- Why Dozens of U.S. President Statues Sit Deteriorating in a Rural Virginia Field | Colossal
- I don’t know how long this video of the Hamilton cast performing for the Grammy Awards will be online. So watch it while you can.
- Black Workers Really Do Need to Be Twice as Good – The Atlantic
“Only in instances where black workers are monitored and displayed a significantly higher skill level than their white counterparts would they stand a significant chance of keeping their jobs for a while, the researchers found.” - An alphabetical The Wizard Of Oz recut is both orderly and chaotic · Great Job, Internet! · The A.V. Club
It’s called “Of Oz The Wizard,” of course.I didn’t watch all of it, but I watched some, and it’s oddly fascinating for a few minutes. - Everyone’s offended these days / fuzzy notepad
On Stephen Fry’s departure from Twitter, being offended, and twitter mobs. - Department of Irony: Thousands of legal Hispanic residents are becoming U.S. citizens from Nevada to Florida and Colorado because of Trump.
“There is a measurable, substantial increase in Latino voter registration and voting when there is a clear villain perceived as anti-Latino.” Thanks to Ben. - An Open Letter To Gloria Steinem Regarding Young Women Who Don’t Support Hillary Clinton – Sarah Grey
- The Ecstasy of Influence | Harper’s Magazine
A long but excellent article by Jonathan Lethem about copyright, plagiarism, creativity, and influence. Nice twist at the end, too. - The 5 Best Punctuation Marks in Literature — Vulture
“(picnic, lightning)” - 20 People Now Own As Much Wealth as Half of All Americans
If it could be somehow shown that the worst-off people in America are better off with wealth divided this way than they would be under any other conceivable system, then this is justifiable. I’m pretty sure, however, that it’s not. - Diets do not work: The thin evidence that losing weight makes you healthier.
- This Transgender Girl Scout Stood Up To A Bully By Selling Thousands Of Cookies – BuzzFeed News
- Hillary Clinton Has a Henry Kissinger Problem
“The point I’m making here is not, [Glenn Greenwald voice] HILLARY CLINTON SUPPORTS A WAR CRIMINAL. (Trust me, I know Kissinger isn’t moving many votes in New Hampshire.) It’s that Hillary Clinton exists in a world where “Henry Kissinger is a war criminal” is a silly opinion held by unserious people. Her problem? Lots of those silly and unserious people want to wrest control of the Democratic Party away from its current leadership, which is exemplified by people like Hillary Clinton.” Thanks to Closetpuritan. - Why Hillary Clinton’s Gender Matters
Thanks to Lee1 for this link. - Attack of the Hillary Bros: This is What Happens When a Woman Supports Bernie Sanders Online — Medium
- Yes, I’m Fat. It’s O.K. I Said It. – NYTimes.com
Op-Ed in the New York Times (!) by fat-positive activist Sarai Walker, author of the novel Dietland. As I type this link, there aren’t yet any comments, but I sort of dread the comments to come. - The A Word: Jughead of “Archie” comics self-identifies as “asexual” for the first time.
- When life gives you lemons, make science
A blogger compiles statistics – and makes graphs! – of where the assholes inherhis comments are coming from. - Disabled People Need Not Apply – Discrimination and Disadvantage
” It’s reasonable for a job involving manual labor to require lifting. Making that 25-pound standard universal, though, excludes a huge class of people.” - FBI Arrests Nearly Every Single Elected Official In A Texas Town | ThinkProgress
Six of the town’s eight elected officials were arrested on bribery-related charges. “Those arrested in Crystal City, Texas include the mayor, the city attorney who is also the city manager, two current councilmen, and a former councilman.” - Reps introduce bill requiring women to register for draft | Fox News
It would be better to get rid of selective service registration altogether; but if that isn’t on the menu, then this is the way to go. - Anti-transgender bathroom bills are clearly unconstitutional.
FWIW, “Scott Skinner-Thompson is an acting assistant professor at NYU School of Law.” - This Is How Hillary Clinton Gets the Coverage She Wants
I’m not posting this as an anti-Clinton thing, since I’m sure a lot of politicians do the same thing. But the press shouldn’t be acting like this. - Feminism Finally Destroyed After YouTuber Posts 478th Video Criticising It
- Why Hamilton is the Perfect Mashup for Every Fandom | Tor.com
FYI, this has a date of Feb 5th and isn’t showing at the top of the main page–I only saw it because of the tweet in the sidebar!
Fixed. Thanks for pointing that out! Geez, it’s amazing that after all these years I can still find new ways to mess up…. :-p
While I agree with the general idea that no draft > universal draft > gender-selective draft, it sounds from the article that the representatives who introduced the legislation are using it mainly as a stunt to try to protest the opening of combat jobs to women. It doesn’t sound sincerely as though they think women should register for the draft; it sounds as though they want to take the decision out of the hands of the people who’ve already made it and get Congress to un-make it, and the universal draft is a tactic to get people talking about it.
I hope it backfires on them, and the legislation passes.
Well, I suspect Trump is partially responsible, too.
And hey, if Obama can be the nation’s gun salesman, why shouldn’t Trump be the nation’s advocate for naturalization?
And now a message from our sponsor, brought to you by national parks spokesman Ron Paul: “See Yosemite today — before we sell it!”
A gender neutral draft is also recommended by a number of the Joint Chiefs, because they believe that, now that combat jobs are open to women, a gender-selective draft is unconstitutional.
I hope that either registration abolishment (preferred) or gender neutral registration is probably going to happen pretty soon.
Off-topic: the RSS feed for your blog isn’t working any more. :(
Unless we’re going to have a draft, draft registration is nonsensical. Given that we’re almost 45 years out from the last time we actually used draft registration for conscription and we seem no closer to reimplementing conscription than we were 30 years ago, it’s probably time to end draft registration.
We’re substantially closer to implementing some form of conscription than we were 30 years ago, although I would not call us “close.” Calls to reinstitute the draft are commonplace, usually in the form of the “universal national service act.” As Vietnam leaves our living memory, they’re going to become more common and popular.
I hope that we get rid of draft registration before that happens, but it doesn’t seem likely.
If the US is ever in a place where reinstating conscription is popular, lack of draft registration won’t stop it.
I also think people advocating for universal draft registration may change their minds when women start to deal with having to choose between their non-violent principles and their ability to get federal funding for college or take certain federal jobs. I don’t see how imposing this on women is any way progressive or feminist.
Tamme, I agree that imposing a draft is neither progressive nor feminist, but not because it forces women to have to choose between violating non-violent principles or incurring the consequences of draft-dodging; it’s un-progressive and un-feminist because forcing people to do that is a violation of their right (or “right” as feminists generally see it, anyway) to self-determination/personal autonomy/whatever-you-want-to-call-it.
Feminists (of which I am one) mostly agree that women are subject to violations of that right more than men are, but the draft is one place where that’s clearly not the case. It is not particularly feminist or progressive to expand the draft, but that’s because it’s not feminist or progressive to institute a draft ever, anyway – on men, or on women, on anyone. So most of the people who provisionally approve of this legislation do so because it’s seen as ameliorating an inequality that’s symptomatic of an anti-progressive law, not because it’s actively progressive. (It’s not.)
I have a hunch that most people who follow that line of reasoning to reach the conclusion that, yes, if we have to have draft registration we should expand it to include women, are taking a somewhat pragmatic stance based on the perceived equality of a situation where registration will be equal but an actual draft isn’t on the table in the foreseeable future – so the compromise becomes a nominal one, and we have de jure equality in that everyone registers but de facto equality in that no one is drafted.
Personally, I’d be arguing much, much more strenuously that we should abolish the draft rather than expand it if it looked like one was imminent. That’s not to say that my principles would change (I feel we should abolish the draft now), but that it would be more pressing to get it right rather than achieve some nominal degree of “perceived equality.”
@Sarah: This reminds me of the people who argue for marriage equality against people who are anti-marriage by saying there’s an obligation to make an institution equal before it’s abolished.
The difference there is that even those who are against marriage as an institution can’t claim that anybody is actively harmed by being able to get married. This is not the case here.
If we had a policy that all blue eyed male babies must be killed at birth, nobody would argue that we should kill all blue eyed female babies too, no matter how pragmatic they were. Obviously this situation is far less extreme, but only in degree – the dynamic is the same. If we are unjustly harming one group, unjustly harming others in the name of ‘equality’ is foolish. (Perhaps a less ridiculous example would involve a campaign to routinely catcall men in the streets or sexually harass them at work)
All this talk about theoretical equality is all very well, but it would be very hard to explain it to a pacifist woman who was unable to go to her college while staying true to her beliefs – a situation that doesn’t exist right now.
Ta-Nahesi Coates recent articles on reparations have been really good:
His initial response to Sanders casual dismissal of the idea of reparations
His follow-up
On liberals who cast aside the idea of reparations lightly (a response to Kevin Drum)
On white solidarity (a response to Cedric Johnson))
And, of course, his original article from 18 months ago: The case for reparations.
I’m currently reading The Warmth of Other Suns, about the Great Migration and the experience of black people under the ferocious injustice of white supremacy in both the north and the south, which makes me more convinced of the justice of and need for reparations than I usually am.
Regarding #18: The blogger (Oliver Keyes) actually uses male pronouns, e.g. in the linked article the first heading is “In which Oliver Keyes Sciences the Shit Out of the Arseholes on his Blog”.
David – Fixed now, thanks!
Reading the “Hillary Bro” article, and having noticed (with small sample size, obviously) an uptick in the aggression of Clinton supporters online lately, makes me think that Angus Johnston was right. He speculated that a major reason for the Bernie Bro phenomenon was that Sanders’ supporters felt like he was being treated unfairly, to a degree that was a threat to his prospects, and this feeling promoted aggression in some of them, while Clinton’s supporters were basically confident and secure, with no perceived incentive to be aggressive. He also thought that if Sanders started doing well in the primaries, there would be an uptick in Clinton-supporter aggression.
Though, it’s worth considering that some the people saying horrible things to the actress in the article were probably supporters of various Republican candidates, not Clinton supporters.
Here’s a Hillary cartoon for your consideration:
https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-PhMneRccUHI/VscSrxyyjlI/AAAAAAADAe8/ICTR9QZ708k/s1600/theo1.jpg
If conscription becomes something along a “National Services Act”, such that there are non-military options, I don’t see how it could exclude women and be considered non-sexually discriminatory.
Tamme:
I don’t see how treating women differently from men in such a case would be justifiable as a feminist viewpoint. But then, I certainly do not bill myself as a feminist, at least as the term is currently being used, so I’d love to hear your opinion on the matter.
RonF,
I don’t speak for all feminists, of course, but I can strain myself & imagine a situation where treating women the same as men would somehow disproportionately harm them, so that forcing women to undergo the same steps as men results in less equal outcomes while allowing women to take different steps than men results in more equal outcomes. Basically the old treating people the same =/= treating people equally argument, which as a progressive stance, for me, requires a very, very high level of scrutiny (it has shades of “separate but equal” to it) but is not impossible to pass.
But I’m having a hard time coming up with a way registering for anything qualifies as that sort of situation, and Tamme’s insistence that the real issue is the violation of pacifists’ principles strikes me as a perfect example of a scenario where treating people equally most definitely means treating them the same. I can’t imagine why one group’s moral principles would suffer more after having to fill out a registration form than another group’s.
@Sarah: I think you’re minimising the issue by claiming it is just about ‘filling out a form’. Even leaving aside the possibility of actually being called up one day (which I’ll admit is remote) being asked to formally sign up for something that is against one’s fundamental beliefs is a big deal, and penalising somebody for not doing it is also a big deal.
It’s like asking a religious person to sign a piece of paper agreeing god doesn’t exist, and cutting their college funding if they refuse.
It’s a good thing no men are pacifists, isn’t it?
I never registered for the reasons Tamme mentions and others, as well. It’s not only college funding that gets cut off. I can never find employment with the federal government. Not a big deal for me, but it can be a big deal for others.
Even with those very real penalties in place, I have no problem adding women to those required to register. It’s up to each person opposed to selective service registration to do the cost/benefit analysis as to whether or not they should register.
Of course we could avoid a lot of this nonsense if people were automatically registered and needed to register to opt out. You know, the way any intelligent government would have done it from the very beginning. Or, you know, abolishing selective service registration.
The conflict regarding the draft comes from feminism issue creep. There has been a great deal of pressure in the last few years for every right-thinking individual to identify as a feminist. There’s even a book called “We Should All Be Feminists.”
Given that anyone who explicitly refuses to identify as a feminist (womanists exempted) is pilloried, there is an incentive to label everything as a “feminist issue” to squelch disagreement.
A little googling of “is a feminist issue” shows that pretty much everything can be identified as a “feminist issue” from Israel/Palestine to fracking. The whole progressive agenda got subsumed under feminism this way, and it alienates a ton of people.
So when we have a clear-cut issue of a policy that treats men and women differently due to obvious paternalism, it’s hard for many to accept the first-level “radical notion that women are people” feminist slam-dunk solution because it’s so caught up in the pile of unrelated priorities tacked on to what it means to be a “good feminist.”
Australians are being told that gender inequality is the root cause of domestic violence. But is it?
I found these bits interesting:
“It’s a good thing no men are pacifists, isn’t it?”
I realise this applies to men too. I dunno if you missed it but I said in an earlier post that the current situation is ‘unjustly harming’ men. I agree with everybody here that we should hope for a world where nobody has to register.
What I don’t seem to agree with is the idea that it’s better to harm everybody than to harm some people.
desipis: I think both (the idea that domestic violence comes from gender inequality and that alcohol is the major causal factor) are wrong, at least to the extent that they are too simplistic.
Alcohol can be a factor in lowering inhibitions, but even if you get rid of the alcohol, most people aren’t violent toward others when they drink, and the problem tendencies are still there, along with plenty of other mechanisms by which they could be and are triggered. Plus, domestic violence isn’t just about the times when the abusive person hits the other person. There are larger patterns – the abuser isolating the other person, controlling them. Even if alcohol is a causal factor in the hitting, I’ve not seen anything to suggest that it causes the underlying pattern, of which the hitting is one manifestation.
As far as the gender inequality thesis goes, well, I volunteer for a program that works with LGBTQ, poly, and kinky domestic violence/partner abuse survivors. The people we work with are of various genders, as are the people abusing them. The gender inequality analysis has little explanatory power for most of the people that we work with. You could point out that they’re a minority, and you’d be right, but the analysis still needs to include them, and it also needs to account for the fact that e.g. bi+ women are more likely to be abused, as indicated by CDC stats than straight or lesbian women (if the gender inequality analysis is sufficient, why would some groups of women be so much more vulnerable?).
The analysis that we go with at my organization is that all sorts of people learn the values and tactics of abuse from their societies in which many forms of dominance and control (related to sexism, racism, classism, homophobia, etc) are still widely condoned and practiced (this also informs our general anti-oppression position). There may be various stressors connected to escalations, but to address the problem properly you still need to work on the underlying mentality rather than attributing it to the stressors. There’s a specific intervention program that we refer local abusers to (as we only work directly with the people abused). Its approach is one we can more or less get behind and it will do groups for abusers who aren’t in the “men abusing women” category.
From the department of headdesk: Brown students are complaining that schoolwork is getting in the way of protesting:
http://www.browndailyherald.com/2016/02/18/schoolwork-advocacy-place-strain-on-student-activists/
This is a level of chutzpah up there with the demand that Oberlin students be paid an hourly wage by the school to protest… the school. If that isn’t severe entitlement, I don’t know what is.
So this Bernie Sanders speech, at 31:50…
So does Sanders really not have any idea of how the Supreme Court works, or is he shamelessly pandering?
https://youtu.be/t32JN7ShLJc?t=31m38s
Lirael:
I’ve been reading a lot lately about the issue of domestic violence, and the main conclusion I have come to is that the causes are complex and not well understood, and that current approaches to reducing the incidence of domestic violence are only having a small effect. Which is why I think it’s so frustrating to see that people who back particular theories (i.e. patriarchal socialisation) are willing to use political means to undermine the attempt to research alternative approaches.
Another example can be seen in this academic article that notes:
Essentially researcher’s attempts to get judges to assign offenders to different programs in order to measure and develop a better understanding is being stifled by advocates of particular theories pushing for a political mandate for their theories aren’t supported by strong evidence and what research there is shows aren’t all that effective.
I find it interesting that you argue against alcohol being an important factor with this argument:
Yet if you look at your socialisation argument:
It’s just as possible to make the same rebuttal. That is argue that everyone is exposed to the values and tactics from their societies, yet relatively few commit abuse, therefore it’s not part of the behaviour.
Personally, I think that mental illness (or at least mental differences) is a significant factor that is overlooked. Particular the role of neurochemicals such as serotonin and oxytocin when they are part of a neural malfunction, the maladaptive coping mechanisms people develop as a result (e.g. alcoholism), and the lack of understanding how these things can cause people to respond to emotional circumstances in a way that doesn’t reflect and can in in direct conflict with cultural norms.
It’s also one I’ve seen frequently dismissed with the argument that if mental illness is considered as an important factor, then that means men have an ‘excuse’ for their bad behaviour. This seems to me to be making the argument that it’s more important for us to point the finger at men and tell them that they’re a bad person, than it is to work with men to help them become a better person. Which seems like a rather unprogressive and unscientific argument to me; we shouldn’t be developing policy responses based on what’s convenient for moral indignation.
@ Amp 27
I’ll take shamelessly pandering for $1,000, Alex. He’s been around way too long and is too smart to believe what he said there.
I imagine it’s a moot point anyway – although the Dem race is certainly more in doubt, I would be very surprised if it weren’t Clinton vs. Trump in the general. And if Trump wins, God help us all….
Except that my point about alcohol wasn’t that lots of people drink but few commit abuse. My point was that abuse means something far more than the outbursts of escalation that are sometimes associated with heavy alcohol use, so even if you get rid of the heavy alcohol use, the underlying problem – that the person thinks it’s okay, in practice if not in theory, to nonconsensually dominate and control a partner – is still there. Which doesn’t mean that getting rid of the heavy alcohol use (or any other stressor that’s associated with notable outbursts) is bad, it’s just insufficient, it doesn’t address the abuser’s mentality toward their partner.
Edited to add: It is certainly true that this is still a field of active investigation, and a complicating factor in studying most kinds of intervention programs is that a large number of the people in them are referred by the courts, and thus only participating because they have to, and what kinds of interventions work for someone participating involuntarily vs someone who wants to improve their own behavior may be different. In the context of the work that I do, like I said, we refer abusers to a particular program. An abuser who is getting a referral from a partner abuse hotline is probably more likely to be on the “voluntary” side.
@LTL FTC
Those activists are just talking to some student reporter about how it can be difficult to balance activist life and professional life. Which, um, any activist who’s doing it as a non-professional could tell you. Some of them are asking for extensions on work. Students often ask for extensions on work (and often for less sympathetic reasons, IMO, than this one). I don’t exactly find that a shocking sense of entitlement, especially when the underlying issue is mental health. And if you don’t think people sometimes take legitimate psych damage in the course of activism, I – someone who has taken a lot of psych damage from activism over the last several years – have no idea what to tell you.
I was heavily involved in elected student government as an undergrad, and the elected student officials said very similar things amongst themselves and had very similar balance problems. It was pretty common for the student body president, the vice president, the leaders of the dormitory council and interfraternity council and so on, the committee chairs, to run into academic problems and to have the quality of their schoolwork go down because of stress and lack of time (student body pres/VP election season, especially, was a hellhole). Some of us asked for extensions, sometimes. Nobody ever interviewed us about it for a student newspaper article, which is just as well, but if they had we probably would have answered the questions asked. That was the Respectable side of student activism – institutionally recognized, business majors gravitated toward it, we had seats on various university decision-making committees – but I don’t see the situation of these student activists as fundamentally different. Balancing civic engagement and work life, and staying reasonably physically and mentally healthy in the process, can be difficult in any setting, at any age or educational stage.
That statement about entitlement was about the Oberlin students being asked to be paid for protesting by the people they’re protesting. What they share is the chutzpah to claim that their academic requirements be treated as inconveniences getting in the way of extracurriculars, to be rescheduled whenever the cause demands it.
But that’s not what the petition (issued by Abusua, a Black student org at Oberlin) said. They asked – well, actually, demanded – that “Black student leaders be provided a $8.20/hr stipend for their continuous organizing efforts around the well being of Black people on Oberlin’s campus, city and beyond.”
The idea that student leadership positions should be paid student jobs is hardly a novel idea that has never before been heard of.
I do think there are problems with Abusua’s demands – not the least of which was, the choice to put it in the form of “concrete and nonmalleable demands.” On the other hand, one member of Abusua said “The rationale was, “if we demand, now the school’s going to sit down and listen.”” So it may just have been a negotiating tactic.
(That quote comes from an article about the things people who don’t like the protesters posted, such as a picture of Hitler, an implied death threat, and various racist and antisemitic comments.)
Notice how it’s not getting paid to tend to anyone’s well-being, or for upkeep of the segregated spaces they demanded. It’s not for counselors, administrative liaisons or tutors. It’s for “organizing.” It seems to me that it’s reasonable to interpret that statement as demanding that they want to be paid to protest. At the very least, they don’t dispel the notion that “organizing” means anything other than “organizing protests.”
Maybe they’ll even get time and a half for overnight sit-ins!
LTL, it’s not “reasonable” to make up garbage and pretend they said it. “At the very least, they don’t dispel the notion” is a ridiculous rationalization. They also didn’t “dispel the notion” that they intend to spend all their time building birdhouses; by your logic, we’re entitled to assume they are demanding to be paid for birdhouse-building.
According to Oberlin’s website, Abusua organizes “various social and cultural events and programs throughout the school year which include communications, social and cultural activities, academic affairs and publications.” Unless you think those things organize themselves, clearly they’d be doing more than protesting. The same page also lists a bunch of other Black student organizations, some or all of whom would also presumably have officers whose positions might become paid student jobs if Abusua’s proposal is implemented (the proposal referred to Black student leaders generally, not just to Abusua’s leaders). Other activities listed include dance troops, a yearbook, helping students find scholarships, bible studies, etc etc..
“…or for upkeep of the segregated spaces they demanded.”
They didn’t demand segregated spaces, they demanded “safe spaces” – i.e., a room – in the student union, in the science center, and in Mudd Library. They specifically name Afrikan Heritage House as the model for what they mean by “safe spaces.”
But AHH – also called Lord-Saunders – isn’t “segregated space.”
They do say that sometimes they’ll have a meeting for members of a specific community in a room. But to parse all that as a demand for “segregated spaces” – as so many right-wing publications have – is dishonest and incendiary.
ETA: By the way, one of their other demands was for better upkeep of Afrikan Heritage House, including tuning its pianos. (Oberlin is famous for its collection of pianos.)
Lirael:
From everything I’ve read I don’t think that is the underlying problem. I tend to see it as people impulsively doing something they don’t necessarily think is acceptable, even if they develop a post-facto rationalisation for their behaviour. Challenging the rationalisation isn’t going to prevent the impulsive acts that are driven by other factors (although it might be a part of getting perpetrators to willingly work towards dealing with those other factors).
Some abusers may have global impulse control problems exacerbated by use of alcohol and/or drugs. But, such people will display violent behaviors more generally, and have a range of problems with employment and the criminal justice system in addition to issues with domestic violence.
When we’re talking about abusers who manage to hold down jobs and stay out of trouble with the law generally – the vast majority of abusers – these are people who know exactly what they’re doing. They’re getting a cheap power trip by non-consentually dominating someone with less physical and/or social power than them. This is not limited to men abusing female partners, but that is one of the most accessible outlets for heterosexual men who like to abuse people. Female abusers are more likely to target their children or elderly relatives in their care. Many abusers also seek out leadership positions, in churches, youth groups, police forces, etc.. Most of these people are very disciplined in when, where, who and how they abuse. They wear one face to their victims, and another, charming one to the rest of the world. That’s why they are able to get away with it.
I don’t see how you can believe that if you’ve ever had the chance to see an abuser close up over a long period of time. Most of what they do is not impulsive. An awful lot of what they do takes long term planning.
“They’re getting a cheap power trip by non-consentually dominating someone with less physical and/or social power than them. ”
We can’t say this categorically. There have been many cases of white middle chass hetero women abusing their white middle class hetero husbands. In these cases the men have more physical and social power but nonetheless were abused.
Physical and social power helps abusers, of course, but it isn’t a necessity.
Yes, I should have qualified with something like “in the vast majority of cases”. There are some abusers who like the challenge of grooming and breaking someone who is strong/powerful/etc.. I think that they’re in the minority, but they may often be among the most dangerous.
These aren’t the only axes that matter, of course, and some of the people you’re thinking of may have had sociological dynamics that were difficult to discern unless you were closely involved. (Maybe you were?) But yeah, I don’t disagree with your main point.
Jake Squid:
Yes, that’s an important point. The way a lot of abusers operate shows a lot of planning and self-control.
kate:
While I’m sure that “sadistic sociopath” is a way to describe some abusers, on the basis of all the studies I’ve read that attempt to characterise and quantify abusers, I don’t think that sort of narrative accurately reflects the majority of domestic violence perpetrators.
The data also tends to show that abusers who fit the “family only” category also tend to commit the least serious levels of violence, the most likely to apologise afterwards and are the least likely to see abuse as acceptable behaviour (in comparison to other categorisations such as the “psychologically unstable/dysphoric/borderline” category or the “generally violent”). This makes the form of abuse that you describe the least concerning overall form of abuse if you consider the negative impact on victims to be the most important factor. (Alternatively you might be describing a distinctive minority subset of the “family only” violence that is severe, but not common enough effect the averages of the group).
That’s not to mention that taking someone who is so psychologically broken that they “get off” on systematically abusing their intimate partner, and sending them on a short course to teach them “abusing women is bad mm’kay” hardly seems like something that’ll be effective in changing their behaviour.
desipis:
I’d be curious to see this data, but that’s a bit vague for my ability to find it–do you have links to papers or summaries?
I’ll also point out that here you’re speaking of physical abuse only, whereas the kind of long-term planning discussed by kate, Jake Squid, etc also includes e.g. emotional abuse and controlling/isolating behavior, which tend to go hand in hand with physical abuse, but are exercised more frequently.
Thank-you Harlequien. I was having trouble composing a response to desipis myself. I also think, sexual abuse is an important issue which is demonstably more destructive within families than when it is mere strangers who are involved. This comprises issues of both marital rape and incest. To my mind, being betrayed in such a way by someone who one loves seems so much more damaging than being assaulted by a random stranger, even if there is more overt violence in the later case.
Harlequin:
This article (pdf) is the one most relevant to my comments.
This article is more recent and does a better job at explaining the subtypes it identifies, however doesn’t actually identify the “family only” category within its data.
@Amp 27–what Lee1 said.
I got this robocall and wondered for a while if Ted Cruz (or supporters of his) were responsible for it. But the stuff I’ve seen from both Bernie and Hillary supporters make me me not too surprised to see this sort of “help”. And the call pretty much says “we’re all afraid of being called racists”–these people seem to think all white people secretly agree with them, so it probably doesn’t enter their minds that they’re hurting their candidate.
Since Trump’s whole brand is anti-political correctness and not caring what people think, it probably hurts him if he denounces it too much. Will we get another “my supporters are passionate?”
Committing “less serious levels of violence” is arguably evidence that they are in control of their actions.
“The finest day that I ever had
was when I learned to cry on demand.
Love myself, better than you.
I know it’s wrong, but what can I do.”
-Nirvana
Knowing it’s wrong does not contradict getting off on the power trip. People get pleasure from lots of thing that they know are wrong.
We want to believe that, if someone realizes that something is wrong, realizes it at a fundamental and emotional level, they’ll stop. And, for a lot of wrong-doers, this is true. But there are also people for whom that understanding is part of the enjoyment in hurting others.
I think that some abuse is probably done by people with poor impulse control in moments of weakness, and some of it is done because of inculturated values, but I also think a lot of it is done for personal power, glorification, and enjoyment. And, of course, there’s overlap between the thing. I don’t think that these things contradict.
Switching topics complete.
Thinking about the Republican primary just now, and reading the 538 estimation of the state of the Republican primary race, it just struck me that if Cruz, Rubio and Kasich asked their supporters to vote tactically, they could ensure a contested convention. If most anti-Trump voters voted for Rubio in Florida and for Kasich in Ohio, that would ensure Trump loses in those two winner-take-all states. That by itself would make it very difficult for Trump to ever get a simple majority of delegates. There are certainly more winner-take-all states later on in the race where tactical anti-Trump voting could ensure a Trump loss.
I can imagine Kasich and Rubio agreeing to do this. I have a harder time imagining Cruz doing it (he is famously not a man who plays well with others), but maybe they could agree that Rubio would be the presidential nominee, Kasich the VP, and Cruz the Scalia replacement on the Supreme Court.
Hey, Doug, sorry it took me so long to reply. The RSS feed addresses have been updated; the correct addresses can now be found on the sidebar, and also at the very bottom of the page.