Ban-ki Moon, Secretary General of the UN, says the world is not doing enough to help, and things look horribly bleak for many, many people. You can read about the problems here. The Red Cross appeal page for donations is here.
Rowling writes, in The Times, that the Conservative party’s manifesto:
reiterates the flagship policy so proudly defended by David Cameron last weekend, that of “sticking up for marriage”. To this end, they promise a half-a-billion pound tax break for lower-income married couples, working out at £150 per annum.
I accept that my friends and I might be atypical. Maybe you know people who would legally bind themselves to another human being, for life, for an extra £150 a year? Perhaps you were contemplating leaving a loveless or abusive marriage, but underwent a change of heart on hearing about a possible £150 tax break? Anything is possible; but somehow, I doubt it. Even Mr Cameron seems to admit that he is offering nothing more than a token gesture when he tells us “it’s not the money, it’s the message”.
Nobody who has ever experienced the reality of poverty could say “it’s not the money, it’s the message”. When your flat has been broken into, and you cannot afford a locksmith, it is the money. When you are two pence short of a tin of baked beans, and your child is hungry, it is the money. When you find yourself contemplating shoplifting to get nappies, it is the money. If Mr Cameron’s only practical advice to women living in poverty, the sole carers of their children, is “get married, and we’ll give you £150”, he reveals himself to be completely ignorant of their true situation.
Speaking to his congregation on Sunday, Father Jones said: “My advice, as a Christian priest, is to shoplift.
“I do not offer such advice because I think that stealing is a good thing, or because I think it is harmless, for it is neither.
“I would ask that they do not steal from small, family businesses, but from national businesses, knowing that the costs are ultimately passed on to the rest of us in the form of higher prices.
“When people are released from prison, or find themselves suddenly without work or family support, then to leave them for weeks and weeks with inadequate or clumsy social support is monumental, catastrophic folly.
“We create a situation which leaves some people little option but crime.”
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation published a report earlier this week on poverty and social exclusion in the UK. The report is based on official government figures, and is built around a set of fifty indicators, including low income, ill-health, debt, and poor education. You can access the report here.
The words are from Caster Semenya, who is the topic of an article by Ariel Levy, in the New Yorker, Nov. 30, 2009. The article places the questioning of Caster Semenya’s sex in a complex context. The article opens with the poverty of the region CS grew up in:
The land is webbed with brambles, and the thorns are a serious problem for the athletes, who train barefoot. “They run on loose stones, scraping them, making a wound, making a scar,” Sako, a tall, bald man with rheumy eyes and a big gap between his two front teeth, said. “We can’t stop and say we don’t have running shoes, because we don’t have money. The parents don’t have money. So what must we do? We just go on.”
Another factor in the picture is the enforced categorizations from the colonizers:
South Africans have been appalled by the idea of a person who thinks she is one thing suddenly being told that she is something else. The classification and reclassification of human beings has a haunted history in this country … Taxonomy is an acutely sensitive subject, and its history is probably one of the reasons that South Africans—particularly black South Africans—have rallied behind their runner with such fervor. The government has decreed that Semenya can continue running with women in her own country, regardless of what the I.A.A.F. decides.
Does she look like "a drag queen," as some have said?
Another comes from the dehumanizing curiosity of the European look:
South Africans have compared the worldwide fascination with Semenya’s gender to the dubious fame of another South African woman whose body captivated Europeans: Saartjie Baartman, the Hottentot Venus. Baartman, an orphan born on the rural Eastern Cape, was the servant of Dutch farmers near Cape Town. In 1810, they sent her to Europe to be exhibited in front of painters, naturalists, and oglers, who were fascinated by her unusually large buttocks and had heard rumors of her long labia … Many South Africans feel that white foreigners are yet again scrutinizing a black female body as though it did not contain a human being.
In addition, the article picks up on the immense complexity of the biology of sex and secondary sexual characteristics. The facts make it clear that it is hardly likely for there to be some simple texts for sex; Ann Fausto-Sterling’s words on natural kinds are made especially relevant. That is in contrast to the role of gender duality:
There is much more at stake in organizing sports by gender than just making things fair. If we were to admit that at some level we don’t know the difference between men and women, we might start to wonder about the way we’ve organized our entire world. Who gets to use what bathroom? Who is allowed to get married? (Currently, the United States government recognizes the marriage of a woman to a female-to-male transsexual who has had a double mastectomy and takes testosterone tablets but still has a vagina, but not to a woman who hasn’t done those things.) We depend on gender to make sense of sexuality, society, and ourselves. We do not wish to see it dissolve.
And there are still other issues: the politics of sports organizations, the way CS, a child, was poked and prodded without any parental consent, and more. And, finally, the impact of it all on the child, who has decided she can only walk away.
Addition: Here’s a link to a piece on Caster Semenya by Judith Butler. Do note that Butler’s piece is more an opinion piece; she is not trying to get the details of the biology right, and that’s one of several respects in which the much longer NYorker article has more information. In particular, levels of testosterone do not necessarily tell us whether the hormone can be used; some intersexed people may have higher than average (for females) levels of the hormone without being able to use them. (Thanks to Rob.)
Dr. Mehmet Oz, the now famous TV personality, held a free medical clinic yesterday in Houston. Figures vary, but the Houston Chronical is placing the turn out at nearly 2,000; he had about 700 volunteers helping. That turnout is low, given that one in three people in the county lack health care insurance.
The stories of the people are important and illuminating. A video from the Chronicle, which I can’t seem to get on this blog, is here. It is really worth watching. As the Chronicle says:
Patients told stories of their barriers to health care: insurance loss after layoffs; premiums that became too high to pay; and being underinsured — having coverage, but not enough money to pay deductibles and co-payments.
Here’s another video taken before the clinic opened:
The opening placement of a commercial from Cadillac is too ironic.
The reference to Katrina is to the massive attempt by Houston and Galveston to take in the refugees from the hurricane that devastated New Orleans. Next to the Reliant Stadium, where Dr. Oz is, is the Astrodome, which provided shelter for the people of New Orleans who were originally in a stadium there.
When reading this interview with David Levy in the Guardian about the advances in sex robot development, for a fleeting moment I had this utopian vision where there would be no more sex trafficking in the world. But of course, human lives are much cheaper than those robots. I looked up the robots David is talking about (with the heated parts but cold feet… ok, that’s realistic!) and they are approximately € 5,500 or US$ 8,000 for a female doll. You can buy 160 Haitian girls for that amount of money.
Richard E Nisbett, an important cognitive psychologist, has published a book on heredity and environmental contributions to intelligence, Intelligence and How to Get It. The NY Times has a review of it that gives us a useful, though partial, update on the state of the debate.
Nisbett emphasizes the importance of a cognitively rich environment for children, and the very unfortunate fact that it tends to be associated with other sorts of privilege, such as social and economic class. Environment does seem to make a different to one’s IQ score, which in turn is also closely correlated with a different in future economic status. This is the clear perpetuation of privilege.
The review also relays a vivid example of the fact that even if differences among individuals were wholly hereditary, it does not follow that differences among groups must be:
The classic example is corn seed planted on two plots of land, one with rich soil and the other with poor soil. Within each plot, differences in the height of the corn plants are completely genetic. Yet the average difference between the two plots is entirely environmental.
This video seems to me problematic for some important reasons, but it makes the growing problem of homelessness in the US very vivid.
What seems to me most problematic is that it suggests all these people were living from paycheck to paycheck. While of course, that might be true, it is hardly necessary. A standard advice given by financial advisers in the US is that one should have 3-6 months living expenses banked in a way that is quickly accessible. The prudent people who did this still may have only very short-term protection, we can now see. And what about their savings? Yeah, well, it is easy it is to get nearly wiped out right now. The people we are looking at may have lost over half their savings and are refusing to touch what’s left.
Of course, we don’t know the facts about these people’s backgrounds and so we don’t know, among other things, how close we are to them.
And we also don’t know how many people are living in these conditions. It is, though, frightening and important that their numbers are growing.
The official count of homeless people in Sacramento is 1,226 people, and they are spilling out to the tent city because the housing shelters are full; one of the shelters is turning away more than 200 women and children a day.
Presumably not a new 200 a day, or at least the figures of homelessness do not seem to be growing at 200 a day. But that’s small comfort.
CNN has an article on an important and horrendous thing going on in Iraq: girls and young women being sold into prostitution by their parents. But what do they call it? “Iraq’s Unspeakable Crime: Mothers Pimping Their Daughters”. Yeah. Because we all know men play no role at all in prostitution. The article itself does a good job drawing attention to the many forces producing this situation: a government that is not sufficiently concerned about women; police imprisoning women who speak out; cultural devaluation of women; war; poverty. But the headline makes it sound like it’s just a matter of mothers who are horrible to their daughters. (Thanks, Jender-Parents!)
