Study: Everyone loves feminists and environmentalists!

[guruilla]

Slomo, every time you mention campus rape policies favoring women I can't be sure if I'm reading it correctly. This is definitely one of my niches and as someone intimately familiar with the process, I can say with confidence that universities employ their full weight in order to cover up rapes and sexual assaults on campus. This is done in order to maintain public relations and ensure that tuition dollars keep flowing and that their campus does not appear unsafe. Especially now with universities across the country being aware of the bubbling nature and tenuous reality in the coming years, some universities are on treacherous ground. I work at one with a large East and Southeast Asian population and our statistics for unreported rapes are believed to be egregiously high - not like they aren't high elsewhere.

I mentioned it elsewhere but my university even eliminated the "survivor advocate" office (the one with whom I was working) altogether when the director tried to blow the whistle about a rape coverup. And this rape in question was perpetrated by a young man against his fraternity brother. That survivor has no justice and I can't really think of many who do. Universities, even when moving forward with charges, will do terribly cowardly things like expel the perpetrator after graduation or warn the survivor not to press charges and make their lives living hells until they themselves drop out of school.

See the book "Missoula" or the documentary "The Hunting Ground" for sources.

My stepdaughter is actually doing her senior year thesis on college rape culture and so we've had long discussions about it. She asked me if it really is an epidemic, and if so, why now. I told her that I didn't believe rape was happening on campus now any more than it ever had in the past, proportional to the relative student population. I also am highly doubtful that public safety and college counseling offices ever handled it better than they are now. But one thing is for certain and that is our current hypercompetitive, all-growth-to-the-top, late capitalist environment is causing institutions of higher education to act like sharks and to maintain the most cutthroat public relations possible.

Luther, the extent to which sexual assault or rape occurs on campus is widely controversial, and the figures vary widely. Part of the problem is how these terms are defined (i.e. there is some language drift). Also, in particular the veracity of the material presented in The Hunting Ground has been questioned, although from your viewpoint you may question the institutional source (on the other hand, if the critics were less noteworthy than Harvard law professors, some might criticize their credibility). Again, I must state: I think sexual assault and rape are very bad things. I may be mistaken on the willingness of institutions to address the problem, but if I am incorrect, it is not because I hate women, it is because I am incorrect about the institutional processes. FWIW, I am in support of universities referring all sexual assault and rape cases to the criminal justice system, where they can be handled in legally appropriate ways. I am not in favor of universities adjudicating the cases themselves, because I doubt they have the expertise to handle the cases, and their biases could go either way (ranging from hyper-vigilance to coverup).

Just to point out that it's worth considering that this is not necessarily an either/or situation. It’s possible that, for example, there are many actual rapes occurring on campuses that are being covered up (I don’t personally doubt it, though I could have been propagandized because it sure does get a lot of coverage in movies and documentaries, and the meme of campus rape cover-up is pretty strong); it’s also possible, simultaneously, and apparently this is a matter of fact though I haven’t followed up the claims of Karen Straughan, that the legal procedures around rape are morphing so rapidly that:

a) rape law is being less and less studied and hence practiced (by women at least) because of its trigger content (wtf?);
b) the requirements for a rape conviction are being rapidly reduced until female testimony becomes sufficient unto itself.
c) the actual criteria for rape are becoming wider and wider/softer and softer, so that, for example, a woman's state of voluntary inebriation can be retroactively presented as evidence of rape
d) rape can also be determined by the "victim's" subsequent feelings about the experience, i.e., a woman can decide afterwards (even days after) that what she had considered consensual sex was actually a rape (perhaps because the guy doesn't come back for more, sorry to be crude, but sometimes the craziness of the context requires it).

I am sure there's an e) and an f) and a g), but you get my point about the changing face of "rape." & no, it is not lack of sensitivity to rape victims to want to point out that there may be a whole lot of pretenders out there. On the contrary, it would be insensitive to rape victims to give time and credence to bogus cases and consider them equal in validity. It's actually a way, potentially, to invalidate all charges of rape ~ which was my main point: that both these arguments (Luther's and slomo's) can be true and may even be complementary, if part of the means to protect actual male rapists is to create general confusion and hysteria around the issue, and to provide a steady stream of relatively or completely innocent patsies to take the heat and assuage the outrage, while the real perpetrators carry on perpetrating.

The same thing has apparently, I would say obviously, been going on with pedophilia: on the one hand it becomes a crime to take photos of your own children in the buff, on the other hand, unspeakable crimes continue to be committed by people in positions of power and privilege, often quite openly, and go unchallenged, or at least unprosecuted. I suspect there's a mechanism at work here, a kind of safety valve for a society in breakdown that works on a known psychological basis: when we are not able or allowed to see and address real trauma, we project it outward onto safe objects and then attack them.

It's called scapegoating, and it doesn't mean there aren't real crimes begin committed, only that the focus is being redirected to protect the dominant group.

[slomo]

Anyway, Jack, let's face: we just don't like each other anymore. That could change once again in the future, but in the meantime, we'll have to agree to disagree. Ultimately, if you're comfortable disliking your own maleness, or the maleness of others, it is your choice, and affects me very little. Or maybe you're fine with yourself and other men you consider your friends, in which case we don't really have much argument except about social phenomena over which we, as individuals, have very little control.

You hang out here more than I do. This all started because I suggested that men not hate themselves for being men, and then I stuck around to defend that position. Mostly, I guess, because arguing over gender is sometimes more interesting than grading exams or arguing over physiology and molecular biology. However, soon enough I'll slip away to attend to things that pay the bills, and you'll have your forum back.

[slomo]

I am sure there's an e) and an f) and a g), but you get my point about the changing face of "rape." & no, it is not lack of sensitivity to rape victims to want to point out that there may be a whole lot of pretenders out there. On the contrary, it would be insensitive to rape victims to give time and credence to bogus cases and consider them equal in validity. It's actually a way, potentially, to invalidate all charges of rape ~ which was my main point: that both these arguments (Luther's and slomo's) can be true and may even be complementary, if part of the means to protect actual male rapists is to create general confusion and hysteria around the issue, and to provide a steady stream of relatively or completely innocent patsies to take the heat and assuage the outrage, while the real perpetrators carry on perpetrating.

The same thing has apparently, I would say obviously, been going on with pedophilia: on the one hand it becomes a crime to take photos of your own children in the buff, on the other hand, unspeakable crimes continue to be committed by people in positions of power and privilege, often quite openly, and go unchallenged, or at least unprosecuted. I suspect there's a mechanism at work here, a kind of safety valve for a society in breakdown that works on a known psychological basis: when we are not able or allowed to see and address real trauma, we project it outward onto safe objects and then attack them.

It's called scapegoating, and it doesn't mean there aren't real crimes begin committed, only that the focus is being redirected to protect the dominant group.

I think this is quite likely, although it is more in the realm of parapolitics than anything that could ever be proved. Thus, the action to take away from this idea, if you believe it, is to sow harmony instead of divisiveness, and to consider that all these different and apparently contradictory positions could be true at the same time.

[Luther Blissett]

Slomo, every time you mention campus rape policies favoring women I can't be sure if I'm reading it correctly. This is definitely one of my niches and as someone intimately familiar with the process, I can say with confidence that universities employ their full weight in order to cover up rapes and sexual assaults on campus. This is done in order to maintain public relations and ensure that tuition dollars keep flowing and that their campus does not appear unsafe. Especially now with universities across the country being aware of the bubbling nature and tenuous reality in the coming years, some universities are on treacherous ground. I work at one with a large East and Southeast Asian population and our statistics for unreported rapes are believed to be egregiously high - not like they aren't high elsewhere.

I mentioned it elsewhere but my university even eliminated the "survivor advocate" office (the one with whom I was working) altogether when the director tried to blow the whistle about a rape coverup. And this rape in question was perpetrated by a young man against his fraternity brother. That survivor has no justice and I can't really think of many who do. Universities, even when moving forward with charges, will do terribly cowardly things like expel the perpetrator after graduation or warn the survivor not to press charges and make their lives living hells until they themselves drop out of school.

See the book "Missoula" or the documentary "The Hunting Ground" for sources.

My stepdaughter is actually doing her senior year thesis on college rape culture and so we've had long discussions about it. She asked me if it really is an epidemic, and if so, why now. I told her that I didn't believe rape was happening on campus now any more than it ever had in the past, proportional to the relative student population. I also am highly doubtful that public safety and college counseling offices ever handled it better than they are now. But one thing is for certain and that is our current hypercompetitive, all-growth-to-the-top, late capitalist environment is causing institutions of higher education to act like sharks and to maintain the most cutthroat public relations possible.

Luther, the extent to which sexual assault or rape occurs on campus is widely controversial, and the figures vary widely. Part of the problem is how these terms are defined (i.e. there is some language drift). Also, in particular the veracity of the material presented in The Hunting Ground has been questioned, although from your viewpoint you may question the institutional source (on the other hand, if the critics were less noteworthy than Harvard law professors, some might criticize their credibility). Again, I must state: I think sexual assault and rape are very bad things. I may be mistaken on the willingness of institutions to address the problem, but if I am incorrect, it is not because I hate women, it is because I am incorrect about the institutional processes. FWIW, I am in support of universities referring all sexual assault and rape cases to the criminal justice system, where they can be handled in legally appropriate ways. I am not in favor of universities adjudicating the cases themselves, because I doubt they have the expertise to handle the cases, and their biases could go either way (ranging from hyper-vigilance to coverup).

Just to point out that it's worth considering that this is not necessarily an either/or situation. It’s possible that, for example, there are many actual rapes occurring on campuses that are being covered up (I don’t personally doubt it, though I could have been propagandized because it sure does get a lot of coverage in movies and documentaries, and the meme of campus rape cover-up is pretty strong); it’s also possible, simultaneously, and apparently this is a matter of fact though I haven’t followed up the claims of Karen Straughan, that the legal procedures around rape are morphing so rapidly that:

a) rape law is being less and less studied and hence practiced (by women at least) because of its trigger content (wtf?);
b) the requirements for a rape conviction are being rapidly reduced until female testimony becomes sufficient unto itself.
c) the actual criteria for rape are becoming wider and wider/softer and softer, so that, for example, a woman's state of voluntary inebriation can be retroactively presented as evidence of rape
d) rape can also be determined by the "victim's" subsequent feelings about the experience, i.e., a woman can decide afterwards (even days after) that what she had considered consensual sex was actually a rape (perhaps because the guy doesn't come back for more, sorry to be crude, but sometimes the craziness of the context requires it).

I am sure there's an e) and an f) and a g), but you get my point about the changing face of "rape." & no, it is not lack of sensitivity to rape victims to want to point out that there may be a whole lot of pretenders out there. On the contrary, it would be insensitive to rape victims to give time and credence to bogus cases and consider them equal in validity. It's actually a way, potentially, to invalidate all charges of rape ~ which was my main point: that both these arguments (Luther's and slomo's) can be true and may even be complementary, if part of the means to protect actual male rapists is to create general confusion and hysteria around the issue, and to provide a steady stream of relatively or completely innocent patsies to take the heat and assuage the outrage, while the real perpetrators carry on perpetrating.

The same thing has apparently, I would say obviously, been going on with pedophilia: on the one hand it becomes a crime to take photos of your own children in the buff, on the other hand, unspeakable crimes continue to be committed by people in positions of power and privilege, often quite openly, and go unchallenged, or at least unprosecuted. I suspect there's a mechanism at work here, a kind of safety valve for a society in breakdown that works on a known psychological basis: when we are not able or allowed to see and address real trauma, we project it outward onto safe objects and then attack them.

It's called scapegoating, and it doesn't mean there aren't real crimes begin committed, only that the focus is being redirected to protect the dominant group.

I can personally assure that the rapes are happening and not being prosecuted on college campuses, so it's either that claim and Slomo are correct, or else it's just me. It is definitely true that barely any university has a policy of turning the crime over to the police - I mean all that Homeland Security money that universities received to create their own dedicated police forces (not just public safety departments)? This means that even less have to be turned over, or ever would. Universities have their own detectives now. Why would a university ever want to let themselves be branded as the "rape campus"? They want that $$$. They need that $$$. Desperately now. Of course that Harvard rebuttal is PR.

I am having a hard time finding rape conviction statistics by year in the U.S. adjusted for population growth (especially as compared to rape accusations and reports) but by every metric, rape convictions are way down. I find it very hard to believe that the gap between rape accusations and rape convictions is closing. On college campuses, the problem is especially stark because of not only the impediment of the institution but because of the myriad cultural and social reasons. Do you really think survivors are not still shunned and vilified? Because of Carry That Weight?

I find those four a-d examples wanting. I don't think less women are studying rape law because of trigger warnings and think that Straughan made it up. I don't think rape convictions are accelerating because of survivor testimony. I think that this retroactive inebriation revoked consent thing is an MRA fantasy devised in chatrooms and has no bearing on courts.

[JackRiddler]

slomo, I have a dick and I like it, and came to live and love my "maleness" long ago, to allow your term for the moment. But this was with difficulties, and a big reason for that is the abundance of not just negative role models of what makes a man, but violent and aggressive role models (who are lionized for it); herdish-macho, bullying, wounded, stupidity-glorifying, alpha-worshipping, self- and other-hating role models; role models enraged by whatever they perceive as weakness, and certainly by the perception of femininity in a male body, or by masculinity in the female. Be a man! (Plenty of women who hold the exact same views, of course, and first in my life among them my mommy, which I suppose would be the stuff of a novel using you and me as characters.) The kind of men who even today hold a lion's share in representing "maleness" in this and most cultures, the kind who can speak for God. Many of whom, in this country, were selling themselves on the idea that they were the unloved heroes and true producers of wealth (exploited) and victims of liberalizing, man-hating, anti-tradition, civilization-destroying conspiracies of perfumed weaklings and harridans dating back at least to the times of the first temperance ladies, abolitionists, 19th-century feminists and other assorted utopians. I am a man. But you don't get to tell me what that means.

I asked you and your action-figure crew for something pretty simple, by the way, and only because of the defensive maneuvers that you-plural have deployed in maintaining your fantasies did it require all the caveats and conditions. Not the "data" but the manifesto. There always is one. Where are the intellectuals, agents, planners, leaders, where is the feminist man-hating movement that justifies or "provokes" the aggressive ideology of MRA and the more general violent "male" backlash?

Luther, I've been watching your separate exchange and salute you and your reason and your patience.

[tapitsbo]

The boring, misguided MRA movement is easy to talk about.

A couple other posters like Project Willow and guruilla were saying interesting things about feminism, I have a feeling they'll return to that.

[JackRiddler]

.

This probably explains a lot about what is happening with men and this country as well (though it's certainly not about slomo).

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/03/healt ... .html?_r=0

nytimes.com
Death Rates Rising for Middle-Aged White Americans, Study Finds

Gina Kolata

Something startling is happening to middle-aged white Americans. Unlike every other age group, unlike every other racial and ethnic group, unlike their counterparts in other rich countries, death rates in this group have been rising, not falling.

That finding was reported Monday by two Princeton economists, Angus Deaton, who last month won the 2015 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, and Anne Case. Analyzing health and mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and from other sources, they concluded that rising annual death rates among this group are being driven not by the big killers like heart disease and diabetes but by an epidemic of suicides and afflictions stemming from substance abuse: alcoholic liver disease and overdoses of heroin and prescription opioids.

The analysis by Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case may offer the most rigorous evidence to date of both the causes and implications of a development that has been puzzling demographers in recent years: the declining health and fortunes of poorly educated American whites. In middle age, they are dying at such a high rate that they are increasing the death rate for the entire group of middle-aged white Americans, Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case found.

The mortality rate for whites 45 to 54 years old with no more than a high school education increased by 134 deaths per 100,000 people from 1999 to 2014.



“It is difficult to find modern settings with survival losses of this magnitude,” wrote two Dartmouth economists, Ellen Meara and Jonathan S. Skinner, in a commentary to the Deaton-Case analysis to be published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Wow,” said Samuel Preston, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on mortality trends and the health of populations, who was not involved in the research. “This is a vivid indication that something is awry in these American households.”

Dr. Deaton had but one parallel. “Only H.I.V./AIDS in contemporary times has done anything like this,” he said.

In contrast, the death rate for middle-aged blacks and Hispanics continued to decline during the same period, as did death rates for younger and older people of all races and ethnic groups.

Middle-aged blacks still have a higher mortality rate than whites — 581 per 100,000, compared with 415 for whites — but the gap is closing, and the rate for middle-aged Hispanics is far lower than for middle-aged whites at 262 per 100,000.

David M. Cutler, a Harvard health care economist, said that although it was known that people were dying from causes like opioid addiction, the thought was that those deaths were just blips in the health care statistics and that over all everyone’s health was improving. The new paper, he said, “shows those blips are more like incoming missiles.”
Dying in Middle Age

Death rates are rising for middle-aged white Americans, while declining in other wealthy countries and among other races and ethnicities. The rise appears to be driven by suicide, drugs and alcohol abuse.

Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case (who are husband and wife) say they stumbled on their finding by accident, looking at a variety of national data sets on mortality rates and federal surveys that asked people about their levels of pain, disability and general ill health.

Dr. Deaton was looking at statistics on suicide and happiness, skeptical about whether states with a high happiness level have a low suicide rate. (They do not, he discovered; in fact, the opposite is true.) Dr. Case was interested in poor health, including chronic pain because she has suffered for 12 years from disabling and untreatable lower back pain.

Dr. Deaton noticed in national data sets that middle-aged whites were committing suicide at an unprecedented rate and that the all-cause mortality in this group was rising. But suicides alone, he and Dr. Case realized, were not enough to push up overall death rates, so they began looking at other causes of death. That led them to the discovery that deaths from drug and alcohol poisoning also increased in this group.

They concluded that taken together, suicides, drugs and alcohol explained the overall increase in deaths. The effect was largely confined to people with a high school education or less. In that group, death rates rose by 22 percent while they actually fell for those with a college education.

It is not clear why only middle-aged whites had such a rise in their mortality rates. Dr. Meara and Dr. Skinner, in their commentary, considered a variety of explanations — including a pronounced racial difference in the prescription of opioid drugs and their misuse, and a more pessimistic outlook among whites about their financial futures — but say they cannot fully account for the effect.

Dr. Case, investigating indicators of poor health, discovered that middle-aged people, unlike the young and unlike the elderly, were reporting more pain in recent years than in the past. A third in this group reported they had chronic joint pain over the years 2011 to 2013, and one in seven said they had sciatica. Those with the least education reported the most pain and the worst general health.

The least educated also had the most financial distress, Dr. Meara and Dr. Skinner noted in their commentary. In the period examined by Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case, the inflation-adjusted income for households headed by a high school graduate fell by 19 percent.

Dr. Case found that the number of whites with mental illnesses and the number reporting they had difficulty socializing increased in tandem. Along with that, increasing numbers of middle-aged whites said they were unable to work. She also saw matching increases in the numbers reporting pain and the numbers reporting difficulty socializing, difficulty shopping, difficulty walking for two blocks.

With the pain and mental distress data, Dr. Deaton said, “we had the two halves of the story.” Increases in mortality rates in middle-aged whites rose in parallel with their increasing reports of pain, poor health and distress, he explained. They provided a rationale for the increase in deaths from substance abuse and suicides.

Dr. Preston of the University of Pennsylvania noted that the National Academy of Sciences had published two monographs reporting that the United States had fallen behind other rich countries in improvements in life expectancy. One was on mortality below age 50 and the other on mortality above age 50. He coedited one of those reports. But, he said, because of the age divisions, the researchers analyzing the data missed what Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case found hiding in plain sight.

“We didn’t pick it up,” Dr. Preston said, referring to the increasing mortality rates among middle-aged whites.

Ronald D. Lee, professor of economics, professor of demography and director of the Center on Economics and Demography of Aging at the University of California, Berkeley, was among those taken aback by what Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case discovered.

“Seldom have I felt as affected by a paper,” he said. “It seems so sad.”

http://fair.org/home/black-lives-matter ... t-graphic/

fair.org
Black Lives Matter? Not in an NYT Graphic
By Jim Naureckas

Dying in Middle Age: NYT chart

Quick–who’s missing from this New York Times chart (11/2/15)?



The point of the chart, based on one in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is that US non-Hispanic whites aged 45-54 have a rising mortality rate, unlike the similarly aged groups included for comparison purposes: Hispanics in the US, and people in France, Germany, Britain, Canada, Australia and Sweden.

The most obvious omission is African-Americans, who make up about 12 percent of the US population. They are left out of the chart not because they don’t support the point—they, too, have a falling death rate in the 45-54 demographic, unlike US whites—but presumably because they would require a larger graph, since the black mortality rate is still well above whites in this age group: 582 vs. 415 per 100,000.

That deaths among middle-aged whites are rising while they’re falling among other groups is a remarkable story—particularly when the disparity is explained, as the PNAS study indicates, by rising rates of drug and alcohol overdoses, alcohol-induced liver damage and suicide. But the story is complicated, surely, by the fact that the shocking news is that middle-age whites in the US now die 71 percent as often as blacks—as opposed to 56 percent as often, like they did 14 years ago.

Perhaps it would have been worth making a bigger chart to make that point?

Jim Naureckas is the editor of FAIR.org.

You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com, or write to public editor Margaret Sullivan: public@nytimes.com (Twitter: @NYTimes or @Sulliview). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.

http://blackagendareport.libsyn.com/

Middle Age White Male Die-Off: When Skin Privilege is Not Enough
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

“A generation of poorly educated white men who came of age in the Seventies and Eighties are suffering dramatic levels of psychological instability.”

It appears that white middle aged men with no more than a high school education have not adjusted well to their declining economic and social status in the United States. That seems to be the logical conclusion that can be drawn from a study by two Nobel laureates in economics who found that the death rate for white men of lower educational attainment between the ages of 45 and 54 has been increasing, while every other racial, gender and economic group has been living longer. The study was conducted during the 15 years between 1999 and 2014. The findings came as a shock – not just because the life expectancy of non-college educated white middle aged males was going in the opposite direction than everyone else, but also because the heightened mortality rate of this particular cohort is not due to the most frequent killers, like heart disease and diabetes. Instead, these low-income white men are committing suicide or dying from the complications of substance abuse at previously unheard of rates. So many of this group are dying by their own hands, or from illnesses based on self-destructive behaviors, that they have dragged down the life expectancy of the entire white middle aged male population, regardless of education and income.

“These low-income white men are committing suicide or dying at previously unheard of rates from the complications of substance abuse.”

Clearly, we are looking at mass psychological problems, rooted in class, race, and gender at a particular point in history in the United States. These suddenly at-risk white men are by no means the most endangered U.S. demographic; Black and Hispanic men still die much younger than whites, but their life expectancies are gradually improving, while the opposite is true of the at-risk white cohort. Even more intriguingly, white relatively uneducated males who are older or younger than the 45 to 54 group are not dying at such high rates from self-destructive behavior.

What the numbers are telling us, is that a generation of poorly educated white men who came of age in the Seventies and Eighties are suffering dramatic levels of psychological instability, so that they drink or drug themselves to death or kill themselves outright. The death rate for this group rose 22 percent during the study period. The researchers noted that the incomes of households headed by people with only a high school education fell by 19 percent during the same period. But, that’s true for less educated households of all ethnic groups and both sexes, and only the white males of a certain age began dying at alarming rates – as if much of their group had been emotionally destabilized.

Working class people of all ethnicities have lost a great deal of economic ground under late stage capitalism in America, but the uneducated white males have also lost what they were led to expect was their special place in the racialized pecking order. Late in life, they find that white skin privilege can’t buy security or serenity in the age of austerity – and their worlds fall apart.

You might say they died from a White Lie.

For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Glen Ford. On the web, go to BlackAgendaReport.com.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

[Luther Blissett]

We talked about that a little over on the "Abolish the White Race" thread, and I drew comparisons to the West Virginia chapter in "Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt". The situation in all four sacrifice zones covered in that book were pretty dire, but something about the West Virginia section seemed so forlorn and hopeless. Part of that might have been because the interview subjects kept dying.

[tapitsbo]

Meanwhile, the working class has gotten richer in Russia (not that I'm some unreserved fan of Putin).

Resource extraction has boomed on this continent, too but without the same results.

But I'm guessing you're not a fan, Jack! It's okay, though. I think it's fair to say that you and I both believed enforced scarcity is a thing.

The part that really gets to me is that most of the time when people say "austerity" they mean programs that were previously funded by a massive inbalance in favour of our part of the world

Maybe austerity will stop me from posting here sometime soon.

[Elvis]

There's a huge missed opportunity in these contentious gender threads. The combatants are mostly very intelligent, well-educated and well-intentioned people. Is anyone even trying to understand where another person is coming from, instead of just doubling down on their existing view of reality? Or do some just love to fight? (and win!)

[Luther Blissett]

There's a huge missed opportunity in these contentious gender threads. The combatants are mostly very intelligent, well-educated and well-intentioned people. Is anyone even trying to understand where another person is coming from, instead of just doubling down on their existing view of reality? Or do some just love to fight? (and win!)

I'm in PMland with at least one person who is not exactly contentious but who has different leanings and background than me.

[guruilla]

I find those four a-d examples wanting. I don't think less women are studying rape law because of trigger warnings and think that Straughan made it up. I don't think rape convictions are accelerating because of survivor testimony. I think that this retroactive inebriation revoked consent thing is an MRA fantasy devised in chatrooms and has no bearing on courts.

I respect your experience in the campus university and defer to it, while not taking it as a final proof of anything.

About the other ^^^, you may be right and if so it would be of great significance that such a distortion of truth was happening. However, simply telling us what you believe or don't believe carries zero information content except about you. I would think that you would want to find evidence to contest those claims being made by Straughan, which ought not to be hard to do, since if she is both ideologically unsound (i,e., under attack) and lying, then rightly indignant others before you will have already done this work and she will be in the process of being thoroughly and roundly discredited. I wouldn't think it would take more than a 5 minute internet search to find that evidence, if such is the case.

On the other hand, the MO with addressing slomo's data-based arguments seems to indicate, to me anyway (& I confess that I have been mostly unable to read/comprehend Jack's posts, as they seem to be very low signal-to-noise ratio), that a combination of sophistry with ideological conviction are standing in for actual arguments, much less real dialogue.

This could also be because I just don't agree and am blinded by my own ideological prejudices, in which case I apologize in advance. But I do wonder why Jack bumped this thread, as if to contain the situation and bring the battle to his own ground. If so, it may backfire, because the fire of imagined dissidence might only wind up spreading further across the board this way (ie, people start to wake up to seeing how they are being corralled, here and everywhere, into the "correct" thought patterns).

Some info that is directly related to the question of male violence against women just came my way, so I'm cross-posting it

THE BACKLASH AGAINST “PATHOLOGIZING WIFE ASSAULT”

The main resistance to accepting personality disorders as important
explanatory criteria for wife assault comes from sociological feminism.
The feminist perspective on wife assault complains that wife assault
was being pathologized, which deflects attention from social causes
and from the radical social restructuring needed to end patriarchy (Yllö
& Bograd, 1988). Yet the data reported earlier in the chapter clearly
show that personality disorders are central to intimate abusiveness
in North American samples. Gender studies handle this empirical
disconfirmation by simply ignoring it, a tendency that is at odds with
academic values of free inquiry and the construction of empirically
testable and falsifiable hypotheses. The analysis offered by feminism is
a paradigm that would be unacceptable if applied to any other social
problem. Imagine researchers suggesting that they wanted to study
“why blacks in general were violent” or “why women in general
became rock groupies.” These proposals would, with good reason, be
vilified. Yet feminists continue to ask why men in general beat their
wives. Data about female abusiveness, lesbian battering, and female-
perpetrated child abuse all exist (Dutton, 1994; Archer, 2000), yet
continue to be willfully ignored by dogmatic feminist analysis.

page 14, Through a Psychological Lens; Personality Disorder and Spouse Assault; Donald G. Dutton and Mark Bodnarchuk


Recognition by researchers of the importance of personality disorder
(PD) as a causative factor in spouse assault has been delayed
largely because PD falls outside the major paradigms created by broad
spectrum theories that are currently in vogue. [sociobiology and feminism] Dutton (1994, 1995) surveyed the main explanations, particularly feminist and sociobiological approaches, put forward to account for wife assault when the issue achieved prominence in the 1970s. Dutton (1994) pointed out that
“broad spectrum” explanations like sociobiology and feminism had difficulty explaining the skewed distribution of spouse assault incidence—that is, that the majority (about 80 percent) of males are non-violent, another 12 percent are violent once, 8 percent are repetitively and severely violent (Straus & Gelles, 1992). Both theories see “male violence toward women” as the defined problem. Hence, individual differences in male violence (among other things, such as female violence or gay violence) are ignored or disregarded.

In surveys of wife assault incidence (for example, Straus & Gelles,
1992), the majority of males, according to their wives, are not abusive;
a smaller group is abusive once; and a still smaller group is repeatedly
abusive. This latter group probably constitutes 8–12 percent of the male
population, large enough to constitute a significant social problem, but
too small to be explained by gender analysis or evolutionary theories
(Dutton, 1995).

An explanation attributing spousal assault to “maleness” would lead to a prediction of a normal distribution of male violence, not the highly skewed distribution found in national surveys. It certainly would not predict that 88 percent of males would be described by their female partners as not physically abusive.

Feminism cannot consider individual differences in males, since it is committed to a generic view of males or “maleness” per se as the cause of wife assault. As Bograd (1988) wrote in Feminist Perspectives on Wife Assault, all feminist researchers, clinicians, and activists address a primary question: “Why do men beat their wives?” (p. 13), and further, “Instead of examining why this particular man beats his particular wife, feminists seek to
understand why men in general use physical force” (p. 13).

Despite the feminist claim that their sociological view can be combined with more fine-grained psychological analyses, it rarely is. In fact, there has been a resistance to examining psychological factors connected to spouse assault because such examination is incompatible with “gender analysis,” the paradigm of feminism.

Feminist theory has also resisted the study of female violence, husband battering, lesbian battering, and gay violence, since these forms of intimate violence are also incompatible with gender analysis, despite a considerable empirical basis documenting these forms of abuse (Dutton, 1994). Studies such as the survey by Lie, Schilit, Bush, Montague, and Reyes (1991), showing lesbian verbal, sexual, and physical abuse rates to be higher than heterosexual rates, are simply dismissed, as are studies showing female intimate violence to be equal or higher in incidence than male intimate violence (Magdol et al., 1997; Archer, 2000). The essence of feminist theory has been to preserve its own ideology at the cost of ignoring or dismissing empirical data that do not serve its ideological ends. The notion that special characteristics of a small group of males may generate intimate violence is incompatible with gender power ideology. Similarly, any work showing that male violence stems from a psychological feeling of powerlessness is ignored (Dutton, 1994).

Personality disorders are defined as self-reproducing dysfunctional patterns of interaction (Millon, 1997). In some cases, they are general to all social relationships; in others, they manifest primarily in intimate relationships. Dutton (1998) described an “abusive personality” characterized by shame-based rage, a tendency to project blame, attachment anxiety manifested as rage, and sustained rageful outbursts, primarily in intimate relationships. This “abusive personality” was constructed around a fragile core called “borderline personality.”

A variety of researchers have found an extremely high incidence of personality disorders in assaultive populations. Studies have found incidence rates of personality disorders to be 80–90 percent in both court-referred and self-referred wife assaulters (Saunders, 1992; Hamberger & Hastings, 1986, 1988, 1989; Dutton & Starzomski, 1994), compared to estimates in the general population, which tend to range from 15 percent to 20 percent (Kernberg, 1977). As the violence becomes more severe and chronic, the likelihood of psychopathology in these men approaches 100 percent (Hart, Dutton, & Newlove, 1993; Dutton & Hart, 1992a, 1992b).

Across several studies, implemented by independent researchers, the prevalence of personality disorder in wife assaulters has been found to be extremely high. These men are not mere products of male sex role conditioning or “male privilege”; they possess characteristics that differentiate them from the majority of men who are not repeat abusers.
[...]

and so on
http://www.corwin.com/upm-data/5158_Los ... pter_1.pdf

[JackRiddler]

Not sure what you mean. I am a big fan of resource extraction. As a species we should be looking to extract, maximize and share resources from the sun, the wind, the garbage, the shit, the restored soil, the healthy growing forests, the potentials for efficiencies and reductions in needless forms of consumption, the languages, the inexhaustible riches of music and science and art and cultures and letters, the infinite information and communications spaces, the friendships, the potentials for peace and understanding, the abundance of love-capacity and warmth of our bodies, the awesome cuisines, all the beautiful day with her offers of free, creative, pleasurable hours.

[tapitsbo]

I meant that some would say Russians have developed prosperity because of the toxic fossil fuel industry, hasn't worked for us

[parel]

Another thread that keeps being bumped to the top and curiosity causes me to open it. It leaves me wondering "what is this thread about?" Oh, a bunch of guys talking about feminism (I think) or being a man or something like that. Whatever, I know it's about a topic that doesn't concern me. Now, I'm not trying to censor the traffic here, it's pretty thin these days and we need input from people.

Not everyone "loves" feminism. I have misgivings about it because "the movement" is white-centred and white-dominated. Women of colour are often forced to choose between their race and their gender, and naturally, race will always win out. To elaborate, a few months ago, there were five domestic violence related murders in my hometown of Brisbane in one day. There was a public outcry about it - the government should do more, perpetrators must be held accountable etc etc. I lost a few female friends in that week (FB "friends" whatever that means) who were calling for harsher penalties for perptrators of Domestic Violence. A lot of these women were traumatised by their own experiences of DV and clearly, want things to change.

Why we fell out is because I disagreed with the "harsher penalties", "more police" line because law and order initiatives tend to affect indigenous people the most (currently, I'm in Australia). When aboriginal women get beaten up, the last thing they are likely to do is to report to police. Aboriginal people make up 60% of the prison population in Queensland compared to being only 2% of the population. They also have a habit of dying in custody. I was attacked for allegedly "attacking" these white feminists for trying to "do something" about DV. I hardly got to even offer my solution which is for more funding to be made available for community-based initiatives. They were lauding the government who set up a State "DV helpline". I was castigated for pointing out what a bad idea it was because women in distress who spill their guts could face punitive consequences later. Nobody else saw the potential conflict of interest there. So I was defriended and blocked by a bunch of well-meaning "lefty feminists". They didn't understand that the survivial of indigenous races is of paramount importance to indigenous people, and that gender politics comes second. Within the framework of indigeny though, there are many "movements" of women trying to break barriers and effect change. There is no feminist sisterhood that i have ever encountered, unless you count those who think success is about advancing a career or being able to display vast sums of wealth.

Feminism has never included women of colour, let alone centred on them. Radical (read: unreconstructed) feminists are also hunting down sex workers in the name of 'rescue' by redefining violence and labelling prostitution AS rape. So we have to deal with the carceral feminists who want us all locked up and segregated from "clean" society in the interests of "saving" us from our own oppression (you'd be surprised how many times the term "Stockholm Syndrome" is invoked to describe any sex worker who does not subscribe to the idea that sex work is inherently exploitative) and the mainstream feminists who think they have all the answers and that the "white" worldview is the only one that is valid.

I won't come out openly and bag feminism anymore. I used to, but now see it as counterproductive. Instead, it is better to regenerate something new, with sisters and allies and any person with a conscience to see that our collective liberation lies in adherence to basic principles of love and respect.

I don't want to be equal to men. I already know, that as a woman I am better.