Matters Political

Quick Hit: The Dumb Rolls On

I am shocked — shocked! — to see that Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum have failed to take my sage advice, and are going ahead with an ill-fated attempt to rebut PZ Myers’s criticisms (which he’s, of course, continuing to make) of them and their book.  They give a list of reasons why they’re responding (and indicate that the series of response posts is already drafted, so I guess it’s too late for a final plea from my tiny little blog to stop them), but none of them are good reasons.  And no one old enough to no longer be getting into fights on the grade school playground should need it explained to them why those aren’t good reasons.

As Mooney and Kirshenbaum have already noted several times, there are lots of positive reviews out there.  If the book itself, plus all the positive reviews, aren’t sufficient to counter one negative review, maybe the book really isn’t all that good — now, I haven’t read it, so I don’t have any opinion on whether it’s actually good or not, but this dogged insistence on countering every point Myers makes makes Mooney and Kirshenbaum (I implicate both here because the latest was posted under both their names, although it has mostly seemed that Mooney has been leading the charge on this dumb-ass blogfight) look thin-skinned, petty, and severely lacking confidence in the quality of their own work.

Seriously, Chris and Sheril.  I like your blog, and I think you mostly do good work.  If PZ’s attacks are wrong, then anyone who reads your book and/or other reviews will know so — and anyone who only reads PZ’s review was never going to accept your arguments anyway.  Let it go!  “New Atheists” are not your enemy.

And PZ, I like your blog too, and I think you mostly do good work too.  “Accomodationists” are not your enemy.

Theocrats are the enemy.  Fight them, not each other.  Disband the circular firing squad.  I don’t know which one of you is the Judean People’s Front and which the People’s Front of Judea, but quit yelling “splitter!” at each other and fight the Romans.  It’s OK if you don’t both fight them the same way.

Could This Get Any Stupider?

I’ll save you the suspense: the answer is no.

Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum wrote this book called Unscientific America.  One of the things they argue is that public understanding of, and willingness to understand, science is impeded by the perception that scientists are intolerant of religion.  In particular, they criticize PZ Myers and other “New Atheists” (a ridiculous term, in my opinion) for their aggressive approach and their insistence that religion and science are incompatible.  Mooney is himself an atheist, but is the sort Myers and others deride as an “accommodationist,” and has been having an ongoing argument with Jerry Coyne on whether or not science and religion are necessarily incompatible (Coyne agrees with Myers and others that they are).

When review copies of the book went out, Myers didn’t receive his immediately, and some other people had already put up their own reviews, from which he learned that he came in for criticism.  He assumed this was why he hadn’t received a copy — which would be a breach of good etiquette if true, though one might equally consider his assumption of bad faith on Mooney’s and Kirshenbaum’s part to be such a breach — and Mooney and Kirshenbaum responded that the process of sending out review copies had just been disorganized, and that he had always been on the recipient list.

Myers then received his copy, and posted an extremely negative review.  Then Mooney responded, citing other, positive reviews, and promising to have “much more” to say about Myers’s review.  Up to this point, it was a pretty dumb blogfight, but far from the stupidest ever.  (more…)

Silence is the Enemy

I am lucky: I was born male in a society that values male persons more than female persons, and, arbitrarily, accords the former undeserved privileges while unjustly denying the latter their full equal rights as human beings.  I am lucky: because of that undeserved privilege, and the way our misogynist culture works, and some measure of random chance, I have not been a target of sexual assault.  I am lucky: I live in a society which, though misogynist, has a relatively effective system of laws, the application of which, even over my three decades of life, has been, on the whole, more closely (if slowly) approaching justice.  The people I know, in my real-world, meat-space life, are lucky: disproportionately few of the women I know are survivors of sexual assault or rape — or at least, as far as I know; but it’s also not unlikely that I simply don’t know about many cases, because our misogynist culture teaches women to be ashamed of, and silent about, having been the victim of crime.

Sheril Kirshenbaum at The Intersection, along with Isis the Scientist, Aetiology, Bioephemera, Neurotopia and The Questionable Authority, has launched a project, inspired by a Nick Kristof column, to bring attention and pressure to bear to try to end the epidemic of mass rape around the world.

Kirshenbaum, taking seriously the idea that silence is the enemy, opens her post by describing her experience with sexual assault.  She’s right: if survivors refuse to be silent and ashamed, it becomes harder and harder for people who’d prefer not to upset the apple cart to pretend the status quo is tenable.

It’s important, however, not to misunderstand this (which I don’t think Kirshenbaum does; she’s just picked a particular focus) as a problem of Darfur, or the Democratic Republic of Congo, or Liberia, or West Africa, or “elsewhere.”  There are certain places in the world — generally, places where a state of war or lawlessness has lasted a long time: mass rape has long been used as a weapon of war, even by our own soldiers — where these things happen in such numbers, and with such brutality, that it can be hard to believe.  The roots of these problems are deep, and are intertwined with histories of colonization and exploitation, and of war, and of poverty.

But we should not believe that we in the “West1” are so much better.  We have, in the United States for example, a functioning government, and relatively fair laws, and no war is being fought on our soil.  But even so, by the most widely accepted estimate, at least one in six women will be sexually assaulted or raped at least once in her lifetime.

Let me rephrase that, actually, because it’s important that we do not linguistically hide the criminals.  Men2 will sexually assault or rape at least one in six women. It’s not just something that happens, it’s something people do.  And like the women of Congo, the women of Darfur, the women of Liberia, like Sheril Kirshenbaum, silence is also the enemy of these women.  Silence is the enemy of the one in six who have been assaulted, and the enemy of the five in six who have not, but who are also in danger.  Silence is the enemy of the men who have been victims of sexual assault, because the weight of culturally-imposed shame falls heavily on them as well.  Silence is the enemy of the men, too, who have never harmed anyone, many of whom simply do not know, because our misogynist culture of shame and silence is not set up for them to know, the true extent and impact of sexual assault and rape.

Two months ago, Melissa McEwan opened a thread at Shakesville to try to help break that silence: the more we understand the extent of this horror, the less excuse we have not to fight to end it.  Silence is the enemy; these stories need to be heard.

1 “West”?  West of what?  We are “the West” only insofar as we are west of “the East” — but it is “the East” only insofar as it is east of us.  Neither, as Edward Said wrote, has any ontological stability.
2 No, not only men; women commit sexual assualt and rape as well.  But the vast majority of such crimes are committed by men, and the problem is inextricably intertwined with our conceptions of “masculinity.”

Domestic Terrorism

A good man was murdered yesterday.

Dr. George Tiller of Wichita, Kansas was one of only a handful — perhaps two, or three, or four, there doesn’t appear to be a clear consensus — of doctors in the entire United States who perform late-term abortions.

Yesterday, as he was walking into church services, someone shot and killed him.

Tiller has been a major target of the anti-choice movement for a very long time.  He has lived with near-constant death threats, frequent vandalism, and other intimidation and demonization, for many years; in 1993, in an earlier attempt on his life, he was shot in both arms, but recovered and returned to practice.

Only a couple of months ago, he was acquitted of trumped-up misdemeanor charges brought in an attempt to prevent him from helping women.

He has been attacked by Bill O’Reilly, persecuted via the Kansas legal system and, now, murdered for doing his duty as a doctor as best he saw it to help women who, on top of being faced with terrible, heartbreaking decisions, were being bombarded from all sides by messages that they were bad, unworthy people who deserved no help.

They did deserve help, of course.  They do deserve help.  Dr. Tiller was one of very few people willing to help them; and now that number is smaller.

It’s important to understand this about late-term abortions: they are a procedure that is simply never performed except for reasons of medical necessity.  They are performed when the mother’s health is gravely imperiled by the pregnancy or the prospect of giving birth, or when the fetus suffers from congenital deformities or defects which will ensure its life is very brief and very painful, or when the fetus is already dead to save the mother the trauma of delivering a stillborn baby, or sometimes when the mother’s only chance to survive cancer is to enroll in an experimental treatment which doesn’t accept pregnant women.  No one ever, ever wants late-term abortions to be necessary; but sometimes they are.

Now that there is one fewer doctor who performs these procedures in the country, many women will be unable to have this necessary procedure performed.  Some will be bankrupted trying to pay for medical care for an infant which cannot survive.  Some will be plunged into depression over delivering a corpse or watching helplessly as their babies die.  Some — dozens? perhaps a hundred or more? — will die along with their fetuses, due to the birth complications that made the abortion a necessity.

The domestic terrorist who murdered Dr. Tiller has killed them too.

I was going to add links to this post, but so much has been written that I hardly know where to start.  Virtually every political blog on my blogroll has one or more posts about it, should any readers want more.

So I’ll just point to Jill Filipovic’s list of suggested organizations to donate money to in Dr. Tiller’s honor, to Sara Robinson’s explanation of how terrorism like this is a natural consequence — indeed, the goal — of decades of right-wing eliminationist rhetoric, and to Ann’s list of things we can do.

Quick Hit: It's Sotomayor

The Times is reporting that President Obama has selected Judge Sonia Sotomayor as his nominee for the Supreme Court seat Justice David Souter will be vacating when he retires at the end of this term.  From what I’ve read this seems like an excellent choice, though I was also excited about the prospect of a couple of his other short-listers, Dean Elena Kagan or Judge Diane Wood, being picked.  I hope that I’m right in believing her record shows her to be more likely to side with the powerless than the powerful; it’s also very exciting to have the first Latino on the court.

Signal Boost: There Must Be Accountability

This is mainly me doing my paltry best to boost signal for Teh Portly Dyke’s post on the necessity of investigations and prosecutions for the war crimes committed by the US government over the past eight years (a subject I’ve mentioned before).

Launching a war of aggression is a war crime. Torturing prisoners is a war crime. Refusing to investigate and prosecute war crime is itself a war crime. And if the rule of law means anything, it means the mighty are bound by the same laws as the small, and president, ministers and CEOs may not be excused for their misconduct on grounds of expediency anymore than pickpockets or junkies.

PD has issued a pledge and a challenge to write letters weekly until investigations commence. I don’t know whether I will manage to do that — it often takes me months to write a single blog post — but I will try, and I encourage you to as well.

…Did She Really Just Say That?

Yes.  Yes, she did.

Michele Bachmann (last seen declaring herself “a foreign correspondent on enemy lines” because she works in Washington, DC, which as we all know is not actually part of the United States) has stated she “[wants] people in Minnesota armed and dangerous” in order to “fight back hard” against the Obama administration’s proposed cap-and-trade system for reducing greenhouse emissions.  Thus continues the trend of Republicans and media right-wingers attempting to incite civil war.

I’d ask if they could get any more irresponsible, but I already know the answer.

The Myth of the Individual

The primacy of the individual is an article of faith in the American civil religion.  This idea manifests itself in all sorts of places, from popular entertainment to political discourse; it’s so deeply ingrained that it inflects how we think about, well, essentially everything.  Our stories are about the one person (usually, the one man) who made a difference.  We love accounts of this or that hardworking person escaping poverty and becoming successful, living “the American dream.”  We idolize individual leaders like Washington and Lincoln and Kennedy and, if we’re stupid, Reagan.  We talk about encouraging personal responsibility.

And all of this is not only a deeply misguided way of looking at the world, but hinders us in making real improvements.

Our thoughts, beliefs and actions do not spring, fully-formed, into being by our sheer will, devoid of all precedent and influence; neither do they take place in a vacuum, with no reverberatory effects reinforcing this cultural notion or challenging that one.  Who we are, and what we think and do, is not fully determined, but is predisposed to a great degree, by both our personal, individual history and the sociohistorical context in which we exist.  (One notable effect of this is the implicit bias phenomenon, and it’s telling that when people recognize their implicit bias and consciously try to counteract it, things improve; but if they simply deny being biased, nothing does.)

This is why it can be so difficult to get even people who identify as “liberal” to recognize that problems like racism, sexism and homophobia are not mainly a matter of individuals holding unpleasant attitudes toward other individuals because of their race, gender or orientation, but are rather large-scale structures that must be addressed in a systemic way.  If tomorrow every white person woke up truly free from prejudice against black people, every man woke up truly free from prejudice against women, and every heterosexual person woke up truly free from prejudice against homosexual and bisexual people, our society would still be (though, we might hope, it would begin to change much more rapidly) a racist, sexist, homophobic society, because the structures would still exist: the wealth and power would still be concentrated in the hands of heterosexual (or closeted) white men.  Merely for those in privileged positions to begin treating the underprivileged fairly, as though there were no relevant history, and it were appropriate to use now as the baseline for measuring fairness, is like claiming a race is fair because no one cheats, even though one runner’s starting line was a mile behind the other’s.

The Myth of the Individual tells us that as long as the runner with the shorter distance to travel isn’t actively hindering the runner with the longer distance, and didn’t him- or herself set up the track, the race is fair.

We are not unconstrained by our sociohistorical context.  We cannot be; and we certainly cannot choose to be.  It is not a question of will.  And insofar as we refuse to recognize this, and continue to fetishize individual choice, individual action, individual attitudes, individual will, even those of us who consider ourselves “liberal” fail to effectively confront the conservative project.  As Kai Chang has very eloquently said, our society, with all its inequity and injustice, is “an edifice with foundations, load-bearing walls, plumbing, wiring, ductwork; and in order to renovate, you need to study those structures.”  To focus on the individual is to look at this structure and try to “renovate” by filling cracks in the plaster with toothpaste, hastily putting up a new coat of paint, and buying a throw rug.  This not only fails to make major changes, but in fact supports the existing structure by tacitly acknowledging it as legitimate.

And yet, the foundations are rotten.