| If you could know the empty ache of loneliness, Masked well behind the calm indifferent face Of us who pass you by in studied hurriedness, Intent upon our way, lest in the little space Of one forgetful moment hungry eyes implore You to be kind, to open up your heart a little more, I’m sure you’d smile a little kindlier, sometimes, To those of us you’ve never seen before. If you could know the eagerness we’d grasp The hand you’d give to us in friendliness; What vast, potential friendship in that clasp We’d press, and love you for your gentleness; If you could know the wide, wide reach Of love that simple friendliness could teach, I’m sure you’d say “Hello, my friend,” sometimes, And now and then extend a hand in friendliness to each. |
Category Archives: Rants&Rambles
Men hate Men
Feminists hate men. It’s such a common accusation thrown at women whether they identify as feminists or not, whenever or wherever they say or write anything vaguely critical of a man or men.
Do I hate men? I’m married to one and after decades together he remains my delight in life so clearly if I do hate men then #not all men.
The accusation is normally followed by a whole series of replies denying that women hate men, yet given the way the world works, given the reality of women’s oppression, male privilege and men’s enforcement of both of those conditions, it is entirely reasonable for every women to have moments where she resents or hates men.
But if we are to clearly separate the individual man for the group of “men” the dominant and privileged half of the population, then it is equally reasonable for every man to have their own moments when he resents or hates men.
Hmm. Given the reality of our lived experience, it is hardly surprising that every man should have moments, when he resents or even hates other men.
Why men hate other men? It’s a much easier question to ask than why women hate anyone. Men are allowed to have active unpleasant feelings and attitudes.
Looking back at that ridiculous “women love men, because..” site, some of the reasons are blindingly obvious.
Men are unsafe
Any man who has a woman he loves in his life, be it a mother, a partner, a daughter etc. must hate the men that make his loved one feel unsafe.
Men kill women in large numbers, often in intimate settings. They rape women. They assault women, physically, emotionally and verbally. My daughter is not safe walking home because of “men”. Our lives are curtailed and made smaller by men.
Her father hates the men that threaten his daughter.
But more than disliking, resenting or hating men’s attitudes to the women in their lives, it is also true to say that men make other men feel unsafe.
Men kill each other in large numbers. They assault other men, physically, emotionally and verbally. Being a young man walking home is not safe, because of other men.
And because of the way the world is structured, men aren’t even allowed to easily admit or discuss the fact that they feel unsafe and afraid. Such fears are often described as unmanly, rather than the entirely rational reaction to the threat of serious damage.
Men are violent. They make the world unsafe for everyone, man or woman.
Men try to make other men feel manly and “masculine”. They define other men using quite narrow characteristics instead of letting men define themselves.
What it means to be a man, the required characteristics and attributes is heavily policed within society. There are some small variations around the world, but the definition is actually pretty consistent and rigid.
Too often being a man is defined in terms that negate and denigrate being a woman or feminine, but even setting that aside, the acceptable ways of being a man are very limiting.
When asked what society values about men in a Pew Research survey, two out of the top three characteristics, financial success and leadership are external characteristics related primarily to the workplace. They are also things that are significantly easier to achieve if you start out privileged and wealthy.
These are attributes that most men will not actually be able to achieve, except in comparison with less privileged and less wealthy groups and by making these two attributes key features for how men self-identify, it gives all men an incentive to maintain the current power hierarchy. All else being equal, no matter how bad his situation, a man will be better off than the woman in his life, better off than the people he knows from underprivileged ethnic and other social backgrounds.
Too often, men’s attempts to make themselves feel “manly” manifest in behaviour designed to demean or denigrate a woman, to make her feel or appear less powerful, to reduce her autonomy and independence.
These attempts manifest in an often violent rejection of behaviour and characteristics in other men that are identified as feminine. If you are a man who values nurturing his children, who wants to stay home and care for his mother, his child, his partner, then you lose status in most societies.
Men define each other into very small limited patterns of behaviour that limit other mens’ choices and make personal success and happiness very difficult to achieve.
#not all men
Men make bad boyfriends, husbands, fathers or grandfathers.
There are many ways to build a family and many roles within that family that can be the responsibility of either or neither gender. Ultimately successful relationships are built on mutual trust and cooperation with a huge dose of good communication.
Good families require empathy, caring and nurturing.
Empathy, caring and nurturing are characteristics and skills that require practice to develop, yet most men have very little opportunity to practice these skills and are often punished for showing these characteristics when young to “toughen” them up. The Pew research poll suggested few people believed empathy, caring or nurturing were important characteristics for men.
Human beings are intensely social creatures. We crave intimacy, physical and emotional. Yet men define each other into roles that require other men to stand outside of that intimacy, to police the perimeter of the family and that is a very cold and lonely place to live.
There is a reason that the highest cause of death for men aged 18-55 is suicide.
Men cut themselves and other men off from the intimacy with other people, men or women, that we all crave and need to be healthy.
#not all men
Men insist on providing financially for a woman as if that were the only, or even the most important job, except when they don’t.
Because men are closely defined by their financial success, their ability or lack thereof to provide for their partner and family is over-stressed and over-valued. It becomes too significant and other measures of support are consequently undervalued.
If a man learns to value himself primarily by external factors such as his financial success, then he is always going to fail: someone is always more successful.
Plus beyond a certain maintenance level, women will be looking for something more than finance. Families need emotional support and commitment. Financial success is just not enough.
The lack of value placed on emotional connection and empathy means that in the event of divorce, men often just walk away. After divorce, men often fail to adequately provide financially for their own kids, as well as absenting themselves from their lives physically and emotionally.
Men define male success in a narrow competitive way that makes failure inevitable.
#not all men
Men are purpose driven.
Because being a man is defined very narrowly and on terms that are almost entirely dependant upon external competition with other men, and in opposition to any characteristic perceived to be female, then much of a man’s life becomes caught up in doing “stuff” and being successful. At the same time, men punish each other for any characteristic perceived to be non-masculine, including but not limited to emotional intimacy or nurturing.
Men learn to do “stuff” to avoid intimacy. They use the stuff they do, whether it’s work achievements or obsessive hobbies, to avoid engaging emotionally or intellectually with other people. They compete rather than cooperate.
Nobody actually died wishing they’d spent more time in the office. Post-retirement, no one in that office will care what you have done. They won’t even remember your name.
Men are too concerned with status and prestige to actually focus on enjoying their everyday lives. They are too distracted by external validation to actually value intimate relationships appropriately.
Men define success in a way that makes emotional intimacy very difficult.
#not all men
Men insist women find them funny, even when they’re not.
As Atwood wrote, men worry about women laughing at them whilst women worry about men killing them.
If many women don’t have a sense of humour it’s because most men are just not funny. Honestly, the jokes are not very good, and no one really finds the threat of rape and violence that we live with very humorous except people who think it’s okay to rape or be violent. Don’t be that man.
Men are discouraged from questioning their role or responsibilities. They are encouraged to view the status quo as normal and natural, even whilst it works to restrict them, to force them down into a very small and painful box. It makes anyone or anything that does challenge the stars quo very difficult for them to deal with.
When a woman challenges a man’s view of himself and his role in life, it can feel like an existential or fundamental threat. The acceptable defined masculine role is so limited and so fundamentally unsatisfying, and painful to live, that almost anything and everything can be perceived as a threat or challenge to a man’s masculinity.
Men react violently to threats, even imagined ones.
#not all men
Men cope with the limitations placed upon them by making women pay the price.
We should each get to decide, within the limits society imposes upon us, our relative wealth, health etc. for ourselves what we value and what gives our lives purpose.
Men demand time and attention from the women in their lives. They require the women in their lives to put them first, to look after them, physically, intellectually and emotionally. Because they themselves are unable or unwilling to put in the emotional work, women are left to do all of the heavy lifting. It’s tiring. It leaves no time for women to actually live their own lives and make sure their own needs are met.
Men need so much attention from the women in their lives that the women don’t get any time for themselves. The personal cost for women is just too damned high.
Men put each other into really small boxes. They cut off huge parts of their personalities in order to fit into those tiny limited roles. They force each other into an insane competition with each other which means almost every man fails at some stage in their life, creating huge damage to each other.
Men expect women to pick up the emotional pieces.
#not all men
Men are not dependable
Given the number of single-mother families in the world men have never been dependable, never been reliable for the women in their lives, and families.
Men run away, emotionally and physically too often to be regarded as dependable.
The rules that make a few men powerful, make the rest brittle and fragile.
#not all men
Men have brought us to this point as a human race.
Men have been in charge for a long time, and let’s face it, it’s not looking like an overwhelming success. There are some obvious problems with the world, and men manage to both refuse to take responsibility for their fuck-ups and refuse to share any power or responsibility for making things better.
For every step forwards, there is a clear an obvious step back. My daughter’s life is not so different to my own.
Our privilege protects us from some men, #not all men.
Women Hate Men
Feminists hate men. It’s such a common accusation thrown at women whether they identify as feminists or not, whenever or wherever they say or write anything vaguely critical of a man or men. It’s normally followed by a whole series of replies denying the very idea so it was thought provoking to come across a book titled “I Hate Men”
I’m a feminist : do I hate men?
I’m married to one and after decades together he remains my delight in life so clearly if I do hate men then #not all men.
But typing in “women hate..” into a search engine leads to some very strange places (setting aside “SEX” which is a whole topic in itself).
Unlike “Women love…” which leads to some very strange sites written by men, mainly pick-up artists, with some truly bizarre ideas about what women want from relationships, “women hate..” leads straight to a wiki page on misandry, and it feels a little censored to be honest.
Apparently, Sociologist Allan G. Johnson argues in The Gender Knot: Unraveling our Patriarchal Legacy that accusations of man-hating have been used to put down feminists and to shift attention onto men, reinforcing a male-centered culture. Johnson posits that culture offers no comparable anti-male ideology to misogyny and that “people often confuse men as individuals with men as a dominant and privileged category of people” and that “[given the] reality of women’s oppression, male privilege, and men’s enforcement of both, it’s hardly surprising that every woman should have moments where she resents or even hates men”.
Hmm. Given the reality of our lived experience, it is hardly surprising that every woman should have moments, when we resent or even hate men.
Why do I hate men? Why is it such a difficult question to even ask without adding distancing quotation marks to “hate”?
Looking back at that ridiculous “women love men, because..” site, some of the reasons are blindingly obvious.
Men make women feel unsafe
Men kill women in large numbers, often in intimate settings. They rape women. They assault women, physically, emotionally and verbally.
My daughter is not safe walking home because of “men”.
She is underpaid and undervalued because of “men”.
Her life is curtailed and made smaller by men.
Men try to make women feel girly and “feminine”. They define women instead of letting women define themselves.
Feeling girly is not the equivalent of feeling feminine, the latter being something that individual women get to define for themselves, but usually involves a sense of power, control and self-determination (even when frills are involved). Experientially, no grown woman wants to feel like a little girl outside of some very, very limited scenarios, most of which involve her actual parents, or some pre-agreed kink with another consenting adult.
Too often, men’s attempts to make women feel “girly” manifest in behaviour designed to demean or denigrate a woman, to make her feel or appear less powerful, to reduce her autonomy and independence.
Far too often such behaviour is actually an attempt to make the man feel bigger or better by making the woman feel smaller or less.
#not all men
Men make bad boyfriends, husbands, fathers or grandfathers.
There are many ways to build a family and many roles within that family that can be the responsibility of either or neither gender. Ultimately successful relationships are built on mutual trust and cooperation with a huge dose of good communication.
Men are pretty crap at communicating. Getting a man to talk about their feelings, to deal with any strong emotions is like pulling teeth and I say this as someone with a relatively astute and caring husband of decades. They are also pretty lazy when it comes to doing any of the emotional heavy lifting in raising and maintaining a family. They’re not great at doing any of the leg-work involved in making relationships work, from physical organising, social diary keeping, playdates through to funeral arrangements, from the emotional rollercoaster that is raising kids through surviving menopause etc etc
Men are seriously quite bad at being boyfriends, husbands, fathers and grandfathers. This is the reason why, where women have a choice, more and more of them are choosing to divorce their husbands. Given a choice between a bad partner and no partner, it’s logical to take the second option.
#not all men
Men insist on providing financially for a woman as if that were the only, or even the most important job, except when they don’t.
Whether or not they involve men, relationships of all kinds are all about mutual support and providing for each other, emotionally, financially, physically.
Supporting someone financially does not excuse someone from doing all or any of the rest of the jobs involved in a relationship and family. More often than not, families need both parents working in the UK so why do men not share in the rest of the familial hard work?
And obviously in the event of divorce, men most often fail to adequately provide financially for their own kids, as well as absenting themselves from their lives physically and emotionally.
#not all men
Men are purpose driven.
Men do “stuff” to avoid intimacy. They use the stuff they do, whether it’s work achievements or obsessive hobbies, to avoid engaging emotionally or intellectually with other people. They compete rather than cooperate.
Nobody actually died wishing they’d spent more time in the office. Post-retirement, no one in that office will care what you have done. They won’t even remember your name.
Men are too concerned with status and prestige to actually focus on enjoying their everyday lives. They are too distracted by external validation to actually value intimate relationships appropriately.
#not all men
Men insist women find them funny, even when they’re not.
As Atwood wrote, men worry about women laughing at them whilst women worry about men killing them.
If many women don’t have a sense of humour it’s because most men are just not funny. Honestly, your jokes are not very good, and no one really finds the threat of rape and violence that we live with very humorous except people who think it’s okay to rape or be violent. Don’t be that person.
Men are rarely as funny as they believe themselves to be. They are also just not as charming or interesting as they imagine. I have reached the age when I am glad to be seated next to a woman at the table because frankly, they’re more fun and less hard work than a man. Men require women to be interested in them, to pretend to find them more charming than they are. Women are required to ask questions and feign a level of interest that just does not exist.
On her last date before lockdown, my daughter’s male “beau” spent 40 minutes talking about his job. He asked her one question about herself. There was no second date. He spent the next few weeks harassing her on-line, before telling her she was dull and uninteresting. How would he know?
#not all men
Men give a woman’s life more meaning. They suck up time and attention that would be better spent elsewhere.
We should each get to decide, within the limits society imposes upon us, our relative wealth, health etc. for ourselves what we value and what gives our lives purpose.
Men demand too much time and attention from the women in their lives. They require the women in their lives to put them first, to look after them, physically, intellectually and emotionally. It’s tiring. It leaves no time for women to actually live their own lives and make sure their own needs are met.
Men need so much attention from the women in their lives that the women don’t get any time for themselves. The personal cost for women is just too damned high.
#not all men
Men are not dependable
Given the number of single-mother families in the world men have never been dependable, never been reliable for the women in their lives, and families.
An extraordinary number of men kill themselves every week, in every country and culture around the world. Men run away, emotionally and physically too often to be regarded as dependable.
#not all men
Men have brought us to this point as a human race.
Men have been in charge for a long time, and let’s face it, it’s not looking like an overwhelming success. There are some obvious problems with the world, and men manage to both refuse to take responsibility for their fuck-ups and refuse to share any power or responsibility for making things better.
#not all men
Women Love Men
Feminists hate men. It’s such a common accusation thrown at women whether they identify as feminists or not, whenever or wherever they say or write anything vaguely critical of a man or men. It’s normally followed by a whole series of replies denying the very idea so it was thought provoking to come across a book titled “I Hate Men”
I’m a feminist : do I hate men?
I’m married to one and after decades together he remains my delight in life so clearly if I do hate men then #not all men.
But the very question leads down an entirely different rabbit hole on-line as searching “reasons women love men” leads to a very strange place aka “The Modern Man”
Men make women feel girly and feminine, which makes them happy and turns them on sexually.
No, really not true: feeling girly and “feminine” does not make me happy, and certainly does not turn me on sexually. To be honest I struggle with the idea that being made to feel childlike ie like a girl, could make anyone feel sexual unless adult-child play is your personal kink.
And if you turn it around and apply it to men ie Women make men feel more boyish and masculine, which makes them happy and turns them on then the whole thing really does seem to play into a weird parent-child schtick which again, if that’s your kink great, but otherwise “no”.
Men can be a boyfriend, husband, father or grandfather, which is something a woman cannot do
NO, though this is a bit of a weird one since it’s really just talking about gendered nouns and kicking out at any same-sex relationship structure. With a gay daughter, it seems pretty clear that two women can have an entirely functional relationship together and not feel any lack of a man. Perhaps more to the point, it strongly suggests that there is only one way to be a partner or “boyfriend, husband, father or grandfather” which is just mind-glowingly stupid. My husband is very different to my friends’ husbands, a different father to them also and no doubt will be a different grandfather. If my partner were a woman, they would be different also, but more because of who they are than what’s between their legs.
Men are proud to provide for a woman, whereas women hate that role.
Seriously no: Women provide for their families whether they have a man in their lives or not. In many ways the stereotypical “role” for women is all about offering up bits an pieces of their soul and their care.
Whether or not they involve men, relationships of all kinds are all about mutual support and providing for each other, emotionally, financially, physically.
Men are purpose driven, which matches well with love-driven women.
Almost everyone is looking for both purpose and intimacy, men and women so this is just drivel.
Men make women feel safe
Obviously no: there is nothing “safe” about a generic man for a woman when the world is full of domestic abuse and men murdering women, most especially the ones they know.
Men make women laugh
Less than you’d think. As Atwood wrote, men worry about women laughing at them whilst women worry about men killing them.
Men give a woman’s life more meaning
No: I give my own life meaning, just like everyone else in the world. We each get to decide, within the limits society imposes upon us, our relative wealth, health etc. we get to decide for ourselves what we value and what gives our lives purpose.
Men are dependable
Given the number of single-mother families in the world this just isn’t true and has never been true.
Men have created much of the technology that has brought us to this point as a human race
Even if this were true (and it isn’t since there are many documented female scientists, technicians etc) then it’s just a daft reason for anyone to love someone. The idea that she generic person somewhere in the world invented a computer (thank you Ida Lovelace) should somehow influence who I love today, is frankly bizarre.
A little Bit racist?
Is it possible to be a little bit racist? A group of racist white men ran riot in London leading to a number of comments suggesting the UK was racist.
This was immediately followed by a whole series of replies saying that actually the UK was not racist, they were British and not personally racist. The people rioting in London were nothing to do with them, did not represent them so it as, apparently unfair, to describe the UK as racist. Because they do not see themselves as racist, the country they live in cannot be described as racist even when clearly racist white men are running around the capital city looking for black people to lynch.
& it’s taking me some time to process all of this.
Clearly I don’t feel myself to be personally racist. Who does? Even the white men running around London looking for people to lynch probably don’t describe themselves as racist. They probably call themselves “patriots” or some other co-opted word.
As a white person, immensely privileged when living in a predominantly white country, I don’t think that I get to decide for myself whether I’m racist or not. I can decide to try not to be racist, todo my best to be positively fair, open and accepting of other people whatever their ethnicity but I don’t believe that I get to decide whether or not I’m succeeding in not being racist. I don’t get to mark my own scorecard.
Passively doing nothing cannot equate to not being racist.
Not charging around the streets of London looking for people to kick, people to spit on, people to abuse, is a pretty low bar to set as a minimum standard on not being racist. It’s really not good enough.
& it also doesn’t really seem good enough to say that the rioting racists are nothing to do with me, therefore I don’t need to worry, or worse still, you don’t need to worry. We’re not racist so everything is ok. Even as racist white men run around on the streets looking for someone to beat up.
“Yes, but…” seems a peculiarly inadequate response to a racist mob.
And suggesting racism is someone else’s problem because “I’m not racist” is just another way of trying to make the victims responsible for their own abuse and is in itself, intrinsically racist.
Because it just isn’t possible to be a little bit racist, anymore than a woman can be a little bit pregnant: racism is racism. And we are all responsible, responsible for identifying what we’ve done wrong that has allowed this to happen, as well as working out what we can do better to prevent it in the future.
Counting days
Life in lockdown is one of quiet tedium, for those of us lucky enough to have older kids, a big enough house for everyone to find some space and a garden to disappear into. The weather has been wonderful, warm and dry. The minute this is over, expect it to start raining and drop back 10C.
We’ve been isolated now for two weeks, and by isolation, I mean no contact with anyone outside of a single visit to a very quiet supermarket. By now, surely we’re disease free, yet paranoia about every cough, sneeze or sniffle is profound.
I’ve read that infection to death takes an average of 17 days. With more than that spent locked into our own home, we should feel relatively safe. For now.
Because covid-19 is pandemic, expected to become endemic. We will all be exposed to it, all of us catch it, sooner or later. Later is better not because it can be avoided, but because later means more health service resources available to keep us alive, more nurses, doctors, ventilators etc. It also means more chance of a vaccine though that’s 18 months away as a minimum and no one can stay in their own home, surrounded by their family for 18 months without going mad.
The UK coronavirus death toll is expected to continue to rise for at least two weeks, the government’s chief scientific adviser has said, despite encouraging signs about the rate of infections and hospital admissions. The official death toll understates the numbers because it only counts hospital deaths. Excluding deaths in care homes means the numbers can be misleading.
Sir Patrick Vallance told Thursday’s daily Downing Street briefing that the number of people to have died from coronavirus in UK hospitals had reached 7,978, after the deaths of a further 881 people. It is the second-highest daily total after Wednesday’s record 938 deaths.
Despite the slightly lower figure, Vallance said the peak of the outbreak could still be weeks away. “I would expect the deaths to continue to keep going up for about two weeks after the intensive care picture improves. We’re not there yet, but that’s the sort of timeframe I would expect.”
Presumably the people being hospitalised now, are likely to take a week or two to recover or die.
The chief medical officer for England, Prof Chris Whitty, pointed out that two weeks ago admissions to intensive care were doubling every three days. He said: “It’s now becoming not quite flat, but doubling time is now six or more days in almost every area in the country. That has only happened because of what everybody has done in terms of staying at home.”
Last week the health secretary, Matt Hancock, said the NHS was preparing for at least 1,000 deaths a day, at a time when scientific advisers were forecasting the outbreak to peak at Easter.
The peak was now expected to come in four weeks, after signs that the transmission rate was beginning to fall. New infections continue to fluctuate. On Thursday, 4,344 new cases were recorded, compared with 5,492 on Wednesday, but the day-on-day rise was still higher than three of the previous four days.
Again, the official numbers of new cases recorded in the UK is nothing like the total number, just the number hitting the hospital admissions and they tend to be the people with worst symptoms. It’s estimated that there are roughly 1000 cases undiagnosed for every one that hits the official lists.
James Naismith, a professor of structural biology at the University of Oxford, said: “It is a mercy that the number of deaths reported today is lower than yesterday but on its own, a single day’s number is of no value in judging the pandemic. The continuing volatility in daily figure of announced deaths [due to different reporting periods and delays] makes it almost impossible to identify any trend with certainty yet.”
He added: “If deaths are still following a rapid exponential growth, today’s new deaths would have been expected to be markedly higher than yesterday’s, and the total number of deaths to date would have doubled from that four days ago.
Most, if not all, the deaths reported today will have come from infections before the so-called ‘hard lockdown’. It does seem that the hard lockdown is, as expected, reducing the rate of increase in the number of new hospital admissions.”
But even with the hard lockdown, obviously infections within family groupings, locked down in close contact with each other, are likely to occur. Assuming an average family of four locked down together, infected in the first two weeks of lockdown will take another two weeks to recover or die – maybe four to five weeks total.
And then we have to expect a second wave of infections when we all come out of lockdown.
Though the UK government seems entirely unwilling to discuss how and when such an exit might occur.
With our PM in hospital, and the foreign secretary somehow promoted to take his place (how, why him?) with parliament not sitting over the Easter recess so very little by way of accountability, it’s becoming increasingly unclear who is making life and death decisions for the country in the event of likely conflicting medical advice on when to end the shutdown.
We have the world’s biggest crisis and no one apparently in charge.
Zombie Apocalypse
Am I the only person rethinking core skills for the zombie apocalypse?
Medics obviously stay on the list but who really wants rule-breakers with a total disregard for health and safety on their team right now?
I’m coming around to the idea that hunters are entirely over-rated as well – they wander about too much and take altogether too many risks vis a vis infection!
Give me some gatherers, organised methodical and likely to have stocked up on paracetamol long before the restrictions were even thought about. And thermometers too (though I know my partner is an outlier on this one).
& now that I’m thinking about it, that just describes mothers.
Plus the zombie apocalypse definitely needs pets. Dogs are good, but cats are better not because they’re practical because they’re mostly not. Unless you have a big dog, they’re really not practical for defensive purposes, and to be honest, there’s not so much defending as expected but lots more lurking in confined spaces
Cats, whatever their size and pedigree will at least chase rodents (mine won’t kill the beggars but they will bring them home gift wrapped) And they really excel when it comes to small space entertainment when they’re in the right mood and when they’re not, they’ll chill and relax the room right down.
Because the real problem with the zombie apocalypse is boredom so I’m going to reserve a place on my team for a storyteller or two, someone with rather less STEM and a bit more humanity.
Reasons to be cheerful
It’s 20C outside and sunny.
The robin has finally learned how to hop across from the branch onto the bird feeder.
The husband has finally learned to put the dishes into the dishwasher.
Finally my attempts at a hanging basket have paid off!
Everyone I know and love is well
I have discovered interactive on-line bridge to play with three mates!
Happy days.
Stay well.
Lockdown
So three of us are locked down at home in the suburbs whilst the youngest daughter is still refusing to come home from university. The university has effectively closed but she still prefers to stay away leaving me with conflicted emotions, partly rejection and partly relief. She’s tricky and that wouldn’t play out well with the rest of us stuck at home.
My eldest and I are taking the allowed walk around the park, painting the careful 2m distance from any of the other people out in the sunshine. With the sun shining away it’s quite uplifting to be out, tempered with a fair bit of bitchy judgementalism when you see other people encroaching on each other’s space.
We’re lucky: we have a garden to enjoy and decent parks nearby that are not too crowded. I’m also one of those mad people who always overstocks the food cupboard and always books deliveries weeks in advance.
My partner is working from home, which is to say, holed up in the spare room (the child still at university) with a couple of computer screens and phone. It’s a relief that hes’ being kept busy and distracted from the “end of days” and from repeat counting of his thermometers.
Whether it’s true or not I can believe the stories of people coming out of family isolation in Wuhan only to immediately file for divorce. Enforced intimacy is a great way to destroy any relationship.
Things which may end up in divorce or murder include (but are not limited to):
- Getting up at the crack of dawn (loudly) and insisting on coming in and out of the bedroom looking for “stuff” instead of letting me sleep!
- Failing to clean up ones own mess.
- Stacking dirty dishes on top of the dishwasher, but not in the actual dishwasher.
- Complaining about the noise (or anything else actually) whilst holding a video conference at top volume with the bedroom door open.
- Constant temperature taking.
- Failing to carry out their share of the agreed housework.
- Flush the bloody toilet!
On the other hand there are plenty of reasons to be cheerful not limited to the fact that we’re all basically healthy or at least asymptomatic, that the sun is shining and the garden is lovely. We’re lucky to have enough space to afford each other some time alone and a garden that is a delight at the moment.
I have finally managed to rid every one of my toilets from limescale thanks to an acid wash specialist treatment or two.
Aside from that epic achievement, my gardener arrived yesterday convinced her job qualified as “key work”and absolutely refused to head home without completing all of the jobs she had planned. She gets paid weekly, and I was very clear (from a 2m distance) that she’d be paid whether or not my grass was mown, but she was insistent that clearing the weeds was an essential task and “Well I’m here now”
I was left feeling both a bit relieved (my garden will look lovely) and incredibly powerless (unable to evict her from MY garden). In some ways it was a peculiarly British feeling, since I could obviously have shouted or otherwise insisted but it would have felt rude…
My cleaner has stayed home with her husband and kids. We’ll keep paying her weekly wage as well. The tennis club has closed this week and although I’d like to keep paying my coach the amount I normally spend each week, I don’t think that he’d take the money. His wife works so they probably won’t starve but it’s not clear that the club will reopen once the apocalypse is over.
Looking through the Imperial College model currently in favour, this epidemic wave should peak and collapse by August but will be followed by subsequent waves, all hopefully less severe. It is, as yet, unclear as whether this virus creates an effective long term immunity, or whether it’s likely to mutate into a more or less dangerous versions over the coming years.
It is endemic though which means it isn’t going away, ever, but hopefully the worst will be contained and the health service capacity for critical care will not be swamped.
Stay well.
Representation
If you don’t go to university, if you’re not a “professional” who speaks for you in political terms? Who even knows what you want or what your aspirations might be for yourself and for your kids?
In theory, in a democracy, the majority should influence — some would even say determine — the distribution of income. In practice, this is not the case.
Over the past few decades, political scientists have advanced a broad range of arguments to explain why democracy has failed to stem the growth of inequality.
Most recently, Thomas Piketty, a French economist who is the author of “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” has come up with a straightforward answer: Traditional parties of the left no longer represent the working and lower middle classes.
In a January Power Point presentation, “Brahmin Left vs Merchant Right,” Piketty documents how the domination of the Democratic Party in the US (and of socialist parties in France) by voters without college or university degrees came to an end over the period from 1948 to 2017. Both parties are now led by highly educated voters whose interests are markedly different from those in the working class.
The result, Piketty argues, is a political system that pits two top-down coalitions against each other:
In the 1950s-60s, the vote for left-wing (socialist) parties in France and the Democratic Party in the US used to be associated with lower education & lower income voters. It (the left) has gradually become associated since 1970s-80s with higher education voters, giving rise to a multiple-elite party system: high-education elites vote for the left, while high-income/high-wealth elites for the right, i.e., intellectual elite (Brahmin left) vs business elite (merchant right).
Changes in the structure of the electorate emerged in force during a period of unprecedented upheaval in the 1960s, when a combination of liberation movements — committed to civil rights, women’s rights, sexual freedom, the student left, decolonization and opposition to the Vietnam War — swept across Europe and the United States.
In support of Piketty’s argument: In 1996, according to exit polls, the majority of voters who cast ballots for Bill Clinton were what demographers call non-college. That year, his voters were split 59 percent non-college to 41 percent college graduates. Twenty years later, the majority of voters for Hillary Clinton were college graduates, at 54.3 percent, compared with 45.7 percent non-college.
Exit polls show substantially larger numbers of college-educated voters than the surveys conducted by American National Election Studies. But the ANES data also shows a sharp increase in the percentage of voters with college and advanced degrees supporting Democratic presidential candidates. In 1952 and 1956, for example, the Democratic nominee, Adlai Stevenson, got 29 and 31 percent of the college-educated vote. In 2012, the most recent year for which ANES data is available, 53 percent of those with at least a college degree voted for Barack Obama.
One of the most important of Piketty’s conclusions is that constituencies that feel unrepresented by the new partisan configuration will be drawn to populism.
The Piketty report is a significant contribution to the growing collection of studies analyzing the inability of democratic forces to adequately counter inequality.
Five years ago, Adam Bonica, a political scientist at Stanford, published “Why Hasn’t Democracy Slowed Rising Inequality?” Economic theory, he wrote, holds that “inequality should be at least partially self-correcting in a democracy” as “increased inequality leads the median voter to demand more redistribution.”
Starting in the 1970s, this rebalancing mechanism failed to work, and the divide between the rich and the rest of us began to grow, Bonica, Nolan McCarty of Princeton, Keith T. Poole of the University of Georgia, and Howard Rosenthal of N.Y.U. wrote.
They cite five possible explanations.
- Growing bipartisan acceptance of the tenets of free market capitalism;
- Immigration and low turnout among the poor resulting in an increasingly affluent median voter;
- “Rising real income and wealth has made a larger fraction of the population less attracted to turning to government for social insurance.”
- The rich escalated their use of money to influence policy through campaign contributions, lobbying and other mechanisms; and finally,
- The political process has been distorted by polarization and gerrymandering in ways that “reduce the accountability of elected officials to the majority.”
In the five years since their essay was published, we’ve seen all of this play out; in the case of campaign contributions in particular, the authors provide strong evidence of the expanding clout of the very rich.
In recent decades, there has been a large increase in the number of people who contribute to political campaigns: In 1980, there were 224,322 individual contributions, the four authors write, and by 2012, that number grew to 3,138,564.
On the surface, those numbers would seem to suggest a democratization of campaign financing. In fact, as the courts have steadily raised the amount an individual can contribute, megadonors have become all the more influential.
The share of contributions donated by the top 0.01 percent of the voting age population grew from 16 percent in the 1980s to 40 percent in 2016.
In other words, if money buys influence over policy, the top 0.01 percent bought nearly triple the influence in 2016 that it purchased in the early 1980s.
Daron Acemoglu, an economist at M.I.T. who has stressed the power of economic elites to set the policy agenda, voiced some skepticism of Piketty’s analysis. In an email, he wrote that what Piketty found can be explained in large part by racial hostility, the adverse effects of globalization on white manufacturing workers, and the decline in social mobility:
It’s not a new thing. This is what George Wallace and Ronald Reagan were about also. Its current reincarnation is almost surely due to the fact that both globalization and technological changes have left behind vast swathes of the country. But why have these people found a home in the Republican Party, not in the Democratic Party? That’s less clear, but if I were to make a guess, I would say that this is related to the fact that economic hardship does not work by itself. It needs to tap into other grievances, and in the US context these have been related to pent-up hostility towards blacks and immigrants (and perhaps their own albeit slow upward mobility). If so, it is natural that it is the Republican Party, with its southern strategy and more welcoming attitude towards soft racism, that has come to house this discontent.
Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at Yale who writes extensively about inequality, praised Piketty’s work but noted that he and others
have argued that the Democrats were cross-pressured by rising inequality because they wanted to maximize campaign cash as well as votes and because they got most of their institutional support from a coalition of single-issue groups. This cross-pressure, in turn, contributed to their weak attempt to maintain the allegiance of the white working class.
Like Acemoglu, Hacker argues that the Piketty analysis does not place enough emphasis on race:
It doesn’t seem very fundamental to Piketty’s story. Yet it’s impossible to deny that the realignment of the parties around race created the opening for the GOP to gain the support of white voters — especially downscale white voters — by exploiting resentment of racial and ethnic minorities.
Dean Baker, a co-founder of the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research, was the sharpest critic of Piketty.
“I’m not sure this analysis is all that useful,” Baker wrote me.
I see Piketty is missing the way in which markets have been restructured to redistribute income upward and to take away options for reversing inequality and promoting growth in ways that benefit low and middle income workers.
Piketty, in Baker’s view, “sees the market outcomes as largely given and redistribution just means tax and transfer policy.”
Baker argues that correcting inequality requires adoption of a much broader policy agenda. Citing the argument in his book “Rigged,” Baker calls for radical reform of exchange rates, of monetary policy, of intellectual property rights and of the financial sector as well as reform of the institutional protection of doctors, dentists, and lawyers and of corporate governance rules that now allow “C.E.O.s to rip off shareholders.”
Baker is not optimistic about full-throated economic liberalism in the Democratic Party.
“Because the party has largely supported an agenda that redistributes upward, they have lost much of their working class base,” he wrote in his email to me:
The friends you keep matter. The speeches that folks like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama give at Wall Street firms are not a good look. The banks don’t hand you huge honorariums if they think you are going to take their money and put them in prison.
There is “an ongoing battle,” Baker continued,
in the Democratic Party as well as in most of the left parties across Europe. There are those who would like to accept inequality and focus exclusively on issues like gender equality and anti-racism. I would never minimize the importance of combating gender inequality or racism/nativism, but if that means ignoring the policies that have led to the enormous inequality we now see, that is not a serious progressive agenda.
If Democrats must adopt a broader agenda to counter inequality, Piketty’s study is indispensable. He demonstrates that the highly educated constituency currently controlling the party has been ineffective in protecting the material interests of the less well off.
For one thing, the well-educated leadership of the left is thriving under the status quo. The economic gains of those with college degrees — now, remember, the majority of the Democratic electorate — are shown in the accompanying graphic. From 1988 to 2012, the inflation-adjusted income of college graduates increased by 16 percent and for those with advanced degrees by 42 percent.
In contrast, those with some college but no degree saw a 1 percent increase; those with a high school degree saw a 0.3 percent income growth; and those without a high school degree saw their income decline by 13 percent.
There is no question that the Democrats’ loss of non-college white support has deep roots in the civil rights revolution of the 1960s. The fight for equal rights for African-Americans resulted in the full-scale regional realignment of the South toward the Republican Party and turned once solidly Democratic precincts in working class sections of Chicago, Boston, Milwaukee and other major cities into partisan battlegrounds.
These upheavals have left the party of the left ill-equipped to tackle not only inequality but economic mobility more broadly and with it the pervasive decline of much of what has become red America.
This in turn raises the question: Can a party split between an upscale wing that is majority white and a heavily minority working class wing effectively advocate on behalf of a liberal-left economic agenda? The jury is out on this question, but the verdict could very well be no.