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.
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“It profits a man nothing …” Blogwatch, the what price for a soul edition
Posted by Sappho on December 21st, 2011 filed in Blogwatch
Freakonomics asks Who Wants to Sell a Soul?, passing on the question of reader Caleb B.:
Here’s my question: what is it about the idea of a soul that even people who confess to not have one are hesitant to sell it? I have been trying, for the better part of ten years, to buy a soul. I’ve offered a dollar amount, between $10 and $50, for someone to sign a sheet of paper that says that I own their soul. Despite multiple debates with confessed atheists, no one has signed the contract. I have been able to buy several people’s Sense of Humor and one guy’s Dignity, but no souls. Additionally, will any Freakonomics reader take me up on this? I’m willing to spend $50 on souls.
Caleb eventually, through Freakonomics, finds a taker willing to sell his soul for $5, but first encounters several more atheists unwilling to sell their souls. A debate ensues as to why:
- $50 is a cheapskate price for a soul. True, but then, if souls are real, isn’t any price too cheap for one
- Pascal’s wager: Even if you’re 99.999% sure you don’t have a soul to sell, aren’t you better off passing on selling it? On the other hand, the people who aren’t selling their souls aren’t paying attention to Pascal’s wager in any other respect.
- It’s fraudulent to sell a soul if you don’t believe one exists. Some people, who don’t believe in souls, are adamant on this point, and honor-bound not to sell their non-existent souls. But Caleb B. has managed to acquire multiple senses of humor, a contract that, if you took it seriously, would be similarly fraudulent.
I think there’s another reason that even atheists don’t want to sell their souls. Think about it. What do people mean, in everyday speech, when they say something like, “He sold his soul for political office”? Absent a literal devil, doesn’t that phrase still have a recognizable meaning? It means that you’ve traded your integrity for something. Atheists, too, have integrity, and atheists, too, may consider the trading of their integrity no joking matter (for obvious reasons, the sale of a sense of humor makes a more satisfactory joke).
Other links:
On Africa: Promoted from the comments, Scott Lahti’s link on the Ten Biggest Positive Africa Stories of 2011.
On being poor and black: Gene Marks, at Forbes, wrote an article titled “If I Were a Poor Black Kid,” that generated a flood of controversy on the net. As Matt Steinglass points out in his relatively gentle response If I were the 99% I’d try to be the 1%
… As Forbes’s Kashmir Hill later posted, most of the vitriol seemed to be responding to the title. The post itself went out of its way to be polite, understanding, and non-partisan, and was mainly guilty of tone-deafness and of an unauthorised attempt by an unqualified ethnic-majority person at racial empathy with an imaginary ethnic-minority person, a gesture which is just extremely risky and basically shouldn’t be ventured.
Interesting responses come from Karl Smith, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Megan McArdle.
On to do lists: Peter Bregnan, at Harvard Business Review, advocates a to don’t list.
On the debt crisis: Is anyone not getting threatened with downgrade? Moody’s says that the UK credit rating may not be immune to the euro crisis. I think I can detect a touch of resentment of Cameron’s veto of the “Merkozy” plan in manager magazine’s account of the downgrade threat, “And Britain was so proud, not to be part of the euro zone.”
Meanwhile, Matt Yglesias reports that
today we see that operation shovel cheap monet at banks is well underway with the ECB doling out “489.2 billion euros, or $644 billion, to 523 institutions, through what are known as long-term repurchasing operations,” much more than the 300 billion euros that analysts had been projecting.
And here’s an older post (by about a week and a half) from Crooked Timber, on Exit, voice, loyalty and – something else as options for the peripheral EU countries, and Ireland in particular.
I’m looking around me at the damage to the Irish social fabric caused by austerity measures to date, and wondering how to think about it, using these categories. Ireland is still a developed economy. But unemployment is now over 14 per cent, half of it is long-term, and it’s worst for young people. The domestic economy is below water, and emigration rates have surged. There are many forms of personal misery – the special needs children who can’t keep up at school because the budget for their personal assistants has been axed, the mental hospital patients who are to be moved into a locked ward for five weeks over Christmas because of staffing shortages, the formerly comfortably-off families seeking help from charities to keep afloat. We can see all the signs that economic activity is faltering – the rash of ‘To Let’ signs on office space, the closing-down sales on high streets and in shopping centres. We listen to the myriad stories told by family and friends of families trapped by unrepayable mortgages; of desperate small businesses running at a loss, hoping their accumulated reserves will buffer them until there is a recovery. We witness the increase in suicide rates, devastating for all affected.
People can put up with austerity for quite some time, if they believe it is necessary and unavoidable, and if they think that there will eventually be some improvement….
Links about sex: Eve Tushnet on the book Premarital Sex in America. Susie Bright on being Blind-sexual.
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DBSA Conference 2011, Ask the Pros (10/14/2011)
Posted by Sappho on December 18th, 2011 filed in Bipolar Disorder, Classes, Lectures, and Conferences
Kent Layton, Psy D: I’m a clinical psychologist. I worked from the bottom up, and now train 23 interns a year. Psychiatry and psychology work together. I can answer questions on cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT), etc.
Himasiri De Silva, MD: I wanted to become a surgeon, but found surgery residency boring. I came across psychiatric patients, and switched to psychiatry. I specialize in bipolar disorder, and try “to get people well, not halfway well.” We can do better in treatment of bipolar disorder.
Just finished a therapist/doctor bipolar disorder symposium in Orange Country (my notes here are unclear on exactly who just finished the symposium, probably Da Silva).
Most of the questions were directed at Da Silva (it’s common in these Ask the Pros sessions for the psychiatrist to get the most questions). I have reordered a few questions and answers to group some similar questions together (the actual Ask the Pros session jumped back and forth in topic, due to the Q & A format).
Read the rest of this entry »
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But oft though wine has played the infidel …
Posted by Sappho on December 17th, 2011 filed in News and Commentary
Andrew Sullivan quotes his now dead friend Christopher Hitchens.
I always knew there was a risk in the bohemian lifestyle… I decided to take it because it helped my concentration, it stopped me being bored — it stopped other people being boring. It would make me want to prolong the conversation and enhance the moment. If you ask: would I do it again? I would probably say yes. But I would have quit earlier hoping to get away with the whole thing. I decided all of life is a wager and I’m going to wager on this bit… In a strange way I don’t regret it. It’s just impossible for me to picture life without wine, and other things, fueling the company, keeping me reading, energising me. It worked for me. It really did.
It’s not a wager I’d ever have taken, for the simple reason that I neither get pleasure from the taste nor from the effect of wine, and, if I don’t have the body that makes wine pleasant, why drink it? (I do, though, enjoy looking at a glass of red wine, and watching people pour it and make toasts with it.) But the quote does make me wonder, what have you done that others would consider foolish, that you nevertheless would do all over again?
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What stories can we tell? On writing and the privacy of others
Posted by Sappho on December 16th, 2011 filed in News and Commentary
Hugo Schwyzer defends his decision to write the story of his second marriage, which unravelled in part because his wife was a lesbian.
Several people have raised the question of whether I’m violating my second wife’s privacy by sharing this account. (One even suggests that “Courtney” has grounds to sue for libel.) In one sense, yes; I’m sharing a true and intimate story of a train wreck of a marriage, replete with some moderately graphic sexual details. On the other hand, there’s simply no way that my second ex-wife could be identified from my article. The chances of someone digging through records to find our marriage license (they’d have to know the county in which we were wed first) and discover her real name are slim indeed. We have no mutual friends, no one to “connect the dots”.
The dilemma of anyone who writes about his or her past is the same: how to tell the truth without harming the innocent. It’s a tough needle to thread. I have little doubt that “Courtney” would not be pleased if she read the story. But I don’t owe her my silence; I do owe her the right to keep her privacy. I think I’ve struck that balance.
I’ve wondered myself, both when I incorporate some memories into my fiction, and when I write nonfictional posts about my life, how to strike the balance between telling my story and respecting other people’s privacy. Some lines are easy:
- Like most bloggers, I make sure any name I give to a person under the age of 18 is a pseudonym. (If the person’s parents have already given him or her a pseudonym, as with CatGirl and GameBoy, I use that; otherwise I make one up.)
- I likewise use pseudonyms any time I tell a story which might reflect badly (whether with good reason or due to stigma I’d disagree with) on someone else. (Exceptions, of course, for public actions of public figures, and for people who have already outed themselves. Because my husband blogs about his bipolar disorder, I feel free to blog about it as well.) Usually this is to spare the person I’d be naming, but in one case (the guy who came after me in the shower), it’s to protect myself, should he, now on the net like everyone else, decide to vanity Google himself.
- I often use pseudonyms for people who aren’t public figures even if I don’t have anything embarrassing to say about them, but not always. I know that my former college roommate Kanef won’t mind if I name him when talking about his filk songs, that my other former college roommate Judy Anderson won’t mind if I give her real name when telling you that she inspired Kanef’s filk song “She’s Always a Hacker,” and that my college friend Matt Nicodemus won’t mind if I give you his real name when I tell you that he once grabbed my hand and danced with me in White Plaza. If I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t mind if I name you, I might name you.
But still, there are times when I’m unsure. I’ve told the real names of two exes, the one who died and the one who’s now famous. What, once I’ve named them, are the boundaries of what I get to say about them? (One boundary, for me, is that any personal story I tell about Dre gets told with his college nickname of Dre, and not with his full professional name, so it doesn’t draw people doing Google searches on news about him. But that’s a slender protection of privacy, weaker than what Hugo gave “Courtney,” since you can learn from my blog archives who “Dre” is, so, if I had any stories of Dre like the one a certain woman told about a certain celebrity’s foot fetish and small dick – I don’t – you wouldn’t read them on this blog.)
In fact, even pseudonyms can be punctured, and do often get punctured, if you’re famous enough. I suspect that Hugo, somewhat public figure though he is, isn’t at that level of fame where his ex-wives will get tracked down. But if he were, say, National Enquirer level notorious, giving “Courtney” a pseudonym wouldn’t prevent the Enquirer from finding her, if they felt that doing so would make a good story. It’s not impossible to work your way through the possible counties to find which one gave Hugo a marriage license (given that he’s had a limited number of wives). Just more trouble than it’s worth.
If Hugo were a really famous author, and “Courtney” were Gore Vidal, probably someone would connect the dots.
Finally, sometimes there may be individual reasons why I decide that a story isn’t mine to tell. My mother-in-law died just one week ago. I’ve thought of putting up a Florence Sax, RIP post about her. But the problem is, I could write that post either like a British obituary, the kind where you tell a dead person’s story warts and all (the way I did with my own Grandmother, when she died), or I could write the more airbrushed kind of obituary, the one where you tell a person’s virtues, but “of the dead, nothing but good.” And I realized that, with all the family members who’d see the post fed through to Facebook, someone would be pained by the kind of post that put her warts on display, and someone else just as pained by the kind that left them out. I can tell you the bare facts of her life: She grew up Catholic in Salt Lake City. Her parents came from Val d’Aosta, a part of Italy so far north that she saw herself as more French than Italian. She was an RN. She attended, for decades, the church in San Bernardino where, as it turned out, Paul Shanley would be sent as assistant priest (without any warning to the priest or parishioners of his pedophile history). She loved to cross stitch. She was the Kennedys biggest fan. But I don’t really feel her story is mine to tell, not now any way, the way my grandmother’s was.
It’s hard to make any one, or two, or three rules that cover the balance between telling my own story and respecting the feelings and privacy of others. Sometimes, I think, the right choice may be to tell your story, even if it offends someone. Sometimes the right choice may be to pass and say that, after all, you can leave this story out.