Fighting the Good Fight: Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid

I only just discovered this, but Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid (TRLA) has a Word Press blog for their press releases. It’s actually an interesting read, largely because of the breadth of TRLA’s work.

Awesome Charts, Volume 1

Interesting, yes? Clearly the Cubans have extraordinarily good children’s health care given their level of income and the Swedes are some kind of tiny gods.

‘Corrective Rape’ in South Africa and the Ex-Gay Movement

In South Africa, “corrective rape” is the term used when a man rapes a lesbian woman, believing that the heinous act will somehow make the woman heterosexual. The phenomenon is widespread enough to prompt a report on it by the South African Human Rights Commission, and articles about its spread appear online as far back as 2003. Particularly disturbing is the complicity of many community members in the practice (the 2003 report linked to above on IOL notes that 19 out of the 33 cases they dealt with were raped by friends, neighbors, family, or ex-boyfriends) as well as an expressed belief by some that rape will turn a lesbian “into a real African woman”

One of the young women interviewed in the IOL piece had this to say:

“I was raped because I was a butch child. I was 13 years old the first time it happened. My mother walked into the room soon afterwards and said to me ‘this is what happens to girls like you’

“It didn’t occur to me then what she meant, but looking back now, that’s not the kind of thing you expect from a mother,” she said.

No it’s not the kind of thing you expect from mother; its a horrific sentiment the belies a fundamental lack of compassion. It’s also the logical endpoint of the belief that homosexuality (or that any sexual orientation located elsewhere along the wide spectrum than at the straightforwardly heterosexual end) is a lifestyle choice rather than an intrinsic aspect of someone’s identity.

Truth Wins Out connects the dots thusly:

Of course, these extreme cases do not represent the so-called “ex-gay” movement in general. Certainly, Exodus and even NARTH, I beleive, would oppose such torture. However, the notion that GLBT people must be “changed” no matter what the psychological or physical toll is in step with the West’s ‘ex-gay’ movement. The very existence of these organizations creates a sour climate where GLBT lives are demeaned and homosexual relationships are viewed as inferior. In such a hostile environment, some people will take desperate measures (exorcisms) or partake in dangerous experiments (shock therapy) to fix the “problem.”

I do not want to start engaging in false guilt by association; the groups mentioned in the quote above are explicitly NOT advocating so-called “corrective rape” for anyone, anywhere. Nonetheless, the belief in homosexuality as pathology lends itself all too easily to escalation from . It’s not just that people will falsely believe in the necessity of desperate measures to correct non-existent problem. They will further likely be unable to recognize when the supposed “corrective” is inherently vastly more destructive than the “probem” it is meant to address. How else could a mother, whether or not she is supportive of her daughter’s sexual orientation, at least recognize the younger woman’s pain and empathize rather than scold?

Getting back to South Africa for a moment, let us consider the likely magnitude of the problem if government agencies find it necessary to address an issue that many inhabitants of the country may very well not consider a problem, even in terms of the broader issue of rape:

Booi and Valentine also blamed cultural issues. Valentine said that high levels of rape were partially because of the widespread belief, in some communities, that it is acceptable for a man to force themselves on a woman if she ignores their come-ons.

Charlotte Allen Has a Big Case of Self-Loathing.

If I were inclined to to support Charlotte Allen’s Washington Post editorial claiming that women are actually stupider than men, I would say that she is the best existing evidence in support of her own thesis.

Among her arguments, we hear that men must be more intelligent since they have larger brains:

The theory that women are the dumber sex — or at least the sex that gets into more car accidents — is amply supported by neurological and standardized-testing evidence. Men’s and women’s brains not only look different, but men’s brains are bigger than women’s (even adjusting for men’s generally bigger body size).

Keep in mind that brain size does not correlate with intelligence any more than skull shape determines personality. She also argues that men are objectively better drivers:

A study published in 1998 by the Johns Hopkins schools of medicine and public health revealed that women clocked 5.7 auto accidents per million miles driven, in contrast to men’s 5.1, even though men drive about 74 percent more miles a year than women. The only good news was that women tended to take fewer driving risks than men, so their crashes were only a third as likely to be fatal.

Note that part of her argument for why men are better drivers hinges on women being less likely to get into fatal car accidents and that the difference she points in the overall rates by gender is miniscule. It also doesn’t make any sense to point how many more miles men generally drive when quoting a rate per hundred miles.

It’s not really worth taking the time to refute this kind of misogynistic idiocy point-by-point, especially when Jill at Feministe does it with more style than I could ever muster. I would like to reinforce what many others commenting on this article have pointed out, namely that had Charlotte Allen chosen to write about any group other than women, this article would never have made it to print.

What Evil Looks Like. (NOT WORK SAFE)

That picture, and the ones below show exactly what the depths of inhumanity look like. The links come from a new Wired Magazine article, but I found them by way of the Washington Independent. This is what American foreign policy actually looks like. This is what “enhanced interrogation methods” lead to. This is why we ought never torture. It leads to our soldiers celebrating the corpses of torture victims:

Yes, that is a real corpse. Here we see the full banality of evil, as Specialist Charles Graner nonchalantly preps his digital point-and-shoot camera:

Abu Graib itself is not news. We have known about this for almost four years now and still remain mired in a surreal debate about whether or not torture is ever acceptable, whether or not what we see above constitutes torture, and so on all down the depraved list of our nation’s crimes against humanity. These images depict EVIL. As thinking, feeling human beings we ought to recognize that whatever our loyalty to this country or its causes, whatever the rationalizations the torturers or their apologists may rely on, we have a moral obligation to STOP torture and hold our own people, our own government accountable.

Strange Maps

That map, which replaces the names of U.S. states with the names of nations that have roughly comparable GDPs (gross, not per capita) showed up in my email yesterday. It is actually post 131 from Strange Maps. Many of the maps there are strangely beautiful; others are actually quite informative if you are fascinated by demographic data in the way that I am. Some of the more absurd old maps may be simply funny, but many of the newer ones, such as Korea’s lights at night or the Internet’s black holes combine aesthetic power with genuinely interesting sociological data (and not necessarily data that intuitively demands mapping for its presentation).

My absolute favorite, thus far, is this map of England shitting an invasion force onto France:

White Supremacists Protest in Jena

White supremacists from the Nationalist Movement staged a protest in Jena, La. a ago Saturday. As disgusting as their beliefs and choice of venue for the protest are, there’s a twisted way in which this is sort-of-good news; the original protests in support of the Jena 6 several months ago drew historically large crowds of 20,000 plus, in contrast to the mere 50 racists in this march (who were opposed by about 100 counter protesters).

That the Nationalist Movement would march in Jena at all is certainly grotesquely offensive, but a march on so small a scale shows weakness rather than strength, especially given Jena’s appalling racial history. Weakness among violent white separatists may not be as desirable as their ceasing to exist, but I find it doubtful that the latter will ever actually happen and so long as the existence of at least some number of overt, violent racists is a fact, I much prefer to see them so utterly marginalized.

Of course, these protests are the carnival sideshow to the much more deep-seated and insidious racism that the Jena situation revealed

Scared Straight by the Liberian Civil War?

There’s a fascinating and disturbing article on the front page of the New York Times today about a Liberian immigrant woman whose desperation to get her son Augustus out of gang life led her to sent him away to live in Liberia, where he ended up surviving the recent civil war.

Aside from the various horrors that Augustus witnessed in Liberia and even aside from the implication of the article’s conclusion, namely that Augustus stands on the brink of slipping back into gang life, I found one aspect of the story particularly appalling. Not only was the mother, Musu Sirleaf, willing to risk her son’s life by sending him to Liberia for four years, she deliberately tricked him into getting stuck there by lying to him. I find it hard to understand how any parent could live with themselves after engaging in such a fundamentally dishonest act, regardless of whether or not four years of relative privation and surviving a civil war proved ultimately to be a net good experience for the child in question. The article touches on this briefly, noting that Augustus did not speak to his mother for several months after discovering the deception. I am surprised that he has been able to reconcile at all since. Perhaps I simply lack an iron-clad sense of loyalty to family above all else, but I tend to believe that were I deceived into living long-term in a place where I might have to witness “child soldiers rape and disembowel a pregnant woman” that my deceiver, immediate family or otherwise, would hold a high place on the list of people unworthy of forgiveness.

Perhaps my urge to judge the mother’s actions here reflects no more than my lack of direct, lived understanding of the brutality of immigrant life in Park Hill, Staten Island. If that is the case, then our society has collectively failed. Even though poverty remains one the recurring tragedies of the human condition, a nation with the extreme degree of collective wealth, resources, and technology that United States possesses ought to be able to provide even the most crushingly impoverished of its inhabitants with better prospects than exiling their children to a potential war zone.