What Was Your First Memory?

Because this is a holiday week in the US, I feel free not to write about only politics and other stress-inducing topics.  For a change of pace, I thought back to the misty past when I was a very small goddess, to figure out my first memory.

The one I'm surest about* is this:

I am upright in the hot sun.  Outside.

Heat.  Light.  Light and heat.  From above.  Above exists.  Cold below.  Below exists.  The stepping stone is cold and I stand on it.  I exist.

I am not the heat, I am not the light, I am not the cold or the stone. 

I AM, small, I end there and I end here, and I stand on this stepping stone and it is hot and it is glaring white above and my legs (I have legs) are bare and warm and I wear a ---- onesie?  and a baby bonnet.

What's your first memory?

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*  I have another one which is a little fuzzier and involves hearing people talk but not being able to understand a single word.  Also, feeling like a turtle on its back, unable to move toward the light from the window.   But the one I write about here is much stronger.

She Is Not My Type. The Recent Sexual Assault Allegation Against Donald Trump.

"She is not my type."  That's partly how Donald Trump responded to the allegations that he had sexually assaulted Jean E. Carroll, long an advice columnist for Elle magazine, in a Bergdorf & Goodman dressing-room twenty-three years ago.

These allegations appeared in print at the Cut which published a short excerpt from Carroll's forthcoming book.  Here's the central bit:

The moment the dressing-room door is closed, he lunges at me, pushes me against the wall, hitting my head quite badly, and puts his mouth against my lips. I am so shocked I shove him back and start laughing again. He seizes both my arms and pushes me up against the wall a second time, and, as I become aware of how large he is, he holds me against the wall with his shoulder and jams his hand under my coat dress and pulls down my tights.

I am astonished by what I’m about to write: I keep laughing. The next moment, still wearing correct business attire, shirt, tie, suit jacket, overcoat, he opens the overcoat, unzips his pants, and, forcing his fingers around my private area, thrusts his penis halfway — or completely, I’m not certain — inside me. It turns into a colossal struggle. I am wearing a pair of sturdy black patent-leather four-inch Barneys high heels, which puts my height around six-one, and I try to stomp his foot. I try to push him off with my one free hand — for some reason, I keep holding my purse with the other — and I finally get a knee up high enough to push him out and off and I turn, open the door, and run out of the dressing room.

Carroll wrote that she told two women about the event at the time, and two women have come forward to verify that. Trump's response was that Carroll is "totally lying" and that "she is not his type."

I find it hard to get over the idea that "she is not my type" would be a defense against sexual assault allegations.  Indeed, I can't get my head around that.  I wonder what his type for sexual assault purposes might be...

The longer the Trump era continues, the more I feel like Alice in Wonderland: (1)

"Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things."
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." 

And Our Dear Leader Speaks About The Demise Of Liberal Democracy

This is funny:

President Trump held a lengthy news conference Saturday in Osaka, Japan, during which he displayed his apparent ignorance of some very basic political terms and historical concepts.

When asked about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s comments saying Western-style liberalism was “obsolete,” Trump apparently thought this term literally referred to the western United States and American liberals.

....

Democratic liberalism, of course, does not refer to the western United States, but rather the Western world -- which generally includes the United States and much of Europe. And liberalism is a political theory that values the freedom of the individual. That term has come to be associated with left-leaning American politicians and political activists, but some right-leaning political thinkers still claim the term as their own.

Broadly speaking, democratic liberalism has been the leading political ideology across the western world since World War II. Of late, though, populist movements across Europe have gained power, leading to questions about how long liberal democracies can survive. Putin’s comments were clearly about that, but Trump doesn’t appear to have processed this very significant development on the world stage.

No.  It's not funny.  It's frightening, as if we live in a mirror world where the Russian dictator is pleased that the idea of democracy, freedom of the individuals and associated concepts such as human rights are now becoming obsolete, and the wannabe American dictator doesn't even understand what the fuck Vlad The Impaler is talking about.

The BBC has a more detailed take on both the meaning of liberal democracy in the Western world, and Putin's assertions:

"Putin's position is that Russia has a specific and different kind of civilisation, where sovereignty trumps democracy, and national unity and stability trumps rule of law and human rights," says Prof Cox.
"Not surprisingly, he's not keen on Western-style liberalism, which he'll see as a fundamental challenge to his style of government.

Bolds are mine. 

Putin's views remind me of how Mussolini, too, made the trains run on time...

Never mind.  The point of this post is that while Putin's war-of-the-ideas uses sophisticated weapons in, say, cyber-warfare, Trump brings with him a toy train.
 

And Alabama Keeps Moving Toward Gilead. The Case Of Marshae Jones.

In Alabama, the state which takes The Handmaid's Tale not as dystopian fiction, but as an instruction manual about the proper care and management of those pesky females, this happened:

Marshae Jones was five months pregnant when she was shot in the stomach. Her fetus did not survive the shooting, which the authorities say happened during a dispute with another woman.

But on Wednesday, it was Ms. Jones who was charged in the death.

Ms. Jones, 28, was charged with manslaughter and booked into jail on a $50,000 bond, according to the authorities in Jefferson County, Ala. The police have said she was culpable because she started the fight that led to the shooting and failed to remove herself from harm’s way.

“The only true victim in this was the unborn baby,” Lt. Danny Reid of the Pleasant Grove Police Department, said after the shooting in December, AL.com reported. “It was the mother of the child who initiated and continued the fight which resulted in the death of her own unborn baby.”

My dear readers, welcome to a taste of the wonderful world where egg-Americans have full human rights and therefore their carriers do not*.

To see how that will work in the glorious future, should the forced-birthers get their way, consider this manly opinion by Lt. Reid:

“When a five-month pregnant woman initiates a fight and attacks another person, I believe some responsibility lies with her as to any injury to her unborn child,” Lt. Reid said then. “That child is dependent on its mother to try to keep it from harm, and she shouldn’t seek out unnecessary physical altercations.”

She probably shouldn't drink alcohol, either, or smoke tobacco.  She probably shouldn't go scuba diving or mountain climbing, she shouldn't travel to dangerous places, and she probably shouldn't be allowed to be in the military or the police or the fire brigade.  What if she goes out alone, at night, in a potentially dangerous area?  What if she eats too much tuna?  Fails to take folic acid?

Duh, some of you might say.  It's only for nine months per child.  Isn't a healthy child worth a few restrictions on your life? 

And most women do make those restrictive choices on their own.  But this is not about their decisions.  It's about the society decreeing that they cannot have the same rights as other adults do.  In other words, human rights for egg-Americans will remove at least some rights from adult women that adult men get to keep.

It could get even worse: 

Because any fertile woman is potentially pre-pregnant, and because pregnancy is invisible to outsiders in the early stages, this way of thinking can easily slide into the policing of all women between the ages of, say, ten and fifty, including keeping them away from dangerous occupations and hobbies and scrutinizing every miscarriage for possible evidence of a homicide.

That's the dystopia we might one day live in if the forced-birthers have their way.  I don't think it will become reality, because most people don't want to see that world realized.  But the doctrine of full personhood of egg-Americans will unavoidably lead us there.

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* Quite a few women, often women of color,  are already familiar with that world.  
 

Children In Cages At The Border: A Feature, Not A Bug.

I rarely write about certain topics*, even when they are of great importance, even when I worry about them every single day.  That's because often I have nothing useful to contribute to what is already being said, or I have no special expertise in the area.  Just joining in the general lamentations about the atrocities that the Trump administration perpetuates doesn't seem particularly worthwhile.   The Greek chorus is loud enough, but the White House is sound-insulated.

What is taking place at the US southern border is one of those topics where my voice is unnecessary, in general, though I do worry about the lack of debate on the left side of the political aisle on what ideal immigration policies would look like, what the US should have done to prevent the current perfect storm from taking place to begin with,** and how to prepare better for similar future events.

Children in cages.  People with any empathy are aghast at the news that some three hundred children were held in cages, many, if not most, separated from their parents or guardians at the border, left without proper basic care and adult supervision.

We can thank the Trump administration policies for a large part*** of that problem, and especially Stephen "Dead Eyes" Miller, the architect of the current immigration policies, the so-called "zero tolerance" among them.   As McKay Coppins writes in an Atlantic Monthly article,

But while Miller’s influence on this issue is a matter of documented fact, his motives remain somewhat murkier. Why exactly is he using his perch to champion a measure that’s so unpopular that it’s opposed by fully two-thirds of Americans? Theories abound, of course—ranging from ideology to incompetence to xenophobia—but they are almost all products of distant speculation.

Coppins believes that Miller wants to "agitate," to create "constructive controversies", because he trusts that they will ultimately resolve to Trump's advantage in the next elections:

But for Miller, it seems, all is going according to plan—another “constructive controversy” unfolding with great potential for enlightenment. His bet appears to be that voters will witness this showdown between Trump and his angry antagonists, and ultimately side with the president. It’s a theory that will be put to the test in November. In the meantime, the heartrending orchestra on the border will play on.

 But why would the voters side with the president here? 

This is where the "feature, not a bug" arguments comes out to play:  Miller wants the news about children in cages to leak out, because he wants those news to be seen and discussed in the source countries of the current migrants and asylum seekers. 

It's as if he is whispering in the ears of those planning to come to the US about what might happen to their children if they do make the journey, suggesting that whatever the reasons they contemplate leaving might be, the likely treatment they would face at the US border is even worse.  And for that approach to work (i.e. to noticeably reduce the number of migrants seeking entry into the US), the news must be cruel enough.

That all-whip-no-carrot approach is, of course, the way this administration carries out almost all its foreign policy, except toward countries led by strong-men dictators whom Trump admires.

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*  Climate change is the most important one of those.  I do what I can in my own life and try to be well-informed, but I'm not a scientist in that area. 

** The reverse of what Trump did.  Give more support to the source countries of the recent migrants in ways which would improve their security safety and economic position.  People don't usually want to leave their countries if they have a safe choice to stay.  And the US, for historical reasons,  owes some real help to that area.

Such aid is not only good for people who live there but also for peace, the control of migration and even for creating new markets for US products, through greater affluence.  And if properly thought out, it's also good for human rights.

Fighting climate change is another central part of the longer-run solution to global migrations and the problems they cause.

For more about some of the problems in the current asylum-based system, see this Time article from last November.

*** Though the sudden increase in the numbers of asylum-seekers and migrants and the lack of resources and preparedness at the border also contributed. 

Friday Coleslaw: The Finnish Cabinet, A Rose, The Female Bomber Pilots in WWII and Conducting-While-Female

This post is full of random stuff, like a coleslaw.  Enjoy.




1.  The new  Finnish cabinet has more women than men. 

It does not mean that  now patriarchy will be tipped on its head, even in Finland, and nobody will come around with gelding shears.   Honest.

Rather, one day future governments, all over the world,  will have women and men in percentages which over the long-run end up matching the percentages of women and men in the relevant populations.   Some years there will be more men, some years there will be more women, and some years the numbers are roughly equal.

A goddess can dream, in any case.

(Now I suddenly imagine a cabinet created by all those people with Trump masks on.  That's the kind of dream Trump dreams:  Himself, eternally, in power.  And fuck the rest of the humankind.)


2.  The story about "the night witches," Russian women who flew bombers in WWII is fascinating.

3.  Marin Alsop, the first woman to lead a major US orchestra, describes conducting-while-female as follows:

Despite the progress made in recent years, she said, female conductors were still judged differently from their male counterparts while on the podium. “The thing about conducting is it’s all body language,” she said, and “our society interprets gesture very differently from men or from women.”

A delicate touch from a woman, for example, is often seen as weakness, when the same gesture from a man is seen as sensitive, she said. Unlike men, women conductors are “required to think twice about gesture because it’s not just the gesture, it’s how the musicians interpret the gesture.”

I found that fascinating, because it's a concrete example of the frequent pattern many of us have observed:  Women are held to different standards in, say, politics and business, because their behavior and statements are interpreted with added expectations about how women behave or should behave.

This phenomenon may well have to do with fields where women are a minority, and might fade away when women stop being minorities.  On the other hand, I may be wrong about that.

4.  The first rose opened in my garden.  It's a David Austin one, with a difficult metallic tone of soft orange (if that makes sense), and tends to clash with the purple-pale-yellow-white-and-pink colors of the June garden here.  So I isolate it with lots of lady's mantles (visible in the picture as the small yellow flowers).

 

On Political Allies. In Housecleaning

A recent UK Guardian article, about even liberal and progressive men not sharing housework fairly, has a bizarre headline*:

Want to be a male ally? Start by cleaning the house.

It's bizarre, because it suggests that doing one's fair share of housecleaning is a way of being a political (?) ally, but to whom?  The class of women?  One's own female partner?

That headline is like asking the readers to go  around several blocks and then to come into the (messy) house through the backdoor, while the front door (the simple explanation) is wide open and the shortest way in: 

Sharing paid and unpaid work equally** is what fairness in a relationship requires.

Okay.  So I am a curmudgeony goddess who has trouble accepting some of the jargon on both the right and left political extremes.  This particular example is about the meaning of the term "ally" on the political left***.

It's not the same as the dictionary definition about alliances between nations or people, such as this one, even though it initially might look the same:

a person, group, or nation that is associated with another or others for some common cause or purpose: Canada and the United States were allies in World War II.

The difference is that the Guardian headline asks the reader (presumably a man) if he wants to be a male ally.  In other words, it's closer to the following definition:


Rather, it's closer to this one:

2 : one that is associated with another as a helper : a person or group that provides assistance and support in an ongoing effort, activity, or struggle a political ally ... —often now used specifically of a person who is not a member of a marginalized or mistreated group but who expresses or gives support to that group

Bolds are mine.

The two bolded sections explain why I disliked the Guardian headline:  The male partner should not be viewed as a "helper" of the female partner when it comes to housecleaning or child-care or other chores.  The male partner, in this context,  is not someone outside the "marginalized or mistreated" group ( of women, here, or just his own female partner?) who is just expected to give support.   He is inside the group "partnership" with his female partner, and his role is not that of a helper, but of an equal participant.

I wonder if that's clear...



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*  Since most headlines are not written by the authors of the articles, this  headline probably wasn't picked by Moira Donegan who wrote the article (which is worth reading, as is this one on house cleaning).

** Absent health problems etc.  Note that there are different ways of sharing work and household chores fairly, but when both partners work equal hours, it's not fair to expect only one of them to take care of all unpaid work as well.

***  The list of the duties of a political ally can be psychologically very onerous.  There are good reasons for making sure that the eager allies won't just take over and get the whole movement centered on their wants, needs, and desires, which makes those lists understandable.

Still, I am not sure that the allyship-concept in politics is ultimately a productive one (in terms of gaining many supporters in various fights for justice) because it signals that different demographic groups really are like different countries, and unless potential allies can prove otherwise,  they are assumed to be citizens of an enemy country (from the angle of the oppressed group).

Today's Granola Post: A Study on Women's Advancement in British Universities.

Granola posts are good for you!  I'm the parent who is making you eat your granola, because it will help you grow big and strong and smart.


A British study examined why male faculty members in the UK tend to rise higher in the academic hierarchies than female faculty members.  The study controlled for (1) variables which roughly measure the idea that women's advancement is hampered by the traditional gendered division of labor within households, and it also controlled for age (as it takes time to climb to the top) as well as research output (papers published in peer reviewed articles, grants obtained and conference papers presented,  all in the last five years).  The study abstract:

In Alabama, Rapists' Fatherhood Rights Rule

Alabama's extreme forced-birth bill is not the only Tealiban*-type move there against the awful possibility that women might have some rights.  Alabama is also one of the two remaining states (Minnesota being the other) where rapists' fatherhood rights are strong. 

Take the case of Jessica Stalling: 

She has stated that her mother's half-brother began climbing into her bed when she was twelve or thirteen**.  By the age of eighteen or nineteen she had been pregnant four times and was the mother of two living children.  Her family forced her to marry her "uncle Lennie."  The marriage was later declared invalid because of the close familiar connection.

But now "uncle Lennie" has gone to court and won visitation rights to her two remaining children.

Women's Soccer. Or On Fair Pay And Using A Doll's Head As A Ball

Because it's the time of this year's Women's  World Cup*, several articles about women's soccer in more general terms have recently been published.

One, in today's Washington Post, has to do with the pay male and female soccer players in the US receive:

On International Women’s Day in March, all 28 members of the women’s team filed a class-action gender discrimination lawsuit against the U.S. Soccer Federation, alleging they do the same job as the men’s team in exchange for lower wages and inferior working conditions. The men’s national team has never won a world title and did not qualify for last year’s World Cup.
...

Defenders of the pay gap pointed to the significantly higher revenue generated by the men’s World Cup, compared with the women’s event. The 2010 men’s World Cup brought in about $4 billion, CBS reported, while the women’s World Cup in 2011 earned about $73 million. The men’s players got 9 percent of their event’s total revenue, while the women’s team got 13 percent of theirs, according to CBS.

He Always Hated Women. Or WaPo on Misogyny and the Alt Right.

About ten years ago I spent quite a bit time surfing some of the nastiest male supremacy sites, and became very troubled by the trends I saw taking shape:

These sites were (and are) bubbles of reinforcement for misogynist beliefs as the correct beliefs.* 

The next step, advocating violence against women, seemed then quite predictable.  It, too, got and gets reinforcement on those sites.

But when I brought up the danger I saw developing, like a dark cloud moving swiftly in from a distance, I was (in many different venues) viewed as a bit deranged myself.  Mostly I was told that the men who hate women on those sites are a tiny and deranged minority and better ignored lest they get more prominence**.

That is the angle from which I read today's Washington Post article on Scott Paul Beierle, a man who shot at six women, killing two, on November 2, 2018 at a Tallahassee yoga studio.  The headline of the piece is "He Always Hated Women."

It's not only Beierle's own history as a hater of women the article covers.  It cites several other mass murders where the search for an explanation led pretty directly to the worst types of misogyny sites, and it highlights the way the misogyny and male supremacy sites are one of the channels into all the other beliefs of Alt Right***.

Sigh.  I hate being Cassandra. 

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*  Beliefs such as

a) that women are genetically inferior, meant to be treated as such or as property or as domestic animals, and to be excluded from all public life,

b) that women, all billions of them,  are inherently and biologically nothing but scheming whores and gold-digger,

and

c) that any man is entitled to have sex with any woman he desires who is not  already the property of another man, which makes it unacceptable that women have any boundaries or any right of refusal.

These beliefs are reinforced on those sites, because anyone trying to introduce a bit more balanced ideas will be banned immediately.

As an aside, there is at least one male in academia who thinks of women as pecan pies or something similar in this context.

** I was also concerned over the fact that these sites are similar to those anorexia sites which encouraged starving and offered applause when someone had managed to go from 110 pounds to 90 pounds. In other words, the actual pain of the men commenting on those sites did not get the professional help it requires.

*** From the WaPo article:

“Incels are full of rage, and it is trivial to turn these guys into kike haters,” explained one of Anglin’s sidekicks, Andrew Auernheimer, known online as Weev, in a Daily Stormer post. “Few people have ever personally had their life harmed by a Jew (in a direct, personally observable sense), but every single breathing man has had it f----- up by multiple selfish, scheming hookers (likely starting with their own mothers).”

The ugly rhetoric can lead to violence. The 19-year-old nursing student alleged to have opened fire in a San Diego-area synagogue in April cited, among a litany of anti-Semitic conspiracies, the role of Jews in promoting feminism.

Incel adherents in particular — who dream of destroying the women they long for, derisively nicknamed “Stacys,” and the attractive men, “Chads,” who have better luck — have emerged as killers.

 

Books As An Anti-Depressant in the Trump Era

My own fiction reading for pleasure is rapidly sliding back in history.  The further I am from the present era and its myriad problems, the more relaxed I become.

This trend began right around the Day of the Apocalypse in November of 2016 when my light reading turned into re-reading 1920s and 1930s novels and detective stories.

At some point I began reading all of the 19th century British novels (and reading some I hadn't read before):  Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair, Thomas Hardy,  George Eliot, Charles Dickens and many more.

My poetry reading has also crept backward in time so that I now mainly read Emily Dickinson, TS Eliot and Ezra Pound, as well as poets from much further in the past.

All those lists are only about those who wrote in English, of course.  But Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Gogol, Camus and many other writers who did not write in English are also back in my daily reading schedule.

As my emotional agony grew with every new example of how terrible Trump, the right-wingers and also some left-wing circular firing squads are now, and how very little any kind of logic or facts matter in politics, my reading moved  even further back in time:  I am now re-reading Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote.

Very soon I will have to read The Tale of Genji again!  Some consider it the first known novel.  It was written in the 11th century in Japan by Murasaki Shikibu, a noblewoman and lady-in-waiting.

Reading very old books takes me away from the unreal reality we live in today.  This is not something dystopian science-fiction novels would do, because they might now have to be reclassified as non-fiction.

But an added gift I receive from those old books is to be reminded that every place in every past time period thought that the values, biases, social hierarchies and sex roles which then prevailed were the obvious, natural and god-given ones*.

Some classics challenged the biases of the time when they written, true, but even then the challenges were partial.  Dickens, for example, drew attention to the plight of the poor and the dangers of capitalistic greed, but at the same time was quite adamant that women belonged in the home (first mis-typed that as "hole") and that families should be patriarchal.

The other way that realization was a gift to me is this:  We should take care that we don't repeat that same mistake today.  It seems to be a human tendency, a widespread human arrogance, to view one's own era as the one in which all answers are going to be  found, when every medical study is going to be the final word on how to cure some illness (only to be refuted in the next era), and so on.

We need more humility, skepticism and debates.  Oh, and a lot more use of that thing which some assume to exist only to keep our ears apart and to give head hair a flat surface to grow on.

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* The Tale of Genji is such a good example of that.  He is the hero of the book, even though his love life we would now call the life of a serial rapist.  But in that time and place noblemen were allowed to have almost any woman they lusted for.  That behavior does not count against Genji in the book.  Indeed, in one story he is praised for the gentle way he extorted sex from a young woman.

The Centenary of The Nineteenth Amendment

The Nineteenth Amendment passed the US Senate exactly one hundred years ago, the House having passed it a few days earlier:

The opening of the Amendment's text reads, "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."

The passing of the Nineteenth Amendment did not initially mean a new-and-immediate franchise for all American women*, but it was a necessary stage in the very long, and still uncompleted,  progress to more equality in the rights of men and women.  Some of that equality is now endangered.


-----------

* This WaPo article discusses the history of African-American women's participation in the suffrage-movement and the racism within the movement.

It also covers the fact that many Native American women wielded political power long before the white settlers arrived to this continent:

“It didn’t start with white women; that’s not the point of entry into women having political voice,” said Sally Roesch Wagner, who received one of the first doctorates in the country for women’s studies, while at the University of California at Santa Cruz. “Indigenous women have had a political voice in their nations long before white settlers arrived.”

All of which is important to add to the American form of how-women-won-the-suffrage.

However, that article — and almost all the coverage of the Nineteenth Amendment I have skimmed today — ignores the fact that women already had the vote in many other countries with different histories.

For instance, in Finland:

The area that in 1809 became Finland was a group of integral provinces of the Kingdom of Sweden for over 600 years. Thus, women in Finland were allowed to vote during the Swedish Age of Liberty (1718–1772), during which conditional suffrage was granted to tax-paying female members of guilds.[113] However, this right was controversial. In Vaasa, there was opposition against women participating in the town hall discussing political issues, as this was not seen as their right place, and women's suffrage appears to have been opposed in practice in some parts of the realm: when Anna Elisabeth Baer and two other women petitioned to vote in Turku in 1771, they were not allowed to do so by town officials.[114]
The predecessor state of modern Finland, the Grand Duchy of Finland, was part of the Russian Empire from 1809 to 1917 and enjoyed a high degree of autonomy. In 1863, taxpaying women were granted municipal suffrage in the country side, and in 1872, the same reform was given to the cities.[109] In 1906, it became the first country in the world to implement full universal suffrage, as women could also stand as candidates. It also elected the world's first female members of parliament the following year.[115][116]

My point is not to single out Finland for praise (well, not my only point...), but to remind you, my sweet and erudite readers (who would never be guilty of this), that the general thought frames used in analyzing US politics often simply ignore everything that happened or happens elsewhere as unimportant, because of the assumed special role and elevated place of the United States), or treat most other countries as if they had or have no agency at all (because of the immense power of American imperialism).

That just might be one of the few cases where it's true that "both sides do it," though for different reasons.

Echidne's Music Hour. Pekka Streng

I learned about Pekka Streng, a Finnish musician,  only yesterday.  He died in 1975 at the age of twenty-six, of cancer.  He knew that he was terminally ill when he began making songs and recording, and the lyrics show this.  He seems to have reached a higher spiritual plane of existence, able to feel joy in circumstances where others would only find despair.

This is his song about reincarnation:





 It's called Back In The Stream.

My translation of the lyrics:

Back in the stream,
to the dawn of my time.
My face turns into countless others.
My color changes, my race changes
When back in the stream I receive
ancient shapes*.

Back in the stream.
Back in the stream.

Back in the stream,
to the time of childhood.
I will be born and I will die
and again I shall be allowed to
live old age.

I am an Indian woman
or a tiny infant.
Centuries pass, all changes shape.

Back in the stream.
Back in the stream.

Back in the stream,
the dark bird of the night
rises on its wings,
flies into the past time,
into the colorful procession of days,
and there I see that the causes for my present time
are my choices.

Back in the stream.
Back in the stream.

To the dawn of humankind
Into the wordless pain of suffering eyes.
Now I know, now I know:
After this birth
when I return to the past
something wonderful
will follow.

Back in the stream.
Back in the stream.

I also like this piece by him:




It's called In the Garden

My translation:

Leafy trees and perennials,
vines, fruit, bleached bones.
Plants which during the day watch with gentle eyes
and which during the night sing a lament.
Plants which take years off our age when we watch them
and plants which deepen the grooves in our faces when they die.

Annabella dances in the garden
where she walks around,
watering the seedlings.
Robert the Hat** tells stories to the plants,
for flowers make excellent listeners.

Tree ferns and frogs
goblins, fairies and daisies.
From your heart flow many springs.




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*  This is a really tough bit to translate.  "Menneet hahmot saan."  A literal translation is that he will be given shapes from the past or past shapes.  I interpret this as meaning that when one dies one returns to the very beginning where all the possible shapes already exist.  But other readings are possible and perhaps better.

** I have no idea who or what this is.  So I translated the name from the Finnish Roope to the English Robert.

And Mueller Spoke

The other day.  He gave a short summary of the findings discussed in much more detail in the report his team wrote.*  There was nothing new in his spoken report, just a repetition of that weird exercise which sounds like something from an elementary logic class:

If Mueller's team had been able to prove that Trump was innocent of obstruction of justice, they would have said so.  But they didn't say so.  And therefore?

I haven't been able to decide if such an odd phrasing seemed necessary for some weird legal reasons or if Mueller tried to minimize the number of people who got it that Trump is clearly guilty as hell of obstruction of justice.   After all, whatever the rectitude of the guy, he is a Republican.


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* My take on the two parts of the report can be read here and here.

Thank you

A thousand thanks to all who donated funds for this blog and also a thousand thanks to all who read here.

Fifth and Final Fundraising Post, 2019. On Fifteen Years of Blogging.

This is my final fundraising post!  You can donate all through the year, of course, but this would be a great time to do so and then you wouldn't have to feel that gnawing guilt about the poor, feeble and frail Echidne typing away in eternal snow while clad in rags and surviving on potato peelings.

For extra incentive, add to these comments any topics you would dearly want me to address in the near future, and I promise to give them serious consideration.

Then to this post.  It's grumpy and gloomy, sorry.  (Must be how weak I am from hunger that makes my humorous vein dry out...)

You've Come A Long Way, Baby

When I Was Little. A Trivial Story For Friday.

When I was little, my grandmother owned a very ramshackle farm where she lived with one aunt and two uncles of mine.  The place was a haven for inquisitive children:  pastures, woods and hills for play, horses, cows and pigs to tend and pet,  and then those very interesting falling barns we were sternly told not to enter.

Which made them the most intriguing targets for me.  One barn was a tall building, built into the side of the hill so that it was three floors high on one side but only one floor high on the other side.  The top floor had been a large hen house at one time, but now stood empty.  I could see the little gates in the wall, high above the pigsty, for the chickens to come out and descend to the pigsty area.  Right below those gates, all closed with wooden shutters, were the chicken ladders:  Long pieces of wood with many short cross-pieces nailed to it so as to make a stairway for them.

And I so very much wanted to climb down those ladders!  That this was forbidden fruit made it so much juicier.

One day, after carefully scouting the area for any adults, I got into the old hen house.  It was a wonderful place, empty, silent, with dust floating in the air, visibly dancing where the gaps in the roof let the sunlight in.  I crossed the floor on tiptoes, in case the building collapsed, and managed to get to one of the tiny gates which I opened.

I was small then and fit into the gate opening with a little squeezing. It was the perfect perch, offering me quite distant views from a new angle, but even at that age I could see that the chicken ladder would not be safe for me to attempt.  So I just sat there for a while, enjoying the sun and the mild breeze and the beauty of summer.

My uncles' two horses were pastured in an area which could not be seen from the farmhouse or from the yard or from the road that led to the farm, but where I sat I could see the pasture and the horses.  They, however, did not see me.

As I sat there, watching them eat grass, one horse suddenly walked to the other horse, they put their heads together, as if having a conversation.  They then turned and moved, together, to the gate opening to the pasture, which was blocked by only one steel wire, stretched across the gap at their chest level.

They proceeded to bite through the steel wire, which allowed them to leave the pasture.  They sedately, side by side,  walked down the road away from the farm, turned right on the main road, and disappeared from my view.

This put me into a dilemma.  I knew that I had to tell some adult the horses had escaped, but doing that would reveal my rules violation.  I did the right thing, anyway, found one of my uncles and told him what I had seen.

He refused to believe me, because the pasture wasn't visible from most parts of the farm.

Only when a neighbor called him and told that the horses were in his cabbage patch, having a succulent dinner, did he rise to action.

***

I remember this incident so vividly, because even today the best explanation for what I saw is that the horses planned the escape and then carried their plan out, and that they did this because they thought they were not overlooked.  Other explanations are more likely, but I treasure that one. 

Elizabeth Warren Earned A Lot? The Horror!

Don't you just love the way Washington Post chose to write about Elizabeth Warren's past legal work?  I can't stop laughing.

Here's the headline to the story:

While teaching, Elizabeth Warren worked on more than 50 legal matters, charging as much as $675 an hour



You have to scroll to the seventh paragraph in the story to find this statement:

Warren’s $675-per-hour rate of compensation to consult on several asbestos-related cases, described in court documents, was at or below market rate for her level of experience and was less than what some law firm partners charged to work on the same matters.

Bolds are mine.

So it goes.  The authors of the piece justify their analysis of Warren's work by stating that "outside income has become a campaign issue for candidates such as Warren who have positioned themselves as crusaders for the working class."

I'm still laughing.  This whole shit is utterly hilarious (1).  For instance, because Trump campaigned for the crook class, the size of his income and the way it was acquired is nobody's business, right? 

But Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez should live on the streets and not in a luxury apartment because she has made housing affordability one of her issues.

And Elizabeth Warren should have earned a lot less than men with similar training and experience in her field.  Indeed, she probably shouldn't have earned anything at all, because the acceptable scale of payments is different for female politicians.

This story reminds me of the 2016 furor over Hillary Clinton's high speaking fees (2) and the fact that she gave speeches to Wall Street capitalists.

To put that into some kind of perspective, last October Joe Biden gave a speech in support of a Republican politician in Michigan and got 200,000 smackers for it.  That sum included 50,000 dollars as a travel allowance (3).   The linked article (from last January) notes that

If Mr. Biden were to have charged a similar range of fees for all his comparable speeches since leaving office, he would most likely have collected between $4 million and $5 million through speeches over the last two years.

Biden did get some flack for that October speech, but nothing on the Hillary Clinton level.  We shall see if his past is scrutinized in the Washington Post with the same microscopic attention as Warren's now has been.

If that's the case I'm willing to admit that this particular piece wasn't quite as sexist as it now seems to me.
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(1) It isn't, but I need my gallows humor.

(2)  Her fees were (or are) high compared to what other female speakers charge, but they are not the highest among all political speakers. In fact, it appears that the highest fee for a speech went for Donald Trump in 2005, possibly around $400,000, but Trump boasts that the fee was $1.5 million.

As an aside, scrutinizing Warren's hourly fees without considering the context is dangerous.  Fees are high for lawyers on her level of training and skill, and they are high in places such as Boston for all professional services.

But an additional context that matters here is linking this discussion to the one about why women don't get raises at work.  One reason is that they don't ask.  But once it becomes common knowledge that women work for less money, then each of those refusals to ask will have a small effect on the likely earnings of other women in the future.

So there's a wider feminist argument which says that women should make sure they are not being underpaid, compared to the men with equal qualifications and experience, even if they themselves for some weird reason won't mind earning less. 

(3)  I'm imagining him riding across the United States, like a medieval king with an entourage: 150 faithful courtiers in feathered velvet hats  riding on milk-white horses  followed by 200 wagons of wine, spices, fruit and smoked hams, all surrounded by a troop of stern soldiers on large black stallions waving their spears at all bystanders.  That's what I would have bought for 50,000 dollars.

 

 

 

Competition in Amazon Warehouses

Amazon is using the economic theory of tournaments in its warehouses!   That theory bases compensation on the relative productivity ranking of firm's workers. The "tournament" name tells us that competition between workers is actively encouraged, and how much someone ends up earning depends on how many other workers they can beat.  The winner, ideally, gets quite a bit more than all those losers.

I was taught that the tournaments model might be used for compensation when it's expensive to measure the actual output of individual workers but easy to rank them according to some related measure. Among the problematic aspects of this form of compensation is that someone can win by not only outperforming others but also by sabotaging the ability of others to perform well.*

But Amazon doesn't justify its new gaming environment in such a manner.  Rather, playing a game is supposed to make boring work more interesting:

But they aren’t whiling the time away playing Fortnite and Minecraft. Rather, they’re racing to fill customer orders, their progress reflected in a video game format that is part of an experiment by the e-commerce giant to help reduce the tedium of its physically demanding jobs. And if it helps improve the efficiency of work like plucking items from or stowing products on shelves for 10 hours a day or more, all the better.

....

Developed by Amazon, the games are displayed on small screens at employees’ workstations. As robots wheel giant shelves up to each workstation, lights or screens indicate which item the worker needs to pluck to put into a bin. The games simultaneously register the completion of the task, which is tracked by scanning devices, and can pit individuals, teams or entire floors against one another to be fastest, simply by picking or stowing real Lego sets, cellphone cases or dish soap. Game-playing employees are rewarded with points, virtual badges and other goodies throughout a shift.
Think Tetris, but with real boxes.

Participating in the games is voluntary, we are told, and the nonparticipants are supposedly not punished for choosing not to game.

So one way of looking at what Amazon is doing is that it's alleviating boredom and making routine work more exciting.  Another way of looking at the same thing is to note that it's trying to squeeze more productivity out of a given number of workers, and at least so far the rewards for that extra productivity (and thus its costs to the firm) are very minor:

Amazon’s experiment is part of a broader industry push to gamify low-skill work, particularly as historically low unemployment has driven up wages and attrition. Gamification generally refers to software programs that simulate video games by offering rewards, badges or bragging rights among colleagues.

And things can get even better for the firm if it quietly keeps modifying the targets in the game, as Gabe Zicherman, an expert on gamification in firms notes:

But, he said, gamification can be used to mask higher productivity goals, because the games’ algorithm is typically kept secret. In customer service jobs, for instance, gold stars awarded for resolving 20 customer concerns may over time require 22 or 25. “When [employers] want to generate more output, they can ratchet those levers,” he said. “It’s like boiling a frog. It may be imperceptible to the user.”

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* An example of this from a somewhat different context could be a graduate student who messes with the work of other students in the lab so as to guarantee that they won't graduate early enough to be able to apply for postdoctoral grants or jobs at the same time as the saboteur.