ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES

What the Bush administration is doing during these last days of its life? Might be worth a glance or two, especially with regard to all those political appointees that were installed in the last eight years:

Burrowing, it's called...

More on poking Joe Lieberman with a loving Q-tip as a symbol of bringing the country together:

Uniting the country does not mean rewarding those who have acted like vindictive children, who have stuck their tongue out while giving speeches on behalf of the Other Party. You treat childish behaviors with a time-out.

I guess that last sentence about Lieberman finding the loss of his chairmanship 'unacceptable' means that he's going to go all Republican if he is denied his throne. Sigh. So why not say that?

Remember how George Bush told that to us after one of his past election victories? Elections Have Consequences.

Well, elections don't have consequences for Joe Lieberman, the Senator with the letter I after his name:

I myself think that Joe acted like a traitor to his old party, but Harry Reid disagrees:

If the past Republican era was one where the Democrats came to face the Republicans' guns with old and rusty swords, the new Democratic era appears to be one where the main Democratic weapons are Q-tips.

This is quite hilarious:

So the hordes of darkness want to impose their values on all right-thinking religous people? Like the value of letting those hordes of darkness get married? How is that imposing on some totally separate people?

In Newt Gingrich's world nothing distinguishes "you telling me how I should live" from "me telling you that you shouldn't determine how I live". They are symmetrical values. And anyone telling him that he shouldn't butt into other people's private lives is a fascist.

Of course Newt Gingrich preaching people on morals is always good for laughs.

Short, sweet and Keynesian: Recessions are times of economic shrinkage, of drawing back, of waiting to spend money, of deciding not to spend it. The more consumers do exactly that, the more firms are going to find their sales dropping, their profits evaporating and their employees excess baggage that should be unloaded. Add to that the current financial situation of local and state governments: Their tax revenues are down and so they are cutting back on spending, laying off workers and so on.

That exacerbates the spiral of shrinkages. As John Maynard Keynes pointed out, the government could work to counteract the business cycles, not to exacerbate them. This means that recessions are not the time for government belt-tightening, but the time for governments to actually spend more by taking out loans (if possible). The time to repay the loans is during the upswings of the business cycle. That would mean taxing people more then.

Why this doesn't work in practice is because voters will vote the high-taxing politicians out of office during booms. In a sense it's our own immaturity that is the biggest problem.

Scott reacts to E.J. Dionne's piece about how to make pro-choice policies more palatable to anti-choice people:

Scott later makes an important observation:

Now to the gross title of this post: "Scratching the itch" is how some people describe having sex. It also explains how I feel right now: I have an itch, caused by reading guys discuss abortion policies with great confidence (including what to offer pregnant women so that they'd give birth rather than have abortions), an itch that I need to scratch right now.

But of course guys can write about these questions, of course. And Scott, in particular, is good people. Yet I still itch. This particular topic often has that effect on me, because while abstinence policies, say, are always presented as gender-neutral, they never are so in practice. It's the Purity Balls we get, all aimed at girls, but the boys still seem to come across with the idea that a Real Man at least tries to get into her panties, just now not with condoms at hand.

Perhaps that would be something that the guys could write about a little more: How to get young men to practice conscientious contraception.

         An Associated Press story says Obama’s election has led to an increase in race-based hate crimes. From a feminist perspective, I’d like to suggest two things:
         1. When we talk about violence, we need to stop disappearing gender. Society needs to continue to question why men are more likely to use violence, whatever the issue.
         2. We need to remember that violence against women because of their gender often does not get reported as a hate crime. For example, the AP story quotes an expert at the Southern Poverty Law Center, but as far as I can tell, the law center still does not track crimes based on gender. Its programs, including the Teaching Tolerance curriculum, center on race, ethnicity, religion and sexual orientation.
        People at the Reclusive Leftist site can wonder if anger at Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin has morphed into more violence against women, but I don't know of anyone tracking that, not the way the Southern Poverty Law Center counts other hate crimes.
        Fifteen years ago, I asked Richard Cohen, then the legal director for the law center, why it didn’t track crimes committed because of gender. He told me:

I've recently read the blogs of several writers, mainly out of curiosity, to see what writers that I like might be saying when they are not writing books. On the whole the experience has been disappointing. Most of those blogs talk about the carpentry of writing: how to condense 250 000 pages into some acceptable number, how to introduce a second voice, how to figure out the best opening chapter. I call this carpentry, because a reader is as interested in that as a fan of beautiful furniture might be about the precise details of its creation.

It could be that I'm the only reader who is not into all that. Neither am I especially excited about the other topics that often appear on those blogs: marketing of the books and the sniffles and coughs and aches of everyday living and where to go to get your book signed by the author.

All this is part of the new marketing trend in books: the writers must now do almost all the PR for their books, traveling the country on book-signing tours, appearing on television and radio nonstop and so on. It could be that this has always been the case, but somehow I think not. What I do think is that this is not the way we should be going, because being a good writer is in no way correlated with being a good marketer or a good speaker or a good media person.

That may be what is behind the author blogs and author websites and the whole idea that somehow the readers are not only interested in but have the right to know about how a particular writer saws the planks and creates the joins in the book: The Author As The Publishing Firm.

September, on the fresh playground looking at the weeds, till those are ground underfoot, then just walking around, master of camouflage, unseen, standing beside their body.

Then on the cold, bright October, in the smoky, low, angled morning sunlight, brisk in the morning wind, a quickened face sparked by fall.

Grey afternoons as the dark clouds pass by, smoke in the papery sky, walking on the sidewalks, blown with clean air. Contained, could be thinking of anything. You easily imagine it’s something good. Always alone. Confidence to move in the town based in their experience that they are invisible.

How many late afternoons sitting in the dry office, waiting for a ride. So familiar the old oak office chairs aren’t less remarkable with this kid sitting in one, doing homework again. Some times while mid-problem, with pencil in hand, looking at the page to balance the equation, as if time rests for the consideration, then checks the work with quick confidence. Goes on to the next one. Office brat, though not a brat. Liked well enough. Once in a while someone notices and smiles at the serious face.

Home, there’s an older one to live up to, they seem to like each other. A good kid, a loner you worry about from time to time. But who you expect will turn out all right. You hope so.

Update: Two Answers

You’re right, I didn’t specify the kid’s gender on purpose.

Yes, the original was about a real person, this is about many others.

There was a bit of debate here, a few weeks back, over the amount of support (if any) that progressives and feminists should give to the porn industry. For the record, I argued that at least some types of porn should be viewed (and regulated) as a manufactured product rather than an act of self-expression; and that the idea of "consent" to certain acts is based on an untenably idealized (and, I'd argue, inherently capitalist) notion of free will and rational choice that ignores virtually everything we've learned about human psychology, sexuality, and gender over the last century.

I also made the point that there's a difference between paying people to simulate degrading or violent acts on film, and paying people to perform them, and that the latter transaction can't necessarily be treated as nothing more than a First Amendment issue.

In other words, the violent porn industry is one to which I'm fairly hostile, and the standard liberal boilerplate that sanctifies the rights of porn producers to their profit margin strikes me as pre-critical (when it's not striking me as childish and deluded).

Which is why I'm very sympathetic to, but ultimately unconvinced by, this argument from sex worker Audacia Ray: One difference, it seems to me, is that there's a basic need for textiles, and the role of textiles in society is essentially positive. While I'd never hold utility up as the standard to which artists or even sex workers must adhere, I do think it's worthwhile to make that simple distinction: no one needs to see someone else eat shit, and the fact that one can make money by producing this imagery says something interesting about our culture (as surely as, say, Hummers or foreign-made patriotic magnets do).

As I've argued elsewhere, money warps our sense of options the way gravity warps space-time. Things being as they are, the fact that people might someday be degraded in improved working conditions isn't comforting; we still have to face the the central issue that for many people -- and women too, of course -- the fact of financial duress (to say nothing of misogyny) comes before the decision to be choked or pissed on or smeared with shit. What Audacia Ray is recommending reminds me a little of California's Proposition 2, which will improve conditions for animals in factory farms: it's definitely more humane, and it's certainly worth supporting, but in the end it does nothing to change the basic relationship between predator and prey, which remains almost too obvious to notice.

I'm strongly resistant to what I see as the paternalism of telling people what's best for them, sexually, not least because it often ends up pathologizing or infantilizing women in the name of protecting them. At the same time, the point that I think Audacia Ray misses is that money is coercion. Which is a strange point to miss; that money is power, and that everyone has a price, are central narratives of our popular culture. And yet, the financial power it takes to produce and distribute violent porn is usually portrayed neutrally by its apologists, as though it were some widget-based example out of an Econ 101 textbook: there's an offer, acceptance, and consideration, so everything's fine.

Virtually anyone on the left can see through this argument instantly when someone like Tom DeLay uses the ideal of economic empowerment to defend paying a woman in Saipan a dollar a day to assemble some sort of consumer gadget; even the woman's heartfelt assurance that she's just grateful to be working will not necessarily convince us that she's there of her own free will. But sex is different, apparently; in this case, it's fine to exalt the form of liberation over its content. Sexual empowerment is simply a matter of doing whatever you want, sexually; why you want it, and who profits most from that desire -- financially and socially -- are questions we seem to be learning not to ask.

        I turn 50 today, and it feels like a personal accomplishment.
        By now, my friends have learned that you don’t give black-bordered birthday cards that make fun of aging to someone with incurable cancer. (I mention cancer, not to win sympathy, but to make visible the lives of people like me. It’s a part of the disability-rights movement.)
        Anyway, I’m in remission, happily munching on the popcorn covered in toffee and dark chocolate that my sister sent me. (It’s what’s for dinner.) I don’t need anything else, but if you’re so inclined, here’s what I’d like:
        Please tell someone that support exists for people with rare cancers. I don’t know how you’ll work this into a conversation, but I trust your ingenuity.
        Pink was everywhere last month for National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. For the record, I oppose breast cancer. But I bet most people have heard about breast cancer by now, and they know that organizations exist to fight the disease and help the patients. On the other hand, even some sarcoma doctors don’t know that nonprofits exist to help sarcoma patients. The other day, a woman found me by “Googling, somewhat pathetically and furtively, ‘Leiomyosarcoma hope.’ â€
        People with rare cancers often can’t meet in person for support groups, but we can connect by telephone and/or email. The Sarcoma Alliance has a peer-to-peer program to make these connections, as does the M.D. Anderson Network and other nonprofits.
        There’s a scientific explanation why some of us live longer than others. In cases where we don’t have answers, it’s tempting to suggest that people survive because they fight harder or they have a positive attitude or they have a reason to live. Avoid that temptation. As a volunteer, I’ve seen real fighters who kept positive and did much for others die. This week, it was my friend Suzanne Kurtz, who founded Leiomyosarcoma Direct Research. She celebrated her 60th birthday and then declined into death.
        For whatever reason I’m still here, I may as well enjoy the chocolatey popcorn.

It's never a good idea to write about things which have affected the author very, very intimately. Trying to see all parts of the question is hard enough when this is not the starting-point. For instance, this piece about the "global fertility crisis" is not terribly evidence-based, and the reason may well be that the author herself was sterile by age 32. The final sentences in the article are, in fact, the thesis of the article:

What's tricky about this thesis as the framing of the "global infertility crisis" is of course that very, very few women get a doctorate and a law degree in their twenties. Indeed, very few women fall into that career group in the first place, the one that the conservative anti-feminists dig out when they complain about (white) dearth of babies: Those uppity women should not go to school. They should stay at home and have more (white) babies.

And of course most men or women are not infertile for age-related reasons at age 32. But if you start writing about the "global infertility crisis" from the angle of the quite small group of "highly educated" women delaying their childbearing too long, well, you are going to end up with a biased piece.

There's another bias in the piece: Note that all the close-and-personal interviews are with women (men don't care about infertility?) and that the expert quoted is a man. But in fact something like forty percent of the infertility found in couples who try to conceive is caused by the man, not by the woman! Men's fertility drops with age, too!

I have never read one of these pieces where that fact is made completely clear. It's as if women are a separate species from men, solely responsible for procreation, and it's also as if the society cannot change at all to allow these women both to go to school and to have children. The society is arranged for the male career pattern but that, too, goes unnoticed.

Instead, we get these kinds of red-warning-flag articles. I fully understand the reason for them. But I'd love to read a more balanced article on these questions, one which actually notes how women are not the sole problem in this world.

       No cute photo, sorry. Just a parable.
       I love cats, but I’m allergic to them. In the past, I’ve fed cats only to end up owning them, to the extent that anyone ever owns a cat.

           In the general election, voters in Nebraska approved a constitutional amendment that bars public agencies from giving preferential treatment based on gender, race or ethnicity. (See this article for possible repercussions.) Colorado barely defeated a similar initiative.
           I favor affirmative action in general. But I think it’s a lost cause if liberals treat it like a dirty word. I wrote about this before, noting how Obama equated it with the conservative idea of “giving preference to minorities who are less qualified.â€
           This Atlantic article suggests Obama’s election was          Obama didn’t need to emphasize his race; so many others did it for him, with accusations of racism and counter-accusations of race-baiting, plus discussions about the importance of electing our first black president. Crowds chanting “race doesn’t matter†did not indicate colorblindness. Colorblindness will occur when people truly stop noticing race.

You know that grating twang Sarah Palin has? And how annoyingly Hillary Clinton speaks? From now on I'm gonna loudly (yeah, I know) criticize any politician's voice if it doesn't match this wonderful example about basso profundo, Maxim Mikhaylov (Mikhailov):



An explanatory note: This may be funny only to those who share my weird sense of humor. But I still think it would be great if all politicians were forced to opera sing their speeches in Congress.

This is from a recent O'Reilly Factor:

I'm floating on this sea made out of pink styrofoam balls and looking at the cardboard sky above. Which is shorthand for being in another reality, a reality where Dennis Miller can state three unsupported assertions in a row (it is mostly women on the left who hate Sarah Palin, the Palins have non-neurotic sex and women of the Upper East Side don't have any sex) and that's perfectly good in a public debate.

Me, I think that Dennis Miller might be a podperson from the planet of Cockheads, that his idea of sex consists of picking a female chicken leg for his dinner and that the last time he ejaculated was when Bush invaded Iraq. Let's discuss those assertions, too, eh?

Note how carefully I didn't add any subtle references to Mailer's Executioner's Song. in my little comparison paragraph.

And yeah, bashing lefty women is perfectly fine with O'Reilly, because he can always pretend that Miller is just a little naughty and that he should have warned all the viewers beforehand that there's going to be just a small interval of misogyny (the problem with those women is that they don't get fucked enough but that's because they are monsters) but of course we can all laugh our way through it.

A recent study finds that statins (cholesterol-lowering drugs) can affect the likelihood of heart attacks and strokes even in individuals whose cholesterol levels were normal. The reason may have something to do with the role inflammation plays in affecting those risks. Statins appear to work on inflammations, too.

The study opens up some very important questions: First, note that it was funded by a company which manufactures the statin used in the study, Crestor:

I don't like the principle of drug manufacturers paying for the studies which evaluate how good their drugs are, never mind how carefully such studies are done. What happens to those studies which find the drugs to be ineffective? Are they published with the same alacrity? Perhaps. But note that having drug firms pay for studies means that the study must pose questions about specific drugs rather than about specific diseases. For instance, perhaps there are other ways to lower inflammation in the body (aspirin?) than statins, and perhaps those other ways might have fewer side-effects and/or be cheaper.

Second, note the ethical problems that findings like this pose for insurance providers: Should statins now be covered even for individuals with normal cholesterol levels? Some views on that:

There are formal ways of answering the question of what a health care system should pay for and why, and those ways consist of various types of cost-benefit or cost-effectiveness analyses. The former try to compare the benefits from a treatment to its costs, often failing, because it's hard to measure the benefits (reduced morbidity or mortality, reduced pain and suffering) in the same units as the costs (which are mostly in dollar terms).

The latter gets around this problem by looking at the costs per some measure of outcomes (say, lives saved or life-years gained). For example, we might compare the costs of lifestyle modification to the costs of taking statins, both standardized per life-years saved or some other suitable measure of outcome. I'd like to see a study do that, perhaps supplemented with other drug treatments that might work. But a pharmaceutical company is unlikely to fund such a study.

Prevention is a weird medical field, by the way, partly, because many of us have an almost religious affection towards it and partly because many forms of primary or secondary prevention have been eagerly adopted before studies have shown them to be effective or even without any studies at all. But it's a neat field for pharmaceutical companies as the market for their products suddenly becomes much wider than just the sick and because those still-healthy people are able to keep on working and paying for the medications, too. - None of this is intended to bash prevention, just to point out that it should be held to the same standards as other treatment forms.

There will be more parts to my series on why feminism is still very much needed. So sad, that. Links to the first six can be found in this post.

If you haven't read those yet you have to send me a donation. I'd like a Daimler with burl walnut paneling. Or you can just go and read the posts in the series so far.

I also noticed that I have become rather radicalized by writing that series. It's as if I took the thin veil off my snakey eyeballs and suddenly I see! The brightness, it hurts! I peeled my skin off to write those posts and does that hurt. To pretend to see a society from outside leaves you seeing it that way for quite a while, no matter how hard you try not to do that.

What hurts especially hard is how funny sexism is. It's really funny, and those who cry sexism are the funniest of all. Also, wimmin are funny, because they are such emotional critters and have tits which they should show more. Britney Spears is funny! Paris Hilton is funny! Olivia Newton-John cannot sing! Chicks don't dig music! Nancy Pelosi has bug eyes! Condi Rice is a cold bitch! Hillary Clinton is a nutcracker! Sarah Palin is stupid! (Well, of course George Bush is stupid, too, but we don't spend centuries discussing that.) And all those grating female voices! I never realized how many people find those voices objectionable. I must be all alone in not being able to listen to Joe Biden's voice.

There's an odd paradox going on. On the one hand we get those science reports about how men are the logical sex and on the other hand we pretend that the playing field for women is completely and totally even in this culture, that there is no need to cheer for the Firsts among women, because women already are either even or the overladies of everything.

Did you come across this science piece in the New York Times:

What fun that outsiders can now make up theories about behavior genetics! I have one that has to do with the gender of all these researchers and the person who wrote the article as well as the kinds of terms selected here: "tug of war" between the sperm and the egg, indeed. I bet they are armed to their teeth, those eggs and sperm. Might it not be the case that these researchers started from their own gender war and worked inwards from that, hmh?

Then to the actual questions they pose which is really whether all these conditions are largely inherited from one parent (note that showing that for just autism doesn't prove their theory at all): There's a very simple way of getting some evidence on that. It's well known that the tendency towards schizophrenia has a genetic component. For instance, if both parents have it in their family lines the child is at a much higher risk. Now go back to those studies and find out if schizophrenia appears to be inheritable only in the female line or much more strongly through that. Then do the same for depression and bipolar disorder. Easy peasy.

But that's not what all this is about. It's about Simon Baron-Cohen's theory that people have male brains and female brains, the former being all systematic thinking and the latter being all emotions. Indeed, the article I link to specifically mentions his role as the starting-point of these theories. That Baron-Cohen is not an expert on genetics, either, doesn't matter for these boyz. That the test he offered for determining which kind of brain you might have is severely biased doesn't matter. That his book on all this ends with a fairly open scream of rage about the unfairness of this world to men doesn't matter. That he wrote two long chapters in it about his imaginations and dreams of the prehistoric society which created that systematizing male brain and that emotional female brain doesn't matter.

I'm not fighting against doing research of this kind or popularizing it, by the way. I'm fighting against the lower standards this kind of research is held to, and the language that is being used in the popularizations. Another example of that:

Here's the "struggle" again, between first the mother and the "unborn child" (hmmm), then between the mother and the father! The mother is all alone on one side. The fetus would love to grow humongous (except of course then it wouldn't get born at all and though it would win the war against its mother as she would die, so would the fetus)!

And this bit is very odd: " On one side, natural selection should favor mothers who limit the nutritional costs of pregnancy and have more offspring; on the other, it should also favor fathers whose offspring maximize the nutrients they receive during gestation, setting up a direct conflict." Why odd, you might ask? Because it assumes that once a baby is born it gets up and starts merrily procreating. A big and bouncy baby born out of a dead mother would have had a very tough time procreating, given that it might have died in the absence of breast milk and daily care. It's also odd because I usually read that argument in a slightly different format, that it's the men who want women to have pregnancy after pregnancy, to maximize the numbers of their own offspring, and that it's the women who want to limit the numbers of their pregnancies to stay alive a little longer.

In summary, note how this story is on the face of it a neutral discussion of some rather wild conjectures, but on the deeper level it sets women against men and mothers against both fathers and their own children.

So it's not really about autism and schizophrenia at all. But if we took the approach used in this popularization seriously we might then conclude that men seem to be doing well in this gender struggle as the rates of autism are rising.
-----
While looking for those Baron-Cohen links on my blog, I came across a post about Desmond Morris' new book, all about male superiority. What was very odd is that he, too, links to Baron-Cohen's idea that it's only men who collect things (supposed to be because they are systematizing). Bad research really does have staying power. Soon we shall all agree that it's men who collect things even though every yard sale and every flea market and every antique shop I visit has more women than men in them.

New York Times Special Edition Video News Release - Nov. 12, 2008 from H Schweppes on Vimeo.

Which would you like first? I'm gonna give you the good news first: A little birdie tells me that president Obama, once in office, might rescind the Global Gag Rule. That would be a perfect beginning for his reign, I think, because it would help the poorest women in this world and the ones with fewest options.

Then the bad news: The Catholic bishops have stated this:

I'm not quite sure how abortion rights legislation would be an attack against celibate men, but let that one pass. And yes, I know what they mean by "the church."

How about this study which looks at women's equality across the world? Right now it's the middle of the night so I won't offer my opinions on it, except to note the large variation between countries which suggests that social, religious and cultural norms are all having an effect on the rankings. Oh, and the United States ranks 27th.

You can read the actual report from the study here (pdf)