The deniers and minimizers are starting to succeed in training me to see deniers and minimizers where they aren’t. Like in this tweet from The New Republic:

The numbers on how many women are raped each year might be off by more than 88%: http://on.tnr.com/Yue1dc

I assumed they meant what Sommers would mean by tweeting that. Wrong. By “off” they meant too low, while Sommers of course always means too high.

The article by Claire Groden:

The recent CDC report, based on surveys conducted in 2011, found that almost one in five women (and 1.7 percent of men) have been raped in their lifetimes. In a single year, 1.6 percent of women reported experiences that are considered rape—almost two million cases. But the NCVS report recorded just 243,800 cases of rape or sexual assault in that year, 12 percent of the CDC findings. Meanwhile, a report compiled by the FBI, which only documents cases that were brought to police, shows only 83,425 rapes that year.

Why the big disparities? Different goals, and different kinds of questions.

This difference made the CDC’s survey broader, especially in the case of victims who were under the influence during the attack. The CDC counted alcohol- and drug-facilitated rape, asking if the respondents had ever experienced various sex acts while “drunk, high, drugged, or passed out and unable to consent.” But, as Scott Berkowitz at RAINN, the Rape and Incest Abuse National Network, pointed out, not all of those 1.2 million cases in 2011 would be considered rape by the Department of Justice. Due to the survey question’s phrasing, a person who had been drunk—but still considered herself capable of giving consent—might have answered yes to that question. A CDC spokesperson clarified that being unable to consent is key to the CDC’s definition of rape. 

That’s confusing. There’s a note at the end of the article saying a clarification by the CDC had been added, and that last sentence must be the clarification, which seems to be saying the opposite of what the previous sentence says. The interpolated “but still considered herself capable of giving consent” confuses the issue. Anyway…Groden seems to be saying that the CDC survey includes women who maybe sort of consented but were drunk or high.

Still, the CDC numbers are a reminder of how many sexual assaults and rapes go unreported. The total number of rapes reported to police in 2011 was 83,425—far lower than either the NCVS or CDC numbers. If the 2011 CDC estimate—almost two million people cases—all fit the legal definition of rape, that would mean only 4 percent were reported to the police. Even excluding alcohol- and drug-facilitated rapes, the 716,000 counts of completed or attempted penetration recorded by the CDC still add up to more than eight times the cases recorded by the FBI and almost three times as many as the Department of Justice. While finding an indisputable number of rape victims seems to be a Holy Grail, the CDC report certainly reveals that the most widely accepted estimates aren’t high enough.

Many rapes don’t get reported; many rapes don’t get counted. Imagine my lack of surprise.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Soraya Chemaly explains some reasons Cathy Young is wrong to say that men get harassed online more than women do.

In addition to the difficulty of comparing data sets of varying size and depth, however, comparing male versus female online “harassment” is problematic for many reasons.

First, as Young points out, women’s harassment is more likely to be gender-based and that has specific, discriminatory harms rooted in our history. The study pointed out that the harassment targeted at men is not because they are men, as is clearly more frequently the case with women. It’s defining because a lot of harassment is an effort to put women, because they are women, back in their “place.”

It seems silly having to explain this. People who have a better spot on the hierarchy ladder are not as harmed by harassment as people who have a worse spot are, because harassment is itself a power move – a ladder spot enforcer.

For girls and women, harassment is not just about “un-pleasantries.” It’s often about men asserting dominance, silencing, and frequently, scaring and punishing them.

…

Rape and death threats made by strangers are also common, however. They coexist online with violent sexist, racist commentary on Twitter, YouTube and Facebook and the sharing of gifs, images, jokes and memes depicting gross violence against women as “humor.” The “humor” can sometimes spill over into aggressive cyber mob attacks, which, as Citron explains in her book, disproportionately target women and people of color. These mobs include hundreds, sometimes thousands of people, systematically harassing their targets. #Slanegirl, a trending global public shaming of a teenage girl filmed performing fellatio is one example. Attacks on public figures like Anita Sarkeesian or Caroline Criado-Perez can take on surreal qualities whose effects can’t be underestimated—either on the individual attacked or on the environment.

Well actually they can be underestimated, by people like Cathy Young and Christina Hoff Sommers (who enthusiastically hyped Young’s article), but they shouldn’t be.

The harassment men experience also lacks broader, resonant symbolism. Women are more frequently targeted with gendered slurs and pornographic photo manipulation because the objectification and dehumanization of women is central to normalizing violence against us. Philosophers Martha Nussbaum and Rae Langton describe in detail how this works: women are thought of and portrayed as things for the use of others. Interchangeable; violable; silent and lacking in agency.

Women take online harassment more seriously not because we are hysterics, but because we reasonably have to. There is no gender equivalence in terms of the denigrating, hostile and sometimes exceedingly dangerous environmental effect that misogyny has, online or off. It has a long history and cannot be isolated from actual violence that we adapt to avoiding every day. The fact that that violence has always suppressed women’s free speech is only now becoming too obvious to ignore.

Despite the best efforts of the Cathy Youngs of the world.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

So now Janay Rice is saying she’s pissed off at all these meddling people who got her husband kicked out of the NFL. She did a post on Instagram saying so:

I woke up this morning feeling like I had a horrible nightmare, feeling like I’m mourning the death of my closest friend. But to have to accept the fact that it’s reality is a nightmare in itself. No one knows the pain that the media & unwanted options from the public has caused my family. To make us relive a moment in our lives that we regret every day is a horrible thing. To take something away from the man I love that he has worked his ass of for all his life just to gain ratings is horrific. THIS IS OUR LIFE! What don’t you all get. If your intentions were to hurt us, embarrass us, make us feel alone, take all happiness away, you’ve succeeded on so many levels. Just know we will continue to grow & show the world what real love is! Ravensnation we love you!

Well, of course it has – that’s a lot of money thrown away.

Sorry, but it can’t be helped. The law can’t give big athletic guys an exemption so that they can keep drawing those big salaries for playing football, and football teams and their league absolutely should not turn a blind eye to domestic violence so that they can keep the talented players. Nope nope nope.

Imagine if it were their daughter he’d punched in the head – should the NFL just ignore that and try to cover it up when reporters ask about it? No it should not.

The guy did what he did. That’s not the public’s fault, it’s not journalism’s fault, it’s not his wife’s fault.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Irshad Manji made a meme out of a sentence from that statement by British Muslims for Secular Democracy that a group of supporters (including me) signed last week, and that the Independent published.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Ok so catching up on the Ray Rice thing, which I didn’t follow before – I just watched the “apology” video. It’s one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever seen.

First he apologizes to the bosses, the fans, the kids – “everyone that was affected by this situation that me and my wife were in.”

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABLVS0Jfgy4

Situation? They were in? He punched her in the head and knocked her out.

That’s a terrible beginning, and it doesn’t get one bit better. He goes on that way for six and a half minutes. It’s all about him. He talks about generalities without ever actually admitting to what he did, without ever mentioning it, without ever saying the words, and using “we” and “us” the whole time as if both of them had punched Janay Palmer in the head.

When you’ve seen this thing happen with me and my wife. People asked questions about what happened. Sometimes in life you will fail, but – I won’t call myself a failure. Failure is not getting knocked down, it’s not getting up.

He actually said that. Dude, you’re not the one who got knocked down, she is, and she was knocked down by you. To the floor. You dragged her out of the elevator and dropped her face-down on the floor outside.

Me and Janay wish we could take back 30 seconds of our life.

No. Just the one. Just Ray Rice, not the woman he punched unconscious.

People told him “You’ll get through it.” He chokes up. “One thing you gave me is trust.” He gets all maudlin and emotional…about himself. It’s disgusting.

• “I’m working on our relationship. I have Janay’s best interests.”
• “Just wanted to thank my supporters.”
• “Showing us a better way. Bringing us together.”
• “We were able to get through this. To let y’all know – we’re still the same people.”
• “I think my wife has something to say – we were in this together.”

And what does she say? “I do deeply regret the role that I played in the incident that night.” She does deeply regret being so annoying that he was forced to punch her in the head and knock her out.

I’m just fucking gobsmacked and disgusted and enraged.

You know what? One of the things we’re constantly told when we wonder why schools and universities spend so much money and time on football is that it builds character and wonderful social skills.

BULLSHIT.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The library came up with that book I told you about last June, Nell Bernstein’s Burning Down the House, about the US’s horrendous and out of step with other developed countries way of dealing with juvenile offenders by throwing them in jail for years. I’ll share some items.

On average, we spend $88,000 per year to incarcerate a young person in a state facility – more than eight times the $10, 652 we invest in her education. In many states, this gap is even wider. In California, for example, the cost of a year in a youth prison reached a high of $225,000, while education spending dipped to less than $8,000. [p 6]

And what’s the payoff? Children turned into repeat criminals. Locking children up does nothing to rehabilitate them and does much to wreck them.

…for as long as we have locked children away in the name of rehabilitating them, the evidence has mounted that this approach is a failure on all fronts. Sky-high recidivism rates… – higher than 80 percent in some states – indicate that whatever is taking place inside our juvenile correctional facilities, no one is actually being “corrected.” [p 7]

It doesn’t just fail to correct, it succeeds in criminalizing.

In fact, multiple studies have shown that putting youth behind bars not only fails to enhance public safety, it does just the opposite, driving low-level delinquents deeper into criminality and increasing the likelihood that they will wind up behind bars again and again. [p 7]

What does work, Bernstein is convinced, is a consistent relationship with at least one trusted adult. Prison isn’t the place to find that.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

So, this guy? Ray Rice, this guy who plays football for the Baltimore Ravens? The one who punched his girl friend so hard he knocked her out, and was suspended by his team* the NFL for the whoppingly punitive two games?

Today a new video was released that shows the actual knockout punch, and the team has now fired him.

Before all they had was a video showing him dragging her unconscious body off an elevator and dumping her on the floor just outside it.

I don’t quite understand why the first video wasn’t enough.

Within hours of the video’s appearance on TMZ.com, Rice’s team, the Baltimore Ravens, tweeted, “The Baltimore Ravens terminated the contract of RB Ray Rice this afternoon.”

The video shows Janay Palmer, now Rice’s wife, being hit in the face in the elevator. Palmer then lunges at the running back before he delivers a blow that knocks her out. When the elevator doors open, Rice drags Palmer’s body outside, leaving her face down on the floor, her legs still inside the elevator.

The clip sparked outrage from fellow football players, coaches and fans, and many called for the NFL to cut Rice sooner. Herm Edwards, a former coach for the New York Jets, said he would have taken action before the video was released.

The most depressing part of the story is that Janay Palmer went ahead and married him.

*Thanks to Nick Little, Leo Buzalsky and others who corrected my howler.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Raw Story reports that Mars Hill church is shrinking operations as more people learn what a pathetic patriarchal mess it is.

An August profile of Driscoll published by The New York Times explained that he had been accused “of plagiarizing, of inappropriately using church funds and of consolidating power to such a degree that it has become difficult for anyone to challenge or even question him.”

A month earlier, it was revealed that Driscoll had posted hundreds of inflammatory Internet comments almost 15 years ago.

Although the media focused on his comments about the U.S. being a “pussified nation,” bloggers who followed Driscoll closely argued that his views on women and sex were the larger problem.

Hello? Calling the US “a pussified nation” is itself a view on women that is a problem.

On Monday, “Love, Joe, Feminism” blogger Libby Anne pointed out one of the more disturbing notions from Driscoll’s Internet trolling days.

Well then let’s go to the source, and while we’re at it get the name of her blog right – it’s “Love, Joy, Feminism.” Joe isn’t part of the story. Take it away Libby Anne:

Things have been getting worse and worse for Mark Driscoll in recent weeks. But what I want to point out for a moment is one of Driscoll’s posts from 2001, when he was posting to a church message board under the name William Wallace II. I have rarely seen an evangelical man assert male superiority and prominence this directly.

The first thing to know about your penis is, that despite the way it may see, it is not your penis. Ultimately, God created you and it is his penis. You are simply borrowing it for a while.

While His penis is on loan you must admit that it is sort of just hanging out there very lonely as if it needed a home, sort of like a man wondering the streets looking for a house to live in. Knowing that His penis would need a home, God created a woman to be your wife and when you marry her and look down you will notice that your wife is shaped differently than you and makes a very nice home.

You  you you – notice that Driscoll assumes that women aren’t reading. Does he think they can’t read?

Yes, really. Men’s penises are on loan from God, and women were created to be “homes” for men’s penises. So much for any claims of men and women being “equal before God.” No, men were created by God and loaned penises. Women were then created by God to be penis homes.

Therefore, if you are single you must remember that your penis is homeless and needs a home. But, though you may believe your hand is shaped like a home, it is not. And, though women other than your wife may look like a home, to rest there would be breaking into another man’s home. And, if you look at a man it is quite obvious that what a homeless man does not need is another man without a home.

Notice that all women are portrayed as another man’s penis home, whether or not they are married. This squares with what I was taught—every woman is some man’s future wife, and that man owns her body even before they meet.

Penis home! It all seems like such a lot of effort for such a trivial thing. You’d think God could have just built the home around the penis, so that the two were always united and the penis was always happy, instead of forcing men to have to put up with a whole entire human being that talks and argues and walks around independently. It’s as if we couldn’t have just mittens, we had to drag a sheep around with us all winter.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

A Catholic school near Detroit has fired a teacher for doing something it considers ooky a sin.

A Detroit-area teacher says she was fired from her post at a private Catholic all-girls high school after she and her lesbian partner announced they were expecting a child through non-traditional means.

So it turns out the Catholic church isn’t so “pro-life” after all, at least according to this school. It disapproves of the future existence of this expected child, disapproves enough to fire the mother from her job at its school. Homophobia trumps “pro-life” it seems.

Hundreds of supporters for Barb Webb, a teacher at Marian High School in suburban Bloomfield Hills, rallied on Sunday at the school after she posted on Facebook that she had been forced from her job after she become pregnant “outside the Catholic way.”

Webb said she was asked late last month to choose between resigning or being fired, but decided against leaving voluntarily although she said the school had offered healthcare for the remainder of the school year had she chosen to resign. She was 14 weeks pregnant at the time.

Well let’s see the protests roll out. It will do the school good.

School officials could not immediately be reached on Sunday for comment about the firing, which comes as legal decisions favoring gay marriage continue to mount in the United States.

Nearly 30 state and federal courts have ruled against same-sex marriage bans since last year’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling striking down parts of the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as between one man and one woman.

A U.S. court of appeals is due to rule on same-sex marriage bans in Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee this month.

A Facebook group in support of the teacher, “I Stand With Barb Webb,” grew to more than 3,200 members shortly after its inception last week when Webb’s post went viral. Current and former students and parents have urged the school to reverse its decision.

Go on, Marian High School. Do the right thing. Don’t be evil.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Oh the hell with it, it’s just going to have to be a recurring, updatable thing.

The insult-tweets of the former philosopher, now American Enterprise Institute hack, Christina Hoff Sommers.

Updating.

Oh goody, she does a Dear Muslima.

Sexism in US: Some video games use damsel-in-distress tropes.Sexism in Iran: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/9487761/Anger-as-Iran-bans-women-from-universities.html 

She sent that out a couple of hours after RTing her source:

Retweeted by Christina H. Sommers
Jack @SkipTerrio · 18h
For the edification of the 3rd wave #feminist mob, this is what an ACTUAL #patriarchy looks like:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/9487761/Anger-as-Iran-bans-women-from-universities.html …
(cc:@CHSommers)

Jim Lippard objected.

.@CHSommers Therefore… ? Beheading is worse than a migraine, therefore no one should complain about or treat migraines?

Sommers informed him that the subject wasn’t migraines.

Bad analogy @lippard. The endangered damsel trope is not a migraine. It’s a reverie enjoyed by millions of people: Men, women and children.

That’s the kind of thing that makes me twitch with fury – the smug, determined mindlessness of it. How much attention do you have to pay to understand that a popular “reverie” is not automatically harmless just because it’s enjoyed by millions? Lots of very popular fantasies are woven into thought-structures that are harmful to subordinated people! The fact that many people enjoy such fantasies does not magically render them harmless.

Or, as Jim put it:

.@CHSommers Some people still like lawn jockeys & Confederate flags, too, but that doesn’t mean it’s not right to criticize them.

But again, Sommers explains:

Another false analogy @lippard.Not saying damsel trope is good BECAUSE people like it–saying its harmless, so leave those who like it alone.

Cool, except that there’s no reason to think it is harmless.

————————–

Now it gets meta.

A few minutes ago.

Oh my! An alarmed critic has created “Sommers Watch” to monitor my tweets.Don’t miss the comments. http://freethoughtblogs.com/butterfliesandwheels/2014/09/sommers-watch/ 

I told her I’m not alarmed but disgusted.

Her fans are telling me I’m bullying her. Well, I might be, if she were a nobody and if she were not being so free with the insults. But she’s not a nobody:

• She’s a Name anti-feminist
• She has a gig at the American Enterprise Institute
• She appears on mainstream (as well as less mainstream) media regularly
• Her tweets get shared by Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker
• She has 12 thousand-plus followers

And we already know she’s free with the insults. So no, I don’t think I’m bullying her.

——————–

Three hours ago.

@GoodJKnight I don’t think @maddoxrules disagrees. But attacking genres that millions of men (and lots of women) love is hardly inclusive.

We have to like everything that already is, and label all attempts to improve them “attacking.” We have to defend the popular and bend all our efforts to making the unpopular even more unpopular.

—————

An hour ago.

The gender warriors made a huge tactical error when they went after the gamers. Wrong group to irritate.

Spoken like a true bully. “Wrong group to irritate” because they’re many and noisy and mostly pseudonymous and not inhibited about threats and harassment. How ugly of Sommers to gloat about it. (And “the gender warriors” of course knew all that, but were brave enough to proceed anyway. How squalid of Sommers to pretend it was just a stupid mistake.)

Imagine saying something similar about the Little Rock Nine or the Freedom Summer campaigners in Mississippi in 1964. “The civil rights workers made a huge tactical error when they went after the Mississippi white supremacists. Wrong group to irritate.”

The next in the pair.

College deans, news editors, politicians–ran for cover when gender hardliners made strident demands. Gamers–male & female–fighting back.

The word “strident” is a sexist dog-whistle. Sommers can’t possibly be unaware of that. She’s doing this crap deliberately. It’s ugly stuff.

———————

An hour ago.

Shows like Oprah & The View make no effort to be male inclusive. They privilege female perspective.Where are the haranguing gender bloggers?

Two hours ago.

Excellent discussion of college rape panic & how males are treated like monsters and females
–fragile maidens. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/09/05/us_colleges_sexual_assault_crusade_123851.html

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Mark Joseph Stern reports that Judge Richard Posner’s ruling striking down Indiana’s and Wisconsin’s gay marriage bans is a masterpiece of wit and logic.

Ironically, by writing an opinion so fixated on the facts at hand, Posner may have actually written the one gay marriage ruling that the Supreme Court takes to heart. Other, more legacy-minded judges have attempted to sketch out a revised framework for constitutional marriage equality, granting gay people heightened judicial scrutiny and declaring marriage a fundamental right. But Posner isn’t interested in making new law: The statutes before him are so irrational, so senseless and unreasonable, that they’re noxious to the U.S. Constitution under almost any interpretation of the equal protection clause.

That will probably surprise no one who has read Posner’s book Sex and Reason. It’s still good to know, though.

Posner’s opinion largely follows the points he made during his forceful, trenchant, deeply empathetic questioning at oral arguments. To his mind, there’s no question that gays constitute a “suspect class”—that is, a group of people with an immutable characteristic who have historically faced discrimination. Refreshingly, Posner performs a review of “the leading scientific theories” about homosexuality to illustrate that being gay isn’t a choice. (Compare this with Justice Antonin Scalia’s gay rights dissents, in which he suggests that there’s no such thing as a gay orientation at all and that “gay” people are just disturbed individuals performing debauched sex acts.)

In some way, on some subjects – and this is one – libertarian legal theorists are very much preferable to Catholic ones.

Posner’s opinion largely follows the points he made during his forceful, trenchant, deeply empathetic questioning at oral arguments. To his mind, there’s no question that gays constitute a “suspect class”—that is, a group of people with an immutable characteristic who have historically faced discrimination. Refreshingly, Posner performs a review of “the leading scientific theories” about homosexuality to illustrate that being gay isn’t a choice. (Compare this with Justice Antonin Scalia’s gay rights dissents, in which he suggests that there’s no such thing as a gay orientation at all and that “gay” people are just disturbed individuals performing debauched sex acts.)

This review is actually unnecessary, since both Indiana and Wisconsin conceded that gay people are born that way. But it serves to reinforce Posner’s analytical framework—basically, that a state can’t disadvantage a suspect class of people without a rational basis. Note that low bar: Not a compelling interest, or even a substantial one. If the states could only prove a rational interest in excluding gay people from marriage, their laws would pass constitutional muster.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Metaphors aren’t just decoration, they’re more like the foundation. Michael Chorost explains in the CHE.

[I]n their 1980 book, Metaphors We Live By, the linguist George Lakoff (at the University of California at Berkeley) and the philosopher Mark Johnson (now at the University of Oregon) revolutionized linguistics by showing that metaphor is actually a fundamental constituent of language. For example, they showed that in the seemingly literal statement “He’s out of sight,” the visual field is metaphorized as a container that holds things. The visual field isn’t really a container, of course; one simply sees objects or not. But the container metaphor is so ubiquitous that it wasn’t even recognized as a metaphor until Lakoff and Johnson pointed it out.

From such examples they argued that ordinary language is saturated with metaphors. Our eyes point to where we’re going, so we tend to speak of future time as being “ahead” of us. When things increase, they tend to go up relative to us, so we tend to speak of stocks “rising” instead of getting more expensive. “Our ordinary conceptual system is fundamentally metaphorical in nature,” they wrote.

I’ve noticed the time one often. I don’t think I could think of it any other way however hard I tried.

Researchers are exploring all this with fMRI studies.

If cognition is embodied, that raises problems for artificial intelligence. Since computers don’t have bodies, let alone sensations, what are the implications of these findings for their becoming conscious—that is, achieving strong AI? Lakoff is uncompromising: “It kills it.” Of Ray Kurzweil’s singularity thesis, he says, “I don’t believe it for a second.” Computers can run models of neural processes, he says, but absent bodily experience, those models will never actually be conscious.

Some think the problem could be solved with sensors and actuators, others think it would be silly to replicate human physical limitations.

What’s emerging from these studies isn’t just a theory of language or of metaphor. It’s a nascent theory of consciousness. Any algorithmic system faces the problem of bootstrapping itself from computing to knowing, from bit-shuffling to caring. Igniting previously stored memories of bodily experiences seems to be one way of getting there.

That interests me – the difference between bit-shuffling and caring. It seems to me to be a big difference.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

It’s Sunday afternoon, so why not have a spot of Walden, courtesy of Henry David Thoreau and Project Gutenberg.

From Chapter One, “Economy.”

I would fain say something, not so much concerning the Chinese and Sandwich Islanders as you who read these pages, who are said to live in New England; something about your condition, especially your outward condition or circumstances in this world, in this town, what it is, whether it is necessary that it be as bad as it is, whether it cannot be improved as well as not. I have travelled a good deal in Concord; and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways.

What I have heard of Bramins sitting exposed to four fires and looking in the face of the sun; or hanging suspended, with their heads downward, over flames; or looking at the heavens over their shoulders “until it becomes impossible for them to resume their natural position, while from the twist of the neck nothing but liquids can pass into the stomach”; or dwelling, chained for life, at the foot of a tree; or measuring with their bodies, like caterpillars, the breadth of vast empires; or standing on one leg on the tops of pillars—even these forms of conscious penance are hardly more incredible and astonishing than the scenes which I daily witness. The twelve labors of Hercules were trifling in comparison with those which my neighbors have undertaken; for they were only twelve, and had an end; but I could never see that these men slew or captured any monster or finished any labor. They have no friend Iolaus to burn with a hot iron the root of the hydra’s head, but as soon as one head is crushed, two spring up.

I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born? They have got to live a man’s life, pushing all these things before them, and get on as well as they can. How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and woodlot! The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Originally a comment by Freedmen’s Patrol on Mr Baptist has not written an objective history of slavery.

Before I get into this, I want to alert readers that I’m going to quote a period description of brutality, including sexualized violence, against a young slave girl. It also includes the use of precisely the racial slur one would expect. If this would traumatize the reader, please skip the comment and continue your day. I don’t want to bring that kind of upset on anybody. I apologize for any distress caused. I don’t really want to write this myself, but I think that what the Economist is denying deserves to be seen.

It’s horrific to think about, but sometimes the incentives ran all the way up to murder. If a planter could get more out of the slave before working the slave to death than paid to buy the slave, then the planter could just buy a new one and repeat the process. This isn’t a prominent feature of American slavery, though it did happen and slaves who had been disabled or otherwise could no longer produce as they once had could be sold to someone on the cheap who would finish the job. Things tended to be rougher the further South and West one went in the South. Sugar plantations were notorious for going through slaves at a great clip. The American sugar industry was marginal compared to cotton, but down in the Caribbean sugar generated so much profit that it made perfect economic sense to work slaves to death in the very dangerous sugar factories and then just buy new slaves off the boats.

That’s aside the benefit an owner might realize from terrorizing his (they were almost always male, given how property law and the patriarchy worked) other slaves by feats of grotesque and conspicuous brutality. Most slaves resisted their enslavement in part by shirking when they could, by studied “misunderstanding” of orders, by “mistakenly” breaking tools, etc. Doing that always involved weighing it against the risk of retaliation and the likely severity. Punishments like this one were intended by owners not just to deter the “guilty” party but also to set the example of what would come. I’m sorry for the following, it’s extremely graphic and includes violence against a young girl. I draw it from William W. Freehling’s The Road to Disunion, Volume 1: Secessionists at Bay 1776-1854. A typical plantation might have a beating like this (39 lashes, by the way) two or three times a week.

Also, this is the really, really bad part. I’m sorry, but it happened despite what The Economist would have one believe. Trigger warnings for sexualized violence and racial slurs.

As Frederick Law Olmstead described “the severest corporeal punishment I witnessed at the South, “a slave girl named Sall was ordered to pull up her clothes and lie on her back, private parts exposed. The overseer flogged her “with the rawhide, across her naked loins and thighs.” Sall “shrunk away from him, not rising, but writhing, groveling, and screaming, “‘Oh don’t sir! Oh plerase stop, master! please sir! oh, that’s enough master! oh Lord! oh master, master, of God, master, do stop! oh God, master, oh God, master!”

After “strokes had ceased” and “choking, sobbing, spasmodic groans only were heard, “Olmstead asked if it was “necessary to punish her so severely.’ … ‘O yes sir,” answered the lasher, laughing at the Yankee’s innocence. Northerners ‘have no idea how lazy these niggers are …”They’d never do any work at all if they were not afraid of being whipped.”

Olmstead was a visitor, a stranger in the South. They did this quite comfortably where he could see. Imagine what happened in private.

FP’s blog is here.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Last Monday Jenn Frank wrote a piece for The Guardian about “a hot trend among a vocal minority of gamers right now: the harassment of women developers and critics.” She summarized what’s been happening to Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn.

Yes, it’s been quite a banner season for the collective of self-identifying core gamers who gather on forums to muster shared fury. Now they feel they are at war with a group of left-leaning games writers and developers who they refer to as “social justice warriors” – this is effectively anyone who has ever questioned the patriarchal nature of the games industry or the limited, often objectifying depiction of women. Because, you know, games are fine as they are thanks.

It’s so familiar – in fact “familiar” isn’t even the right word; it’s not so much familiar as exactly the same thing. I’m surprised these angry gamers don’t call Sarkeesian and Quinn “rage bloggers” or “FTBullies” or “The Sisterhood of the Oppressed.”

Crucially, a good troll knows how to attack a woman’s “professionalism” – particularly if you’ve never read, watched or played anything she has produced. Your method is to undermine her credibility and devalue her work by hardly discussing it – and maybe discussing her full sexual history instead.

Your goal – if you, too, are keen on suspicion and hate – is total alienation, making your target feel impossibly hopeless and alone by way of attacking her friends, colleagues or anyone who has ever written anything positive about her.

Because war is war! A cherished way of life is at stake, so there must be no prisoners, no neutrals, no non-combatants, and no survivors. Feminists criticizing the depiction of women in games are obviously such a terrifying existential threat that only Total Thermonuclear War will do.

…if you really want to help ruin the games industry, it helps to have money on your hateful side. For instance, you might launch a successful online campaign to fund a documentary exploring how tech culture has been “hijacked” by Sarkeesian and other “social justice warriors”.

All the while, bullies of the games industry, do insist that your efforts to totally ruin a woman’s life and career are founded in “transparency”, “ethics” and “integrity”. Do suggest, at every turn, that “games journalism” has not yet fully acknowledged your campaign of terror because of an industry-wide “cover-up”.

Be careful not to concede that anyone writing about said campaign may also fear retaliation. Certainly we do. In fostering this culture of terror, you can ensure the majority is silent – that it won’t speak out against the harm you are doing.

Well how else are they going to prevail?

So guess what happened after that. Can you?

David Futrelle has the details.

Congratulations, assholes! You did it! Your threats and harassment have driven game journalist/designer Jenn Frank and game designer/media critic Mattie Brice to leave the gaming world.

Frank, an award-winning writer and sometime game designer, came to the attention of the misogynist mob after writing a brief opinion piece for The Guardian decrying the widespread and vicious harassment of women in gaming. In addition to writing about the harassment she’s gotten — including someone trying to hack into her email account — she (as you might expect) also highlighted the misogynistic rage directed at feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian and indie game designer Zoe Quinn.

The new rule seems to be that any woman who writes about online harassment will herself be harassed, and in this case it didn’t take long.

It took a couple of days. By Wednesday night she’d had enough.

This proves that there is no misogyny problem in the gaming industry. Right? Right?

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Another depressing/enraging story out of India – a woman is repeatedly raped by her husband’s father while the husband is working in Dubai, and clerics want to reward the rapist and punish the woman.

The 28-year-old victim alleged that her husband has been working in Dubai for the last two years and her father-in-law has been sexually assaulting her at gun point since 2013.

She remained silent because he used to threaten to kill her. He also video recorded his act and threatened to make it public if she opened her mouth.

When she told her husband about it, he blamed her for making a false allegation against his father.

She told her parents, and they advised her to go to the cops.

She created ruffles in the local administration and the Muslim community on Thursday by moving an application before District Magistrate Kaushal Raj Sharma to arrest her father-in-law and allow her to abort her seven-month pregnancy.

After the application by the victim, clerics jumped into the case and declared that the husband of the victim will be treated as her son.

Avoiding any comment against the father-in-law who repeatedly raped and blackmailed the victim, Maulana Mohammad Nazar of Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind said: “As per the Sharia law, the baby in her womb is her husband’s brother. Her husband must divorce her, even if his father looked at his wife with lust.”

In other words the whole thing has to do with men and relationships between men. The woman is just a cipher with a pleasurable hole between her legs. The father, the husband, the “baby” all matter, while the woman is a mere object, like a broom or an urn.

H/t Kausik

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The Freedmen’s Patrol on that Economist review.

…the fact remains that the editors published the review. They read it and thought it a reasonable, cogent piece of commentary worth putting forward in one of the more prestigious magazines in the Anglosphere. My honest first inclination is to presume stupidity, but one should not let shock entirely determine one’s response. Likewise it seems improbable that The Economist would assign a reviewer who literally does not know what the word “slavery” means or ignorant of who enslaved whom in Americas to a book about slavery in America.

This leaves us with a far worse scenario: Whoever wrote this review understood the subject, knew the facts, and thought it correct anyway. One still has room to question the second presumption, though. Anybody who thinks Puritanism characterize the American South doesn’t understand much about the region during that time. Proslavery writing routinely castigated antislavery Puritans, denouncing them as fanatics and heretics at odds with true Christianity. B.F. Stringfellow looked into the census and found out that the New England Puritans had fewer churches with fewer seats in them than the slaveholding South did and used it as evidence that slaveholders were the better Christians.

Southern slaveholders identified themselves with the Royalists while the Abolitionists were more on the Puritan side. Christopher Cameron has a long article on the subject at academia.edu.

Back to Freedmen’s Patrol.

The Economist asked its readers to believe that the operative force in American slavery was not cruelty but benevolence. The magazine asked that we set aside the nineteenth century’s notorious exploitation of labor, including the labor of children, its horrific working conditions, its ruthless and violent suppression of labor activism (Activism aimed at better working conditions, no less!), essentially the entire body of literature produced by the slaves themselves, by contemporary observers of slavery, and from the very pens of the slaveholders who did the whipping or ordered others to do it on their behalf.

Take, for example, this incident from the life of probably the most famous and celebrated American slaveholder born after 1800, a man we often hear cared greatly for the slaves he inherited and treated only with kindness. I quote from Eric Foner’s Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction:

Wesley Norris, a slave of Confederate general Robert E. Lee, later recalled how after he and his family had attempted to run away, Lee ordered a local constable “to strip us to the waist and give us fifty lashes each.” Lee, Norris added, “stood by, and frequently enjoined the constable to ‘lay it on well,’” then ordered him “to thoroughly wash our backs” with saltwater to increase the pain.

You can read all of Norris’ story in his own words here.

The Economist’s reviewer and its editors, until shamed into correction, would probably complain that this story reflects poorly on Lee when, after all, Norris and his family did attempt to run away. They were stealing from him. Did they have no regard for his property rights? One can hardly blame Lee for going to the law to defend those rights. Clearly some anti-capitalist bias animated Foner and Norris both.

It’s political correctness run mad! Again.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Ken White at Popehat takes the Chancellor of Berkeley to task for an email he sent to students faculty & staff on the subject of free speech. You can see what’s coming a mile off, can’t you – the Chance said free speech is very nice but you can’t say anything Offensive.

Well he didn’t, really, although he did say something tending in that general direction – free speech to work properly should be civil and respectful yadda yadda. But Ken thinks he said it With Menaces, so to speak, and I don’t really think he did. Several commenters don’t think so either. (For a piquant detail I’ll add that before I saw this post of Ken’s, I saw a tweet of Sommers’s on the same subject, and I read the Chance’s email then, and thought it was more advice than commands. Who knows, maybe if I’d seen Ken’s post first I would have agreed with him. Priming, doncha know.) (Mind you, I did think it was depressingly woolly bureaucratic buzz-speak even then.)

Let’s take a look.

…it is important that we recognize the broader social context required in order for free speech to thrive. For free speech to have meaning it must not just be tolerated, it must also be heard, listened to, engaged and debated.

Well, no, not really – that’s a woolly generality that doesn’t really mean very much. But I don’t think it’s particularly worrying. I think it’s just some advice, not an announcement of new Rules For Speaking.

After some more wool, there’s even more wool.

Specifically, we can only exercise our right to free speech insofar as we feel safe and respected in doing so, and this in turn requires that people treat each other with civility.

Now, Ken takes that “requires” literally, as the Chance telling everyone that civility is required:

No.

Civility is an admirable value. It is right and fit that we ask it of each other and impose social consequences upon the uncivil. But speech need not be civil to be entitled to robust protection.

But the Chance isn’t saying otherwise. He isn’t saying it need be civil to be entitled to robust protection, he’s saying it need be civil to be available and usable for everyone. It’s a different kind of “needs” or “requires” – not literal, but the condition of something else happening. “I need to inhale some coffee if I’m going to stay awake for the Chancellor’s talk.” That’s not someone compelling me to inhale some coffee, it’s a necessary condition for my staying awake. That’s what the Chance takes civility to be for everyone’s ability to exercise her right to free speech.

That’s what I think anyway.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Yikes. The Economist published a grotesque review of a history of slavery and capitalism in the US. so grotesque that it ended up apologizing and withdrawing the review, while also keeping it for the record.

Apology: In our review of “The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism” by Edward Baptist, we said: “Mr Baptist has not written an objective history of slavery. Almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains.” There has been widespread criticism of this, and rightly so.

Slavery was an evil system, in which the great majority of victims were blacks, and the great majority of whites involved in slavery were willing participants and beneficiaries of that evil. We regret having published this and apologise for having done so. We have therefore withdrawn the review, but in the interests of transparency the text remains available only on this special page and appears below.

Yup, that’s what the review said.

The reviewer’s point was that Baptist overstated how profitable cotton combined with slavery was, and that other Excellent Protocapitalist Virtues also played a role.

Take, for example, the astonishing increases he cites in both cotton productivity and cotton production. In 1860 a typical slave picked at least three times as much cotton a day as in 1800. In the 1850s cotton production in the southern states doubled to 4m bales and satisfied two-thirds of world consumption. By 1860 the four wealthiest states in the United States, ranked in terms of wealth per white person, were all southern: South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana and Georgia.

Mr Baptist cites the testimony of a few slaves to support his view that these rises in productivity were achieved by pickers being driven to work ever harder by a system of “calibrated pain”. The complication here was noted by Hugh Thomas in 1997 in his definitive history, “The Slave Trade”; an historian cannot know whether these few spokesmen adequately speak for all.

Another unexamined factor may also have contributed to rises in productivity. Slaves were valuable property, and much harder and, thanks to the decline in supply from Africa, costlier to replace than, say, the Irish peasants that the iron-masters imported into south Wales in the 19th century. Slave owners surely had a vested interest in keeping their “hands” ever fitter and stronger to pick more cotton. Some of the rise in productivity could have come from better treatment. Unlike Mr Thomas, Mr Baptist has not written an objective history of slavery. Almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains. This is not history; it is advocacy.

Whooooooooooooooo that’s an incredibly bizarre thing to write.

I guess this is now the Reactionary Talking Point For the Decade – that everybody who takes any kind of progressive or egalitarian or social justice position whatsoever is simply “playing the victim card” and must be derided and then ignored.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

NPR did this story on the “Men’s Rights” movement the other day, starting from that conference in Detroit organized by A Voice for Men.

Leaders in the movement say they want to bring more attention to the problems of men and boys. Critics worry, however, that these sites are a breeding ground for misogyny.

For his part, Farrell actually tries to avoid the phrase “men’s rights.”

“It’s like somebody saying we’re in favor of the king’s rights,” he says. “The average person thinks that men are already at the top of the political structure. They have all the rights, they made all the rules, [and] if anything is going wrong with men, it’s their fault, because after all, it’s just a consequence of men’s rules.”

Who made the rules isn’t really the point. (Well sometimes it’s the point. The fact that the Catholic church is officially all-male in the upper reaches is because of the rules, which were indeed made by men, and which obviously create a situation that is self-perpetuating, so who made the rules really is the point. But broadly speaking it isn’t.) The point is making better rules. The point is moving from a hierarchical situation (that none of us alive now ever actually agreed to, much less created, after all) to a non-hierarchical one. And that would be good for men and boys.

For one obvious thing, in a non-hierarchical situation, men in families no longer have the whole responsibility for bringing in the money.

More than that…if we ever could get to a place where people weren’t constantly policing both genders, boys and men would be under so much less pressure. Are we supposed to assume that they all actually like all that shit? All that contempt for showing what’s taken to be “girly” and all those commands to “man up”?

Boys also drop out of college and commit suicide at higher rates than girls, Farrell notes.

“We need to know not only why are our sons committing suicide, but also why are our sons much more likely to be the ones to shoot up schools?” he says. “We’re all in jeopardy if we don’t pay attention to the cries of pain and isolation and alienation that are happening among our sons.”

Well of course we need to know those things. Is there a feminist on earth who doesn’t agree?

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)