Short Posts for Friday, 11/16/2018: Thongs in Ireland, On Opposition To Nancy Pelosi and Gathering Spruce Cones

1.  In Ireland the defense in rape cases can still use various forms of "what was she wearing" to defend the accused.  Here is one example*:

The accused maintained that the sexual contact between him and the girl, which took place in a laneway in Cork, had been consensual.
Details of the closing argument presented by his senior counsel Elizabeth O'Connell, however, attracted widespread attention and prompted a series of online protest movements.
"Does the evidence out-rule the possibility that she was attracted to the defendant and was open to meeting someone and being with someone?" she asked, according to the Examiner's report.
"You have to look at the way she was dressed. She was wearing a thong with a lace front."

So now you know.  Better wear really old and gray and torn underwear when you go out.  Otherwise someone might think that you are open to "meeting someone and being with someone."  — This rule is the reverse of the old rule that you must always wear clean underwear in case you get hit by a car and decapitated, because strangers will then see your underwear.

This whole thing is stupid, even within the backward Irish system.  The girl in this case was seventeen.  Seventeen-year old girls choose their clothing on the basis of peer pressure and the female idols of their social sub-group.  I used to wear orange eye-shadow at that age and it was not an attempt to attract male honey bees or anything of that sort.

2.  When Alexandra Petri is funny she is very very funny.  Her latest column is about the opposition to Nancy Pelosi becoming the majority leader in the House.  The arguments against her vary, but I have seen these used:  She is too old, she is too centrist, she is too bipartisan, and she has not mentored younger people so that they can now be ready to strip the tiara off her head.

And all those argument may or may not be correct, depending on the context.  The proper context, if we wish to analyze the possibility of sexism here, is to ask if a man with the same flaws and the same skills (she does get the Democrats working together) would be criticized in exactly the same way.  I am especially interested in knowing how good older male politicians have been at mentoring younger politicians, and if we even know, for certain, that Pelosi hasn't done that.

3.  One of my neighbors has a giant spruce tree on his lot.  It's a handsome tree and I love it, but it drops an enormous amount of those long spruce cones everywhere.

The other day my neighbor was lovingly gathering them one by one and gently placing them in a basket.  Up to the point when he accidentally picked up a dog turd.

I laughed.  I am now going to hell.

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*  The accused won the case, and it's not clear from the stories I have read if he would have won even if the thong had not been waved in the court.  But that's not the point of the story.  Rather, it's the fact that in Ireland the "what was she wearing" trick is still legal to use.

On the Tallahassee Killings

The murders of two women, Nancy van Vessem and Maura Binkley,  and the wounding of five other individuals at a yoga studio in Tallahassee, Florida, was hardly a blip in the news cycle, buried in the larger numbers of hate crimes during the week preceding the midterm elections.

But this hate crime also deserves closer scrutiny.  The killer chose a yoga studio, because yoga practitioners are more likely to be female than male, and he was looking for women to kill.  The police is still searching for some other connection between the butcher and that yoga studio, but I doubt such a connection exists.  The place was picked because it offered accessible prey for a misogynistic hunter.

And a misogynist the killer was.  He had posted YouTube videos about his grudge against women in general and against certain women in particular:

Beierle’s YouTube and SoundCloud history is rife with violent sexism. In one video, he says of a woman who canceled dates with him, “I could have ripped her head off,” according to BuzzFeed. In a song called “Locked in My Basement,” he describes holding a woman prisoner and raping her.

He mentions Rodger in a video called “Plight of the Adolescent Male,” saying, “I’d like to send a message now to the adolescent males ... that are in the position, the situation, the disposition of Elliot Rodger, of not getting any, no love, no nothing. This endless wasteland that breeds this longing and this frustration. That was me, certainly, as an adolescent.”

Beierle had also been arrested in 2012 and 2016 for grabbing women’s buttocks without their consent, according to the Tallahassee Democrat.

The Vox article which gave me that quote asks us to take online hate seriously.

Thinking about that made me search for any evidence that the Tallahassee butcher might have frequented manosphere sites such as the incel sites, where the hatred of women, as a class,  is validated and strengthened (1), but if the police have any evidence against or for that possibility they have not yet shared it.

Thinking about those hatred-of-women-is-the-correct-response sites, in turn,  made me think of something else, and that else is the way the misogynistic sites create an alternative world theory (2) for some men in great pain:

That "theory" explains that women, indeed, are all callow, shallow gold-diggers and lookists who will voluntarily only fuck a small number of rich and handsome alpha males on top of social hierarchies and who won't even consider any other man until Father Time gives the women themselves wrinkles and layers of belly fat.

Then those poor beta men will be accepted, but only as hard-working slaves to be exploited while the perfidious women scheme and plot to take their devout beta husbands to the cleaners in some future divorce.  Should any richer and more handsome man come along, that is.

If that (slightly exaggerated) summary sounds familiar to you, well, it might be because you have read my criticisms of some of the wackier evolutionary psychology musings, the kinds which initially argued that women mate for money and power, men for youth and beauty, and all that is hardwired in human beings.

That, my friends, is where the pseudo-scientific underpinnings of the incel Theory Of The World can be found: in the cocktail-party type musings about genetic determinism.

And that, my friends, is, perhaps,  the real reason why I have written so many criticisms of those weird evo-psycho musings. (3)  Just look at the kinds of places where essentialist theories about men and women and about sex are eagerly adopted and adapted, and you see the damage they cause.

Once I focused on that particular connection, I began seeing it in many anti-woman places.  Jordan Peterson, for one example,  mines evolutionary psychology for his arguments that it's natural for mostly men to be found on top of social hierarchies and so on.

Whether the Tallahassee killer visited misogyny sites or not, he certainly thought that his anger deserved a public hearing on YouTube, and  at least some on one incel site regarded his "solution" to his dilemma as not an invalid one: 

One commentator on a new incel site argues that

" you will NEVER EVER stop sexually frustrated men from seeing blackpill content online, learning the truth about human sexuality and life, and, finally (for some of them) getting pushed over the edge and going ER." (4)

Note that this commentator (why not commenter?) believes he knows the truth about human sexuality and life, on the basis of reading online and, in particular, on the incel sites.  This "truth" is what I mean by the world theory incel sites offer their readers.  And that theory is a toxic one.

------

(1)  As I have written before, those sites remind me of the anorexia sites I once visited where the anorexics support and congratulate each other for not eating.  They are not sites which make the visitors well.

(2) This is in a manner similar to the theory anti-Semitists have about Jews as running the whole world and also similar to the way the nutty race science is used to support racism.  People visiting the misogyny sites are given a seemingly science-smelling explanation for why women are awful:  They are "hard-wired" that way by evolution, and cannot change themselves.

That "explanation" is derived from the earliest and crudest versions of the worst kinds of speculations in evolutionary psychology, and the specific form of it varies between, say, pickup artist and incel sites.  But once it's accepted as a worldview, any real-world solutions to, say,  the problems of loneliness and the desire to find a female mate on the incel sites are excluded by the warped essentialist logic.

(3)  There are even articles which propose that increasing the odds of getting raped might be an evolutionary adaptation in women who are not deemed sufficiently attractive otherwise.  After all, they can get progeny by having someone rape them, so the adaptation is to act in ways which would increase the probability of rape.  Just imagine what some of the incel sites could make out of that!

(4) The black pill refers to the argument that hopelessness is the correct emotion to feel if you are a man who cannot have the heterosexual sex he wants, because the fault lies in his genes and women's hardwired shallowness.  Going ER means mass murdering people along the lines of Elliot Rodger. 



 

Trump's Presser, Translated

I watched Trump's recent press conference in its entirety, because I was bored and felt a little masochistic.  Then I took notes, to filter everything out of what Our Dear Leader said, except the emotional contents.  And this is what remained:

 +++

Trump reads from prepared notes. 
Mumblemumblemumble. 
Reads more, haltingly, sounding bored. 
Gives a few ex tempore quips and explains them to six-year olds.  Mumblemumblemumble.

Trump praises Pelosi but warns the Democrats not to investigate him because he will investigate back and he is better at that game.

Trump reads that "now is the time to set partisanship aside (!)" and continue working for the great economy and how all the visiting foreign dignitaries compliment him on his economy and look how well steel industry is doing, how well the military is doing, how well law enforcement and how well mining is doing.*

After the monologue, Trump asks for questions from the journalists (roughly 37 or so get to talk).  The fifth questioner (Jim Acosta of CNN) causes him to erupt:

Acosta's first question is about the migrant caravan and the way Trump called it an invasion.  Trump answers that fairly calmly, but then there's chatter and then he says, angrily, "That is enough" several times.

Acosta's second question is about the Russian investigation, and Trump explodes:  CNN should be ashamed to employ you, he says to Acosta, you are a rude, terrible person**, the way you treat Sarah Huckabee is horrible.  And so on.

We all know the consequences of that little spat. Acosta lost his White House access.***

And Trump did not regain his calm for a while.  Around the seventh questioner he tells one journalist "sit down I didn't call you" and says that the CNN polls are voter suppression and calls the media hostile, so sad,  and tells one woman that she rudely interrupted some other journalist.

Later he was asked what lessons he learned from the midterm election results. His lessons were that people like him and the job he has done, and those he campaigned for won but those he didn't campaign for didn't win.  Lots more about how wonderful he is and how Bill Nelson lost because Trump campaigned for his opponent even though celebrities campaigned for Nelson in Florida.

When asked about forced-birth policies he is pursuing he says that he has a secret solution to the division in the country around that, a solution nobody else has.

He calls this White House the hot White House and says that everyone wants to work there.

On North Korea he says that he has made more progress in five months than his predecessors managed to make in seventy years.  And nobody could have done what he has done.

When he is asked about the increase in antisemitism and other type of hate movements he turns the answer to Israel and says that no prior president has done as much for Israel as he has done.  He moved the US embassy to Jerusalem and built it with very little money.  Nobody has done more for Israel than Donald Trump.

When again asked about the divide in this country he goes on about China, saying that China has come down tremendously and would have superseded the US in two years (if Obama's policies had continued) but now they are not even close.

Trump says he is a great moral leader and loves this country.

A question about working together with Democrats even if they investigate him   causes another eruption:

He says he comes here (to the press conference) a nice person wanting to answer questions and look at journalists jumping out of their seats with not nice questions.

A question about Trump's nationalism and if that means white nationalism caused him to call the question a racist one, several times.   When another journalist continued on the topic of Trump's alleged racist statements, he stated that it's people like that  (journalist) who create division in this country.

In later questions he tells us that he has lowered the price of oil in the last three months because he doesn't like OPEC.

Finally, when asked about the flight of suburban women from Trump, he responds by telling that he was very well received by this country, that the US military will now be the strongest ever, that the vets are doing great now, and that people are very happy with the job he has done.  People want security at home and at the border and women of this country (great people!) want physical security and financial security and ICE is wonderful, because it has taken out thousands of criminal gang members.****

He believes peace and unity must start with the media. It isn't good what the media is doing and he has the right to fight back and he is not doing it for himself but for the American people.

+++ 

 That was ninety minutes I will never get back.  Still, it's clear that we have a narcissist steering the country and that he is very thin-skinned.  He kept mentioning Obama's administration and its policies whenever he wanted to promote his own policies.  This even included asserting that Obama allowed the Ukraine to be taken by Putin, and when the journalist asking the question noted that it was Putin who invaded, Trump stated that it happened during Obama's watch, nothing to do with himself.

Clearly, Obama is the festering splinter in his finger.
-----

*  All overwhelmingly male-dominated industries.  This was common in Trump's pre-election rallies, too, and probably is equally common in his post-election rallies.  It's a way of signaling which groups he aims to help first.

**  Hilarious, coming from a very rude person.  For example, he told several journalists to shut up.  A polite person would have said something like "please, wait for your turn."

*** This article argues that the video of the events was altered to exaggerate Acosta's reactions, so that his suspension would seem fairer.


**** Who, presumably, would have preyed on suburban women?
Note how he cannot even quite figure out what women might want, so he talks about the military instead. 

Fourteen Years. Or the Blog Anniversary.

You write fourteen years
and what do you get?
A whole lot older
and deeper in debt.
St. Peter don't you call me
coz I can't go
I owe my soul
to the online show.

With apologies to the original.

In other words, this blog is fourteen years old.  It has teenage hormones and acne and weird, wild dreams.  Or would, if it were human.  In reality it's very very tired and wonders about the meaning of life, eternity and the number 42.

Thank you all.  Have some chocolate orgasm cake to celebrate.  The nice thing about cyber-cake is that it has no calories.  Sadly, much of the online writing is the same.

All I Wanted For Christmas Was The House. My Election Reactions.

All I wanted for Christmas was the House.  That's all.  And I believe that parcel is under the tree.

I didn't write about the elections much because a) I have been very depressed and b) because of the "surprise, surprise!" element in 2016 (imagine a monster with bleeding eyeballs popping out of the gift box) which left me with PTSD,  but the overall results today are quite good.  Had the Republicans maintained control on both the House and the Senate the extra damage they would have caused might not have been repairable until three or four generations down the line.

Women ran in record numbers this year and women also did quite well:

Female candidates performed particularly well in an election cycle that had been billed as the Year of the Woman.
Two 29-year-old Democrats, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Abby Finkenauer - are due to be the youngest women ever to win House seats.
Ilhan OImar and Rashida Tlaib are the first Muslim women and Sharice Davids and Debra Haaland the first Native American women to be elected to Congress. All are Democrats.

The total number of women in the House will increase, but it will not be anywhere near the half it should be on the basis of demography.

All in all, the results are satisfactory, though to achieve those results required enormous amounts of labor.  Thanks to all who worked to get people to vote.

Also keep in mind that most of the open Senate seats were in very Republican areas, that a good economy (inherited from Obama, though) usually makes the voters stick with the incumbents and that Republican gerrymandering has made many districts almost unwinnable for Democrats.  Because of all this, I am happy with the outcome.

And so is Our Dear Leader, who manages to turn it into praise for Himself:

“There’s only been 5 times in the last 105 years that an incumbent President has won seats in the Senate in the off year election. Mr. Trump has magic about him. This guy has magic coming out of his ears. He is an astonishing vote getter & campaigner. The Republicans are.........

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 7, 2018

....unbelievably lucky to have him and I’m just awed at how well they’ve done. It’s all the Trump magic - Trump is the magic man. Incredible, he’s got the entire media against him, attacking him every day, and he pulls out these enormous wins.” Ben Stein, “The Capitalist Code”

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 7, 2018

Now that will learn you my friends.  But first let's roll on the floor laughing our heads off.

Recent News About Women's Issues. Or From Google Via Nobels To Ethiopia And Back

1.  Thousands of Google employees walked out on Thursday, to protest sexual harassment which the protesters said the leadership has not taken seriously.

The impetus for the protests was this:

Protestors were galvanized by a recent New York Times report that chronicled three top company executives who have received massive payouts over the past decade despite being credibly accused of sexual misconduct.

Google denies the claim that one of those executives received $90 million as an exit package.

The protesters' demands include an end to forced arbitration in cases of harassment and discrimination.  Microsoft ended forced arbitration in 2017, but most tech firms use it.  Why is it bad? Because of this:

Arbitration is a private, quasi-legal procedure originally designed to expedite disputes between corporations. But over time, it has evolved into a system where individuals are compelled for a variety of reasons to agree to arbitration decisions versus seeking a court decision. The net result is that disputes that normally would have been adjudicated via the public court process are often processed via private arbitration, which generally favors corporations over individuals.
Worse still, in the world of arbitration, there is no possibility of class-action claims. Arbitration proceedings are additionally often shrouded from public view, meaning it is traditionally difficult to find out about sexual harassment or misconduct claims at corporations.

Republican Political Tricks 101. Hind-Brain Politics.

The midterms are coming and the Democrats, despite their wishy-washiness and milquetoast demeanor might actually gain a few seats in the House.  So what's a Republican cunning strategist to do  to fix that problem?

The great tax cuts for the super-rich didn't go down quite as well as the Republicans hoped, perhaps because the goodies went to a small already goodies-loaded minority.

But fret not!  There's always those hind-brain emotions: fear and anger.  Angry and frightened people are easy to lead by the nose to the voting booths.  And angry and frightened people find logical counterarguments impossible to absorb.

So what could the cunning strategist do to cause panic and anger among the potential Republican voters so that they would claw their way to the voting booths to save their lives and destinies?

I know!  Pretend that this country of 326 million citizens, boasting the largest military force on this planet,  is going to be invaded by a massive military force consisting of a few thousand unarmed Central American migrants!  

Pretend that those few thousands hide among them frightening criminals (more frightening than homegrown American criminals) and deadly Middle Eastern terrorists.

Pretend that those few thousand harbor horrible diseases which they are going to spread all over this glorious country in the first few hours of their arrival at the border.  Leprosy, for example*.  Or the plague, perhaps.  Or foot-and-mouth disease (not to be confused with the Republican foot-in-the-mouth disease).  Or rabies.  Or any of the many diseases which already exist in the United States.

Clearly, this invading giant civilian ragtag force is nothing but a walking talking bomb, ready to explode and destroy this great and powerful country.

The above plans take care of the fear.  Fox News and other similar sites will forecast these messages over and over, because repetition is the mother of all learning and because brainwashing requires repetition, too.

If a few of the more rational conservatives are still not convinced that there is any real threat, have Our Supreme Leader send military troops to the southern border.  This demonstrates to even the most skeptical conservatives that the threat is "real" and that the time now is to panic.

When  all that fear is nicely simmering inside the ideological pot, add a few shakes of anger:

Hint that it's the Democrats who have organized this giant invading force.

Don't dwell into their supposed reasons, but simply say that the caravan is going to occupy this great country with its powerful military, because the Democrats want this country to be taken over by a few thousand South American migrants.  And real Murkans must stop them before it's too late!  Vote Republican or die of leprosy, rabies and demonic possession.

Now isn't that a clever package of voting incentives?

Of course it's very sad, our Republican strategist might admit,  that fanning the flames of baseless fear and anger and pointing accusing fingers at the other party and at specific individuals (such as George Soros) can cause some collateral damage.   But to the Republicans domestic politics is nothing but civil war by other means.



------

*  Armadillos are a more likely source of infection than people for this, though the overall risk is minimal.  Besides, the disease has a very long incubation period and is treatable.

I added the foot-and-mouth disease, thinking it was funny because I thought it's a cattle disease only.  But humans seem to get a mild version of it or of some viral infection with the same name.

This Dismal Week in American Politics. Or Turning and Turning in the Widening Gyre.

William Butler Yeats:

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

On Wednesday this past week,  two people were butchered at a Kroger supermarket in Jeffersontown, Kentucky:

A gunman who killed two people at a Kroger supermarket in Jeffersontown, Ky., on Wednesday tried to enter a predominantly black church minutes before the attack, the police said on Thursday.

The man, Gregory Bush, 51, of Louisville, was arraigned Thursday on two counts of murder and 10 counts of wanton endangerment. He was ordered held with bail set at $5 million. The victims, Vickie Lee Jones, 67, and Maurice E. Stallard, 69, were both black, while Mr. Bush is white.

...

The police said there was no indication that Mr. Bush knew either of the victims, nor did he have any known connection to the grocery store. Mr. Bush has a history of mental illness, Chief Sam Rogers of the Jeffersontown Police Department said at a news conference on Thursday. Court records show that he also had a long history of domestic violence charges, and had previously been barred from possessing a firearm.

The attack is investigated as a possible hate crime.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

All through the past week most of the leadership of the Democratic Party, the CNN, and several other individuals who might to him look like they had disrespected Donald Trump, Our Savior received pipe bombs in the mail:

Targets have included Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, former CIA director John Brennan, former attorney general Eric Holder, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), Robert De Niro and billionaire donor George Soros.

The suspect, a registered Republican man from Florida,  has a lengthy criminal record, including 

in 2002, a “threat to throw, place, project or discharge any destructive device.”

These acts of political domestic terrorism aimed at many of the leaders of one of the two major parties met with an oddly non-serious response.  Some on the right openly speculated that the bombs were a false flag operation.

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

On Saturday, to cap this week,  an anti-Semitist man opened fire at a Pittsburgh synagogue, killing at least eleven people in a clear hate crime.

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

At least the last two killers appear to have been radicalized by watching right-wing news in the United States.

The biggest recent news item there has been the extremely frightening caravan of a few thousand Central American migrants approaching the southern border of this wealthy country with its several hundred million inhabitants, some presumably cowering under their beds. 

But in the right-wing news this, my friends, is an invasion, something to be very scared of, something, which requires the military at the border, and something which might, just might be a way for a few Middle Eastern terrorists to get into the US. 

An earlier president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, told worried Americans in a different context that "the only thing we have to fear...is fear itself,"  but our current president loves to fan the flames of fear.  Here is Trump on the migrant caravan:

 

Sadly, it looks like Mexico’s Police and Military are unable to stop the Caravan heading to the Southern Border of the United States. Criminals and unknown Middle Easterners are mixed in. I have alerted Border Patrol and Military that this is a National Emergy. Must change laws!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 22, 2018

Trump later admitted that he has no proof of his assertion that the caravan contained Middle Easterners.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

*****

This is the story of the last week.  It's not a story of incivility from both sides of the political aisle, and it's not a story of the horrible violence of the Antifa movement.  Both sides can be and have been violent, but attempts at some sort of false equality are truly misplaced here.

We are not turning and turning in a widening gyre because we have all somehow forgotten how to treat others with respect, but first and foremost because of decades of right-wing talk radio, Fox News, Breitbart.com and many online hate sites which declare the hatred of women, minorities and Democrats to be justified and patriotic.*

Still, Donald Trump has repeatedly "jokingly" signaled that he is comfortable with political violence and that he admires a good brawler.  He also explicitly refuses to bear any responsibility for the influence his own statements may have, and he is simply incapable of acting presidentially in any context for more than thirty seconds or so.

Then his inner demons take over and he starts preaching hatred to his red hat acolytes.  This is what he tweeted shortly after CNN received a pipe bomb:

Funny how lowly rated CNN, and others, can criticize me at will, even blaming me for the current spate of Bombs and ridiculously comparing this to September 11th and the Oklahoma City bombing, yet when I criticize them they go wild and scream, “it’s just not Presidential!”

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 26, 2018

But we all knew this on that fateful election day in 2016.  Here are two of my posts written around that time.  They are still worth reading, if only as a reminder that a sufficient minority of American voters preferred this man to that crooked woman, and quite possibly to any woman.

The falcon (the forces Trump has loosed) cannot hear the falconer (Trump in his role as the inciter of hate) if the falconer suddenly tells the falcon not to tear and rend the flesh of the prey.  And this is what we now see at Trump's never-ending victory rallies where his bottomless need of assurance is momentarily sated by the adulation of his followers.

But the crowds are restless, now.  They don't want to hear a more presidential Trump.  They have tasted blood and they need more.  Lock Her Up (any her will do)!

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity...**

------

*  In other words, the right began this trend and magnified it over the last few decades. Donald Trump is simply the natural outgrowth from all the propaganda conservatives have swallowed every day for years.  This does not absolve those on the left who have joined the same trend.  But the fault is not in our stars. 

**  At this point in my writing I found out that Charlie Pierce had used parts of the same poem on the same topic.  Great minds and all that.

I could have added stuff about the centre not holding, except there isn't a political center anymore, what with the conservatives having slipped to the right of Attila the Hun. 







  

True Or False? On Accusations of Sexual Violence in The Kavanaugh Era.

(This post is really the third in my series: On the Kavanaugh Nomination And Women's Reproductive Rights.  Or Back to the Basics. But that title is a little boring and uninformative by now.  The first two posts can be read here and here.)

1. Introduction

Our Dear Leader recently noted how scary this time in the US is for young men, because false allegations of sexual violence are so commonplace!  He, himself, has received a whole wheelbarrowful of them!

At about the same time, Bret Stephens, a right-wing columnist at the New York Times, had a few thoughts about such false allegations in the context of Brett Kavanaugh's alleged sexual misconduct:

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.

That "five times as common" argument means that about 5% of rape accusations were found to be false or baseless (1) in one study.  Other (properly done) studies have quoted figures ranging from 2% to 8%.

Let's set aside the question whether Brett Kavanaugh actually did what Christine Blasey Ford and others have accused him of.  Let's, instead, consider this heightened concern with possible false accusations which is very evident both in the context of the Kavanaugh hearings and in the changes Betsy deVos created when she scrapped the Obama-era guidelines on how colleges should handle sexual violence accusations.  The most crucial of these changes is this:

The most controversial portion of the Obama-era guidelines had demanded colleges use the lowest standard of proof, “preponderance of the evidence,” in deciding whether a student is responsible for sexual assault, a verdict that can lead to discipline and even expulsion. On Friday, the Education Department said colleges were free to abandon that standard and raise it to a higher standard known as “clear and convincing evidence.”

The higher bar for evidence means that fewer students accused of sexual assault will be found responsible.  It's less likely that someone falsely accused would be found responsible, but it's also more likely that someone guilty of sexual assault will be found not responsible.  The overall effect may be to cause fewer accusers to come forward (on the basis of why-bother).

So what is going on here?  Is this truly a scary time for young men, and if so, what times have not been scary for young women?  And what do Stephens and his friend in the above NYT quote mean when they say that they would rather be accused of murder than of sexual assault?

The Happy Hour For Birds?

My neighbor has a tall cherry tree near the fence separating our lots.  I have never seen it bear berries before, but this fall the tall canopy of the tree has been full of giant red shiny globes, delicious even from a distance.  It still is fairly full of those berries, and thereby hangs a tale.

Very early one morning I woke up to a tremendous cacophony of sounds, birds speaking to each other in full voice in a hundred different languages, at different frequencies and levels of loudness.  Beautiful it was not, a nature's symphony it was not.

I looked out from a second floor window and saw birds everywhere.  About forty starlings pecking at the so-called driveway (which is not abnormal), three or four blue jays leaning weirdly on top of the roof, a couple of morning doves playing bomber planes at the ground and at each other, and ten or so robins lying in the grass.  And when I say "lying in the grass," I mean it.  When I made a fearsome noise, a couple of the robins managed to fly away, the others turned glazed eyes at me and that was it.

I opened the window and stuck my head out and got bombarded by a pair of small birds.  They flew so close to my face that I felt the air their wings moved in my hair.

All this was a little troubling.   Suddenly I heard a noise from another second floor window, one which has a narrow screen for ventilation at the bottom.  A blue jay was busily trying to tear that screen into small pieces.  As I approached the window, from inside the house, the jay looked at me, scornfully, and resumed its wrecking work.

After an hour or so the happy time was over and things returned to normal (well, normal for the Snakepit Inc.).  But the same show was repeated at slightly lower attendance rates for about a week.

What's going on here?  Are the berries in the cherry tree fermented, thus offering migrating (and non-migrating) birds a nice alcoholic bar?  A birds' happy hour?

I don't think any birds were harmed in making this spectacle. 

Too Obvious, Too Weird, Too Republican

I know I'm preaching (in a sonorous voice) to the choir when I point out that we have that US budget deficit problem because Mitch McConnell and his boyz decided to give the rich a humongous tax cut.  And then, a few minutes after that:

(Bloomberg) -- Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says the U.S. budget deficit is "disturbing" and spending on entitlement programs must be addressed by both Republicans and Democrats.

— Brian Chappatta (@BChappatta) October 16, 2018

This combination is naturally Republican politics as usual, because the goal is to drown the government in a bathtub (except for the military to protect the money of the rich and the legal system for the same protection).  But it's seldom happening so very quickly.  First Mitch tries to put all the dollars in the wallets of the billionaires, then he takes one breath and follows that with the worry that the budget won't balance so let's put the old and the poor on cat food diets.

All that is obvious.  But it's worth wondering what kind of a society Mitch&Friends want to build.  Somalia?  Something from ancient history?  There are some really good reasons for taxes*:  That's how we pay for a somewhat safer, fairer and more affluent society.

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* In the sense that everyone should pay their fair taxes, to cover our common expenses.  This doesn't mean not keeping an eye on government spending and its efficiency.  But there's something a little bit wrong if Echidne pays more federal income tax than Jared Kushner.

The Proud Boys' Founder, Gavin McInnes, Visits The Republican Club In New York City, And A Brawl Follows

It's all hilarious*.  If you don't know what the Proud Boys stand for, do read my earlier blog post and then this one and then this one**.  And then note that it was a former Proud Boy who planned the fatal white supremacist march in Charlottesville in 2017.

Proud Boys are into violence, Western nationalism,  and, most centrally, misogyny.  Last May Tucker Carlson posed with a few Proud Boys for a picture, though it's unclear if he knew what they stand for (which is a slightly dirtier version of what Tucker himself stands for).

It's unclear what the brawl was all about or who started it.  The New York Times chose to give the story one of those passive headlines (like a woman gets raped):

Fight Breaks Out Near Republican Club After Visit by Gavin McInnes, Police Say

The Daily Beast used a more active voice:

Far-Right 'Proud Boys' Kick, Punch People in New York Following Speech From Leader

To top all this, the Republican club was vandalized the night before Gavin McInnes' speech there, probably to protest the fact that New York City Republicans want to listen to a fascist-cum-racist-cum-misogynist***.  I thought those people were heard in the 1930s and responded to in the 1940s in a rather decisive manner.

But nope.  The Republican club advertised McInnes as follows:

Banned from Twitter - this Godfather of the Hipster Movement has taken on and exposed the Deep State Socialists and stood up for Western Values. Join us for an unforgettable evening with one of Liberty’s Loudest Voices!

One of "Liberty's Loudest Voices?"  If you read my earlier blog posts on McInnes and Proud Boys, you know that the last thing he is about is liberty for women and/or minorities.  And Twitter banned the Proud Boys for being a violent extremist group.

In any case, McInnes' misogynistic views would fit right into the rules of ISIS, so there's nothing Western about them.

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*  It's not hilarious in the ordinary sense of the word, of course.  It's dismal and frightening and very wrong that fascism is once again rearing its ugly head.  But the whole mess has a moonless night bitter humor about it.  The Proud Boys preach violence and male-and-white superiority, and the opposition responds with violence.

**  Another juicy quote about feminism from one of Liberty's Loudest Voices:

“I think a lot of us sort of tried it, too. When we were in college we go, ‘Oh, ok— you take the reigns,’” he said, noting that he dabbled in actual feminism (he still insists that he’s a feminist). “And then realizing that not only is it not correct that men suck, but I don’t think that the people saying it really even believe it themselves. I think they want to be dominated. I think that’s why Game of Thrones is so popular, because deep down they love ‘Winter is Coming’ and men with giant swords.” (In 2013, McInnes wrote about his own sexual reeducation: “I learned they want to be downright abused. When I stopped playing nice and began totally defiling the women I slept with, the number of them willing to sleep with me went through the roof.”)

***  It's worth noting that Proud Boys accept — and have — men of color as members but they do not accept women.   I still think they are racists, too.

How I Miss the Era of Hypocrisy!

I have come to miss the era when Western politicians gave lip service to  human rights concerns.  Trump believes that human rights apply to him alone, and the rest of the world is rapidly finding the same rising tide of all sorts of bigotries: nationalist, sexist, racist and religionist.

Democracy, my dears, is in deep peril*.  It never was that perfect, what with power and money being the most addicting (il)legal drugs of all,  but at least in some countries the use of that greedy power was disguised to appeal to certain fairly commonly accepted social norms.  This is less common today.

Thus, we see tweets like this one, about the murder of a Saudi journalist (who had permanent residency rights in the US) inside the Saudi embassy in Turkey:

BREAKING: #Saudi and #Turkey agree to form a joint team to investigate #Khashoggi disappearance.

Turkey Presidency made announcement and said it’s based on Saudi official request.

— Joyce Karam (@Joyce_Karam) October 11, 2018

It's as if Jeffrey Dahmer was appointed to the team investigating his horrible crimes!  But only wet-paperbag idealists see anything wrong with that.   And, as Trump has explicitly noted, the Saudis are too important trading partners for the US to punish in any way.

But then the Saudis are our Best Friends Forever**, despite the powerful Saudi clerics' views on women's rights (nonexistent, pretty much), and the way petro-dollars are disseminating those views in many other countries.

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*  Both because in the US (and certainly also elsewhere) voting  is suppressed, certain groups are disenfranchised on purpose and the voting results are often impossible to properly verify, but also because far too many voters are uninformed and tend to "vote the bums out" or want change for the sake of change, even when the new rulers will be every bit as corrupt and greedy.

**  This is not about the Saudi people.  The ones I have met have all been wonderful warm people with good values.  It's about the Saudi state and the form of extreme religion they uphold.

Lock Her Up!

A chant frequently heard at Trump's never-ending campaign-cum-victory rallies.  Initially the "she" to be locked up was Hillary Clinton*.  Clinton is still a popular target for the chant, but recently it was also applied to Senator Dianne Feinstein and might have been applied to Christine Blasey Ford who accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault.

So many crooked women who need locking up...

It has even spread to Canada, where the supporters of the right-wing populist, Doug Ford, for the premiership of Ontario, used "lock her up" about his female rival.

I Googled "lock him up," and found only the predicted response to the above chant against Hillary Clinton, where the resistance demands that Trump be locked up.  Thus, it doesn't seem to be the case that male politicians are routinely greeted with a chant of this type.

This makes me wonder if it's being an uppity female which needs stern punishment in the conservative minds.

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* Note that she has not been charged for any crime. 

Too Extreme And Too Dangerous To Govern

 The blood in my veins ran ice-cold when I read about the campaign rally our sitting (yes, sitting!) president gave the other night.  He is always campaigning, sigh.

And that is NOT what presidents are supposed to do.  Still, he cannot survive without adulation or worshipers, and that's what those campaign rallies are.  Organized ass-licking in both senses of the word.

But they are also rallies in hate speech.  It's not too strong a term to use when the president of this country no longer even pretends to be the president of all Americans, but just a war-leader or cheerleader for the Republican Party and, in particular, its Alt Right segment.

David Neiwert makes the point which troubles me greatly.  I recommend his whole Twitter thread, but especially these two tweets:

3) This is a remarkable moment in American politics: The President of the United States just declared an entire political party fundamentally illegitimate. And the media are treating it as just another of Trump’s crazy things.

— David Neiwert (@DavidNeiwert) October 7, 2018

THIS IS NOT NORMAL.  WE MUST NOT NORMALIZE IT.

It's not normal to have a president who is incompetent, ignorant, rude and outright sadistic.  It's not normal to have a president who spends a quarter of his time in office on golf courses and much of the rest of it either doing campaign rallies  (rah, rah!  Lock her up*!)  or scribbling vicious tweets to all and sundry, including to fairly ordinary and powerless people who happen to have angered him.  It's not normal to have a president who  takes advice from Fox News.  It's not normal to have a president who lies All.The.Time.

And it's not normal for the media to judge some Trump event a success if he didn't drop his pants to moon the audience.

I shouted the above two lines about what is not normal and what must not be normalized, because I am frustrated by our (and my own) inability not to start accepting the current state of affairs as the new-normal, where normal means that all conventions have been turned upside down, where normal means that a stubborn and selfish  (mental) child president just decides which rules and laws he will follow and which he will ignore,  and nobody can do anything about it, and where normal also means that behind the curtain the Republicans are rapidly dismantling the welfare state, democracy and most of the government (with the exception of the military). 

This should be particularly abnormal and acceptable, given that the current administration didn't win most of the votes, but acts as if it has complete justification to do what the fuck it wants.  And often it wants to stick it to the majority that didn't vote for Trump.  Indeed, the Trump acolytes love that sadism and appear to want to see Democrats suffer, even if they themselves end up suffering more.

That is not healthy for the country.  It's an illness which incubated in the right-wing political radio shows and then showed its first symptoms when Fox News was created.  It's now a raging fever made hotter and hotter by Breitbart.com and other Alt Right organizations, and among its major symptoms is the belief that Democrats and the left are the true enemy of America, a far bigger and more dangerous enemy than any outside threat.  Note how this (and Trump's statement above) means that around half of the citizens of this country are not regarded as true Americans.

There is no cure in immediate sight.  If anything, the same illness, causing the objectification and hatred of "the other side" is showing symptoms on the left, too**.

But there are things we can do.  The most obvious one is to vote in November, and the next most obvious one is to be politically engaged in other useful ways. If you feel up to it, it might include trying to reach out to those conservatives who are not motivated by pure hatred and, perhaps, trying to find some common ground with them outside politics.***  




----------------

*  It's unclear if the acolytes still want to see Hillary Clinton (and probably all uppity women) in prison or if the latest round of yelling was about Christine Blasey Ford.

**  By saying that I am not engaging in some both-sides-do-it argument, common in the mainstream media.  No, the American right started the process, and when the nonstop conservative hate speech worked in both radio and television, the average Republicans' views began to creep rightward.  Indeed, the National Review, a very conservative political journal,  is now seen by many Republicans as not sufficiently conservative!

But after a few decades of the hateful propaganda, the responses from our side of the political aisle began taking similar shapes.  It's hard to see what other form those responses can now take, true, given that no compromises are acceptable to the kinds of Republicans the hate propaganda has created.

Still, the situation is truly lamentable, like an unhappily married couple kicking, punching, clawing, biting and hating each other while chained together somewhere where divorce does not exist.

As an aside, this is one of the reasons for the convention of comity in politics.  Yes, it can be idiotic pretense politeness, but its real intention was to force politicians to remember that when they interact with their political opponents they are dealing with human beings whom they disagree with and who might seem to them to be very flawed, but they are not dealing with vicious monsters from the deepest hell.

***  As one silly example, I noticed that several avid Trump acolytes on Facebook also spend time rescuing dogs and cats and so on.  So we might share some values.

And yes, I know that this suggestion will not get a lot of positive feedback.  I don't expect anyone to try to befriend the Stephen Millers of this world or the fascists, racists or sexists among the conservatives, just some more ordinary conservatives.

The alternatives to finding some common ground are not palatable in the longer run (secession?  political violence?).   But I admit that the chances of success in trying to find the humanity in each other across the aisle could be slim, and the thanks for that go to Alex Jones, Breitbart.com, Rush Limbaugh and other insistent purveyors of objectifying hate speech.

  
 

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.