- If the above video isn’t showing, it’s because the heirs of David Foster Wallace have used a copyright claim to have it taken down. Read more about it, and sign the petition asking them to reconsider, here.
- Rob Tish at Waking Up Now did an extraordinary series of posts responding to a Catholic blogger’s list of anti-marriage-equality arguments. If you have a bit of time and want to read some excellent pro-SSM argumentation, pull up a chair and start reading.
- How will a mass influx of robots affect human employment? The answer is, it’s up to us. If we want, we can have a Star-Trek-like paradise where all basic needs are met and humans live lives of chosen work and leisure. But I suspect that we’ll just have gated communities for the rich and misery and starvation for everyone else.
- How Social Networks Drive Black Unemployment – NYTimes.com
- Beauty, and What It Means: Wearing Stigma “It’s impossible to think of the performance of femininity without considering the ways that the performance is an exercise in stigma management. And it’s impossible to think of the ways women manage the stigma of their bodies without looking at fashion and beauty.”
- QUOTE: “When I was little, I thought the stars were a metaphor, something poets wrote about to inspire people. It wasn’t until I got glasses in second grade that I realized they were actually up there and everyone could see them.”
- Why Do Men Keep Putting Me in the Girlfriend-Zone?
- January 2008: Can Marriage Survive? | Cato Unbound An interesting essay by Stephanie Coontz and response essays by various folks.
- The Flaw in Many Humanitarian Arguments for War – Conor Friedersdorf – The Atlantic
- On Writing While Privileged
- Having Chronic Pain Is…
- Social Power and the Central Park Five; Should a prosecutor be held responsible for locking up five innocent boys be training future lawyers at Columbia? There’s so much good in this Ta-Nehisi Coates post that I’m tempted to just quote the whole thing.
- 1 | A New Map Of The U.S., Created By How Our Dollar Bills Move
- Why Reading Or Watching News Is Bad For You
- Patrick Buchanan says that Christians will respond to gay marriage with civil disobedience. What on earth would civil disobedience look like, in this case? I mean, it’s cool if Pat wants to boycott attending gay weddings, but frankly I doubt he’s getting many invitations.
- The new anti-urban ideology of ruralism, followed up by Ruralism, Urbanism, Suburbanism. If returning to small-town roots is the right way to live, what should folks from big cities be doing?
- An experiment in paying villagers in one of India’s poorest states an unconditional basic income has been successful enough to change the government’s thinking.
- How I Lost Faith in the “Pro-Life” Movement Long but excellent post.
- I saw the new production of “Pippin” on Broadway. I wouldn’t say it was deep, but it was pretty spectacular.
I have a notion that anything which is permitted to housed people (like drug use and addiction-- they're illegal, but…
I looked at that NPR story. It says “Despite years of public education and policy, one in five college women will be the victim of rape or attempted rape before graduation.” based on a study funded by the Department of Justice. But looking at a study done by the Department of Justice, we see an incidence of somewhere around 2.7% for rape or attempted rape over a 6.9 month period in the late 90’s. While the study offers the possibility that the number could be projected to the concept that 1:5 college women could be (not “will be”) subject to rape or attempted rape, it quite sensibly cautions:
Any incidence of rape or attempted rape – or any manner of sexual assault – should be considered a problem to be solved. I can see where both victims of assault and a university’s administrators would be frustrated facing incidents of sexual assault that were reported but that were not prosecuted. But the reaction to the issue of local prosecutors not wanting to prosecute such cases seems to be that the school’s administrators take away the rights of the accused. You don’t increase justice to one group of people by taking it away from another.
What, specifically, are you referring to?
—Myca
The same study also found that, prior to the beginning of the school year, about 1 in 10 college women had experienced rape and 1 in 10 had experienced attempted rape sometime in their lifetime. (See exhibit 7, page 18). So NPR may have been misstating that statistic. But either way, NPR got something wrong.
Indeed, and I’m sure that two sitting U.S. Representatives, one sitting Wisconsin state representative, the 173 U.S. Representatives who co-sponsored a bill with problematic language, opinion columnists for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Yale Daily News, a widely-known French author/public intellectual, Whoopi Goldberg (on an episode of “The View”), Harvey Weinstein, a judge presiding over a rape trial, a coach in charge of high-school boys who raped someone, the actual neighbors of an actual 11-year-old victim as well as the defense attorney at the trial of one of the accused in that case, and some of the law enforcement personnel in charge of investigating sexual assaults will be pleased to know they are “a collection of fools” whose opinions, apparently, carry no weight and affect no one, so we can disregard them.
RonF –
– So, a large collection of quotes by an assortment of people, including politicians, people on the media, and judges, doesn’t count as a cultural context that feminists should respond to because those people are clearly fools, and don’t represent actual general beliefs.
– Yet, feminists’ collective beliefs can be taken to be rather ridiculous statements that we have yet to establish that any feminist said, because there is sort of evidence that maybe a handful of individual feminists might have said something that sort of sounds like it if one chooses to interpret it that way, because after all, if any feminists say something that might be misconstrued, it’s feminism’s collective fault?
I think when you’re interpreting a statement, you also have to consider the audience it was written for. You could argue that it’s bad strategy that feminism doesn’t spend more time addressing general audiences. But I don’t think it’s reasonable to say that feminists should never “talk among themselves” (even if nonfeminists can view the conversation). And feminist readers, for the most part, are going to know the historical and present-day context that “believe women” comes out of.
If most readers in someone’s intended audience don’t understand what a writer was trying to communicate, that’s a failure of the writer. But writing for a specialized audience doesn’t make you a bad writer.
I’m in a discussion elsewhere about whether rapists tend to be high status. Anyone know of research about rapists’ demographics?
I realize the numbers would necessarily be incomplete.
I have no concern whatsoever about what feminists say to each other and no expertise on how they interpret each others’ statements. I’d appreciate an explanation of how you come to the conclusion that I was commenting on that.
Harlequin, I’m sure that there are far more than two sitting U.S. Representatives that I would consider fools. I will essay the proposition that you could say the same, although our lists might not coincide. The issue of the problematical language (e.g., “forcible rape”) probably comes from the fact that it’s language the FBI uses in their crime statistics, and it got changed once reasonable objections were raised to it’s use. There’s far, far too many opinion columnists in the U.S. for any two of them to be counted as representing anything but their own opinions and those who may openly support them. We’re talking the U.S., not France – viewpoints regarding human sexuality and sexual relations are a lot different in France than they are in the U.S. (should Bill Clinton pre-decease Hillary I seriously doubt you’re going to see Hillary crying on one side of his coffin with her kids and his mistress crying on the other side of the coffin with her kids). Whoopie Goldberg is an entertainer, and a good one, but when it comes to any topic outside of entertainment I have no problem putting her in the “fool” column. Ditto Harvey Weinstein, etc., etc.
As support for the concept that there is a sizable group of people in raw numbers that have a certain attitude towards rape that list is fine. As support for the proposition that it’s anywhere close to a majority of the U.S. – or representative of the audience on this blog – it fails.
And now I’m out for a bit. Myca, catch you later.
RonF, my last comment was mostly a response to this:
Which I took to be an argument that if you misunderstood a “believe women” statement (because of your lack of background: “[The context of counteracting the traditional belief that women habitually falsely accuse men of rape] may be a context that’s understood by feminists, but it’s not one understood by me”), the person who wrote it was a bad writer (or if not, must actually believe that women never lie about rape); however, if someone was writing for a >101-level audience, I believe that that audience would likely have no trouble understanding it.
In the case I’m referencing the writer was addressing me specifically. She knew who her audience was.
FWIW, someone linked to a post of the Yes Means Yes Blog that reminded me of this discussion. That blog, or at least a few of their top posts, gets linked a lot in the feminist blogosphere, and is arguably pretty hard-line anti-rape. I realize that one blog doesn’t definitively prove anything about the way that “believe women” is used in general (and the other points that gin&whiskey raised), but it is one data point, so for those interested…
[talking about a group that posted people’s stories of abuse in the Fetlife community]
Discussing and acknowledging how “legal rape” doesn’t map 1:1 with “nonconsensual sexual act”:
[Yes Means Yes approvingly quoting ConsentCulture]
This describes false accusations as “incredibly rare”, but “incredibly rare” does not mean “never”. It is pretty clearly talking about false accusations specifically, not biased presentation of the story, false memories, etc.
And another post from Yes Means Yes includes the phrase “Teach young men to believe women and girls who come forward”. This is quoting and recommending a Zerlina Maxwell piece on Ebony. This is her elaboration on “believe women” [emphasis mine]:
So, something completely different:
The Ongoing Saga of the Private Property Protection Act
The Supreme Court case Kelo vs. City of New London concerned the action of the City of New London in Connecticut of using it’s eminent domain powers to seize private property – the land and homes of a group of home owners – in order to sell it to private developers. The assertion of the City was that the development would lead to new jobs, new tax and other revenues for the City, and would revitalize what they considered a depressed (although not blighted) area. The home owners sued. They lost, in the Supreme Court.
I personally thought this was a complete outrage. It’s one thing to take private property to build roads or a fire station. That to me seems to be what the term “public use” means in the 5th Amendments’ Takings Clause:
But the Supreme Court disagreed. It holds that “public use” can equal “public purpose”, and that the purpose of increasing employment, tax revenues, etc. was sufficient to justify the use of eminent domain. The legislation referenced in the above link would prevent any such redevelopment from using Federal redevelopment funds – a minimal protection, to be sure, but helpful.
I was wondering what the rest of you would think of this. Should local governments be free to convey one private owner’s property to another private owner against the first owner’s will as long as the local government thinks it’ll get more taxes and people will get more jobs?
Would your opinion change upon considering the fact that in the actual test case, the developer ended up having problems raising money, abandoned the project and the land currently sits vacant and is being used as a temporary dump?
Also, note the following comment by Christina Walsh in the Washington Times:
No. Not only no, but hell no. “Public use” actually means something. You could b.s a “public purpose” for pretty much any use of land whatsoever.
RonF,
How do you feel about forced pooling of mineral rights?
I was mad about the CT eminent domain thing when I first heard about it. Not surprised that the Supreme Court upheld it, though. I WAS surprised (and pleased) that they found no right to patent human genes, unanimously, no less.
RonF:
I have not thought deeply about this issue, but at first blush: good heavens, no.
Charles:
Ron hasn’t spoken to this one yet, but I’ll throw my opinion in: not a fan. In general, it seems to me that when what you’re doing can do irreversible harm to me, you should be held to a high standard. As far as I know, there is no effective way to remediate the damage caused by most drilling, including hydrofracking. Even if you build me a cistern and truck water in for me and my family (which these companies don’t do), you have still created a situation where I am dependent upon you and have an indefinite relationship with you which I did not want, and you have still slashed the value of my property, which used to have a drinkable well or spring.
The same is not true of, for instance, wind and solar. If a wind or solar installation turns out to be a problem, it can be removed with minimal remaining trace.
Grace
As far as I know, there is no effective way to remediate the damage caused by most drilling, including hydrofracking.
“Here is a stack of money.”
That usually works pretty good, although its compensation rather than remediation per se.
Mining does not have to be irremediable, though, for that matter. I have now twice lived on top of former coal mines. (It’s not part of my secret plan to dominate the world by gradually taking control of its abandoned tunnel infrastructure. Pinkie swear.) The second time, it was a perfectly nice suburb, though you could tell the neighborhood used to be coal mines, because everybody was still talking about the time twenty years back when a couple houses went “phoosh” and disappeared. (They fixed things up a bit after that.) The first time, the mines were older and if it were not for the name of the road, you would not have known there had ever been humans living there let alone a coal mine. My bit of the neighborhood was a forest that looked like it had been dropped by God a thousand years ago and ignored by everyone since, including the Indians, until I came along and parked an RV there. My effective next door neighbors (down a quarter mile of gravel road) were Seattle Mariners’ then-superstars Ken Griffey Jr. and Jay Buhner, who owned the last two mansions on the street of mansions leading up to my forest. They seemed pretty content with the physical environment too.
(Jay Buhner was a dick who wouldn’t even look at you. Ken Griffey Jr. was really nice, and would wave and say hello. Just for future reference, if the two of them are stuck on a railroad track and you can only rescue one, rescue Ken, and tell Jay that he shouldn’t have been such a dick to Robert Hayes back in Issaquah.)
On to Charles’ question: I’m not super keen on forced pooling, but my understanding is that forced pooling has been the law for many many years, so it’s part of the settled expectations of a landowner. The big caterwaul about Kelo is that it’s a radical expansion of the state’s power to dick over landowners; granddad would have scoffed at the idea that the state of Missuhsippi could take his fig grove and make it a Wal-Mart, but wouldn’t have been shocked to find out that the radium mine was going to tunnel under his land. Other than his land being on a river delta and the only mineral content being old bottle caps, anyway.
Robert:
That is not remediation. It is compensation. Often, compensation stands in for remediation, because we can do no better.
But it’s not remediation, and you well know it, and my objections to “here is a stack of money” are exactly what I laid out above, possibly minus the ongoing relationship.
Grace
And your objection is noted, but that has been the law (for pretty good reasons) for a very long time. Don’t buy land in oil and gas country, is your (prospective) remedy, and it’s not a particularly insensitive one. On top of that you get royalties for the minerals extracted, and you have a whole sheaf of torts available to you at civil law for specific provable harms.
If the alternative was unicorn land, I’d be all for unicorn land, but the alternative is gas that costs $100/gallon and steel that costs $200,000 a ton and electricity that costs $5 a kilowatt. Solar? Wind? There is none of that, because economies crippled by incredibly high materials costs aren’t going to spend (nonexistent) billions on low-yield alternative techs. (Also, there won’t be enough pollution to stir the interest in the first place. Which might sound great, until you remember about everybody working on farms and children dying, because we’re still in 1673 AD in terms of material wealth.) Without pooling of mineral rights, it’s just hugely uneconomical to do anything industrial.
Robert:
Oh! I don’t care what the law is. Charles asked me how I felt about forced pooling of mineral rights. Well, I feel that poorly understood things which you may not be able to take back should be held to a higher level of scrutiny and responsibility than well-understood things which are basically reversible. So in the specific case of forced pooling of mineral rights, not that I’ve studied the issue closely, I’m not feeling the warm fuzzies.
(And if you’re looking to convince me to feel the warm fuzzies, saying, “But, but, but, cheap gas! Industry!!” is a strategy which could use some optimization.)
There are plenty of laws I think could be improved, or which I think should be stricken from the books, and I even enforce some of them. Doesn’t mean they’re good law.
Grace
(And if you’re looking to convince me to feel the warm fuzzies, saying, “But, but, but, cheap gas! Industry!!” is a strategy which could use some optimization.)
Big fan of pointed-stick-and-dung stoop agriculture, are we?
I no longer seem to be able to edit my posts, even in the 15 minutes we used to be allotted. Do I have to actually proofread before I post, now? The horror, the horror.
I know. It’s like living in the fucking Dark Ages. (I do love bitching about my miracle technologies. Waaaaah! My incredible world-changing paradigm-shifting totally fucking magic box is only producing 99 unicorn smiles per hour instead of 100. Waaaaah!)
And yet it’s totally heartfelt. Sigh. Human nature, I guess.
I bet that I could tell that Robert’s forest was not old-growth. But I’m the type of person who thinks during movies, “Your characters are supposed to be in The Wilderness. Why are they running through a pine plantation?”