Opinion
Consistently wrong: Larry Summers' record should rule him out of the Fed chairmanship
As a general rule in life – and certainly, in applying for a job – your record counts. If you've had a history of alienating people, being consistently wrong on the biggest issues in your field and screwing up – say, by helping set the stage (pdf) for the worst recession since the Great Depression – it's time to look for a new career.
But that's not, apparently, how life works out for Larry Summers, the fervent champion of deregulation and paid Wall Street consultant confirmed in last week's presidential press conference to be a leading contender as Obama's pick for the next chairman of the Federal Reserve.
That's really too bad, because if Larry Summers replaces Ben Bernanke in what is the top economic post in the largest economy in the world when Bernanke steps down in January, we – meaning the overwhelming majority of American workers and taxpayers – will all likely suffer the consequences.
Doubts about Summers' fitness for the job abound. A paid consultant to Citigroup, hedge fund DE Shaw and other companies, he is immersed in Wall Street both personally and professionally, posing the question of how he can possibly be trusted to regulate banks. He was also famously among the pushers of the deregulatory obsession that gripped Washington in the 1990s and early 2000s, which sowed the seeds of the financial crisis that cost our economy at least $14tn.
Let's also not forget the massive risks he took with Harvard University's endowment while serving as president, which cost the university more than $1bn, and his astonishing comments on women's lack of "intrinsic aptitude" in math and science.
Then, there's his defense of Enron during the California energy crisis. And not forgetting the weird, offensive memo he signed while chief economist at the World Bank that suggested dumping toxic wasted in third world countries.
So far, so familiar, perhaps. But what comes up less often is Summers' approach to workers and the labor market. It's not widely known, but in addition to containing inflation and regulating banks, one of the Fed's mandates is to ensure maximum employment and maintain a robust job market. Bernanke has enraged critics on the right, in fact, by keeping Fed policy since the recession focused on this aspect of its role.
But how well would Summers fare on meeting this responsibility?
Although he's recently been talking a good game, claiming he cares about the ongoing unemployment crisis, Summers' past remarks and his record tell a different story: that he lacks understanding about how the labor market works, and has no empathy for people who have been unceremoniously ejected from the job market – thanks to the financial crisis Summers had a hand in creating.
Check out this entry by Summers in the 2007 "Encyclopedia of Economics", created by the free-market foundation, Liberty Fund Inc. In it, Summers effectively blames jobless workers – and wacky programs like unemployment insurance – for long-term unemployment.
Under the header, "What Causes Long-Term Unemployment?" Summers writes:
Unemployment insurance increases the measure of unemployment by inducing people to say that they are job hunting in order to collect benefits … Government assistance programs contribute to long-term unemployment ... by providing an incentive, and the means, not to work.
Nowhere does Summers mention that macroeconomic conditions – like, say, a deep recession that follows decades of deregulation, downsizing and outsourcing – could explain why workers are sitting on the sidelines. No, it's those pesky workers, who are taking advantage of government largesse to remain idle.
Is this the person we want presiding over the Fed's mandate of maximum employment?
Summers' apparent suspicion of workers stands in stark contrast to his faith in Wall Street and big financial institutions (pdf). After pushing for the repeal of key provisions of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act – which had separated commercial and investment banking and prevented proprietary trading – and battling regulation of the derivatives that helped cause the financial crisis, Summers now opposes efforts to break up megabanks to save taxpayers from the too-big-to-fail problem. (Is it a coincidence that his friends at too-big-to-fail Citigroup secured $45bn in taxpayer funds in the 2008 bailout?)
Clearly, Summers – who has amassed a fortune of between $17m and $39m consulting for financial firms and other companies – is Wall Street's man, not Main Street's. Yet, his spokesperson talks about how Summers' "broad exposure to different parts of the economy gives him a unique perspective on what makes America work." Note that these "different parts of the economy" do not include much interaction outside the financial district with the 155m-plus workers and would-be workers in the US.
Such isolation from working people does not bode well for a Summers Fed chairmanship. There are times when a Fed chairman has to choose between expansionary policies that support job growth and benefit workers and policies aimed at containing inflation that tend to benefit Wall Street. That choice is likely to sharpen as the US economy continues its uneven, halting recovery. I think it's clear which way Summers would lean.
The Federal Reserve has already come to accept a so-called natural rate of unemployment of 6.5% – a supposed post-recession new normal. This rate of unemployment ought to be wholly unacceptable for the way it wastes human potential, holds down wages, and slows economic growth. I haven't yet seen Summers weigh in on the "natural unemployment rate", but I fear he will be just fine with 6.5%. After all, the plague of long-term joblessness is apparently the fault of those would-be workers sitting at home, watching reruns of "Here Comes Honey Boo Boo" as they collect their government checks.
Critics often take Obama to task because his soaring rhetoric doesn't translate into policy achievements that help working people and the middle class. Although it's true that Obama doesn't control the architecture of our economy, he very clearly does control the choice of who will lead the Fed. Appointing Summers would mean embracing a leading representative of the Wall Street players who brought our economy to the brink, gutting retirement accounts and kicking workers out of homes and jobs en masse.
These days, scrutiny of job applicants is especially intense, as employers subject them to drug tests, credit checks and endless interviews. One slip-up, and you're out of the running. But as Larry Summers emerges as a prime contender for Fed chairmanship, it's clear that for him, the same rules don't apply.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
[Image via the World Economic Forum, Creative Commons licensed]
Psychology's answer to trolling and online abuse
If the 'sleep of reason produces monsters' then psychological science offers the tools to awaken it
Do we each harbour a dark passenger? A malevolent psychopath? A fragile narcissist? Contrary to popular belief, decades of psychological research shows that anyone is capable of aggression, cruelty and violence. The "self" is a murky mixture of light and shade.
Lately the dark side seems to be winning. On Thursday, Downing Street called for a boycott on the website ask.fm following the tragic death of Hannah Smith. Meanwhile, the barrage of threats directed at Caroline Criado-Perez and Stella Creasy has led to several arrests and forced Twitter to work on better ways of handling abuse. Beyond triggering action and debate, these cases have fuelled the growing realisation that online abuse is disturbingly common, especially for young girls and women with public profiles.
While most of us agree there is a problem, much less has been said about possible solutions. Are our only options punitive or regulatory? As law blogger David Allen Green explains, simply banning or criminalising a behaviour doesn't make it magically disappear. Could there be more effective ways to quell online abuse without stifling freedom of speech or censoring society's most vulnerable?
Psychology may hold a big piece of the puzzle. Nearly 10 years ago, the American psychologist John Suler argued that online environments unleash aspects of our personality that we normally keep under guard – a phenomenon he referred to as the online disinhibition effect.
Suler's basic idea was that by masking their identities, abusers not only avoid accountability for their behaviour but also dissociate their online selves from their real-world selves. In real life, aggressive behaviour triggers an immediate reaction from a victim – a change in facial expression, tone of voice, body language, perhaps even violence. But in the online world these deterrents are missing or delayed, which helps abusers see their victims as faceless, imaginary cutouts who have no feelings and are unworthy of empathy.
Many aspects of Suler's theory remain untested, but a recent Israeli study found that people were less likely to issue online threats under their true identity, suggesting that anonymity is one contributing factor. However, the researchers also found that the strongest inhibitor of online aggression wasn't anonymity per se but the act of maintaining eye contact. In other words, anonymity may lay the path for aggression but the lack of social feedback is what drives the abuser on. So what can be done to reshape the cognition of an abuser? Here are five psychological interventions that might help. While none are proven to curb online abuse, they can be effective at boosting self-control, empathy and mood.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy
This approach is grounded in the idea that changing patterns of thought can alter our emotions and behaviour. In one form of CBT called "stress inoculation training", patients begin by identifying triggers that provoke reactions of anger or aggression. They then practise self-statements to counteract their usual responses, such as "This isn't important enough to get angry about" or "I shouldn't take this personally". Some evidence suggests that CBT may be effective in reducing aggression, though whether it leads to real-world benefits for antisocial behaviour has been questioned.
Cognitive Bias Modification
Cognitive bias modification uses a range of different strategies to correct imbalances in attention or emotion. Psychologists from the University of Bristol recently showed the promise of this approach using a computerised experiment in which participants were trained to recognise happiness in ambiguous facial expressions. Interestingly, the researchers found that this simple training regime can correct negative emotional bias and reduce aggression in adolescents admitted to a youth programme.
Inhibition Training
This new approach is based on the idea that we can improve our self-control through practice. Recent studies have found that training people to start and stop very simple actions, such as pressing a button, can make them less impulsive – reducing the tendency to gamble or eat junk food. These benefits might also be enhanced by mild electrical stimulation of the prefrontal cortex, a brain region that is important for learning and decision-making. As yet, we don't know whether inhibition training reduces antisocial behaviour, but the signs are promising because of strong links between self-control and aggression.
Empathy Training
One of the hallmarks of an online abuser is a lack of empathy – a trait that is also shared by sexual and violent offenders. Strategies to enhance empathy in these more serious offender groups include things like taking the perspective of the victim, writing letters of apology, reading victim impact statements, viewing footage of victims talking about the offence, and group therapy with role-play. Although controlled trials of empathy training are lacking, this type of rehabilitation is theoretically very promising for treating online aggression.
Preventative measures
Can we stop online abuse before it happens? One approach may be to shape online environments in ways that encourage prosocial rather than antisocial behaviour. As we saw above, maintaining eye contact can reduce aggression, and simply presenting images of eyes can make people more generous and supportive of the public good. So could something as simple as placing more eyes on web pages temper our aggression?
Looking deeper, perhaps we should also be teaching children the importance of maintaining a tolerant moral compass even when their identity is masked and normal social cues are missing. Sooner or later, society must accept that many of today's children will grow up to have online identities that are every bit as real as their offline selves. Education at a young age on how to build an online identity without surrendering the morals we value offline could help eliminate the trolls and cyberbullies of the future.
Psychological interventions aren't a universal solution for online abuse, and using them doesn't sidestep the need to pursue technical, social and legal avenues. But one thing is for sure: keeping our dark passengers in the back seat will require everything psychological science can offer.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
How should you protect yourself from cyber surveillance?
The more research I've done on security, the more worried I've become about our ability to keep up with the bad guys
What are your risks in this era of surveillance, hacking and sloppy software coding? It depends. So what precautions should you be taking? Same answer: it depends.
That's a pretty unsatisfying bit of advice, isn't it? Yet it's a core truth of digital security. You should be concerned, very concerned, but in order to make decisions about your own security measures you should first figure out which threats you're likely to face.
Over the next several months I'll be posting a number of pieces here about how you can do a better job of protecting your privacy and staying secure. Understanding what's at risk – and that not all threats are equally daunting – is a key to how you should respond.
Here's an example: every summer, thousands of computer hackers and security experts flock to a sweltering Las Vegas. They assemble at two of the most important annual conferences in the field, DEF CON and Black Hat, where they compare notes about their increasingly complex and worrisome fields.
DEF CON bills itself as the largest hacker gathering in the world. I've attended several times as a member of the press. Before I departed for Las Vegas last week, the organizers sent me a pre-conference email with a long list of cautionary measures I, as a journalist, should take before arriving, during the gathering and after I get home. It's a sobering document. Here are several of the many useful suggestions (I'll be posting the entire thing on my personal blog soon):
Beware of public Wi-Fi. Do not use any wireless networks at DEF CON or the airport unless you want to be hacked aggressively.
Conferences are a whirlwind of information and events so be sure to keep all of your accounts secure and within your control. Create and use a password strategy to ensure that confidential emails containing breaking news are not compromised. A few tips to creating your strategy:– Use a pattern on the keyword instead of words from the dictionary.– Rotate this pattern regularly. Change your passwords after each conference.– Use a unique password for each important account.– Be careful when selecting password hints or security questions as the answers can often be easily guessed using information you've posted to social sites.– Do not send passwords in clear text.– Change your passwords before you leave and as soon as you get home.
Shield RFIDs. Keep your RFID credit cards, keys and IDs at home or in a special wallet. They can be legally scanned from over 200ft away.
Leave important data and devices at home. The safest way to protect your data and devices is to leave them at home. Assume all information and devices you bring to the event may be compromised. Many attendees bring a burner laptop and phone just for this event. If you delete data from your devices, make sure to shred the data so it really is gone. You could also bring a paper and pen. There are no known remote access attacks for this measure.
I don't want to suggest that you need to take all of these precautions at all times – unless you are worried, and have good reason to worry, that you are a specific target of highly trained surveillance experts and/or hackers. You probably aren't on a routine basis.
But you do need to consider what security experts call your personal "threat model" – what you, based on reality and not paranoia, believe are the likely threats to your own computing and communications on a day-to-day basis. So if you are a political activist or revolutionary working for regime change in a dictatorship, your threat model is among the most severe: you should assume that you are the target of concerted efforts by your government to find out what you are doing, where you're doing it, and what you are discussing with others.
But if you are a typical American holding a typical job, you should not make the assumption that the US government has specifically targeted you for surveillance – though, as we've learned from the Edward Snowden leaks about the National Security Agency and other federal bodies, you've been included in a dragnet surveillance of all Americans' communications to one degree or another.
The advice I received from the DEF CON folks was specific to that event, and daunting. I left my regular laptop at home, bringing instead an older one on which I'd installed a fresh operating system and zero personal documents. When I got home I reinstalled the operating system, wiping the previous files away. I didn't use the conference Wi-Fi at all, and paid cash for everything instead of using credit cards. And so on.
I'm less worried when I'm on regular business trips, though, some of the conference discussions gave me the shivers – the state of computer and communications security is iffy at best and horrendously porous at worst. (See this story about the ridiculous insecurity of Wi-Fi routers, for example.) With too few exceptions, the technology industry has done, overall, an abysmal job in this area.
The more research I've done on security and privacy, as I work on a new book, the more worried I've become about our ability to keep up with the bad guys. The news isn't all bad, however. Example: one thing I always do when I'm on a network I trust is update my software. You should, too; it appears to be an essential part of staying (relatively) safe. I'll explain why in an upcoming column.
© Guardian News and Media 2013
[Scared male eye spying through a keyhole macro via Shutterstock.com]
Taking pills for unhappiness reinforces the idea that being sad is not human
If you have a terrible job or home life, being unhappy is hardly inappropriate. Pathologizing it can only make everything worse
I was trouble at school. "Like a monkey at the zoo, Giles is intent on displaying himself from his least flattering angle," said one teacher in my term report, a document strewn with words like "disruptive" and "unfocused". Thank God this was in the early 80s, otherwise I bet someone would have suggested Ritalin. For, since the mid 80s, society has decided that adolescent trouble-making is some sort of medical condition. We have given it a scientific-sounding classification, ADHD, securing a sense that a messy adolescence is pathological, some sort of chemical imbalance. Thus the scientists are called in to reinforce generally conservative norms of appropriate behaviour. In the US, between 1987 and 2007, there was a 35-fold increase in the number of children being classified as having some form of mental deficiency.
Of course, there are alternative narratives of my trouble-causing. I hated school because I wanted to live by a different story to the one proposed by the British public school system. Or, maybe, I preferred having fun to reading Chaucer. That may be a less noble account, but hardly pathological, or in need of some medical classification. But deviation from social conformity is increasingly seen to be something in need of a pill. In the UK in 1999, there were 158,000 prescriptions written for Ritalin. In 2010 it was 661,463.
The same thing has happened with depression and drugs like Prozac; though calling it depression is already to classify a particular kind of experience as something quasi-medical, thus leading one to think in terms of medical treatment. Sometimes I am just sad. Sometimes pissed off. Sometimes smothered in darkness. But we often lump all these experiences together simply because pharmaceutical companies have developed a certain sort of treatment. And, once you have a hammer in your hand, it is convenient to see every problem in terms of its being a nail. We have found the solution, now let's make the problem fit the solution we have available. It's a form of reverse engineering.
It is significant that psychoactive drugs were originally developed for other purposes. Drugs such as Thorazine, Miltown and Marsilid were developed in the 50s as ways to treat infections. But they were also seen to have mood-altering side-effects – though scientists had no idea why or how. So, as several writers have pointed out, "instead of developing a drug to fit an abnormality an abnormality was postulated to fit a drug". Thus we are encouraged to think of our problems in terms of the lucrative solutions to problems we didn't know we had. In this way, the pharmaceutical companies are responsible for the very conditions they propose to alleviate
Forget the fact that some people are miserable because they are struggling on zero-hours contracts, or have lost their partner or have been watching the news too much – if we translate misery into some sort of chemical imbalance then someone can make big money out of it. But unhappiness is often a perfectly proper response to the state of the world. If you have a shit job or a shit home life, being unhappy is hardly inappropriate. At best, many of the drugs we are popping only deal with the symptoms of all this, not the causes. At worst, they pathologise deviations for normalcy, thus helping to police the established values of consumer capitalism, and reinforcing the very unhappiness that they purport to cure.
Yes, there are some for whom happiness can be reclaimed by doing a bit more exercise or being more sociable. This sounds healthier than pills. But for those for whom these are not solutions, let's not make it worse by insisting upon the compulsory happiness of the smiley face. For, like the drugs, this can be just another way of shutting people up.
Twitter: @giles_fraser
Meet Tian Yu: The woman who nearly died making your iPad
Tian Yu worked more than 12 hours a day, six days a week. She had to skip meals to do overtime. Then she threw herself from a fourth-floor window
At around 8am on 17 March 2010, Tian Yu threw herself from the fourth floor of her factory dormitory in Shenzhen, southern China. For the past month, the teenager had worked on an assembly line churning out parts for Apple iPhones and iPads. At Foxconn's Longhua facility, that is what the 400,000 employees do: produce the smartphones and tablets that are sold by Samsung or Sony or Dell and end up in British and American homes.
But most famously of all, China's biggest factory makes gadgets for Apple. Without its No 1 supplier, the Cupertino giant's current riches would be unimaginable: in 2010, Longhua employees made 137,000 iPhones a day, or around 90 a minute.
That same year, 18 workers – none older than 25 – attempted suicide at Foxconn facilities. Fourteen died. Tian Yu was one of the lucky ones: emerging from a 12-day coma, she was left with fractures to her spine and hips and paralysed from the waist down. She was 17.
When news broke of the suicide spree, reporters battled to piece together what was wrong in Apple's supply chain. Photos were printed of safety nets strung by the company under dorm windows; interviews with workers revealed just how bad conditions were. Some quibbled over how unusual the Foxconn deaths were, arguing that they were in line with China's high rate of self-killing. However conscience-soothing that claim was in both Shenzhen and California, it overlooked how those who take their own lives are often elderly or women in villages, rather than youngsters who have just moved to cities to seek their fortunes.
For the three years since, that's the spot where the debate has been paused. In all the talk of corporate social responsibility and activists' counter-claims that the producers of iPads and iPhones are still sweating in "labour camp" conditions, you hardly ever hear those who actually work at Foxconn speak at length and in their own terms. People such as Tian Yu.
Yu was interviewed over three years by Jenny Chan and Sacom, a Hong Kong-based group of rights campaigners. From her hospital recuperation in Shenzhen to her return to her family's village, Chan and her colleagues kept in touch throughout and have published the interviews in the latest issue of an academic journal called New Technology, Work and Employment. The result is a rare and revealing insight into how big electronics companies now rely on what is effectively a human battery-farming system: employing young, poor migrants from the Chinese countryside, cramming them into vast workhouses and crowded dorms, then spitting out the ones who struggle to keep up.
Yu fits the profile to a T. In February 2010, she left her village in central China in order to earn money to support an impoverished family. As a leaving gift, her father scraped together about ¥500 (just over £50) and a secondhand mobile so she could call home. After a journey of nearly 700 miles, she was taken on at Foxconn. The employee handbook urged: "Hurry towards your finest dreams, pursue a magnificent life."
But Yu doesn't remember her daily routine as particularly magnificent. Managers would begin shifts by asking workers: "How are you?" Staff were forced to reply: "Good! Very good! Very, very good!" After that, silence was enforced.
She worked more than 12 hours each day, six days a week. She was compelled to attend early work meetings for no pay, and to skip meals to do overtime. Toilet breaks were restricted; mistakes earned you a shouting-at. And yet there was no training.
In her first month, Yu had to work two seven-day weeks back to back. Foreign reporters who visit Longhua campus are shown its Olympic-sized swimming pools and shops, but she was too exhausted to do anything but sleep. She was swapped between day and night shifts and kept in an eight-person dormitory where she barely knew the names of her fellow sleepers.
Stranded in a city far from her family, unable to make friends or even get a decent night's sleep, Yu finally broke when bosses didn't pay her for the month's labour because of some administrative foul-up. In desperation, she hurled herself out of a window. She was owed £140 in basic pay and overtime, or around a quarter of a new iPhone 5.
Yu's experience flies in the face of Foxconn's own codes, let alone Apple's. Yet it is surely the inevitable fallout of a system in which Foxconn makes a wafer-thin margin on the goods it produces for Apple, and so is forced to squeeze workers ever harder.
The suicide spate prompted Apple CEO Tim Cook to call on Foxconn to improve working conditions. But there is no record of him providing any money to do so, or even relaxing the draconian contractual conditions imposed on Foxconn. Asked about it yesterday, Apple's press office said it did not discuss such matters and directed me to the company's latest Supplier Responsibility report. A glossy thing, it opens with "what we do to empower workers" and describes how staff can study for degrees.
After her suicide attempt, Yu received a one-off "humanitarian payment" of ¥180,000 (£18,000) to help her go home. According to her father: "It was as if they were buying and selling a thing." Last year, Tim Cook received wages of $4m – it was a big drop on the package he took in 2011.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
Doctor Who: Peter Capaldi will bring an edge of danger to new series
During his most vicious riffs in The Thick of It, there frequently seemed a threat that his pulsing facial veins might burst
Two weeks ago, I bumped into Peter Capaldi at a literary festival and asked what he was up to. He said he was filming the role of Cardinal Richelieu in a BBC version of The Three Musketeers and then planned a holiday after the 10-month shoot before taking on "one very specific thing" in television. He made that commitment sound very small and casual, which shows both what a clever actor he is and the fanaticism with which the BBC was protecting the identity of the performer code-named Houdini until 7.25pm on Sunday night.
Over the past five decades, the identity of the next actor to play the Doctor has moved from being announced in press releases and then at press conferences to becoming one of those jobs – others include prime minister, England football captain and winner of Britain's Got Talent – declared live on television.
This galloping inflation of revelation is partly due to generally increased levels of hysteria in media and social media, but also reflects the rise in the time-travel drama's profile since it returned to BBC1 in 2005. The role of the Time Lord has graduated from solid character actors – including the Bakers, Tom and Colin, and Sylvester McCoy – to attracting the sort of performers who play Hamlet on stage, such as Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant. The advance speculation on this occasion had included two more classy former princes of Denmark in Rory Kinnear and Ben Whishaw.
Older than recent incumbents, at 55, but continuing a Scottish casting spread after Tennant and McCoy, Capaldi has stage experience — most recently in a version of The Ladykillers — but is most celebrated for his screen work. His primary quality as an actor is danger; during his most vicious riffs as the sewer-mouthed Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It, there frequently seemed a threat that his pulsing facial veins might burst. He was also memorably menacing as the new boss in the second series of the TV newsroom drama The Hour. In that sense, Capaldi might have seemed more natural casting for the Time Lord's nemesis, the Master.
So the main interest in his portrayal of the Doctor will be whether show-runner Steven Moffat – who has previously cast the actor in supporting roles in both Doctor Who and the spin-off Torchwood – encourages him to maintain his signature screen-bursting energy or explore a gentler part of his range.
As Capaldi is not only in demand as an actor but also writes and directs, he is giving up a significant amount to fulfil the show's brutal shooting schedules in Cardiff. His casting confirms that, like James Bond, the Doctor has become a role serious actors are happy to take on.
Given the rules of regeneration theoretically permit the Doctor to become anyone, many may regret there has been no change of race or gender – although, following recent concern over misogynist attacks online, female actors may be relieved to have avoided becoming a test case for the limits of Twitter tolerance by feminising a famously boy-centred franchise.
But, 50 years on, the speculation of recent weeks and the lavish peak-time unveiling have proved the show's title remarkably prophetic: millions want to know the Doctor's identity. Now the questions start about whether Capaldi can bring singularity to a role that has had 11 previous owners.
© Guardian News and Media 2013
[Image credit: Featureflash / Shutterstock.com]
Twitter must wake up: Women should not be subject to rape and death threats
To be frank I don't know how Twitter is going to cope without me. People will just have to pull through somehow without me tweeting a picture of a baby hedgehog or linking to some Funkadelic. Never mind all the important "research" I do on Twitter. None the less, everyone will have to manage as I am making the weeniest symbolic gesture of boycotting Twitter on Sunday.
A conversation has begun that is a long way from over. Women – the majority of social media users – should not be subject to rape and death threats. And yes thanks, I know the difference between disagreement and a description of dismemberment. We want the company hosting these threats to be less lackadaisical and able to respond faster. We provide the content and can it take it elsewhere. There are other platforms out there and Twitter has felt past its peak for a while anyway.
The perception that this is merely the concern of some self-important newspaper columnists who will collectively flounce depriving everyone else of their wit and wisdom is one I understand. Simply though, this idea wouldn't have any legs if all kinds of people were not disgusted when online misogyny is made visible.
Plus, as protests go it's about as easy as it gets. You have to NOT do something instead of doing it! If you don't want to be silent then tweet Simone De Beauvoir all day and shout back at the abusers (troll is not the right word). All is fine.
There have been previous discussions about misogyny online but this has hit a nerve. We watched a week of Twitter dithering and the police making the right noises but unable to achieve much.
What has been eye-opening is the outpouring of hostility to the very notion of a boycott. The ongoing discussions about the technical difficulties abound and the essential complicated ones about free speech will continue. But what remains is the simple and essential fact: right now it possible to threaten rape and kill women online without any consequences. Behaviour can and does change. When Lord McAlpine successfully sued prominent tweeters for libel, Twitter woke up a bit.
The past week has opened a can of worms. Some of the worms get off on each other. This strange goon squad of sub-Clarksons, bedroom anarchists, useful idiots and hardcore woman haters gives most of us the creeps and they will be slithering about on Sunday.
In cyberspace, as in the real world, they will not prevail. The boycott is a bunch of people going quietly Travis Bickle. We "ain't gonna take it any more". Join us or don't. The boycott has already worked. Because Twitter, the company, is nervy and watching its back. Hello? That's how it feels when strangers abuse you en masse. Personal apologies to high-profile women feel nothing but patronising. A 24-hour boycott has made us talk much more openly about what could happen, what is happening. That's all. Funny chaps us women? Because once we start talking, we won't stop.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
["Woman Having A Problem With Her Laptop" on Shutterstock]
Backlash against feminism aims to preserve the 'manosphere'
Misogyny, rather like the poor, will always be with us. Don't worry, I am not going to rehearse the "How OK is it to threaten to rape a women online" number. Is it quite OK? A little bit OK? Not OK? Show me your workings. Essentially Twitter has to decide whether it is a platform or a publisher (responsible for its content). As it is selling ads, it is indisputable that it is more than a mere conduit.
All this has been useful in highlighting the crap thrown at women. This is not to say others don't suffer abuse based on their race, religion or sexuality. We are not special victims. The abuse is samey: you will be raped/mutilated into silence. It's no surprise to me, as I wrote pre-internet. There were angry people and what's more they had got hold of stamps and envelopes.Scary.
Aeons ago Sharon Stone described Hollywood thus: "If you have a vagina and an attitude in this town, then that's a lethal combination." The only thing that's changed since then is that now we all live in this town, offline and on it. So let's call out what it is we are fighting. A conscious backlash against the gains that women have made.
When Susan Faludi wrote Backlash in 1991 it was interesting but documented a different culture – the US. In the UK, we had no strong religious right for example. She then produced Stiffed in 1999, about how men were suffering too: underpaid and abandoned.
Significantly, though, she had recognised that an anti-feminist backlash occurs not when women have achieved equality but when there is any possibility that we might. It's "a pre-emptive strike" and here, I would say, it's been going on for the past five years. This is a strange time to be talking of backlashes when we have just seen several successful feminist campaigns, but we need to understand the scale of what is happening. I am glad there is a woman's face on the money. But can we have more actual money? Equal pay?
The reality is that in public life, politics, business and media, we are grossly under-represented. There are constant attacks on abortion, a push to make women dependent on partners – Iain Duncan Smith's "belief" – and women are disproportionally hit by cuts. The icons of the day are mute and "respectable" – such as Sam Cam and Kate Middleton.
The backlash started in the early 90s when to be laddish and un-PC was a bit a naughty. Liam Gallagher, described brilliantly by his brother Noel as "a man with a fork in a world of soup", was its pin-up.
Right now we are dealing with something worse: a rightwing establishment and its lackeys who have managed to convince themselves they are mavericks and who are openly anti-feminist. From Toby Young to James Delingpole to Guido's bloggers, their putrid offerings are not outside the establishment but part of it. They are just fagging for the Tories.
They may do some childcare and fantasise about PJ O'Rourke, but they encourage the bottom-feeders of the "manosphere" who never seem to realise that feminists not only have relationships with men, but sons too.
A recession first reduces equality, then liberty. Look at Clegg wincing next to Cameron. The Lib Dems really don't do women at all, they are just like … liberal. Clegg is a classic example of a man who pays lip service to feminism but supports the backlash that stops women entering his hallowed territory.
The "manopshere" celebrates BoJo getting rid of an adviser on women as he gets his leg over. Equal rights are just an 80s throwback. Tory women promote a fuzzy, free-floating feminism – marry well or have a cupcake business.
So when surrounded by angry men who feel belittled, it is necessary to point out that women haven't won. Actually we are losing our hard-won rights. They still own most of the world.
Those in power are legislating away women's rights at work, making sure women are not promoted, maintaining a status quo in which half the population are silent and invisible. Internet trolls are but fleas on the mangy coat of the backlash. In popular culture as in politics, as Faludi wrote, this is not an organised and centralised conspiracy. Its workings are "encoded and internalised, diffuse and chameleonic".
So, as a humourlesss feminazi, if I really need to explain that threatening to slit my throat and rape my entrails is not much of a joke, then perhaps we just haven't had that much feminism.
Indeed, post-feminism has splintered into tiny groups each policing their own identity politics with little sense of a bigger struggle. But as the online cracks open up, some light is shone on women-hating as more than a game. The propaganda is everywhere. What makes women unhappy? Equality. It gives us careers, cancer, makes us drink too much, it makes us ugly to men! Boo-hoo. The backlash whispers in our ears that women secretly yearn for servitude not power. Those who say otherwise will be shut up. No, simply drown this out with noise, pure noise, and wake up. It's starting to happen. Remember all of them are just guys with forks in a world of soup.
We make the soup.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
['Woman peeking behind notebook' via Shutterstock]
Restoring voting rights to felons is more important than fighting Voter ID laws
When it comes to minority voting rights in the US, restrictions on felons and ex-felons are the largest issue
Voter identification laws have Democrats up in arms. One of the reasons, as Nate Cohn illustrated last week, is that they disproportionately affected non-white and Democratic voters in North Carolina. This effect, however, only would have padded Romney's lead in the state by 0.5pt to 0.8pt. In other words, it would only have made a difference in the tightest of elections, and North Carolina isn't close to being the state that determines the winner in presidential elections.
If Democrats want to be upset about something, they should turn their attention to felon and ex-felon voting restrictions. As I investigated last summer, these rules are quite unusual by international standards. Moreover, they have far more potential to actually change election outcomes than voter ID laws.
In a 45-country study by ProCon.org, 21 countries have barely to no restrictions of any type on felon voting. This includes Germany, Israel, and South Africa. Another 15 countries have limited restrictions. This includes Australia, France, and New Zealand. Putting the two groups together means that less than 20% of the countries studied had complete bans of felon voting. Only 11% of the countries had bans post-release. Even Russia wasn't on this list.
Compare this to the United States where most states prohibit felons from voting. The two states that allow it are Maine and Vermont. These two states also happen to be the whitest states in the nation. Another 13 states and the District of Columbia allow felons on parole to vote. Most of these 13 states have incredibly small black populations such as Montana, New Hampshire, and Utah. An additional four states allow those on probation to vote. Nineteen states allow voting once release is final. And the real kicker is that 12 states stop felons from voting permanently if they don't meet certain requirements.
The people overwhelmingly affected by these laws are minorities. Only 2.5%, 5.8 million people, in the voting age population were made ineligible to vote by felon voting laws in 2010, according to the Sentencing Project (pdf). That percentage tripled to 7.7% among African-Americans. Another way of putting this is that 38%, 2.2 million, of all those stopped from voting by felon restrictions are black. About a million black ex-felons (i.e. those who have "paid their debt to society") are disenfranchised.
Not surprisingly, these voters would vote overwhelmingly Democratic. A study of felon voting patterns (pdf) from 1972 to 2000 found on average 30% of felons and ex-felons would vote if given the chance, and about three out of four would vote for the Democratic nominee for president. This would have doubled Al Gore's margin in the national vote. Of course, it's the vote tallies at the state level that determine winners in United States elections.
I don't need to tell you that African-American voting rights and the southern United States don't exactly have a glorious history. None of the 21 states where incarcerated felons, those on parole, or on probation can vote are in the south. In Alabama, 15% of voting-age blacks are kept from voting by felon laws, and 14% of voting-age blacks are stopped in Mississippi. This percentage climbs to 19% in Tennessee.
In terms of pure numbers, 137,478 of African-Americans in Alabama, 107,758 in Mississippi, and 145,943 in Tennessee are kept from voting. Of the voters made ineligible by felon voting laws in Tennessee, over 40% are black. That percentage is above 50% in Alabama and Mississippi. The vast majority of these are people who have not only been released prison, but are off probation and parole as well.
The ability to reapply for voting rights can be as simple as submitting an application to the board of elections, but some states make it much more tedious. In Alabama, you can never regain your enfranchisement for certain offenses. In Mississippi, one might lose the right to vote for felony for writing a bad check. Said person would then have to get the state legislature to pass a specific bill allowing them to vote. That's probably too much for someone who likely has a lot of difficulty just finding a job, which is why only 0.28% of ex-felons in Mississippi (pdf) had their voting rights restored in the last decade.
So why hasn't there been more outrage over prisoner and ex-prisoner voting? The reality is that most states are simply uncompetitive in most elections. It wouldn't make a lot of difference.
Florida and Virginia, however, are very competitive* and have very strict felon laws whereby even ex-felons can have difficulty voting. Neither of these states have sterling records when it comes to civil rights overall. In Florida, all ex-felons must wait at least five years before asking an executive board for the right to vote. Some more violent offenders must wait seven years thanks to a rule signed by its Republican governor. Virginia's Republican governor has recently loosened its rules, but all ex-felons must still pay outstanding fines to the courts and some must still wait five years before re-applying.
Over 20% of the black populations in each state are disenfranchised because of felon and ex-felon voting restrictions. That includes about half a million blacks in Florida and a quarter of a million blacks in Virginia. Over 15% of the black populations in each state are disenfranchised because of ex-felon voting restrictions. More than half of the voters made ineligible by Virginia's felon and ex-felon restrictions are black.
In terms of electoral results, President Obama would have added 2.6pt to his 0.9pt Florida margin had felons and ex-felons been allowed to vote. Even if we just count ex-felons, it would have been 2.2pt. Al Gore would have easily won the state given this data. Obama would have tacked on another 1.6pt to his 3.9pt win in the swing state of Virginia if it had the felon voting rules of Maine or Vermont. It would still have been an additional 1.2pt including just ex-felons – as allowed in the vast majority of states.
Thus, laws prohibiting felons and ex-felons have a major impact on elections and may determine a winner in the near future. I don't expect people to take up the banner of felon and ex-felon voting rights. They're not are as sexy as a topic as voter identification for obvious reasons. But if you're looking for voting restrictions that afflict minorities in the south and can have major electoral implications, then felon and ex-felon voting laws have a far greater impact than voter identification laws.
*The competitive state of Iowa has recently switched its rules to tighten ex-felon voting thanks to its Republican governor. Up-to-date data, however, is unavailable on how many people this would affect. John Kerry likely would have won Iowa (pdf) had felons been allowed to vote.
© Guardian News and Media 2013
["Stock Photo: Man in handcuffs" via Shutterstock]
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