Housekeeping Issues

I am trying to put together links to the most useful blog posts from my archives (which span almost seventeen years), especially on the topics of neurosexism, pseudoscience, and sex-based oppression.  I was one of the very few people who wrote about them to amateurs, so perhaps the front page should offer easier access to them.  I was also almost the only one who wrote about the bad popularizing of research into gender and sex, and I think the archives should be easier to search for that topic, too.

What would be the best way, in your opinion, to create easy access to posts which still are useful and have not dated?  Something in one of the side columns?

And if you have read here for a longer time period, do you remember any particular posts which you found especially enlightening?  I could add unrelated posts if they get votes.  Like  adding not only Ms Universe, but also Ms Congeniality.

Anything else you would like to remain available online?  Thank you for any help.

My Virus. A Biography.

Only because someone might be interested in the life of a mild case of the coronavirus.

I caught it around the tenth of February, without knowing what it was I had at the time.  I had spent a long weekend at one of the early epicenters of the disease, and had not taken any special precautions, other than some extra hand-washing.

The symptoms appeared around a week later*.  The most obvious of them was one that I have never seen mentioned:  I felt that whatever I was suffering from was totally different from all the colds and flus I had had in my life.  It was something new, a different feeling of being, full of truly incredible fatigue and lassitude.

My other symptoms were very minor.  I had a fever which rose and fell repeatedly over a few days, extreme joint and muscle pain, and I lost both my sense of smell and my sense of taste.  I did cough, but not much, I had a mild headache and a sore throat, and one night I felt that hot, red-raw feeling slowly sink down towards my lungs but somehow I managed to stop it from getting there**!

The recovery was fairly fast except for the fatigue which hung around for several months.  But the after-effects have not been pleasant, if they are after-effects of the virus.  I got the first urinary tract infection of my life, simultaneously with a sinus infection (which is a more repeated problem with me), the sinus infection returned three times before it finally succumbed to very strong antibiotics.  I got two gum infections, and dental checks found no explanation for them.  I got severe pain in my toes and slightly less pain in my fingers.  I suffered from moving pains in my intestinal tract which seemed to have no correlation to what I ate or what I did. And so on.

I am glad to say that all that is now in the past.  About ten days ago I realized that I was running up the stairs for the first time in months, and that carrying the laundry basket down to the basement (where the washing machine is) didn't have to be carefully planned beforehand like a polar expedition!  I had muscle power back!  I felt human again!  But getting to that point took four months.

So wear your masks, practice social distancing, wash your hands and avoid large public indoor gatherings.

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* I assumed that I got the ordinary flu, despite being vaccinated against it, and that the weird overall feeling was linked to it being a version one gets with the vaccine.  For purely random reasons I probably didn't give the virus to anyone else.  At first I was too tired to go out, and then I thought I had the flu so had someone else get me groceries and that person didn't get the virus.  But none of that is to my own credit.

**  All I can say about that weird sentence is that it felt that way.  I did a lot of qigong breathing exercises that night, but the outcome probably was just good luck. 

On Donald Trump As A "Karen"

Here is a picture of Donald Trump someone created online.  My apologies for not finding the creator, to provide proper credit:

Why it is a funny picture requires a) knowing that the Supreme Court of the United States recently decided that president Trump cannot hide his tax information, b)  knowing that this would obviously create narcissistic rage in our Donald who would therefore scream about it, and c) knowing the online Karen meme.

The Karen meme may have been* created by Black women to describe the type of a White woman who would act in overly entitled and racist ways while dealing with people of color working in customer service, often demanding to see the manager.  The Karen of this original meme is a racist middle-aged, middle-class White woman, and the point of the original meme was to draw attention to racist behaviors by White women.

The meme, however, has also taken on a life of its own**, so that is now be used as a general slur about (mostly) White women who do stupid things (such as not wearing the mask against the covid virus) or about (mostly) White women who express controversial opinions.

Returning to the above picture, the joke that we are supposed to get from it is that Trump has now turned into a Karen!  The only way we might ever be able to realize that Donald Trump (an extremely powerful, rich, entitled and rude White man)  truly is overly entitled is by depicting him as a woman called Karen!

And that, my friends, is sexist***, whatever your opinions of the popularity of this meme.

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*  I have not done the necessary research on the very first appearance of this meme.  I have also seen someone argue that the first use of the term was by a man berating his ex-wife and that even earlier uses exist. 

**  The male-centered Reddit discussion site has several large Karen subreddits where people collect their stories about entitled women calling the manager, being racist, or doing something else the posters found irritating or stupid or anger-causing. 

These stories are not necessarily sexist in themselves.  Many of them describe (alleged) bad behavior by some (usually) White woman, and  doing that would be okay if similar subreddits also existed about White men who do stupid things (refuse to wear the covid masks, say), who act in racist ways, or who feel overly entitled and want to see the manager when things aren't to their liking. 

Those types of behavior are not less common among White men than among White women.  But White men who behave badly are mostly not given a name (Bubba?), and that name is therefore not employed in creating a meme about a large sub-group of people.  The only exception I can think of to this rule is "the Florida man" meme, but it is nowhere as widespread as the Karen meme is today.

What all this means is that the individual acts of really stupid or rude or entitled White men are seen as just that:  Individuals who are acting like assholes.  Here is one example of that.  (My apologies for losing the source for this one, too. I blame my illness.)  The original didn't give this man a generic name which would create a meme applicable to all White men of his age and general looks out of his behavior.

But that is what seems to be happening to the Karen meme.  I have seen a few attributions of a possible Karen status to someone just because of a particular haircut (short and fairly straight) and hair color (blond), even when that person is a stranger who has done nothing Karen-like and is not planning to do anything Karen-like.  So one can become a Karen simply because one looks like what someone thinks Karens do!

***  We tend to use most of the  -ism terms without thinking of their basic definitions.  It can be useful to do so, however.  In this particular case the correct way to think about this term is to ask if anything changes in our responses if the only thing we change in some incident is the sex or perceived sex of the culprit while leaving what the individual does intact.

 

 

 

Getting Back In The Saddle. Or Writing After Illness.

I have never ridden a horse though I have sat in a sled pulled by a horse, called Lotta.*

Okay.  That's the entirety my post title produced inside my feeble brain. 

The goal of this post is to get the writing machinery started again, which may mean that its contents are not going to be exciting for anyone else.  Or who knows?

Here it goes, a list of the brilliant thoughts  my recent illness has incubated:

On online political commentary in social media:

1.  I am stunned by the innumeracy of so many otherwise intelligent people.  It's not about most people not understanding the difference between the mean, the mode and the median as measures of central tendency or that the concept of exponential functions (important during this pandemic) is so often utterly misinterpreted.  Those gaps are normal for people who have not taken statistics in college.

It's the more basic type of innumeracy which frightens me.  Not seeing a difference between very small and very large numbers, not understanding that "minority" implies a head count of less than fifty percent of the total,  not seeing that one example of something does not, in itself, tell us anything about how common the phenomenon in the example might be. 

Percentages are often interpreted incorrectly when the size of the base used in the calculations is ignored.  If the prevalence of some illness in a country rises from ten cases to twenty cases, the percentage rise is 100% and looks enormous, but the absolute number of new cases is quite small.  If the prevalence of another illness in the same country is initially one hundred cases and rises to 110 cases the percentage increase is ten percent while the increase in absolute numbers of new cases is the same. 

This matters when we compare, for instance, two states with very different initial Covid-19 cases and the later increases in those cases.  It also matters when interpreting percentage increases in some phenomenon which starts from a very small base.  Any increase will be a big percentage increase when the base is tiny and doesn't necessarily support writing about "the group where the rates are rising most alarmingly."

2.  Because of the nature of online commentary, its major focus tends to be in words and persuading others by using words.  Words and gestures do matter, don't get me wrong.  But what might matter even more is how material resources are distributed or re-distributed.  Or at least the two, communication and resource provision, must dance together.

Take the Black Lives Matters movement.  For the US to really improve racial justice it is ultimately necessary to address racial and/or class inequalities in wealth and income.  There are various ways of approaching the needed re-allocations**, but ultimately money must change hands.  And social justice movements must also focus on the necessary work to achieve that outcome.

3.  While sick I spent some whole days reading political comments on Twitter and in many other places.  Doing that made me think how very important it is to go back to one's basic principles about fairness and justice, or at least to visit those principles once in a while.  Specific examples of injustice are important and useful, but that is because they put flesh on the bones of the underlying principle***.  It is that principle we must remember.

Whenever I get confused about some specific example of unfairness, and in particular about an example where the rights of two groups or individuals clash or appear to clash, I get clarity by going back to the basic principles I hold about justice and fairness.  When I don't do that I sometimes drift into focusing on other aspects of a particular example than what it truly is about.

On reading while bed-ridden:

Do you ever re-read books which changed your life?  And how do they seem to you on that re-reading?  I have read a lot in the past month, for obvious reasons (didn't have the energy for ditch-digging, say), and when I found nothing new that looked interesting enough I began to read my old favorites again.

Some of them retain their initial flavors to me, some now read outdated, and in a few cases reading a book again made me detest it. 

But what I certainly learned from that project is that the "me" who once existed does not exist today, and the "me" that exists today does not need the same literary diet the old "me" benefited from.  The Buddhists who say that there is no such thing as a constant and permanent "me" are most likely correct.

Then there's the odd realization that my memories of many books were distorted.  I would remember, vividly, one scene from a novel, thinking it provided the major focus of the book, and then I would read the book again and find that this vivid scenes took all of two paragraphs in the story.

Okay.  That was pure fluff.****

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*  The horse belonged to my grandmother and my father borrowed it one Christmas eve when a late snow-storm and lack of plowing made the roads otherwise impossible to navigate.  We had presents to take to my cousins so my father harnessed the horse to a sleigh and I went with him, wrapped inside a thick blanket like a hot dog inside a bun.  It was great fun, until the sleigh overturned on a steep hill and I flew out of it like a rocket, landing in deep snow upside down.  My father dug me out and the horse was not hurt, but this memory is one of my earliest ones, both because nobody used a sled-and-horse anymore and because of that rocket flight.

** From reparations for slavery to changing systems so that they don't produce systemically racists outcomes, even as an unintended by-product.   Making sure that schools and health care and grocery stores and so on are equally good and equally available in all areas would be a small beginning of what is needed.

*** This particular thought also links to the previous one in that any single anecdote just tells us about that particular example and not necessarily about the total number of such examples occurring during a year, say.

****  Then from the wider angle everything is fluff.  We are born, we struggle and we die, while the gears of the universe go grinding.  Can you tell my illness has made me severely depressed, too?

A Short Announcement

My apologies for the silence on the blog.  I  have not been well.  Things will resume when they can.  In the meantime, Black Lives Matter.  Stay well and healthy during the pandemic.

More Covid-19 Era Thoughts: On Gender Roles, The Role Of The Media And Trump's Masks

1.  I am not a fan of rigid gender/sex roles, because they are one of the main channels which have historically been used to keep women second-class citizens.  I would love such roles to be reduced to the absolute minimum.  Indeed, I see no alternative to that if we are actually ever to create a world where male and female people have roughly equal opportunities.

One recent example highlights the effects of the traditional division of labor at home, when combined with the covid-19 pandemic:

In April Dr Elizabeth Hannon, deputy editor of the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, noticed that the number of article submissions she was receiving from women had dropped dramatically. Not so from men.

“Negligible number of submissions to the journal from women in the last month,” she posted on Twitter. “Never seen anything like it.” The response was an outpouring of recognition from frustrated female academics, saying they were barely coping with childcare and work during the coronavirus lockdown.

This particular anecdote is about academic work from home but the same concerns would apply to all who now must work from home and who also have minor children to care for and educate under the lockdown conditions.

More generally, the pandemic-related job losses are hitting women particularly hard because women are more likely to be concentrated in the kinds of jobs which deal with people*, and those jobs are the ones most affected by the lockdowns.  At least some of that sex segregation in employment is linked to societal gender roles and beliefs about the most suitable occupations for men and women.**

2.  It's astonishing how much attention the various protest movements wanting instant reopening of the economy have gotten in the media.  Or at least I find it astonishing, given that clear majorities of people are opposed to the very idea.  Even the most recent Fox News survey found 55% of its respondents agreeing with the statement that the US should wait before reopening the economy, even if this means that the economic crisis will last longer.

I mostly blame the media's need to create angry debates in order to keep getting the most clicks on the stories that are published.  Advertising revenue goes up with clicks and, sadly, most of us are vulnerable to click-baiting.  Given that the ad-based business model is the only one that seems to work at all to fund journalism the situation is not easily remedied.

But still.  I find the outrage-based news media extremely irritating and depressing.  Social media, in general, is even worse.  Twitter, for instance, seems to monetize rage.

3.  Our Supreme Leader refuses to wear a Coronavirus mask in public.  I don't care why he refuses so adamantly.  It could be because of his narcissistic vanity or because of some belief that when a tough 100% manly warlord president glares at the virus the virus will disintegrate without any sissy masks needed.  Or because he wants to stick it to the media.

But in judging Trump's choice not to wear a mask, we should remember this: 

The Coronavirus masks we wear in public, when in contact with others, are there to protect those others, and their masks are there to protect us.  Should Trump catch the virus and not yet know that he has it, he would be somewhat less likely to pass it on if he wore a mask***.   So he is choosing not to care about that.

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*  These are also often low-pay jobs.  Even women with children who don't work in traditionally female jobs depend on the traditionally female job category of child care workers to be able to continue their own work outside the home.  (Or so it looks if we wear the traditional gender role blinders and see child care as the responsibility of mothers first and of all female people second).

**  For more on this wider question, see this 2018 article.

*** And considerably less likely if the others coming into contact with him were also masked.

 

Trump And Hydroxychloroquine: Another Game

Remember my earlier post about the games Trump, as a great narcissist, plays?  One of narcissistic tricks is to start a new game when it looks like another, still ongoing game is not letting the narcissist win.

That is the best way of understanding why Trump suddenly tells us that he is taking hydroxychloroquine.  Journalists can't ignore this new game, for obvious reasons, and so the media attention moves away from the game Trump no longer wants to be played.

That earlier game is about Trump firing four inspector generals in the last two months.  The most recent firing, that of the State Department's inspector general, Steve Linick, is the most controversial of these.  Trump really doesn't want the media to focus on whether the fired inspector general was investigating Pompeo and whether Pompeo then asked him to be fired:

The State Department Inspector General who was fired by President Donald Trump late Friday was investigating his administration's use of emergency powers to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia despite congressional opposition, according to a senior Democratic lawmaker.

Inspector General Steve Linick is the latest federal watchdog removed by Trump and the latest impeachment player who may have faced some form of presidential retaliation. Pompeo recommended his dismissal and supported the president's decision, a senior State Department official told ABC News Friday.

The watchdog office was also looking into whether Pompeo used staff to run personal errands, according to a congressional aide.

That game doesn't look great for Trump.  So he starts one of his "scandal" games.  Those won't bother his base much at all but will keep the media, and the public,  occupied.

 

 

Kerala And Covid-19. Lessons for the US.

This Guardian story about the "coronavirus slayer" of Kerala makes for interesting reading.  Kerala's fight against covid-19 has so far been near-perfect, and the credit for that goes to its health minister, KK Shailaja:

On 20 January, KK Shailaja phoned one of her medically trained deputies. She had read online about a dangerous new virus spreading in China. “Will it come to us?” she asked. “Definitely, Madam,” he replied. And so the health minister of the Indian state of Kerala began her preparations.

Four months later, Kerala has reported only 524 cases of Covid-19, four deaths and – according to Shailaja – no community transmission. The state has a population of about 35 million and a GDP per capita of only £2,200. By contrast, the UK (double the population, GDP per capita of £33,100) has reported more than 40,000 deaths, while the US (10 times the population, GDP per capita of £51,000) has reported more than 82,000 deaths; both countries have rampant community transmission.

I recommend reading the linked article to find out why Shailaja stresses the importance of proper planning and how she went about achieving it in quite a poor Indian state.  Kerala's decentralized public health care system (every village has a health center) and its relatively strong education system (which guarantees high literacy rates) were also crucial in Kerala's success against the virus, because they allowed information and mitigation efforts to reach almost everyone in a short amount of time.

Though Kerala has won this battle in the war against covid-19 the war, of course, is ongoing, and nobody knows how the future battles will go once India lifts the current lockdown.  But there are lessons we all can learn from Shailaja Teacher's proper planning.

One is that the war against the covid-19 indeed might best be viewed as a war when deciding on how to best defend against it:   That defense must start with plans from the very top government levels, it must be properly coordinated all the way down to local government units, and citizens everywhere must be made active participants on the side of the defenders.

From that angle the Trump administration has really bungled this.  But then, of course, Trump doesn't see himself as the Commander-in-Chief of this war.

Political Tribalism And The Pandemic

Joe Lockhart asks why so few editorial boards of newspapers are calling for Trump to resign.  He contrasts that silence to what happened in the Watergate era:  Nixon's resignation was demanded by most major newspapers.

Why the current silence?  The central reason seems to be this:

I put this question to more than a dozen experts, media columnists, editorial writers, academics and White House reporters. What emerged was not one simple explanation, as journalism professor Jay Rosen of New York University explained it, but a number of factors that have discouraged editorial pages around the country from taking this bold step.

Central to these, according to John Avlon, a senior political analyst at CNN and the former editor in chief of the Daily Beast, is that "the reality of the hardened partisanship is beyond reason. We've become really unmoored from our best civic traditions." And one of our best civic traditions used to be holding political leaders to account -- demanding, in extreme situations, that they resign.

Put in simpler terms, Trump won't resign, whatever the demands for it might be, and Republicans won't demand his resignation, because politics has grown increasingly tribal.

It's not just "my country, right or wrong," but "my party, right or wrong."*   And as the mainstream media itself is viewed by the right (and also by some parts of the left) as a member of the "other" tribe and not neutral, it's pretty easy to see why few editorial boards would bother to demand a resignation which will not happen.  Indeed, the recent no-consequences impeachment is still fresh in our minds.

When did American politics become this polarized and tribal?

Many would argue that polarization has always existed, of course.  Still, there is something different in the most recent version of it, and that is because legal and technological changes have enabled extensive polarization in what was once called the media or the press and in what now is simply all the different sources of information, rumor and hearsay that consumers use.  Those same changes have made fighting against this trend much harder.

The end of the FCC Fairness Doctrine is perhaps the starting-point of the current polarization epidemic.  Once the Fairness Doctrine was buried, Fox News could be launched**, with its policy of presenting one-sided and selective information as if it were completely neutral.  The era of the Internet now offers almost limitless opportunities for the replication of that Fox News foundational principle.  

The proliferation of politically biased news sites, on both sides of the political aisle though more on the right,  makes staying in the same tribal information bubble easier, and even the comment-ability that the Internet has provided for all of us serves to strengthen feelings of tribal belonging and also to self-police the borders of the tribe***.

This particular topic seemed to me barely worth writing about in these pandemic times, until I thought about the fact that we have Donald Trump leading the effort against the pandemic at least partly because of the new political tribalism and despite the fact that most everyone knows he only cares about his own re-election chances.


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* Or whatever ideological group you might wish to see as the relevant tribe if "party" doesn't work in that context.

** An erudite commenter (Alby) noted that Fox News itself wouldn't have been subject to the Fairness Doctrine which covered only public airwaves, though the end of that doctrine did make right-wing radio shows possible (Rush Limbaugh and the like).  But Fox certainly was a sign of the changing times.

*** That is because to truly feel that one belongs to a tribe there must be interactions with the other members, and those interactions must reward opinions which strengthen the tribe and discourage opinions which weaken the tribe.

Now we can have those interactions with total strangers, not just with those whom we meet outside the cyberspace, and that has both good and bad outcomes.

Though being able to talk with strangers online creates many good outcomes, including community building, excess tribalism is one of its bad outcomes.  As an aside, it's much easier to recognize "excess" tribalism than it is to define it, but I think it is operating whenever tribal membership is more important than what a particular person is actually stating in how that person's message is received.

The Pandemic And The Deconstruction Of The Administrative State. Or Did Stephen Bannon Get His Way?

Eons ago, in 2017, president Trump still had his own Rasputin standing behind the throne and whispering in his ear:  Stephen Bannon.

Bannon was Trump's chief strategist and the architect of the president's ideological strategies.  Bannon may have disappeared from the Trump administration and also largely from the public view, but one of his most important goals has not: The deconstruction of the administrative state.

What did Bannon mean by that term?   The answer:

The process, he explained, began with Trump's first presidential hires.

"If you look at these Cabinet appointees, they were selected for a reason and that is the deconstruction, the way the progressive left runs, is if they can't get it passed, they're just gonna put in some sort of regulation in -- in an agency," Bannon said. "That's all gonna be deconstructed and I think that that's why this regulatory thing is so important."

So did Bannon get his way in this respect?

I think we are learning the answer while watching, in real time:  The way this administration stumbles around in its responses to the current pandemic, how it seems to be passing the proper tasks of the federal government* to individual states without apparently coordinating that change with such federal institutions as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

Or compare the US pandemic policies to those practiced in countries which seem to have the pandemic under better control:

While statistics show that this wave of the pandemic in the US is nowhere near peaking, our Supreme Leader wants it to be over so he has decided that it is more or less over.

He wishes to refocus on opening the economy**, whatever the resulting cost in lives lost, because he sees a booming economy as necessary for his re-election.  And that is why he earlier today told us that he will wind down the coronavirus task force, though he has now had to walk back that statement a little bit.

I think Bannon should be pleased with the current state of the federal administrative state, even if some of the destruction has come from the uncertainty and dizziness caused by all of us having to live inside Trump's personal and weird worldview.

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*  Even the most conservative of economists would agree that the fight against a globally spreading infectious disease  is the duty of the federal government.

**  It is not wrong to focus on both the pandemic and the economy, of course.
We need to be able to produce food and to get it to consumers, for example,  and even more generally the economy cannot stay in a lock-down forever.

But Trump's plan is not the kind of careful and considered "re-opening in stages" which some other countries are pursuing once it is clear that the peak of the first Covid-19 wave has passed in that country.  It's just a general re-opening, as if the pandemic has left the USA, when it is actually just checked into the second hotel in its tour around the place.

How We Talk about The Pandemic: A Slightly Different Slant

1.  Those who vociferously protest against the stay-at-home-orders are a small minority.  They are not representative of any large group of Americans.  The media should clearly state this when they cover the protests, and we should all take care that we are not viewing that group as representative of, say, all Republicans in the US.

I get that covering the protests is great click-bait, but to pretend that we are seeing a giant wave of citizens protesting the orders distorts facts.  The media has the responsibility not to distort facts.  Neither should the media allow itself to be used as a PR machine for the groups raging and ranting at various state houses.

2.  In fact, most Americans (and most citizens of almost all countries) have been almost exemplary in their willingness to obey the various mitigation efforts governments have introduced against the Covid-19.  To see this has been heart-warming and has made me slightly more optimistic about the future of humankind.

It is easy not to see the good news when so many news are frightening.  But good news also exist.*  The willingness of ordinary people to work together in the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic is good news.

3.  I once read, in a book about birds, that crows take care of their elderly and sick.  I have no idea if the story was true, but reading it made me think that taking care of those community members who are of no obvious immediate use value might be one marker of what we call civilization.

Contrast those crows to the opinions of one Northern California city official:

A Northern California city official has been ousted after he suggested on social media that sick, old and homeless people should be left to meet their “natural course in nature” during the coronavirus pandemic.
City council members in Antioch, a city of about 110,000 people 35 miles east of Oakland, voted unanimously Friday night to remove Ken Turnage II from his post as chairman of the city’s planning commission.
NBC Bay Area reports there was a swift uproar after Turnage characterized people with weak immune systems as a drain on society.
He wrote on Facebook: “the World has been introduced to a new phrase Herd Immunity which is a good one. In my opinion we need to adapt a Herd Mentality. A herd gathers it ranks, it allows the sick, the old, the injured to meet its natural course in nature.”
As for homeless people, he added that the virus would “fix what is a significant burden on our society and resources that can be used.”

Mr. Turnage was not writing about a triage situation in some hospital where ventilators might be so scarce that health care providers must decide who can get them**.  Rather, his comments appear to be about everyday life***.  But our resources are not so scarce that we would have to make terrible choices about who can get them.

As an aside, I love him calling that view "a Herd Mentality!"



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* For pretty obvious (mostly psychological) reasons, what we call "news" tends to mostly consist of "bad news." We want to know about possible future risks and how to avoid them.  But good news are also news, and trying to see them serves to keep us more mentally balanced.

**  The usual examples where Mr. Turnage's views would be mentioned are all about truly catastrophic situations:  People in a life boat with enough water or food for only a few of them, an isolated tribe facing mass starvation if it tries to feed all members of the tribe, only one available ventilator remaining in a hospital and three patients needing it, and so on.  But Mr. Turnage extended that way of thinking to everyday society, perhaps so that the economy could be quickly re-opened.
  

***  Even if we all adopted Mr. Turnage's callous world view, it is unlikely that even he would like the world thus created.  That's because almost everyone, including, Mr. Turnage, would one day fall into the category of individuals with no remaining immediate use value while still having some life years left. 

This, in turn, would change the incentives of all individuals about how they would behave toward others in the same community.  Altruism, for instance, would be much rarer because at least some altruism is based on the expectation that if one helps others then one day those others will return the help.  Nobody would be willing to serve in the armed forces if returning wounded or disabled veterans would just be thrown away.  And so on.

Mr. Turnage also ignores the fact that the coronavirus is disproportionately affecting black and Hispanic communities.  Although many of the reasons for the higher infection and death rates among black and Hispanic communities are directly or indirectly linked to poverty (which correlates with race and ethnicity) and (especially) for the black communities also to the impact of historic institutional racism, some are due to the fact that many of the now-essential workers come from exactly these racial and/or ethnic groups:

On the first, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in NYC is a useful and disturbing example. As the New York Times reported last week, bus and subway workers have been hit hard by the coronavirus: 41 dead and more than 6,000 either diagnosed with Covid-19 or self-quarantining because they have symptoms that suggest an infection, as of April 8.

Who works for the MTA? Black people and Latinos. They account for more than 60 percent of the agency’s workforce in New York City, according to estimates from 2016.

Black people in particular are overrepresented in the MTA; they are 46 percent of the city’s transportation workers versus 24 percent of its overall population. (White people, on the other hand, make up 30 percent of local MTA employees but 43 percent of NYC residents.)

This is, again, true across cities and sectors. As Devan Hawkins wrote in the Guardian, black Americans are more likely than white Americans to be employed in the essential services that have been exempted from state stay-at-home orders, and they are more likely to work in health care and in hospitals. In America as in other countries, health care workers make up a disproportionate share of Covid-19 cases.

 Being an essential worker is exactly the reverse of how Mr. Turnage depicts the victims of the coronavirus pandemic.  These are the people we really need right now, and they are dying at higher rates.

While Staying At Home: Echidne Stuff Which Might Distract You For A Moment

1.  Things you notice while self-isolating:  The Decline Of The Humble Garlic.

What happened to garlic?  Once upon a time a head of garlic had several plump cloves, easily detached from the head, and very easily peeled. The skin came off with just a little bit of rubbing.

Now, unless I shop very carefully*, I get heads of garlic where someone has glued the skin on with superglue.  Attempts to peel the cloves leave sticky garlic skin over all surfaces, including me and the nearby floor.  And what looks like one medium-sized plump clove turns out to be a group of five or six thin sliver cloves, each wearing its own garlic winter coat skin.  Peeling those micro-cloves requires a magnifying class and takes hours.

This makes me grumpy.

2.  I got even grumpier when scrubbing the floor.  A particular stubborn dried marmalade stain low on a nearby wall made me start scrubbing the woodwork around the door.  It is old and battered, that woodwork, and so my scrubbing allowed a splinter to slide under the nail of my right middle finger.  The "giving the finger" finger.

The pain was pretty exuberant, so I swore as exuberantly while looking for the smallest tweezers in the house.  When I found them I took a deep breath and then yanked the splinter out.  Luckily it came out in one piece.  Less luckily, everything went dark for a second.

After disinfecting (a lot of disinfecting), I felt relief.  Then the lessons I learned:

-  Wear those housework gloves when scrubbing floors, even when they are uncomfortable.
-  There is a good reason why torturers use this particular trick.

3.  Mask-making.  I have now made many face masks.  The first ones I made out of vacuum cleaner bags, using a pattern which follows the shape of the face.  For ties I used various ribbons, piping and elastic thread I had hoarded in the past.

Those work pretty well, but they are rough against the skin, so the next generation of masks has two layers of cotton material (pillowcases) sandwiching several very thin layers of slightly different filmy material from the insides of vacuum cleaner bags.  They are quite comfortable, but I have no idea how effective they are.

I have also made a few cloth masks without any fillers.

While doing all that I mused on the fact that an extremely rich country now has several areas where people are required to wear masks outside (a good requirement), but where getting those masks is left completely to the individuals.  Indeed, one article recommended home-sewing as the answer to this supply-side problem. 

Most people probably don't know how to sew and even fewer have sewing machines.  There are methods allowing the making of no-sew masks, of course, and a bandana works in a pinch.

But still.  There's something very Trumpian about the way a very public health problem is now partly addressed by home-spun and private solutions.  This is because Trump does not seem to see much of a role for the federal government in combating covid-19.  Earlier he implied** that states would be on their own in acquiring masks, gowns, and so on for health care workers.  This has resulted in something like a Wild West market where individual states are bidding against each other.

I believe the reason is that Trump doesn't understand which tasks even conservatives see as the role of the federal government. 

-----

*  Whole Paycheck has some expensive ones which are like the old-time garlic, so not all garlic has suddenly mutated. 

** From here:

Trump initially indicated states should try to buy supplies themselves, but they found themselves competing with each other and the federal government as they scoured the globe for supplies. The president then said he would distribute some supplies, but a failure to start the process earlier and put a single agency in charge exacerbated manufacturing and distribution problems, according to local, state and federal officials.

The President And The Pandemic

The New York Times analyzed Trump's comments about the current pandemic from March 9 to mid-April.  The results will not surprise you at all if you have read my earlier post about Trump's narcissism:

The New York Times analyzed every word Mr. Trump spoke at his White House briefings and other presidential remarks on the virus — more than 260,000 words — from March 9, when the outbreak began leading to widespread disruptions in daily life, through mid-April. The transcripts show striking patterns and repetitions in the messages he has conveyed, revealing a display of presidential hubris and self-pity unlike anything historians say they have seen before.
By far the most recurring utterances from Mr. Trump in the briefings are self-congratulations, roughly 600 of them, which are often predicated on exaggerations and falsehoods. He does credit others (more than 360 times) for their work, but he also blames others (more than 110 times) for inadequacies in the state and federal response.
Mr. Trump’s attempts to display empathy or appeal to national unity (about 160 instances) amount to only a quarter of the number of times he complimented himself or a top member of his team.

Bolds are mine.

That his attempts to display empathy are fairly rare is because he cannot feel empathy but must simulate it.  Neither can he really understand why others find empathy important in a leader.  This is because he literally does not have the capacity to feel empathy (and not because he would be particularly sadistic, say).

These are the consequences of so many people voting for someone with this particular personality type to run the country.  

Other consequences also follow:

Narcissism also makes learning new things seem pointless.  After all, a narcissist must already pretend to be perfect, which makes extra learning unnecessary!  Thus, we now have a president who can't be bothered to learn anything, but who enjoys publicly speculating* about possible treatments that could work against the virus.  Ingesting bleach might work, he speculates.

Trump does not like the new game he accidentally began, about his theories about disinfectants and the effect of light on the coronavirus, because that is a tough game for him to win against medical experts.  His current countermove is to state that he was being sarcastic and that he was talking to the press, his favorite enemy, not to the medical expert present at the time.  Sadly, all video evidence suggests that neither of those countermoves are true.

It will be interesting to see which new outrage-game he will start to move the media's attention away from the game he dislikes.

Actually, it's not interesting at all, and neither is dissecting Trump's various rage tweets or the moves in his narcissistic games.  All this could have been avoided in 2016.

In the meantime, the US covid-19 deaths are likely to exceed 60,000, even with a calculation method likely to lead to severe under-counting of actual deaths either directly or indirectly caused by the virus.

-----
* Because he craves the attention.  Negative attention is better than no attention, though adulation is what he is looking for.




  

How Old Are Mass Killers?

The latest terrible mass slaughter in Nova Scotia, Canada made me think about the demographic characteristics of mass killers.  Most violent crime, in general, is committed by young or youngish men*, and this seems to have been true for mass killings in the past, too.

But the Nova Scotia butcher was fifty-one.  The Las Vegas killer, in 2017, was sixty-four. 

Mass shootings are statistically fairly rare events.  That makes it hard to see if the two examples I give here are just outliers or if something might actually be changing in the age distribution of mass killers.

Still, this looks to me like a question worth exploring with proper research.**  If there is a change in the age distribution of mass killers, what might be driving it? 

Different weaponry?  Social change now appearing to threaten some in the older age groups?  Different ideologies becoming dominant (Fox News type), some perhaps disseminated by hate online sites and now reaching older age groups than in the past?  Different medicines and supplements older men might be routinely taking now but not in the past?



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* Based on published statistics.

** Or it could all be my imagination.  That is always a possibility.

Why Trump Temporarily Stopped Immigration

He may have done that to toss some raw meat to his base, but his main reason has to do with narcissism (see this post for more information):

Narcissists play games.  All debates are games, and a narcissist must win all such games.  When it becomes clear that a narcissist might not actually win a particular debate, he or she will first try to turn the tables in that debate*, but if this cannot be done, the next solution is to start new games, games which the narcissists know they will win.  And those new games must be made so attractive to others that they forget to play the game the narcissist was losing.

Trump cannot win the conversation about how competent he has been in leading the country during this pandemic, and so he doesn't want that game played anymore.

To lure the media, and the rest of us, away from the game he wishes to be buried, he offers us alternative games, truly outrageous ones, and because he is very good at being a narcissist, the games he creates are like shiny baubles for magpies:  Journalists will flock to report on them, and this makes it less likely that Trump will have to lose the debate about his incompetence.

Those recent alternative games he has set up include his claim that masks in hospitals are rare because health care workers are stealing them, his de-funding of the World Health Organization,  and now his decision to temporarily stop all immigration to the US**.

Whatever other reasons he may have had for starting those particular games, their major function is to shift the play away from the one game he does not wish anyone to play.  And that is the question how well or poorly he is leading the country during a pandemic.

----

*  My description of the narcissistic games here is kept simpler than how such games actually work.  When I write "turning the tables" I mean the trick of taking whatever someone is being accused of and simply reversing that argument or finding comparable arguments that can be used against the original accuser.  In a sense those, too, are alternative games.

And of course many people who are not narcissists play some of those games, too.  The difference is that the narcissist always plays these games, always, and never admits to any kind of defeat.

** This particular alternative game is so very clearly intended for only that purpose.  Immigration is not exactly booming during this pandemic, and Trump cannot currently defend his immigration move as an attempt to protect Americans against the virus coming from abroad, given that the virus is already here and raging.

And More Plague Thoughts. Or On The Politics of The Current Pandemic.

A. I see the law of the hammer ("I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.") in action in the way the current pandemic is treated in various political contexts (1).

Those who have always been activists of a specific type still try to do that activism (a hammerer looking for nails to hammer) even when the current problems don't fit into that framework.  Creepy-crawlies floating in the air can't easily be hammered down, but if all you have is a hammer, well, you are going to try.

This is easy to relate to.  We have all been yanked out from what we used to regard as "the way things are," into a new and somewhat frightening reality.  Reflex actions and old learned reactions will happen under those circumstances, even if they don't make that much sense.  We all have our favorite tools for understanding the world and for trying to influence it.  We also all have our favorite causes, and it can be tough to see that others currently pay no attention to them or what we say about them.  We then hammer even more.

Do not confuse what Our Supreme Leader is doing with just the law of the hammer.  Or at least do not think that he might, with time, learn to appreciate the seriousness of the situation.  He will not, because it's not just that all he has is a hammer:  He Is The Hammer.

That seemed like a good sentence at first but of course it's pure crap, and an example of my own hammering tendencies (2).

Trump is not a hammer but an extreme narcissist.  Because of that, he runs the pandemic in ways which protects his ego from all real and imaginary attacks (see this post for more).  He doesn't care about any other aspect of the pandemic. 

As part of that protection strategy, he starts several simultaneous games with the media and with various international organizations, all intended to take any blame away from him, and many intended to be so outrageous that the journalists will flock to play some alternative game to the one currently threatening Trump's ego (that he is incompetent).  His most recent alternative game is to cut payments to the World Health Organization (WHO).

The proper response to Trump's games has always been not to play them but to stick to the important questions about how he is dealing with the pandemic in this country.  And yes, that proper response is a hard one to stick to, given that this particular narcissist just might be the most powerful man in this world.

B.  Speaking of powerful men, an NYT briefing from ten days ago asked how the new global crop of populist right-wing dictators is coping with the pandemic (3).

That is a good question.  In theory, at least a benevolent dictator (should there ever be such a creature) should have all the powers needed to enforce quarantine orders, to allocate health care supplies properly to those areas needing them most and to create a testing plan which quickly gets the epidemic under control.

In practice a "benevolent dictator" might be an oxymoronic term (4). The new populist strongmen sound to me a lot like our own wannabe dictator, where many motives can best be traced back to narcissism.  One recent example comes from Brazil where the strongman dictator Jair Bolsonaro fired his health minister because the latter was far more popular than Bolsonaro himself.

C.  Returning to that law of the hammer, it is pretty easy to see that the Trump administration, and the Republicans in the Senate,  are still focusing on their real main task which is to build more and more pipelines to move the maximum amount of wealth into the back-pockets of the Rich Boyz.  Remember all those tax cuts?

Something similar is happening with the coronavirus relief package:

More than 80 percent of the benefits of a tax change tucked into the coronavirus relief package Congress passed last month will go to those who earn more than $1 million annually, according to a report by a nonpartisan congressional body expected to be released Tuesday.
The provision, inserted into the legislation by Senate Republicans, temporarily suspends a limitation on how much owners of businesses formed as “pass-through” entities can deduct against their nonbusiness income, such as capital gains, to reduce their tax liability. The limitation was created as part of the 2017 Republican tax law to offset other tax cuts to firms in that legislation.
Suspending the limitation will cost taxpayers about $90 billion in 2020 alone, part of a set of tax changes that will add close to $170 billion to the national deficit over the next 10 years, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), the nonpartisan congressional body.

I don't get the Republican insistence on all this.  Any country with extremely skewed income and wealth distributions will be an unpleasant and dangerous place to live in, even for those who have money.  Why can't the Republicans be content with the current (already far too skewed) distributions?

I guess the answer is in short-term victories and short-term greed.
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(1)  Both in official places and online. Twitter, Facebook, political blogs and so on are all demonstrating how difficult it is to suddenly shift one's focus.

(2)  Using my "elegant" sarcasm and my forked tongue and my "supreme" rationality (flaps eyelashes, looks down along the nose) to attack all sorts of crap in politics, including political tribalism, falsified data, lying and so on.  That hammer has long been useless as most other people are now equipped with nail guns which run on emotions, persuasion, shaming, greed and so on.  All those are more powerful in politics than the sort of stuff I used to do here.

(3)  For some reason the link didn't work for me today.  This is what it said:

In responding to the coronavirus pandemic, the world’s autocrats are turning to their tried-and-tested tool kits, employing a mixture of propaganda, repression and ostentatious shows of strength to exude an aura of total control over an inherently chaotic situation.
For Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, that meant deploying chemical warfare troops, clad in protective suits and armed with disinfectant, to the streets of Cairo, in a theatrical display of military muscle projected via social media.

Russia’s leader, Vladimir V. Putin, donned the plastic suit himself, in canary yellow, for a visit to a Moscow hospital for coronavirus patients. Then he dispatched to Italy 15 military planes filled with medical supplies and emblazoned with the slogan “From Russia with Love.”
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, a prodigious jailer of journalists, locked up a few reporters who criticized his early efforts to counter the virus, then sent a voice message to the phone of every citizen over 50, stressing that he had everything under control.
And in Turkmenistan, one of the world’s most repressive countries, where not a single infection has been officially declared, the president for life, Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, promoted his book on medicinal plants as a possible solution to the pandemic.

(4)  Perhaps a hereditary ruler might in some rare cases qualify for that label?  I am not certain.

But those who come into power through some type of populist uprising tend not to be benevolent at all.  Indeed, several marks of narcissism appear to be common in the various strongmen rulers.  Also marks of misogyny, of course, but then a truly oppressive right-wing dictatorship cannot run without it.

Plague Thoughts

1.  The daily numbers about people dying from Covid-19 and about new cases found through testing are useful information, but when they are employed for international comparisons absolute numbers (counts) are not that informative.

That's because countries have quite different population sizes and because there are very few places where we have even an inkling of the TOTAL numbers of individuals who have had the virus, including those who had mild or asymptomatic cases.  Also, the level and type of testing which is done varies wildly.

I am not saying that we shouldn't also report the counts because they are crucial for making sure that the health care systems are prepared.  But relative counts are also needed.  For the most obvious example, the case casualty rate (mortality rate) depends on the total numbers of people who have been or are infected by the virus.  We don't know what those totals might be, except perhaps for countries like Iceland.

2.  Trying to get information on the etiology of Covid-19 is extremely difficult for everyone, even for the experts, because we are talking about a brand new virus.

There is no substitute for proper studies and doing those studies requires data which is not yet available. 

Until we get those studies my advice for us lay people is to take everything we read (about miracle cures or about abandoning all hope and so on) with a big pinch of salt (not real salt!) and to err on the side of caution in how we live our lives.

3.  I watched the Queen's Speech about this pandemic, even though I am not British, and it made me tear up a bit.  Mostly because she demonstrated moral leadership* only a day or two after Our Supreme Leader demonstrated its exact opposite in that face mask debacle:

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump announced new federal guidelines Friday recommending that Americans wear face coverings when in public to help fight the spread of the new coronavirus. The president immediately said he had no intention of following that advice himself, saying, “I'm choosing not to do it."

4.  Domestic violence rates are rising in many countries because of the policies encouraging or ordering people to stay at home.  The reasons for such increases are pretty obvious:  The pandemic causes extra stress, abusers use violence as a release valve for that stress, and the usual targets for that violence are conveniently nearby and unable to easily escape.

On the more positive side, several countries are aware of this extra risk and are working on solutions.

5. What do you do for your mental and emotional health under these very trying conditions?

I have upped my tai chi and qigong practice, baked Finnish cinnamon buns** and fixed a few things that annoyed me at Snakepit Inc, including a broken handrail in the staircase.  I even dragged out my old sewing machine (it's extremely old, bought used and I have had it for a long time) which I used to make lots of face masks and also several new throw pillows for the living-room.

Reading books which have nothing to do with today is also a good escape.  Or if you like to read something vaguely relevant, the Decameron*** might keep you busy for a few days.



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*  Whatever your opinions of the monarchy and so on might be, you can't argue that Elizabeth doesn't know what her actual job is and I think she does it quite well.  Trump, on the other hand, cannot stop from centering himself in everything he utters.  Or does.  The latter is the more frightening part of him having all sorts of secret presidential powers.

**  Like cinnamon buns except also flavored with cardamom and, ideally,  with some nib sugar on top.  The way they scent up the whole house while in the oven is wonderful. 

***  I read it as a preteen for the first time (borrowed it from the local library not knowing what it was as I was going through the books methodically in alphabetical order).  It was exciting because of the sexual bits, but even at that age I knew that the sex wasn't described from the woman's point of view.

If you like to read something vaguely relevant but sad, Camus' The Plague might suit you.  I don't recommend it, to be honest, and neither do I recommend spending a lot of time on those online sites where the message is omygodweareallgonnadienow.

That's because protecting our mental health is also pretty important.

On Trump's Assertion That Masks Are Stolen In Hospitals. The Games He Plays.

I used to write, all the time,  about Trump's inane statements, about his ignorance, his lack of interest in learning and about his extreme selfishness. 

I no longer think those writing exercises improved the health of our nation in any way (1).  Enough Americans (and Vlad "The Impaler" Putin) in 2016 had no problem with electing an ignorant narcissist to run the so-called Free world.  They knew what they would get, liking it well enough.  And they still like him well enough.

So I haven't written much about Trump in recent months. (2)  But perhaps this is worth re-stating:

Trump is a narcissist.  This means that he doesn't have certain moral senses most of us share.  He can intellectually understand empathy, and he can even mimic it, but he doesn't know how empathy feels. 

He lives in a world centered around his ego.  The crucial part of understanding this is not that he is selfish (though he is) or that he sees himself as the Sun God of this century (though he does).  The crucial part to understand is that for him his ego, his very self, is like a soap bubble, hovering in a dark world full of sharp objects.  It is extremely fragile. (3)

It must be defended!  Anything piercing that soap bubble would burst it — pop! — and then there would be no Donald Trump.  And the things which threaten that soap bubble consist of everything which threatens the greatness of Donald Trump.

Once you understand this, you can predict almost everything he will say or do.  He will judge all news on the basis of how they make him look, and he will deem the news fake if they make him look bad. He will vigorously attack all criticism and all critics, and he will punish the critics with all means available to him.  He. Must. Win.

Winning, for him, equals keeping the iridescent soap bubble intact.  If he doesn't win, the bubble will burst.  That's why he never gives up in his stupid email fights, and that's why those fights so often seem to be about little personal things which a president should not care about.  But for Trump the personal barbs are the worst barbs.  They threaten his very existence, and must be fought.

If it looks like he is not winning a particular debate, he will convert it into a different debate, one which he cannot lose.  All narcissists are masters in that game, and this is one instance where, indeed, Trump might be the greatest of all.

That is the background against which we should read his comments about masks being stolen in New York hospitals:

President Donald Trump alleged that a New York hospital lost protective masks or even allowed them to be stolen, questioning how demand for the product could have spiked so rapidly during the coronavirus outbreak.
Trump cited no evidence and didn’t identify the hospital.

By suggesting something this outrageous, Trump takes some pressure off himself, because the diversion he opens here is one journalists will eagerly follow.  Not because they believe what Trump is stating, but because they do not believe it, and wish to make the facts in the case quite clear.  But by doing that they are cooperating with Trump by doing what he intended:  To shift the debate away from the problems of his leadership in this pandemic to other outrageous topics which do not threaten his soap bubble.

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(1)  That is a bit grandiose.  I don't have enough readers to make much of a difference, though I do have many influential readers (believe it or not) and all my readers are wonderful brainy and compassionate people.

(2)  Or about anything else. The reasons are complicated, but I have been ill for a couple of months.  It's likely that I had the Coronavirus in February, though without easy testing for antibodies there is no way of telling now.  Whatever it was, it caused a tornado of various after-effects.  I'm slowly recovering and getting shiny eyes back and so on.

(3)  I am not a psychologist so cannot talk about the reasons for Trump's fragile ego, though his parents and especially his cold and rejecting father probably had a role in creating him the way he is now.


 

Short Posts About Women And Gender: Sexism in Politics, Online and In House-Cleaning; New Definition of Feminism And Some Fun Stuff

1.  One study strongly suggests that sexism played some role in Elizabeth Warren's performance in the primaries:

Data for Progress surveyed 2,953 likely Democratic primary voters in August, 2019 and then re-interviewed as many of them as possible (n = 1,619) at the end of January, 2020 -- just before the Iowa caucuses. In the first wave of the survey, respondents reported how much they agreed or disagreed with four statements that are meant to gauge one’s level of “hostile sexism”: 

1. Most women interpret innocent remarks or acts as being sexist.
2. Women are too easily offended.
3. Most women fail to appreciate fully all that men do for them.
4. Women seek to gain power by getting control over men.

As you might imagine, many Democratic primary voters tend to strongly disagree with all of these statements, but this is not true for everyone. Roughly one-third of likely Democratic voters do not, on average, disagree with these statements.

...

...Warren received little-to-no support from the roughly one third of the Democratic primary electorate that does not reject these sentiments. The current front-runners, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, have support from voters with a variety of views on these items.

The linked article stresses that there are many other reasons why someone might not have cared for Warren's policies.  But sexism seems to have played a role.

It's also possible that some primary voters engaged in what the linked article calls second-round sexism, i.e., the belief that other voters are likely to be sexist and that having a woman as the Democratic candidate in the general elections is going to make defeating Trump less likely.  This strategy, then, would explain why the remaining two Democratic candidates are white men roughly Trump's own age:  Minimize all differences except for the bits about Trump people hate so that as many as possible will not vote for him.

2.  Sir Tom Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world-wide web, is worried about the way women and girls are treated online:

Berners-Lee highlights three areas that need “urgent” attention. First is the digital divide that keeps more than half of the world’s women offline, largely because it is too expensive, or they do not have access to the equipment or skills to use it.

Second is online safety: according to a survey by Berners-Lee’s Web Foundation, more than half of young women have experienced violence online, including sexual harassment, threatening messages and having private images shared without consent. The vast majority believe the problem is getting worse.

The third threat comes from badly designed artificial intelligence systems that repeat and exacerbate discrimination. “Many companies are working hard to tackle this discrimination. But unless they dedicate resources and diversify teams to mitigate bias, they risk expanding discrimination at a speed and scale never seen before,” he writes.

I would add to that list all the misogynistic hate sites, including the incel sites, and the radical hatred of all women they disseminate.

I have no idea what a workable solution to this problem might look like, though it could help if other users strongly disapproved of social media behavior which consists of misogyny, sexual harassment and the like.  In other words, the social norm on this needs changing.

3.  I felt a strong sense of deja-vu reading a new Guardian piece which asks if it is ever acceptable for a feminist to hire a cleaner.  That's because roughly the same story was written by my favorite anti-feminist, Caitlin Flanagan, some fifteen years ago, and I wrote about it then.

The hidden framework both those articles use goes something like this:

Most unpaid work at home shall be defined as Women's Work.  If a woman refuses to do it so that she can do more paid Men's Work outside the home, then poorer and more oppressed women must fill the gap she is leaving by that refusal.  Because that unpaid work at home is Women's Work.

This means that the liberation of middle-class women comes at the expense of working-class women, and is not real liberation.  

The only ethical solution is for all feminists to do their own Women's Work *. 

It's worth spelling that out given that the class (or capitalist) analysis the argument otherwise applies is equally valid for studying similar ethical questions in the lives of, say, male stockbrokers who choose not to clean their own offices at work and who choose not to launder their own suits or iron their own shirts.

Perhaps the ethics of those choices tend not to be questioned because they are seen as taking place in the public sphere or in a marketplace and not at home?

But what about that same male stockbroker who employs a cleaning lady to clean his fancy townhouse?  Why would the ethical considerations there be any different?   In any case, why are questions about who cleans the toilet seen as somehow the responsibility of women alone when lots of people use those toilets in many households?

The problem with this analysis is that it conflates two different questions.  One of them is low-pay work and the exploitation of workers.  The other one is labeling certain chores as belonging to women and then holding women to different standards than men when it comes to exploiting low-paid workers.  The solution to the worker-exploitation problem is better labor market protections and fairer wages.  The solution to labeling certain chores as inherently belonging to women only is to stop doing that.

4.  The Planned Parenthood website has a glossary of terms.  One of them defines feminism in a manner I have not seen used before:

Feminism

The belief that people of all genders should have equitable economic, political, sexual, and social rights.

 My guess is that this definition tries to update and expand the traditional definition of feminism which has to do with equitable rights for both sexes.  But switching from sex to gender causes difficulties which the writer of that definition might not have thought about:

When someone writes "all genders" the basis for defining "gender" is probably coming from the gender identity school of thought, which assumes that all individuals have a gender identity which is not based on their actual biological sex but may correlate with it (in which case one is called cisgender inside that school of thought) or not (in which case one is called transgender or nonbinary).

The decoupling of biological sex from gender identity and the use of the latter to define "gender" (what men and women and nonbinary people are) then means that all the genders in the above definition will contain both female-bodied people and male-bodied people (though the relative percentages vary widely).

Suppose abortion was banned.  Would the new feminism, as defined in the above quote, be concerned about this ban?

I don't see how it could be concerned, because the imagined abortion ban would not be singling out any particular gender, as long as all genders contained some male- and some female-bodied people.  All genders would be equally constrained by that abortion ban, and in that sense their rights would remain equitable**.

If this is the way feminism is now defined, then no social justice movement addresses sex-based oppression, despite it still being probably the type of oppression in this world which has the largest number of victims.  So I hope that this is not the generally used new definition, or that people using it figure out how to amend it to allow the traditional tasks of feminism to still be carried out.

5.  Finally, some fun things about women.  Here are ten inspiring stories about individual women (from the International Women's Day celebrations).  This story is about a painting now attributed to Artemisia Gentileschi which was earlier attributed to a male pupil of her father.  And here are colorized pictures of British women working in factories and such during WWI.




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* This is, in fact, also the conclusion of the author of the Guardian piece!  The unequal distribution of work at home (child care, cooking, cleaning, laundry) is one reason why women earn less than men, on average, so it's odd to see a self-declared feminist recommend that more women increase their share of that work, and it's even odder to see how quickly she gets past the idea that men should chip in more.

It's also somewhat difficult to see how not hiring cleaning ladies would make their lot better, or how the valuing of  traditional women's work would increase if more women voluntarily do it for bed and board.

**  Similar problems crop up with pregnancy discrimination in the labor market.  When individuals from all genders can get pregnant, discriminating on the basis of pregnancy is actually not gender-based discrimination.

Actually, similar problems crop up with all aspects of sex-based oppression, including sex-based labor market discrimination, sex-based religious rules which limit women's lives, sexual violence and harassment which are predominantly aimed at female bodies (or bodies which look female to others) and so on.

It's worth noting that trans women, for instance, can also suffer from sex-based oppression when others view them as women, and that female-bodied nonbinary individuals are unlikely to be able to escape sexism, given that sexism depends on how others view us, not on how we view ourselves.  Thus, the importance of understanding (and being able to measure and analyze) sex-based oppression is not limited to just those the gender identity school would call cisgender women.

The Trump Administration And the Coronavirus Pandemic

Two years ago Donald Trump, Our Leader Extraordinaire:

ordered the shutdown of the White House National Security Council's entire global health security unit. NBC News had a good report on this recently, noting that the president's decision "to downsize the White House national security staff -- and eliminate jobs addressing global pandemics -- is likely to hamper the U.S. government's response to the coronavirus."

And how does he now justify that decision?  Like this:

"I just think this is something, Peter, that you can never really think is going to happen. You know, who -- I've heard all about, 'This could be...' -- you know, 'This could be a big deal,' from before it happened. You know, this -- something like this could happen.... Who would have thought? Look, how long ago is it? Six, seven, eight weeks ago -- who would have thought we would even be having the subject? ... You never really know when something like this is going to strike and what it's going to be."

This is the kind of presidential awareness millions of American voters felt comfortable with..

There's a reason why we want smart, knowledgeable and experienced people running countries and important public organizations.  There's a reason why having years of experience matters.  There's a reason for not engaging one's hind-brain in the selection of leaders.

My anger about Trump's incompetence, denials and clear lack of overall understanding comes from seeing how terribly poorly the US is coping, compared to other industrialized countries.  Testing for the coronavirus in this country has been almost a farce so far:

A week later, the United States declared a public health emergency, a process designed to speed the development of diagnostic tests and other medical products. The CDC received the first “emergency use authorization” to make and distribute its test to the backbone of the public health system in the United States — mostly state labs.

But the emergency policy, intended to keep quality high, also discouraged hospital labs from quickly developing in-house tests. They would need specific approval from the FDA to do so.

“Since CDC and FDA haven’t authorized public health or hospital labs to run the tests, right now #CDC is the only place that can. So, screening has to be rationed,” Gottlieb tweeted on Feb. 2.

The CDC manufactured kits, and on Feb. 6 and 7, 90 test kits were shipped to the public health labs. Some labs began to have trouble with the test. On Feb. 12, the CDC announced the test was providing inconclusive results in some laboratories. The problem was in one of the three components of the test.

How do other countries manage to test thousands of people, then?  What about using the test kits they use?  The answer:

Some critics have questioned why the CDC didn’t switch to tests being used by other countries as soon as the problems arose, but the official said it would have taken longer to apply for a new authorization from the FDA and validate and manufacture a new test than it would to fix a test they knew worked in their own lab.

So it goes.  Currently the US testing is too narrow to allow us to tell much anything about the possible spread of coronavirus in different areas.  This means that we have no idea how correct the numbers of those infected might be.  And then there is this bit:

On Feb. 13, HHS Secretary Alex Azar testified before Congress that a limited five-city pilot would begin to add coronavirus to the usual flu surveillance system to see whether “there is broader spread than we have been able to detect so far.” But the plan was delayed because coronavirus tests weren’t available.

Wider testing for the virus is required to properly plan the need for hospital facilities and medical staff and for deciding when stronger quarantine policies might be in order.  So far the US testing has been totally inadequate for these purposes.  To put it into perspective:

As of Sunday, 1,707 Americans had been tested for the novel coronavirus, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. South Korea, by contrast, has tested more than 189,000 people. The two countries announced their first coronavirus cases on the same day.

This looks like a clown show, to be honest.