Day: April 29, 2003

The Glacial International Criminal Court

Today I was reading a story that the Christian Science Monitor ran in early March about the trial of Pauline Nyiramashuhuko. Nyiramashuhuko is the first woman ever formally charged before the International Criminal Court for genocide and crimes against humanity. She was a major player in the Rwandan government and numerous witnesses testified they saw her give orders for Hutu gangs to rape Tutsi women before killing them.

Rwanda would like to try Nyiramashuhuko itself partly because some in Rwanda still blame international actors such as the United Nations for not stopping the genocide when they had a chance and also for openly helping the genocide planners when they fled Rwanda for bordering countries.

But the length of the trials is also a bone of contention — these trials are moving at a pace which is just ridiculous. There are many rape victims who were not killed but who will die from AIDS well before Nyiramashuhuko’s trial concludes.

Look, the main Nuremberg trial lasted from November 1945 to September 1946 — 10 months. Nyiramashuhuko first plead guilty in September 1997. Her trial is likely to last well into 2005 — eight years in custody at a minimum, and of course it will take even longer for her inevitable appeal.

They should have just handed her over to Rwanda and let them try her if they were going to move at this glacial pace.

Source:

A woman on trial for Rwanda’s massacre. Danna Harman, The Christian Science Monitor, March 7, 2003.

Caching RSS Feeds and Macros in Conversant

The right-hand sidebar on the front page of this site features recent headlines from other sites I manage. This is accomplished using a macro in Conversant that reads the RSS feeds from those sites and then displays the two most recent posts on the weblogs there.

Which is cool, except it used to cause the page to load slowly when it was time to update the RSS feeds (which the macro did every hour).

So when the discussion on the Conversant support board veered to talking about RSS, I mentioned that it would be nice to be able to change the length of the feed cache.

Well, it didn’t take long until not only was that possible, but a feature was added so that the results of the entire macro itself could be cached. The upshot is that now the text of the headlines here only changes every six hours which means the front page now loads much faster than it used to.

Good stuff. And it may load even faster once we do a server upgrade currently schedule for May.

Let Me Organize My Newsfeeds, Please

This is one of the more annoying things about using Userland software — it’s great if you happen to do things Just Like Dave Winer, but the software tends to leave you high and dry otherwise.

Dave thinks that all a news aggregator should do is present a reverse chronological view of the news rather than try to organize it. Try to organize the news? Who would want to do that?

Well, uh, I would like to do that, actually. I have to wonder just how many newsfeeds Dave actually subscribes to. I’m only subscribed to about 60, and even with Radio’s handy ability to e-mail me the new headlines in e-mail digests, the sheer number of new items is unwieldy and Radio desperately needs the ability to let me organize my newsfeeds.

What I’d really like is the ability to create my own categories, assign specific news feeds to them, and then receive the headlines in category-specific e-mails. For example, I have a lot of feeds that are international news. Some about animals. A few about feminism.

The entire experience would be much more useful if I could have three separate Radio news pages or three separate e-mails with one for international news, one for animal-related news, and one for stories about feminism.

As it is, I receive e-mails every hour which often contain 300 or more different stories with absolutely no organization whatsoever. I can’t even arrange it so that all of the newsfeeds about say, Africa, occur after each other which would at least be a start. Instead the first 10 stories might be from Moreover’s Africa feed, then 5-6 stories from an animal news feed then some tech news and then finally more stories from another news feed about Africa.

Reverse chronological display is okay if you’re only dealing with a small number of items, but when you start doing large volumes then it really sucks.

Natasha Walter Argues for “True Equality” and Misfires on Women and War

In April, Natasha Walter wrote an odd column for the Independent complaining essentially that women were not acting enough like women. Walter lead off her column by complaining that,

Where women appear in public life right now in the West, there seems to be nothing distinctively female about what they are doing.

. . .

Does this mean that one of feminism’s old arguments, that more powerful women would make the world a better place, has stalled? After all, you might ask what the point is of going on agitating for women to get into public life — if they are indistinguishable from men once they get there.

Where do these people come up with this stuff? Walter writes as if men and women are completely different species — and to her that’s the feminist point of view. Talk about women as the other!

But not to worry. The only reason there was a war at all is because there is no true equality and men were calling all of the shots. Walter is certain that sexual equality in the United States is a myth, for example, because “just 13 percent of American politicians are women.” She is referring to Congress there, where 13.6 percent of House of Representative member are women and 14 percent of Senators are women. At the state level, women only 25.3 percent of all elective state positions nationwide and constitute 22.3 percent of state legislatures.

But, alas, even in the United Kingdom Walter is likely to be disappointed by women who are acting too much like men. Writing on April 3, Walter wrote of attitudes about the war against Iraq,

THe latest polls on the war show that women in the UK have not been won over by the supposed requirement to support our soldiers in action. A third of women, as opposed to a quarter of men, believe that this war is going badly. . . .

Given the kind of fighting that is now going on in Iraq, that means more and more women are being alienated from what is being done by our forces. Despite the fine words of the coalition leaders, we can see that this war is being fought by trigger-happy soldiers who cannot — or will not– distinguish military from civilian targets, and that the primary victims of this war are injured children and weeping parents.

You do not have to believe in any old-fashioned myths about women naturally being peace-loving to understand why more women than men might tell pollsters that they find this unacceptable. While the gap between the people who do caring work and the people who are powerful is still so great, politicians will go on taking decisions that will alienate more women than men.

Walter must have been sorely disappointed by follow-up polls after the swift conclusion of the war which was clearly fought to minimize casualties on both sides, Walter nonsense to the contrary notwithstanding.

An April 15 poll commissioned by The Guardian found that 60 percent of women polled supported the war — only 23 percent of women said they opposed the war.

Apparently the only serious alienating going on was the alienation of Walter from her stereotypical views of male and female behavior.

Source:

Would there have been this war if there was true equality for women? Natasha Walter, The Independent, April 3, 2003.

Kenyan Women Assaulted by Anti-Trouser Religious Extremists in Kenya

The BBC had a brief item back in February about women in Kenya being assaulted by members of the Mungiki youth sect. The women were targeted because they were wearing trousers, and their assailants stripped them naked for this offense.

The Mungiki sect is an ascetic religious extremist group that, like many such groups these days, sees itself defending traditional values against encroaching liberalism driven by exposure to Western ideas. Estimates put the number of people involved with the sect at around 300,000 (out of a population of 30 million).

Along with assaulting women who wear short skirts or pants, the sect also advocates in favor of female circumcision and has reportedly kidnapped women and forcibly mutilated them.

Women in Kenya, however, seem willing to stand up to these thugs. The BBC quoted one of the woman who was assaulted in February as saying, “I felt so bad, I felt so humiliated . . . [but she will keep wearing trousers because] It’s my right.”

Source:

Kenyan women protest at ‘trouser police’. The BBC, February 3, 2003.

Glenn Sacks on the “Women Work Harder” Claims

For years I’ve been hearing these claims that a United Nations study found that when you include housework and other non-compensated labor women actually work more hours per week on average than men. In fact, sometimes this claim is taken further and cited for various other purposes — for example, with claims that the additional work that women preform should be added to the GDP or that various programs that cover workers should be amended to take into account women’s undocumented work.

But Glenn Sacks did a nice job of puncturing this myth in a March 18 column, Men, Women and Work. Now certainly the work that women do is to be praised and duly compensated. Laws and traditions that kept women from working or excluded them from certain professions was not only morally wrong, but was also completely wrongheaded economically. Anyone whose ever worked with or for a talented woman must marvel at the idea that in an earlier time those talents would have been allowed to go to waste (and it is mindboggling that some nations still hamper there economies with such dubious restrictions).

But the question at hand is whether or not women work significant numbers of hours more than men, and the answer there is no. Well, at least that the studies that claim to show this are bogus.

The major source of such claims is the United Nations’ 1995 Human Development Report. This claimed that by the time you add in housework and other uncompensated work that women do, they end up working significantly more hours than men. But Sacks notes there are a number of problems with the report,

As men’s issues author Warren Farrell explained in his 1999 book Women Can’t Hear What Men Don’t Say, the UN report upon which most claims of “women work more” are based was deeply flawed. In fact, UN official Terry McKinley admitted in February, 1996 that the UN misrepresented the study in several important ways. For one, the information provided by the UN to the press only applied to countries where women were found to work more hours than men; the countries where men were found to work more hours than women were deliberately excluded.

Now there is a neat trick that more researchers would love to be able to pull out of their hats. Releasing only the data that supports a hypothesis while not including the data that contradicts a hypothesis is pretty much a ticket to ride. Sacks continues,

Moreoer, when the data provided by researchers in some countries (including the US) did not fit the UN’s intention to show that women “do more,” researchers were asked in a private communication to amend their studies. Researchers were asked to include women’s voluntary community work as well as hobbies in order to increase women’s perceived workload. Researchers were not asked to include those items or new ones in men’s labor. As a study of men and women’s labor, the UN findings are worthless.

And it’s not just the UN using such patently unsound methods. He also takes to task UC Berkeley professor Arlie Hochschild’s 1989 book, The Second Shift which claimed that “women work an extra month of 24 hour days each year.” Holy cow — is there even enough time available for such an enormous disparity? Well there is if you compare two very different groups of men and women. Sacks writes,

For one, she compared the housework burdens of full-time employed males with those of part-time employed females, portraying men working 50 hour weeks as lazy and selfish for not doing as much housework as their wives who were working a 20 hour week. Also, she claimed that men did no more housework in the late 1980s than in the prefeminist era, but, with one minor exception, she used data on male housework from studies done in the pre-feminist era, rendering it worthless [as a source for late 1980s male housework trends].

In the United States, Sacks reports, men in act work 3-5 hours per week more than women on average. That’s actually a pretty amazing figure, especially if it includes women who have temporarily altered their workload after having children. Lets have three cheers for America — where everyone is entitled to work 50 hours a week regardless of their sex!

Source:

Men, Women and Work. Glenn Sacks, Mens News Daily, March 18, 2003.