the general attitudes about sexuality and about women's rights in the right-wing religious sects (3):

Sandi Villarreal, a former rape crisis advocate while at a Southern Baptist university, told the Fix that some evangelical leaders reject stories such as Ford’s because they disrupt their entire worldview about gender.

“These men tend to brush off the youthful ‘indiscretions’ — of boys,” Villareal said, “Young women, on the other hand, are held responsible for causing boys to stumble or tempting them into sin by the way they dress, how and whether they flirt, really, by virtue of being a woman.”

And, in the context of the #MeToo movement among the Southern Baptists (4):

Within evangelical culture, as I’ve written previously, the idea that women are “supposed” to be the gatekeepers of male sexuality, that male sexual urges are inherently uncontrollable, and the idea that forgiveness is automatically “owed” to any alleged abuser, converge to create a climate in which allegations of sexual harassment and abuse tend to be seen as minor or, at least, forgivable.

Certainly, the evangelical community is already redeeming its own people accused of sexual misconduct during the #MeToo movement. Earlier this month, former Southern Baptist Convention president Paige Patterson — who left his position as president of the Southwestern Baptist Seminary in disgrace after accusations of sexism — returned to public ministry with a pair of sermons that denigrated the #MeToo movement and focused on the problem of false rape allegations.

Patterson chose as one of his first sermons on his return the story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife, i.e., a story about a false rape allegation.  Given that false rape allegations are much, much rarer than those true rape allegations which never result in any kind of sentence to the perpetrator, Patterson's choice tells where his priorities lie. (5)

Forty-eight percent of white evangelical respondents in a recent poll would have Kavanaugh on the bench even if Blasey Ford's allegations were proven to be true.  That's not too surprising, given that the support of white evangelicals for Judge Roy Moore was not affected by the allegations that he, as a younger man, had stalked and groomed (vulnerable) young girls for sex.

None of this is to argue that many white evangelicals wouldn't fervently believe that abortion is murder and that stopping murder matters much more than stopping sexual violence or rape.  But if the Bible is supposed to be their guide in all this it's worth noting that abortion is not mentioned in that book while rape is (6).

Whatever the overall motivations of the above quoted leaders might be, I cannot help concluding that an important motive for them is the defense of the patriarchal power hierarchies among their communities.  Their fight against abortions and their acceptance of sexual harassment and violence neatly fit into the same scenario if that is what motivates them.

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(1)   Just think of the fact that over eighty percent of white Evangelicals voted for a pussy-grabbing president over a (gasp!) woman.  They probably would vote for Devil himself if that would achieve the end of all reproductive choice for women.  (This is the women-as-vessels-and-subjugated-handmaids view in conservative Christianity).

(2)   Todd Akin, a Republican representative from Missouri then,  made that argument in 2012 when he was asked whether abortion should be allowed in the case of rape:

“It seems to be, first of all, from what I understand from doctors, it’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down.”

And the woman instinctively knows how to fight off a rapist without herself getting killed or seriously hurt...

(3)  If you have read my earlier post in this series, you may have spotted that this is the religious version of the sexual ice-hockey game.  It's common not  only in right-wing Christianity but also in conservative Islam.  And probably in other patriarchal religions.

(4)  More can be found in part 5 of this post.

(5)  As an aside, a woman was recently sentenced to two years in prison for allegedly "spreading false news" in Egypt:

An Egyptian woman who made a video alleging sexual harassment has been given two years in prison and a fine on charges of “spreading false news”.
Amal Fathy, an actor and a former activist, uploaded a video to her Facebook account in May detailing how she was sexually harassed during a visit to her bank and criticising the government’s failure to protect women.
Two days after the post, Egyptian security forces entered her home in a pre-dawn raid and arrested her along with her husband and young son, both of whom were later released.
Fathy was subsequently put on trial accused of spreading false news with intent to harm the Egyptian state and possessing “indecent material”. She was sentenced to one year in prison for each charge, and given a fine of 10,000 Egyptian pounds (£430) for making “public insults”.

 In another case a Lebanese tourist visiting Egypt was also sentenced for a similar offense:

Mona el-Mazbouh, a Lebanese tourist who recorded a comparable video during her stay in Egypt, was arrested at Cairo airport and sentenced to eight years in prison in July, accused of “spreading false rumours that would harm society, attacking religion and public indecency”.
Her sentence was later reduced to one year and then suspended, before she was deported to Lebanon in September.

This is how accusations of sexual harassment might be treated in a deeply religious patriarchal society, and right-wing Christianists certainly have such societies as their goal.  The silence of victims is a central part of that plan.


(6) From the standpoint of men in a nomadic herding community a long time ago.  But at least it's mentioned as something deplorable.

My Impressions on Kavanaugh's Answers In Today's Judiciary Committee Hearings

1.  Shouty McShoutyface. 

That was my first impression on Brett Kavanaugh's performance in today's Senate Judiciary Committee hearings:

every woman in this pic tho pic.twitter.com/6Y2SvY4YlU

— Gustavo Luis (@verygooster) September 27, 2018

Had Kavanaugh's first name been Brenda, say, that behavior would have been interpreted as evidence that women are too emotional* to serve on courts.  But it will serve Brett well among the Republican base.  Trump loved it, I hear, and probably so did all the Breitbart-readers.

I, on the other hand wonder if someone that angry could ever evaluate cases having to do with sexual violence, say, with the kind of neutrality and objectivity we ideally would wish to see in Supreme Court Justices. — How has Clarence Thomas decided on cases having to do with women's rights?

Or perhaps Kavanaugh is supposed to represent a particular political faction on the court?   Such as capitalists and fratboys and the fundie patriarchs?   He comes across as a very political operative.

2.  Why did the Republicans questioning Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh hire a female prosecutor as "an assistant?"  Or as an apron, but only for the first part of the cooking show. 

It's because eleven Republican men questioning, probing and doubting Blasey Ford's testimony would look a little bit weird, even perhaps to Republican women.  As if only their men are to decide which claims are credible.

But then if Kavanaugh gets the SCOTUS job, he will be the swing vote to decide on the proper use of women's wombs in a majority decision made out of all men.  Besides,  there are too few women among the powerful Republicans, what with the American Taliban values the party celebrates.

That none of this much matters is an interesting sign of these supposedly #MeToo times.

3.  Whose pain matters?   Kavanaugh expressed great anger at the way he and his family have been treated, suggesting that the questions about his past have destroyed his family.

And that is horrible.  But Blasey Ford's family hasn't exactly been paraded around on rose floats, either.  She has faced death threats and had to move, and I'm fairly certain that coming forward is not going to improve her life or her career.

My intention is not to belittle the pain Kavanaugh and his family have probably felt, but to point out that the families of people accused of all types of crimes feel similar pain, both when the accused persons are found guilty and when they are not, and that victims of sexual violence coming forward to tell their stories face largely negative consequences from doing so.

This has changed  a little because of the #MeToo era, but anyone accusing a famous person will face insinuations about the reports being false and will have her whole life turned over.  And for what?

Perhaps so that others can have justice?  Is this where these particular hearings are heading?  And who is it who is going to get justice?  Is Kavanaugh entitled to a seat on the SCOTUS bench, for example?

I have written very little* about the pain many survivors of sexual violence are experiencing while following the Kavanaugh debates.

Sexual violence can destroy the families of the victims.  It can destroy their dreams about future, their professional careers,  their mental health and their ability to create loving sexual relationships later in life.

But it is my impression that many still worry more about destroying the future lives of those falsely accused of sexual violence than about destroying the future lives of those sexual violence victims who get no justice and are not believed.

4.  The Renate Alumni.

This is a reference to Brett Kavanaugh's high school yearbook page.  He was listed as a "Renate Alumnius:"

The word “Renate” appears at least 14 times in Georgetown Preparatory School’s 1983 yearbook, on individuals’ pages and in a group photo of nine football players, including Judge Kavanaugh, who were described as the “Renate Alumni.” It is a reference to Renate Schroeder, then a student at a nearby Catholic girls’ school.

Two of Judge Kavanaugh’s classmates say the mentions of Renate were part of the football players’ unsubstantiated boasting about their conquests.

“They were very disrespectful, at least verbally, with Renate,” said Sean Hagan, a Georgetown Prep student at the time, referring to Judge Kavanaugh and his teammates. “I can’t express how disgusted I am with them, then and now.”

Any woman knows that the above is slut-shaming.  It doesn't matter for that purpose whether the girl mentioned even knew any of the boys who participated in it.

Slut-shaming is not just a sadistic thing that some immature minds find deliciously funny.  It's also a form of bonding** among the small group of boys who participated in it, and a way to destroy a young girl's reputation. 

It's also another sign of the conservative ideology about sex***: Men are supposed to be on the offense in this ice-hockey game, while women are supposed to be the goalies.

A goalkeeper who repeatedly fails has awarded a giant victory to the boys, and that victory is worth crowing about.  Which is what these boys did.

And at least as as young teenager, Kavanaugh bought into that traditional sexual ideology.  This does not bode well on how he might rule on topics which have to do with women's rights.

Well, that is my take on the Renate Alumni.  But Kavanaugh argued differently in the hearings today:

One thing in particular we’re sad about: one of our good — one of our good female friends who we would admire and went to dances with had her names used on the yearbook page with the term “alumnus.” That yearbook reference was clumsily intended to show affection, and that she was one of us. But in this circus, the media’s interpreted the term is related to sex. It was not related to sex. As the woman herself noted to the media on the record, she and I never had any six — sexual interaction of — at all. I’m so sorry to her for that yearbook reference. This may sound a bit trivial, given all that we are here for, but one thing I want to try to make sure — sure of in the future is my friendship with her. She was and is a great person.

On the other hand, the New York Times tells us something different:

Michael Walsh, another Georgetown Prep alumnus, also listed himself on his personal yearbook page as a “Renate Alumnus.” Alongside some song lyrics, he included a short poem: “You need a date / and it’s getting late / so don’t hesitate / to call Renate.”

So the yearbook reference was clumsily intended to show affection, that "she was one of us?"  I very much doubt that.  She was slut-shamed, and Kavanaugh is not telling the truth here.

And the woman in question seems to agree with me, as she withdrew her support for Kavanaugh's nomination after finding out about the yearbook.




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*  The reason is twofold:  First, there are many, many people already doing the necessary writing.  Thus, and second, what I could offer in that area would just be replicating the efforts of others. My comparative advantage is in more analytical writings about the topic.  But yes, my jaw hurts from all the clinching I have practiced in the recent past and memories sometimes overtake me and bring pain back.

** That male bonding aspect is relevant in much of the bad sexual behavior of some young men (such as street harassment of a woman by a small group of men).  It may even be an aspect of gang rapes, where the role of the rape victim is not that different from the role of a spittoon, though she might be treated with less care.

*** Much more on that can be found in part 2 of my earlier post.

Meanwhile, in Alaska, A Travesty of Justice

The contents of this post include sexual violence.

***

This is what happened in Alaska in 2017: 

A woman was looking for a ride at a gas station.  A man offered her one, but did not drive her to her destination.  Instead, he told her that he needed to pick up something first, drove the car to a dead-end street in a residential area, and asked her step out of the car while he was loading something in the back.

He then pushed her to the ground, told her that he was going to kill her and then strangled her with both hands.  She lost consciousness.

When she regained consciousness, she found that he had ejaculated on her.  According to the detective in the case:

"The man told her that he wasn't really going to kill her, that he needed her to believe she was going to die so that he could be sexually fulfilled,"

This is what happened in Alaska in 2018:

The above case came to court:

On the Kavanaugh Nomination And Women's Reproductive Rights. Or Back to the Basics. Post One.

Over the last week I have started several posts on the Kavanaugh hearings and the various political reactions to the allegations that he sexually assaulted a fifteen-year-old girl when he himself was seventeen and a student at an all-male private school.

I didn't manage to complete any of those posts in one day (because of my still-frail health), but by the next day(s) so much new shit (1) would hit the online fans around this topic that a new post seemed faster than attempting to patch and darn the changes into the earlier draft.  Rinse and repeat. 

For these reasons I am going to do two fundamentals-posts on this topic: This first post begins by taking a few steps back, so as to achieve a wider view on the meaning of Kavanaugh's appointment and the allegations against him.  The second post will zoom in on certain details about the treatment of Kavanaugh's accuser.

Let's begin*.

Why Does My Pesto No Longer Love me? A Culinary Call For Help.

This flu is unusually severe.  Get your vaccinations this year if you have not in the past.  Or get the flu and  feel like something that's drawn through the wood chipper, repeatedly.

I'm slowly creating an actual post in my head, in the few available tiny spaces between the giant snot deposits.  But in the meantime, I have a culinary question for you:

What makes pesto taste worse than Trump's ideas?

I have made pesto for years, from all kinds of nuts and all kinds of herbs.  Some combinations are tastier than others, but all of them have been acceptable.  Except recently.

Five times I have had to throw large amounts of pesto down the sewer because of an extremely strong metallic (or bitter) aftertaste it gives*.  Changing the olive oil has not helped, guaranteeing the freshness of the herbs and the nuts has not helped.

So I suspect the garlic.  I am bigoted toward recent garlic.  In the olden days it was easy to peel, but now it takes me hours to peel enough cloves.  And the cloves seem often to be miniature cloves inside something that initially looks like a normal-sized clove.

Is it the garlic?  Or something else?

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*  I first tried doctoring it with more cheese or more herbs and so on.  Nothing made it edible.  And it's not the cheese that's at fault, because after the first mishap I tasted the mixture before cheese was added.

And the taste is there.  I don't quite know if it is bitter or metallic or salty.  It's a little of all those things, but whatever it is, the message to my taste buds is negative. 

The Trump Show. What's Happening Behind the Curtain?

I know that I'm back in Murka when this is how Our Dear Leader behaves en route to the Flight 93 September 11 Memorial Service in Shanksville, PA:

Actual photo of Trump on his way to  the Flight 93 memorial service. pic.twitter.com/0lNUYXLwBZ

— JΞSŦΞR ✪ ΔCŦUΔL³³º¹ (@th3j35t3r) September 11, 2018

In a sinister way that is reassuring:  He hasn't developed any significant behavioral changes in the last few weeks.  He's still without any empathy or social intelligence...

And what are the wizards behind the curtain doing while we watch The Trump Show?

1.  Well, Betsy DeVos is fixing the problems in how colleges handle allegations of sexual misconduct:

I Am Back, Partly

From my traditional summer trip.  It's not a vacation, but, nevertheless, a change, and it usually refills my writing reservoirs. 

This time, however, I had a long layover during which I was allowed the enervating experience of watching someone hack and hork their lungs out.  I sent a few quick messages to mount Olympus, asking the other deities to make sure that this particular passenger would be sent off in some other plane, to some other reality.

But Zeus, that goat-fucker, intercepted the message, and because he hates my guts (me belonging to the half-monster-type deities* with sharp, divided tongues), he seated that particular consumptive patient right behind me, in the same plane.

And so I'm only partly back, in a state of infirmity and fuzzy thinking.  That thinking suggests that I did, after all, have something to declare:  An infectious cough.

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* And no, Zeus certainly is not a sexist!  Just like Kavanaugh, he was born out of a female creature and just like Kavanaugh, he has daughters.  And so on.

Snakes And Stuff

I found this old embroidery while looking for something else.  It's supposed to be a fallen angel and an experiment in different kinds of embroidery stitches.

Apologies for the poor quality of the photo.

And here's a snake applique.  I have made a lot of them, for some weird reason.

 

Like this one:

The above two are humongous in size, but I have several small ones, too.

This one I use as my gravatar in social media:

The Benefits of Gender Integration At Work

Last March I wrote about a study which demonstrates the benefits of gender integration at work:  It reduces sexist prejudices and increases equality between men and women.

If that is true, then the opposite might also be true:  Gender segregation allows those types of prejudices to thrive.  From that angle the sexism in the tech industry would not be exactly unexpected, because women are a small minority in the field.

A Finnish Poetry Hour. With Music

First this one.  It's a poem by Kaarlo Sarkia and particularly important for everyone who feels gloomy and hopeless.

Then this one.  It's a poem by Marja-Leena Mikkola, about a dancing bear, life, art and love. Especially about love.

Both are set to music and I provide rough translations for both poems.

The Heart And Mind Of The Republican Party, Revisited.

Earlier I wrote a piece about how I see the Republican Party.  It's not based on research but on my own experiences and the opinions those inform.

I recently read that post again and still agree with most of it, except that the problems of the Trump base are putting several of the more traditional type free-market (free-money-for-some) Republican politicians in a real bind, and the same applies to the dilemma of how to accommodate (or not) the increasingly more explicit racism and sexism of the party's new base and of some inside the Trump administration.

Some Republican politicians appear to have made the Faustian bargain.  Paul Ryan might be one of those.*  What he and other free-market Republicans get from Trump is so good** that they are willing to wear blinders and ignore all the Trumpian outrages, Trump's penchant for dictatorship and his groveling adulation of one Vladimir Putin.

I cannot predict how the internal power struggles inside the Republican Party will develop.  But its extreme right wing fringe is currently dragging the party even further to the right, and the impact of such "thinkers" as Stephen Miller inside the Trump administration means that white supremacists/misogynists are emboldened in general.

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* Though he is retiring, in order to spend more time with his teenage children.  Right.  He  is probably retiring because he calculates that Trump, like Humpty-Dumpty, is going to have a great fall, and all the Republican congresscritters cannot put him back together again.  This means that Ryan must wait out the coming catastrophe, after which he can return to Washington as the golden money-boy.

** Like much lower taxes for the super-rich, many fewer regulations to protect the workers or the environment.

 

Statistics Can Be Sexy

As this post from 2014 demonstrates.  Well, perhaps not sexy, but very empowering.  If that post turns you on, I have a whole series about introductory statistics, mostly in the context of understanding opinion surveys.

The Economics of Women And Work. Some Snippets.

1.  Can we prove that sex discrimination exists in the labor markets?  I got asked that question once and this post gives my answer*.  There have been further studies since, but the basic arguments have not changed, which means that reading that post will be good for your weapons arsenal.

2.  Christina Hoff Sommers has argued, most recently on Twitter, that if women really want to close the gender gap in earnings they should change their college major from feminist dance therapy (heh) to electrical engineering.  That it wouldn't work quite like that is something I describe in this post.  And while you are there, read the rest of that series.

3.  I still haven't been able to find a good regression analysis which would allow us to study the interaction effects of sex and race on earnings and so on.  I'm sure that such studies exist, and if you know of one, please leave the link in the comments.  The reason why we need such a study is to see what the relative percentage effects of being black and being female might be on black women's earnings etc (to quantify the effects of intersectionality, if you like).  One study, on the increasing racial inequality on earnings,  suggests that the effect of being female is greater than the effect of being black, though both serve to reduce the earnings of black women, but it doesn't quite do the kinds of analyses I'd like to see.

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*  Similar proof exists for racial discrimination, as this meta-analysis of audit studies shows.  Some of its analyses control for gender and find it non-significant, but I'm not quite sure what that means in the context of comparing different studies, some of which had both male and female fictional applicants and some of which did not.  For a shorter summary, see here. 

The Role of the Media In The Trump Reich

Last September I wrote a post on the Harvard study which analyzed the role of online media in the 2016 presidential elections.  That study tells us what the role of the online media might have been in getting us so much closer to a dictatorship, and I still recommend reading my post for some background.

Whatever the sins, omissions and commissions of that media coverage might have been, currently the most serious problem the press faces is one Donald Trump and his views, expressed in several tweets, that the media is the enemy of the people.

This behavior is typical of dictators who close down any newspapers that criticize the government or even imprison journalists who are not sufficiently adulatory toward the dictator.  Our Dear Leader would love to join that elite group of autocrats!

And a plurality of Republicans seems to agree. A survey conducted by Ipsos and published in early August found that:

All told, 43 percent of self-identified Republicans said that they believed “the president should have the authority to close news outlets engaged in bad behavior.” Only 36 percent disagreed with that statement. When asked if Trump should close down specific outlets, including CNN, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, nearly a quarter of Republicans (23 percent) agreed and 49 percent disagreed.

Republicans were far more likely to take a negative view of the media. Forty-eight percent of them said they believed “the news media is the enemy of the American people” (just 28 percent disagreed) while nearly four out of every five (79 percent) said that they believed “the mainstream media treats President Trump unfairly.”

I wonder what those percentages would have been had Hillary Clinton been the president that those poll statements referred to.  Knowing that would allow us to assess if this new desire for the end of democracy is just the average win-at-any-cost tribalism or if, indeed, a sizable percentage of Americans wants democracy to end.*

While most mainstream newspapers are on Trump's Enemies List, one part of the US media does, however, have a very specific role in the Trump Reich.  Last January Matthew Gertz argued in Politico that Trump uses the conservative media, and, in particular, Fox News, as a source of information for presidenting!

Here’s what’s also shocking: A man with unparalleled access to the world’s most powerful information-gathering machine, with an intelligence budget estimated at $73 billion last year, prefers to rely on conservative cable news hosts to understand current events. 

Alternatively, Fox News now has the role a state-run media organization might have in dictatorships.

So it goes.

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*  Other answers in the survey give me hope that the latter is not the case:

And virtually everyone (85 percent of respondents) believed that “freedom of the press is essential for American democracy” (compared to 4 percent opposed to that statement).

Still, we are left with the dilemma that this belief contradicts the Republican plurality in the above post which would want Trump to have the authority to close down "badly behaving" news outlets.  Those would be the outlets which criticize him, after all, and the press cannot be free if it can be punished for criticizing the president.

And, of course, the continued survival of any kind of democracy also depends on safe election systems.  Right now the belief in their security is totally unwarranted.

Escape Reading. Terry Pratchett's Discworld.

I love re-reading Terry Pratchett as an escape from the Trump Reich and all the other problems of this world, but as this post from last year shows, some of those problems exist on Pratchett's Discworld, too.

This year I've been re-reading Pratchett's Tiffany Aching books.  They are meant for young adults, I think, but the Nac Mac Feegle (the wee free men) are funny enough at any age.

Gendered Coverage of American Politicians' Sins

I wrote about that in March, but the problems in coverage haven't since disappeared*.  It's always useful to make the thought experiment, when reading criticisms of some female politician, of asking if the criticisms would have been the same or of equal intensity had she been a male politician instead.

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* Much of this is caused by the right-wing press, because there are many more Democratic female politicians than there are Republican ones, and the right-wing press attacks Democrats and not Republicans.  But even so, I sense a difference in the intensity when the target of attack is female.

As an aside, the small numbers of Republican women in the Congress is probably caused by the same reasons as the tilted right-wing coverage against Democratic women.