I just heard on the radio on my way home that Scott Roeder, who murdered Dr. George Tiller in cold blood last May and was convicted of first-degree murder in only 37 minutes in January, was today sentenced to a “Hard 50” — Kansas imposes a mandatory life sentence for Murder 1, but the judge had to choose whether Roeder would be eligible for parole after 25 years, or after 50. It’s excellent news that the judge imposed the harsher of the two possible sentences in this case; as the prosecuting attorney explained, Roeder is a domestic terrorist, and it’s right that the full force of the law be brought to bear. Our justice system must take right-wing Christian terrorism every bit as seriously as it takes right-wing Islamic terrorism, and this is a good step.
Matters Political
Thoughts on Gamer Culture, Rape Culture, and CNN
Melissa McEwan has generously given me space for another guest post at Shakesville. Here’s the intro:
[Trigger warning for discussion of video games which simulate rape and violence.]
I’ve got video games on my mind lately — as some of you have probably seen me talking about in comments, I was at the Penny Arcade Expo in Boston this past weekend — and I just wrote a mostly-positive post with some criticism and a dubiously clever pun for the title over at my blog, about gamer culture in general and one panel at the Expo in particular.
This post is much less positive, and I’m also much less certain, ultimately, what should be done to try to fix the problems I’m talking about.
Many of y’all probably remember previous discussion, both here (Rape For Sale, Looking for Rape Products? Try Amazon., From the Mailbag for 2009-08-17) and at many other blogs over the past several years, of a Japanese computer game called RapeLay, the genre of hentai (lit. “pervert”/”perverted”) games, and the subgenre of rape-focused hentai games to which it belongs.
CNN’s Connect the World program has now run a story on the game, and its continuing availability through illicit channels despite its having been pulled from production and removed from retail…
Et In Penny-Arcadia Ego
I was very happy to be able to attend PAX East in Boston this past weekend. I had a great time, despite missing Wil Wheaton’s keynote and some of the panels I hoped to see. Penny Arcade is a remarkable phenomenon, and one I don’t think could have been possible at any historical moment other than this, or more precisely other than 1998 to 2003: that first half-decade in which, with a combination of timing, talent and luck, Jerry “Tycho” Holkins and Mike “Gabe” Krahulik turned a hobby webcomic into a successful business venture and into a focal point for the nascent gaming community — until it had reached a sort of critical mass, and Gabe and Tycho were able to use it as a springboard for additional projects. In 2003, they launched the Child’s Play charity, which to date has provided nearly $7 million worth of toys, books, movies and of course video games to children’s hospitals around the country; and a year later, when it was announced that E3 would no longer be open to the public, they decided to launch their own convention, the Penny Arcade Expo. In 2005, after noted anti-video-game crackpot and public nuisance Jack Thompson (this was back before he was disbarred) offered $10,000 to a charity to be chosen by the head of the ESA, and reneged, claiming it was “satire,” Gabe and Tycho gave the $10,000 in his name.
What I’m saying is, they’ve built a hell of a thing, and they’ve done some real good in the world, in the process of doing it. They have managed to become sort of a nucleus around which gamer culture, or at least a subculture of it, is starting to coalesce. The first PAX, in 2004, had some 3300 attendees; PAX 2009 was over 60,000, and it’s my understanding that this first east-coast incarnation of the convention was of a similar size. Watch Wheaton’s keynote, and the sense of love for and pride in gamer culture is palpable; watch exchanges like these two (from just a single panel I happened to attend) and also easy to understand.
Dr. Margo Seltzer [Ada Lovelace Day]
Last year I didn’t have a post idea for Ada Lovelace Day, so I just put up a small link roundup. I wanted to do a little better than that, this year.
Dr. Margo Seltzer‘s [Wikipedia entry, personal website] is not necessarily a well-known name in most computer science circles — I know I hadn’t heard of her until late 2007, when she encouraged my partner to come to the Harvard PhD program as her advisee — but her influence in the field is significant. She was an original codeveloper of Berkeley DB, the ubiquitous embedded database, and cofounder and CTO of Sleepycat Software, the company formed to provide commercial support for BDB in 1996. (Sleepycat and BDB were acquired by Oracle in 2006, and BDB remains available under either a commercial or an open-source license.)
Seltzer also helped break ground at Harvard — her undergraduate alma mater — for gender equality in the sciences, beginning as an associate professor a year after receiving her PhD at UC Berkeley, and winning tenure in 2000. She conducts systems research, serves as Vice President on the USENIX Board of Directors, and works to encourage more women to study computer science. On a personal note, as I mentioned, she is my partner’s PhD advisor, and has been incredibly helpful and supportive both with courses and research, and with various personal, family and health related issues my partner has had to deal with in the past couple years.
See also:
- Wikipedia’s listing of women in computer science
- The Border House
- Geek Feminism
- Adafruit is doing 24 posts, one every hour! (And a 10% off sale on their awesome kits.)
- The Hathor Legacy
- Twenty-Something Science
Quick Hit: Health Care Reform
Well, it’s done. The House has passed the Senate bill, and the package of reconciliation fixes.
There are a bunch of good things that kick in quickly, and that’s a big plus. Some thirty-odd million more people are going to have health care coverage, and insurance companies will (at least in theory, though I expect they’ll find whatever ways around this they can) be prohibited from denying coverage to or retroactively rescinding coverage from sick people.
There’s no long-term solution to rising costs, and the Democrats’ — from the President on down — betrayal of their own party platform, which says “The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to choose a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay, and we oppose any and all efforts to weaken or undermine that right,” is craven, disgusting, and disheartening in the extreme. And this is an absurdly industry-friendly bill, carefully tailored to maintain insurance company profits, and to not introduce any measures, such as genuine competition from a public option, optional earlier Medicare buy-in, removing their anti-trust exemption, or new, robust regulation, that would come close to bringing American per capita health care costs in line with the rest of the developed world, who spend much less for care as good or better than ours because single-payer systems are more efficient.
So in short, the Democrats remain a party largely under the influence of corporate money and the inbuilt misogyny of our social structure, while the Republicans are not only completely and happily under those influences but actively seeking at all times to expand them. D. Aristophanes’ graph, thus, applies pretty well both to the HCR bill and to the parties themselves.
In other news, as Paul Krugman notes, Newt Gingrich is now attacking the HCR bill by comparing it to LBJ’s civil rights legislation. Hey Newt, your mask is slipping.
Quick Hit: And Here I Thought…
…that dumping Lou Dobbs indicated CNN was starting to take their middle initial seriously. As it turns out: Nope! They were just looking for someone even more objectionable. (One wonders why they didn’t just keep Glenn Beck, really.)
I don’t really see what further comment I could add. Erickson is vile. He’s certainly as vile as Limbaugh or Beck. He makes much of the rest of the conservative blagoweb look measured and reasonable, and that’s no mean feat.
Yet, somehow, the fact that people say “fuck” on Daily Kos is constantly held up as evidence that liberal bloggers are hateful and meanspirited and unserious — and I have no doubt that we’ll also continue to see right-wing bloggers and Fox News blasting CNN for being an exemplar of the “liberal media.”
(Previously, previously. Via.)
Quick Hit: I've Got My Story and I'm Sticking To It!
Yesterday on my way to work I was listening, as is often the case, to the BBC World Service NewsHour program on my local NPR station, and one segment in particular caught my ear. They were discussing the aftermath of the Chile earthquake, including President Bachelet sending thousands of troops into Concepción to “restore order.” Starting at minute 39, presenter Robin Lustig talks with Frank Furedi, a professor of sociology, about “the morality of looting.”
What struck me about this was Lustig’s dogged insistence on established narrative — people who take food and supplies from stores in the aftermath of a disaster are “looters,” selfish criminals out for their own benefit who don’t care about anyone else; post-disaster urban areas (especially those populated by non-white people) devolve into Hobbesian nightmares; it’s correct for governments’ primary response to be “restoring order” by sending in police or troops — in the face of Furedi’s patient explanation that the evidence doesn’t support that narrative. People act more altruistically after a disaster, crime rates are lower, and those who “loot” food and supplies tend to then distribute them among the population. But Lustig would be damned if he’d let silly little things like facts interfere with the preferred story.
On Not Getting Fooled Again
(Update: apparently I forgot to linkify things that were supposed to be links! I was sure I had done. That’s what I get for posting on only one cup of coffee. Fixed now.)
As most people probably know by now, on Friday President Obama accepted an invitation to speak to and answer questions from the Republican caucus at their annual retreat — on the condition that the news media be allowed and the speech and Q&A session be broadcast live.
And as most people probably know by now, the Republicans are almost certainly thinking to themselves, “how could we have been so stupid?” (The answer, I think, is that they got so used to the lies they use to keep the rubes voting for them that they kind of forgot they were lies, and they honestly believed their sad little talking-points recital would leave Obama transfixed and tongue-tied, and he’d eventually have to break down and admit they were right about everything.)
If you haven’t seen the video, you should try to find time to do so — it’s a bit over an hour, but it’s pretty remarkable. Each time someone asks a question, it’s clear they think they’re scoring a major point, and that there’s just no way the President can refute their argument. And each time, he calmly, reasonably, cuts their head off. You can see the whole thing at Shakesville (with links to more discussion), and TNC provides the soundtrack, but I’ve provided some highlights below the fold.
Quick Hit: Spending Freeze
So apparently President Obama is planning a freeze on all new non-defense discretionary spending. That leaves out, as far as I can tell, current funding levels, additional DoD funding, and anything to do with Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security.
The left-wing/liberal/progressive blagoweb pretty much thinks this is stupid. Jeff Fecke provides a partial defense, which to Fecke’s credit doesn’t descend into “he’s playing 37-dimensional chess, you just have to trust him!” but still rests on too many hypotheticals for my comfort. Krugman takes a gloomier view.
Here’s my thing.
Politically, I don’t see this working well. Liberals think the last thing we should do is freeze spending on “discretionary” domestic programs like, oh, say, education. Conservatives, and moderates who have been bombarded for generations with conservative messages about how government deficits are terrible things, will find plenty of ground to accuse the administration of flim-flammery if Fecke is right and the freeze is aimed at providing deficit-hawk-ish cover for passing health care and jobs bills, and if not they’ll just hang the failing-to-substantially-improve economy around his neck (actually, they’ll probably do that no matter what).
And as policy, to be blunt, it’s shit. It has no significant impact on actual deficits — according to tonight’s Marketplace report, it will cut “only $250 billion over 10 years, but that’s out of a $3.5 trillion budget every year,” — but it cuts funding from areas where we really need more investment (like education and environmental programs), hurting people who need help. (And, cf. LGM, ignores the areas of real waste.)
So, I mean, maybe tomorrow night’s State of the Union turns it all around — maybe President Obama lays out a bold new liberal vision for the country, inspires the people to rally behind it, and shames recalcitrant Democrats into pushing forward a progressive agenda; or if that’s too fanciful a dream, maybe at least he proposes policy initiatives that make the current situation look less dire. Maybe. I’ll wait and see. But it doesn’t seem likely.
Update: I just got an email from the Washington Post with the subject line “Breaking News: Obama to promote more education spending in State of Union speech” — how does that square with this “spending freeze”? I don’t know. FWIW, here’s their story on the subject.
"Gender Junkies": The Post That Wasn’t (Yet?)
For a long time I’ve had a partly-finished post sitting in my draft queue. It’s entitled (as you might have guessed by this point) “Gender Junkies,” and it’s an attempt to argue that, roughly,
- Gender is a social construct
- It’s a necessarily hierarchical and therefore unjust social construct
- True human liberation requires the end of our belief in this social construct
- But it’s so embedded in our thinking that we genuinely cannot conceive of what a society without it would look like
- So the best we can do is try to make gender matter less, bit-by-bit.
(But using nerdy analogies like Dune and The Matrix.)
But as I say, I started the post a long time ago, and have been having a hard time finishing it, and in the meantime I’ve been reading various blogs and interacting with various people, and various things have happened; part of the reason, then, that I’ve had difficulty finishing the post is that I’m no longer sure I’m arguing well. I’ve learned much that I didn’t previously know, for example, about the problematic history of links to transphobia the idea of gender-as-social-construct has. And I want to avoid, if possible, saying something hurtful because I haven’t thought things through enough or because I’m working from faulty ideas.
So, since I’ve been getting a lot more visitors in the past week or so, thanks to generous links from several other blogs, I thought maybe now would be a good time to try opening a discussion thread.
How do you define “gender”? Do you see it as a social construct, or a function of biology (including brain biology, mind), or some mix of factors? Do you think it’s inherently hierarchical, or is a system of gender classification which is also egalitarian conceivable to you?
(Note: I realize that this is a very fraught topic, and what seems like a relatively abstract philosophical opinion to one person may seem to another like an outright attack on their right to exist. If you join the discussion, please be sensitive to the complexities of the subject, treat others kindly, and assume good faith in the absence of clear evidence to the contrary.)
