Ghost lives

I've been kicking around trying to condense some thoughts on this for a few weeks after a few "debates" went... poorly, sometimes with a certain breed of human male (the types I usually try to avoid). The most frustrating of which have been with more sexist versions of people like myself though, who think they're being rational and skeptical. So I've kept unwinding my thoughts and winding it all back up not thinking there's much that can be said by me. There's a bunch of disclaimers I feel like I needed to make that I mostly won't make here.

Because I think it has become clarified in the last week that it suffices to focus in on one thing that keeps coming up in almost every forum this is discussed.

Male obliviousness of how women are living, and the ability not to have to worry about that ignorance or its consequences.

Where that intersects here lately. I don't walk into a room outnumbered by women, or simply alone with a single woman, with one or both/all of us perhaps in some degree of inebriated state and suddenly start to worry about my physical safety. Or being molested. I don't have to. I have been groped or grabbed or simply stared at by a relative stranger with some level of sexual interest before. But I am a rather large human male. I'm not sure I'd have to worry about this as a real threat in almost any room under any scenario, and I can't think of an occasion that I have done so (I experience other anxieties being in a room with a lot of people, but none involve my actual safety). I am not sure very many men if asked on the spot could come up with a concept of what kinds of defenses would be necessary to reduce or prevent this from happening, what kinds of precautions to take, and finally have any understanding that there probably is still a last line of thought for "this could go sideways anyway, no matter what I do, what would I do then?". Because it's not something we've ever had to consider.

There's a general concept for men of "this isn't a friendly neighborhood, I will walk with my guard up a bit to discourage a fight and make sure my car doors are locked up when I park/leave". But that's very different than "I'm in a room with 4 other men, I need to make sure I know where the exits are, be careful where I put a drink, try to decide which of them I can trust not to be a dick", and on down the line of precautionary elements. It's a different level of specificity and passive/active mental practices to inhabit. This is a serious cost to pay for what often amounts to, for men, normal social interaction. The relative freedom to engage with other human beings without worrying about security or physical abuse is something I can take for granted. And that's all being imposed as a mental and physical tax upon women for safety and security in ways that will probably always exist (it'd be nice if rape or sexual abuse could be abolished... but that's not the point here). It's why some women probably won't go in that room with 4 men. It's also why it can be convenient to play a "boyfriend/husband on TV", as it were. To discourage some other asshole from bothering a friend. The larger point though is there's a bunch of places and situations I can walk into and never have to think twice or think about how to structure the experience to make sure I come away safely at all that almost every woman I know does to some degree consider this.

A related but far less pressing problem here is that it deprives men of the company and input of women in certain situations at work or in some social setting. And that's unpleasant for us too. That's a cost we're all paying for because some of us are dicks. This is low hanging fruit as a space for room of improvement is to get men to behave a little bit better and be aware of this as a cost imposed on the women around them when they do not. There are ghosts around us where there should be a person, or these are people who have to deal with some very angry and ugly ghosts just to get through the day. That's not unusual, but the particular flavor and its widespread nature should be concerning.

Especially if we are to come to consider how common it is that virtually every woman a man knows; his wife or girlfriend, his daughter, his friend from work or school, his mother and grandmother, has had a small to large mountain of sexist bullshit to wade through, daily, for most of her life (at least teen on, if not prior). From more innocent seeming comments than intended to overlong glances and stares assessing her entirely as a physical sexual specimen on the lowest end of the scale (what might be called the pornification of women) to creepy guys exposing themselves or randomly asking for photos of her breasts, to a boss or coach molesting them. Some women will manage or avoid portions of that ugly continuum far better than others. But it's a universal experience. At some point, possibly daily, hopefully rarely, she will feel like she is an object. No longer a person. The person is a ghost, dismissed from the scene. Most men have little feeling or consideration of this as it relates to themselves I expect. I do not think other people are assessing me as an object. I am not certain any people are assessing me much at all frankly, but certainly it does not cross my mind to contemplate being seen as an object of fantastic desires, nor am I made to feel that bad about it if I am not fulfilling any social demands and expectations that I should be so considered.

One of the things that's come up often after the Ford-Kavanaugh hearings, such as they were, is the volume of men talking to and hearing from women around them who have similar stories and the overwhelming reaction of these men has been along the lines of "I had no idea". The point here isn't "all men are creeps". That's not the issue. The issue is that most men are unaware of how widespread this is that women have had to figure out how to deal with this wide variety of creepy and sexist behavior, up to and sometimes including physical or sexual violence against her personally. Firsthand, not simply through some talk their parents gave them as a child. And then probably never told any of the men around them about it after it happened. We don't know about the catcalling because it never happens when we're standing right there. We don't know about getting random dick pics because they get deleted (and it's not like we'd want to see them either). We do not know who was beaten by an ex. We don't know which of our friends were raped or had some guy in college or at a party force himself on her that she fought off and escaped.

I do not think all of these stories and events are equally terrible. Nor is the point that women are equally as innocent as men are in some manner guilty. I do not think all of these events will be handled in some way that every woman involved in it won't respond by handling it herself and not needing any man to fight any part of the battle for her. The point here isn't that women can't do some things to improve. That however isn't a very interesting question for me, a human male, to try to understand is what is it that women can do to improve the behavior of men, much less what we could do to improve the behavior of women.

The question that has nagged at me for months, years now, is what is it that men should do. Not just to improve behavior toward women, but amongst ourselves.

I'm not always sure what it is that we are going to do next to deal with these as societal concerns. Shame and shunning does not seem to have any prominent effect anymore. The assholes among us keep coming on anyway now, without apology or recognition. Indeed, they are sometimes clustering together in damaging, sometimes violent ways. Due process doesn't always apply in some formal legal sense, leaving informal and inconsistent quality measures instead to evaluate claims and defenses. Which is all very messy and probably less effective at providing some context of what someone did that was wrong and what they need to learn not to do in the future. The methods and tools at hand for social and cultural change are, thus far applied, weak, inconsistent, and probably not favored to be used by many still yet anyway. What has become clear is this is not something that men can pretend doesn't happen anymore; to claim that sexual harassment and gender inequality was resolved decades ago and now a gender peace in the workplace reigns. Or claim that because he didn't touch you or didn't penetrate you, or if he did that he didn't use his penis to do it or didn't "finish", it doesn't really matter. Or make broad claims that women are making up rapes, or idiotic claims about how female physiology works. Or to claim that "boys will be boys" and find that a compelling defense.

There's been a wide variety of responses to this sudden sunshine over blissful ignorance by men. Some of which are outright sickening or pathetic. "We can't flirt or tell a dirty joke anymore", said by idiots, up to "I need to record all my sexual encounters to make sure she can't accuse me of rape", said by monsters. We are not monsters, or at least, I'd like to set the bar at least that high for most of us as human beings. That leaves doing something else besides complaining about the behavior of half the population in order to improve these circumstances. Nominally it is not the half of the population actually committing these sexual assaults and misconducts and disrespectful attitudes and speech coming up for introspective analysis at that. Introspectively trying to understand "what is the problem", "is there something I can do about it", and then where possible go do that is a big start. Being aware of these issues and listening to women, compassionately as people, not because they're "my wife/girlfriend/daughter", which is merely an object state in relation to ourselves, happens to go over really well. At least according to some women around me. Men are capable of exercising this faculty. Maybe not very well, but it's a possibility. I would recommend we improve upon that.

I think the value of feminism ultimately comes down to helping men (and sometimes women too) behave a little bit better toward each other, across and within genders, by being slightly more aware of the lived experiences of other people, and thus offering a marginal space to improve how they relate to women around them, and sometimes to other men around them. People they purport to care about might be better treated and respected. But more importantly, people they don't know and don't care about at all might be accorded a level of respect. If we are having issues with teenagers and college students trying to navigate sexuality and consent, and I think there's broad agreement that this has been a problem for decades, if not centuries, maybe we should be doing a better job allocating our social and political capital and trying to figure out what to do with it instead. How can we prepare each other to try to make difficult decisions and take any actions required gracefully, and behave responsibly and compassionately. We will not abolish the worst aspects of human behavior. That's not the point. It's how can we help each other avoid and manage those horrible things as best we can. That cannot happen if there is a veil of ignorance pulled over it by half the population. This is also not a simple problem with a simple solution. There's probably 50-100 major factors filtering into all of this sludge of toxic masculinity and sexism, and some of the results of that will never really wash away no matter how diligently we try. That does not absolve us the responsibility of looking at it and trying to improve. If not for ourselves, for children or their children.

A note on bathrooms

Much fussiness has arisen over who gets to use which bathroom. This seems incredibly paranoid and silly at best, but mainly doesn't seem like something that requires laws. Which is to say: transgendered persons have been using bathrooms of their choice and intention for years without much in the way of public complaint or incident. Nobody really noticed or cared. Why this arises now? Most probably because anti-gay bigotry is less popular to express, but some version of it still demands expression. This is as close as some people can get. Laws restricting the behavior of homosexuality are unenforceable and unlikely to pass muster in courts. Trans persons are a relative unknown, very few people know much about the biology involved (and people's eyes will glaze over when you try to explain the available neuroscience to them), and they represent an even smaller minority that is thus easier to pick on. Any legal fight is still perceived as uncertain.

What we are seeing is that there is a strong cultural fight ongoing, where businesses and liberals and progressives are (generally) allies, social conservatives are off on a strange island, and there is some number of people in the middle who don't yet know what to think of any of this and perhaps harbor vaguely creepy and uninformed notions about who or what transgender means in society and as a set of behaviors. As with abortion, this physical and moral uncertainty (and even fear) can sometimes privilege very restrictive legal actions that are inappropriate or unnecessary, even as an intention to alleviate some alleged social or health related problem. To be clear, I feel I know very little about this subject myself. I've written about it before with some circumspection. What I do know suggests very little of the public debate has had anything to do with the behavior of transgendered persons, the reasons for it, the norms enforcing that behavior, or really much of anything with respect to the actual fears of people involved.

There are pretty strong norms about bathroom use; that someone going into the women's restroom should look like they belong in that space for example. But even these allow for some things like a parent taking small children into the "wrong" bathroom, or women using the men's room stalls at large events (sports or concerts), and so on. Creating laws which might rigidly define who can use what bathroom seems typically unnecessary. Social conventions are quite capable of handling this question in a "common sense" way without messily involving the law and its blunt instruments of gender assignments. And the implication of law is that somehow we must be enforcing these restrictions. Using what methods? This is a question generally left unexamined. Would we punish women who look insufficiently feminine for using the "wrong bathroom"? How would we even tell someone who has had sex reassignment therapy or surgery is in the "wrong space"? Is someone going to be assigned to check IDs? Or check people's bits? Again, social norms will tend to enforce these conventional situations more than adequately without these mixed up scenarios.

The creepy "men will get dressed up as women to watch women peeing" or some such narrative pushed by many men on this point makes no sense in relation to this subject. Men can already do this. They generally don't. In large part because social norms and (yes) laws will punish such behavior. And in any case, there's plenty of this rather odd sexual fetish available relatively freely on the internet (presumably including varieties where men have dressed up as women). Mostly this suggests something is wrong with the person making this argument, that they think this is something people would suddenly start to do that they somehow cannot right now. It has little to do with what makes someone transgendered that someone "decides" to use a "different" bathroom, much less for the purpose of creepily staring at women or children. Such a conversation is like speaking a different language with an alien species and rarely amounts to productive conclusions.

There isn't in fact very much danger in public restrooms for sexual abuse. Upon women or children. Think about what this argument suggests for a moment. A random stranger, someone totally unknown to a woman or child, will sneak into an inappropriate bathroom where there may be an unknown quantity of persons within, often doing so in full view of store security or video surveillance, and most likely with a guardian, friend, or parent nearby to the person they wished to target for abuse, who then will have ample opportunity to resist and to call for help in a public location where other human beings might hear them and assist. There are many reasons that sexual abuse is nearly always perpetrated by someone known to the victim (for children, the percentage of known abusers approaches 95%. Random assaults or even kidnappings are vanishingly rare). But these are all pretty strong arguments against the fear of random strangers in public bathrooms, not arguments in favor of laws relating to who can use what restroom. We are imagining a fear that doesn't actually exist, and not creating a new scenario that didn't already exist by allowing people to use the bathroom in which they are personally most comfortable. More to the point, rates of sexual assault itself have been declining. The actual danger being identified, a risk of something untoward happening while someone is in the vulnerable position of relieving their body of physical waste, is already unlikely, and is in a category of crime that is itself less and less likely.

One problem I have been seeing is that comparisons are being made to demand laws or stronger social efforts to punish sexual offenders (instead of these kinds of silly laws regarding restrictions on transgendered bathroom selection). We already have a vast infrastructure of laws punishing all manner of lewd and inappropriate behaviors, sometimes severely, in addition to laws punishing sexual assault and rape and other more morally reprehensible crimes. Thousands of people are required in most US states to register as sex offenders, to be restricted on where they may live, contact with family members is often heavily restrained (assuming their offense was not involving such, family is often a key method of reintegration to society as it provides a basis of support), to have social stigma attached to them from neighbours who often wrongly infer their actions make them a threat to their children, job restrictions on where they can work or what kind of work they can do, and so on. The vast majority of these people did not go around molesting children, raping women, or other heinous actions of sexual predators. Therefore I would submit that the idea that we should punish sexual offenses more severely or more readily is already an idea we have taken to heart and practiced as a society. We already do it at a prodigious rate.

To be sure, there are still problems in how many people, including some police and prosecutors and judges, perceive rape and sexual assault, and the methods of adjudicating claims thereof are still often fraught with he-said-she-said difficulties, and problems in how swiftly and readily evidence is processed for criminal convictions (or as proof of innocence). And there are serious questions of sexual consent (and communication regarding sexuality in general) that are still awkwardly worked out for many young people in a way that disadvantages them from the healthy and consensual enjoyment of the human form. But our eagerness to punish sexual misbehavior reaches far beyond these questions and often ends up vigorously criminalizing (generally natural) sexual exploration by teens, drunken stupidity like public urination, and on down the list. This is where we go when we want to punish sexual misconduct as a society. And not toward more violent and non-consensual criminal actions. We should be careful to look at an imaginary danger, some vast looming threat posed uniquely by transgendered persons using the "wrong" bathrooms in public, and not replace it with other imaginary dangers in the effort to dismiss the former.

Flip-flops

Sadly. This is not a post about the virtues of not having to wear socks for months at a time.

During a digression on sexism and politics, one of the constant refrains that emerged as a "factual issue" of concern and note was the concept that a politician's word on some issue cannot be held to trust and account because they have changed their position on some given issue. Sometimes in the last week. Sometimes from a position they held 20 years ago.

Leaving aside for a moment whether this is indeed a salient feature of how to evaluate specific political figures (I do not think it is very useful at all), the nature and presentation of it itself proceeded along the same sexist lines. One political figure who has so famously flip-flopped so often that Colbert does a late-night segment where he debates himself (as a formidable opponent no doubt), is described as "honest" and receives a pass (Trump). Trump "changed his mind" on abortion only a few weeks ago about 5 times in one weekend. Some things he's changed his mind on in the same press appearance. Clinton meanwhile, received no such pass for views that have "evolved" over several decades. If one is going to apply this as some form of rigorous standard, that politicians should mean what they say and explain their evolutions to us when they occur that they have to change their minds, one should do so "fairly", without a prism of sexism to blind people to one form of doing so as excused or ignored, and painting a huge target on someone else for doing the same thing.

The question then becomes whether this is a useful metric for measuring the probable performance of someone in public office. This is I think much more mixed. There are a number of problems with holding it up as a high end value assessment. Pretty much everyone changes their minds at least some of the time. Especially in politics. This is, in most walks of life, a virtuous element of their character, that people apportion their beliefs to evidence and values that have changed and adapt accordingly. "New shit has come to light, man", and one should naturally follow along to see where it goes. Politician's difficulty is typically in explaining why, not the what, in a way that satisfies their partisan fellow travelers and opponents alike (this is not often possible). But we should expect political figures to have changed their positions on a number of topics over a career in public service, even within the last few days or weeks. What exactly we are holding them to account for is not that they have changed their minds, but something else.

People who don't change their minds in politics based upon changing conditions, values, and evidence, are typically called ideologues. And they are usually dangerous people when given public office and public powers. Or at least, they tend not to perform an executive office very well. This is because such people are too confident in their own mental faculties and too unwilling to rely upon the advice of others on the probability that they might be wrong. Someone like Sanders comes up obviously to this view, that he seems very unwilling to respect points of view indicating he might be wrong in either his diagnosis of a problem or his probable solutions. Someone like Trump comes to this problem from a different perspective, but the same effect: poor quality advice is likely to occur because the only advice he will want is what he already wants to hear. These are the risks of people who don't appear to change their minds, or people who rely too closely on their own minds to make their assessments of what they should or should not do in public office. It is not simply the case that we should want "honest" and steady figures, because such figures do not historically have a track record of providing quality governance and provide glaring flaws as to why this might be the case.

This does not mean that public officials changing their minds is of no consequence. What we are actually assessing is something about their method of making judgments. Someone who appears too quick to jump ship may be of concern to people with particular ideological and policy issue commitments they wish to see fulfilled. This would require people to be pretty activist and informed about some particular policy issue. Which is not the case for most people that they are deeply committed to a platform of ideological goals and aware of the policy levers that are being pulled or ignored that could help further those. Most people therefore aren't making this complaint when they complain about flip-flopping. Someone who appears unwilling to stick to a decision might be a concern in a crisis (this is a common argument made against FDR's first two terms and his handling of the Depression, with a lot of meddling going in different, sometimes contradictory and counterproductive directions. I honestly don't think he would be regarded as a great President without the third term and "The War" to rescue his reputation). This might be closer to the truth of the matter that we would want to know there is a level head trying to make decisions in terrible situations, someone who won't panic or make poor decisions. I still think it grants too much to the motives of voters however for why this occurs as an issue in politics.

We are trying to assess how and why someone has changed their minds. This will not always be clear, as any change would be internal. We can assume it will be for craven political calculus, for example to follow the national mood on some issue or another, being for or against something because it is politically expedient. This appears to be what many do. Cynically I am inclined to agree this is often a feature for why political figures decide one day to stand up, when they usually remain seated, but this does not explain our behavior that well as voters standing in judgment. It does not explain why we fix on some candidates over others for this flaw. We can assume it will be because they have become personally moved on this issue. In many cases I am willing to grant this may be the case, simply because politicians are often as ignorant of the many subjects on which they are often called upon to legislate as we are in the general public. But many others are not so forgiving. This would all be acceptable behavior. If it went on that often. What most people seem to do instead of these options however is cognitive dissonance of a partisan or tribalistic nature. They ignore or minimize changes to positions for their favored candidates. And they highlight those of candidates they are not disposed to like (people from the other party, or the other candidate in a primary cycle). This then is actually why we are doing it: "Our team is noble and pure. And the other people are all hypocrites."

As someone who has observed from the outsider status the nature of politics and political arguments, who doesn't much like any of the tribes involved (even the one I am nominally leaned toward on some policy grounds), I am here to say "you are all full of shit". That's an amusing game I'm sure, but it isn't very satisfying or convincing that any of you are right about what you want, what policies we should or should not pursue, even about what political figures can best advance or deter such policies. Calling people out for lying is something you can do as a political counting game, perhaps to encourage an honest and fair accounting of the achievements and goals of political figures when we try to decide which ones to elect or not. I do some of it myself where there is little clear goal or purpose behind a particular agenda (re: the recent wave of attempts to pass anti-transgender laws and the often creepy and ignorant statements by political figures in support of them). But it does little good when people aren't willing to look in the mirror, ever, to call this an imposition of honesty. Honesty is not part of this game. It never has been. It never will be. The essential point of politics as government should be something on the order of: "what are our goals and how can we best serve them". Deception is a part of that. People don't sit down at a poker table and only play the hands they get and expect to have won money when they get up. Same thing in politics. I expect the political figures involved to learn how to bluff better, to avoid sounding like they are prevaricating or if they are uncertain, to simply say they are uncertain and that they are seeking more information. And while that's a flaw that some political figures (Clinton for example) have had difficulty escaping (she is not a natural politician, her husband was a very gifted figure in this regard), it's not one that tells me they are bad at every other facet of the game we are asking of them. It isn't very informative. It offers little advice on policy what we should expect. If someone has a bad poker face, but always has drawn good cards, why should we care? We should focus our attention there instead. Do they even have good cards? Do they offer good and effective policies? Have they a decent understanding of the scale and scope of our problems as a nation (or a planet in the case of foreign policy, or climate change)?

If we aren't asking those questions, we can't really evaluate whether or not they are being honest in the first place because we don't have any idea why we should care if they are or not. Maybe because you have some goal you really care about, bully for you if so. Maybe because you don't like someone and are searching for a better sounding answer than "I don't like her attitude". And so on.

Not so quick hits

Hacking Ashley Madison

I'm not terribly sympathetic toward the people whose privacy is threatened here, but then legal cases and rights are typically bounded by cases that don't involve very sympathetic people. We shouldn't expect to be that sympathetic of other people's privacy when it is their privacy at stake rather than our own, but should work to be to a modest degree. The thing that seems less clear to me is why, if the beef is with the company/website, the hack intended to release the private information of possibly millions of customers (or former customers). Who would, by the logic of going after the site itself as some form of scam or immoral business (the motives are not entirely clear to me), be more like victims in this. It would seem to me that exposing that the site is not terrific at protecting identity theft or disclosure would be sufficient to discourage its use if that was the goal (to put it out of business). But this has already been done with other technical problems in the website's design. And yet it remains.

Which to me leads to some questions about the function of a website designed for people to have flings and affairs. Clearly there must be some amount of market for this, to at least look, or such a site wouldn't have sprang up. There have usually been gray markets of a sort designed to meet needs or desires of individuals that are not illegal (adultery is not illegal in the US), but which aren't exactly looked kindly upon for social reasons. People have been able to make private arrangements for affairs and sexual infidelities for centuries. This is not a new thing. The difference is the implied discretion of the internet overarching these arrangements or the easier manner with which the internet allows for arrangements (lowers transaction costs of searching for partners willing to indulge in an affair, etc).

But. This is the implied problem of such a site from a moral or social perspective: the idea is to do something in secret, without the consent of a monogamous partner (typically), for whom ordinarily someone has granted a great deal of trust, communication, and affection at some point. The purpose of discretion isn't so much to conceal that someone is a slimier character from others unknown, the usual character of the internet commerce, but from parties closely and intimately known. This is or should be troubling. It did not start with Ashley Madison, so blaming such a setup seems unlikely to produce much change in social conventions and intimate arrangements of human sexuality and expression. But the existence and sudden highlighting of such a convention, and the scope and scale with which it had expanded should indicate that some of these conversations and conventions of human sexuality are already being altered, or maybe have always been altered and simply weren't known to the degree by which they were.

I think in some sense, there was an unspoken degree by which marriage as an institution allowed for some amounts of infidelity, in secret, and without disclosing socially the amounts of people engaging in extramarital sex or relationships. What this variety of hack would disclose is that there are a fairly large number of people who are willing or desire to look for such activities. Since this seems to be the case anyway, I would propose these should be the social goals we should want to strive for.

1) Social disclosure is less important. It is not important to tell all of your friends and family you are having an affair. This kind of disclosure is not as essential to the underlying relationships or the social cache that is placed upon marriages. Our sexual histories or intentions thereof aren't usually objects we wish or need to be socially informed (to have others advise us on them) and socially disclosed (to make others aware of them).

2) Intimate disclosure, with any regular and typically monogamous or monogamous-desiring partner is vital. If people are going to be having or seeking to have affairs, they should communicate these desires to potential or current partners. It may be possible to head off some number of affairs by modifying or repairing (or ending) an existing relationship, by communicating and working through problems of say, sexual excitement and variety, or by simply being up front about this as a possible sexual interest that other people would be able to say they think they are okay with or not. One of the problems of consent discourse is that if a person is having multiple close emotional and sexual relationships this is not typically done openly with the consent of other partners. People probably don't need to communicate every one-night stand they do while dating. But they should communicate if they are having problems, or are jealous, or are otherwise troubled while married or engaged or in what are otherwise exclusive relationships where both partners are intent on remaining with this other person rather than seeking other partners at the same time.

3) All of that includes the other parties who should also be aware of what is going on as these other people will be human beings complete with their own emotional or physical interests and needs and not simply objects used for sexual gratification. There is some advantage in this setup through a website designed around the idea of helping people cheat on their spouse or other intimate partner in that the third party person can reasonably conclude they are with someone who is actually married, or who is actually engaged in extramarital sex or relations with them.

4) If some people are going to be in more open marriages, or other polyamorous arrangements, this is not in and of itself that troubling to me. It might be troubling to the parties involved that they attempt this and find it is not that easy to do (which it wouldn't be), or isn't as fun or satisfying as they expected it to be. There's probably some number of people who are willing to fantasize about a spouse being with another person, or themselves fantasizing about being with another person. Transferring this from the realm of sexual fantasies to a reality involves more messy human emotions and attachments (or detachments) than many people can deal with at one time. This is worth acknowledging. Indeed, it's one of the reasons I would suggest we move toward more open communication as many people in proceeding with an intent to have an affair may find that the consequences and any enjoyment of doing so are less desirable than they may have believed. They may find also it is perfectly enjoyable or fulfills some need or demand. But given that our ordinary monogamous sexual relationships are often hit or miss on our enjoyment, or complete with other varieties of work and management to maintain them, adding more such relationships may be too much for many people to handle adequately without risking damage to other partners that they hold in some esteem.

5) If you are in a relationship, or considering one, and the other party to it expresses interest in a more open or polyamorous arrangement, you can push back against this to reject it but persist in the relationship on a more monogamous framework, you can leave on the understanding that this other person is not someone whom you believe you could form or sustain a stable relationship, or you can go along with it and re-visit or place strict rules of communication and transparency. Simply providing some assent to this in theory is very different than approving of all its possible particulars. Just as consenting to any sexual act is not the same as consenting to have, say, anal sex as well, this is something that needs to be negotiated and examined throughout as a given consent rather than a blanket "sure, go ahead".

Drug testing welfare

I've written about this some before, but it's something I'd rather not have to, so this is one of these "I'll write something so I don't have to for a long time". This comes up periodically as different states or governments propose doing it. There are, unfortunately in my mind, broad bipartisan supports for this as an idea. Conservatives love the idea as it feeds into a notion of persistent poverty as caused by cultural artifacts of lazy stoned people. Meanwhile every state it has actually been tried it hasn't ensnared a lot of drugged up poor people to be kicked off of welfare, has been declared illegal (for reasons that will be examined in a moment), or just otherwise hasn't justified the intrusiveness and fiscal costs by materializing in substantial savings.

Here are the problems with it in theory and in practice

1) It includes an assumption of guilt before innocence, which offends our standard model of justice. People may object that this applies to random job drug testing as well. I would agree. I don't think that is a substantial moral objective in most professions that drug test presently either. For performance or safety reasons, I could conceive of a basis for drug testing. For most jobs that presently drug test randomly, I could not see this as a common problem however. Roughly a third of working people have to take such tests. These are themselves largely clustered in occupations that are lower working class (with a few exceptions), just as people who are on welfare might find as options instead of being on welfare.

2) It relies principally on a gross underestimate of how many people are on welfare programs (almost 40-50M, many of whom are children or otherwise not adults), who is on such programs, and how many poorer people use drugs regularly or addicts (and who are able to apply for social assistance programs), what restrictions already exist that are designed to delink drug use from welfare. Estimates made by people of the proportion of drug use among welfare recipients largely focus on observational evidence rather than rigorous study. It's very easy to see visible people who are not working strolling through a neighbourhood (not all of such people qualify for or are on welfare of course). It is not easy to see the many millions of people who are working (sometimes two jobs) and still qualify for many welfare programs. Because those people are at work.

In addition, there are constraints for housing assistance that are intended to prevent people who have drug convictions from getting it. This is at least punishing people who have been convicted of a criminal act (whether or not it should have been a criminal act is a different question), but it tends toward the notional penalties people are wishing to see applied here already in a more efficient and less intrusive manner. If the intention is to break drug use from welfare, the goal of a successful policy should be to do so as efficiently and unintrusively as possible.

3) It discards as appropriate other forms of tax assistance and subsidy that middle class and richer people receive. "My" money is fine but I don't want to give money to "those people" is what this sounds like as an argument. Medicare is effectively subsidized by poorer, younger, working people to pay for older, richer non-working people's health care. This looks very similar to welfare in some respects (taking money from other people to give to others who are "not contributing"), except the beneficiaries are seen as sympathetic. So few people complain. This also applies to housing subsidies in the form of mortgage interest deductions which largely favor banks, realtors, and wealthy people and inflate housing prices such that poorer people are priced out of some areas to try to live in.

From a moral and ethical standpoint, using taxes to be taking money from poorer people to give it to richer people should be seen as far more problematic than taking money from richer people and giving it to poorer people via taxation.

4) This also relies on a perception that poorer people are spending their money unwisely, on drugs and big screen TVs say, rather than on sensible things like education, food, clothing, and housing. On average, the average poorer person spends way more on food and housing as a percentage of their consumption habits than a middle class person. Something like 75% of spending is on basic needs, where this is much, much lower for someone of modest means, closer to 40-50%. And even lower for an upper middle class professional. They are not generally wastefully spending money in this way. There are other wasteful signaling problems in poorer communities, but this is not one of them. This basic sense of paternalism may have been useful if people were actually wasting money and not obtaining food and shelter as part of their basic needs. They are however getting precisely that.

5) Many of the complaints seem aimed more at the existence of the welfare state in the first place rather than the need to administer some form of tie-in to drug policy. There are many possible flaws in the existing programs that could be pointed out, or a preference for cash instead of transfer payments, or a general philosophical belief that safety nets could be provided in some other way besides taxation (this seems very unlikely, charities don't do that much that can be scaleable on a societal level). But this demand for a tie-in to drug consumption and addiction seems rather low on the rank of problems in any event. It is unlikely to substantially shrink the size of the welfare state, and would do so by adding new layers of bureaucracy and interference, growing the size of government. If the goal is to decrease the footprint of government, or reduce or abolish the welfare state, this is not the road to do so.

6) Other complaints, perhaps from more liberal perspectives, might be focusing on the efficiency of the program being in some way improved if people are more surely spending public money on food or housing instead of drugs. Or this in some way being an efficient way to curtail drug addiction and abuse/use of illegal narcotic substances. Neither seems likely to be true however. The cost of administering such programs to monitor and test drug use will in some way achieve some combination of the following: the state will be adding more bureaucracy and cost to existing welfare programs because not many people will be caught (this in part relies on some very flawed concepts of what constitutes "drug addiction" as well), some number of people will not be able to afford the additional upfront costs (even if they would be reimbursed) to apply for these programs and will not apply in the first place thus reducing the number of people who are aided by social welfare programs rather than increasing efficiency, some (additional) number of drug addicts or regular drug users would not apply for these programs and be further socially isolated and removed from possible sources of intervention or assistance beyond the legal system. Which the legal system is probably the least efficient means of dealing with the social problem of drug addiction of the available alternatives. None of this looks optimal as a way of improving either drug policy or the welfare state.

The slippery slope argument

Most of this I disagree with. 

I do think there are sound strategic reasons for advocates of same sex marriage not to move on to this; namely that the status of same sex marriage is still going to need to be reinforced over the next decade or so in the US, and remains unrecognized in various moderate to liberal nation-states. That part I certainly agree with. The focus of advocates for same sex marriage need not begin to fracture into other causes in order to achieve these ends however.

Morally and legally, these are not persuasive arguments for the state to be involved in restrictions against polyamorous arrangements. Viewed in a utilitarian sense, I do not see this as a very strong case myself (as a semi-utilitarian, particularly in public policy views). I'm not sure why this is described as a "utilitarian" case against it: that it causes some number of people (who are not party to the arrangements) unpleasantness is not a case for government restriction on its own (it might be a case for coercive restraints of a sub-state nature). A similar and perhaps stronger utilitarian case could be made for any number of existing marriages that they will fail or be singularly unpleasant for one or both parties (or their children, should they have any) for the state to step in and prevent them from occurring in the first place if this is an argument for government intervention. Why this flaw of reasoning does not occur to people in rejecting pluralistic marriage arrangements is very strange to me.

The basic statement boils down to some sort of claim that every person must have equal possible sexual and intimate right to another person. Some people are assholes however. Not every person is easy to live with, or desires to make formal arrangements for their sexual partnerships. Simply because some men or women would be able to amass more partners via their popularity, sex appeal, etc seems like a flawed case for "some men or women would have no access to these partners". This suggests that they would be able to marry or even enter into an intimate relationship with these other men or women in the first place (those who are "closed off" by entering into multiple marriages). Perhaps this suggests some sort of trickle down effect where more eligible candidates for marriage are effectively destroyed because they are bound up in this other arrangement and this eventually screws some number of people. I do not follow that this is likely to be a significant effect.

It also implies that the marriages will be permanent effects. While the divorce rate has been going down (for various reasons), it's still a considerable weapon for marriage arrangements that are deemed unfair or unpleasant to be amended, or for people within those arrangements to revisit these concerns prior to breaking off their marriages, and so on.

Stability arguments at the end are the same gobbledegook that were thrown at homosexual "marriages" being less stable for many years, and in fact to me is and was an argument for recognizing and providing a method of stabilizing influence (a legal contract with social capital behind it, aka, marriage).

As for making extra demands for more people in the marriage arrangement, I'm not sure this is a case against polyamorous arrangements either. People already have the option of engaging in extramarital intimacy and sexuality. When confronted by this, people often find it to be pretty destabilizing to their existing relationships and marriages, often because it occurs without consent or permission or knowledge. This is not an argument against allowing people to try to do this openly or within the confines of marriage. Indeed, I would argue this would be a more healthy social outcome that people who wished to be monogamous could insist on this as a demand (rather than assume it to be the case at their own peril) and people who do not have this as a wish for their private relationships could choose among people who do not make such insistence to conduct their relationships.

The strongest arguments against such arrangements aren't utilitarian but are I think feminist or humanist concerns about consent to such arrangements being often unipolar or overly domination concerned rather than resulting from the active consideration of all parties will and desires for one another. Example: one man deciding on his own to have another wife than his existing partner consenting to this equally as a party to the arrangement, or even that both wives are actively consenting to marry this man in the first place is not clear. This lack of clear consent or equal party to contract is a significant problem ethically (even in a utilitarian sense as it is the source of harm). It is theoretically possible to construct such arrangements in a way that all parties have consented. But it will be difficult to conceive of arrangements for the government to determine this and regulate it (for that matter, the same arguments again apply to regular two-party marriages, as de Boer points out).

The complexity argument for regulating currently standard legal decisions is also a factor. Laws should be simple and easy to transparently enforce in my view. Two-party homosexual marriages are fairly easy to regulate as they're virtually identical in the legal sense to two-party heterosexual marriage in how the various rights and benefits could be conveyed. This is not some invincible argument against polyamory however. It is possible to construct legal rights and methods of conveyance that could account for this. It just requires more work.

Random sex scandal stories mentally intersected

Probably shouldn't be, but I don't know enough about either story on its own to fully address either.

The Duggar scandal. - I tend to break these kinds of stories (and there are lots of them) into a couple standard elements

The presumption that "godly" or "god-fearing" or otherwise ardently religious people are good, decent people and thus incapable of heinous abusive actions clouds the reaction with a lot of "but he seemed like such a kind, decent person" reflexes. My operating assumption isn't just that ardently religious people are assholes, but that most people are. Even, or perhaps sometimes especially, the "kind, decent" people that I barely know. I don't assume they're incapable of anything unless there's a lot of evidence to the contrary. Most of us do not know this family and its various members, just as we do not know many other 15 minute TV celebrities or politicians and so on. So the inflection of these characters with special decency, or special hatred (as is often the case) is bizarre. As I said back during Tiger Woods' story some years back, we don't know them just because we watch them play golf and let them sell us Buicks on TV commercials. So the idea that we should just assume they are all wholesome goodness is absurd. This is particularly rich for someone like me when it is suffused with a lot of religion as in this case (as though this automatically removes the prospect of guilt and destructive actions against fellow human beings), but the argument holds across virtually any sector.

I think that interacts with the Cosby rape allegations over the last many years in a disturbing way. Namely that we are slower to see it when we have established this person as a social role model. We should be able to separate out the social role model, the character that a person has crafted and presented to the world, from the actions of the human being and hold them accountable. Many of America's founding political philosophers/lawyers owned slaves. This does not automatically invalidate their political views. It means they are flawed in a nearly fatal to the country way which was partly resolved some decades after their deaths. But the arguments are no less sound simply because they were not at the time applied to all men (much less all women). If we have to do the same now with a musical performer, or a comedian, or a TV star, maybe people can do that and still enjoy their art (or whatever it is that reality TV shows are portraying). But if someone is actually a slime ball of a human being who has abused and assaulted women, that can matter to our calculations of how we appreciate and enjoy their art, and it certainly should mean that we will still want to find them accountable for any actions they've done.

Huckabee has taken a somewhat forgiving stance in his public statements so far. I'm not sure I begrudge this if it existed on its own as it's probably an outgrowth of his general religious faith. But there are problems with it. First, that he wastes little time blaming and socially insulting or assaulting people whose cultural views he does not agree with for their actions (eg, liberals), but then also wastes little time forgiving his cultural allies. That's convenient selectivity for his purported desire for forgiving people (if he's going to waste as much time as he does attacking Beyonce for basically being a good capitalist, it doesn't make much sense to defend this guy in other words. But then, I didn't quite understand where he was going with the Beyonce stuff in the first place). Second, that the problem with the story isn't that he did something awful and could or should not be forgiven for it (some people won't be able to, but some would), but that he did something awful and nobody did anything about it, so far as can be shown, and then is to be forgiven for it now with nothing having been actually adjudicated so far as anyone can tell, either in a court or a psychologist's office or whatever. It seems like he went and did some yard work and it was otherwise swept under the rug for quite some time even before that occurred. This is not the way one deals with a problem like child molestation. It is somewhat understandable that a family might be slow to pull the trigger to turn in a family member for conducting horrifying indignities upon young women, but this all seems like nobody ever took it that seriously. Including Huckabee in his public statements about it after the fact. That should be worrisome both for Christians in how it portrays a continued lack of concern for the well-being of women and in general that we seem to be comfortable according a certain lack of concern for both the victims and the perpetrators of sexual violence (when underage like this story implies, it suggests they may also have been victims too of course, which is a further problem).

At the same time, I've been vaguely following the Columbia mattress art project story. And I can't really make heads or tails of it. I suspect that's why the university didn't do anything either, despite a lower standard of guilt required than a court of law. What that tells me isn't that we don't take women seriously when they make accusations of sexual assaults, though that might be true in many respects, but that we don't always have a very clear means of adjudicating those complaints in a manner that clears it up for all parties in a decisive and satisfying way. Applied to the Duggar case, it isn't obviously clear what we should have preferred we do. Register him as a sex offender for life? We have lots of problems with how that system allows people to re-integrate into society, or seek any necessary treatment and atonement for what they did, in a manner that is disproportionate even in a society that makes such reintegration difficult. Prosecute him for sexual assault? That can be difficult if the victims do not want to cooperate with police and prosecutors, as it may be likely in the case of family members (for example). Nor does a conviction mean that the victims of such assaults like molestation are automatically healed and may go forth without incident or harm to their development as people. There are intermediate steps here to resolve these cases most likely that we could have chosen that may not satisfy every gawking audience but may have worked fine for victims in this or other cases.

But I suspect one of the problems is that we don't do very much as a culture to give people a way to communicate about sex in general, and sexual abuse in particular (and this includes, perhaps especially, evangelical Christians like the Duggars). We do not have a very clear grasp of sexual consent and the language both physical and spoken involved, and that means it is difficult to teach children about it as something they could defend themselves against, or might wish to complain to an adult or parent about if it were to happen (not that we spend much time doing so). It becomes more difficult to navigate and adjudicate complaints between possible couples or one-night stands in a college dorm in a way that feels like justice. And it becomes easier to dismiss dozens of complaints against famous celebrities by generally ignoring the story because we previously enjoyed the celebrity and their performances being held at fault more than we wish to provide a means of justice and resolution for these harms and injustices committed upon them.

Maybe this is because some of us don't really think these are harms or injustices deserving of serious attention, as might be the case with many devoted fans of the Duggars or Bill Cosby, or just some random student at Columbia who we maybe aren't sure did anything that should be considered illegal or not (and so far as the university was concerned, didn't). Maybe this is because some of us think these are people incapable of being improved, for lack of a better term, and by extension reducing the incidence of these types of sexual criminal acts by giving such people (mostly men in these examples and cases) a manner of relating to women as individuals and human beings rather than just objects of sexual desire. Or in the case of child sex abuses, there are treatments and therapies available for that as well. Maybe this is because we just don't like talking about sex, gender politics, sexual communication, and sexual abuse, and we'd prefer someone else handle all of that (if anyone as again evangelicals seem especially prone to ignoring the valence of these as subjects demanding conversation).

Passing the buck isn't really an option here. In part because it doesn't seem like there is a clear expert on which we should trust an opinion on all matters of sexual confusion, much less disturbing sexual abuses. We have to take some responsibility for not wanting to discuss these things with our children, or our friends, or our families. Not all of it needs to be aired out in public for all the world to see, or even our close friends who we might talk about all manner of things instead, but there needs to be somewhere to start. But in large measure this is because these are some of the most intimate forms of abuse one can construct. They often involve very trusted friends or family members or family friends (or other trusted authority figures, like celebrities can often be). Without some architecture for understanding what is even happening, without some method of reporting what has happened, it will go on. And without some one stepping in and saying, "no, that's not appropriate", or even "no, that is wrong", it will go on. In order to do any of that, we will need to be able to talk a little more about what we are not sure about.

Sex is basically a form of physical communication for human beings. Even if it is inappropriate or unwanted it is still a communication. It is at that point saying "I can do whatever I want to your person" and also at some level "your body is what I want, so I will do whatever I want to it", which is a terrifying or horrifying message to want to communicate. It is inherently dehumanizing and stripping another person of agency, desire, and the capacity of communication of anything in response, physically or spoken. One response to this would be to tell people to want to communicate less horrifying, "better" messages instead using their bodies (and by extension communicated with other people's bodies). At some level that shouldn't have to be a message we have to explain to other people but we may have to start at this basic level and build up. It doesn't appear we're making a lot of headway by compiling "yes means yes" policies and trying to explain things like obtaining affirmative consent (using words) or by establishing draconian penalties for sexual abuse and wrapping in a lot of inappropriate nudity (streaking or peeing in public for example or mixed age teenage sexuality, or teens just sending nude photos to one another), or by generally ignoring complaints of sexual abuse and misconduct for years at a time. Start at the beginning and move forward from there.

A further and perhaps more important point might be what should we do about the victims in the meantime. It isn't clear the Duggars did anything (as little as they did with the molester among them, this isn't that surprising). Cosby's various accusers haven't gotten a day in court that I can tell and there doesn't seem to be any hurry to provide one. Columbia let one form a complicated performance art stunt to complain. That may be an option even if all it really tells us is someone is maybe an asshole.

Addendum: TLC or any other network could pull a reality TV show off the air for pretty much any reason and I would not complain. But this seems like a fairly reasonable response is to kick off the air a family that has a lot of offscreen moral and legal trouble going on right now, even if the response wasn't designed as a penalty (it undoubtedly is, but still). For the main reason that it portrays the network (and the family it is airing a TV show about) with a certain aura of hypocrisy for proclaiming some sort of "family values" notions when at least one member of that family has a now admitted history of abusing other members of it. But also because this sort of attention isn't something that needs to come to focus for his victims (if they don't wish to be a part of it). People do not always want to be defined as victims of a sexual crime and that would be difficult to avoid with a TV show in the public forum. They may prefer to be known for other things. I'm inclined for their sake to let them try to do so.

Filed under situation normal

all fucked up

Most of these are questions that people who have studied voter habits and biases/prejudices have known about for years. They are systematic biases (against foreigners, against the economy having grown, etc). Most of them make no sense except in the light of some variety of prejudicial thinking (the probable population of immigrants or Muslims being absurdly high in most countries). The most interesting part for most people would be the absurdly high numbers of some of the actual statistics (Spain's unemployment rate, South Korea's life expectancy).

Still I found a couple of these interesting because they're not part of typical voter bias statistics versus just a general knowledge of demographic data. The voter bias research shows that usually people can estimate general knowledge data closer than understanding expert fields like economics or international trade. But these sorts of particular knowledge upset even that comfortable bias toward random and meaningless errors because they are fueled by additional bias concerns.

The teen pregnancy rate. 
I suspect people don't actually understand what the birth rate is and how to calculate it as one problem with asking people to calculate this figure. Such a figure is typically very low. Most women are not giving birth in a given year of life, and fewer still are doing so as teenagers. If people but reflected back on it for a moment, what's the probable number of girls they went to high school with who were pregnant while they were in a given school year. That figure, per year, could be very high at some high schools, and very low at others. But it wouldn't be a quarter of each year's class. Or a fifth. Or maybe even a tenth at the very "worst" cases. It would be amazing if it were more than one or two girls per classroom (say a "room" of 30). So it would be maybe 5% at most, and most probably less. That's how people should estimate it. They don't have this heuristic ready at hand to think about it. Further, since
a) people believe this figure is going up (it's not, it's going down) and
b) people hear about this as a problem or as parents worry about this as a problem, they imagine it must be very common in the way that we inflate all things we worry about as likely risks.
c) We're also bad with estimating low probability events generally. We like to tack on to those with media attention and fear (school shootings, terrorists, etc).
It's likely that the number gets inflated in the minds of those guesstimating it.

Parents should be taking some precautions that their teenage children should take some precautions against these unplanned events, but parents should also know it isn't very common that every 4th daughter out there is getting knocked up. Actually getting and staying pregnant is not that simple, on top of that teenagers (while they certainly talk a game otherwise), are probably not having sex all the time. Many aren't having sex at all, or not until their late teens. Birth control itself moving forward will be easier to use (IUDs) or easier to come by (condoms and access through health insurance, or perhaps OTC).

Religion percentages.

This is well known by people who aren't religious apparently how many people are of some religious sect or that, or not at all. But yes, the US is no danger of becoming a secular-atheist-Muslim-satanist country anytime soon. Most all of you Americans are Christian or some derivation there of (including that "spiritual but not religious" component, which is mostly "Christians who don't like going to their church" as far as I'm concerned. I can't say I blame them).

A big percentage of you apparently don't know that and apparently many of those confused souls think they are Muslims instead. Or perhaps secret Muslims are a thing after all. I realize that whole Jesus-Mohammed worship must be awfully confusing, but I think they're distinct enough for most people to tell the difference and know which one they might be trying to pretend they are following some of what they said with some seriousness.

No other religious group makes up more than 1-2% of the American population. Jews are common in a few cities. Muslims are common in a few cities. Buddhists are common in a few cities. Mormons are in Utah. Atheists or nones are kind of all over, but they're not anywhere near as common as people like to think. Either atheist/nones or Christians. Still, 15-20% isn't bad.

I draw attention to these two because Americans are particularly bad at estimating both. Canada is a little worse on the Muslim question (same with France and Belgium).

I would also draw attention to the immigration question. This is pretty predictable as an expressed bias of voters. Voters have an anti-foreigner bias built into to their ideological narratives. Either as "immigrants are dirty, noisy, lazy, criminals", with maybe an exception for certain Asian or European countries depending. Or as "people in those other countries are stealing our jobs", either through outsourcing/trade or as coming here to work dirt cheap. To be honest 13% seemed actually pretty high to me. That's almost 40 million American residents. For a country that doesn't make it easy to come and live here if you aren't born here. It seems possible, but seemed very high given the obstacles. Witness Australia or Canada's much higher percentages, countries with somewhat more sensible and lessened obstacles.

The net effect of this kind of research is that politicians and people covering or writing for politicians probably cannot go broke if they keep betting against the American public being well educated and informed on a given subject. And they all know this. The question mark is who these people are and whether they vote. Many of the ill-informed do not. But on questions like these, there are fewer and fewer people who are not ill-informed, indeed, the plebs could be said to express views which are not only wrong, but support ideological holdings and demand policies opposite to those fueled by an informed reality. All getting and encouraging more people to vote does in those circumstances is further deepen the divide between reality and imagination. The crisis isn't participation (again, roughly 2/3s of us are showing up to vote). It's information.

People think there are legions of immigrants, and that they hold some "foreign" and "dangerous" faiths.
People think crime is going up, by leaps and bounds in some cases.
People think the economy isn't growing, or that inflation or unemployment are absurdly high.
People think foreign aid makes up an absurd portion of our government spending (or, worse, that Medicare and Social Security do not).

In some cases they think these things because they are actively misinformed by others. The media runs a lot of crime stories, or covers immigration or the economy a lot, and perhaps on these issues it is to blame for misleading the public. In most cases though the public think these things because that's what they want to think. One of the misinterpretations of a lot of "Faux News viewers are more poorly informed than others" is that the problem is necessarily Faux News. The problem is probably in large part the type of person who wants to consume Faux News as a legitimate news organisation in the first place as their primary source of information. That type of person believes a certain set of things, and doesn't want to hear that their comfortable assumptions about the doom of our time coming from non-existent Muslim immigrants crossing the Rio Grande, having sex with their daughters, and shooting at our schools. The problem with that type of person isn't that someone feeds them their demands. The news have always done this service for the body public.

The problem is how we dissuade them of those demands in the first place.

Yes doesn't mean no either

California passes a law. Various sectors choose to comment on what it means. So I guess that means me too.

Let's go ahead and make a few important stipulations to get them out of the way of the conversation.

1) Rape is rape. Regardless of its cause it is an act of aggression. "Rape rape" is perhaps distinct in circumstances but certainly not in the type of violation against another from say "date rape". They are the same animal.
2) Rape is a criminal act, depriving another person of agency and autonomy for personal gratification without consent is a serious criminal act even and should be treated as such. I would place very few criminal actions as more serious in the form of moral and legal violations involved (basically murder or torture would be on par, but that's about it).
3) Attaining consent is not that complicated (for most of us it really isn't that complicated to have sex when we want to, with a partner we want to). Which should make violations of consent and autonomy less sympathetic. Yet there is still some social and rhetorical baggage relating to victims of sexual crimes that suggests that we do not take them necessarily as innocent victims of aggression.
4) Thus things which we can do to prosecute violations of consent, protect those who are violated or potentially violated, and make such violations less likely are an important public and social good benefiting the individuals who can instead form mutually beneficial relationships.

All that said. I don't think California's law falls into that last category (as a common issue with many laws, it looks like a "we must do something, this is something, let's do it" logic, rather than well-thought out as an approach to the problem). I have a number of complaints.

Firstly. The bill is limited to college universities. It does not apply outside of colleges. It governs the procedures of investigation and authority and evidence involved in acts committed on universities by their students (or faculty). While there may be some mysterious process by which rape is more common among students of colleges and the inhabitants of dorm rooms than among the general public which accords these matters with greater importance to the legislative process, I am doubtful there was any evidence presented that the vulnerability was greater among those bodies of the public than among any other. If our interest in governing is in protecting the welfare of the general public, it should be for protecting all of that public, and not merely those fortunate and educated enough to attend universities. General legislative bodies should not make it their business to make distinct legal environments for certain groups of the public without some compelling reason that it should be necessary. This fails to do so. Either there are victims or there are not, and it should matter very little whether they were attending a school or not. If it was to be an experiment to try to reduce sexual assaults and rapes at universities, in the form of attempting to accelerate a discourse over sexual advances, equality of genders, and the importance of clear communication of consent, let the universities do the testing rather than a government. A law has the quality of being difficult to abandon as an experiment if/when it is shown that it does not work and thus we should be cautious of making laws where other bodies may act. And to boot, this law has the quality of accelerating and continuing the arbitrary nature of enforcement by that same lesser body of justice than the courts that could very easily have appointed it upon itself to make these changes internally already.

As a related problem within sexual assault cases, there are states where rape victims must pay for the medical treatment that they must undergo to treat injuries and examinations of their bodies after a crime has been committed against them. The state may pay for portions, such as the collection of evidence of a rape (usually sexual secretions like semen), but large quantities of the bill could go on the members of the public who were victimized, or the bill may be only paid after any criminal charges are pressed and a case goes to prosecution and a victim is paying up front. California may not have this problem, but lots of other states do. That seems like a pressing matter for a legislature to attend to to help protect the citizens they represent. All of them.

Second. The bill does not treat rape and sexual assault necessarily as criminal acts. Both for the victim and the accused, this is a poor attempt at justice. An accused deserves more than preponderance of evidence for significant penalties to emerge, but rather clear evidence of guilt should be involved and adjudicated. Even if those penalties relate to their academic life, at one particular university, the attainment of a college degree at a particular university, or post-graduate degree, still has significant impact upon lifetime earnings, career paths, etc. It is not the same as imprisoning someone in the deprivations that are involved. But we are talking about a person's life here. Our system should presume a strong level of innocence until we provide proof otherwise of guilt in the destruction of others. This is also true of victims of assault, it is a person's life, and a strong level of innocence should be provided. Such cases deserve the prospect of severe penalties (like that of depriving the liberty of others to do as they see fit). They should be arbitrated, but the arbitration of justice should include the possibilities of using police powers and courts of law to do so. Colleges are not necessarily trained to deal with these matters, and have just as many incentives as police to be arbitrary and capricious toward both accused and victim, but they have a further incentive in that they are dealing with their own students, with powerful donors/boosters, star athletes or students, and so on. There were already a number of complaints relating to the handling of some high profile rape cases, or the matter of how some conservative Christian colleges were handling the entire concept of rape that suggest that the treatment by the university of complaints and grievances of a serious nature may not be to the incentive of the university to take to task. Police have their own bad incentives in investigation or prosecution of crimes, but they also have no direct financial and PR incentive to make rapes go away if they might reflect poorly on the institution of the university (they have also incentives to protect their students, but creating a system that allows them to arbitrarily punish some students and ignore others is the best way for them to do so, by their standards). A law which entrenches this poor incentive rather than removes it ought to be treated with some level of suspicion rather than cheered.

Thirdly. To me the general problems of college campuses and rape or sexual assault stem from two things
a) People (mostly men) who are predatory, and who commit acts of sexual aggression in a serial way, taking what they want from others. Generally such people do not care much about what consent laws might be changed to mean in the first place, and for whom these kinds of legal changes are irrelevant (if not protective). There is not, by and large, an ambiguous nature of consent for sex and sexual acts, nor some grey zone of uncertainty to navigate that there are large quantities of rapes committed because someone didn't understand the body language and intentions of a potential sexual partner. Nobody really has to tell anyone verbally that sex is on the table (one of the more common complaints I'm hearing is the ad reductio argument that now sexual partners will have to ask each other at each step of a sexual event what they're doing next. You don't really have to ask in words, so that's a rather silly complaint). It helps to come right out and say so of course, but it isn't that hard to read both the when it is and when it isn't from just body language and physical reactions.

There might be some nebulous zone where there is reluctance, from either party or both, for some action or another. But this is unlikely to stray into a denial of consent either and usually only requires that both parties are communicating and listening. If there's something that might be helpful there and there are numerous complaints about these kinds of incidents being registered as sexual assaults by colleges or police, or some other authoritative body, what would probably be necessary isn't a new legal environment. It's a sex ed course that teaches and discusses issues of consent and communication with sexual partners. Acts that crossed the line over into assault or rape, we already have laws for without needing a new standard necessarily. If this was the problem, which I'm dubious, then the need for a standard is cultural in change and nature. More people need to be willing to communicate and listen to any intended sexual partners about sexual acts. Before, during, and after. As embarrassing or complimentary as that can be, and as awkward as many people find it. It's a far healthier environment on the other side of that fence.

b) The second causal agent is alcohol (and to an extent other mind altering substances too). Younger people at college have a rather easy relationship with alcohol. They are away from supervisory agents (parents usually) who could also attend to their relative safety. They are often away from long-time childhood or teenage years friends who have a strong investment in their well-being and safety who will look out for them at a party or friend's room/home and assure they won't do something that could place them in danger. Many college students come in with some level of "expertise" in the use of any of these substances, but they don't have a clear delineation that says "I can consume this much and still make cogent and responsible decisions in a moment of crisis, but if I consume this much, I cannot". The compression of available recreational time between studying and normal behavior and the possibilities of penalties for underage drinking further press for higher pressure consumption habits. Which results in a lot of binge drinking, and also a lot of drunken occasions that can involve sex. Consensual or not (some of it while intoxicated is consensual, some of it is perhaps unwise, and some of it is sexual assault).

None of this suggests that it is the fault of the students who consumed too much if something awful and terrifying happens to them later. It is incumbent on others to treat someone who is in a state of vulnerability from a chemical "impairment" with a level of dignity and security for their person rather than to press the advantage and violate that person. It is hardly our fault if there are a few who seek a more predatory relationship with our vulnerabilities and we fail to adequately protect ourselves against any possible, however unlikely, threat from coming to pass. If someone is robbed, it is not our fault that we didn't have a security system installed, or proper locks. Such precautions may reduce our risks, but they are not deemed as blameworthy. Someone still had to decide to walk into our home or property and take something from it. The same applies here.

I cannot say there would be a point of alcoholic consumption where I would find that individuals would cross that line that didn't require alcohol to violate it in the first place. That is: the people who are initiating assaults don't need to be drunk, don't need to be warned not to get drunk or to be careful who they are drunk around, because they'd be the same assholes with or without it and the alcohol is not their problem. The alcohol is a grease for them to use their problem more easily. There does need to be a strong social message at work here. Not to say "don't get drunk", but "look out for one another". Hold up as praiseworthy those who object or stand up rather than look the other way and claim the victim deserved it and should have known better not to get that drunk. In the long run there's a strong need again for that honest conversation about sexuality and consent to be undertaken by scores of many young people, and that aggression against others without obtaining consent is a serious concern that should be treated seriously, perhaps even criminally.

Our ultimate goal here in dealing with this as an issue should be in part to assure that people who are committing acts of aggression are adequately punished for having done so in accordance with the severity and frequency of those violations. In some cases, the number may be dozens and the severity will be utterly banal in its details. "She said no and I did it anyway" versus "she said nothing and I did it anyway" is not really a different legal and moral environment to me, both are a species of aggression and sexual assault or rape. This is not that complex when boiled down to its specific elements that we should need a standard that is very different from "no means no". Non-consent is non-consent. Resistance or verbal objection should not be necessary to tell someone to stop trying to fuck someone if they don't want "you" to do it. In the sense that this establishes a "yes means yes" standard, that's great for slogans, but it doesn't actually shift the goalpost in moral terms toward stopping anything.

More importantly, the main goal should be to reduce the likelihood that anyone in particular is violated and becomes a victim of such people. There might be a path where these kinds of changes help make that the case. There are other universities around the country who have installed these kinds of rules relating to sexuality among students. Perhaps there have been studies on the effects those changes have on the frequency of sexual assaults, complaints of assaults, and the penalties doled out for those assaults as there may be for this to suggest that it does have a strong impact on the social conversation and the likelihood of sexual misconduct versus a sexual equality. But if there are any looking into the impact of such concepts, I'm not seeing them trotted out in defence of the legislature making a change instead of the universities doing so ahead of them, and I'm not clear on how the college can make the system less arbitrary and reasonably fair to all parties to a complaint (especially victims) with or without the intervention of the state on their behalf. I'm concerned we have allowed victims to be ignored, accused to be punished without due process, and for no one to learn much of anything about how to prevent it from happening again, or to others.

Given the seriousness of the issue, I am willing to allow for some leeway in experimenting to see what will work and what will not to reduce its severity and impact further. I'm not convinced that it won't ultimately have some positive effect that these kinds of changes should happen somewhere. Perhaps it will help. But I am not sure that it properly targets the problems, provides a clear and transparent method of adjudicating claims and concerns for all involved, and places a stronger incentive for colleges to treat this as a serious matter for their attention (than should already have been the case).

Hobby Lobby

Silver linings. Maybe a toilet bowl lined with shiny things. But still. Shiny things.

1) It seems, as with Citizens United, to have pissed off the left-wing base that increasingly is the agitating energy for the Democrats. Citizens United, I don't think they are correct on most any sensible legal theory. This one I think was more questionable.

2) It does not appear to have actually denied anyone any access to birth control measures. There's a work around that the government used for non-profit entities that will be applied.

2a) We should really stop pretending in our society that "denying access", eg "banning" things is at all the same as "reducing the accessibility or affordability of" whatever it is. The second is still often bad, and may have bad consequences, or unequal consequences, but it is not (usually) the same as "criminal and civil penalties for". When many abortion restrictions are considered by states, those are effectively doing both. Where this decision was concerned, it did neither. The semantics are important here because people talking about actual denial of access when what we have is an increase in risk to accessibility in actual terms (because of money usually) are confusing the best practices of solutions. If the problem is people (women) cannot afford it, that's very different from people putting up actual roadblocks via regulations, like these: "you need a prescription, so you must go see your doctor first", or "the pharmacist won't fill those prescriptions for religious reasons", or "you must wait 48 hours", or "the clinic needs admitting privileges".

We're talking about accessibility in economic terms and there's ways to resolve that, via public policy if we choose (subsidies that phase out based upon income and need would have been far, far better than insurer mandates). If we're talking about accessibility in legal terms, then we have a very different problem, one that almost entirely depends upon public policy decisions. We should not be conflating the two kinds of problems. Stop it. Just don't. They can sometimes overlap in practical terms, but the fix for either is usually different. (This is probably why debates about freedom of speech in the wake of McCullen also annoy me, in that they fail to distinguish action, which is regulated or restricted, from speech, which should not be).

3) It is a fairly narrow reading of religion or religious beliefs. Which is amusing. I've seen it referred to as all of religion comes down to in the eyes of the conservative wing of the court is "unapproved fucking".

The first amendment protection of free speech restrains the government from doing very much about speech (which is why for Citizens United, I'm not sure what the corporate personhood element had to say or why people started running around complaining about a very long jurisprudence decision that "corporations are people" in legal terms). The first amendment protection of freedom of religion does likewise, but I'm not sure how this was squared with this decision. It did not permit other religious objections under the free exercise clause. Just this one part. It puts the court or the government in the unusual position of deciding which exercises of religion are acceptable within this context of employer/employee and thus regulating those. That was a very bad idea really. Either it means there will be many more cases of the same variety or the government will eventually say, nope only these sorts of objections are okay.

It's probably further evidence that employer provided health care plans are an incredibly stupid way to go. But it's mostly evidence that freedom of religion is poorly understood.


4) Of all the aspects of the ruling that are annoying, probably most annoying is why it was that this narrow religious objection was singled out as acceptable in the first place. The belief turns largely on a metaphysical belief about the nature of personhood as applied to fertilized human eggs (but not yet actually conceived via the scientific definition of conception as there isn't one simply because the term has no unified meaning) and thus what this means about the utility of certain kinds of birth control measures. Considering a vast number of fertilized eggs fail to implant in the uterine wall and thus become "conceived", and a further vast number are implanted but fail to develop for whatever reason and are miscarried, applying such a definition is based upon a flawed understanding of the nature of human reproduction. A definition that should be considered flawed enough as to carry little weight in the decisions to mandate certain kinds of birth control be carried under a company insurance policy because it is too fungible and arbitrary to be fairly used in legal terms. It would be like judging that it is okay that only people who believe the earth is flat can have unemployment insurance at this company. Not only is the belief wrong, it is functionally meaningless to the performance and benefits of the employees.

There were far better practical and legal objections to that mandate that had nothing to do with birth control. The fact that it was singled out suggests a focus by the right upon the aforementioned "unapproved fucking" of its own that may have merited the decision of the court to narrowly tailor the ruling to that one element of religious doctrinal thinking.

5) The other annoying part is the "closely held corporation" exception. While this is not the same as large publicly traded corporations, I'm not sure why this was somehow a right that should only apply narrowly to "smaller" corporate entities, controlled by few people.

6) Some of the decision turns on the question not of the size or scope of ownership, but on the profit motives of the companies involved. Which to me seems to have little or no bearing on what restrictions of these type may be applied, and in any case, which the government seems already to have accorded non-profit companies with special accommodations for religious liberty (however absurd in this case). Why it should not also do so with for-profit corporations is not something that I think is easily established, or why the government could not also perform a similar accommodation.

7) Another aspect of the decision itself has focused on the intentions of Congress and then subsequent interpretations of those intentions by the appropriate regulatory body. With the implication that HHS in promulgating regulations exceeded its authority. While this is debatable in this case, this reading of the case suggests yet another separation of powers battle, one of several over the last year, with the basic impact and import to be to rebuke the (bloated) expansion of the executive that took place especially over the last decade. I'm not sure this was necessary in this instance, but as a general matter, this is a laudable goal. Where it fails specifically is that Congress attempted to deal with this precise question and voted down the objection of religious practices.

8) Ginsburg's dissent is a mishmash of things I find agreeable and things I do not, much as the ruling itself is. The main thrust of the argument that I find of note and interest is the general practices of a law, if everyone must comply with a given law or regulation, religious exemptions are of little importance to them, and likewise if targeting the particular religious expressions are not the interest of the state in forming the law or regulation, as it was not in this case, then the law should stand. Again, I find this interesting in a general sense, but the specific law, requiring a private actor to buy something, as well as dictating the terms under which that something must exist, seems to be the wrong hill on which to fight that battle. It further becomes muddy because of the existence of exemptions for similar, but not same, formats of companies, exemptions which came into form primarily (but not wholly) because of religious exemptions. I do not find the logic that it in some way damages the accessibility of the contentious forms of birth control persuasive, because it is plain that there are already existing methods available to substitute to assure the interest of accessibility was maintained.

9) The main appealing quality (for me) of Ginsburg's dissent is where it remains tightly focused on first amendment free exercise readings, simply because for me this was largely a question of whether a particular belief was being infringed upon, and that in this instance, the particular belief was absurd. The problem there is that there are legal statutes in place that intend the courts not to challenge whether a belief is central and essential, regardless of its absurdity. And there does not appear to be case law in either direction suggesting that corporate entities, in their function as economic devices controlled by people, do or do not have access to those exercise rights of religious beliefs. The conclusion that they should is inferred from example. The conclusion that they should not is largely inferred by absence. This is not as clear and settled a matter as a result as it appears in dissent.

Some general rules of things that occur frequently to me

A general series of philosophical observations following weird dust-ups on social media.

1) Humanist/secularist notions while they can often operate on a utilitarian ethic do not absolve us of the prospect of entertaining ourselves before discharging some grand moral duty. Life is itself a (quasi) measurable reward that includes pleasures of more selfish nature. Indeed, I'd suggest that ignoring our selfish nature leads us away too often from moral duties. What our selfish nature does do, taken to its logical conclusion, is recognize that other people have needs and wants and concerns and that if we want to satisfy our wants and needs and have our problems resolved, we must also seek to satisfy some of theirs. Call it friendship if you want. Or it can be more transactional and more obviously set in a reciprocal altruism sense. Or it can be Adam Smith's invisible hand, guiding us to act in the service of the community by recognizing and meeting its needs through operation of business. There are numerous interpretations of this as a social order.

2) Humanist/secularist notions are not distinct from feminist notions. What they (both) often identify is that the particular target of some abusive or oppressive behavior/policy/action is, even in a modern developed country, very often a woman, and that this therefore means that an oppressive agent must not be tolerated or must be stopped on these grounds. Not because it's a woman but because there is oppression. The oppression and abuse exists because it can oppress or abuse a woman more easily than it might have a man. That's not "feminist" to point out; that's realism. The "feminism" part is deciding that the solution is to empower women and to remove the anchoring weights of abuses or oppressive agents of society that all people might flourish.

3) This does not mean that other kinds of oppression or abuses of power and authority do not exist and would be tolerated or ignored. Racism or religious intolerance, say, does not exclude or compete with oppression of women. It competes to some degree with the amount of outrage energy available. But if oppression is a vehicle of political activism, and responding to it is likewise, then there's not a top limit on the amount of capacity to respond to it or to impose it. The limitation is the apathy of the oppressed or those who work on their behalf with the implication that it cannot be changed.

4) There are various reasons that particular kinds of changes may not work or be as successful, and I think we should assess a particular kind of change on these grounds to wonder whether or not it will actually and usefully advance the cause it claims to advance, and not whether or not the intentions behind the proposal say so. Just because there is a problem in any society does not imply that a) the government should do something about it, that b) whatever X we are suggesting we do about is the only and best solution, or that it is in fact a solution at all, or couldn't make it worse. It's very probable we overlook very effective solutions in the haste to satisfy our demand for good intentions. Example, the focus on "equal pay" for women overlooks that a very large portion of the supposed discrimination is not from greedy employers trying to scam a female portion of the work force into working for less money than men, something that basic discrimination legislation would assess and could help deal with, but from a systematic issue with how women have come to interact with the workforce while still often juggling a home life based on traditional norms and our modernizing economy has failed to recognize this and offer ways to juggle successfully. The discrimination is still there, but it is much smaller and more manageable. The bulk of it is still probably discriminatory but the fault is more our own (as a society) so we're trying to pass the buck to make someone else pretend to do something about it.

5) Feminism, like other unpopular labels, has an image problem that causes some people to recoil from the label. Some of this image problem is the fault of more radical feminist notions (see: environmentalists setting fire to vitamin A enriched rice because "it's a GMO!" or atheists with a deliberate intention to stir the shit rather than advance secular ideas). But most of this image problem is a public relations issue caused by media and entertainment coverage and the public's mental framework working as stereotyping.

6) Labels or the rejection of same should not excuse people from practicing ideals and values consistent with those labels overall goals that they otherwise would agree with, say, religious (or non-religious) freedom, or the relative economic and social equality of women and girls. The "no true Scotsman" fallacy applies in both directions. If these are your ideals, fight for them in politics and society, practice them in life as best you are able, and argue over them to examine them from time to time to assure that you are practicing them as best you are able or that they are the best ideals you can put in practice available, and don't worry very much about what other people try to call them as a package of ideas. You can decide that. Atheism can become both the flying spaghetti monster and scientists and scientific literature using neurological behavior, evolutionary predictions and behaviors, anthropology and so on to explain the phenomenon of religious belief. Environmentalism can be both Greenpeace and getting a Prius and pushing for wind or solar power adoption (but probably not getting solar panels on your house since most of us would put them on the wrong side of the house). Feminism can be both the cause for more gender-balanced societies and the associated expansion of opportunity for women, or even for families and children regardless of gender issues, and so on (say, better family leave, paternity and maternity, or more flexible work schedules and telecommuting opportunities to allow whoever to stay at home when possible.)

7) Feminism doesn't remove or exclude the prospect that men and women can or should get along, that they couldn't approach one another, can't flirt, can't have (casual) sex, can't enjoy off-colour remarks and the like in mixed company, or couldn't discuss sexuality at all, and that somehow the only relationships between men and women must be completely sterile and platonic friendships mixed with somehow, someone becoming (mutually) attractive as a physical partner once in a while on top of that. I have no idea why this argument persists (naturally among men) that the issue is somehow that approaching and talking to an attractive woman is in some dystopian future liable to get a sexual harassment lawsuit. Depends on how that talk went, or what behaviors went along with it. There's nothing inherently wrong with recognizing attraction or even making people uncomfortable with potentially offensive remarks. There's something wrong with not recognizing that they are making others uncomfortable, using them out of context, or persisting in that attraction when it is not desired to be pursued or acknowledged.

And in particular, in not acknowledging a variety of wholly legitimate reasons why that lack of interest could be true that are not "I have a boyfriend/husband/significant other". Such as "you might be an asshole, go away". Possibly learning how to listen and talk to women, or just talk in general with other human beings, would be a great improvement for much of humanity. I do not consider myself a master at this, but other people seem capable of listening and responding to me in what we might fashion to call a conversation.

8) Most people do not give a shit. About you, or much of anything, often including themselves. What that means is not "they will run over you in a truck to get their way", or our sometimes more likely interpretation "they will run over you with the truck in order to make their way". What that means is mostly they will ignore you as you would ignore a bug on the sidewalk and they're not actually a problem. They are not plotting your destruction, injury, and harm. The general status quo of other people is apathy and ignorance toward the general status quo of other people. They are not interested enough to come and bother you, deliberately inconvenience you, find you absurd and worth their shame and derision, and so on. This implies both that we should be less wary of other people and that we should pay attention when they are paying attention to us or doing something that we feel is worthy of our attention.