Do Republicans have better sex? On the reported orgasm gap between Republicans and Democrats
Posted by Sappho on February 3rd, 2012 filed in Sexuality
In Survey: Women Are from Mars, Men Are Adorable, Republicans Are Best in Bed, Jen Doll at the Atlantic Wire reports on the new Match.com singles in America study. I want to focus first on the “Republicans Are Best in Bed” part.
Republicans do it better. Or say they do, at least, claiming the most orgasms “despite having the least amount of sex.” More than half of conservative Republicans said they had an orgasm every time they had sex, compared to only 40 percent of liberal Democrats. Fill in the blanks: Liberal guilt is a _____ _____.
I think that, before we can draw any conclusions about this finding, we need to know whether it’s been controlled for gender. There’s a gender gap in politics, with men being relatively more likely to be conservative and Republican, and women being relatively more likely to be liberal and Democrat. There’s also an orgasm gap between the sexes, such that most men reportedly have an orgasm every time they have sex, while about 10% of women don’t reach orgasm at all, and many more don’t have an orgasm every time they have sex. These two facts, combined, could well, all by themselves, account for the orgasm gap between Republicans and Democrats, if the results haven’t been controlled for whether the respondent is male or female.
That said, though I see nothing that indicates the study counters the stereotype about the sexes that men tend to have orgasms more quickly and easily than women, there is some pushback to the “men trade love for sex while women trade sex for love” stereotype. In the words of the Atlantic article,
Men are woefully misunderstood. Just because that guy broke up with you after seven dates using the well-practiced method of never speaking to you again doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt him deeply — nor that he’s not still pining away after you. Among the learnings gleaned via this survey about menfolk: Men are more likely to fall in love at first sight; men believe couples can stay married forever; men like to show affection; men think sex is better with a long-term partner than a one-night stand (except maybe this guy); men are, by and large, adorable, loving individuals and why they ever got a bad rap is a mystery to us all, Gary.
Women are sex fiends! Ok, not fiends, per se, but 50 percent would dump a guy for being bad in bed. Meanwhile, men were turned off by low sex drive in a partner. It’s the age-old battle of quantity vs. quality, some might say. Women also enjoy ambition, cleanliness, independence, and a sense of humor. Men, for the record, like ambition too, and we’d guess they also like their partners to be clean, though that was not reported. In other news, now that it’s 2012, men mostly don’t mind being stay at home dads, or, at least, think it’s acceptable. Stereotypes be gone!
So, there you have it. Women want great sex, and men actually will buy the cow if you give away the milk for free. But I still think that the guy who broke up with me using the well-practiced method of never speaking to me again didn’t shed any tears about the break up, and that it was probably an entirely different guy who kept pining for me.
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On conscience exceptions to generally applicable laws
Posted by Sappho on February 2nd, 2012 filed in News and Commentary
I would like to talk, not directly about whether Catholic-affiliated hospitals and social service organizations should be obliged to provide birth control to their employees, but more generally about the question of conscience exceptions to generally applicable laws.
The first thing that I believe is that, if a law is written in general terms, applied equally to everyone, and not directed at any particular religion, there is no First Amendment right to a conscience exception from that law (particularly if churches themselves are not directly burdened by it). I am serious about this. I believe that the government could order me and my fellow Quakers into war, and not be in violation of the First Amendment. (Obviously, I am not advocating that the government actually do this.)
The second thing that I believe is that, though the First Amendment does not require conscience exceptions to generally applicable laws, allowing at least some such exceptions is good public policy. At the same time, allowing such exceptions to become too abundant and too broad can cause problems. So, for what reasons might we want to allow conscientious objection to a particular law, and for what reasons might we not want to allow it, or want to keep the exception narrow?
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The Wide Sargasso Sea: Book and Movie
Posted by Sappho on January 31st, 2012 filed in Books, Movies
Movies and books are such different forms that you’re bound to find, seeing a movie after reading the book, that some parts of the book were captured and others left out. But it’s interesting to see which parts a movie chooses to keep, and which to cut.
The book The Wide Sargasso Sea is several things: a prequel to Jane Eyre by a completely different author, the story of the unraveling of an arranged marriage, a contrast between Jamaica and England, and a story of both flawed gender roles (with Antoinette losing her property, her freedom, and her mind as a result of her marriage, till she becomes the trapped madwoman in the attic) and racial tensions. It’s told in the voices of both Antoinette and Rochester, with Antoinette taking Parts One and Three, and Rochester Part Two.
The movie trims more extensively from parts one and three than from part two, so that, though bits of Antoinette’s voice can be heard at the beginning and the end, it’s mainly Rochester’s point of view of his descent from loving husband to husband from hell. The focus is on Rochester’s sensual connection to, and ultimate alienation from, both Jamaica and his wife. In the process of telling this story, a couple of things are changed:
Antoinette’s new name: In the book, Rochester gives Antoinette the new name of Bertha; in the movie, the same work is done by having him call her Nettie, her mother’s nickname. This loses the “Bertha” connection to Jane Eyre that makes it clear that this story is a Jane Eyre prequel, but in some ways works better if you just see the story as self-contained. “Nettie” both makes sense as a nickname for Antoinette as well as Annette (Antoinette’s mother’s name) and as a kind of aggression (Antoinette called it obeah, or magic used against her) when you consider the fact that Antoinette’s mother has gone mad, and by the end of the story she will be mad as well. (On the other hand, “Bertha” is a more extreme renaming, that puts more emphasis on Rochester’s arbitary exercise of authority over his wife.)
An odder choice is the movie’s omission of Sandi Cosway. In the book, Antoinette’s black “cousin Sandi” is perhaps the real love of her life, the man she should have married instead of Rochester, but doesn’t because of the color line. He’s also the impetus for Rochester’s act of cruelty in having sex with the servant Amelie in Antoinette’s hearing; Rochester takes this action after learning from Antoinette’s other black cousin Daniel Cosway of Antoinette’s prior relationship with Sandi. All of this is tied to a certain ambivalence in Antoinette’s character about race; she is both, as the daughter of a white slaveowner who grew up in the shadow of a revolt by former slaves, someone who fears her black neighbors and their resentment of her, and also someone whose real closest and most trusting relationships are with black Jamaicans, Sandi and the obeah healer Christophine.
The movie keeps that racial ambivalence on Antoinette’s part (and keeps Christophine, without whom it would be hard to tell this particular story), but drops Sandi. It does this while leaving some of the scenes where a reference to Sandi belongs. You see Antoinette bullied as a child, but don’t hear of her particular connection to the boy who rescued her. You see her throwing a rock as Rochester watches, but don’t hear her tell Rochester who told her to throw. And you hear Daniel tell Rochester that he’s not the first man his wife kissed, but don’t hear him tell who was.
Interestingly, this is done while keeping Rochester’s sexual jealousy of his wife and its racial connection. As Rochester uneasily watches his wife dancing with former slaves, the camera turns to linger on the handsome chest of the drummer. When Daniel tells Rochester that he’s not the first man his wife has kissed, you see a flashback, not to Antoinette with Sandi, but to her mad, abandoned mother kissing a black man (Daniel has suggested Antoinette would become like her mother). And Rochester’s decision to bed Amelie, as in the book, appear driven by jealousy as well as lust (while Antoinette, as in the book, points out that he has just used his black servant in the same way that her father used black slaves). So the jealousy from the book is retained, but, since Sandi’s never actually shown, without the sense the book offers that Antoinette had a clear alternative, and betrayed herself in submitting to the color line and rejecting that choice.
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The meaning of the word “conservative”
Posted by Sappho on January 28th, 2012 filed in News and Commentary
Conor Friedersdorf has a post on the many different (and sometimes completely contradictory) things Americans mean when they say they’re conservative. Now, you could say something similar about the different things people may mean when they say they’re liberal or progressive, so I don’t point to this as a slam on conservatives. Rather, I found the range of suggested meanings interesting, in that Friedersdorf included things I’d enthusiastically affirm (e.g. “A desire to preserve the political philosophy and rules of government articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.” or “Consciousness of the fallibility of man, and an awareness of the value of skepticism, doubt and humility.”), things that I’d consider a valuable expression of one side of an argument (e.g. caution about change, especially when it involves remaking society to match some abstract account, or recognizing the positive values of free market capitalism), and things I’d thoroughly disagree with (e.g. “A belief that America should export its brand of democracy through force of arms.”). Friedersdorf also tried to match the four remaining Republican candidates to his list, to say in which sense each of the four was “conservative.” (By his account, my strongest point of disagreement with Romney would be his acceptance of “A belief that America is an exceptional nation, a shining city on a hill, whose rightful role is leader of the free world.”, my biggest disagreement with Ron Paul would be his “Disdain for American liberalism, multiculturalism, identity politics, affirmative action, welfare, European-style social policies, and the left and its ideas generally.”, and, though Gingrich and Romney are in some sense about equally “conservative,” Gingrich manages to be “conservative” in many more of the ways I don’t like than Romney does.)
Anyway, if any of you cares to read Friedersdorf’s post, I’d be curious to know:
- Do you think he accurately captures the range of things people mean by calling themselves “conservative,” or do you think he’s off?
- If you see yourself as conservative, in which of his senses (or which sense that he misses) do you mean the term?
- If you don’t see yourself as conservative, which of his versions of “conservative” are you primarily rejecting?
- Do you think he accurately characterizes the versions of conservatism that the remaining Republican candidates subscribe to?
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Sue of Still I Am One on “The rule of the last inch”
Posted by Sappho on January 27th, 2012 filed in Blogwatch
I found a new blog, of a “Quakerly-inclined Unitarian.” Here, from that blog, is The rule of the last inch.
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Of object-oriented software design and Quaker state of the meeting reports
Posted by Sappho on January 22nd, 2012 filed in Computers, Quaker Practice
From the textbook for my class on object-oriented analysis and design:
Also, often the point of creating artifacts or models is not the document or diagram itself, but the thinking, analysis, and proactive readiness. That’s an Agile Modeling perspective: that the greatest value of modeling is to improve understanding, rather than to document reliable specifications.
As I read this, I’m reminded of what the clerk of our Ministry and Oversight Committee likes to say about State of the Meeting reports: that the process of reflection and discussion about the state of our meeting that we go through when writing our report is more important than our final report.
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There isn’t really such a thing as being an accidental rapist
Posted by Sappho on January 22nd, 2012 filed in Sexuality
Benito confirmed my suspicions. “Panderers on this side, Seducers on the other side. Come, we must find a bridge.” He turned left, and we followed uncertainly.
“I … was a seducer,” Corbett said uncertainly.
I remembered the convention atmosphere and what happened the night before I died. “Me, too.”
Benito snorted. “Did you ever have a woman against her will?”
“No -”
“Or make her drunk, or drug her?”
Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, Inferno
In Niven’s and Pournelle’s novel Inferno, the Seducers of Circle Eight are people who have gotten others sexually in ways that might or might not legally amount to rape, but that definitely were against the will of their victims. Their victims might be incapacitated by alcohol or drugs, or they might be the victims of quid pro quo sexual harrassment (sleep with me or you lose your job), or they might have been emotionally manipulated, but, one way or another, both Seducer and “seduced” knew darn well that the “seduced” wasn’t willingly seduced. Corbett and the novel’s narrator, “seducers” in the more modern sense of finding enthusiastically willing groupies eager to sleep with the famous astronaut or science fiction writer, at first fear that they may belong in this circle, but are schooled in the difference between the enthusiastically consensual variety of “seduction” and the variety of “seduction” that puts people in this circle.
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Full index to SoTeC posts at Alexandria
Posted by Sappho on January 19th, 2012 filed in Classes, Lectures, and Conferences
Here are my posts on the Southland Technology Conference, in October, 2011, at the new Alexandria site (some of them are also mirrored here):
SoTec 2011 (the overview of the conference)
SoTeC 2011 notes: Why Perfectly Rational Processes Fail And What We Can Do About It
SoTeC: Innovation and Organizational Maturity: How to Effect the Right Kind of Change
SoTeC 2011: Creating a Client Centric Organization
SoTeC 2011: Dehumidifying the Cloud
SoTeC 2011: The New Rules of Engagement on LinkedIn
SoTeC 2011: The Role of Planning and Product Marketing in Innovation
SoTeC 2011: 10 Tech Trends Altering the Testing Landscape
SoTeC 2011 talk on Agile QA’s Game Changing Impact on Project Management
SoTeC 2011: CyberSecurity Data Breaches: All Those Bits & Bytes
SoTeC 2011: Learning to Surf: Economic Volatility and Relevant IT
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Your “desire” shall be for your husband
Posted by Sappho on January 17th, 2012 filed in Bible study, Feminism, Theology
At The CBE Scroll, the blog of Christians for Biblical Equality, Trevor raises the question of the meaning of the word “desire” in Genesis 3:16b:
… A part of his belief system was based on the assumption that women desired to usurp from men, this God-given authority….
So when my friend heard of this ‘new’ teaching (as it was back then) comparing the use of the word ‘desire’ in Genesis 3:16 with the very same Hebrew word in Genesis 4:7, where it related to God’s pronouncement of how it would be for Cain, he was ecstatic. Here the thought was of sin lurking at the door with a ‘desire’ to overpower Cain. The word (Hebrew – Teshuqa) carries with it a, sense of longing, eagerly desiring – no argument with that, but for my friend it was a fresh revelation proving that women have an inbuilt, intense desire to rule men. I have heard this particular interpretation often since then, sometimes in the most unlikely places, but I have never been convinced by it. In fact, a recent reading again of the actual texts, in various translations and paraphrases, only serves to confirm my suspicion of such conclusions.
Why couldn’t it simply mean that even though Eve (and through her, all women) would experience extreme pain in childbirth, she would still have an intense, inbuilt longing and desire to be sexually intimate with her husband? … Or, if as some interpreters suggest, what if the ‘intense longing’ describes the woman’s desire to turn away from God and move toward her husband being in the place of God in her life? …
Oddly, I first heard the “new” teaching that Trevor heard from his friend from a book that had exactly the opposite take to Trevor’s friends “complementarian,” women-are-Biblically-supposed-to-submit-to-men take on the relationship between the sexes. The version I read was that the curse of Genesis 3, the result of the Fall, was that Adam should rule over Eve and Eve should desire to rule over Adam; in other words, a mutual desire to dominate that replaces the natural equality of Eden. And, really, if you’re going to interpret Eve’s desire for Adam as a desire to rule over him, given that Adam doesn’t rule over Eve till after the Fall, seeing both parties’ desire to rule as part of the Fall actually makes more sense to me than seeing Adam’s desire to rule as just fine and dandy and Eve’s desire to rule as sin.
The other thing that I’d say is that all three of the desires Trevor describes work as descriptions of human nature. We desire each other sexually, and we desire to boss each other and sometimes we put each other in the place of God.
I suspect, though, that in the text the word simply means sexual desire. Michelle, in the comments to Trevor’s post, points out that the same word for “desire” is used in the Song of Solomon, and the close proximity of the “desire” to Eve’s pain in bearing children makes the sexual reading make most sense to me.
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Haiti two years after the quake
Posted by Sappho on January 16th, 2012 filed in Blogwatch
One of my cousins sent me a link to her friend’s account of her trip and volunteer work through a humanitarian organization to Haiti – 2 years after the earthquake. Check it out.
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Alexandria has relocated
Posted by Sappho on January 14th, 2012 filed in Blogwatch
My blog master at the group blog where I post has relocated Alexandria from WordPress to its own domain. I’m continuing my blogging about the Southland Technology Conference that I attended in October 2011 at the new Alexandria, with a post about the key note address about the XBox. When I’ve finished the series (four more SoTeC posts to go, all of which I’ve written and will have up within the next few days), I’ll post here with links to the whole series.
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What a Circus
Posted by Sappho on January 13th, 2012 filed in Memory
One of my friends posted, on Facebook, a link to the song What a Circus from Evita, with the remark, “Oh, what a circus, oh, what a show! The GOP is coming to town!” She lives in Michigan, so the GOP race may still not be completely settled by the time it hits her state in February. I’m expecting, by the time we in California have our June primary, that the only question remaining will be what Mitt Romney will do to win the supporters of his opponents. But hearing that song again reminded me of when I saw Evita. It was in the summer of 1997. At the time, Joel and I used to go once a week to visit my grandmother, and bring her a movie to see. We rented Evita, and it turned out that we saw it the week of Princess Diana’s death. I remember watching Antonio Banderas sing the song “What a Circus,” surrounded by frantic mourning for Evita Peron, and thinking of two very different women. There’s no way that Princess Diana resembles the character Evita, as Andrew Lloyd Webber portrays her in the musical. I don’t suppose they much resembled each other in real life. But the mourning was familiar, the way the death of one particular woman, whatever her merits and faults, captures the imagination of a crowd.
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On Being Good, Giving, and Game, and on Sexual Regret
Posted by Sappho on January 11th, 2012 filed in Sexuality
There are two points from Eve Tushnet’s comments on Premarital Sex in America that I’ve been meaning to get back to.
p88: A girl says oral sex is “vulgar” but women should be nice and “giving” in relationships and do it anyway. This gets at one aspect of what you might call the Dan Savage worldview which I hadn’t considered: If social norms shift such that the default is more like the “Good, Giving, and Game” model where you do the sex act you’d (strongly, in the case of anal sex, as Regnerus and Uecker find) prefer not to do, women have to give in a lot more often than men. (Assuming that this shift in social norms doesn’t radically shift which sex acts men vs women object to and how strongly.) The “GGG” model can be just another way of playing on women’s altruism–and our preference for justifying our actions as altruism even when there are a lot of other motives in play.
[ETA: I should make clear that I think this gender imbalance is an unintended consequence of the "GGG" idea. I mean, I don't think Dan Savage came up with this phrase in order to prey on women's insecurities! But I do think it plays into some of those insecurities.]
I think that there are three ways in which GGG works less well in the heterosexual world than it does among gay men, like Dan Savage.
- Woman as gate keeper: Every so often, I’ll come across a letter to an advice column, in which a woman’s describing what seems to me a quite ordinary request from her husband (to wear lingerie, say) as if it’s incredibly perverse and treating her like a whore. This is the opposite of the problem Eve describes, one in which a woman has learned her gate keeper role too well, and isn’t GGG enough. I don’t mean, by this, that she should actually agree to the lingerie, to be “giving” and nice; if lingerie’s a squick for her, something she just as strongly objects to as other women object to anal sex, then she shouldn’t force herself to do something that, for whatever reason, feels truly humiliating. I mean, rather, the part where resisting a personal sexual squick (that’s really not actually immoral), rather than being owned as an individual preference, is tied to shaming the desire itself. (I suppose this way of framing makes it sound as if I’m saying women sexually shame men and men don’t sexually shame women; obviously I don’t mean that. People sexually shame each other every which way. But this is the counterpoint that came to my mind when thinking about Eve’s remarks about how the GGG ideal plays in the straight world. And I do think that my own degree of buy in to the GGG ideal would be, not that Joel and I have to actually be GGG about everything one of us may want and the other, perhaps strongly, not want, but that we be GGG about listening to each other in an open way.)
- Woman as caretaker: This is the problem Eve describes, where you’re so geared toward altruism, and justifying your desires as altruism if they have mixed motives, that you don’t properly defend your own wants, needs, and boundaries. Not all gay men like, want, or take part in anal sex, and those who don’t, don’t seem to have a problem turning it down. Complaints about winding up doing (to please someone else) something you really strongly didn’t want to do are things I hear more from women than men. Here, the problem isn’t not being GGG enough, but being GGG beyond the point where it’s conducive to happiness.
- “No” as a bargaining position: This is the problem where a “no” gets treated, not as an actual expression of preference, but as a starting position for extended bargaining. Put it together with the “caretaker” problem just mentioned, and you can get really memorably bad sex.
And memorably bad sex brings me to the next point from Eve’s comments that struck me, about sexual regret.
p110: The authors imply that there isn’t a script for regretting casual sex–they write as if seeking out sex is scripted but regretting it is more authentic or less socially-condoned, and I’m not convinced that’s true.
I’m not convinced that’s true, either. I’m also not convinced you need a script to regret casual sex, just not to have a script that prevents you from expressing your actual regrets.
I think, though, that what I see isn’t so much the absence of scripts as clashing scripts.
Take Neely Steinberg’s post at the Good Men Project. Here’s Neely Steinberg, on her reaction to no-strings attached sex.
Neely: I agree with a lot of what Hugo has to say, but I think we may have different perspectives on the effects of casual, no-strings attached sex. I also happen to think most women aren’t all that interested in having a lot of it for purely sexual reasons, with multiple partners no less. And I’ve come to believe that feminism’s inability, and at times refusal, to acknowledge differences between the sexes has been disingenuous and has gravely backfired on women, leaving them ill-equipped to discover what really feels good and right to them….
I spent the latter half of high school, college (if dating was scarce when I was in college, it’s nonexistent today), and many years post-college, mired in the hook-up scene, which was, mind you, always fueled by alcohol. It’s as if I needed the crutch of Vodka to tell me what I was doing was an awesome idea, because without it I’d know better. I wasn’t alone. It was happening all around me. My friends, female acquaintances, countless women I’d met briefly over the years—we were all in the same boat. Post-college, we could pursue our careers and hobbies and passions full-force but were unable to form lasting attachments, to believe that a man wanted us for anything more than a quick hook-up, to understand what real intimacy was about….
And, in the comments, Sara replies
Neely, your post is so full of fail I am not sure where to begin….
You mentioned being lonely and crying… it wasn’t that sex that made you that way. At the moment you were having sex you were feeling pretty damn good… maybe not second later, but lets be honest about the intrinsic value of orgasms, shall we? Later, when you were not having sex and not feeling good you felt lonely and unloved. You are reaching for a reason to pin it on and say… AHA, it was because I had sex BACK then that I feel LONELY now. No. At the time, the sex felt good enough that you kept doing it. If it didn’t, you wouldn’t. And the reason you were lonely was because you hadn’t met your partner yet. Pretty straightforward.
Notice what’s happening here. Neely has generalized her experience, of having been involved in repeated alcohol-fueled hookups and regretting it, and her observations of her friends’ similar experiences, to conclude that women in general are badly served by hook-up culture, with few exceptions (“I was told, by the 10% of women who are capable of effectively and consistently compartmentalizing their emotions when it comes to no-strings attached sex …”), and that sex-positive feminism, which she sees as having encouraged her to deny her emotions, sold her a bill of goods. Sara, offended at Neely’s generalization, makes her own retaliatory generalization (“but lets be honest about the intrinsic value of orgasms, shall we”), suggesting that Neely’s misrepresenting, not only the experience of women in general, but even her own experience and regrets.
Lets be honest about the intrinsic value of orgasms. Many, many women do not have orgasms from their hook-ups. The fact that Neely (“always fueled by alcohol”) repeated the experience doesn’t mean that she was having fabulous orgasms from her hook-ups (maybe she was and maybe she wasn’t, and I’m not at all convinced that the “I get a reliable orgasm from every one night stand” experience is more common than the alternative). And lets further be honest about the intrinsic value of orgasms. If you do share orgasms with someone, and that someone then either treats you very well or treats you like crap, it’s really not that freakishly odd for the fact that you shared orgasms to intensify your reaction to the subsequent treatment, for good or ill (in Neely’s case, ill: “After being totally ignored at a party by a guy who I had hooked up with the night before”), to the point where those emotions matter to you more than the orgasm itself. (Qualifier: Though I’m critiquing Sara’s response to Neely, I don’t, myself, agree with Neely that feminism’s the problem, here. I see the environment “fueled by alcohol” that she describes as more of the issue. Absent the alcohol crutch, I think people tend to learn quickly not to repeat alienating hook-ups.)
I suspect, though, that Sara wouldn’t have been so inclined to insist that Neely really enjoyed her hook-ups more than she was willing to admit, if Neely’s account of why hook-ups aren’t for her had sounded more like this:
… And I really respect and admire his position. But casual sex just doesn’t work for me. I used to wish it would. I have even seen that as a setback and a personal weakness. But inevitably I have returned to the same conclusion. It doesn’t.
Everyone’s psychological make-up is different….
The argument, in other words, isn’t about whether you get to regret sex (even intensely), but about whose experience gets to be the norm. Even though Neely Steinberg includes a passing expression of tolerance for others who might actually enjoy casual sex more than she does
I want women to be happy, and to be honest with themselves, without feeling the need to buy into a politically-correct ideology, about what makes them happy. If it truly is lots of casual sex and fleeting hook-ups, more power to you! If not, that’s okay too!
she makes it quite clear what she thinks most women will find, if they’re honest with themselves. And Sara’s equally clear that most women will find, if they’re honest with themselves, that their regret isn’t really about the sex. I see, here, not an absence of scripts for speaking of sexual regret, but clashing scripts.
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Who you’d give your vote for president, and whose views you want to be heard
Posted by Sappho on January 10th, 2012 filed in News and Commentary
In a presidential election, we get to choose from a number of inevitably flawed candidates. Whomever we choose, we’ll have to stomach at least some positions we don’t want. And we pick the most appealing, or the least flawed. Some years, voting with more hope, we may make our flawed choices with actual enthusiasm. Other years we hold our noses and go for the lesser evil.
When making this choice, one has to take a man’s whole spectrum of positions and experience into account. Presidents are often blocked by Congress from doing what they want (be it privatizing Social Security, in the case of Bush, or closing Gitmo, in the case of Obama), but you have to at least consider what a potential president might accomplish if he has a period of time in which his party holds both houses and a veto proof majority in the Senate. If you don’t consider that, you might assume that, say, Obama could never, ever pass health care reform, because the Democrats have been failing to pass it for decades, and then find yourself mistaken. Likewise, you have to at least consider what impact a particular president might have, long term, if he gets to appoint a couple of Supreme Court justices. It doesn’t do to assume that your favorite candidate will only win on those issues where you agree with him, and be blocked on those issues where you disagree with him.
But sometimes a candidate whom you’d never want as President still brings something to the race that you wouldn’t want to miss. Perhaps you’re one of those people who, back when Jesse Jackson was running for President, decided in the end that he really didn’t have the experience you needed to vote for him, or that there were things he’d said that ruled out your voting for him, but who still got some satisfaction in seeing a black man, for the first time, win a presidential primary, in hopes that the way would be that much clearer for the right candidate to win regardless of race sometime in the future. Or perhaps there’s someone who has policies you can’t abide, but others that you think need to be heard; on balance, you’ll vote against him, but you hope his participation in the debates will bring support for his better policies.
And so it is that I watch with some ambivalence candidates for whom I’ll never vote. Should I applaud an anti-interventionist argument, even from someone nearly all of whose other politics I disagee with? Or should I worry that it’s the anti-Federal Reserve argument, not the anti-war argument, that in the end will influence the Republican party, and that we’ll see a party that wants to throw, not just Keynes’ ideas on stimulus, but Milton Friedman’s monetarism, under the bus (leaving no tools to balance business cycles)?
On balance, I want everyone heard, and a broad spectrum of ideas put up for public debate (in my ideal world, Gary Johnson and Buddy Roemer would also have made it to the debates). But I also want those ideas well critiqued, because the very people who are really, really right on one issue are often dangerously wrong on another.
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Ghost Writing
Posted by Sappho on January 10th, 2012 filed in News and Commentary
Malcolm X didn’t literally write his autobiography. Alex Haley did. But if someone were to quote from Malcolm X’s autobiography, and attribute the words to Malcolm X, I’d be surprised if I were suddenly to see a chorus of people indignantly complaining that Malcolm X didn’t write those words, that someone else wrote those words.
I mention this because Amanda Marcotte takes a strong position on the authorship of certain newsletters.
Cue the chorus of people claiming that we can’t actually believe that someone using the first person and signing his name to a document could have possibly written it. Next you’ll be saying Duncan Black is Atrios.
Technically, it seems to me, Amanda Marcotte is wrong. It’s not at all obvious that, if you’re a public figure, and if you’re not (like Amanda Marcotte or Duncan Black) a public figure because of your writing, words written in the first person, in your name, with your biographical details (“I voted against this outrage time and time again as a Congressman.”) will literally have been written by you. Public figures use ghost writers all the time.
It’s just that the normal way ghost writing operates isn’t that you have no clue who your ghost writer is, that you have no clue what he’s been writing for years in your name, and that none of your friends even thinks to tell you if he writes something that everyone who knows you knows you’d completely disagree with. Normally, ghost writing works more the way it did for the Autobiography of Malcolm X, where you know Malcolm X didn’t put the words in their final literary form, but where you can trust that Alex Haley is faithfully representing what Malcolm X told him, and that Malcolm X had some clue what Alex Haley was writing in his name. Normally, if someone’s been ghost writing your newsletters who, according to many of your associates, is your good friend and was your congressional chief of staff, and whom you continue to associate with him long after the newsletters in question were written, the reasonable assumption is that your former congressional chief of staff correctly reported your voting record and that, in his role of ghost writer for your newsletters, he expressed views that he reasonably thought you’d be OK having published in your name.
If you think that a certain person has adequately repudiated the words that appeared twenty or so years ago in his newsletters, I can at least understand that argument. After all, I’ve grown up in a world in which many people of both parties (Strom Thurmond, George Wallace, Robert Byrd) revised their political positions, once into the civil rights era, and were accepted, partly because, really, we’d have had to get rid of a lot of politicians if we lost all the formerly segregationist ones. Sometimes the renunciation of old views was more believable than other times, of course. But “he repudiated those old statements” is at least an argument that makes sense to me, even in those cases where I don’t find a particular repudiation sufficient.
What I don’t understand is high indignation at the deep unfairness of believing someone has any responsibility at all for what his ghost writer wrote, or could possibly have known what his ghost writer said. That is a very strange way for ghost writing to work.
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Daraat
Posted by Sappho on January 9th, 2012 filed in Movies
One sentence summary: Teenage boy in Chad, after an amnesty is declared for acts committed during the civil war there, sets out to take revenge on the man who killed his father.
It occurred to me, after I started watching this movie, that it has a similar frame to Eleni, which (particularly in the movie version – movies being more streamlined than books) follows Nick Gage as he seeks to find, and take revenge on, the man who had his mother killed during the civil war in Greece. But the focus is entirely different. While Eleni is, as the name implies, about what Nick Gage learns about his mother (the man who had her killed only appearing briefly), Daraat is about what Amit learns about his father’s killer, and whether, having come to know the killer as he is now, Amit will still be willing to take revenge.
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Angela Merkel’s political woes (and, even more so, the FDP’s)
Posted by Sappho on January 7th, 2012 filed in News and Commentary
Compared to Greece and Italy, Germany has a happier worry: a jobless rate that has hit an 18 year low, stoking fears of a labor shortage. And so it should be no surprise that the German media have generally been kind to Merkel, who, despite the eurozone crisis and despite a reputation to which the word “uncharismatic” is often attached, still remains one of Germany’s more popular politicians. Chancellor Merkel does, however, face two tricky internal political problems.
The more recent dilemma is what to do about the President of Germany, Christian Wulff, like Merkel a member of the CDU, who faces a scandal over his home loan which provoked demonstrators to gather today waving shoes. Discussions have begun among the coalition partners about his possible departure from office.
The longer standing problem is the freefall of Angela Merkel’s junior coalition partner, the FDP.
… That, though, wasn’t all. A new survey released on Friday, conducted by the pollsters at Infratest for German public television station ARD, found that, were elections to be held on Sunday, just 2 percent of Germans would vote for the Free Democrats. Some 83 percent of those asked said that the FDP has not delivered on its promises. A further 72 percent say that it isn’t clear where the party stands when it comes to the euro crisis. Just 15 percent of Germans think the party is credible.
It is an incredible fall for a party which used to be the kingmakers of Germany’s political landscape. For decades after the war, the FDP formed governing coalitions with the CDU as well as, at times, with the center-left Social Democrats (SPD). When the party scored an all-time high of 14.6 percent in the 2009 general elections, it seemed as though the FDP’s place in the German political landscape was clear.
Since then, however, it has been all downhill. Then party-leader Guido Westerwelle, who is currently Germany’s foreign minister, showed an inflexible obsession with tax cuts, despite the dark economic clouds gathered overhead. Merkel ultimately was forced to humiliate Westerwelle with a categorical rejection of the plan. And the FDP swoon began in earnest….
Most recently, the FDP suffered a blow as the state government in Saarland, a three way coalition between the CDU, the FDP, and the Greens, collapsed, to be succeeded by talks about a coalition government between the CDU and the SPD. The Saarland debacle and its recent grim polling numbers (below the 5% threshhold needed to return the FDP to Parliament) made the FDP’s traditional Epiphany party gathering a gloomy affair.
What effect does the FDP’s crisis have on Angela Merkel’s ability to promote her favored solutions to the eurozone crisis? Less, perhaps, in the short term than a similar crisis would have in, say, Italy. Germany was the first country to adopt a constructive vote of no confidence system. This means that Angela Merkel’s coalition government can only be toppled by a vote of no confidence if there is a positive majority for some potential successor. Since federal elections are held in Germany about once every four years, and were last held in 2009, the FDP has until 2013 to attempt to recover from disaster. But should it fail, Germany’s libertarian king maker party may see its traditional coalition partner role taken over by someone elses.
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Cynicism about what people would do for a million dollars
Posted by Sappho on January 5th, 2012 filed in News and Commentary
Matt Yglesias is skeptical of a report that an overwhelming majority of people wouldn’t kill their favorite pet for a million dollars.
Saying you wouldn’t kill your favorite pet for $1 million is cheap talk. Actually declining an offer of $1 million in exchange for the life of your pet, by contrast, costs $1 million. How many people would really turn that offer down in these cash-strapped times? Some enterprising billionaire should start making real cash offers for the purposes of social science
Seriously? How cash strapped would you need to be to kill this in return for a million dollars? The happiness trade off seems clear to me: Either I get to live a pretty good life in which I don’t have a million dollars, but can still pay my bills, and have three furry friends who love and trust me, or I get to kill one of them, my favorite, forever losing that love and trust and carrying with me the memory of just who I killed, in return for a million dollars that I will pretty much take for granted (losing any happiness boost) long before I’ve forgotten the dead pet. Just looking at my own happiness, why on earth would I make that trade?
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A Dog’s Life
Posted by Sappho on January 3rd, 2012 filed in Daily Life
Today, I got a tooth pulled.
My dog’s view of the situation: Mommy’s home! Mommy’s home with me all day! That must mean she can take me on a walk all the way to the park! Oh, take me for another walk, Mommy!
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John Woolman and the robins
Posted by Sappho on January 1st, 2012 filed in Books, Quaker Practice, Saints and Witnesses
I may here mention a remarkable circumstance that occurred in my childhood. On going to a neighbour’s house, I saw on the way a robin sitting on her nest, and as I came near she went off ; but having young ones, she flew about, and with many cries expressed her concern for them. I stood and threw stones at her, and one striking her, she fell down dead. At first I was pleased with the exploit, but after a few minutes was seized with horror, at having, in a sportive way, killed an innocent creature while she was careful for her young. I beheld her lying dead, and thought those young ones, for which she was so careful, must now perish for want of their dam to nourish them. After some painful considerations on the subject, I climbed up the tree, took all the young birds, and killed them, supposing that better than to leave them to pine away and die miserably. In this case I believed that Scripture proverb was fulfilled, “The tender mercies of the wicked are cruel.” I then went on my errand, and for some hours could think of little else but the cruelties I had committed, and was much troubled. Thus He whose tender mercies are over all His works hath placed a principle in the human mind, which incites to exercise goodness towards every living creature; and this being singly attended to, people become tender-hearted and sympathizing; but when frequently and totally rejected, the mind becomes shut up in a contrary disposition.
John Woolman, Journal of John Woolman
Other people’s confessional writings don’t always appeal. Sometimes, the “sin” related seems so small that you’re left wanting to tell the author that he or she is overscrupulous and should stop the self-flagellation. Other times, the wrong done seems so enormous that you think nothing you’ve done can compare.
Not so, for me, John Woolman’s story of the dead birds. True, I’ve never killed a mother bird with a rock, but I’ve been a child who took pleasure in aiming a rock or dart or arrow, and I can understand the joy in aiming true, even though that true aim kills a small creature protecting her young. At the same time, when I read of his real sorrow for the motherless birds, the guilt he feels over the small birds he’s thoughtlessly harmed for sport strikes me as fitting, the early pricking of a conscience which would later be exercised over larger wrongs, that the rest of the world would overlook.
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Economists and the 40 hour week
Posted by Sappho on December 28th, 2011 filed in Anarchism, News and Commentary
A man in the front row who had attracted my attention by his white hair and lean, haggard face rose to speak. He said that he understood my impatience with such small demands as a few hours less a day, or a few dollars more a week. It was legitimate for young people to take time lightly. But what were men of his age to do? They were not likely to live to see the ultimate overthrow of the capitalist system. Were they also to forgo the release of perhaps two hours a day from the hated work? That was all they could hope to see realized in their lifetime. Should they deny themselves even that small achievement? Should they never have a little more time for reading or being out in the open? Why not be fair to people chained to the block?
The man’s earnestness, his clear analysis of the principle involved in the eight-hour struggle, brought home to me the falsity of Most’s position. I realized I was committing a crime against myself and the workers by serving as a parrot repeating Most’s views. I understood why I had failed to reach my audience. I had taken refuge in cheap jokes and bitter thrusts against the toilers to cover up my own inner lack of conviction. My first public experience did not bring the result Most had hoped for, but it taught me a valuable lesson. It cured me somewhat of my childlike faith in the infallibility of my teacher and impressed on me the need of independent thinking.
Emma Goldman, Living My Life
Why do we have a 40 hour work week? To me, the obvious answer always seemed to be, “Thank a union.” Or, to put it at more length:
- Most workers naturally prefer working moderate hours and getting vacations to working long hours and getting few days off.
- The average worker not having the individual clout to make such a bargain on his or her own, workers banded together, in organizations called unions, to bargain for, among other things, an eight hour day. (Though legislation protecting collective bargaining didn’t pass till the New Deal Era, Emma Goldman describes unions already carrying out this struggle in the nineteenth century.)
- Henry Ford, a strong opponent of labor unions who sought to forestall unionization by a combination of union busting and “welfare capitalism” to create good will with employees, established first a 40 hour week and then a 48 hour week at his plants in the 1920s.
- In 1938, with Roosevelt’s support, the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed, establishing a minimum wage, guaranteeing time and a half for overtime in certain jobs, and restricting “oppressive child labor” (a term defined in the statute).
- “White collar” jobs got exempted from the overtime role, I always assumed because those employees were considered able to drive their own bargains better than the government could bargain for them. I’ve spent six years of my working life as “non-exempt” and getting time and a half for overtime, and the entire rest of my working life as “exempt.” Most people I work with have also been “exempt.”
Now, I learn, through Andrew Sullivan that economist Robin Hanson takes a different view of Why Work Hour Limits?, leading to a different view of why certain jobs are exempt:
Many laws discourage and limit work hours. Laws require holidays and vacations, limit hours per day and week, and require extra payment for work over these limits. And of course income taxes discourage work more generally. The standard economic explanation for these limits is to prevent inefficient signaling. People motivated to gain relative status, to show their extra dedication to success, and to appear more able, work extra hours, for a net social loss. Work hour limits can reduce such losses….
This argument makes some sense, but it would make a lot more sense if we set broader and more consistent limits…. Furthermore, high status occupations are especially exempt…. Why are we so selective in our limits?
One explanation is a battle for relative status between professions and activities. Areas where work hours are limited produce less, and so look less impressive. Ambitious folks who want to show their high abilities then choose other areas, leading to an equilibrium were observers reasonably less respect folks who work in limited areas. On this story, work hour limits were set in manufacturing and manual labor in order to reduce the status of such activities….
So, on Robin Hanson’s theory, we computer professionals are mostly exempt from overtime rules because we want to look professionally impressive by working long weeks. People who value seeing their families more than showing off their ambition can then head for other jobs (in the companies I’ve worked for, that generally means “pink collar” administrative assistant jobs, and I suppose that may be one reason why, even now, many women cluster there). This actually makes a certain sense when you look at, say, work hours among software engineers in Silicon Valley (where it does seem to me that working long weeks serves a status signaling function). I do question, though, the compatibility of the theory that “work hour limits were set in manufacturing and manual labor in order to reduce the status of such activities” with the historical record of unions pressing for such limits as far back as the nineteenth century. It seems to me more likely that, if there is a status motive involved, the motive for the limits was still a simple desire not to be worn out by work, and the status signaling among occupations then followed, for those jobs that had both ambitious people and work that could be done for long hours without leaving you physically bone tired at the end of the day. But then, I’ve read more Emma Goldman than economic theory on the work week.