Speed Blogging, Mon 9/16/2013: On Women

Note:  Not all these are from the last few days.

First, the Taliban in Afghanistan is waging a physical war against women in the public sector, by killing female police officers, by burning down girls' schools, of course, and by killing other women who have used their voices.  These moves serve deeper desires to keep women restricted to the home and to make sure that women don't vote, for example.

Second, good news about teenage pregnancy rates in the US.  They are falling, and the most likely cause seems to be an increased use of contraception.  So what is being reduced are unintended pregnancies.

Third,  a rumored death of an eight-year-old bride in Yemen has created a debate about child marriages in that country.  What makes the debate more difficult are the religious arguments:

In 2009, Yemen's parliament passed legislation raising the minimum age of marriage to 17. But conservative parliamentarians argued the bill violated Islamic law, which does not stipulate a minimum age of marriage, and the bill was never signed.

Activist groups and politicians are still trying change the law, but more than 100 leading religious clerics have said restricting the age of marriage is "un-Islamic."

Fourth, and as usual (for this debate is one we always have), Hanna Rosin argued last month that the gender gap in wages is total hogwash because men and women mostly work in different occupations and even industries and that the actual pay difference for  identical work is very small.  But one recent report suggests that the story isn't that simple.   If you want to learn more about this all, have a look at my gender gap three-part series, available here.

Fifth, and finally, this piece and the picture attached to it are hilarious.  Talking about it properly cannot be done in speed blogging, and in any case I must refresh my mascara and learn about Syria, to be a proper feminazi. 

But a quick look at the pic might be something we can fit in here:  A room full of pretty and thin young white women, one being available as a keyboard table and in the middle of it all, one lucky guy!  It has the flavor of those nineteenth century European paintings about harems. 

Nah,  I just don't care enough about the Goldberg phenomenon to take it seriously, though naturally I'm willing to contemplate posts on fashion, makeup and dating should that make me, too, very rich.

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The Language Of The Class Wars

Here's what is interesting about the newest round of battles in the American class wars:  As the haves are truly beating down the have-nots, the language the henchmen and henchwomen of the haves is strengthening, becoming cruder, more accusing, more totalizing and more objectified.

Why that would be the case beats me.  After all, they are winning, soundly, the haves.  Just look at the most recent evidence:

The top 10 percent of earners took more than half of the country’s total income in 2012, the highest level recorded since the government began collecting the relevant data a century ago, according to an updated study by the prominent economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty. 

The top 1 percent took more than one-fifth of the income earned by Americans*, one of the highest levels on record since 1913, when the government instituted an income tax. 

The figures underscore that even after the recession the country remains in a new Gilded Age, with income as concentrated as it was in the years that preceded the Depression of the 1930s, if not more so.

Pay attention to that last sentence.  Incomes are now as concentrated as they were in the years preceding the Great Depression!   The top 1% of earners took in 19.3% of all household income in 2012*, the largest percentage since the Twenties, and 95% of all income gains since 2009 went to them.

So if I was the referee in these class wars I'd give the last few rounds (well, most of them) to the rich.  The rich are getting richer at a nice gallop, the poor ---   well, they are takers, and anything that might help them, such as the unions, are leeches.

That's what I hear from the conservative media.  On Labor Day, Fox News channel told us that the day was about the takers and the makers, the makers being people who have jobs, I guess, and the takers being everybody else.  But ultimately the takers are viewed as anyone not earning enough to pay federal income taxes.  That group includes retired people and students at schools and colleges and stay-at-home parents, too.

The language of takers and makers is not something we should just snort at.  It's an attempt to frame the current existing income and wealth inequality as just, perhaps not even sufficiently tilted towards the rich, because those who have more money got it due to  their good work ethic and hard work.  Those who don't have money, even if they have three jobs, made bad choices and are takers.

A few examples of how the right talks about all this.  First the Labor Day story I refer to above:



Second,  the usual brush the Fox people grab when they wish to describe the less wealthy consists of "lazy, dependent on government, deserves their fate."  For example:

Fox hosts Bill O'Reilly and Geraldo Rivera cited a U.S. census study which found that many poor Americans own appliances to paint entitlement recipients as lazy or unwilling to work. This analysis ignores the fact that 9 out of 10 Americans receiving entitlements are elderly, disabled, or were members of working households.

Third, here we are taught about labor unions, one of the few institutions which help the have-not side in the class wars:

Fox News continued its assault on the labor movement during a Cashin' In panel discussion that characterized unions as parasitic "vestigial" lobbying organizations that do nothing for their members and harm the economy. As evidence of their claims, the panel referenced a decades-long decline in union membership, but ignored the sustained political assault behind the drop as well as the empirically established economic benefits of a robust labor movement.
On the September 14 edition of Fox News' Cashin' In, host Eric Bolling introduced a segment about union membership drives and protests taking place this month, asking whether the effort was "bad for workers."
Fox regular Jonathan Hoenig explained that the membership drive was necessary, because unions are "parasites" that "need new blood."

I could go on for hours with that list of examples.  The point is that the rich are already winning. So why are the Fox talking heads so adamantly fighting for even more on their plates?  Is no amount enough?

What makes all this propaganda is not that there weren't lazy unemployed people or bad trade union representatives or no people who have worked hard and become rich.   There obviously are.  It is the totality of the slander which becomes propaganda:  Every poor person is lazy and unwilling to work, every person needing help from the government is a leech (with the exception of any viewers of Fox News who might be on Medicare and Social Security, naturally), there are no hard-working poor people in the whole wide world!

It is this propaganda which the Wallet Right needs, to get politicians who are willing to put even more in their wallets, by painting everyone but the top 10% of earners, say, as parasites, leeches and undeserving.

What makes me tear up about this is that the natural consequence of such politicians in power is to open a  chute in the floor where those 10% work, leading right down into the hell of the lazy and undeserving.  Because the more we change welfare and tax policies to benefit only the well-to-do, the greater the number of people who slip down those chutes when something bad happens in their lives.  A major illness, a bout of unemployment, a death or divorce in the family, and down slips Mr. or Ms. Smith, to join the parasites, the takers!

And once that fall ends, the bottom layer will offer no trade unions, hardly any food stamps, no Medicaid to help with the health care costs.  But there might be bankruptcy laws which treat a family losing a second home better than one of "those takers!"

I get the hind-brain feelings which Fox News flames day in and day out.  They have to do with the feeling of outrage that others get stuff for nothing when "you" work so hard, that others get food stamps and "you" have to pay the grocery store prices, that others get to stay at home with their children while "you" can't afford good daycare and so on.

But that's a hind-brain feeling, not an actual comparison between how that person's life would be if he or she was really poor, and the way to reduce the misuse of any system is by policing the misuse, not by getting scissors and gleefully ripping through the safety net which lies below all of us.

Because ultimately the safety net is there for all of us.  That the Fox News is denying this, altogether, and turning the safety net into some sort of a sticky spider web of total dependence is what they excel at.  The implication is that for people to work hard they need to dance on that tightrope without the government safety net!  To truly crash down and die, if they fail, to starve to death on the streets, to get their fair desserts.

What's hilarious about that are the Heads Which Talk on Fox News.  If you have millions in your bank accounts you already have a safety net!  You yourself are not motivated by any of the fears you wish on other people, you yourself can rear your children as lazy and unwilling to work as you wish, and they will still be AOK.   Rush Limbaugh can crack jokes about the diets of the poor, and nobody thinks that is about the funniest thing ever.

There's something nasty about the utter lack of all compassion in the new conservative class-wars language.  But even if we take the standpoint of a completely selfish person, a society with tremendous inequalities and no safety net is not a nice place to live for anyone.  If you manage not to be viewed as one of the takers, your choices of safe places to live and to work in are not many, and it's sorta unpleasant to step over dead animals or people on your way to the guarded shopping mall.  As the actual middle classes shrink downwards, it becomes tougher and tougher to find nurses, dentists, teachers, physicians and so on.  Though one can then fly abroad and get the services in those countries which decided not to view the world as consisting of the makers and the takers.

The previous paragraph is an exaggeration when it comes to the US.  What's more probable is that the political will to do anything about the growing income inequalities just will not be found, because the US democracy is so dependent on campaign financing and that is much simpler to get from the rich.  In return, the rich want certain laws passed.  As the lives of the rich and the rest of us diverge, so do the ideas of what the society might need.

Perhaps that is why the new language of class wars has become so callous.  The rich already live in a different reality.
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*I'm not sure why the two links I give quote slightly different numbers. 

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Friday Echidne Thoughts

This blog is still the gateway drug to feminism, the bowl of dry-scientific-granola-with-a-sprinkling of cyanide and I'm still worse than a thousand Hitlers and far too much a goody-two-shoes.

Whether there's any usefulness in that I don't know.  But as long as I have some fun!

This mood is linked to one of my favorite Finnish poems, by Aaro Hellaakoski, Hauen Laulu (The Pike's Song).  It's wonderful in Finnish but not really translatable, at least by me.  The gist, in English:

From its wet home
the pike climbed the tree
to sing

When through the gray clouds
the rising sun glimmered
and on the lake woke up
the laughing wavelets, to race

Rose the pike to the top of the spruce tree
to bite on the red cone

It may have heard or smelled
or tasted the end of the cone
all dew-wet from the morning ---
such unspeakable greatness

when opening wide
its bony mouth
clicking
its giant jaw bone

such a wild-heavy a psalm it sang
that the birds went silent
as if the weight of the waters
had swept over
and the cold lap of loneliness.

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Bullying Beats Anti-Bullying Programs?

That's what I read here:

Anti-bullying initiatives have become standard at schools across the country, but a new UT Arlington study finds that students attending those schools may be more likely to be a victim of bullying than children at schools without such programs.

The findings run counter to the common perception that bullying prevention programs can help protect kids from repeated harassment or physical and emotional attacks.
"One possible reason for this is that the students who are victimizing their peers have learned the language from these anti-bullying campaigns and programs," said Seokjin Jeong, an assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice at UT Arlington and lead author of the study, which was published in the Journal of Criminology.

Even the title of the summary is all about that: 

Youth More Likely to Be Bullied at Schools With Anti-Bullying Programs

The writing carefully avoids mentioning explicit causality, but the impression the reader gets is that the anti-bullying programs don't work.

And that can be the case.  However, if you read through the actual study you will find a different reason:  The data the study uses is cross-sectional, meaning that all the researchers can compare are data from the same time period.  So schools with anti-bullying programs can be compared with schools which don't have them, and that's the comparison the summary talks about.

Why is that a problem?  Because we don't know if the schools with anti-bullying programs had the same levels of bullying as other schools, before the programs were introduced.  Perhaps the schools with programs introduced them explicitly because bullying was so bad?  Perhaps the levels of bullying in those schools now are lower than they were before the programs?  Or perhaps not.  The point is that we cannot tell, because the researchers didn't have data over time, only data from one harvesting of information.

Yet it makes sense that schools with or without such programs might differ in other important ways, such as the level of reported bullying.

A second (though smaller) problem is that having anti-bullying programs can make students more aware of the fact that they are being bullied, because it gives the language for expressing bullying.  It's a bit like more people reporting rape after society changes its views on rape and punishes it more severely, even if rape rates are not rising.

I should note that the study itself covers lots of ground and does point out the lack of time-series data.

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Yellen vs. Summers As A Metaphor

Atrios posted on the nomination of the next chief of Federal Reserve.  The forerunners have been defined as Lawrence Summers and Janet Yellen.  Summers looks to be the one the president prefers.

The big difference between the two is in gender.  Yellen has ladybits, Summers has talked about the ladybits in the past, wondering about the role of biology in women's lesser presence in the STEM field.  So the choice between two professionals also lends itself to all sorts other choices, a murky underground where things slither and creep and crawl, and a great opportunity for brawls about gender and such.

But that's not what Atrios wrote about (that was me).  He pointed out this:

One reason the (likely) failure to nominate Yellen as the next Fed Chief is such a disappointment is that it will miss an incredible opportunity to give the job to a woman for the first time. She has the experience. No one really denies she's qualified, except to suggest she's insufficiently bro-y. And these opportunities don't come up all the time. Due to historical extreme explicit discrimination against women, and existing barriers (including discrimination) big and small, fewer women rise up close enough to the top that getting the top job is realistic. It's reason enough to give her the job. It's an opportunity.

It is, I think, one reason for the disappointment of some Hillary Clinton supporters in 2008. While it hopefully happens more and more, at the moment the likelihood of women getting close enough to reach the top is just lower. One only has to look at the gender balance of governors and senators, the people who have a realistic shot at getting the nomination, to see this. Of course a similar issue existed for her main opponent at the time.

The way I always thought about such nominations in high places, from my feminist point of view, is that they serve to change ideas about what women (or minorities etc.) can do, that they widen the social gender norms, that they give us weapons against those who come and tell us that women (or blacks) are not good at anything to do with the command roles in the public sector and so on.  And mostly I think that approach is the correct one, given what has happened in many fields where the women were a curiosity in the past and where they now are just like the men in the fields, no better or worse.

For example, male medical school students used to fight tooth and nail against women's admittance in the nineteenth century England.   Now women can be physicians in all countries of the world, and one never hears the argument that women cannot cope in that job.  But without  being allowed to try a job, no evidence of that coping can come about.

Now juxtapose this argument with the more recent strand of feminism which suggests that women (or people of color) already close to the top of the hierarchy don't deserve any special push from feminists (or other social justice movements).  We should aim our effort at those who are truly suffering and work at the bottom rungs of the societal ladders only.

And there's truth in that, because of the relative levels of suffering.  But there's also truth in that work which tries to change societal norms, to reduce misogyny of a certain type, and sometimes that work requires paying attention to people who are already doing very well but who are treated in a  certain way because of their gender, race, sexual preference and so on.

So I'd prefer to have several arrows in my quiver, to talk and chew gum at the same time, to make a nice mess of metaphors.  One reason for that multiplicity of objectives is that the government matters and other institutions matter and that we want to have them representative of the population so that the specific concerns of different groups are fairly represented.  In my idealistic moments I think that may also help in the laws we need to work better lives for those who are poor and suffering.  In my more realistic movements I understand that those who have risen through the system to some extent must have the values of the system.

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Those Discouraged Young Men Who Live in Their Parents' Basement

Something interesting from Pew Research on the possibility that young men are now so discouraged and effeminate because of feminism that they just live at home with their parents.  Probably in their basement, watching pron and playing computer games..

If that sounds odd to you, rest assured that I 'm not making the arguments up.  They are common among the end-of-men lot and crop up pretty regularly in the media.

Imagine my great surprise, then when I read this from Pew Research:

In 2012, Millennial males (40%) were more likely to live at home than Millennial females (32%).
This 8 percentage point gap in living at home is smaller than the 11-point gap evident in 1968.
The growing gender parity in likelihood of residing at home is especially pronounced among 18- to 24-year-olds. In 1968, 59% of male 18- to 24-year-olds lived at home (very similar to 2012). In contrast, in 1968 only 42% of females in that age group lived at home. So a 17 percentage point gender gap in living at home in 1968 has narrowed to a 9 percentage point gap in 2012 among 18- to 24-year-olds.
One factor that has contributed to the growing gender parity in living at home is the rise in the share of young women who go to college. (Goldin, Katz, and Kuziemko, 2006). In 1968, only 19.5% of 18- to 24-year-old females were enrolled in college in 1968, compared with 34% of their male peers. That ratio has since flipped; as of 2011, women were 6 percentage points more likely to be enrolled in college than men among 18- to 24-year-olds.

Bolds are mine.

I missed checking this out myself!  Hangs head in shame.

What's the point?  Young people are counted as living at home even if they live in a dormitory at college.  And it seems that even in 1968 more young men than young women "lived at home,"  meaning that they were either actually living at home with their parents or that they were studying at a college or a university and counted as living at home.

And the other point is that a gender gap which has narrowed over the long-run is being sold to us as a brand new gendered difference.  Some of the recent changes may have new causes (such as the change from early marriage to cohabitation and later marriage or just cohabitation), but the important thing is that young men were more likely to live at home even before feminists did any of their nasty work!

The lesson:  Always check the data, preferably in a time series format.

And let me rush to state that I'm not making fun of the reduced work opportunities of young men or of young women.  But that's an economic problem,  not a gender-politics problem.

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Silly Stuff

Good book names:

Caressing the Hedgehog.  This would be a good name for a book about trying to be a social helper.

My Life As An Old Man.  I want to write that one, just because.

The Makers And The Takers.  This right-wing slogan can be turned around niftily.  For instance, who makes those delicious gourmet dinners at high-faluting restaurants and who eats them?  Or those yachts.  Who makes them and who sails them.   Who cleans those toilet and who uses them? 

That one could give us a whole library of books.

Ready, Steady, Fire!  The circular firing squads in politics.  Lots of short-term fun, lots of long-term suffering, those are.  But the friendly fire is a lot less frightening, for the perpetrators.

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Patriarchy Is Dead. Long Live Patriarchy!

That's just me having fun with the title of this post.  I have so few pleasures in life.

The post is about Hanna Rosin's new post, to push her book about the End of Men towards higher sale numbers, I think.  It's a nice kick-in-the-overall-pants for all us feminazis in our academy ivory towers, the Fempire!

I love stuff like that, I do.  To be so powerful!  To be a goddess of all I survey!  And to find that the Evil Patriarchy Is Dead and that I should finally admit it and move to happier pastures of writing.

But I seldom use the term "patriarchy."  That's a bit of a dilemma.  So how about telling you all what Rosin argues in her post at the Slate's DoubleX, a sub-site intended for women and somewhat feminist women at that.  Quoth:

You would think that a book called The End of Men would be, prima facie, an insult to men. But one of the great surprises I’ve had while speaking about the book over the last year is how little resistance I have gotten from the aggrieved sex. Yes, I’ve been to a forum or two where dude-bros from the men’s rights movement accuse me of destroying American manhood. But most of the resistance to the idea that men have ceased to be the dominant sex has come from women—not from working-class women, who seem to find what I’m describing painfully familiar, if not totally obvious, but from women in the college, professional class.

There comes a point in nearly every book event I’ve done when a little feminist revolt stirs inside the crowd. I can feel it coming when an audience saves its whole-hearted applause for the first moment I mention a sin committed against the women of America—say, our appalling lack of paid maternity leave (which is appalling!). Or when a questioner quotes to me in a triumphant tone statistics about the tiny percentage of female CEOs, as if I had never heard them before.

Hmm.  Based on my wading in the really polluted MRA sites they hates Rosin as a feminazi, my precious, they hates her.  But never mind, because hatred is more likely to sell books than indifference, right?


And then there is this:

But that confessional approach only brought more ire. “Lucky for you that you have the luxury to agonize about your choices,” the young woman said. “What about the woman who picks up your trash after you leave at 5?”

This is when I knew I was dealing with some irrational attachment to the concept of unfair. For my book I’d interviewed plenty of women who might find themselves picking up the trash, likely as a second job after a full day of school or another job, or both, because their husbands—or, more likely, the fathers of their children—were out of work. My young interrogator might be annoyed to learn that many of those women who pick up the trash yearn to bring back at least some aspects of the patriarchy. They generally appreciate their new economic independence and feel pride at holding their families together, at working and studying and doing things on their own, but sometimes they long to have a man around who would pay the bills and take care of them and make a life for them in which they could work less. And they want the men in their lives to be happy. It’s elite feminists like my questioner and me who cling to the dreaded patriarchy just as he is walking out of our lives.

And this:

I understand that the big picture is not always reflected in women’s daily experience of life. Maybe a woman has an overbearing husband or a retrograde boss or just a lingering problem that has no name. But as a collective, it sometimes feels that women  look too closely at the spot right in front of us. This is a moment, unprecedented in history—and also pretty confusing—when young women who work how they want and have sex how they want may also quilt and can fruits. When working-class women who quietly leave the only steady paycheck on the kitchen table every week may still believe that a man is the God-ordained head of the household. So I want to tell these women who are seeing only oppression: Look around.

Which brings me back to the title I picked.  We are told that patriarchy is dead, when it comes to uppity educated and probably white women, and then we are told that working-class women really want patriarchy back.  Because their husbands are out of work.  But that's an odd way of offering a choice, isn't it?  Either you have a husband who is not working (and perhaps isn't doing anything in the house) or you can have patriarchy back and be taken care of.

Oppression, patriarchy.  The way Rosin frames her story is intended to be inflammatory, of course, because inflammatory sells books and brings bread on the table.  But it's completely possible to discuss the impact of gender, as it affects our relative position on those complicated societal power ladders based on class, race, gender, nepotism, religion, ethnicity etc etc without imputing hatred or oppression on any particular person.

The way Rosin avoids gender analysis is by comparing women with women, not with men.  Thus, rich and powerful women are better off than poor women.  The former can do almost anything, these days (with the exception of the military and many religions), whereas the latter are much more constrained by income and the local gender norms.

But remember those ladders.  It is quite possible for a rich white woman to be worse off than an otherwise similar rich white man.  And of course any unfairness she suffers isn't as painful as the worry over daily bread.  But then all the same arguments could me made in comparison between rich white men and poor white men or rich white men and rich black men or poor white men and poor black men and so on.

The point I am trying to make here is a simple one:  Gender plays a role.  It is not the only thing that matters, it may not even be the most crucial factor, but it plays a role in where one finds herself or himself on those power ladders.

Depending on which country we look at the impact of gender differs.  In Afghanistan, for example, gender is one of the most crucial features which determines how one's life will be.  Yet of course even there a gilded cage is better than a rusty cage.

Come to think of it, Rosin's post is utterly provincial.  To discuss how feminism is no longer needed is a slap in the face of most of the world.  But nevermind.

Rosin focuses much of his treatise on choice.  I've discussed choice before, the idea that somehow we are autonomous human beings when choosing careers or jobs or how much skin we bare in our clothes.

Yet all that depends on the society we grow up in and on its general gendered values.  The suitable jobs for women are almost in the mother's milk we absorb, they are certainly in the cartoons we watch, in the sermons we hear at church, in the movies we watch, in popular music and in our peer groups.  By the time a choice about an occupation must be made, the choices are already flavored by that smell of gender suitability.  They are also determined by what we believe about the future, whether we are going to be the main breadwinners (with an assistant in that job, these days) or whether we are going to be the main caretakers of children (possibly also with an assistant.)

So it's not that Rosin is wrong in arguing for "choice" as the reason why women don't work as long days as men, on average, or as the reason why women appear to pick jobs which pay less.  But the framework of that choice should be made clearer.

What I find interesting about this post is how it reminds me of most right-wing arguments about gender:  Women don't want to be liberated and, in any case, women choose to earn less. And so there's no problem at all!
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Added later:  Bryce's take on all this.

And even later:  Rosin gives wrong figures for the percentage of women in the US Congress.  The correct figure, 18.3%,  is quite a bit lower than one third she uses here:

The 2012 elections inspired a similar reactionary response in some quarters. A record number of women were elected to Congress, bringing their number to a third of the membership, the level many sociologists cite as a tipping point when a minority becomes normalized and starts to enter the mainstream  

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On Pax Dickinson. And A Little on James Taranto.

Here's where I go wrong.  Dickinson was, until today, working for the Business Insider.  He is pretty well known as an eager anti-feminism tweeter.

After reading his tweet yesterday (having to do with the titstare presentation), I got all excited about discussing what, if any, the difference might be between misogyny and the things he finds not misogyny:

In other words, I have been doing this wading-in-the-nuclear-acid-waters for so long that my emotions are no longer triggered on, that I directly focus on the logical questions and dwell among them, instead of saying something uplifting out of clear-burning anger and such.

What saved me from that error (if error it is) were two things:  First I read, in one place, the long list of tweets Dickinson* has sent over the recent months, here (do read the list!), and if he doesn't have a serious problem with women I am a pink mouse goddess.

Second, Dickinson got fired, apparently because of his  sexist and racist tweets and the responses they created.  That, sadly, means that lots of the foam-and-fury now will be about a truth-speaking man getting fired by evil feminazis.  So let me plead my case and note that I was asleep during those events. 

Still, that list of Dickinson's tweets sounds like something from one of the worst MRA sites.  And that makes me wonder how many people like him have powerful posts in this world and how they use those posts.

Which brings me to James Taranto, of the Wall Street Journal,  who has done his fair bit from an Evo-Psycho angle on us wimminfolk.  His latest tweet:

Hard to interpret that cryptic tweet, of course.  The headline he refers to is this:

Shellie Zimmerman Won’t Press Charges Against Her Husband. Alleged Domestic Violence Victims Often Don't.

So a kind explanation of Taranto's outburst is that nothing can make Zimmerman innocent, not even the charges being withdrawn.  But that kindness would be superficial, because the fact remains that many alleged domestic violence victims don't press charges, even when they truly are victims and not just alleged victims.  Then there's the wider context to this, what with Zimmerman shooting a black teenager.

A different explanation would be to put that comment in the framework of Taranto's other opinions on gender.
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*I kept mistyping his last name as  "Packinson!"  Get it?

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Peeling the War Onion

Peeling an onion gives you tears, especially if the onion is one of the northern types (which, in my opinion, are onions on steroids).  The trick is to have a few unlit matches between your teeth while you do it and to have the water running from the faucet.

The onion I was trying to peel over the weekend is a different type.  It's the War Onion:  The odd desire of human beings to go to war.  For note that even when a war seems unavoidable and a necessary evil, there's that desire, to show how tough a country is, to force "respect" from other countries, to worry about the "standing" of one's own country, to go rah-rah and to wave the flag.

That all these things crop up, even after we all know what killing is really like and what it results in (end of beings, enormous grief for the survivors, displacement, long-term mental suffering, physical destruction), there's still a sizable number of people who view it all almost as a football game or at least as a computer war game.

At the same time, I get why not all wars can be avoided, I get the political calculus and the fact that some types of wars are about whether those people survive or whether  "my" people survive.  An existential fight.  But most wars don't fit that bill.

So why can't we avoid wars better?

You might be astonished that Echidne,  who bills herself as a minor goddess, doesn't know the answer.  Duh.  But I think it's useful to take the War Onion apart, layer by layer.  It's more than peeling, of course, because you end up with nothing.  In some ways that's the real significance.

The top layer of the onion is always some recent horror, some recent insult, some difference of opinion, of religion, of values that appears not amenable to diplomacy.  Why it doesn't bend itself to diplomatic means may not always be that clear, but looking at the layer below that one gives us some answers, about the history of the events, about resource distribution between and inside countries, about bad leadership, evil dictators, past grudges, and so on.  A careful study of that history might tell us where things could have gone differently, but that careful study is often possible only many years after the events.

Move one more layer into the onion, and you might come to the resources, both the fight over new-found resources or the fight over very scarce resources.  Some of these fights are just about greed and dominance, some are about survival.  Many of the powder keg areas of the world have that underground rift, of insufficient resources or of resources others want, and that's why they are potential or actual places of war. 

The Israel-Palestine hostilities are about many things but among those are resources, access to water, access to fertile land.  Likewise, I was shocked to learn that Egypt doesn't have enough arable land to support its large farming population.  That fact explains much of the poverty in the country and explains one part of the current unrest.  And in Syria, lack of water is one of the reasons why the poorest farmers had to give up farming and move to cities where they create the suffering and marginalized population from which the rebel movement could do its recruiting.

The lack of resources is not enough for wars, but it may well be one of the necessary conditions for most wars.

Go one layer deeper, almost to the heart of the War Onion, and what do you see?  Perhaps some unpleasant aspects of human tribes.  The desire to divide people into "us" and "them", the desire to base that choice on religion, ethnicity or race.  It is not just a desire, of course, but a fact, in many cases.  Hence civil wars are not about brothers killing brothers, but about brothers of the "right' faith or ideology killing brothers of the "wrong" faith or ideology.

Whether this or the resource layer are deeper can be debated.  They interact.  Thus, if there is enough space, land, water and food, the "wrong" type of people can be endured, and to some extent propaganda can be used to raise the in-group/out-group emotions even when resources aren't that scarce.  Think of the Existential Threat propaganda, the use of the self-defense argument when it's clearly not applicable. 

I'm not sure where the quality of the leaders enters all this.  It matters, greatly.  A warlord will not work for peace, a dictator will not fix the resource scarcity of one part of the population,  the leader of the "free world" will try to manipulate what that world consists of.  And what those leaders care about, in terms of their private psychological makeups, matters also.

But in some ways I think the emptiness in the very middle of the War Onion is Mother Nature turning over in her sleep and scratching the itch caused by too many fleas in one area.  The system is out of balance, and something needs to be adjusted.  That this adjustment is horrible for most sentient beings is sad for them.  Still, it is one solution to the resource problem:  With fewer people the resources stretch better.

That is not intended as an actual description, not intended as implying that the planet thinks or acts in a conscious way, but a way to suggest that if we tended to the underlying problems perhaps we would have fewer wars, fewer acts of collective violence.  Among those underlying problems the climate change is a major one to work on, because without that work we are going to get worse resource shocks. 

If that was coupled with proper population levels?  More investment in knowledge and education, so that individuals learn ways to manage those in-group/out-group feelings?  More focus on equitable division of resources?  These are probably childish thoughts.

 

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Titstare!

Titstare is an app.  It takes pictures of "you" when you stare at tits.

The Guardian wrote about it, too:

Over the weekend at the Techcrunch Disrupt hackathon in San Francisco, Australian duo Jethro Botts and David Boulton jumped on stage to present Titstare, an app that lets you "stare at tits". As they presented their project in under 60 seconds, the audience laughed at the numerous tit-related puns.

I never thought I'd write a post with that name, fellow titholders!  Or racks.  Or racks for tits?  Not sure what the proper synechdoche here might be.  But note that our mates Jethro and David didn't use a synechdoche!  They talked about tits as the things we are all obviously interested in and the things we need an app for.   For ogling purposes.

And I never thought that I'd do an actual analysis of what's wrong with having this particular presentation at that type of meeting.  But it seems necessary to do that, because so many people appear to have the mental age of twelve when it comes to women, tech and tits.  If only women could leave those tits at home when they want to work in tech, things would be much better, right?

But the real message of presentations like this one is that women are not supposed to be in the tech field!  Notice who the intended audience for the speech is.  I don't go around ogling at tits, ever, though I have some weird hobbies.

And that probably goes for the vast majority of women.  So this particular app, in the way it was designed, assumed that the audience in the room would consist of heterosexual men.  The only slight hesitancy in that was the quick reference to women not liking tit-ogling.  But it was quickly passed!

Let's do the analysis, my friends.

First, I don't mind humor about tits, given that it is in the right proportion.  Suppose that I cracked jokes about pricks, non-stop.  Every time you came here you'd read yet another post about pricks, without any real reference to the prick-holders as people.  It is that non-stop approach that gets old-old very quickly, and if you happen to be a prick-holder you'd judge my approach akin to someone who invited you for dinner and then you turned out to be the main course.*

Second, and this is because the more stuff about tits and racks and so on we hear about in coed conversations, the clearer it becomes that to some men that's what women are.  Bits and pieces only.

Third, there's a strong whiff of entitlement in these kinds of treatments.  I could never do that non-stop-penis-column because I don't feel entitled to something like that, not to mention the fact that I do think of prick-carriers as human beings, some of them awesome, kind and gentle and so on.  But Jethro and David don't have those qualms.

Fourth, there's the in-group and out-group aspect of all this.  The presentation assumes that the tech in-group consists of hetero blokes, all keen to ogle at tits.  That the room might have contained a few tit-holders was lamentable but easily ignored, and, besides, this was a joke!  And note that even if it was a joke (perhaps a sorta reverse laugh at the tit oglers), it still was a joke that would hit someone who has been the oglee differently than someone who has been the ogler.

Fifth and finally, place this into the context of women and tech.  Women tend not to go into tech, and some have argued that the reason is in the brogrammer atmosphere (tits and such).   It is that atmosphere which is of concern, not any particular silly stunt like this one.  But that such silly stunts are regarded as AOK, that is what tells us about the atmosphere.

So it's not that I can't take a joke.  But what is funny depends on that background, on one's life experiences, on whether one is a dinner guest laughing at the joke or the rump roast being served.

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*That still isn't a good counterexample, because my blog would be just one place.  The reality is that puerile talk about tits can be found in umpteen zillion places on the net.

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Added later:  TechCrunch has issued an apology.

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Today's Action Alert

Is to help Ann Kristin Neuhaus.

Why?  Katha Pollitt explains.

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Speed Blogging, Fri Sep 6, 2013: On Exclusion, Reproduction, Legos and Elections.

1.  Worth reading:  How Women's Voices Were Excluded from the March on Washington.  This is not uncommon in any social justice movement or any political movement, at least in the past.  The default position for women is to serve as the gals' auxiliary, and if women have special concerns or goals they are told to wait for those until the more important goals are met.  But all this is much better than the right-wing religious movements which explicitly exclude women.  But then the exclusion of women is often one of their major objectives.

Still, even the progressive movement can do better.  And feminism can do better in terms of inclusion of people from different ethnic and racial groups and social classes, as has been recently extensively discussed on the Internet.

2.  In Turkey, the Prime Minister Erdogan wants Turkish women to have at least three children each, preferably five.

Mmm.  Reproduction is usually treated differently from production.  If some country wants to increase production, it doesn't just tell that this is so.  It gives the firms and workers incentives to do so, and mostly that is money or similar incentives.  But when it comes to the hard work of reproduction, women are just expected to open the faucet more or less, as per the commands!

It is this differential treatment which tells me pretty clearly how women's roles in reproduction are viewed.  Both Erdogan and the US right wing want to make women (at least some women) have more children, and the way to do that is by using the stick, not by handing out carrots.  Thus, Erdogan wants to limit access to abortion and so do the US right-wingers.   To force women, in short.

3.  The Lego toy company has come out with a female scientist mini-figure.  She isn't even pink or frilly!

4.  Finally, something quite fun (via Gromit):  A German election ad video. 

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Going For Chinese Food Tonight?

The odds are pretty good for that, even if you don't decide to eat Chinese cuisine.  That's because of large percentages of such foods as tilapia (a fish) and apple juice sold in the US already come from China.  Indeed, when I last cleaned my freezer I noticed that the frozen beans I had there were labeled "Made in People's Republic of China."

There's nothing wrong with food being grown in any particular country, of course.  But there's something pretty wrong if food flown or shipped across half the world is still most cheaply produced that way, that China could really be the most efficient country in the production of most anything, so efficient, that the products can then be shipped all over the world more cheaply than they could be produced locally and still make a nice profit for everyone.

It's not impossible.  But it's extremely unlikely.  Other theories are that the farming method in China ignores environmental costs or that the Chinese workers are heavily underpaid or that the Chinese government subsidizes the industry.  Or all of those together, in varying proportions, depending on the product we are looking at.

Here's the worrying part of the question:  Past evidence suggests that quality control in China is poor and that the incentives managers and workers have contribute to lower quality, because low price is so important.  Bad quality control, combined with an increasing market share in food by China, means that any bad quality control will affect consumers all over the world.  Or at least in those countries whose governments are not willing to do their own additional quality control.

Chicken nuggets.  That's the most recent food product joining this particular dance:

Just before the start of the long holiday weekend last Friday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture quietly that it was ending a ban on processed chicken imports from China. The kicker: These products can now be sold in the U.S. without a country-of-origin label.
For starters, just four Chinese processing plants will be allowed to export cooked chicken products to the U.S., as first reported by . The plants in question passed USDA inspection in March. Initially, these processors will only be allowed to export chicken products made from birds that were raised in the U.S. and Canada. Because of that, the poultry processors won't be required to have a USDA inspector on site, as The New York Times , adding:
"And because the poultry will be processed, it will not require country-of-origin labeling. Nor will consumers eating chicken noodle soup from a can or chicken nuggets in a fast-food restaurant know if the chicken came from Chinese processing plants."

Fascinating.  Let's get this straight:  First the chickens will grow up to adulthood and face execution in the United States or Canada.  Then they will be shipped to China, the first foreign trip they take.  In China they will be processed into foods such as chicken nuggets.  Those nuggets will then take the second across-half-the-world trip, to end up on your plate, perhaps!

But you won't know whether you are eating an adventurous traveler chicken nugget or just a stay-at-home version!

I doubt that makes any environmental sense at all, and I can't see how it can make economic sense,   What I mean by the latter is this:  If the same chicken was processed in the United States using exactly the same ingredients, rules and regulations, would it be more expensive than one which did two trips between the US and China?

There's more to this story, about planned changes in how chicken processing lines will be inspected by the USDA:

Basically, these changes would replace many USDA inspectors on chicken processing lines with employees from the poultry companies themselves.

What on earth could go wrong there? 

This would be hilarious if it wasn't potentially a serious health hazard.

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On Blog Comments

This post talks about their purpose.  What do you think about having comments, not having comments, the best way to moderate them and so on?

In my experience most comments on newspaper sites without moderation are cesspools.

But then I was thinking about this beautifully written and argued article, which I sadly think describes something that might not be the right reason why poor white women who dropped out of school have experienced such huge reductions in their life expectancy.  The comments to the piece did point out the most likely real cause for this phenomenom:  A cohort effect.

Squarelyrootedblog in the comments explains what might be going on:

I hate to say it since this is such a well-written and deeply-felt piece, but I think the central finding it is based on (like the paper it draws from) is mostly due to a cohort effect. From 1990 to 2008 the share of white women over 25 who completed high school went from 79% to around 88%. This means the group under study shrank by nearly half over those two decades. The reason is, essentially, that while the hs grad rate for white women stayed the same over those years, the oldest part of the cohort phased out into the next life - that older part having graduated in a time when hs graduation for women especially was less tethered to socioeconomic status. Basically, the patriarchal oppression of prior generations, which kept relatively higher socioeconmic status white women from completing hs, was fudging the stats, masking the difficult conditions of the bottom 10% from statistical view. Is it possible that things have gotten objectively worse for that bottom 10%? Sure. Do we know that from this data? No. The question we need to ask is "have conditions changed, for better or for worse, for a certain constant subset of the population over time?"

That is a useful comment, and the comments here (sparse as they may be) are also almost always useful.  At the same time, the comments are a lot of work for the blogger and weeding out trollery etc. can be as unpleasant as disinfecting the garbage can.

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The Blogger's Rush Hour, Nokia and Rubber Boots

There are times (like right now) when I have too many topics to write about, topics which I want to write about, topics which deserve to be written about, topics which are just too goofy not to write about and so on. 

What happens then is  what happens in the rush hour traffic.  No topic gets through the intersections in my brain, except by crawling and horn-tooting.

Interesting, innit?  Probably not, but I'm a bit like Buridan's ass today.

On most other days I keep asking myself if it's even useful to write anything.  Sigh and alas and woe is me and my sermons are given in an empty temple, and in any case I'm worse than a thousand Hitlers.

In other news, this is a joke about the Nokia-Microsoft trade:

Nokia used to make rubber boots.  Perhaps they still do.  They also used to make snot rags (tissues for the nose).

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The New Washington Post And Rape Apologists

CONTENTS:  RAPE


The Washington Post has a new owner, Jeffrey Bezos, and he's going to create a new golden age for the newspaper!

I don't know if two recent opinion  pieces in the WaPo are part of this gold-seeking.  But they were published within just a few days.  Let's have a look at what they say.

The earlier opinion piece, by Betsy Kurasik  is a plea for the decriminalization of statutory rape of students by teachers, if I understand it correctly.

It argues that the sex can be consensual.  It doesn't talk about the problems that would follow decriminalization.  The teachers are in a position of authority over the students,  the teachers have power over the students' grade, the students are still taught to look up to the teachers and in many places to obey them.  That makes student's consent a concept fraught with difficulties (if the legally minor status of many students in such relationship wouldn't already cause sufficient problems).

What makes the piece unpleasant (to put it very mildly)  is its hook (journalese for what grabs someone's attention long enough to get the reader start on the article), which is rape and the rape victim's suicide:

There is a painfully uncomfortable episode of “Louie” in which the comedian Louis C.K. muses that maybe child molesters wouldn’t kill their victims if the penalty weren’t so severe. Everyone I know who watches the show vividly recalls that scene from 2010 because it conjures such a witches’ cauldron of taboo, disgust and moral outrage, all wrapped around a disturbing kernel of truth. I have similar ambivalence about the case involving former Montana high school teacher Stacey Dean Rambold. Louie concluded his riff with a comment to the effect of “I don’t know what to do with that information.” That may be the case for many of us, but with our legal and moral codes failing us, our society needs to have an uncensored dialogue about the reality of sex in schools. 

As protesters decry the leniency of Rambold’s sentence — he will spend 30 days in prison after pleading guilty to raping 14-year-old Cherice Morales, who committed suicide at age 16 — I find myself troubled for the opposite reason. I don’t believe that all sexual conduct between underage students and teachers should necessarily be classified as rape, and I believe that absent extenuating circumstances, consensual sexual activity between teachers and students should not be criminalized. While I am not defending Judge G. Todd Baugh’s comments about Morales being “as much in control of the situation” — for which he has appropriately apologized — tarring and feathering him for attempting to articulate the context that informed his sentence will not advance this much-needed dialogue.

I'm tempted to conclude that Kurasik would decriminalize child molestation, too.  After all, that might reduce the number of molested children who are killed.  While we are at it, let's decriminalize all crimes short of murder, because doing so will reduce the likelihood that, say, armed robbers will kill the people they are robbing.

I'm tempted but not really going there, even though Kurasik almost did.

The second and later piece, by Richard Cohen,  links twerking, Miley Cyrus and the Steubenville rape case.  It's one of those "old man yells at the clouds" piece in some ways, in other ways it's an apologia for the sexual exploitation of young girls, which Cohen sees as perhaps caused by Miley Cyrus:

So now back to Miley Cyrus and her twerking. I run the risk of old-fogeyness for suggesting the girl’s a tasteless twit — especially that bit with the foam finger. (Look it up, if you must.) But let me also suggest that acts such as hers not only objectify women but debase them. They encourage a teenage culture that has set the women’s movement back on its heels. What is being celebrated is not sexuality but sexual exploitation, a mean casualness that deprives intimacy of all intimacy. Cyrus taught me a word. Now let me teach her one: She’s a twerk.

It's hard not to read that in any other way but as implying that women are at fault if they are sexually exploited, that there's no causal link from popular culture and pornography which demand certain behaviors from female performers, that peer pressure is irrelevant, that young men are helpless victims of stupid young women and so on.   It's also worth pointing out that the song Cyrus twerked about, the song she was interpreting on stage*, that song was sung by Robin Thicke, the guy who was standing there fully clad, singing about tearing someone's ass into two and so on.  But for Cohen he doesn't exist at all, it isn't his song that all the shit was about.

My goal is not to argue that all young women are completely blameless or that they wouldn't often participate in their own debasement, for many and complicated reasons, including the fact that the markets want it (for performers)  and that their peer groups want it (for teenagers).  But to erase so much of the picture!  How does Cohen do that?

What did Cohen return from when he began that quote I give you above?  He returned from explaining to us why the Steubenville rape case was not rape at all!  Here's why:

The first thing you should know about the so-called Steubenville Rape is that this was not a rape involving intercourse. The next thing you should know is that there weren’t many young men involved — just two were convicted. The next thing you should know is that just about everything you do know about the case from TV and the Internet was wrong. One medium fed the other, a vicious circle of rumor, innuendo and just plain lies. It made for marvelous television.

So now you know.  Except that I followed the case and knew the details.  According to Wikipedia (warning: this is Wikipedia, not a peer-reviewed publication, but what I read there matches my memory):

According to trial transcripts, at approximately midnight, the intoxicated victim left a drinking party with four football players over the protests of her friends. They went to a second party where the victim vomited and appeared "out of it". The same group left after about twenty minutes heading to the unsupervised home of one of the witnesses.

While in the backseat of the car during the fifteen minutes en route, her shirt was removed and Mays violated the semi-nude victim with his fingers and exposed her breasts while his friends filmed and photographed her. In the basement of the house, Mays attempted to make her perform oral sex on him. Now unconscious, she was stripped naked and the second accused, Malik, also vaginally violated her with his fingers. She was again photographed. Three witnesses took the photos back to the second party and shared them with friends. ^[3]

On March 17, 2013, Mays and Malik were convicted of rape after the trial judge found they had used their fingers to penetrate her vagina and that it was impossible for the impaired girl to have given consent.^[2]

The victim testified in court that she had no memory of the six-hour period in which the rapes occurred, except for a brief time at the second location in which she was vomiting on the street. She said she woke up the next morning naked in a basement living room with Mays, Richmond and another teenage boy, missing her underwear, flip-flops, phone and earrings.^[2]

The evidence presented in court mainly consisted of hundreds of text messages and cellphone pictures that had been taken by more than a dozen people at the parties and afterwards traded with other students and posted to social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, and which were described by the judge as "profane and ugly."^[2]

In a photograph posted on Instagram by a Steubenville High football player, the victim was shown looking unresponsive, being carried by two teenage boys by her wrists and ankles. Former Steubenville baseball player Michael Nodianos, responding to hearsay of the event, tweeted "Song of the night is definitely Rape Me by Nirvana" and "Some people deserve to be peed on," which was reshared later by several people, including Mays. In a 12-minute video later posted to YouTube, Nodianos and others talk about the rapes, with Nodianos joking that "they raped her quicker than Mike Tyson raped that one girl" and "They peed on her. That's how you know she's dead, because someone pissed on her."^[4] In one text, Mays described the victim as "like a dead body" and in another he told the victim that a photo of her lying naked in a basement with semen on her body had been taken by him, and that the semen was his. In a text message to a friend afterwards, he said "I shoulda raped her now that everybody thinks I did," but "she wasn't awake enough."^[5]

In the days following the rapes, according to the New York Times, Mays "seemed to try to orchestrate a cover-up, telling a friend, "Just say she came to your house and passed out," and pleading with the victim not to press charges.^[2]

Bolds are mine.

Hmm.  So the two defendants were convicted of rape.   Perhaps Cohen doesn't know the definition of rape or prefers the definition of forced insertion of the penis  into the vagina (excluding the insertion of fingers or the attempted insertion of penis in her mouth from his definition)?

The question of how many individuals were involved in the events depends on what one means by involvement, I guess.  But certainly a large number were aware of what was happening (I watched all the YouTube videos that fall and saw lots of people in the room where the then-happening events were discussed), and more than one of them took pictures of the victim.  So is one involved when one comments on sexual molestation while it happens but does not try to help the victim or seek help?   Or when one gets a kick out of photographing her body?

Enough on all that.  These two pieces are opinions.  That the Post published them within a short time interval may not tell us that we are going to see one of these every few days.   But something smells off to me, because neither piece is especially well researched or argued.  Indeed, both take an exaggerated position when it comes to rape:  That of an apologist.

I'm not opposed to the kinds of discussions these pieces try to elicit.  I'm opposed to the way they are written and to the lack of careful thought behind them.  I also can't help noticing that both pieces are in some ways about the agency of the victims and about the presumed lack of agency on behalf of the accused.  Hence the title of this post. 
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*For a different angle to the whole Miley Cyrus performance and its relationship to the intersection of race and gender, read this.

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On Striking Syria. Questions.

I'm confused, so this post is mostly in the form of questions.  First, read this long article or at least Digby's take on it.  I have no way of judging whether the Polk piece gives the correct facts or not.

But if it does, note two things.  First, climate change and the relationship between resources (too few) and people (too many) are part of the picture.  Not the total picture, but part of it, just as it is part of the picture in the Israel-Palestine conflict and in Egypt, too.

Second, note this part of the Polk piece:

5:         Who are the insurgents?

 We know little about them, but what we do know is that they are divided into hundreds – some say as many as 1,200 -- of small, largely independent,  groups.  And we know that the groups range across the spectrum from those who think of themselves as members of the dispersed, not-centrally-governed but ideologically-driven association we call al-Qaida, through a variety of more conservative Muslims, to gatherings of angry, frightened or dissatisfied young men who are out of work and hungry,  to blackmarketeers who are trading in the tools of war, to what we have learned to call in Afghanistan and elsewhere "warlords."

Each group marches to its own drumbeat and many are as much opposed to other insurgents as to the government; some are secular while others are jihadists; some are devout while others are opportunists; many are Syrians but several thousand are foreigners from all over the Middle East, Europe, Africa and Asia.   Recognition of the range of motivations, loyalties and aims is what, allegedly, has caused President Obama to hold back overt lethal-weapons assistance although it did not stop him from having the CIA and contractors covertly arm and train insurgents in Jordan and other places. 

The main rebel armed force is known as the Free Syrian Army.  It was formed in the summer of 2011 by deserters from the regular army. Similar to other rebel armies (for example the “external” army of the Provisional Algerian Government in its campaign against the French and various “armies” that fought the Russians in Afghanistan) its commanders and logistical cadres are outside of Syria.  Its influence over the actual combatants inside of Syria derives from its ability to allocate money and arms and shared objectives; it does not command them.  So far as is known, the combatants are autonomous.  Some of these groups have become successful guerrillas and have not only killed several thousand government soldiers and paramilitaries but have seized large parts of the country and disrupted activities or destroyed property in others.

In competition with the Free Syrian Army is an Islamicist group known as Jabhat an-Nusra (roughly “sources of aid”) which is considered to be a terrorist organization by the United States.  It is much more active and violent than groups associated with the Free Syrian Army.  It is determined to convert Syria totally into an Islamic state under Sharia law. Public statements attributed to some of its leaders threaten a blood bath of Alawis and Christians after it achieves the fall of the Assad regime.   Unlike the Free Syrian Army it is a highly centralized force and its 5-10 thousand guerrillas have been able to  engage in large-scale and coordinated operations.

Of uncertain and apparently shifting relations with Jabhat an-Nusra, are groups that seem to be increasing in size who think of themselves as members of al-Qaida.  They seem to be playing an increasing role in the underground and vie for influence and power with the Muslim Brotherhood and the dozens of other opposition groups.

Illustrating the complexity of the line-up of rebel forces, Kurdish separatists are seeking to use the war to promote their desire either to unite with other Kurdish groups in Turkey and/or Iraq or to achieve a larger degree of autonomy.  (See Harald Doornbos and Jenan Moussa, “The Civil War Within Syria’s Civil War,” Foreign Policy, August 28, 2013).  They are struggling against both the other opposition groups and against the government, and they too would presumably welcome a collapse of the government that would lead to the division of the country into ethnic-religious mini-states.

Is that correct?  I can't tell.  But suppose it is correct.  How, then, to interpret this?

The White House’s aggressive push for Congressional approval of an attack on Syria appeared to have won the tentative support of one of President Obama’s most hawkish critics, Senator John McCain, who said Monday that he would back a limited strike if the president did more to arm the Syrian rebels and the attack was punishing enough to weaken the Syrian military. 

Which of the rebel groups would get the US support?  Jabhat an-Nusra, labeled as a terrorist organization?  Al-Qaida?   And if none of those groups are very large, the winning group would not necessarily be anything different from the current dictatorship.  Warlords, for instance, don't spell democracy to me.  But then I am very confused.

One of the awful aspects of wars are the refugees, both external ones and misplaced persons inside the country.  The pressure they face is not the only problem; the countries which now host them are going to be stretched to the limit, too.  Are we doing enough about this?  And if not, what else could be done?

I wish the world could intervene in some useful way.  But I can't think of any that would get the political backing it needs.
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For other views, go here and here and here.

  

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Why Women Shouldn't Conduct Orchestras

 Vasily Petrenko - Picture © Mark McNulty

It's year 2013.  The apples are ripe, the leaves soon turn yellow, and the luscious Vasily Petrenko (the principal conductor of the National Youth Orchestra and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic in Britain, as well as the principal conductor of the Oslo Philharmonic in Norway) tells us that girls cannot conduct orchestras.  

The reasons have to do with male sexuality, pretty much, and also that cumbersome thing called "family" which men don't have to worry about:

The principal conductor of the National Youth Orchestra and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic has provoked outrage by claiming that orchestras "react better when they have a man in front of them" and that "a cute girl on a podium means that musicians think about other things".
When conducted by a man, musicians encounter fewer erotic distractions, Vasily Petrenko claimed. "Musicians have often less sexual energy and can focus more on the music," he said, adding that "when women have families, it becomes difficult to be as dedicated as is demanded in the business".

In translation, all orchestras consist of nothing but heterosexual men or perhaps of lesbian women*, and seeing a "cute girl" on a podium means that sex rears its nasty head.  The fault for that is in the presence of the cute girl, of course.

In case you think that older and/or ugly women could do the job, Petrenko points out that women have families and then can't be dedicated to the business.

This is more delicious than a freshly-out-of-the-tree red-cheeked and blushing apple (I hate apples, too)!

I like Petrenko's defenses even better!  He explains that he meant all this would be true in Russia, not necessarily elsewhere, but he also suggested that if he had made these statements in Britain rather than in Norway they would have been AOK!  High-Fives Dudebros!

The only good point Petrenko makes that different countries indeed are at different places when it comes to the general approval of sexism of all types.  There are places where you can open your wide mouth and insert that elegantly shod foot and not much happens, except perhaps some applause or high-fives.  In other countries people like minor Greek goddesses go on for reams (or would be for reams if this was paper) about the logical problems in Petrenko's views.

Such as these:

Everything he says pretty much would apply to school teachers!  They stand in front of the class!  They are often women!  Even young women, gasp.  And the class may contain teenage heterosexual boys.  So there.  Let's get rid of all female teachers, too.

Come to think of it, we should probably make sure that no woman ever leaves her house, just to make sure that all that sexual energy doesn't spill about and make hard-working male conductors slip.

Sigh.  Petrenko is an asshat here.  He lives in the late 1950s.  He also fails to notice that the career he thinks only men can have while having families is so probably because some woman is taking care of his family.  Things are interlinked. 

And he appears to know nothing about the fact that orchestra member auditions were one of the first places where real sexism was shown to exist.  When the auditors for a place in an orchestra played behind a curtain, many more women passed the hurdle than was the case before, and over time orchestras (at least in the West) began employing many more female musicians.

Most of them are probably heterosexual, so one could argue that having Petrenko standing up there might make their sexual juices flow, too.  But were that the case, Petrenko would probably advocate excluding them, rather than firing his very own self.
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*Added later:  I don't think either group would have any actual trouble following a female conductor, of course, but Petrenko appears to assume something of that sort.

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What's Sauce for The Goose Is Not Sauce For The Gander? Robin Thicke And Robin Thicke Parodied.

First there's the Blurred Lines song by Robin Thicke, with lyrics which are really all about the supposed blurred lines about whether no means yes and so on.  You can see the song here:



And you can read the lyrics to the song here.  A small taste:

One thing I ask of you
Let me be the one you back that ass to
Go, from Malibu, to Paris, boo
Yeah, I had a bitch, but she ain't bad as you
So hit me up when you passing through
I'll give you something big enough to tear your ass in two
Swag on, even when you dress casual
I mean it's almost unbearable
In a hundred years not dare, would I
Pull a Pharside let you pass me by
Nothing like your last guy, he too square for you
He don't smack that ass and pull your hair like that.

The video shows several men in suits and several women in what amounts to very skimpy beach wear.  Some observers think that's how hetero sex looks:  men all suited up and women in their underwear.  I've read YouTube comments, my sweetings!

Then there's this parody take on the Blurred Lines song, called Defined Lines:



It's lyrics are stronger and more reverse-sexist, but the idea is to do a gender reversal.  The singers performed the song as part of the University of Auckland’s Law Revue show.  That's in New Zealand.

The parody video seems to have been removed from YouTube for a while, but it's back at the time I'm writing this post.

What's fascinating about the latter song are the comments to it.  Quite a few of the male commentators regard the parody as an example of misandry, the degradation of men and an example of the feminazis wanting to have their high-heeled foot on their necks.*  But this doesn't seem to make them understand the point of the reversal parody at all.

Other men (and women) get the point.  Popular media defines sexuality as naked or barely-clad women who want everything anyone might think to do to them, and having that definition painted like a bull's eye  on all women's backs (or at least young women's backs) makes life sometimes disgusting and often more cumbersome.

The other thing some critics of the reversal don't seem to get that objectifying men in  a few rare parodies doesn't equal in volume the non-stop treatment of women that way, doesn't make the two things identical, doesn't make one type of sexism every bit as bad as the other type of sexism**.

Because the sexism in the reversal is an attempt to wake people up, to show how it feels when the shoe is on the other foot, to show the gander how the goose feels.
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*Except that feminists are supposed to be ugly and not wearers of high-heeled shoes.  The reason they are feminists is because they hate men and want women to rule the world, and also because they can't get laid but would really want their hair pulled and their asses torn in two and will end up happily making sandwiches for all misogynists.  Or something like that, summarized from some of the comments in the thread attached to the parody song.  At the same time, a remarkably large number of comments were positive so don't over-paint this tendency.  Otherwise you are beginning to slip and slide into the equivalent of all-women-are-sluts disease, only from the other side.

**Quite honestly, if men and women were presented in equally degrading ways in sexual media things would probably be better.  For one thing, men are less likely to accept that treatment as can be seen from the comments to the parody post.  For another thing, then everyone would have that bull's eye painted on their backs.  But naturally I'd prefer something better than equal degradation.

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How Older Parents Are Wrecking The World

It's that time of the year again when we talk about too old parents having children.  I'm annoyed by this piece in the New Republic, even though it might make many good medical points.  My annoyance is based on four factors:

First, the article is a vast exaggeration of what's going on.  A vast exaggeration.  Take the title:

How Older Parenthood Will Upend American Society The scary consequences of the grayest generation.

We have the upending of the society!  We have the scary consequences!  And yet there's this:

That women become mothers later than they used to will surprise no one. All you have to do is study the faces of the women pushing baby strollers, especially on the streets of coastal cities or their suburban counterparts. American first-time mothers have aged about four years since 1970—as of 2010, they were 25.4 as opposed to 21.5. That average, of course, obscures a lot of regional, ethnic, and educational variation. The average new mother from Massachusetts, for instance, was 28; the Mississippian was 22.9. The Asian American first-time mother was 29.1; the African American 23.1. A college-educated woman had a better than one-in-three chance of having her first child at 30 or older; the odds that a woman with less education would wait that long were no better than one in ten.

Bolds are mine.  What that paragraph supports is not the upending of the American society.

Second, the story is written from an upper-class point of view and largely reflects the concerns of those who must choose between further education and having children early.  Delaying childbearing for those reasons is NOT the largest global reason for the reduced fertility rates in many countries. It may be a consequence of wanting a smaller family size, but worldwide fertility rates are not dropping because women everywhere are delaying childbirth for careers!

Third, the story conflates fertility rates and late births in a way which leaves me feeling that the author wants everybody to have lots of children, and that the way to do that is to begin at menarche or so, given that the body then is less likely to have accumulated toxins or mutations or whatever might make the children of older parents more likely to have problems.

Indeed, the story tries to press all the panic buttons together!  Though I must give it kudos for pressing them on men, too.  Usually these articles only press women's panic buttons (We women always do everything wrong:  If we are black, we have children too young and without husbands.  If we are white, we don't have enough children or too late, at least if we are not poor.  If we are white and poor,  we also have children too often without husbands and so on.  I'm going to stop reading this crap.)

Fourth, this article contains something which I've noticed before in these kinds of articles.  Here's an example.  It's a subtle one, following some time after an assertion that feminists really are celebrating older parenting everywhere!

If you’re a doctor, you see clearly what is to be done, and you’re sure it will be. “People are going to change their reproductive habits,” said Alan S. Brown, a professor of psychiatry and epidemiology at the Columbia University medical school and the editor of an important anthology on the origins of schizophrenia. They will simply have to “procreate earlier,” he replied. As for men worried about the effects of age on children, they will “bank sperm and freeze it.”

Bolds are mine.

What's irritating about this?  It pays no attention to people's life circumstances, the absence of paid maternity leave, the difficulty of establishing a family in one's early twenties, the absence of protections for women who take a maternity leave from work and wish to return to the same position in their career paths, the absence of support for daycare and so on.  And note that the people who have to "procreate earlier" are really not all people, because some can bank sperm and freeze it, assuming they can afford that.

I've read similar opinions in earlier old-mother articles, and they always give orders like that, pretty much.   Sorta shape-up-or-ship-out.

At the next step in the article the author gives us the usual good advice about what's needed for that earlier procreation to happen.  That advice (of which the first paragraph is aimed at only the educated upper classes, by the way) will be ignored, as it has been, for decades:

Demographers and sociologists agree about what those policies are. The main obstacle to be overcome is the unequal division of the opportunity cost of babies. When women enjoy the same access to education and professional advancement as men but face penalties for reproducing, then, unsurprisingly, they don’t.

...

More immediately effective are policies in place in many countries in Western Europe (France, Italy, Sweden) that help women and men juggle work and child rearing. These include subsidized child care, generous parental leaves, and laws that guarantee parents’ jobs when they go back to work. Programs that let parents stay in the workforce instead of dropping out allow them to earn more over the course of their lifetimes.

Compare that to the medical advice that "people" will just have to procreate earlier.

OK.  After picking through all that, the piece has good points about the fact that having children late in life carries larger risks than having them early.  To what extent epigenetic studies about mice or rats directly translate into humans is unclear, however, and the article would have much benefited from placing the numbers it quotes into a proper framework.

It's not terribly informative to tell us that some condition becomes more likely with parental age if we are not told what percentage of all children the condition applies to and, thus, what the actual increased risk might be.  Given that most people still have children relatively young, the societal upending the post predicts doesn't seem called for.  At least I wanted to know exactly what percentage of American men and women have their first child after the age of, say, forty.

Just to remind you again, the average maternal age at first birth in the US is 24.5 years, not forty years.  Thus, to write about the scary consequences of the graying generation is like telling us that the sky is falling.  But that treatment is good for clicks, advertising income and the survival of a struggling newspaper, right?
 

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