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One of the offshoots of this conversation has been whether it’s appropriate for men to relate their impression of it with the women in their lives. As some Republicans have backed away from Trump, they’ve cited that they were horrified because of their wives and daughters. This lead to a degree of backlash about how women are people apart from their relationship with men.
I can understand the frustration. Society has often juxtaposed women in relation to the nearest man. Formal letters are often addressed to Mr and Mrs John Smith, for example. Books about women are often titled about their relation to men (Preacher’s Wife, Coal-Miner’s Daughter). And beyond that, there is perhaps something infantizing about it and how it’s deployed.
That being said, the objections in cases like this tend to be misguided.
I don’t consider myself especially sexist or misogynistic. I’ve always believed that women should get equal pay for equal work. I entered into a marriage of non-traditional arrangement with a female breadwinner and a stay-at-home dad, and felt no special compunction about doing so. And of course, rape is bad and sexual harassment is bad and have always been bad.
Even so, it’s one thing to believe things abstractly and another to have a specific reference. While I did believe that sexism in the workplace existed, things changed entirely when my livelihood depended on my wife being treated fairly in the workplace. That was when I started seeing unfairness everywhere. Not just as it pertained to her, but I started seeing it more around me generally. Things I had before found other explanations for became “Well, Other Explanation maybe, but I suspect there is sexism involved as well.”
If we so choose, we can attribute this to Trumwill’s Failure of Creative Empathy. It is not to my credit that I was as dismissive as I was before my own welfare was on the line, for sure. But even if we grant this, my wife became a conduit through which I saw – and saw the importance of – sexism more than I had before. Likewise, having a daughter has made me more keenly aware of the importance of female strength and independence. Strength and independence from the need of a man. This may not be ideal, but it is what it is.
All of which is to say, encouraging men to look at issues of sexism with the women and girls in their lives as a conduit is a good thing. Because it’s likely to be effective. The tangible always trumps the abstract. And this does apply both ways.
I've decided I'm going to start all of my comments if things happen to men with "As the sister of two brothers, I am outraged by this."
— Elise Foley (@elisefoley) October 9, 2016
Toe above tweet is supposed to illustrate the absurdity of this, but it really doesn’t. The key here is whether the bad thing that happens is male-centric or not. If it’s something that is as likely or not to happen to anyone regardless of gender, then it is silly. But that’s not really what we’re talking about when we’re talking about sexual harassment or assault. We’re talking about something I am very unlikely to ever have to deal with, or if I do it’s in a trivial or infrequent manner (like when I was a substitute teacher and rather uncomfortable with a bunch of women talking about the hotness of the CSI detectives). So it becomes easy for me to disagree with the likelihood or severity of the imposition.
Men may generally have less creative empathy than women, but it’s certainly something I’ve seen with issues that they are rarely likely to be on the wrong side of. False paternity is a historic example. Perhaps the most contemporary example of a male-centric problem is due process for college students accused of sexual assaults come to mind. I want women thinking about their brothers and sons when it comes to giving men adequate room to defend themselves against a change. When we talk about kids getting kicked out of college, I think they are less likely to think of it as “no big deal” if they’re thinking of their sons. And sure enough, women who talk about this (from a pro-process perspective) do talk about their sons.
Notably, they almost all have sons.
I am going to keep an eye on things, and if these arguments do really offend women (outside opinion-on-everything Twitter and the like) then I will stop using it. I may lack the creative empathy to see why exactly its effectiveness is insufficient to undermine its offensiveness. It would be a shame if that were the case.
But there is another way of looking at these debates. In a 2014 article, “Microagression and Moral Cultures,” in the journal Comparative Sociology, Bradley Campbell and Joseph Manning offer another diagnosis. They note that a peculiar feature of the recent events surrounding microaggressions has been the rush to publicize grievances, usually through social media and university websites, to inflict shame and punishment upon the offender. They claim this dynamic suggests “an approach to morality that is relatively new to the modern West,” particularly with regard to responding to insults. In the “honor culture” typical of pre-modern societies and still present in some settings, those who suffer insult are encouraged to respond directly to their detractors, calling upon tight communal bonds for support. In the modern West, however, honor has given way to “dignity culture.” Officially, the judicial system addresses all damage to life and property. Lesser, verbal offenses are not directly addressed, because individuals are taught to view themselves as autonomous rights-bearing individuals.
Perhaps because this ideal of autonomy places great pressure on our sense of self, the individualism of dignity culture seems to be combining with the sensitivity of honor culture to produce a third epoch. In this “culture of victimhood,” psychological pain itself bestows moral authority, leading to a culture of “competitive victimhood,” as Campbell and Manning describe. In their conclusion, the researchers highlight just how consequential this dynamic may become. “The clash between dignity and victimhood engenders a similar kind of moral confusion: One person’s standard provokes another’s grievance [and] acts of social control themselves are treated as deviant.” This can of course provoke a perverse victimhood arms race.
Source: What Tocqueville Can Teach Us About Microaggressions – Acculturated
New York Magazine has a bit of a retrospective on the Obama administration. The pictures in the article got some attention in the “look at how much Obama has aged” which is something of a perennial subject. There are theories that the presidency does age people faster, which makes sense because stress! On the other hand, the presidency seems like it might be primed to sort of notice the aging. We see the president on a regular basis, and track them somewhat closely, but don’t see them on a daily basis where aging can just kind of creep up on you. Given the life longevity of presidents, it doesn’t seem like the aging is anything more than superficial, though, if that.
-{This post assumes that you have not watched the Amazon series Alpha House and either have no intention to or don’t mind spoilers.}-
There will, evidently, be no Season 3 of Alpha House. This is not a huge surprise. Real life rendered the show redundant.
A brief explanation of what the show is about. It follows four Republican senators through their personal and professional lives. Keeping the character descriptions as short as I can, they go:
Senator Gil John Biggs, played by John Goodman. He’s a former UNC basketball coach who went into politics mostly on account of his wife’s (Julie White) ambitions. Over the course of the series he gradually drifts towards the center on climate change, military sexual assault issues, among others I can’t recall. He’s probably the most sympathetic of the lot. Senator Robert Bettencourt, played by Clark Johnson, an African-American from Pennsylvania and stylistically doesn’t deviate much from other characters played by Clark Johnson. Senator Louis Laffer, played by Matt Malloy, an effeminate Mormon from Nevada. Most of his story is his mentally dancing around his apparent sexual attraction to men, and some jokes about Mormonism. Senator Andy Guzman, played by Mark Consuelos. He’s intended to be a parody of Marco Rubio and is really the only character who takes the place of a real senator.
On the whole, the show was surprisingly sympathetic to its Republican characters given the givens. The only bad character was Guzman, and he was coming around. Even Laffer, the anti-gay gay guy, had endearing aspects. It even undercut one of its themes (Republicans are the party of Old White Men) by insisting on a diverse cast (giving us black Bettencourt, Hispanic Guzman, and a black and couple gay aides) It is what it is, of course, and I always have to grade such shows on a curve. But given the constraints of Hollywood, a failed Turing Test here and a lefty sermon there are somethings I can live with. I’ll take what I can get, and I lament that there won’t be more. I recommend the show to anyone who follows politics who is not either (a) a liberal who believes conservatives must be portrayed with horns on their heads, or (b) a conservative really sensitive about being made fun of.
The show ends with Laffer slowly realizing his homosexuality, Bettencourt waiting on the returns of a really close re-election race against real life Ed Rendell, Guzman gearing up for a presidential bid, and Biggs being urged by some to run. I was not surprise when the announcement of a third season was indefinitely delayed. The show weaved between reality (Obama is president, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul exist, Rendell and Schumer appear) and fiction (none of the principals are real, and Rubio doesn’t exist). And the entire point of the show is to ridicule Republicans. What could this show possibly do to the GOP that the GOP hasn’t been actively doing to itself?
The more I thought about it, though, I was thinking about it all wrong. There was actually a more fascinating story to tell that would have made Season 3 amazing. And very in keeping with the character, if not the original intent, of the show. One of the things I’ve constantly wondered was what it would be like to be a Republican congresscritter while all of this was going on.
There were a couple of ways that the show could have handled this. They could have inserted two of the characters into the race with Biggs as Kasich and Guzman as (of course) Rubio. They also could have inserted a new character in place of Ted Cruz and just kind of had at it. It would have been a great deal of fun if they could have pulled it off. I go back and forth on whether it would work better with the Kasich/Biggs thing or without it (if it would have made it too busy), but John Kasich’s campaign was so weird that there’s some comedy material in there somewhere. If they go this route, I would probably swap Trump out with a similarly atrocious reality TV candidate pattered off Duck Dynasty (Rip Torn may be available).
An alternative to that is simply to have any and all presidential runs fail and have them hanging out in DC while all of this is going on. This might be easier, and ultimately more fulfilling. Start the show right about the time Rubio (Guzman) drops out. Keep the three-person race as Trump/Cruz/Kasich or swap them out for Torn/somebody/somebody if you want them to appear on the show as characters or you want to avoid the characters endorsing real live politicians.
In any case, just as I believe House Slythrin would be the most interesting House to be a fly on the wall in Harry Potter, the Republican caucus would be a more fascinating (and more hilarious) venue than it was from 2012-14, the first two seasons. I can envision plots of people trying to get them on board the Trump Train (or Torn Train or whatever) and I’ll even take an eye-rolling scene where they refuse to endorse their party’s nominee (except I’ll be cheering instead of rolling my eyes).
David Frum wonders if it’s really sexist to criticize Hillary Clinton’s smile and suggests that it’s less a matter of men and women as Hillary getting a special exemption.
As with a lot of similar things, the real answer is… we really don’t know. As Frum points out, we’re not shy about criticizing male smiles. But the gender dynamic is there, and it’s certainly not inconceivable that while we will criticize everyone, some women (and ideologies) are more likely to get criticized than others.
Which leaves us in a dissatisfying place where we don’t know what extent, if any, of the criticism of Clinton and the volume of said criticism is guided by gender and her personally.
Over There, Tod writes about Theranos with some stuff that didn’t make it into an article he wrote for Marie Claire.
I have some comments on a couple of them. First, about Holmes herself:
When speaking in public, Homes has an awkward, stilted way about her. She’s monotonous and unemotional. While others on Ted Talks vibrantly emote, Holmes just kind of dully drones on. When answering tough questions in interviews, she tightens up and looks nervous, her face a mask of forced smiles.
There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. Lot’s of people simply aren’t good on stage or interacting with people they don’t know, especially on camera. If you’re one of those people, you can sound boring, or look like you’re being disingenuous or hiding something, even if you’re not. The point simply being that when looking for a reason for how Holmes not only got away with doing what she did for as long as she did, but also for how she became a near-universal media darling, the answer “charisma” falls woefully short.
Photo by TechCrunch 
The second is about narratives, which I think is important but have comparatively little to add:
No one who had Holmes answer their questions with that answer on national television was under any illusion that Holmes was in any way answering that question, let alone addressing a very real serious public health concern about her product. But no one cared. In every case, the person interviewing her smiles and nods, and moves on to ask her how awesome it is to be the world’s youngest female self-made-billionaire, or what it’s like to truly make the world a better place, or some other totally unserious question that fits the narrative they set out to push before they ever lined up their interview questions.
Theranos became a public health problem because it was in Theranos’s interests to push a narrative that simply and obviously was never true. But it became one too because it was in the media’s interest to do the same.
This worries me about media coverage generally. I was talking on Twitter with someone recently about globalism and how one of the criticisms may be off-base. He asked whether I actually believed what the article said, given that it’s a pro-capitalism outfit and our masters all want us to believe it. I said that I believed it, but acknowledged something important: While I believe it’s true, I believe the media would tell us its true regardless of whether it’s true. I think the media does this about a lot of things, including trade, immigration, and race and gender narratives. Even political race coverage, wherein I believe the experts who say that Trump likely won’t win, but in the event that Trump were going to win, I believe they’d be saying… pretty much what they’re saying now. Which doesn’t lead to a reflexive disbelief on my part, but a persistent skepticism I don’t always know what to do with. But narratives are exceptionally important, and deviating from high society’s favored narratives is costly, which makes it easier for everybody to go along.
The last is a bit more political:
It turns out — and I know this will come as a shock to you — that most states have laws against medically testing people without a doctor’s consent, especially by medical testing facilities using procedures not approved by the FDA. Go figure! Turns out that Arizona also once had laws like this on the books. HB2645 essentially lifted those regulations so that Theranos could begin selling its tests to Arizona citizens.
Unsurprisingly, this strikes me as a more complicated issue. Yes, the Arizona legislature dropped the ball here. And they did so in service of a bad actor. And yet… medically testing people without a doctor’s consent doesn’t strike me as an inherently bad idea. I would say something about unapproved-by-the-FDA facilities and that being a good place to hang my hat, but… well, it’s the FDA. While the FDA might keep a company like Theranos from selling faulty goods, I don’t have a whole lot of difficulty believing they’d approach a good actor the same way.
And in a statement against interest, I believe we require a doctor’s consent on too much. A commonly cited example is birth control. Eyeglasses requirements are a bug up my craw as well. Doctors are too busy, and their time both too valuable and too expensive, to be involved in everything. Which gets to the difficult, nitty-gritty aspect of regulation. My approach here isn’t “Deregulate Everything!” but that some things that sound like a transparently bad idea – such as allowing blood tests without a doctor’s consent – may not be.
So while I can easily see that this particular manifestation of such deregulation is a bad idea, it’s not super clear to me what a better model looks like.
Addendum: Make it four. He mentions former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist as someone who lent Theranos credibility. I only bring this up because when there was talk of a Third Party thing with a split of the GOP, I brought up Frist on a few occasions. It was said mostly jokey, as someone underwhelming to a group of people who had their eyes on Mitt Romney or John Kasich. Someone kind of dusted off the shelf because “Hey, he’ll work.” Anyhow, one thought I did have that didn’t make me like the idea is how much he cashed in after he left office. The Theranos thing doesn’t surprise me. Notably, though, he sold out in ways that Democrats would approve by speaking positively about PPACA.
New York’s yellow-cab drivers no longer required to pass English test (The Guardian)
A new law that streamlines licensing requirements for different kinds of drivers has done away with the longstanding English proficiency test for taxi drivers, which supporters say will eliminate a barrier to the profession for immigrants, who make up 96% of the 144,000 cabbies in the city.
Drivers must still pass tests on such details as driving rules and where they can pick up passengers.
The end of the English test is also a recognition of how technology has transformed the business. Many drivers now rely on computer navigation programs rather than verbal directions to reach a destination. For-hire drivers for app-based services such as Uber have never had to take an English test.
Critics of the change, including some drivers, say a good command of English is a basic requirement for a job that involves communicating with passengers and reading street signs.
“If you’re going to work in this country serving the population which is majority made up of American citizens that speak English, you probably should learn how to speak English,” said Tanya Crespo, a tourist visiting Manhattan from Newport, North Carolina.
I don’t get irate about Pressing 1 for English. I am not worried that immigrants aren’t going to assimilate. I don’t get mad if I’m in line and the people in front of me are speaking a language I don’t understand. I only complain about Indian customer support when it actually makes customer support more difficult.
But on this? I agree with Crespo. I could favor getting rid of the requirement if it’s determined to be a waste of time and money. But to lower the barrier of entry? For New York Taxis? Because if they’re really interested in lowering barriers, I have some suggestions.
Back in reality, though, the taxi market is very constricted in New York. This may be right or this may be wrong, but it is what it is. We limit the number of taxis we allow on the streets for a variety of reasons, including preventing the oversaturation of the market. In other words, barriers for the sake of barriers. We only want a limited number of suppliers and, by extension, drivers. And if we’re going to limit the number of drivers, after things like bad criminal records and knows the rules of the road, language is a pretty decent requirement.
Most of the time you may not need to be able to communicate with the driver, but sometimes you do. And since the number of drivers on the road is limited anyway, it seems more than reasonable to require for that contingency. “What about markets” simply doesn’t apply here, and an argument about “Would you rather have a driver who can’t speak English or no driver at all?” doesn’t work, when we’re limiting the number of drivers anyway. (As an aside, this also raises questions about immigrants doing “jobs Americans don’t do”… but that’s pretty tangential.
Along these lines, I don’t care about Uber or Lyft. There we are talking about a tradeoff between the number of drivers and the ability to communicate with them easily. A language requirement might lead to less supply, which might be a tradeoff not worth considering. So I’d leave it to them to decide. If enough people get angry about non-English speaking Uber drivers picking them up, then they can revise. If nobody does and they will simply take the availability, then the people have spoken. (Provided, of course, that language requirements don’t transition into a legal zone of “unlawful discrimination.”)Photo by robnguyen01
Imagine a presidential debate between a Senator Mike Davis and Governor Betty Neilson. Throughout the entire debate, the Neilson refers to the senator as “Senator” or “Senator Davis.” In turn, Davis consistently refers to Neilson as “Betty.”
This would largely be considered a textbook example of sexism. Absent some greater context, I’d probably cringe at it myself. Even if I supported Davis.
I’ve commented before that in Deseret, my wife and other non-LDS female physicians were constantly referred to by their first name while male doctors of any religion (and female LDS ones) got the Doctor honorific. They did this in front of patients, which is a no-no. That LDS women got the “Doctor” treatment suggests it wasn’t entirely a matter of sexism but also of respect. But male gentiles got the respect regardless.
There’s nothing wrong with going by one’s first name, as a physician or anything. Clancy had intended to do so until she kept running into the problem of patients not taking her seriously, or slipping into calling her a nurse. So she goes by Dr Himmelreich largely to avoid that.
I had for the longest time avoided calling Hillary Clinton “Hillary.” This was an inconvenience in many respects because “Clinton” was typically a reference to Bill Clinton. It’s for the same reason that George W Bush was Dubya, W, or sometimes Shrub instead of just “Bush.” And Jeb is Jeb, of course. But even taking these things into account, I was very conscientious about it all. Then Hillary Clinton decided Hillary was okay and I stopped worrying about it. Even despite that, people have “called me out” for using her first name. As she gets closer to becoming president, I do refer to her as Clinton more and more, just as “Bush” gradually came to refer to the younger rather than the older.
To get back to Davis-Neilson, it’s noteworthy that while Hillary Clinton’s supporters are claiming sexism in the moderation of the last debate (because Clinton was interrupted more than once), less attention has been paid to the fact that he called her by her honorific while she referred to him as Donald. Trump really prefers to be called Mr Trump. She didn’t extend him that courtesy and likely declined to do so precisely for that reason. She wanted to get under his skin and make him do something stupid.
Nobody, of course, is going to call this sexism. Nor should they, even though it’s something Trump would have been called out for under different circumstances (that she accepts “Hillary” complicates things).
My point isn’t poor-old-Donald or anti-PC. But rather as an illustration that it’s complicated. Because the sexism being complained about absolutely exists. But it doesn’t exist in every manifestation. It’s not unlike how half of the lines of attacks against Bill Clinton (womanizer! Slick!) and George W Bush (dumb, unsophisticated, lazy) would suddenly take on a huge racial component when lodged against Obama in a very similar manner.
Which leaves the discussion in an awkward place. It’s easier to say “This wouldn’t happen if it was a white male” but that’s rarely accurate. It’s easier to say “This has nothing to do with race or gender” even though that’s probably wrong because race and gender can amplify or color particular arguments. The truth, that maybe this attack would be used anyway against a white guy but more likely under circumstances in which it is warranted and probably to lesser effect, doesn’t fit into a headline.
In The New Atlantis, Jacob Hoerger writes of light pollution and what it’s doing to our views of the stars.
Growing up in the suburbs, I could always see the stars okay but not great. In the city, you can’t really see them at all. It wasn’t until I moved to Deseret that I was able to look up and see all the stars. It was an amazing, almost spiritual experience.
What strikes me reading the article, as well as people astronomer types talk about it, is how avoidable a lot of the light pollution is. My initial read on the controversy was… not favorable to the complainants. But the more I read, the more I understood where they were coming from. A lot of it is just sloppiness.
— T. Becket Adams (@BecketAdams) September 23, 2016
Japanese fisherman, 63, ‘fights off bear with karate’
The 63-year-old was fishing in a mountain creek when the 6ft 3in creature set upon him in what he said was an unprovoked attack.
In scenes seemingly reminiscent of Leonardo Di Caprio’s epic tussle with an angry bear in the Oscar-winning film The Revenant – Atsushi Aoki was bitten and scratched repeatedly, including on his head.
“The bear was so strong, and it knocked me down,” Mr Aoki told Tokyo Broadcasting System.
“It turned me over and bit me right here,” he added, pointing to his bandaged leg.