Opinion
Seven things you should know about the wackiest 'fiscal crisis' yet
Sometime in the next week, Congress will either get it together to pass a new budget resolution or the government will shut down (all but essential services). Two weeks after that, the federal government will reach its debt limit. If it is not raised…
Tea partying: When protest movements defend the interests of the ultra-rich
Four years ago, the modern tea party seemed to emerge from nowhere, leaving journalists bewildered and the public with few reference points to understand seemingly spontaneous rallies by middle…
Choice, for women, is not about biology. It's about basic equality
The battle over abortion rights is simply a flashpoint in women's pervasive experience of being deprived of control of our destinies
One of the most frustrating things about being "pro-choice" is the assumption that the only choice we care about has to do with our bodies. Really, the choices we're talking about have to do with preserving, or expanding, all of the choices available to women. The choices we make about our bodies, yes, but also choices about our time, our minds, our emotions, our money, our thoughts, our votes and our voices.
There is not a woman reading this right now that hasn't experienced a reminder, probably quite recently, maybe even today, that her choices are more limited than a man's. This week, I asked the Twitter universe for examples of this – examples of how women don't have the options that men do in all kinds of situations. Some of the answers were funny, a lot were serious, all of them meant something. A few favorites:
@anamariecox not always on hairstyles, try wearing hardhat w/ponytail, but don't have to worry about shaving for respirator fit (beards bad)
— Geeky Girl Engineer (@gkygirlengineer) September 18, 2013
@soonergrunt @anamariecox I would have been a flight medic, would have made a sniper both closed at time. Men aren't thrilled with 11bravo.
— JessicaRRG (@Mumaroo1) September 18, 2013
@lechatsavant @anamariecox not diagnosed with adhd until my 40's because everybody knows only boys have adhd
— Knuck (@knck1es) September 18, 2013
@anamariecox when you see a woman executive, chances are she's in HR because, you know, vagina means soft skills, right?
— Lois Lipstick Long (@LipstickLong) September 18, 2013
And a last one, kind of meta and very sad:
@anamariecox Not wanting to share incidents here to avoid dealing with potential backlash when colleagues/professional contacts see it
— Teresa Genaro (@BklynBckstretch) September 18, 2013
(You can find almost the entire thread here.)
My own first clear memory of realizing that my future would be different than a boy with the same dreams was in high school. I read Jack Kerouac's On the Road, and, like most 15 year-olds who read On the Road, I immediately wanted to take off across the country myself. That Kerouac was sexist I don't think I realized or maybe chose to ignore. But what I knew in my gut was that I probably would never be able to make that trip, certainly not by myself.
Since then, there have been other reminders. As I said, almost daily ones. But my own experience is less important than the fact that I even something that specific didn't just happen to me.
When I asked the Twitterverse for those examples, in fact, one of the very first responses was from another journalist, who shared her frustration over not being able to safely take the same assignments as male colleagues – which is the adult, professional version of my own frustrated Kerouacian dream, and one I share today. I have male colleagues who have reported from war zones, profiled Somali pirates, gone undercover in secret societies, and they've written amazing pieces – stories that I will never get the chance to add to myself.
It's true that you or I could do any one of those stories. What's different for me, for us is the effort, the support needed, and the danger involved.
In the implicit closing down of options, in the subtle way power is exerted over our choices, in the diffuse and invisible discouragement, the lack of any one person to blame … that narrowing of choices in the assignments I can take or in the places you can go or the sports our daughters can play – all of these are minor analogues to the more intensely personal and dramatically physical shutting-down of women's choices about their bodies.
Yes, there are villains in the story of needless access restrictions and "safety" regulations; yes, there are specific lawmakers and activists. There are people we can rally against. But what makes the battle for reproductive choice so tricky is that while it's easy to defeat or expose the obvious assholes (Todd Akin), the rhetoric and tactics of our opposition draw on the existing and pervasive forms of institutionalized sexism that don't have an obvious connections to pregnancy or contraception. Some examples of what I mean:
• Laws that require practioners to have hospital privileges or that bar the use of telemedicine in reproductive health, but allow it for non-gendered procedures, draw on the idea that women's bodies are inherently more mysterious and delicate, and that they must be protected against imaginary threats.
• Laws that mandate ultrasounds (pdf) or counseling (pdf), or both, draw on the idea that women don't know their own bodies, or don't realize the consequences of their decisions. This despite the fact that today most women seeking abortions – up to 72% – are already mothers. They know what's happening to them, the connection between what's happening to them and the potential for a child.
• Barring abortion in all cases except for when the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest relates to the belief that in any other situation, a woman's unwanted pregnancy is "her fault", that a woman who decides of her own free will to have sex is tacitly agreeing to become pregnant – because the only real reason for a woman to have sex is, of course, to get pregnant.
• Waiting periods, and multiple clinic visits, hinge on the underlying belief that women are prone to hasty, "emotional" decisions, that they must be protected from their own hysterical behavior. This despite surveys that show almost 90% of women who seek abortions are "highly confident" about their decision before they contact a provider.
This assumption of flightiness, that women who want to end their pregnancies haven't made a rational decision, underlies almost all the justifications for limiting women's access to providers of reproductive healthcare. The decision to end a pregnancy involves emotions, it generates emotions, but it's not an emotional decision. People who are anti-choice disparage the abortion decision as one made to "get out of" being pregnant, as one made out of selfishness or hedonism. But any woman who's faced an unwanted pregnancy knows that the decision to end it carries its own negative consequences. I'm not talking about pseudo-scientific warnings about "post-abortion syndrome" or any permanent mental or spiritual or physical impairment, but just a weight of knowledge that inevitably follows the decision to refuse what we know to be a gift, in exchange for a different kind of gift.
Any real choice also has consequences; any freedom worth having has a cost. When we argue for choice, choice of any kind, we are not arguing that we want something for nothing. We are arguing for the right to pay the cost that men pay, and get the same benefit in return. To do the same work that men do, and get the same pay. To achieve what they've achieved and not have it taken away.
When I opened up that conversation on Twitter, I knew that there would be pushback.
A lot of the pushback took the form of "men suffer too!" I have some sympathy for this argument. Gender roles constrain men, though they usually constrain men only when they want to exercise a behavior that's considered feminine. Men don't suffer when they act like men; they experience bias when they want to do something that women do. What's more, the gender bias is rarely (not never, but rarely) enshrined in law. Imagine if there was a waiting period for Viagra.
Also, I would gladly trade some of the so-called "advantages" women have for, say, equal representation in politics. You can have my Jimmy Choos. Give me Governor Wendy Davis.
Most of the negative commentary on Twitter was just sarcasm and mockery – laughing at the idea that having to pay more for alterations was part of the "war on women". Two things on that: first, any time women are reminded that they don't have the same freedoms and benefits that men have matters; and second, invalidating the discussion as trivial kind of proves the point that we need to have it.
That mockery and pushback are also a hint at the most powerful tool we have in claiming the choices we've been denied: to speak out about them. To call out the sexism we experience as sexism. This can be exhausting, I admit. I think most of us choose to not do it all the time; it could turn into a full-time job. (That's mine!)
Everyone can choose their own limits about these things, pick her own battles. It helps to have a sense of humor. But we do have to talk about it.
Not talking about institutionalized, invisible and everyday, "trivial" sexism allows it not just to persist, but persist in ways that other women (and men!) don't even recognize. I give credit to a lot of the men who watched that Twitter discussion unfold and wrote that they "didn't realize" what we faced. Didn't realize that, yes, we notice when there aren't women's teams on television, or women's names on the ballot, or that our pants don't fit, or that garage mechanics overcharge us.
I worry that some women might not realize that those forms of sexism are pervasive but not permanent. Things can change. Things do change. But we have to talk about them first.
• This column is a version of a speech the author gave at NARAL-Pro-Choice Minnesota's "The Power of Choice" event on 19 September
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
If Paul Ryan really listened to Pope Francis he would oppose cruel cuts to food stamps
As Congress considers cruel and barbaric attacks against the poor embodied by efforts to impose massive cuts in the food stamp program — cuts that would make the poor more poor, the hungry more hungry, the needy more needy and the ill more ill —…
America's gun disease is a national security issue
The spate of shootings in the US and the lack of political will to tackle gun control shows the country as a basket case, not a model state
If this isn't a matter of national security, what is? When 13 people end up dead at a US military base, that surely crosses the threshold – putting America's problem with guns into the category reserved for threats to the mortal safety of the nation. At its narrowest, Monday's massacre at the Washington navy yard is a national security issue because it involved hostile entry into what was meant to be a secure military facility. Plenty will now focus on how a man twice arrested in gun-related incidents was able to gain such easy access to the nerve centre of the US navy. There will be inquiries into the entry-pass system, use of contractors and the like.
But that would be to miss the wider point. America's gun sickness – which has turned massacres of this kind into a fairly regular, rather than exceptionally rare occurrence – endangers the US not solely because it can lead military personnel to lose their lives, nor even because it can lead to the murder of schoolchildren, as it did at Sandy Hook elementary school last year, or the death of young movie-goers, as it did in Aurora, Colorado, also last year – dreadful though those losses are.
The foreign policy experts who gather in the thinktanks and congressional offices not far from the navy yard often define national security to encompass anything that touches on America's standing in the world. That ranges from its ability to project military force across the globe to its attractiveness, its "soft power". For decades, this latter quality has been seen as one of the US's primary assets, central to its ability to lead and persuade other nations.
But America's gun disease diminishes its soft power. It makes the country seem less like a model and more like a basket case, afflicted by a pathology other nations strive to avoid. When similar gun massacres have struck elsewhere – including in Britain – lawmakers have acted swiftly to tighten controls, watching as the gun crime statistics then fell. In the decade after the rules were toughened in Australia in 1996, for example, firearm-related homicides fell by 59%, while suicides involving guns fell by 65%.
But the US stays stubbornly where it is, refusing to act. When President Obama last tried, following the deaths of 20 children and six staff at Sandy Hook at the end of 2012, his bill fell at the first senate hurdle. He had not proposed banning a single weapon or bullet – merely expanding the background checks required of someone wanting to buy a gun. But even that was too much. The national security pundits who worry how a US president is perceived when he is incapable of protecting the lives of innocent Syrians abroad should think how it looks when he is incapable of protecting the lives of innocent Americans at home.
On guns, the US – so often the world leader in innovation and endeavour – is the laggard, stuck at the bottom of the global class. Bill Clinton perfectly distilled the essence of soft power when he said in 2008, "People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power." He was right. But every time a disturbed or angry individual is able to vent his rage with an assault weapon, killing innocents with ease, the power of America's example fades a little more.
@Freedland
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
The 5 stages of climate denial are on display ahead of the IPCC report
Posted on 16 September 2013 by dana1981 The fifth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report is due out on September 27th, and is expected to reaffirm with growing confidence that humans are driving global warming and climate change. In…
[Image via Gage Skidmore, Creative Commons licensed]
Jesus is having a moment in literary fiction
Novelists such as Colm Tóibín and Naomi Alderman are breathing new life into the gospels
If you haven't read Colm Tóibín's The Testament of Mary, you may know it as the short one on the Booker shortlist (and therefore not a bad place to start). It has only 104 pages. But what makes it really striking – in addition to its compelling narrator, lyrical physical evocation of its time and place and bombshell ending – is the fact that it is another novel about Jesus.
Jesus is having a moment in literary fiction. Novelists can't get enough of him. In September 2012, Naomi Alderman's The Liars' Gospel was published – a month before Tóibín's book. The year before that came Richard Beard's Lazarus is Dead, and before that Philip Pullman's The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. More allegorically, JM Coetzee's Childhood of Jesus appeared earlier this year.
"There have definitely been more novels about Jesus recently," says Stuart Kelly, who is on the judging panel for this year's Booker. He thinks they might be a reaction to the current situation in the Middle East, or "the gauche and strident atheism of the likes of [Richard] Dawkins. People can argue what they like about the new atheism, but what it doesn't do is explain why this story has had such a hold over the human imagination for 2,000 years."
So why has it? Rowan Williams, the former archbishop of Canterbury, has read the novels by Pullman, Jim Crace (whose 1997 book Quarantine is about Jesus's 40 days in the desert) and some of the Coetzee. He thinks the story in the gospels intrigues novelists because: "It is a story freighted with the most immense irony imaginable – the decisive embodiment of divine action and purpose and power in the human world turns out to be not only a wandering peasant shaman, but a figure who fails to persuade and ends up humiliated and executed."
"Decisive" these portraits are not, however. Tóibín's Mary is determined not to oblige the gospel-writers seeking to preserve the teachings of her son (she can't bring herself to say his name). They seem more interested in the story than in the truth, and Mary's son comes across as an annoying figure with a loud voice and weird clothes who takes up too much pavement space – a sort of first-century hipster. Alderman's Miryam differs by obliging a follower by telling him what he wants to hear about her pregnancy. "She knows that the story she is telling is a lie, but she says it anyway … because it brings her comfort to see that he believes it."
As that last sentence suggests, the writing of the gospels is woven into the plot of both Alderman's and Tóibín's books. Perhaps the story of Jesus's life bears novelistic reiteration partly because it has always been told by multiple voices – not only Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, but many more whose versions were not included in the Bible.
That duplication and overlapping of narratives must create holes and folds in which novelists can work, to narrativise the contradictions and build new worlds in the gaps. After all, each telling carries its own truths, and the collective effect of their variation is to suggest there is no such thing as a gospel truth – just lots of gospel stories.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
How the U.S. government inadvertently created Wikileaks
I was in Germany for Chaos Congress 2009, a hacker conference, and after attending a series of talks I was headed back to my hotel when I spotted Julian Assange. This predated my working as a project manager at DARPA…
Google Glass looks silly now, but we'll all be wearing mini-computers soon
An open-mind about new technology will help lead us to discover endless possibilities for its use in our daily lives
I have a nostalgic memory from my childhood that conjures up that youthful sensation of limitlessness, of the feeling that the day will be so long and full of opportunity that it couldn't possibly be filled.
It was a full hour until my best friend was due to arrive and, I'd spent a restless minute or two fidgeting by the front door in anticipation. To an eight-year-old, an hour seemed like waiting until the end of time.
Then, time seemed elongated, as if without all that assumed knowledge and the prejudices of experience, the perception of time was changed. This is a blissful, open-mindedness with which to view the world, learning by doing, getting stuck in. But that openness of mind seems extremely hard to retain into adulthood.
There is an easy currency in the curmudgeonly tradition of dismissing anything new, a default superiority given to wry scepticism over youthful enthusiasm and intrigue. In other words, technologists have to work damn hard to get ideas accepted by the mainstream and there's a tediously charted route through uninterest and scepticism, the ridicule and hype of early adopting, the undulation of that scrutiny and eventual, often reluctant, acceptance. And then before you know it, everybody has a mobile phone!
This is not to be confused with the vital scrutiny of new technologies and their place in our lives; one such example is the personal privacy implication of the Memoto lapel camera, which automatically takes nearly 3,000 pictures throughout the day. And then there are the Guardian's revelations that the US National Security Agency has systemised access to swaths of our online activity – nothing less than a devastating crisis of trust for the consumer web and deserving of a separate analysis. That crisis also illustrates how vital it is that we understand the risks of the technologies we rely on daily, rather than absolving ourselves of responsibility for our online lives to others who allegedly know better.
Often under-considered in our attitude to new technologies is that the human side of engaging and improving that technology is half the point. Technologists present us with the tool and we help work out what it can do; the shopfront for mobile apps was built by the technologists, but their success was down to hundreds of thousands of developers and designers who had ingenious ideas about useful or entertaining things to build. Google Glass, another of a swath of wearable technologies slowly drifting into the public consciousness, is an exciting, challenging case in point.
There is no app store for the life-augmenting tech of Google Glass yet, but its success depends on it. So what can our open-minded imaginations – to recall that sensation of limitlessness and exploration – conjure up? A speaker by our ear, a camera for stills and video, voice commands and a small, basic screen in our peripheral vision. Forget that you'll feel silly wearing them (because you felt silly and unsure when you first used your pager/mobile/Skype) and think of the opportunity. It could be great for sport, with live radio coverage playing into your ear and statistics displayed. Or maybe for travel, where the headset will translate everything you see and hear instantly. Boom! Another industry disrupted. All in a day's work for Google.
Rethinking the mini-computer that is our smartphone makes sense. Our mobile lozenge is a legacy format that started with the candlestick telephone, a format determined by the size of the technology and the dimensions of the human body. We deserve better! We are comfortable with a watch format because we know it and Samsung's Galaxy Gear or the Apple iWatch combine that format with the success of wearable fitness devices, like FitBit. But add new sensors, as well as imaginative software, into these mini-computers and the impact could be significant. Non-invasive blood testing will soon be a reality, transformative for diabetics who will no longer have to puncture themselves several times a day, as well as those who have to monitor cholesterol.
To scratch the surface of what's possible: health apps will be able to monitor those blood test results, and sync with the restaurant as the wearer walks in, to suggest the most suitable low-GI or low-cholesterol meal. The behavioural implications could be profound, but we need to be interested in understanding and exploring the potential so that we are ready for the debate about who has access to this data, and whether it could ever be shared with a health insurance provider.
Picasso reportedly said computers were useless because they could give only answers. It's a beautiful idea that without human inspiration, without knowing the questions we need to solve, we can't create anything really powerful. But he also told his lover and fellow artist Françoise Gilot he saw painting "as a form of magic, designed as mediator between this strange hostile world and us". Perhaps that's the best way to see technology, and with the limitless possibilities of an open mind.
Breaking the mold
Free with every purchase of Sugru is the wonder of what you ever did without it. It looks like play-dough, but dries as a flexible, silicon rubber. The real delight is the playful, hack-it-better mentality of users, who have created glow-in-the-dark tent pegs, a kettle for the visually impaired and camera housing on a helium balloon that took photographs of the Earth from 100,000ft. Its appeal is the ethos of modifying and personalising mass produced products, and in repairing rather than throwing them away.
The magic of old tech
Technology of an even older kind at the Proms recently, where I was mesmerised by Janine Jansen of the Orchestre de Paris leading Benjamin Britten's Violin Concerto. Whatever the technological secrets behind that Stradivarius sound – wood infused with potassium borate, or an unidentified music – it was the elemental technology of a 286-year-old violin and the manipulation of horsehair, gut and precious metal that created all that magic. With more than a touch of artistic genius, too.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
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