The well-educated phenomenon

People from well-educated families are almost twice as likely to suffer from some dangerous food allergies as others — possibly because their bodies’ natural defences have been lowered by rigorous hygiene and infection control, suggests a new Canadian study.

Maybe. It could also be that doctors are less likely to contradict well-educated parents who insist that their kid has a food allergy. Meanwhile the parent with less education cowers before the doctor's authority when she tells them that little Johnny's reaction is perfectly normal and nothing to worry about.

Womanly Virtues Wednesday

This advertisement has upset a lot of people.




My favourite uncle used to say, if something is making someone sensitive, make an issue of it. So here goes.

Agender NZ president Cherise Witehira, said many in the transgender community were outraged at the ads which were "blatantly transphobic".

"It's extremely offensive because it's pretty much saying the only way you can be a woman is to get your period.

"That's where a lot of the anger in the community is coming from - it's saying you are not a woman unless you can get your period.

"Obviously we can't menstruate. However, we identify as female."

Actually, the really notable thing about this advertisement is the complete lack of phobia. There is no fear or hatred present and those are the qualities that make a phobia. The young woman in this video is completely accepting of the transgendered person. She doesn't say, "What the hell are you doing in the women's washroom", nor does she turn and walk out because she feels uncomfortable.

The ultimate proof that the biological woman accepts the transgender woman is that she enters into the rivalry with her.  Sexual status games are played out between women all the time. There is a great video of Queen Elizabeth meeting Marilyn Monroe the year they were both thirty years old. Go watch it and pay close attention to the Queen's eyes and you can see her glance down at Marilyn's body as she assesses her as a sexual rival.

Anything you can do, I can do better
The thing is that the ad makes narrative sense and that is what troubles the people who are troubled by it. Whether you laughed, were offended or, like me, did neither, you can follow the narrative. And if we look at that narrative something important may jump out at us. And that something becomes clear if we consider some counterfactual examples.

Imagine that we are in the washroom at a dance club and two hot young women come to stand in front of the mirrors at the sinks. Emily and Pippa both know one another but not well. What they both know is that they are rivals and a certain amount of posturing takes place. Okay, here is the thing that is different: Pippa would not win that duel by whipping out a tampon! To the contrary, she'd lose because she and Emily are having a duel for sexual status and acknowledging that she is having her period would put Pippa at a temporary disadvantage in that struggle.

Okay, now imagine another scenario. Emily was born Martin but now identifies as a woman and she enters into the same struggle with Pippa but Emily is so convincing that neither Pippa nor we know that she is not a biological woman. Does Pippa pull out her tampon to win that battle? Of course not because that rivalry is not about who is a "real woman" but rather about who is more of a woman.

Okay, now imagine you are watching an advertisement in which Emily-born-Martin-but-identifying-as-a-woman is playing the trans person only she is so convincing that you can't tell. Does that ad make any narrative sense? No it doesn't. The ad above makes sense because everyone knows that the transgendered person in the video isn't really a woman! Love it or hate it, you know that. You couldn't know enough to be offended if you didn't know that.

The biological woman doesn't prove she is really a woman by whipping out a tampon. She and we already know that. You can see it in her skin, the shape of her body, the way she moves. She accepts the transgendered person as a transgendered person and that is why the rivalry is possible. But the transgendered person is not a woman but (literally) a parody of a  woman. We all know that she isn't "really" a woman. You can start a long argument about what "really" means here if you want but the mere fact that you can start the argument means you have already lost. If transgendered persons really became women by "identifying" as women there would be nothing to argue about.

The struggle here is not about what these two people are. That is clear. What the ad really does is to tell girls that they are special. "Libra gets girls."

And girls are special. Nothing is going to change that.


Final thought, just think about the expression "transphobic tampon ad".

Addendum

The most appalling things about that Atlantic article I wrote about earlier today is the fact that Stephen Bloom is a journalism professor. He doesn't just have this diseased, hate-filled mind, he gets paid to teach other people his biases.

Here is an interesting video that suggests that maybe journalists just don't like it that ordinary people have a good time and that they have thought this way for a long time now. The commentator's name is Ben Grauer and boy does it bug him that people are celebrating New Year's Even instead of worrying about all the stuff he wishes they would worry about.



The Last Psychiatrist, courtesy of whom I found this, has transcribed some of the patter:

On the side of the Allied Chemical Tower, you have it spelled out in big letters– didn’t know about that, 1966– So there’s the end of the year which was featured with the escalation of the war in Vietnam, and The Dow Jones hitting a new high, just 30 points shy of 1000 just today; gloom at the homefront; increasing war overseas– maybe this crowd senses that besides the warm weather we’re having, the sense of hope as Harriman and Kohler and Goldberg scurry about the world on the peace offensive…and an increase in social security tax for Medicare.  So take it or leave it, you’ve got the new year of 1966.
And the traditional crowd which had been building to maybe 700000, one of the biggest we’ve seen in years, just like the lemmings of Norway, is scurrying off to their homes and parties.  They may have a transit strike, some of them may be weary, we don’t know the story on that yet, nor does New York’s newest Republican Mayor, first in 20 years, John Lindsay….

Yeah, 'cause the reason they write the year in big letters is because people need to be told. No doubt Ben also thought that the reason people put the birthday boy or girl's name on the cake was in case people didn't know. Cheap cynicism doesn't get any cheaper than "you have it spelled out in big letters– didn’t know about that, 1966". I also like the non sequitur whereby the news that the Dow has set a new record high is followed immediately by our reporter saying "gloom at the homefront". Our reporter doesn't seem to like capitalism much. And then the comparison of the crowd to rodents. This is who we have trusted to give us news for decades!

Speaking of hate and bigotry

I'm late to this but check out this gem at Get Religion about an astounding piece of hate-journalism at The Atlantic.

I can't add much to the brilliant criticism at Get Religion but there are three things I'd like to highlight. The first is this gem of bigory:

The reason everyone seems related in small-town Iowa is because, if you go back far enough, many are, either by marriage or birth. In Iowa, names like Yoder, Snitker, Schroeder, and Slabach are as common as Garcia, Lee, Romero, Johnson, and Chen are in big cities.  

And there is something wrong with those names? Try to imagine how writers at The Atlantic would respond to a piece written about New York that said, "Boy there sure are a lot of people with Hispanic and African American names in the phone book!"

The second is the sheer delusion behind this claim by writer Stephen Bloom:

About the only possible bright spot in the rural Iowa economy is wind energy.

 Finally, note the cultural bludgeoning going on in this long passage that Get Religion also excerpts:

 Rules peculiar to rural Iowa that I've learned are hard and fast, seldom broken: Backdoors are how you always go into someone's house. Bar fights might not be weekly occurrences, but neither are they infrequent activities. Collecting is big -- whether it's postcards, lamps, figurines, tractors, or engines. NASCAR is a spectator sport that folks can't get enough of. Old-timers answer their phones not with "hello," but with last names, a throwback to party-lines. Everyone's phone number in town starts with the same three-digit prefix.

Hats are essential. Men over 50 don't leave home without a penknife in their pocket. Old Spice is the aftershave of choice. Everyone knows someone who has had an unfortunate and costly accident with a deer (always fatal for the deer, sometimes for the human). Farming is a dangerous occupation; if farmers don't die from a mishap (getting a hand in an auger, clearing a stuck combine), they live with missing digits or limbs.

Comfort food reigns supreme. Meatloaf and pork chops are king. Casseroles (canned tuna or Tatertots) and Jell-O molds (cottage cheese with canned pears or pineapple) are what to bring to wedding receptions and funerals. Everyone loves Red Waldorf cake. Deer (killed with a rifle is good, with bow-and-arrow better) and handpicked morels are delicacies families cherish.

Religion is the glue that binds everyone, whether they're Catholic, Lutheran, or Presbyterian.

Hey, I'm not from Iowa but that sure sounds like where I come from. There is nothing about these rules that is peculiar to Iowa. Millions of people all across North America live in places where similar if not identical conditions apply. Upper New York State for example. These paragraphs just show how provincial and small-minded Stephen Bloom is.

This is a target rich environment but let's go through them anyway:

1. That you can come in the back door is an honour. It means you are a friend welcome without an invitation. One of the wonderful things about a place like Iowa is how readily people grant you that status. On the other hand, on my street here in the city there are two people who have lived on the same block for more than a decade but never met until this summer.
2. In most big, blue-state cities, bar fights are daily if not hourly occurrences.
3. Answering your phone with a family name is a throwback to an era when people were more formal and not to party lines. When I was boy, I was taught to answer the phone "Aimé residence, Jules speaking".
4. What's wrong with hats?
5. Old Spice is good.
6. Anywhere you have lots of white-tailed deer (see Westchester county for example)  you are going to have a lot of car-deer collisions.
7. Farming is a dangerous occupation. Got any solutions for that smart boy?
8. What used to be called "soul food" is also comfort food. Would you feel comfortable making generalizations about African Americans based on that Mr. Bloom?
9. Red Waldorf cake sounds yummy to me.
10. Any time I meet someone who has killed a deer or turkey with a bow, I take the hat I find essential off to them because that is damned impressive feat. Try it sometime yourself if you don't believe me.
11. Hand-picked Morels are also delicacies families cherish in Southern France. I suggest you never go to Provence Mr. Bloom. You'd hate it.
12. "Religion is the glue that binds everyone, whether they're Catholic, Lutheran, or Presbyterian." That's true. Kind of impressive that it can do that don't you think?

"Neutral" application of the law and racism 1

Ta-Nehisi Coates has a challenging piece up that he calls The Banality of Racism. He has a good point: that racism is rarely the sort of direct attack on a person that first comes to mind. A lot of racism is hidden in process. It's a good point and if Coates goes astray, it is because he doesn't apply it generally enough.

Consider, for example, the case of gun control. The ostensible purpose of gun laws is to stop guns from being used in crimes and from getting into the hands of those who are unable to appreciate the dangers and handle them carefully. In fact, however, the brunt of gun laws comes to bear not on criminals but on legal gun owners who tend to be more law abiding than the public at large. And if you read the opinions of the most vociferous supporters of measures such as the recently abolished Long-gun Registry here in Canada, it quickly becomes obvious that these people tend to be opposed to guns in general and not the specific issues of guns used in crimes and careless handling of firearms. And they push, sometimes successfully, for laws whose real purpose is to make gun ownership difficult or impossible under the guise of preventing criminal or careless use of firearms.

This sort of abuse is possible in virtually any area of the law. A while ago we had a city councilor here who hated dogs. She didn't pass any new bylaws but merely used her influence with the city administration to have existing bylaws enforced in a way that was tantamount to hassling dog owners. Bylaw officers who had better things to do spent hours sitting outside city parks looking for dog owners who leashed their dog ten feet on the wrong side of the sign that designated where the off leash area ended.

It will always be possible to abuse use  seemingly neutral laws or groups of laws to serve discriminatory purposes. The challenge is to determine how to limit this effect while achieving something as close to neutral application as is possible.

One possible solution is the rationalist approach. In this approach, well-drafted laws or additional laws, regulations and precedents can be made to cover every possibility. That, however, is never enough. No text can be self-interpreting and supplying a second text to interpret the first always reaches a limit. Ultimately, we rely on the good faith of the executive arm of government and here there will always be failures.

And there, I think, is the core of Coates' mistake, this being the case, his move to suggest that power be taken away from one level of government and given to a higher level. He wants to regard every single case of neutral laws intended to stop voting fraud as discrimination. He is not alone in this, rationalists always seem to push for more government and more central government (the reductio ad absurdum of which is world government).

Of course, this response is conditioned by history: states rights was used to justify racism. But that is a contingent fact. It could just as easily have happened the other way. A powerful central government combined with a plurality of voters who either support racist measures or don't care enough to do away with them could impose racist laws on local governments eager to do away with same.

The solution is to be less rationalistic and have more faith in rationality.

More to come tomorrow.

The Wings of the Dove

(To make this a blog exclusively about the Wings of the Dove click here.)


A bit of a potpourri this time.


Aunt Maud meets Densher when his return becomes known and we get this sentence from JAmes:

She welcomed him genially back from the States, as to his view of which her few questions, though not coherent, were comprehensive, and he had the amusement of seeing in her, as through a clear glass, the outbreak of a plan and the sudden consciousness of a curiosity. (p 248 my edition)

The reference here to Paul's first letter to the Corinthians is obvious:

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

The meaning is not so clear. James has reversed the reference—made Merton get it wrong as Shakespeare does with Bottom in Midsummer Night's Dream.  Merton Densher may feel he is now seeing this clearly but he is hardly in heaven. A point hammered home a few lines later when Kate enters the room and Merton read the asssessment in her Aunt's facial expression:

It took her in from head to foot, and in doing so it told a story that made poor Densher again the least bit sick: it marked so something with which Kate habitually and consummately reckoned.

That was the story—that she was always, for her beneficent dragon, under arms; living up, every hour, but especially at festal hours, to the "value" Mrs. Lowder had attached to her. High and fixed, this estimate ruled on each occasion at Lancaster Gate the social scene; so that he now recognised in it something like the artistic idea, the plastic substance, imposed by tradition, by genius, by criticism, in respect to a given character, on a distinguished actress. As such a person was to dress the part, to walk, to look, to speak, in every way to express, the part, so all this was what Kate was to do for the character she had undertaken, under her aunt's roof, to represent. It was made up, the character, of definite elements and touches—things all perfectly ponderable to criticism; and the way for her to meet criticism was evidently at the start to be sure her make-up had had the last touch and that she looked at least no worse than usual. Aunt Maud's appreciation of that to-night was indeed managerial, and the performer's own contribution fairly that of the faultless soldier on parade.(pp 248-249 my edition)

This is really great stuff. You can't help but think of the discussion of role-playing in Alasdair MacIntyre  and wonder just how much MacIntyre owes to Henry James. MacIntyre has never, to be clear, hidden his debt to James but it seems pretty extensive.

Anyway, there is the old virtue. To be virtuous you must fill a certain role and your inner life matters little except for how it might get in the way.

We get the flip side, the modern moral predicament, about twenty pages later. Kate and Merton are considering Milly and her illness and wealth and Kate appears to think this:

She looked at him now a moment as for the selfish gladness of their young immunities. It was all they had together, but they had it at least without a flaw--each had the beauty, the physical felicity, the personal virtue, love and desire of the other. Yet it was as if that very consciousness threw them back the next moment into pity for the poor girl who had everything else in the world, the great genial good they, alas, didn't have, but failed on the other hand of this.

In modern terms what they have is all you need to marry:"each had the beauty, the physical felicity, the personal virtue, love and desire of the other". In a society driven more by a sense of appropriate roles based on status and honour, they would need what Milly has to be happy and the qualities listed for themselves might seem not to matter. Here we have the old and the new morality confronting one another.

Here's an interesting touch. When Maud, Kate and Merton are discussing Milly over dinner Susan finds herself feeling a little uneasy about the way Milly is being talked about.

... Milly's anxious companion sat and looked--looked very much as some spectator in an old-time circus might have watched the oddity of a Christian maiden, in the arena, mildly, caressingly, martyred. It was the nosing and fumbling not of lions and tigers but of domestic animals let loose as for the joke. (p 255)

And we, knowing more than Milly's anxious companion,  must begin to fear that it is not such a joke, especially as we know that the book has been full of references to various people being sacrificed.

More to come

Sort of political Monday: Authority now!

I was downtown on the weekend and noticed the following sign posted:

You're not pulling your weight

Shape up or

Ship out

Notice the incredible sense of authority behind this. The person or persons who put up this sign has no doubt whatsoever about their ability to declare judgment on others. The signs, by the way, were around the group of office buildings where the largest investment firms, banks and chartered accountancy firms have their local offices.

The small print at the bottom of the sheet said it was put there by the local Occupy movement.

That alone is funny because who has the right to put up signs on behalf of a movement that has no leadership, no organization, no spokesperson. And yet there is this need for authority that is intense. That is the thing that most worries me as we head into 2012.

We live in a society that craves authority. You can see this in the cult of Obama. Not Obama himself who is just another politician but in the crazy cult of hope and change that built up around him. And you can see it in the Occupy movement that didn't seek to change anything itself so much as it demands that others do so. I see it in the way that Bill Gates was treated as a brilliant visionary a few years ago and Steve Jobs is now even though neither man made even a single significant contribution to the development of the new technology that made them both so rich—their genius was in  marketing not technology.

But "marketing" doesn't have the power and authority that so many seem to need. No one asks the head of marketing for his views on world peace or personal fulfillment. A great creator of new technology who reshaped the way we live and behave, on the other hand hand, is just the ticket so we imagine that that is what Gates and Jobs were.

That we would desire authority is, in one sense, not surprising. We have been demolishing authorities for several decades now. And yet the destruction of authority and the deep need for it in our time seem even more closely related than that. In Britain, for example, we see a generation whose only collective achievement so far is the ability to pass out, face down in their own vomit and yet feel incredibly comfortable attacking and hating authority while, at the very same time, embracing the leadership of celebrities. The rest of us are not far behind.

The similarity between this sort of thing and the Weimar Republic or France in the dying days of the Third Republic is chilling.


By the way: Blogger's built in spell check doesn't know "Weimar". That is also scary.