Posted 10:06 PM by Angie Schultz

Iraqi Elections: A Pajama Occasion

As always, we must turn to the classics for understanding in these difficult times:

Mike: Okay, and there's nothing in between? It's either grain alcohol in back alleys or a happy world of rodents in feety pajamas?

Servo: Yes.

Crow: I mean, why is that so hard to accept?

Playlet re-enacted here, starring Stephen Green as Mike, Bob Herbert as Servo, and the rest of the media as Crow.

Posted 10:25 AM by Angie Schultz

Caliban's Mirror over Procrustes's Bed

InstantMan links to a post on WMD flip-flopping at the BBC on the Highway 99 blog, written by M.J. Smith (do check out the rest of the blog while you're there; it's a good 'un).

To make a long post short: M.J. reads A Higher Form of Killing, a history of chemical and biological warfare by Robert Harris and Jeremy Paxman. (Paxman is a big-shot BBC journalist.) This book was originally published in 1982; a new edition was put out in August of 2002, containing an extra chapter. This new chapter stressed the continuing relevance of their topic, citing, in particular, Iraq: "Every warning about the ease with which chemical and biological warfare (CBW) weapons could proliferate has been proved true by Saddam." The go into considerable detail, quoting UN weapons inspector Richard Butler, among others, and asserting, "The unsettling truth is that much of Iraq's CBW arsenal remains intact."

There's much more. M.J.'s interest is in the contradiction between Harris's and Paxman's assertion that "Iraq's CBW arsenal remains intact" and the BBC's spin that the British government (and, of course, George Bush) deliberately lied about Saddam's weapons. How can the BBC spin it this way when Paxman, one of their biggest guns, asserts that the weapons existed as late as August, 2002?

M.J. says that Paxman holds a position at the BBC corresponding to that of Walter Cronkite (in his day) or Dan Rather at CBS. If he says so. I don't know the Beeb well enough to know that it's true (the web site he cites shows that Paxman has a long resume, but it's difficult to gauge his importance from it).

Furthermore, Harris and Paxman must've relied on Western intelligence sources for their book -- surely they didn't go into Iraq and poke around themselves. Therefore if the information from the intelligence services was wrong, so was their book. Although it is true that they quoted people who were not in an intelligence service, such as the aforementioned Butler.

In any case, the apparent disconnect between Paxman's book and the BBC's current spin isn't as interesting to me as the tone of the excerpts M.J. quotes from that last chapter. One sentence that struck me as well as him was, "For twenty years, Iraq, under Saddam's leadership, has held up Caliban's mirror[*] to the West."

Western governments invented CB weapons in the first place. Western companies (witting or un) sold Saddam peaceful items that could be used to make weapons. Western intelligence was slow in recognizing what Saddam was doing. The US resists a "proper [international] arms control regime, with provisions to allow international inspectors to call, unannounced, at any time...."

In this chapter Saddam himself is treated like a force of Nature, like some type of dumb but deadly beast that has escaped due to the incompetence or arrogance or greed of the West. There's no use blaming the beast, for he's a beast, amoral -- unreasoning, one of the lesser breeds without the Law. He is not a moral actor, like Bush or Blair.

An objective observer might wonder what all the fuss is about. We're agreed it's a dangerous beast. Can we kill it? Yes, we can. Are we afraid to do it? Not really. Then why not?

I think the real reason is that many in the chattering classes see Saddam (and those like him) as Nemesis. He is our just deserts. He is the instrument of divine retribution, the payment for our wickedness, and the fact that he is a thousand times more wicked does not change this.

[*] I searched for the precise meaning of this phrase, and came up empty. This fellow also wondered what it meant. He came up with an Oscar Wilde quote about Victorian society, realism, and romanticism:

The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.

The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.

In other words, they wanted to see themselves in the mirror, but only if it showed them as beautiful, which they were not. In Harris and Paxman's imagination, Saddam is the West's ugly reflection. The reflection cannot act, it can only react. It cannot be faulted for what it shows. Saddam has no significance except to return the ugly image of the West.

Posted 2:55 PM by Angie Schultz

A Summers Storm in Winter

The other day, Harvard president Larry Summers caused a stir.

The president of Harvard University prompted criticism for suggesting that innate differences between the sexes could help explain why fewer women succeed in science and math careers.

Lawrence H. Summers, speaking Friday at an economic conference, also questioned how great a role discrimination plays in keeping female scientists and engineers from advancing at elite universities.

...

"It's possible I made some reference to innate differences," he said. He said people "would prefer to believe" that the differences in performance between the sexes are due to social factors, "but these are things that need to be studied."

There's a big discussion of this over at Asymmetrical Information.

Context is, if not everything, much. The context of the speech was a conference on "Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce: Women, Underrepresented Minorities, and their S. & E. Careers." Summers spoke at lunch, and specifically said he was going to "provoke" the participants. He noted that a number of factors could account for difference, including the long hours top scientists have to work, and the fact that women with children could be reluctant to put in those hours.

(Of course, no one ever brings that up when speaking of fathers who put in long hours, and we all know why that is: men (pace Lileks) usually manage to weasel out of childcare. Or, alternatively, women are culturally or biologically more inclined to place children above other concerns.)

Afterwards, Summers broached the possibility of innate differences. The NYT article makes his remarks sound reasonable in the context they were made, although that was not the universal opinion of the participants. (There wasn't a transcript; Summers spoke without notes, and I guess no one was recording his remarks.)

So I'm going to let Summers off the hook, here, and instead turn my attention to the peanut gallery, as represented by the commenters at Asymmetrical Information (and the numerous trackbacks thereto), and here at the Washington Monthly.

Many of the commenters are praising Summers for "bravely" going against the politically correct grain by saying what everybody surely knows. And after all, shouldn't these questions be investigated? We can't just ignore them because some people don't like the answers! That's contrary to the spirit of scientific inquiry!

Undeniably. But I'd be more sympathetic to their outrage if I thought they weren't more interested in sticking it to the PC "establishment" than they were in the actual answer. There's also the question of what, if anything, society (or Harvard) should do about it. If the differences are innate, why, we don't need to do anything about it! So sorry, ladies.

Let me mention a couple factors that I think have depressed the number of women in science. As you read, remember that the whole point of this discussion is to find out what we can do about this. Is there a way we can remedy it? Not everything is amenable to solutions by fiat.

In my experience, bright young men are encouraged to explore and express their gifts, whereas bright young women are encouraged to Sit Down and Shut Up. (As with everything I say here, this is by no means universal; it's only a trend I've noticed.) The "villains" here are not always men, but are frequently women. A consciousness of one's superiority is taboo in female society. Other women can accept the superiority, but the superior one herself must never acknowledge it. "You think you're better than us!" she is accused: a grave offense. You'd think that humility would be a very useful characteristic to foster, in anyone, but I'll explain below why it isn't.

Secondly, women are (or used to be) encouraged to think primarily of their future roles as wives and mothers, with careers coming a distant second. The summer before I went to grad school, my mother and I ran into a lady who'd been our neighbor years before. Her younger daughter and my sister had been very good friends. My mom told her that in the fall I'd be starting grad school, working toward a PhD in physics. "Oh," replied our former neighbor with an airy wave of her hand, "You'll get married and have ten kids and forget all about school!" She didn't say this accusingly, but as if this were a perfectly natural outcome. She wasn't the only one, either, and various aspects of this attitude kept popping up here and there. It definitely saps the morale a bit when any discussions of accomplishment (or anything else, really) get sidetracked by reference to the Holy Babies -- who has them, who doesn't, and when are you going to produce yours?

Thirdly, since science is dominated by men, male culture tends to be prevalent there, including some things that women tend to have a great deal of trouble with. The foremost of these, in my experience, is aggression. In science, it's very frequently not enough to be brilliant, you have to look brilliant. You have to get out there and dazzle 'em. For many people, this means giving people the elbow (sometimes literally) to get out in front of them. This is where the culturally-enforced female "modesty" comes into play.

It's difficult to write of this behavior without using the word "jerk", or worse, "asshole". I must remember that all cultures are valid, and that behavior which is perfectly innocuous, even encouraged, in one culture is prohibited in another. However, some men seem to be under the impression that big-dick swinging is itself a process of the scientific method. "That's the way it's been for years, honey," they'll tell you. "It's that way because it works." Uh, no. It's that way because it's that way. You have no idea what else will work, not having tried it.

Naturally, not all male scientists behave in this manner -- in fact in my experience the fraction is fairly low -- certainly lower than in the population at large. But I'm frequently shocked at how often the abrasive characters are given a pass by the much less abrasive men. I've seldom seen or heard of anyone having to suffer consequences for (what I would consider) overly aggressive behavior.

On the other hand, women are told constantly, from infancy, that People Are Watching. They are judging your looks, your clothes, and your behavior, and they will remember any unpleasantness or peculiarities, and hold them against you. So your function at all times is to be pleasant and avoid giving offense.

Several years ago I was interviewing in a large scientific institution, and I talked with one of the senior female members. We talked about the difficulties of women in science, and she said (heavily paraphrased) she was a Southerner, and had been raised to be a Lady, and she didn't think she should have to change her personality in order to do some science. Surely, she said, I felt the same way.

I told her that I did indeed know what she was talking about, but (again, heavily paraphrased) I would gladly turn into an asshole, if that's what it took to make a good scientist, but I didn't know how.

(I'll point out here that a scientific society completely dominated by women, with a traditional woman's culture, would not be paradise either. There'd be a premium placed on consensus, and playing well with others. Therefore we'd have to have lots of meetings about what sort of projects were worth doing, and we'd have to all be in agreement. And whatever we couldn't all agree on nicely would have to be thrown out, which would leave practically nothing. And any scientist who explored other avenues on her own, without the approval of the group, would be subject to censure for defying the collective will. In other words, it'd be a lot like the UN.)

So, what's the end result of this reckless waste of bandwidth?:

1) Part of what Summers said was certainly true (need for studies) although a woman might suggest he could've put it more carefully. Part of what he said (about his daughter and the trucks) was just fatuous.

2) On the other hand, Nancy Hopkins of MIT, did women no favors:

Nancy Hopkins, of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was one of the academics who walked out of the conference.

She said that, had she not done so, she "would have either blacked out or thrown up".

That quote's a little niffy; a Google news search turned up many quotes from her along those lines, all different. The WaPo reported that she said, "I felt I was going to be sick...My heart was pounding and my breath was shallow...I was extremely upset." The Chicago Sun-Times said it made her "nauseous" -- with quote marks in the original. Nevertheless, it's clear the poor thing needs some smelling salts and a lie down. Is it that raging hormonal imbalance again, sweetie?

3) On yet another hand, or perhaps a foot, men who gleefully trot out studies showing that men have better spatial abilities on alternate Thursdays during the full moon when there's an R in the month, and this completely explains any preponderance of men in science, so tough luck, girlies, are idiots.

4) The real question is, what can be done about this? There's no use wringing our hands over it if (as seems very unlikely at this point) discrepancies are entirely due to innate abilities, or forces beyond institutional control. For example, I don't believe the government can or should try to counteract the female tendency to concentrate on children over career. (This is not out of any demographic concern, but simply because it's a choice, whereas being discriminated against is not.)

5) Now, I know it seems to the conservatives like political correctness has ruled forever, and feminists have had society by the throat since the late Mesozoic, but it is not true. I'm old enough to remember when a female scientist or engineer was an uncommon and usually unwelcome sight. While some men were welcoming, and others at least tolerant, others resented us as an intrusion onto their male domain. That's always seemed ridiculous to me, but it's true: some men looked at their work environment as a chance to escape from women, and here women were coming to clutter it up! And this was only in the late '70s.

Most of these men had little if any idea of what women could do, and cared less. Left to themselves, they'd always somehow find a man for a job, no matter how qualified a woman might be.

6) And that's why I believe that affirmative action-type programs still have value (or, I should say, they did in the late '70s/early '80s). Spare me any indignation that the "best" person must be chosen for the job. When you've winnowed it down to the top five or ten candidates, there is no "best" -- they're all pretty much right for the job. At that point you have to go by less quantifiable factors, such as who's going to be a better "fit" to the local environment. This is where the women, no matter how qualified, generally got it in the neck, "Oh, but she just wouldn't make a good fit!" This is doubly useful, inasmuch as women would swallow that sort of thing easily, being a little more obsessive on the subject of fitting in.

(I must point out that there are those who somehow believe that affirmative action, rather than serving to prime the pump (so to speak) for women and minorities, ought to be some sort of permanent fixture, a redress for past grievances. Ha ha ha. No. One day it should be dismantled. But I don't know that we've come to that day yet.)

Blogging U. Chicago physicist Sean Carroll has an interesting post on this topic. He references this earlier post of his on the same topic, in which he says, It might be that the only way to achieve gender equality in science is to completely overhaul...society, which strikes me as a big project...

I agree with that last: I believe that the major factor in the under-representation of women in the sciences is not good old-fashioned mustache-twirling wickedness on the part of the male Establishment, but rather a continual low-level societal discouragement. Preferential hiring of women is not going to remove this discouragement all by itself (though I think it will help a little), but getting rid of it really isn't amenable to large-scale governmental action, or great lashings of cash.

Posted 3:35 PM by Angie Schultz

That Valuable Media Exposure

Pity poor James Lileks! He gets his first big-time media exposure in the WaPo, and they can't even get the name of his book right!

Very little in "Home Desecrations" (Crown Publishers, $23.95) is protected, which is too bad. Sunglasses or blinders would have helped in viewing rooms he captioned as "the visual equivalent of granulated glass in your eyes."

Ah, but that's further down in the story. I see that they got it right in the second paragraph:

The book, "Interior Desecrations: Hideous Homes From the Horrible '70s," is a full-throated rant against the decade of shiny op-art wallpaper, plaid upholstery and long-haired rugs in a palette dominated by orange, green and brown, everywhere brown.

Still, this is why we need Big Media, eh? Editors.

Suggested anti-blog motto for the Old Media:

Whatever happens
We have got
Our editors,
And they have not.

Just keep repeating it 'til it's true.

Posted 8:02 AM by Angie Schultz

Prostitutes All at Sea

Feast your orbs on this item on tsunami relief. The gist of the piece is a little muddied, wandering to and fro over several topics. Partly, though, it talks about the concerns that the local political groups and organizations have about foreign aid coming into to Aceh province.

For example, there's the Islamic Defenders Front, which the article rashly describes as an "extremist" group (it goes around smashing up bars). Their coordinator for Aceh, Farid Safri, expresses concerns about the foreign aid coming into the stricken province:

"We have to be careful," he said. "Maybe there are weapons packed in the aid boxes. And the Americans on their ship offshore, they usually have prostitutes on board, so we can't have them around for too long."

This is passed without direct comment by the article's author, Rachel Harvey, although a few paragraphs later, speaking more generally, she writes, "There is a mix of both paranoia and pride behind these sentiments."

Now, what is the ethics of this sort of thing?

If a source says something ripely stupid, are you under any obligation to report it, if you know it's stupid? And if you do report it, are you under any obligation to point out that it's stupid? Is Harvey being fair and balanced, when she quotes this directly? After all, she could've paraphrased it: "Farid Safri is worried about moral corruption from the prostitutes which, he says, Americans carry on board their ships." By this construction Harvey would distance herself from Safri's opinion, while still reporting it as an example of local thinking. Maybe that's too subtle for the BBC. Or is she meaning to take no position on whether American ships carry prostitutes?

Perhaps I am digging too hard for dirt. After all, it's not like the BBC has a history of quoting idiots without caveats.

"It was like a Hollywood film. They cried 'go, go, go', with guns and blanks without bullets, blanks and the sound of explosions. They made a show for the American attack on the hospital - action movies like Sylvester Stallone or Jackie Chan."

(At least Ms. Harvey names her source; the source of the above quote is ambiguous.)

Of course, you have to wonder how widespread any of these beliefs are. How hard did Ms. Harvey have to work before she turned up someone who was worried about the precious bodily fluids of the local Muslims? Was it just a few nutters, or is it really a common concern (i.e., a lot of nutters)? Surely a member of the respectable media wouldn't lend credibility to the fevered rantings of a few bozos...

Oh, dear.

Well, it's not like the BBC would spread stupid rumors like...uh oh.

(Prostitute story via "chevalier de st george", commenting on this Biased BBC post.)

Posted 11:07 AM by Angie Schultz

This Oeuvre Ain't Big Enough for the Two of Us, Pardner

This, I suspect, was the message wrapped around a brick and flung through James Lileks's window one dark morning in the early Nineties. It was unsigned, but there was no need for a signature, for Lileks knew it came from the hand of Dave Barry.

I got something rare and extra-special for Christmas: a new Lileks book. No, not Interior Desecrations (though I got that, too), but one of his older, out-of-print books: Notes of a Nervous Man, published in 1991. In that book (a collection of newspaper columns) we find that there was once a Darwinian struggle over who would occupy the ecological niche we now think of as the Barry Shale.

The first half of Nervous Man reads like second-rate Barry. Now, I don't mean to criticize when I say that. I like Dave Barry. These columns are much like Barry's oeuvre in that they cover such topics as fear of flying, home ownership, and hair loss (that is to say, fear of flying, fear of home ownership, and fear of hair loss). As we know, Barry was more successful in this niche, possibly because he was better at achieving le mot juste.

Whereas Lileks is content to describe apartment neighbors as "...the young couple in 3A who seem to be picking up extra income by working as megaphone testers", Barry would go further, e.g. "...working as megaphone testers for Screeching Weasel Records". Where Lileks writes, "...73 percent of all women agree that men are, as a rule, as appealing as garden slugs, although generally better with power tools," Barry would write, "...as appealing as garden slugs, although with more boogers". Thus we see how going the extra parsec secured Barry's position as Humorcolumnist Rex, a post he has recently abdicated.

There are a few pieces in the first half of the book that show glimpses of the Lileks to Come; I don't believe Dave Barry would think to discuss The Phone Book as Literature, for example. Toward the end of the book, we leave behind the facile yuks of Barrydom and enter the realms of thoughtful introspection which is the hallmark of Lileks today. That's where I started to get bored.

I was going to say that a little bit of ruminative disquisition goes a long way, and that Lileks lost me to ennui in the last third or so of the book. But I see it isn't the last third or so of the book, it's the last article in the book, "The Rainbow Tribe", covering the Rainbow Gathering, which apparently infested a national park in Minnesota in the late '90s or early '80s. While Lileks doesn't really romanticize them, I believe he credits the act of casting off civilization to scamper naked through the forest with more profundity than it deserves.

Speaking, sorta, of the hippydippy, one of the book's surprises is this little paragraph from "The Earth Is Not Our Buddy". The context ought to make itself obvious:

Given a choice between the two positions, I'd have to go with the liberals on this one, even if it means casting my lot with the pro-lichen crowd. They believe global warming is coming, and we should either change our ways or coat ourselves with the Colonel's special blend of eleven herbs and spices and prepare to be fried. If they are wrong, fine. Better that than saying global warming needs more study, and ending up twenty years hence reading travel stories on "Anchorage: Rio of the Pacific Northwest".

This is not the Lileks we know and love today. (Note to the Lileks of 1991: Anchorage has only six more years to grow the palm trees, white sand beaches, and tiki bars necessary to a tropical tourist trap. I don't think it's going to make it.)

In short, if you really love Lileks, the book is worth tracking down. I like his more recent books a lot better, though.

I'll leave you with one interesting passage:

I bring all this up because I think the image of me doing jumping jacks in the ditch while a military convoy passes by is an image for our times, and I want to claim it before one of those guardsmen writes a novel and swipes it.

No, I'm not going to explain that. Buy the book and find out. Page 175.

Posted 4:18 PM by Angie Schultz

Shut Up and Sit Down, Kid

A very sad story from the tsunami:

Tilly Smith, from Oxshott, Surrey, was holidaying with her parents and seven-year-old sister on Maikhao beach in Phuket, Thailand, when the tide rushed out.

As the other tourists watched in amazement, the water began to bubble and the boats on the horizon started to violently bob up and down.

Tilly, who had studied tsunamis in a geography class two weeks earlier, quickly realised they were in danger.

She told her mother they had to get off the beach immediately and warned that it could be a tsunami.

And her mother slapped her across the mouth and told her to shut the hell up, just what the hell did she know, anyway, and did she think she knew more than all these adults? Huh, Miss Smarty Pants? I don't care what that damned teacher of yours told you, he don't know shit and neither do you, so just shut the hell up. No, I'll tell you what you can do, you can just go straight up to the room for the rest of the day, because I am just Sick and Tired of listening to you talk.

So the little girl went back up to their room on the eighth floor of the hotel, and minutes later her parents were swept away by the tsunami, and have not been seen since.

No, wait! That's not right. That's what would have happened if the girl had had good old-fashioned parents -- the kind not afraid to exercise a little discipline -- instead of this lax, modern pair she has. What really happened was:

Her parents alerted the other holidaymakers and staff at their hotel, which was quickly evacuated. The wave crashed a few minutes later, but no one on the beach was killed or seriously injured.

In an interview with the Sun, Tilly gave the credit to her geography teacher, Andrew Kearney, at Oxshott's Danes Hill Prep School.

She said "Last term Mr Kearney taught us about earthquakes and how they can cause tsunamis.

"I was on the beach and the water started to go funny. There were bubbles and the tide went out all of a sudden.

"I recognised what was happening and had a feeling there was going to be a tsunami. I told mummy."

Yes, yes, the girl's family, plus about a hundred other people, were saved because her parents believed her. I suppose you could call that a happy story. But it was all due to bad parenting, damn it! Now she'll go around believing she's special, or something, and never learn her proper place in the world.

Via the very model of a modern Micklethwait at Samizdata, who apparently doesn't see the downside.