Open Thread and Link Farm, The Pants Have Eyes Edition

(Photo found on Bill Mudron’s twitter.)

  1. Open Enrollment for AFFORDABLE HEALTHCARE Started Yesterday | And Taking It Personally
  2. Rigged: How Voter Suppression Threw Wisconsin to Trump – Mother Jones
  3. Unsealed Documents Show That Kris Kobach Is Dead Set on Suppressing the Right to Vote | American Civil Liberties Union
    Also note that Kobach directly lied about the existence of these documents.
  4. Things That Are Hillary Clinton’s Fault, Starting With Harvey Weinstein | Literary Hub
  5. Is Washington bungling the Census?
    The statistics branches of the government – not only the Census, although the Census is crucial – are critically underfunded.
  6. EPA cancels talks by 3 agency scientists at Providence event – News – providencejournal.com – Providence, RI
    Because Republican policy is to shut up scientists rather than permitting them to talk about climate change. They really are the anti-science party.
  7. Activists at Reed College are disrupting lectures to protest “white supremacy,” but many students are taking steps to stop them – The Atlantic
  8. Chattanooga man loses job after sitting during national anthem at weekend event | WTVC
    It’s perfectly legal for them to fire this dude, but imo it shouldn’t be. Private employers aren’t the government, of course – but in practice, most working people are not rich and cannot risk losing their job. Employers policing what employees say off the job is an enormous threat to people’s real freedom to speak out.
  9. Stop Calling Women Nags — How Emotional Labor is Dragging Down Gender Equality
    Thanks to Grace for the link.
  10. Inside Sammy’s Bowery Follies, the scuzziest, greatest dive bar of all time (circa 1940s).
  11. The Bump Stock Millionaire and the Las Vegas Massacre – Bloomberg
    But he needn’t worry about his invention being outlawed: Three Weeks After Las Vegas, Legislation to Ban Bump Stocks Has Stalled Out In Congress
  12. The Obamas Choose Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald to Paint Their Official Portraits for the Smithsonian
    Both artists produce works that are very skilled (as is always the case for the artists selected for these gigs) and very interesting (which is not always the case).
  13. Schrödinger’s Fat Girl – Medium
    “The replies come to no consensus but rather devolve into arguments about whether Blizzard’s art of Mei has depicted her as fat or not.”
  14. There’s No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence – Machine Intelligence Research Institute
    Linked for the intro, which argues that the main function of fire alarms isn’t to tell us that there’s a fire, but to make it socially acceptable for us to flee the building.
  15. Many of us know this famous picture of Tommie Smith and John Carlos. But few know the bravery and tragedy of the white guy, Peter Norman.
  16. Distinctions Between Natalism Positions | Thing of Things
  17. The Inequality Beneath the Sexual-Harassment Headlines – The Atlantic
    “The problem is worse in low-profile, low-accountability, and low-wage industries.”
  18. When I was nineteen years old, Elie Wiesel grabbed my ass.
    “While other men have done, technically, worse things to me, Wiesel’s actions were, in some ways, more sorrow-inducing. Perhaps bad people do bad things. Conversely, one might hope, good people don’t do bad things.”
  19. America’s affordable-housing stock dropped by 60 percent from 2010 to 2016 – The Washington Post
  20. A Catfishing With a Happy Ending – The Atlantic
    This story did not go where I initially expected it to go.
  21. The Giant Frog Farms of the 1930s Were a Giant Failure – Atlas Obscura
    And the most basic problems with the frog-eating industry continue today.
  22. Why Is Virginia Tech Silent About a White Supremacist Instructor Threatening and Harassing an Undergrad? 
    And why hasn’t he been fucking fired yet?
  23. Wolverine’s head legitimately looks like two Batmans kissing in front of a sunset.”
  24. Ryan Murphy’s new show ‘Pose’ will feature the largest transgender cast in TV history / LGBTQ Nation
    Very cool. I’m a bit disappointed not to see Jamie Clayton on the cast list, I thought she was amazing in Sense8.
  25. School shootings and the brutalisation of boys
    ” It seems to me that the feminist mainstream is eager to condemn the brutality of masculinity and the violent excesses of men, but surprisingly reluctant to concern itself with the violent brutalisation of boys that instils that brutality in the first place.”
  26. The Legion Lonely | HazlittA longer article asks, why are so many men lonely? (Men in particular seem more likely to be lonely as we age.) Lots of interesting material here, too much to sum up in this format.
  27. Democrats add to ‘Better Deal’ platform with a slew of pro-labor-union ideas – The Washington Post “The main problem facing this installment of the Better Deal is one that’s bedeviled every Democratic policy rollout: The difficulty of getting anyone to notice.” Also quotes some disenchanted union folks saying they’re going to try to advance the cause through referendums.
  28. Awaiting Trump’s coal comeback, miners reject retraining
    This is just depressing.
  29. The Civil War Was Not a Mistake – The Atlantic
  30. The Monster Eating Our State and City Budgets : Democracy Journal
    “The monster” is underfunded pension benefits, and rising Medicaid costs. This long article outlines the problems and suggests some solutions, focusing mainly on the pension issue.

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97 Responses to Open Thread and Link Farm, The Pants Have Eyes Edition

  1. 1
    chuckles says:

    #7 is an engaging and well-paced read – or should I say Reed. :) It lays out how campus politics is different from electoral politics and why left activists have had so much success with one and not the other.

    Reedies Against Racism, which was protesting classes – not trollish outside speakers brought in to bait them, but classes – operated largely unopposed because they utilized verbal abuse and intimidation. So widespread was the climate of fear that the student newspaper would not even run anti-RAR quotes, let alone op-eds. One particularly memorable Facebook group exchange between a leader of the group and a student who didn’t want to attend a protest is excerpted in the article and it reads like a cross between Mean Girls and a Maoist struggle session.

    Only when POC students with sufficient identity “cover” called them out in public did the dam burst and the campus start calling out RAR. They shattered the illusion that they spoke for all POC and the organization was revealed to be a small clique that felt entitled to impose their will on an institution they openly loathed.

    College administrators are terrified of bad PR and will do anything to create an illusion of calm, especially if it can be done by hiring a bunch more administrators and setting up some more panels. Students are susceptible to peer pressure and social ostracism. You can bully your way into controlling the campus debate for some time, until the wider student body learns that volume and popular support are not the same thing.

    Outside the campus, these tactics are useful. Call someone a “laughin at a lynchin kinda white” for not protesting on demand (quote from the article) – a vanishingly small number of sycophants and masochists will sign up for that kind of abuse and everyone else will drop you like a hot potato. Try to occupy a Senator’s office and nobody there will hesitate to call the cops and get that cleared up in a matter of minutes with nothing achieved.

    Protest tactics honed on campuses are a dead end. Protestors who cut their teeth on these shenanigans are setting themselves up for breathtaking amounts of failure unless set straight.

  2. 2
    RonF says:

    In a way, #7 and #22 tie together. For some reason that I frankly can’t account for, there are a lot of schools whose administrators will simply not take action against either students or faculty who harass or otherwise interfere with other students’s or faculty members’ right to speak or simply conduct ordinary educational business. Speakers’ and faculty members’ presentations are interrupted or blocked entirely. Faculty members harass students; the fact that there’s plenty of left-wing faculty members who have done it to conservative students doesn’t justify what this guy is doing.

    The perception of the focus of the academic environment has been slowly degrading in the public’s eye. More and more they are being viewed as indoctrination centers run by administrations who are either openly complicit or who seem to be incompetent or unconcerned as long as they keep their jobs and keep securing funding. Opposition to funding universities is held to be anti-intellectual, but what a lot of people I talk to think is that the universities themselves are anti-intellectual.

  3. 3
    nobody.really says:

    From PubMed.gov, the publishing arm of the National Institutes of Health: Differences in negativity bias underlie variations in political ideology.

    [L]iberals and conservatives differ from each other in purviews of life with little direct connection to politics—from tastes in art, to desire for closure … from disgust sensitivity, to the tendency to pursue new information…. Compared with liberals, conservatives tend to register greater physiological responses to [negative] stimuli and also to devote more psychological resources to them. ….We … stress[] that identifying differences across ideological groups is not tantamount to declaring one ideology superior to another.

  4. 4
    nobody.really says:

    Will Rahn, CBS News Digital:

    In 2016, … Donald Trump … ran on a distinctly unlibertarian message of less trade, less immigration, more cops, and more government. [But t]he first year of Trump’s presidency is the closest we’ll probably ever get to a real libertarian moment….

    While in office, Trump hasn’t done anything, aside from some regulatory relief and a travel ban currently surviving by the skin of its teeth in the courts. Congress hasn’t been able to pass any major legislation….

    [A]n ineffective Congress isn’t the worst thing by libertarian standards. Yes, they haven’t repealed Obamacare or Dodd-Frank, and they may not even be able to lower taxes all that much. But they’re not passing new regulations. They’re not raising taxes. The pre-Trump status quo, while deeply imperfect, is being more or less in place. And it can be said with some confidence that Ryan, who gobbled up Ayn Rand novels in his youth, maintains an essentially libertarian outlook despite the compromises he feels forced to make.

    [T]he executive branch … remains understaffed and overburdened. The government is already smaller in the sense that it has fewer people running around than it did during the Obama years, and it’s hard to regulate if you’re not hiring regulators. No wonder the stock market, which initially fell when news broke that Trump had been elected, keeps soaring to new heights.

    With a few notable exceptions, Trump has also been appointing a raft of libertarian-leaning jurists to the bench, including Neil Gorsuch….

    Trump’s government is not the night-watchman state many libertarians would prefer. But it is incompetent enough to not get much of anything done, which might be the next best thing. Call it the drunk-watchman state….

    Murray Rothbard may have been on to something when he argued that the only way forward for libertarianism is right-wing populism.

  5. 5
    nobody.really says:

    Remember Amp’s cartoon “Time Traveler“? It depicts Amp at various ages, time-traveling back to report that the new president is even worse than anything we could have possibly imagined, culminating with the report that by 2024 we’ll be ruled by giant alien roaches (“So it gets better!” we sigh with relief.)

    The Daily Show is finally catching up.

  6. 6
    Ampersand says:

    Nobody Really, thanks for that link! That’s amazing!

  7. 8
    nobody.really says:

    “Ioana Marinescu, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy and Practice, who researches basic income, says that research on the Alaska fund is enlightening, but not dispositive. ‘We know $2,000 a year makes a real difference to many people,’ Marinescu says. ‘But would something lower still make a difference? We don’t know.’

  8. 9
    nobody.really says:

    In a blatant attempt to distract Amp from doing productive things, the NYT reports that DC Comics has fired Eddie Berganza–editor of the best-selling Dark Knight: Metal and Superman series–after BuzzFeed News reported that he had forcibly kissed or groped co-workers in the 2000s.

  9. 10
    Jake Squid says:

    After being hit with a 38% increase in the renewal rate for our company’s health insurance – and switching to another insurer at only a 12% increase – I was looking through our premium history. That 38% increase would have been about $10 more per month than we paid in 2013. Our 2017 rate was 22% less than our 2013 rate. It’s hard to say exactly why our rate spiked so much this year but I have my suspicions.

  10. 11
    Harlequin says:

    Since this is getting a bit off topic–after I liked to a piece by Victoria Coren on this thread, Amp said:

    Odd trivia: Victoria is married to the brilliant comedian David Mitchell (of Mitchell & Webb).

    I haven’t read Mitchell’s autobiography, but a while back somebody linked me to this clip of him reading the part about Victoria Coren. It’s very sweet, and also has an interesting bit about what it’s like dating when you’re famous.

    (I’ve also just realized that my stance on SciHub is not particularly consistent with my stance on watching British panel show content on YouTube in the US…)

  11. 12
    nobody.really says:

    [W]hy should the Palatine Boors be suffered to swarm into our Settlements, and by herding together establish their Language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.

    [T]he Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased. And while we are, as I may call it, Scouring our Planet, by clearing America of Woods, and so making this Side of our Globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why should we in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People? why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red? But perhaps I am partial to the Complexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind.

    Benjamin Franklin, “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind” (1751)

  12. 13
    nobody.really says:

    From @12, who were the “Palatine Boors”?

    The Palatine Hill is the centermost of the Seven Hills of Rome, overlooking both the Roman Forum and the Circus Maximus. By lore the location of the city’s founding, it is in fact one of the city’s earliest settlements and, starting with Augustus, a favored location for Roman Emperors to build their palaces. Indeed, “Palatine” became the root of words such as palace (Italian: palazzo, French: palais, German: Palast, Czech palác, etc.), paladin (chivalric knight in public service), and comes palatinus or count palatine (Roman title for government official and, later, a feudal title comparable to a marquis.)

    A region administered by a count palatine around the Rhine (today, on the French/German border) became known as the Palatinate. Following a series of raids by French troops and counter-strikes by German troops, 13,000 German peasants who lived along the border—a minority of whom actually lived in the Palatinate—fled to England in 1709. The conspicuous nature of this sizable group, and their failure to immediately integrate into English society, prompted politicized debates about the merits of immigration. English authorities eventually tried to settle them in England, Ireland, and the Colonies. In the New World, “palatines” became a term form any German-speaking immigrant.

    This created the Palatine regions of New York, and the Pennsylvania Dutch (from “Deutsch,” or German). And the Pennsylvania Dutch prompted Franklin’s objections. Ironically for him, one of those Pennsylvania Dutch was Nicholas Herkimer, later a commanding general in the Revolutionary War.

    In case you were curious….

  13. 14
    RonF says:

    nobody.really @ 4: “[T]he executive branch … remains understaffed and overburdened.”

    Well, according to the Washington post, there’s blame to spread around on that. On the one hand, to this point in their first terms Pres. Trump has nominated fewer people than his 3 immediate predecessors. OTOH, the Senate has confirmed fewer of those nominations than his 3 immediate predecessors. He has more nominated but unconfirmed nominees than his 3 immediate predecessors and the amount of time the Senate is taking to confirm them is anywhere from 33% to about 80% longer than his 4 immediate predecessors. It is alleged that the Senate Democrats are slow-walking his nominees so as to keep their Obama Administration predecessors in office.

  14. 16
    nobody.really says:

    On March 10, 2008, the New York Times broke the news that … Eliot Sptizer … had been a client of a high-end escort service, spending thousands of dollars on prostitutes while serving as New York’s attorney general and in his current position as chief executive of the Empire State….

    I was shocked. And more than a little bummed out. I had really admired Spitzer, who had been a crusader for progressive reforms, taking on Wall Street banks and powerful corporations with an incomparable fearlessness, almost a swagger. I had even thought of him as a potential vice presidential candidate in 2008, or maybe even the first Jewish president. Now all that was out the window.

    The more I thought about it, the more depressed I got. I thought about how hard he must have worked to win his first election, and how many people had helped, and how important it must have been to all of them that he get the chance to make a difference. I thought about all the important work he had done as attorney general and was now doing as governor, and what would happen to his mission of reining in corporate abuse. I thought about other politicians who had made similar mistakes, like Gary Hart…. How could these guys risk everything that they’d worked for like that? How could they live with themselves after letting so many people down?

    * * *

    I was now the presumptive [Democratic] nominee [for Senate].

    But I was still stuck in my funk, distracted by the tragic fall of Eliot Spitzer. And I couldn’t help but feel a strange sense of foreboding.

    Al Franken, Al Franken, Giant of the Senate, Chap. 15.

  15. 17
    nobody.really says:

    EARTH-SHATTERING DISCUSSION (regardless of the temperature, or changes therein, of said Earth): Why do we say “his or her,” but not “her or his”? Neither chivalry nor alphabetical order supports our standard usage.

    Discuss.

  16. 18
    Grace Annam says:

    nobody.really:

    Why do we say “his or her,” but not “her or his”? Neither chivalry nor alphabetical order supports our standard usage.

    My guess: because it used to be “his”, because the male default used to be standard across the board (“In 2039, Man reached the stars…”) and when adding “her” to make things more inclusive, it wouldn’t sound right to say “hers and his”, and would also be falsely chivalric and/or giving too much of a concession. (Also, to my ear, it doesn’t sound quite as fluid, but I suspect strongly that that is a result of a lifetime of hearing it one way, rather than actual ease of pronunciation.)

    Grace

  17. 19
    Jeff says:

    nobody.really @17

    English has a lot of weird rules, and it’s surprising how many of them we obey without realizing it… For instance, descriptive words always appear in a certain order: opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material and purpose. As an example, “I have a really cool, little, new, rectangular, black, Japanese, carbon fibre iPad.” And if you switched any of those descriptors, it would come off as awkward as hell.

    Grace @ 18

    My guess: because it used to be “his”, because the male default used to be standard across the board (“In 2039, Man reached the stars…”)

    That’s not quite right…. “Man”, as in “Mankind” is actually gender neutral in origin. If you rolled back about 800 years, you probably wouldn’t be able to hold a conversation with the inhabitants of England at the time, lots of Old English words and terms are simply unrecognizable now. One of the things that’s changed are gender identifiers.

    What we now think of as Man (the species), Man (the gender) and Woman (the gender) used to be “Mann”, “Wermann”, and “Wifmann”, respectively, and somewhere along the way Wermenn lost their unique identifier. Even then, it was fairly understood than “Man” was still a stand in for the shared experience of mankind.

    I think that changed around the time of second wave feminism. There was a serious push to make language inclusive, and I think that people who didn’t really know the origin of the word, but saw something they thought was noninclusive, wanted to push for inclusivity.

  18. 20
    Charles says:

    I agree with Grace, the “or hers” is added as an afterthought to the generic male, “his (or hers)”. I wonder if people using that construction in cases where the generic is assumed female use “hers (or his)”, say “her (or his) makeup”…. a quick google search confirms that all the hits for “her or his makeup” are about makeup, and all but one of the top hits for “his or her makeup” are about genetic makeup or makeup schedules or such not.

    Hisorers did sound more euphonic to me than Herseris when I started saying them, but I think pretty quickly becomes similarly smooth, although maybe the emphasis in Herseris wants to be on ‘Ser’ rather than ‘Her’ or ‘is’ more than the emphasis wants to be on ”or’ in Hisorers. Also, the consonant pair ‘rs’ seems like it wants to split in Herseris, which makes it harder to understand.

  19. 21
    Harlequin says:

    Amusingly, I just yesterday watched the comedian James Acaster take on the his or hers issue.

  20. 22
    Harlequin says:

    Jeff:

    There was a serious push to make language inclusive, and I think that people who didn’t really know the origin of the word, but saw something they thought was noninclusive, wanted to push for inclusivity.

    This framing is kind of interesting to me, in that it seems to imply that if second-wave feminists had understood the historical meaning they would not have wanted to change “man” for “human.” But I don’t think that’s true. After all, what makes the historical derivation of the word more relevant than a modern ear’s understanding? When kids in high school called me “weird”, if I’d said “but I can’t control your destiny,” I’m sure they would have said, “See? Weird.”

    (My intellect wants me to be descriptivist, and yet you will pry “whoa” from my cold dead hands. It is not “woah” and it is definitely not “whoah”. Among many other snobberies. :) )

  21. 23
    Humble Talent says:

    Harlequin @22

    I agree, actually…. language evolves over time. We’re constantly adding and changing vernacular, and the current usage of words is going to be more relevant than historical uses. I’m not sure I’m sold that had second wave feminists been generally aware of the historical connotations of “man” that they would have pushed exactly the way they did, but at the end of the day, that’s entirely academic because the number of people then, like today, that even know that “wermann” was a word can probably be counted on the hands of a bad shop teacher. My point was more that “Man” when used as a stand in for a generic person was, at the time these word conventions were being banged out, a neutral term.

    And I think English language history is neat. I’m weird like that. It’s amazing how many words make much more sense once you learn a little of the surrounding etymology. Knowing that “wermann” was the Old English word for “man” gives “werewolf” a little bit of context, for instance. I had always assumed that “were” was a word bit that related to change or transition, but the word is just literally “manwolf”.

  22. 24
    Grace Annam says:

    Jeff:

    English has a lot of weird rules, and it’s surprising how many of them we obey without realizing it… For instance, descriptive words always appear in a certain order: opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material and purpose. As an example, “I have a really cool, little, new, rectangular, black, Japanese, carbon fibre iPad.” And if you switched any of those descriptors, it would come off as awkward as hell.

    Every language I have studied has adjective hierarchy, and while there is some cross-linguistic continuity, the patterns are not universal. They’re not universal in English, either. You’ve probably heard of the “big, bad wolf”, and to use your example, I am a native speaker of American English, and to my ear this sounds perfectly cromulent: “I have a really cool, little, new, rectangular, black, carbon fiber, Japanese iPad.” The ordering can be influenced to some extent by which modifier the speaker regards as most intrinsic, or most important to their point, and by other things, for instance, euphony and intonation.

    That’s not quite right…. “Man”, as in “Mankind” is actually gender neutral in origin. If you rolled back about 800 years, you probably wouldn’t be able to hold a conversation with the inhabitants of England at the time, lots of Old English words and terms are simply unrecognizable now. One of the things that’s changed are gender identifiers.

    Sure. And “gyrle” meant any child or young person, up until the 14th Century or so.

    But none of that speaks to how we changed from a universal use of “he” to a common use of “he or she” to mean “the generic unspecified human being referenced in this sentence”. I’m old enough to have been taught originally that “he” was correct, and that “he or she” was unnecessary and clumsy. I watched part of the process of the academic world conceding that “he or she” was the preferred use (and now we’re watching the probable start of general acceptance of “they”, which has been in play for centuries, but never, to my knowledge, ascendant until now). So, while I cannot say it with complete certainty, I’ve seen a shift from “he” to “he or she”, and therefore I’m reasonably confident in saying that it’s because “or she” was a concession to social pressure in the mid-to-late 20th Century.

    Harlequin:

    Amusingly, I just yesterday watched the comedian James Acaster…

    I love that punchline. Also, “…and I hope I’m pronouncing this right…” Thanks, Harlequin.

    Grace

  23. 25
    nobody.really says:

    I am a native speaker of American English, and to my ear this sounds perfectly cromulent….

    Funny you’d say that. Though I’m a native Klingon speaker, to my ears this sounds perfectly Romulant.

    Happy Thanksgiving–her and him alike.

  24. 26
    nobody.really says:

    Too late to aid my Thanksgiving conversation with a certain uncle, I’ve just read Duncan Kennedy’s “A Left of Liberal Interpretation of Trump’s ‘Big Win.’” Kennedy acknowledges that, due to the razor thin margin of Trump’s victory, we are justified in identifying pretty much anything as a potential cause. That said, he uses this essay to focus on free-market neoliberalism:

    “[M]any non-college white voters who had voted for Obama did not turn out for Clinton or voted for third party candidates…. [M]any non-college whites who had not voted in 2012 turned out to vote for Trump….

    Why would non-college whites vote for Trump instead of for Hillary? [T]hey were voting against Hillary for the same reason they voted against Bush and Kasich in the primary[:] because [Trump] was trashing the dominant policies of the Democratic-Republican, neoliberal consensus.

    * * *

    Robert Putnam, Our Kids from the left, and Coming Apart by Charles Murray (yes, him), from the right, [agree] that there is a white, ex-working class increasingly isolated from what is happening to everyone else and trapped … at the bottom. [T]he biggest change from the 1950s for non-college whites is the virtual disappearance of upward social mobility. A high school diploma was once an indicator of promise; now, without more it indicates “no prospects.”

    [F]or this group, even Trump’s much mocked evocation of a golden American past is right on point….

    The victims certainly deserve part of the blame for their fate. A “traditional values” response to the crisis—say by banning sex education and abortion—seems wildly counterproductive; locating the problem in big government or affirmative action or immigration likewise.

    But I don’t think the white, ex-working class deserves what has happened to them, even if racist and sexist attitudes and utterances and practices are more common (o.k., much more) there than among their college-educated counterparts. [I]t was logical—if not justifiable—for non-college, white voters in these particular deindustrialized or declining agricultural locales to vote for Trump.

    * * *

    [T]he single most important cause of devastation [among white non-college communities] has been the adoption of “neoliberal” policies, equally by Democrats and Republicans, … since approximately the Carter Administration. Nixon was the last president with a strong, affirmative model of state intervention to stabilize the system and inflect its growth….

    [N]eoliberalism is …. a set of policies that collectively eliminated particular regulatory structures that had produced relatively evenly distributed growth…. [T]he drivers of policy change acted from a correct estimate that there would be many gainers, above all, and enormously the one percent….

    * * *

    [Neoliberalism led to] a dramatic, long-term rise both in GDP per capita and in household wealth. The losses [among white non-college communities] have been no more than a small fraction, in dollar terms, of the gains in dollars to the people living in the centers of development. Those people include migrants from the internal American periphery who escaped to a better life in the cities, and a large, post-civil-rights, black, middle class. Moreover, the gains to perhaps a billion very poor people living in the countries that now export to the US have been life-transforming….

    So what’s the problem? The neoliberal policies caused the good development and they caused its bad effects. [But] the bad effects go far beyond national trends of increased income and wealth inequality, wage stagnation, and differential red/blue state growth rates. They were concentrated on a subsector of non-college whites and the black, urban poor….

    The bad effects were not a necessary cost of the gains…. The gains were so large that it would have been possible, without changing any neoliberal policy, to tax enough of them away from the gainers to fund large-scale attempts to halt or reverse peripheral downward spirals. Alternatively, it would have been possible to alter many neoliberal policies at the micro level, selectively departing from free trade and domestic uncompensated factor mobility (capital can’t just up and leave), to tilt toward losers. Or some combination.

    Nothing like that happened.

    * * *

    Trump’s switching non-college, white votes, and of Hillary’s lost, no-show, white, non-college votes, were in rebellion against the Republican/Democrat … consensus…. [Yet] nothing will come of it. The Inaugural was a farewell. These voters are obviously powerless in relation to the consensus. Only 40 percent of the electorate is white and non-college educated; the putative rebels are a minority of the minority with no consensus about what’s wrong or what to do about it.”

  25. 27
    Mookie says:

    Harlequin @22

    This framing is kind of interesting to me, in that it seems to imply that if second-wave feminists had understood the historical meaning they would not have wanted to change “man” for “human.” But I don’t think that’s true. After all, what makes the historical derivation of the word more relevant than a modern ear’s understanding? When kids in high school called me “weird”, if I’d said “but I can’t control your destiny,” I’m sure they would have said, “See? Weird.”

    Exactly right. (I also take umbrage with the implication that second-wavers were somehow ignorant of etymology, rather than that they were highlighting and objecting to contemporary and historically-recorded usage, the presumptions and prejudices inherent in that usage, and how that usage both reflects male dominance and reinforces it by casting non-male people as interlopers and also-rans in their own culture(s).) In fact, pace Jeff, it inhibits acknowledgement of “the shared experience of mankind.”

    Also

    Humble Talent @23

    It’s amazing how many words make much more sense once you learn a little of the surrounding etymology.

    Well, no, that’s backwards. Examining etymology in a vacuum does not necessarily tell us anything about coding and meaning in a living language. The way speakers use words in the here-and-now is what determines their definition, not obscure roots long-divorced or branched away from their purpose. You’d have to be comfortable with some very special pleading to pretend that language is so static. And if we’re going to engage in that kind of funny business, we’ll need to accept that human and man in English (and languages descended from PIE in general) are not cognates at all (similar to the frequent misunderstanding of the relationship between female and male). Those common errors actually reinforce the feminist objection nicely; that words drift and evolve, sometimes to extremes, to accommodate users and a corresponding and persistent tendency to use words to express the idea that male people and humanity as a whole are interchangeable say something important about a culture and its values.

    My point was more that “Man” when used as a stand in for a generic person was, at the time these word conventions were being banged out, a neutral term.

    That’s collapsing historical linguistics far too much, unless by “being banged out” you mean the span between early written language up to the present day. Setting aside some sticky rules for declension and case entirely, idiomatic Latin, for instance, had many informal but regular conventions about who could use homo, when, and whom they could describe when doing so. Flouting those conventions could result both in confusion on the part of the listener or reader and anger or disgust at the attendant social and political implications of calling someone homo when they were not. Needless to say, it was important to distinguish (gender- and class-wise) who could be homo and under what circumstances. Who counted as homo depending on who counted as “human” and what privileges that meant you were afforded.

    Grace Annam @24

    and now we’re watching the probable start of general acceptance of “they”, which has been in play for centuries, but never, to my knowledge, ascendant until now

    That’s true, but historical and contemporary usage of “they” as neuter singular* is also explained, in English, by its loss of inflection.

    *most Indo-European languages revert to male plural when addressing or describing a heterosocial group

  26. 28
    Ampersand says:

    Mookie, that whole comment was super-interesting, and thank you. But I don’t know what “inflection” means, as you’re using it in the second-to-last line of your comment.

  27. 29
    Mookie says:

    Amp, I’m referring to the transition between Old and Middle English where, among other changes to inflection (like the narrowing of the case system), grammatical gender disappeared but for select uses, like personal pronouns for living things, and certain irregular forms and and idiomatic conventions, like certain objects and places being feminized (pronouns for boats, countries), leading to both unmarked and neuter* uses of singular and plural “they” and “them” in the third-person that do not present opportunities for confusion in native speakers and listeners. (“They” and “them” can be marked, of course, as a personal pronoun.)

    *unmarked where the existence of gender (identity, grammatical category) is in question or where the pronoun is referring to an inanimate thing or things and neuter where distinguishing or acknowledging gender(s) (identities) is unimportant

  28. 30
    Ampersand says:

    I see. Thanks for explaining!

  29. 31
    Mookie says:

    (Edited: I left this follow-up to fester or macerate or whathaveyou, and then posted before refreshing, missing Amp at 30. But it feels a bit wrong to remove it, even if it’s redundant.)

    To put it another way, the weakening of inflection in English gave rise to conditions and circumstances by which we could begin to employ unmarked categories (versus neuter ones) functionally and without loss of sense or flouting of grammatical convention.

    In an inflected language, a neuter plural “they” or “them” helps a speaker “fudge” when the grammatical gender of a word is unknown to them, thereby not sacrificing sense for the listener where the speaker is ignorant and, when referring to people in the singular or plural, indicates an individual whose gender identity is unknown or unimportant, refers to a gender-neutral Everyperson, or refers to a group of men or a heterosocial group.

    But where grammatical gender has minimum impact, where words other than pronouns are not gendered and require no grammatical agreement, “they” and “them” aren’t needed for masking ignorance and can function as something other than plural placeholders for an inanimate collection of “its.” Their use can transition from terms of convenience, expedience, and indeterminance to something more pointed, the unmarked use arising from social and political, rather than grammatical, function, the way all language evolves to meet the needs of a culture rather than to rigidly determine, against all resistance, its hierarchies and biases.

    Under these circumstances and in light of the historical Middle and Modern English use of the nominative and accusative neuter third-person singular, “his or hers,” “he/she,” “him/her,” apart from reinforcing an unnecessary binary that is also incomplete, are surplus to requirements, when “theirs,” “they,” and “them” exist and their usage is canon. Those alternatives to an unmarked third-person are a choice, not an inevitability, and in many ways one could argue continue to privilege maleness (and/or the the importance of a gender identity in general) of the subject or object rather than render the question of gender identity moot except where and when the speaker wishes to highlight the matter.

    And, just to reiterate, the notion that this point eluded second-wavers is a bit silly; none of this is alchemy or lost knowledge. One forgets that the defaulting to the female pronoun was a viable, if less universal, alternative. AskAManager does this, for example, where the gender identity of subjects are unknown or undisclosed.

  30. 32
    Mookie says:

    Of course, some characterize defaulting to a blanket “they” and “them” when referring to a specific person whose pronouns are both known and known not to be “they” and “them” as dehumanizing and de-personalizing, cf the never-ending over-correcting hopscotch between adjectival and noun “female” (“she is a female butcher” compared to “that female is a butcher”) and adjectival and noun “woman” (“that woman is a butcher” versus “she is a woman-butcher”).

  31. 33
    RonF says:

    After reading what Matt Lauer had been up to I found myself thinking “Maybe these guys should have a CT scan of their brain to see if there’s a tumor in there affecting their thinking.” I mean, I’m past the whole “This used to be a common practice but times have changed” bullshit that Weinstein tried to float past people. I just can’t see how any rational person could ever think this kind of thing is ever justified. Apparently being a psychopath helps you get ahead in media and politics. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s something organic wrong with some of them.

  32. 34
    RonF says:

    I am contacting both my Senators and my Representative and asking the following questions:

    1) Have you ever used taxpayer money to settle a sexual harassment claim against you?
    2) If not, were you aware that such a system existed?
    3) Will you co-sponsor a bill to reveal the names of everyone who did such a thing and the amount of money that was spent?
    4) Will you sponsor a bill to reveal the names of every person who authorized or approved such a payment, on whose behalf the payment was that they authorized or approved and the amount of money involved?

  33. 35
    Elusis says:

    No, RonF, it’s not men with brain tumors, or mental illness, or psychopathy, or abuse histories. It’s men, all kinds of men. Sick and well and smart and stupid and progressive and regressive.

    Nearly 1/3 of college men say they would force a woman to [have] sexual intercourse, but many would not consider that rape.

  34. 36
    Gracchi says:

    Elusis,

    Some scientists draw false conclusions by asking respondents to answer on a scale from ‘not at all’ to ‘very likely’ and then converting this into a yes/no scale, where every answer but ‘not at all’ is treated as ‘yes’. The result is that scrupulous respondents who believe that there may be rare circumstances where they will do bad things (like when drunk or drugged) and who thus are unwilling to answer that they are absolutely certain that they will never do something bad, are treated as if they are fine with doing bad things. IMO, this is not appropriate and this deceives those who read the papers that use this method.

    My theory is that this is not an intentional deception, but that these scientists don’t understand how some respondents interpret their questions.

    Anyway, this error means that it is a falsehood when you say that the study shows that “nearly 1/3 of college men say they would force a woman to [have] sexual intercourse.” What it actually shows that nearly 1/3 of college men believe that there may be a circumstance in which they would rape someone. This doesn’t even have to mean that they believe that such a circumstance exists, they may simply feel unable to answer with absolute certainty that they will never rape someone while drunk or drugged.

    The proof of my claim can be found in the Edwards paper your link refers to, which uses a yes/no scale (see table 1). That paper explains that it uses the survey from this Malamuth paper. You can see on page 37 that it uses a 1-5 scale, ranging from ‘not at all’ to ‘very likely.’ You can also see on that page that the question (marked as ’13 & 14′) does not specify that it’s limited to what the respondent thinks he may do while being of sound mind.

    Now, the Edwards paper doesn’t explicitly say how it converted the 1-5 scale into a yes/no scale (which is negligence on their part), but given the high ‘yes’ values, it’s almost certain that they counted all 2-5 responses as yes.

  35. 37
    Michael says:

    Gracchi#36- Yes, people with scrupulosity/ harm OCD do sometimes worry that they might rape or sexually harass women- I have no problem believing that the problem is much greater than usually stated- but I have a MAJOR problem believing that they comprise more than a few percent of the male population. The condition is too unknown for that.
    That being said, I don’t put too much stock in studies where people say they’d commit a crime if they could be sure they’d get away with it. If my aunt had testicles, she’d be my uncle.

  36. 38
    desipis says:

    Gracchi, that’s not the only sloppy thing in that study.

    This is the phrasing used in their methodology section (emphasis mine):

    The behaviors that were included were heterosexual intercourse, forcing a female to do something sexual she does not want to, and rape.

    Those three items (which match those in the referenced Malamuth paper) somehow transform into two different items in their results section (table 1):

    Intentions to force a woman to sexual intercourse
    Any intentions to rape a woman

    It’s not clear what questions were actually asked and “something sexual” to “sexual intercourse” is a very significant difference in this context.

    Another important point applies to the interpretation of the results that men don’t consider “forcing sexual intercourse” to be “rape”. The conjunction fallacy is a common logical error when people think about the likelihood of two similar and overlapping concepts. Interpretations of responses from people about likelihood as if they were consistent with Bayesian probability are significantly flawed.

  37. 39
    Ampersand says:

    Gracchi:

    Some scientists draw false conclusions by asking respondents to answer on a scale from ‘not at all’ to ‘very likely’ and then converting this into a yes/no scale, where every answer but ‘not at all’ is treated as ‘yes’.

    I can definitely believe this happens – but I’d still prefer to see some evidence cited.

    Desipis:

    Another important point applies to the interpretation of the results that men don’t consider “forcing sexual intercourse” to be “rape”. The conjunction fallacy is a common logical error when people think about the likelihood of two similar and overlapping concepts. Interpretations of responses from people about likelihood as if they were consistent with Bayesian probability are significantly flawed.

    I’m having trouble following your argument here. Could you spell out what you mean a bit more?

  38. 40
    Ampersand says:

    Michael – nonetheless, I think there’s still a significant difference between someone saying “very unlikely” versus “likely,” and counting them both the same – that is, both as not having answered “absolutely not” – does seem troubling, especially if the conflation isn’t reported.

    If almost no one answered “very unlikely,” however, then it would matter less. But that’s something I’d prefer to see reported in the study.

    If my aunt had testicles, she’d be my uncle.

    Except, of course, for those people who have aunts with testicles, or uncles without testicles.

  39. 41
    Charles says:

    Table 1 in the Malamuth paper (page 37) shows the percentage of respondents who gave each answer on a 5 point scale:
    for likelihood the respondent would commit rape:
    1 = 74%, 2 = 14%, 3 = 6%, 4 =5%, 5 =2%
    for likelihood the respondent would force a woman to do something sexual she didn’t want to do:
    1 =42%, 2= 27%, 3= 14%, 4=12%, 5=5%

    Based on that, assuming the two studies produced similar results, it would appear that Edwards et al grouped 1-2 as no and 3-5 as yes (31% would force, 13% would rape in Malamuth and 32%/14% in Edwards). On the other hand, supporting Gracchi’s assumption is the Table 1 descriptor of the seconds row “Any intentions to rape a woman” (emphasis added). “Any intentions” sounds more like 2-5 than 3-5.

    While I can see wanting to excluding over-scrupulous responses, arguing that some of the respondents were acknowledging that they might commit rape or force sexual acts when they weren’t in their right mind doesn’t diminish the number. Many rapes and sexual assaults are committed by people who are drunk or angry or grieving (that was Roman Polanski’s excuse for drugging and raping a 14 year old), so someone who acknowledges that they might commit rape or sexual assault when not in their right mind is someone who acknowledges that they might rape someone, period.

  40. 42
    Ampersand says:

    Thanks, Charles.

    I had to go look to see which direction the scale goes in. In case anyone else does, I can save you a click:

    In answer to “how likely, if at all, are you to commit such acts,” “1” indicates “not at all,” and 5 indicates “very likely.”

  41. 43
    Gracchi says:

    Ampersand,

    I can definitely believe this happens – but I’d still prefer to see some evidence cited.

    See the Edwards paper*, page 190 bottom left to top right, where it says that they asked the respondents about their intentions by using part of the attraction to sexual aggression (ASA) scale as further defined in the Malamuth paper*. It quotes** part of the question that it uses, which is the question marked as ’13 & 14′ on page 37 of the Malamuth paper (no other question in the ASA scale survey has that text fragment).

    So this establishes that the Edwards paper used the question in the Malamuth paper and that they initially scored the question on a scale of 1-5 , because they say that they used the ASA scale. They did not say that they merely used the question from the ASA scale, which is what they should have said, if they had used their own scoring in the survey.

    So up to this point I have proven that, if the Edwards paper writers didn’t write down falsehoods, they asked the ASA question marked as ’13 & 14′ and collected the answers on a 1-5 scale.

    However, we see in the Edwards paper that table 1 has the answers as percentages of respondents who indicated yes or no. So there must have been a conversion from 1-5 to yes/no. The Edwards paper is negligent in not explaining that they did this or how they did this, but they must have done so, unless they told a falsehood earlier.

    Ultimately, a trustworthy scientific paper has to explain their methodology, making clear how their results were collected. The Edwards paper provably fails at this by claiming that they used a 1-5 scale and then presenting their data as yes/no.

    I also think that they were deceptive by presenting their outcomes as the respondents giving their “intentions to force a woman to sexual intercourse,” when question 13/14 from the ASA scale doesn’t talk about intent, but about likelihood. If you ask people how likely they think they are to cause a car crash, it would be wrong to assume that people only consider the possibility that they will intentionally crash their car. Similarly, one may assume that some of the people answering the question would think that they might unintentionally force a woman to sexual intercourse, for example because of impairment.

    This might actually explain why the yes percentages of the ‘Intentions to force a woman to sexual intercourse’ question is far higher than the ‘Any intentions to rape a woman’ question. Many of the men may believe that rape requires premeditation, so they may think that they could accidentally force a woman to sexual intercourse when being drunk or drugged, but not with intent to rape.

    Anyway, if you look at the Malamuth paper (page 29, bottom right), it explicitly says that the outcomes of ASA scale surveys cannot be presumed to accurately reflect intention to rape. So the way that the Edwards paper interprets the results is explicitly rejected by the Malamuth paper, even though the Edwards paper depends on the methodology defined by the Malamuth. Interpreting the results of using a methodology in a way that is inappropriate according to the scientists who developed the methodology and who present evidence why this is inappropriate, is of course a major, major issue. The Edwards paper doesn’t even note that they are doing this, which strongly suggests that they were very sloppy.

    Because of this deceptive presentation in the Edwards paper, Elusis understandably misunderstood what was actually presented. RonF was talking about men like Weinstein, who as we know, is a predator with premeditated intent to commit sexual assault/rape. The paper that Elusis referenced does not show that 1/3 of men have premeditated intent to commit sexual assault/rape. I think that I have shown this conclusively.

    *The links to both papers are in my previous comment.

    ** “if nobody would ever know and there wouldn’t be any consequences”

  42. 44
    Gracchi says:

    Charles,

    I initially thought that the Malamuth figures strongly suggested that the Edwards paper converted 2-5 to yes, but after looking at it more, I am now rather unsure/confused. So in the post above this one, I build a case that the Edwards paper has major issues and that it cannot be used in the way that Elusis used it, without arguing that this is because the paper converted 2-5 to yes.

    so someone who acknowledges that they might commit rape or sexual assault when not in their right mind is someone who acknowledges that they might rape someone, period.

    Are you 100% sure that you will never commit rape when drunk or having used mind-altering drugs? I’m not talking about 99.99% percent certainty, but absolute certainty.

    I personally don’t believe that I can be 100% sure, because I believe that drugs/alcohol can be very potent and that I cannot predict with absolute certainty what it does to me. Furthermore, I don’t believe that a non-intent to use drugs/alcohol provides 100% certainty, because alcohol/drugs can be administered to me against my will.

  43. 45
    Ampersand says:

    Having been both drunk (albeit very, very rarely) and having used mind-altering drugs (less rarely), I’m 100% sure that I’d never commit rape, any more than I’d decide to chop off my own arm or beat up one of the children in my life. Being on drugs simply doesn’t change me to THAT extreme; I become giggly and see new colors and become frightened of police and lose my sense of time. I don’t assault people.

    Regarding this:

    Some scientists draw false conclusions by asking respondents to answer on a scale from ‘not at all’ to ‘very likely’ and then converting this into a yes/no scale, where every answer but ‘not at all’ is treated as ‘yes’.

    I can definitely believe this happens – but I’d still prefer to see some evidence cited.

    You misunderstood what I was asking. I wasn’t asking you about the Edwards paper specifically; I was asking you about your claim that this is something “some scientists” do, which I took to be a claim that it’s common enough so that we should assume it’s “almost certain”ly the case when a number is larger than we’d intuitively expect (i.e., “but given the high ‘yes’ values, it’s almost certain that they counted all 2-5 responses as yes.”). I’m sorry I wasn’t clearer about what I was asking.

    Regarding Edwards, I agree with you both that the authors should have specified how the 1-5 scale was converted to a dichotomous variable, and that they either should not have taken the Malamuth scale to indicate “intent,” or at least should have justified that choice while acknowledging that Malamuth cautioned against that interpretation.

  44. 46
    Elusis says:

    And so we miss the forest for the trees. I doubted whether I should include that link and now I wish I hadn’t, because now we’re talking about study methodology rather than the point: all kinds of men harass, grab, pinch, leer, stalk, make crude “jokes,” pressure, touch, demean, degrade, boundary-test, offer quid-pro-quos, “accidentally” show porn, sexualize, assault, rape, and otherwise cross boundaries. All kinds.

  45. 47
    Harlequin says:

    I just can’t see how any rational person could ever think this kind of thing is ever justified. […] I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s something organic wrong with some of them.

    Regardless of whether this is true or not–what difference does it make? Theoretically, the abusers are not less morally responsible, nor should any punishment or consequence be different, if they have psychological problems (apart from the kinds that we already account for in, say, the legal system–which does not appear to be the case for the abuse cases that have been coming out lately). Practically, it’s all well and good to say there’s something wrong with people who sexually harass or abuse others, but unless you can detect and treat or address that before they abuse, that does us no good at all. And I see no evidence of our society doing a good job of detecting and preventing specific individual people from abusing, although some systematic choices seem to be (thankfully) reducing the amount of abuse that occurs.

    I suppose the main difference would be what kind of treatment is necessary to prevent these people from abusing again once they’ve been caught. But that seems like a very small part of the reckoning we are now, finally, starting to have.

  46. 48
    desipis says:

    And so we miss the forest for the trees.

    I see it that we skipped the dogma for the evidence; which is a good thing.

    I’m having trouble following your argument here. Could you spell out what you mean a bit more?

    People are going to focus on common meaning and intended significance of the words rather than their literal meaning.

    Consider a person who ate a salad including tomatoes for lunch. If you ask them “did you eat a fruit for lunch?“, they would likely respond “no“; yet if you ask them “is a tomato a fruit?” they might very well respond “yes“. The implied emphasis in the first question is on general culinary definitions, while the later the implied emphasis is on scientific definitions. The person’s response to the first question shouldn’t be used to imply they don’t think tomatoes are a fruit, simply that that fact wasn’t a significant factor of their answer.

    In regards to the study, using the word “rape” in the question is going to evoke a sense of moral extremes and the subject will likely infer the intent is to focus more extreme acts that could be described as “forced sex”, and then judge whether they feel like they could commit such acts. Using the term “forced sexual intercourse” invites a more technical consideration and the subject will likely infer the intent is to focus on the less extreme acts. There’s also the fact that a subject answering both questions would likely infer there is an intended significance difference between the two and adjust their responses accordingly, exacerbating the issue.

  47. 49
    Michael says:

    @Charles#41, Ampersand#45
    “someone who acknowledges that they might commit rape or sexual assault when not in their right mind is someone who acknowledges that they might rape someone, period.”
    “having been both drunk (albeit very, very rarely) and having used mind-altering drugs (less rarely), I’m 100% sure that I’d never commit rape, any more than I’d decide to chop off my own arm or beat up one of the children in my life. Being on drugs simply doesn’t change me to THAT extreme; I become giggly and see new colors and become frightened of police and lose my sense of time. I don’t assault people.”
    No, Ampersand, you’re not 100% sure. There’s still a small chance that you will and you’re willing to take the risk. What Gracchi meant when he talked about “scrupulous” is that people with scrupulosity/harm OCD will worry that might harm people even if there’s only a very small probability that they would. And Charles, the point is that someone that worries excessively that they might rape someone might be no more likely than a “normal” person to rape. Now, just to be clear, I don’t think such people are more than a small fraction of the people who answered the survey. But the point is that SOME people who are harmless DO think they might be a threat.

  48. 50
    Harlequin says:

    In regards to the study, using the word “rape” in the question is going to evoke a sense of moral extremes and the subject will likely infer the intent is to focus more extreme acts that could be described as “forced sex”, and then judge whether they feel like they could commit such acts. Using the term “forced sexual intercourse” invites a more technical consideration and the subject will likely infer the intent is to focus on the less extreme acts. There’s also the fact that a subject answering both questions would likely infer there is an intended significance difference between the two and adjust their responses accordingly, exacerbating the issue.

    But “rape” is not a subcategory of “forced sex.” To the extent that they are different, it is forced sex that is a subcategory of rape (which may also include, eg, coerced sex, if you’re considering forced only to mean physically forced). And “forced sex” is, for most people, one of the centrally defining subgroups of “rape” if they’re not completely synonymous, so the effect you describe should be small.

  49. 51
    Gracchi says:

    Ampersand,

    I’m 100% sure that I’d never commit rape

    Are you talking about a stereotypical/extreme case of rape, where a person knowingly commits rape? Or are you talking about the very typical kind where both people have been drinking and one person has trouble communicating their desires clearly and the other person has trouble recognizing what the one person is communicating?

    Alcohol has the very unfortunate combination of effects where it impairs people, but also impairs their perception of their impairment. Now, you may be one of the rare people whose perception is not altered when under the influence, but scientific research strongly suggests that almost all drunken people who think that they function on a high cognitive level, are in fact impaired when tested. So I can’t take your word for it that you are any different.

    Note that the ASA scale doesn’t define rape or ‘forcing sexual intercourse.’ We know from other studies that people have wildly inconsistent definitions. So we have absolutely no idea how the students from the study actually defined these terms. For example, with the recent scandals we’ve seen that some people define any power disparity between people as being likely to cause forced sexual intercourse. There is a subset of feminists who believe that truly voluntary heterosexual sex cannot happen and/or that we cannot prevent abuse of power in heterosexual sex, due to gender inequality.

    So some male students may believe that they may end up having sex with a woman who perceives the man as having the power to hurt them and who choose to have sex against their will out of fear, without communicating this clearly to the man (because they are afraid to do that too). They may believe this means it there is a decent chance that they end up ‘forcing sexual intercourse’ accidentally because of such a scenario.

    I was asking you about your claim that this is something “some scientists” do, which I took to be a claim that it’s common enough so that we should assume it’s “almost certain”ly the case when a number is larger than we’d intuitively expect

    ‘Some’ is an extremely weak claim. I would have said ‘many’ if I were to make a claim that it is common and ‘most’ if I were to make a claim that most scientists do this.

  50. 52
    Gracchi says:

    Elusis,

    I wish I hadn’t, because now we’re talking about study methodology rather than the point: all kinds of men harass, grab, pinch, leer, stalk, make crude “jokes,” pressure, touch, demean, degrade, boundary-test, offer quid-pro-quos, “accidentally” show porn, sexualize, assault, rape, and otherwise cross boundaries. All kinds.

    All kinds of women do these things, as well.

    However, the currently popular sport among most feminists and non-feminists seems to be to essentialize both men and women, where we blame all men for what some men do and blame no women for what some women do.

  51. 53
    Charles says:

    Gracchi:

    RonF was talking about men like Weinstein,

    And (implicitly) men like Louis CK, a man who has never committed sexual assault or rape as far as we know, who has merely forced multiple women to do something sexual they didn’t want to do, which is what the ASA specifically asks about, oddly enough.

    More importantly, RonF suggests that men like Louis CK and Weinstein are exceptionally aberrant (e.g. suffering from a brain tumor) rather than being the visible surface of a common problem. As Elusis pointed to, there is a large body of research, of which Edwards is an example, that demonstrates that lots of men are attracted to or open to committing rape or other forms of sexual violation of women. Louis CK and Weinstein (and probably the teacher at my high school who ran the yearbook club, and millions of other men) simply found themselves in the position where they were pretty sure they could get away with it, and failed to consider the harm they were doing to their victims to be a sufficient detriment to counter-balance their enjoyment (or possibly, as Edwards argues, they considered the harm they were doing to be part of their enjoyment).

    In other research, Koss (1998) found that 15% of men surveyed had engaged in sexual contact through force or the threat of force. Louis CK’s form of harassment wouldn’t even show up as that. He’d perhaps be part of the 25% who self reported that they had engaged in some form of sexual aggression (although even there, not quite).

    So Edwards founds that 30% of men might engage in sexual aggression, while Koss found that 25% of men had engaged in sexual aggression. That’s not a lot of difference, particularly considering Edwards small sample size.

    I think RonF’s mistake is to think that all but a tiny aberrant minority only take actions that they believe are justified (“I just can’t see how any rational person could ever think this kind of thing is ever justified”).

    Back to the trees for a moment:
    The Malamuth paper you linked to is Part One. In part two of the paper, an earlier Malamuth paper from 1984 if referenced that demonstrates that the 1-5 scale can appropriately be divided into 1 “no” and 2-5 “maybe”, and Part Two endorses this method as the correct interpretation of the ASA. The researcher asks people to rate on a scale of 1-5, and then reads 1 as “no” and 2-5 as “maybe.” So if that is what Edwards did, they were correctly applied the ASA as described. Because you are trying to dig up arguments why their research is bad rather than being a fellow researcher, you perhaps didn’t notice that the paper had two parts and that the second part explicitly endorses what you accuse Edwards et al of doing, thus wasting all our time with a pointless derail. You call it a bad wrong method, but you fail to link to the literature that demonstrates that it is not an appropriate method.

    For the slight oddity of equating “force a woman to do something sexual she doesn’t want to” and “force a woman to have sexual intercourse she doesn’t want,” you’ll need to dig into the earlier literature referenced in Malamuth (1989a), because while Malamuth specifies the first version of the question in table 1, they also reference this as the “likelihood of forced sex” question in the introduction and repeatedly, so Edwards is again using the method as written when they treat the result for that question as referring to forced sex (that is: rape).

    Note also that, relevant to both your claims and Michael’s concerns about never being absolutely sure, the 1-5 scale uses the labels “not at all likely” and “very unlikely” for 1 and 2. “Not at all likely” does not mean “Could not ever happen.” It is not at all likely that I will be struck by a meteor or that I will be asleep 20 minutes from now, even though both of those things could conceivably happen (it is conceivably possible that the vitamin D pills I just took were actually a powerful sleeping agent, due to some error at the factory, and I’m about to slump to the floor, but that is not at all likely).

    Gracchi again:

    Because of this deceptive presentation in the Edwards paper, Elusis understandably misunderstood what was actually presented.

    If I recall correctly, Elusis actually has the professional background to understand the methods of this research, whereas you (demonstrably) and I (admittedly) do not. In any case, they read it correctly and you read it incorrectly, so do please quit your sad attempt at condescension.

    desipsis,

    I see it that we skipped the dogma for the evidence

    You also should dial back the hostility or go away. Your choice. Also, you’ve wandered off into the weeds again.

  52. 54
    desipis says:

    Charles,

    Louis CK… who has merely forced multiple women to do something sexual they didn’t want to do

    From all the allegations I’ve heard, Louis CK didn’t force anyone to do anything. He might have asked for consent in inappropriate ways or circumstances, but that’s not force.

    Also, that Koss study is another example of a flawed study. The questions supposedly showing “legal rape” are excessively vague, particularly the questions on alcohol or drugs. The fact that only a quarter of the women in those cases consider the situation rape shows this to be the case. The only remotely reasonable interpretation of the male responses is 1-2% have raped. I have no idea where you pulled 15% from.

  53. 55
    Charles says:

    page 30: Table 4, highest level of sexual aggression reported:
    7.2% sexual coercion, 3.3% attempted rape, 4.4% rape = 14.9%
    I’m mistaken though, that’s through force, threat of force or use of drugs or alcohol. For drugs or alcohol, that’s men answering yes to “have you ever had sexual intercourse [or attempted to, or engaged in sex play] when the woman didn’t want to because you gave her alcohol or drugs?”

    2/3rds of those who answered yes to those questions also answered yes to “have you ever had [sex of some sort] when the woman didn’t want to because she was overwhelmed by your continual arguments or pressure?”

  54. 56
    Gracchi says:

    Koss has an agenda to portray rape a something men do to others, but that women do not do. A standard tactic by such people is to ask excessively vague questions to men, but not to ask the same questions to women (which is of course the logical thing to do, if you honestly care about gender issues), because doing that would expose that many women would answer affirmatively. As such, doing perpetrator research for only one gender is key to avoid producing research outcomes that don’t fit the rape apologist agenda.

    PS. I am minimizing my interaction with Charles, due to verbal abuse.

  55. 57
    desipis says:

    Charles:

    7.2% sexual coercion, 3.3% attempted rape, 4.4% rape = 14.9%
    I’m mistaken though, that’s through force, threat of force or use of drugs or alcohol.

    2/3rds of those who answered yes to those questions also answered yes to “have you ever had [sex of some sort] when the woman didn’t want to because she was overwhelmed by your continual arguments or pressure?”

    You’re still wrong (particularly the “also” part).

    The 4.4% “rape” is a total of “force, threat of force or use of drugs or alcohol”, with the 3.3% “attempted rape” being the same but where “intercourse DID NOT occur” (see page 16 of the study). The alcohol questions are too vague and could easily include innocent incidents, so even these numbers are too high. Hence my 1-2% for rape (sexual intercourse using force or thread of force); items 9 & 10 are both listed as 1% each, although there’s no indication of how much overlap there is on these items.

    For a more general “sexual contact through force or threat of force” you could combine items 3, 4, 9 & 10 to get 2-6% (again the overlap is unclear).

    The 7.2% “sexual coercion” covers men who answered no to the “rape” or “attempted rape” questions, but yes to “being overwhelmed by argument” which is laughably vague and in no way implies any wrong doing, or “yes” to abusing authority which could be described as “sexual harassment”, but not something most people would interpret as “force or threat of force”. Conflating these two is ridiculous. Conflating “overwhelmed by argument” with “force or threat of force” is profoundly absurd.

  56. 58
    Charles says:

    Yeah, non-consensually masturbating in front of someone, flashing someone, badgering someone into submitting to sexual activity they don’t want, all things that are not rape by force or threat of force, and yet they are all still incredibly shitty forms of abuse that most people would never choose to do. And yet they are all still things that millions of men are willing to do and millions more can imagine themselves doing. It’s pretty unlikely they all have brain tumors.

  57. 59
    Charles says:

    desipis,

    You are right that I was misinterpreting those four categories. Those are a really weird set of divisions to have used.

  58. 60
    Seriously? says:

    flashing someone

    I have never flashed anyone. I have been flashed by women whom I did not know four times.

    Once on a beach in Europe (not in a country where going topless was common at the time), once while jetskying in a lake between South and North Carolina (while showing off, by half a dozen of women on the same boat, and which caused me to wipe out) once at a concert, and once at a gas station after midnight.

    Are those incredibly shitty forms of abuse as well? How would you describe all the women who have flashed their breasts at a man? Especially that now that I am an old fart, and no one has flashed me in a decade, I hear that kids nowadays flash each other five times before breakfast.

    ———-

    Five times. Once from a moving car as I was walking after dark in Vegas… and I was offered a ride from the driver, mostly to embarrass the woman, I guess, so I’m not sure how it counts.

  59. 61
    Charles says:

    I don’t know, how did you feel about it? Did it feel like a threat? Were you concerned that the women who flashed you would escalate to physical violence or sexual assault? Have you ever talked to a woman who was flashed by a man? Did her experience and concerns align with your experience and concerns? Did those four or five times represent the majority of your experiences with sexual harassment or abuse, or were they minor peaks in an ongoing mountain range?

  60. 62
    Elusis says:

    Again, forest for the trees. I don’t owe anyone a debate on the study; as I said, I thought twice about including it and wish I hadn’t. My point in using it was only “it’s not actually that uncommon for men to endorse all kinds of terrible behaviors toward women.” Whatever you think of its methodology or specific wording, the results it captures should either shock you, or bore you to tears with something you already knew in your bones.

    RonF suggested the men who assault women must be really WEIRD men – outliers, rogue agents, damaged, peculiar, the fringe of man-dom. I countered: No, these men are not weird. They’re just men, ordinary men – unusually successful men in some cases, but they’re just the tip of the iceberg that’s currently being exposed by the shifting tides. They’re simply men.

    And I’m not even going to dignify the “women assault too!” attempt at a derail, because that has nothing to do with the price of cheese in Pittsburgh, Jesus Harriet Christ on a tractor. Nobody said anything about what women do or don’t do.

  61. 63
    desipis says:

    Whatever you think of its methodology or specific wording, the results it captures should either shock you

    If the methodology is significantly flawed, then the results are meaningless. Your desire to draw conclusions from the results of a flawed study reveal far more about your biases than they do about the beliefs of men.

    They’re simply men.

    To say that is the equivalent of saying that ISIS are “simply Muslims”. We might not yet know how to measure, or even accurately describe, the difference, but if a small minority behave significantly differently to the majority then clearly there is something different.

    And I’m not even going to dignify the “women assault too!” attempt at a derail,

    Wouldn’t want to derail your misandrist rant by observing that women are people too…

  62. 64
    Ampersand says:

    Wouldn’t want to derail your misandrist rant by observing that women are people too…

    Dial it back a few notches, please.

  63. 65
    Ampersand says:

    Also, I agree with you and Mandolin about “if you have to ask yourselves…”

  64. 66
    Charles says:

    desipis,

    That’s now the second time you’ve been warned by a mod in this thread for exactly the same thing.

  65. 67
    Mandolin says:

    If you’re wondering if you’ve crossed a line, take that thought very seriously; most of the time, it’s true.

    (I don’t necessarily think this is true. I think learning how to detect when you’ve crossed many kinds of subtle lines is a process and people will err in figuring it out as they learn–learning which continues as social norms evolve.)

  66. 68
    Ben Lehman says:

    Maybe “evaluate whether or not you’ve crossed a line in the context of your own psychology and society, ideally with the help of a therapist, priest, or other trained mental health professional, and never under any circumstances rely on strangers on the internet who’ve never met you and are speaking in general terms to judge your morality, ethics, or personal behavior.”

  67. 69
    Charles says:

    I feel like that is a perfectly good message, but maybe at a tangent to the message PZ’s rant was going for? On the other hand, as I realized in the other thread, PZ’s version also seems like it is at a tangent to what he was going for. Franken, Weinstein, Louis CK, Roy Moore: despite the broad range in severity of their crimes, none of these men seem like they were struggling in the edges of “hmm, I wonder if I just crossed a line, maybe I should check in on that with someone.”

    Really, the current moment should probably be more of a teachable moment on “Don’t stay silent about other people’s crimes. Don’t shut people up when they try to report. Don’t enable the criminals,” than it should be a teachable moment on “Be more careful about not accidentally overstepping lines.”

  68. 70
    Ben Lehman says:

    I think that’s a much better teachable moment. I also think that it’s a much harder “sell,” if that makes sense. It’s not surprising that people are going for a message of personal guilt rather than collective responsibility. But it is wrong, and we need to figure out how to reshape the discourse.

    There’s a whole thing about my frustration with the social structure that tells us “feeling the emotion of guilt means that you have done something wrong.” Offhand, I would say, of our high profile sexual harassers and sexual assaulters, some seem to feel no guilt at all, and others are wracked with guilt over their actions. You know what? I don’t care. It doesn’t matter if, for instance, Moore feels no guilt at all and CK feels a ton of guilt. What matters is accountability and removal from positions where they have the power to act this way. They can feel guilty, or not, on their own time.

  69. 71
    RonF says:

    Elusis @ 35:

    Nearly 1/3 of college men say they would force a woman to [have] sexual intercourse, but many would not consider that rape.

    I think it is completely absurd to make this claim based on a study whose sample is 86 men at one university.

    No, RonF, it’s not men with brain tumors, or mental illness, or psychopathy, or abuse histories. It’s men, all kinds of men. Sick and well and smart and stupid and progressive and regressive.

    How do you know? Have there been any studies that have looked at such abusers and examined their health (including brain CT scans), mental state, abuse histories and political attitudes?

    And I said “some”, not “all”, in any case.

    And, to a comment you made to someone else, I think it actually is quite significant to say “Women do it too”. IIRC, Feminism 101 says that sexual assault and rape is about power, not sex. From that it follows that this is not an issue of masculinity, it’s an issue of power – and the fact that where women have power they also abuse it (e.g., female teachers raping male high school students) proves that out. When people hold power they abuse it. Since there is a sex-linked disparity in media and politics you’re going to see far more examples of men doing this kind of thing than women in those fields. But it’s human nature to abuse power, and that’s not exclusive to any one sex.

  70. 72
    Michael says:

    @Ben#68- I agree completely. The problem though is that if people assume that anyone who voices concerns is a predator then people who have concerns will be afraid to voice them. So I guess I’d add “If someone does voice concerns to you, don’t automatically assume they’ve done something wrong”.
    @Charles#69- But this unfortunately raises the “If Alice doesn’t want to press charges against Bob, do I have the right to reveal that Bob’s a predator?” question. Which is more important- respecting Alice’s wishes or protecting future victims from Bob?

  71. 73
    Charles says:

    [edited]
    Yeah, I can’t respond to Michael or RonF’s comments here within the guidelines of civility on Alas, so I’m just going to delete that and walk away.

  72. 74
    Charles says:

    Ben,

    I think there is an interesting discussion to be had about the issues you raise, but I don’t think I can have it here.

  73. 75
    Ampersand says:

    Ron, you can argue – without, so far as I can see, any basis – that abusers are especially likely to have brain anomalies, and cannot be representative of normal human behavior. (Your argument is a bit confusing, but I think that’s more or less it.)

    Or you can argue that “it’s human nature to abuse power.”

    But I don’t think you can argue both at once.

  74. 76
    Michael says:

    @Charles#73- My apologies if I offended you. I meant to ask a sincere question- what’s a guy supposed to do if a woman tells him that a man assaulted her but she doesn’t want to go public? If he goes against her wishes and tells everyone but the guy gets away with it anyway, then he’s traumatized her again for nothing. If he keep silent and other people get hurt, then it’s arguably his responsibility. He can’t follow the perpetrator around 24/7.

  75. 77
    desipis says:

    Ampersand, there is a scientific basis for such an argument. See this for example:

    Prefrontal Structural and Functional Brain Imaging findings in Antisocial, Violent, and Psychopathic Individuals: A Meta-Analysis

    Findings confirm the replicability of prefrontal structural and functional impairments in antisocial populations and highlight the involvement of orbitofrontal, dorsolateral frontal, and anterior cingulate cortex in antisocial behavior.

  76. 78
    Ben Lehman says:

    Michael: How to handle private disclosures of sexual assault is a very complicated moral calculus that evades simple answers. Ultimately, you have to make your own moral choices, if only because you are the person who best knows your own social context. Asking someone else to give a broad, sweeping judgement of all such cases without an understanding of that context is particularly unfair.

    Personally, I err strongly but not exclusively on the side of non-disclosure. In the only circumstance where I haven’t, I did my level best to protect the identity of the victim(s). I don’t regret that decision, but I do feel guilty about it sometimes (as I should, it was a violation of the confidence that they placed in me.)

  77. 79
    Mandolin says:

    Sure, yes. Some people have brain tumors that cause them not to have functioning self-monitoring behaviors. You can drive a railroad spike through someone’s head and change their behavior. The question, really, is whether this kind of brain damage (which need not be tumors) is really responsible for most assault. I kind of doubt it?

  78. 80
    Jake Squid says:

    The question, really, is whether this kind of brain damage (which need not be tumors) is really responsible for most assault. I kind of doubt it?

    Do you have proof that a railroad spike was never jammed through Al Franken’s head? desipis has you there!

  79. 81
    Ampersand says:

    Desipis, thanks for the link. That was interesting, although it was also beyond my ability to fully understand.

    RonF wrote:

    I just can’t see how any rational person could ever think this kind of thing is ever justified. Apparently being a psychopath helps you get ahead in media and politics. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s something organic wrong with some of them.

    I may be reading too much into this – after all, this is a blog comment, not a PhD thesis, so people’s phrasings tend to be a little loose – but it seems to me that there are two slightly contradictory thoughts in there. First Ron says that he can’t believe “any rational person” (emphasis added) would do such things, and goes on to discuss “something organic” being wrong. I think that – the implication that no person without “something organic” being wrong would act like LCK or HW did – is what people have been reacting to. And that statement really isn’t supported by the link you provide.

    But Ron also said “something organic wrong with some of them.” (Emphasis added.) That’s a more defensible statement, and that is supported by the link you provide. And people (including me) have been responding as if he didn’t say “some.”

    The finding “antisocial behavior was significantly associated with reduced prefrontal structure and function” doesn’t mean that all people with antisocial behavior have these problems (let alone vice versa). In fact, the study you link points out that other research has found an association between antisocial behavior and “environmental, psychological, and social pathways that potentially lead to these behaviors.”

    Finally, Ron, sexual harassment and assault aren’t necessarily more common in politics and entertainment than in other fields. We see a lot more news coverage of sexual harassment in those fields, but I think that’s because the media is biased towards writing about those fields, not because it happens more often there. Sexual harassment also happens commonly in other fields. For example:

    ‘He Was Masturbating… I Felt Like Crying’: What Housekeepers Endure To Clean Hotel Rooms | HuffPost

    Ending Sexual Harassment in Restaurants Means Changing Service Culture – Eater

    Sexual Assault Reports in U.S. Military Reach Record High: Pentagon – NBC News

  80. 82
    Mookie says:

    sexual harassment and assault aren’t necessarily more common in politics and entertainment than in other fields. We see a lot more news coverage of sexual harassment in those fields, but I think that’s because the media is biased towards writing about those fields, not because it happens more often there.

    I also think it’s because the public at large may recognize but not be personally acquainted with a perpetrator, may have even consumed some of their work or voted for them, and that creates the impression that these abusers are answerable not only to their victims but the world at large, members of which in turn may express their disapproval or quest for justice in a number of legitimate but extra-legal ways (including making consumer choices that are explicitly designed to withhold money and support from abusers and the people that willingly work with or employ them after they’ve been outed / accused).

    People generally feel the most passionate about injustice when they’re directly or indirectly involved; there is an extra layer of tragedy, bewilderment, anger, or sympathy when the players aren’t otherwise anonymous to us, when we believe we have the power to right a wrong one of them committed through individual choices. This is also why the atomist-voter theory of non-collective action is so intoxicating to so many people, I imagine.

  81. 83
    Harlequin says:

    I guess I’m going to, again, question the usefulness of discussing whether or not sexual harassers have organic brain problems. Everyone has something “wrong” with them, something outside the norm for human development and functioning. Having an organic structural problem with your brain does not put you in a separate category far away from, and easily distinct from, people with “normal” brains. It’s not

    normal brain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . brain problem.

    Instead it’s

    normal brain . bit of a problem . moderate problem . big problem

    (and just as likely there are advantageous mutations going left from this little diagram). A lot of the extremes of human diversity are indeed caused by organic differences, but there’s a continuum going all the way out.

    The current crop of newly revealed, famous sexual harassers are all successful people with high-powered careers. They’re capable of functioning relatively normally within their local society. Yes, there is likely something organic “wrong” with some of them, in the sense of being far outside the mean in ways that make them behave antisocially–but so what? That’s what the human population is; such people are always with us. Organic problems are not some extra added variability; they are (part of) the variability. The important question is how we deal with such people, whether or not they have organic brain problems. Since there’s no bright dividing line, I think labeling abusers (or even some abusers) as “other”, as separate from “normal” people, is exactly what we should not do as we try to address sexual harassment and abuse going forward.

    (Or, what Elusis said.)

    As a side note, while this is not my area of expertise, brain structure is influenced by brain usage as well as vice versa. Afaik the size of the observed effects have not been shown to be as large as the differences in desipis’s link, though.

  82. 84
    desipis says:

    Harlequinn:

    Having an organic structural problem with your brain does not put you in a separate category far away from, and easily distinct from, people with “normal” brains.

    The fact there might be a spectrum of brain problems doesn’t prelude an individual from not being able to understand someone at the other end to the extent they will seem categorically different. We can observe that people who are successful at basketball will very likely fit into a “tall” category without needing a neat distinguishable point in the height distribution.

    The important question is how we deal with such people, whether or not they have organic brain problems.

    Surely the underlying cause of particular behaviour is critical in effectively changing or preventing that behaviour?

  83. 85
    Seriously? says:

    The underlying cause is having the power of forcing your will and getting away with it. In the course of my life, I’ve worked in Commie military counter-intelligence, provided security services in Eastern Europe of the early 90s, worked as a TA at MIT, and as the IT department head of a pretty large manufacturer.

    I’ve seen plenty of people with power. If you think that people in the US entertainment industry, Western employers, and even US politicians have power, that’s because you have never deal with an aparatchik’s scion, or a made man in a country where the government cannot collect taxes, and police enforcement is nonexistent. Power corrupts. It’s a trite saying, but it is true nonetheless. When you can do more than other people, when you can influence their fates, when you see how they change their behavior around you, you feel different, you look down on them, and you may be tempted on having your way, because it is not as if they are as human as you, are they?

    There is nothing special about the abusers. It is not their race, it is not their industry, it is not their brains. And no, it is not their gender, either. It’s their power.

    In the US, the top three abusers of power I have personally interacted with have been two females and one male. Two of them personally owned companies with 1000+ employees. One was a highly placed executive in a financial company. Never witnessed anything sexual, personally, but I have seen plenty that has turned my stomach. And to be honest, I’ve never done anything about it unless it was directed at subordinates of mine, so I’ve let two of them coasts, without even a reproach. And for the third one, well, I was pretty careful with my criticism… or should I say politely phrased mild disapproval.

    On the other hand, I’ve stood up against plenty of sexual harassers with no power, or at least power definitely lower than mine. Random guy on the street slapping a gal? Low ranking engineer bothering one of the draftswomen? Machine floor guy catcalling his colleague? Asshole at a party? Easy. What are they going to do to me? Sexual harassment is the easiest thing to oppose in the United States, if you can weather some low level violence, and I can.

    Try even articulating why the head of Marketing emasculating one of the salesmen is wrong, or why thinly veiled contempt for a single mother’s troubles is abhorrent… let alone doing something about it, then get back to me.

    I’m an old Commie. I did not know it, but the older I grow, the more I realize it. The only way to reduce oppression is to reduce power differentials, and you cannot get there from here quickly and easily. The only way is through societal wealth and civil dialogue, and good luck with that.

  84. 86
    Seriously? says:

    Heh. I tried to post something, and it was marked as spam. Of all things…

  85. 87
    Ampersand says:

    Heh. I tried to post something, and it was marked as spam. Of all things…

    Thanks for the heads up! I’ve fished it out of the spam trap.

  86. 88
    Ampersand says:

    Oh, and Seriously?, did you get my email?

  87. 89
    Jake Squid says:

    That’s a great comment, Seriously?. I would only add that the ways in which power are abused can be greatly influenced by the society in which it happens.

  88. 90
    Jake Squid says:

    In the surprise of the year for me, Doug Jones wins!

  89. 91
    Charles says:

    Thanks 150 thousand Republican-voting white Alabamans who voted for Jones!

    Republican voters swung 6% towards Jones relative to the Romney vote in 2012. Independent voters swung 25% towards Jones (and some stayed home). Democrats swung 8% towards Jones, or they may have just stayed home. Thinking about that, that last one is probably the last Dixiecrats finally dying or changing to calling themselves Republicans or Independents in the last 5 years, which makes the Republican cross-over numbers even more impressive.

    Notably, being a serial sexual predator cost Moore about 6% of the vote. Being a Dominionist cost him about 18% of the vote (he shared a ballot with Romney in 2012, and only won by 4% while Romney won by 22%, so he only lost 6% compared to 2012).

    Thanks also to black Alabamans for voting like it was an election that mattered (black voter participation didn’t fall off like some people expected, and black Alabamans are serious about voting (30% of voters, 26% of eligible voters), but black voters as a % of all voters was nearly unchanged from 2012). Thanks also to The Ordinary People Society for their work on restoring voting rights to felons.

  90. 92
    nobody.really says:

    There is nothing special about the abusers. It is not their race, it is not their industry, it is not their brains. And no, it is not their gender, either. It’s their power.

    In the US, the top three abusers of power I have personally interacted with have been two females and one male.

    Has anyone read The Power?

  91. 93
    Petar says:

    Has anyone read The Power?

    Yes, but my best friend was kicked out of Alas at least once for expressing his opinion about similar, highly awarded books, so I will refrain from commenting on it.

    I had sky high expectations after reading the Liar’s Gospel, but it is clear that Noamy Alderman knows a lot less about organized crime, personal weapons, and power dynamics than about Hebrew, Latin and Ancient Judea.

  92. 94
    Petar says:

    By the way, I know that the Liar’s Gospel is absolutely not rooted in the history of Judea and Jerusalem as the Romans recorded it. This makes it easier for me to sell it to people serious about Christianity. “Obviously, it is not set in our reality. It is the Liar‘s gospel, after all”

    But interactions between the characters are interesting, and look plausible enough. Just ignore the historical references… after all, we have no hard data about Yehoshuah, right?

  93. 95
    Mookie says:

    Thanks 150 thousand Republican-voting white Alabamans who voted for Jones!

    You’ve written variations on this theme (white voters’s agency is what counts) in two threads now, and it doesn’t really describe what happened. Black voters turned out like it was a presidential election. White voters didn’t. In their absence or apathy, a thing happened, sure, but a passive action was exceeded by a dynamic one, particularly hard-fought-for because black voters were singled out for intimidation, disinformation, and trickery.

    black voter participation didn’t fall off like some people expected

    This is a weird second-place prize you’re presenting. No one is expected to turn out for special elections. GOP were pretty much banking on it, and used this as a rationale for shutting down polls in black neighborhoods.

  94. 96
    Charles says:

    Black voters deserve great credit and thanks for overcoming the aggressive voter suppression measures that Alabama white people have inflicted upon them in order to vote. Organizations such as the Alabama NAACP and The Ordinary People Society deserve thanks and financial support for their work in mobilizing voters and restoring the franchise to ex-felons (TOPS has done amazing work on that).

    Black voters turned out like it was a presidential election. White voters didn’t.

    As far as I can tell, this is wrong. Black voters and white voters both turned out at about the same percentage of the electorate as they did in 2012 (the last time there were exit polls). Black turnout rose a tiny bit relative to white turnout (29% instead of 28%). For both black and white voters, turnout was about 2/3rds of presidential levels, which is a lot for a special election. I’ve been seeing people make the claim you just made, but I haven’t seen any support for it. Black voters, and Democrats generally, usually include more marginal voters, people who vote in presidential elections and not in special elections, so just maintaining parity in a special election is a great accomplishment. Simultaneously, black people in Alabama are somewhat more committed to voting than white people (28% of voters in 2012, but 26% of eligible voters), and in presidential (and this) elections, they turn out at higher levels than their proportion of the population. If black turnout had dropped as a percentage of the electorate to match their percentage of the population, Jones would have just barely lost. So kudos to the Alabama black community for voting like it mattered, which it did!

    Roughly 150 thousand white people who voted for Romney and Trump voted for Doug Jones. Without those voters, Jones would have lost in a landslide.

    In 2012, black turnout was basically the same percentage of the electorate as it was in this election, and Roy Moore won by 6% (and even there, roughly 120k white Republicans voted for Romney and against Roy Moore). So there was an 8 point shift away from Moore, and that came from white voters.

    Black people in Alabama basically are the Democratic Party there (3/4 of it anyway). The Democratic Party in Alabama is hard pressed to win state-wide races (by which I mean, they haven’t in a long time). For a Democrat to win in Alabama requires not just committed black voters overcoming aggressive voter suppression efforts, it also requires more than a hundred thousand white people who normally vote Republican deciding that a straight-up Dominionist pedophile like Roy Moore is a step too far and that they are going to vote Democratic. The NAACP gets my thanks and my cash, but the 150 thousand Republicans who voted against their party get my thanks too.

  95. 97
    nobody.really says:

    I’m happy to grant an award for Conspicuous Inaction Above and Beyond the Call of Duty.

    In other ineffective attempts at humor, George Carlin’s “Seven Words” sketch has been updated.