Quotulatiousness

May 19, 2013

Stephen Harper’s chief of staff submits his resignation

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:42

Maclean’s covers the morning’s breaking news from Ottawa:

The prime minister’s chief of staff announced his resignation early Sunday, saying he left his post in light of the controversy around his personal handling of Sen. Mike Duffy’s expense payments.

Nigel Wright stepped down after a phone conversation with Stephen Harper, signalling a recognition that he — and not Duffy’s improper expense claims — had become the story.

Ray Novak, who has been by Harper’s side since 2001, will be the prime minister’s new chief of staff. Novak is thought to represent stability and is well known by all the federal ministers.

The Prime Minister’s Office said earlier this week that Wright personally paid off $90,000 in inappropriately claimed housing expenses for Duffy, prompting critics to complain that the bailout violated ethics rules that prohibit senators from accepting gifts.

I’m surprised it took this long for Wright to resign … I’d expected him to fall on his sword the day after it was revealed that he’d paid Duffy’s expenses with a personal cheque.

May 18, 2013

The “most balanced gender studies textbook available”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Cathy Young has some concerns with a popular gender studies textbook:

A few months ago, a post with a shocking claim about misogyny in America began to circulate on Tumblr, the social media site popular with older teens and young adults. It featured a scanned book page section stating that, according to “recent survey data,” when junior high school students in the Midwest were asked what they would do if they woke up “transformed into the opposite sex,” the girls showed mixed emotions but the boys’ reaction was straightforward: “‘Kill myself’ was the most common answer when they contemplated the possibility of life as a girl.” The original poster — whose comment was, “Wow” —identified the source as her “Sex & Gender college textbook,” The Gendered Society by Michael Kimmel.

The post quickly caught on with Tumblr’s radical feminist contingent: in less than three months, it was reblogged or “liked” by over 33,000 users. Some appended their own comments, such as, “Yeah, tell me again how misogyny ‘isn’t real‘ and men and boys and actually ‘like,’ ‘love‘ and ‘respect the female sex‘? This is how deep misogynistic propaganda runs… As Germaine Greer said, ‘Women have no idea how much men hate them.'”

Yet, as it turns out, the claim reveals less about men and misogyny than it does about gender studies and academic feminism.

I was sufficiently intrigued to check out Kimmel’s reference: a 1984 book called The Longest War: Sex Differences in Perspective by psychologists Carol Tavris and Carole Wade. The publication date was the first tipoff that the study’s description in the excerpt was not entirely accurate: the “recent” data had to be about thirty years old. Still, did American teenage boys in the early 1980s really hold such a dismal view of being female?

When I obtained a copy of The Longest War, I was shocked to discover that the claim was not even out of context: it seemed to have no basis at all, other than one comment among examples of negative reactions from younger boys (the survey included third- through twelfth-grade students, not just those in junior high). Published in 1983 by the Institute for Equality in Education, the study had some real fodder for feminist arguments: girls generally felt they would be better off as males while boys generally saw the switch as a disadvantage, envisioning more social restrictions and fewer career options (many responses seemed based on stereotypes — e.g., husband-hunting as a girl’s main training for adulthood — than 1980s reality). But that’s not nearly as dramatic as “I’d rather kill myself than be a girl.”

Update, 19 May: Welcome to all the visitors from Reddit. I think this is the first time one of my posts got linked from Reddit (and several thousand of you have dropped by in the last 24 hours). To mark the occasion, I’ve added a Reddit link to the Sharing options on all posts.

May 15, 2013

Pollsters wrong-footed (again) by BC election results

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:07

It wasn’t supposed to go down like this:

First things first: British Columbians last night witnessed the most incredible comeback in recent political history, and the biggest choke the province has ever seen.

In the days ahead, Christy Clark’s stunning, come-from-behind win will be endlessly compared to Alberta Premier Alison Redford’s surprise win over Wildrose in 2011. But this is so much harder to believe.

For starters, Alberta’s Progressive Conservatives were actually leading Wildrose in polls right up until the election. The B.C. Liberals have essentially been trailing the NDP since 2009 (briefly, after the 2011 leadership race that saw Clark take the Liberal helm, the party moved ahead of the NDP in polls before again plunging far behind).

And in Alberta, Wildrose leader Danielle Smith made serious campaign blunders. Many Albertans scurried back to the PCs, worried Smith wasn’t ready for prime time. But B.C. NDP leader Adrian Dix made no major mistakes. In fact, Dix’s campaign had so impressed the Globe and Mail that yesterday it published a premature ode to his campaign. Dix’s positive style would surely become a model for politicians across the country, it argued.

Just how historic was the Liberal win? Going back 20 years, there are no examples of a government in a parliamentary system trailing by such a wide margin for the 18 months leading up to an election, then coming from behind for the win.

And the Liberals didn’t just win; they increased their seat count, giving Clark a comfortable, 50-seat majority (the NDP won just 32 seats).

Those results almost perfectly reversed predictions of pollsters who, after yet another spectacularly bad call, will certainly face tough questions.

Canadians’ hypocrisy on climate change

Filed under: Cancon, Environment, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Stephen Gordon fired off a tweetstorm yesterday:

May 14, 2013

QotD: Litmus testing political scandals

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:27

Dear friends in the media.

Come on.

I mean, come on.

You and I know what’s going with the Benghazi thing. Let me share something that I first put into play during the “was Anthony Weiner’s Twitter account hacked” debate, but that comes from watching the Lewinsky scandal, the where-did–Mark-Sanford-go scandal, the why-is-David-Wu-dressed-in-a-tiger-suit scandal, and a wide variety of wrongdoing committed by politicians:

When there is evidence of scandalous or bizarre behavior on the part of a political figure, and no reasonable explanation is revealed within 24 to 48 hours, then the truth is probably as bad as everyone suspects.

Nobody withholds exculpatory information. Nobody who’s been accused of something wrong waits for “just the right moment” to unveil information that proves the charge baseless. Political figures never choose to deliberately let themselves twist in the wind. It’s not the instinctive psychological reaction to being falsely accused, it’s not what any public communications professional would recommend, and to use one of our president’s favorite justifications, it’s just common sense.

Jim Geraghty, “The Mask Is Ripped Off of ‘Hope and Change'”, National Review, 2013-05-14

May 12, 2013

Modernizing the “rules for radicals”

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:20

James Delingpole suggests that the Saul Alinsky playbook needs a bit of updating for the current radicals (that is, not the broadly left-wing radicals of Alinsky’s day):

Why do we need some new rules? Because the old ones were written in the 70s by a Marxist community organiser called Saul Alinsky. He had some useful ideas, many of which we can steal or adapt. But some of them are ill-expressed or incoherent. Eg Rule 10 “The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.” I think he could have omitted that one, don’t you, without jeopardising his place in history as a great revolutionary thinker?

Who are we? Not the same as the radicals of Alinsky’s generation, that’s for sure. Alinsky’s radicals were broadly on the left: Che admirers; Black Panthers; communist revolutionaries; hippies; communitarians; environmentalists; radical feminists. The hegemony which they were trying to destroy was, very loosely, a conservative one.

Today, though, the positions have reversed. We new radicals are broadly — but not exclusively — of the right, not the left. Many of us would describe ourselves as conservatives, classical liberals, libertarians, UKIPers, Tea Partiers. Revolutionaries, yes, but in the traditions of Burke, Wilkes, Cobbett, and, indeed, the Minutemen and the Founding Fathers, rather than of Marx and Lenin. Some of us might not even think of ourselves as righties, but that’s OK, it’s the direction of travel that matters not the labelling.

We’re against: arbitrary authority; big government; high taxes; overregulation; corporatism; cosy stitch ups between the banksters, the lawyers and the political class; the EU; the UN; identity politics; eco-fascists; elf-n-safety; wind turbines; quantitative easing…

We’re for: empiricism; sound money; free markets; liberty; small government; low taxes; deregulation; cheap energy; rigour; meritocracy; integrity; equality of opportunity, perhaps, but most definitely not equality of outcome.

We’re on the right side of a culture war which currently we’re losing. Why are we losing? Not because we’re bad people. Not because we don’t have all the truth, all the logic, all the arguments on our side. We’re losing because, thanks to Alinsky, the enemy has a forty-year head start on us. They’ve got the techniques. All we’ve got is the moral high ground — except, the way Alinsky’s acolytes have brilliantly spun it, we don’t get to enjoy the benefits even of that.

May 11, 2013

The “Liberator” isn’t really a gun … it’s a political theatre prop

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

In The Register, Lewis Page points out that the 3D printed “Liberator” isn’t actually much of a gun at all:

People are missing one important point about the “Liberator” 3D-printed “plastic gun”: it isn’t any more a gun than any other very short piece of plastic pipe is a “gun”.

You can take my Liberator ... and shove it

You can take my Liberator … and shove it

Seriously. That’s all a Liberator is: a particularly crappy pipe, because it is made of lots of laminated layers in a 3D printer. Attached to the back of the pipe is a needlessly bulky and complicated mechanism allowing you to bang a lump of plastic with a nail in it against the end of the pipe.

An actual gun barrel is a strong, high quality pipe — almost always made of steel or something equally good — capable of containing high pressure gas. It has rifling down the inside, making it narrow enough that the hard, tough lands actually cut into the soft bullet jacket (too small for the bullet to actually move along, unless it is rammed with massive force). At the back end there is a smooth-walled section, slightly larger, into which a cartridge can be easily slipped.

It’s not much of a gun at all. But as with the old saying about the dancing bear, it’s not how well it dances but that it dances at all. After some 100,000 downloads, the company was requested to take the files offline on Thursday:

May 8, 2013

Mark Sanford is back in politics, despite his past mistakes

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:36

I really didn’t expect former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford to win his bid for a seat in congress, but he not only won, he won convincingly:

‘Excuse me, do you know what’s going on here that it’s so crowded?”

I’m walking through a Publix parking lot in Mount Pleasant, S.C., to the Liberty Tap Room, and it’s 7:55 p.m. on Tuesday, May 7 — Election Day in the state’s first congressional district. A middle-aged woman is leaning out of her Suburban, frowning in the direction of the bar, trying to ascertain the reason for the plethora of TV news trucks and camera equipment.

“It’s Mark Sanford’s victory party,” I tell her.

She gapes at me, confused.

“Did he win?”

Less than an hour later, the AP declares that the answer to that question is yes — and not just a yes, but a definite yes, by nine points, despite being outspent 4–1 and abandoned for all practical purposes by the national fundraising arm of his party. There will be lots of analysis in the days to come about what this election means, but one thing isn’t up for debate: Mark Sanford knows how to campaign, and his win here is due at least in part to his tireless canvassing and cheerful willingness to ask for the vote of anyone who would listen to him.

May 7, 2013

The growing insecurity of the UK’s political classes

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:59

In sp!ked, Tim Black explains why the modest electoral success of the UK Independence Party in last week’s council elections looms so large in the fears and worries of the major parties and their supporters:

Since the results came in at the end of last week, however, perspective has been singularly lacking. In fact, given the hysterical response among the political and media class to UKIP’s success, you could be forgiven for thinking UKIP had actually come out on top, not third to the UK’s two struggling main parties. Rarely has an electoral success prompted such agonising. UKIP, remember, is a party with fewer actual MPs than either the Green Party or the latest George Galloway Party (they both have one each). Yet while editorials have wrung their papers’ hands, tied as they are by party-political allegiance, and commentators have tried to make sense of just what has gone wrong and rightwards, it’s the party-political establishment which seems most traumatised.

[. . .]

This disparity between the fairly impressive UKIP election results and the massively depressive reaction among the political class does not really tell us that much about UKIP’s electoral performance itself. It testifies, rather, to the political class’s current sense of fragility. UKIP really didn’t have to do much to prompt angst and anger in Westminster; the UK political class’s own insecurity rendered it all too eager to turn this mid-term electoral drama into a long-term crisis, and, with it, to turn UKIP and its leader Farage into a threatening political force.

The roots of this insecurity are not hard to fathom. Isolated and deracinated, today’s main political parties are terrified of one thing in particular: the people, and those whom they support. To the modern Tory and Labour parties, popularity, grounded as they see it in the ‘prejudices’ of the people, is to be feared, not embraced. Hence in the shape of UKIP, they don’t see democracy, but demagoguery. There’s little doubt that UKIP, and in particular its leader Nigel Farage, do resonate in a way that the established parties do not. Where the main parties seek mainly to dodge and attribute blame for problems, UKIP are willing to offer up solutions. Where Cameron or Miliband talk unconvincingly in PR-conscious platitudes, Farage is always keen to speak his mind. To the political establishment, UKIP embodies popular sentiment. And that is why, in Farage’s words, UKIP’s election results have sent a ‘shockwave’ through the political establishment.

May 3, 2013

Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia at 75

Filed under: Books, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:05

In the sp!ked review of books, Mick Hume looks at the book that got Orwell tossed out of the inner circle of leftist writers, not because it was bad, but because it was honest (and made Stalinism look too similar to Hitlerism):

George Orwell could have been killed twice in the Spanish Civil War. Once when he was shot in the throat by General Franco’s fascist forces; then when he was hunted by official Communist agents who, with the backing of Stalin’s Soviet Union, stabbed the revolution in the back and imprisoned, tortured and killed leading leftists and anarchists who were ostensibly on the same Republican side. Orwell learned the hardest way that the war against fascism in Spain was also a civil war against Stalinism.

Homage to Catalonia, Orwell’s famous account of his time in Spain from his arrival in Barcelona on Boxing Day 1936 to his escape in June 1937, has just reached its seventy-fifth anniversary. Like its author, the book almost didn’t make it either. The radical journalist and author’s usual publisher, Victor Gollancz, turned the book down without even seeing the manuscript, insisting that he would not publish anything ‘which could harm the fight against fascism’ by criticising the Communists.

Most of those from Britain and Europe who went to write about and fight in the Spanish Civil War took a similarly one-eyed view and followed the pro-Soviet line. What was unique about Orwell was that he hated fascism, but also stood apart from the official Stalinist-dominated left of his time. The radical maverick wrote about what he saw in Spain, rather than simply what he was told was true — although he also warned his readers to ‘beware my partisanship’ when seeking an objective account. He questioned the ‘official’ Stalinist-dictated account of events in Barcelona and elsewhere that was accepted around the world. This heresy made him the subject of a hate campaign when Homage to Catalonia was finally published in 1938, a campaign which continued well into the 1980s.

[. . .]

Orwell’s brilliant firsthand account of the conflict stands apart from and well above the I-was-there school of emotive, narcissistic war reporting we witness too often today. He also attempts to put his personal experiences into some proper political context, in two chapters now removed (at his request) from the narrative text and published at the end as appendices.

Here, Orwell closely interrogates and challenges the ‘official version’ of events in Barcelona, put about by the Communists and their many international apologists to justify their brutal repression of the non-Stalinist left. As he unravels the twisting of truth by propaganda organs such as the CPGB’s Daily Worker, you can almost see the ideas he was soon to express in his novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. He is also cutting about the way that the Communists simply branded their opponents as ‘Social-fascists’ and ‘Trotsky-Fascists’ to avoid engaging in important political arguments. Many who express their admiration for Orwell today have yet to absorb his point that screaming ‘Fascists!’ in the faces of those you disagree with is not the same thing as making your case. ‘Libel’, as he concludes, ‘settles nothing’.

A “bunch of fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists” finished second in UK by-election, gain seats in local elections

Filed under: Britain, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:44

The initial reports from the UK’s local elections yesterday were certainly encouraging for the UK Independence Party:

Britain’s populist United Kingdom Independence Party made sweeping gains in local elections and finished second in a parliamentary by-election, according to results announced Friday, shaking mainstream political parties, consolidating its position as an emerging political force and claiming a “sea change” in national life.

Once scorned by Prime Minister David Cameron as “a bunch of fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists,” the party, which wants Britain to leave the European Union and strictly control immigration, gained about a quarter of the vote in a series of elections in different areas of the country on Thursday, according to an initial count. The outcome represented the party’s fourth electoral advance in six months.

“We have been abused by everybody, the entire establishment,” Nigel Farage, the Independence Party leader, told the BBC, “and now they are shocked and stunned that we are getting over 25 percent of the vote everywhere we stand across the country. This is a real sea change in British politics.”

A government minister, Kenneth Clarke, had also dismissed party members as “clowns,” prompting Mr. Farage, in a string of TV and radio interviews, to parry with, “Send in the clowns.”

Has society’s immune system fallen victim to a variant of the Hygiene Hypothesis?

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:43

An interesting take from Jonah Goldberg:

Is the American body politic suffering from an autoimmune disease?

The “hygiene hypothesis” is the scientific theory that the rise in asthma and other autoimmune maladies stems from the fact that babies are born into environments that are too clean. Our immune systems need to be properly educated by being exposed early to germs, dirt, whatever. When you consider that for most of human evolutionary history, we were born under shady trees or, if we were lucky, in caves or huts, you can understand how unnatural Lysol-soaked hospitals and microbially baby-proofed homes are. The point is that growing up in a sanitary environment might cause our immune systems to freak out about things that under normal circumstances we’d just shrug off.

Hence, goes the theory, the explosion in asthma rates in the industrialized world, the rise in peanut and wheat allergies and, quite possibly, the spike in autism rates. There’s also a puzzling explosion in autoimmune diseases. That’s where the body attacks healthy organs or tissues as if they were deadly invaders.

Which brings me to my point. If you think of bigotry as a germ or some other infectious disease vector, we live in an amazingly sanitized society. That’s not to say it doesn’t exist, of course. And we can all debate how prevalent it is later.

My point is that the institutions — the organs of the body politic — that are the most obsessed with eradicating bigotry (as liberals define it) tend to be the places that have to worry about it the least. The Democratic party is consumed with institutionalized angst about prejudice, intolerance, and bigotry in America. But the odds are that relatively few of these people (particularly those under the age of 50) have been exposed to much real racism or intolerance.

Wikipedia forced to re-examine categorization

Filed under: Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

In the New York Review of Books, James Gleick recounts the tale of Wikipedia’s “American women novelists” category:

There is consternation at Wikipedia over the discovery that hundreds of novelists who happen to be female were being systematically removed from the category “American novelists” and assigned to the category “American women novelists.” Amanda Filipacchi, whom I will call an American novelist despite her having been born in Paris, set off a furor with an opinion piece on the New York Times website last week. Browsing on Wikipedia, she had suddenly noticed that women were vanishing from “American novelists” — starting, it seemed, in alphabetical order.

[. . .]

At Wikipedia, all hell broke loose. (Let’s pause here to flag the phrase, “at Wikipedia.” Wikipedia is a notional place only. It is not situated in a sleek California corporate campus, like Google in Mountain View or Apple in Cupertino, but instead distributed across cyberspace.)

These kinds of debates are usually bruited and argued on Wikipedia’s “Talk” pages, which are set aside for discussion by editors. After the Filipacchi article, Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s cofounder, created a new entry on his personal Talk page under the bold-face heading, “WTF?” Wales does not give orders or directly cause things to happen. He is more of a noninterventionist god. He is often referred to simply as Founder (capital F) or Jimbo. Anyway, he wrote:

    My first instinct is that surely these stories are wrong in some important way. Can someone update me on where I can read the community conversation about this? Did it happen? How did it happen?

Heated argument broke out on a page set aside for discussion of changes to Wikipedia categories. Categories are a big deal. They are an important way to group articles; some people use them to navigate or browse. Categories provide structure for a web of knowledge — not a tree, because a category can have multiple parents, as well as multiple children. Wikipedia lists 4,325 Container categories, from “Accordionists by nationality” to “Zoos in the United States.” There are Disambiguation categories, Eponymous categories — named, for example, after railway lines like Norway’s Flåm Line, or after robots (there are two: Optimus Prime and R2-D2) — and at least 11,000 Hidden categories, meant for administration and therefore invisible to readers. A typical hidden category is “Wikipedia:Categories for discussion,” containing thousands of pages of logged discussions about the suitabilities of various categories. Meta enough for you?

May 2, 2013

A layman’s guide to evaluating statistical claims

Filed under: Media, Politics, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:23

We’re awash with statistics, 43.2% of which seem to be made up on the spot (did you see what I did there?). Betsey Stevenson & Justin Wolfers offer some guidance on how non-statisticians should approach the numbers we’re presented with in the media:

So how can non-experts and policy makers separate the useful research from the dross? Allow us to offer six rules.

1. Focus on how robust a finding is, meaning that different ways of looking at the evidence point to the same conclusion. Do the same patterns repeat in many data sets, in different countries, industries or eras? Are the findings fragile, changing as one makes small changes in how phenomena are measured, and do the results depend on whether particularly influential observations are included? Thanks to Moore’s Law of increasing computing power, it has never been easier or cheaper to assess, test and retest an interesting finding. If the author hasn’t made a convincing case, then don’t be convinced.

2. Data mavens often make a big deal of their results being statistically significant, which is a statement that it’s unlikely their findings simply reflect chance. Don’t confuse this with something actually mattering. With huge data sets, almost everything is statistically significant. On the flip side, tests of statistical significance sometimes tell us that the evidence is weak, rather than that an effect is nonexistent. Remember, results can be useful even if they don’t meet significance tests. Sometimes questions are so important that we need to glean whatever meaning we can from available data. The best bad evidence is still more informative than no evidence.

3. Be wary of scholars using high-powered statistical techniques as a bludgeon to silence critics who are not specialists. If the author can’t explain what they’re doing in terms you can understand, then you shouldn’t be convinced. You wouldn’t be convinced by an analysis just because it was written in ancient Latin, so why be impressed by an abundance of Greek letters? Sophisticated statistical methods can be helpful, but they can also hide more than they reveal.

4. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking about an empirical finding as “right” or “wrong.” At best, data provide an imperfect guide. Evidence should always shift your thinking on an issue; the question is how far.

5. Don’t mistake correlation for causation. For instance, even after revisions and corrections, Reinhart and Rogoff have demonstrated that economic growth is typically slower when government debt is higher. But does high debt cause slow growth, or is slow growth in gross domestic product the cause of higher debt-to-GDP ratios? Or are there other important determinants, such as populist spending by a government looking to get re- elected, which is more likely when growth is slow and typically drives debt up?

6. Always ask “so what?” Are the factors that drove the observed negative correlation between debt and GDP likely to exist today, in the U.S.? Does it even make sense to speak of “the” relationship between debt and economic growth, when there are surely many such relationships: Governments borrowing simply to fund their re-election are likely harming growth, while those investing in much-needed public works can provide the foundation for growth. The “so what” question is about moving beyond the internal validity of a finding to asking about its external usefulness.

ESR on the true meaning of moral panics

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:03

Eric S. Raymond on the difference between the claimed meaning and the actual, underlying reason for various moral panic incidents:

In my experience, moral panics are almost never about what they claim to be about. I am just (barely) old enough to remember the tail end of the period (around 1965) when conservative panic about drugs and rock music was actually rooted in a not very-thinly-veiled fear of the corrupting influence of non-whites on pure American children. In retrospect it’s easy to understand as a reaction against the gradual breakdown of both legally enforced and de-facto racial segregation in the U.S.

But moral panics are by no means a monopoly of cultural conservatives. These days the most virulent and bogus examples are as likely to arrive from the self-described “left” as the “right”. When they do, they’re just as likely to be about something other than the ostensible subject.

In Lies, Damn Lies, and Rape Statistics a college newspaper does a little digging through U.S. crime statistics and finds that the trendy “anti-rape” movement is exaggerating the rape risk of college women by two full orders of magnitude — as it concludes, “the ‘one in four’ chant should be abandoned and replaced with the more appropriate, albeit less catchy, 1 in 400.”

What can explain such gross distortion? I’ve looked into this issue myself and discovered a lot of flim-flam. Still, even the the best-case figures I arrived at apparently overestimated the actual risk on campuses by a factor of 50. (Barbarian zones — like, say, inner-city Detroit — might be a different story.)

If the rape panic runs parallel to the the now nearly forgotten drugs-and-rock panics of the 1950s and 1960s (and many others like them, before and after) we should expect it to actually be be rooted in an attempt to assert control of or cultural dominance over some threatening Other. And there is indeed evidence that points in that direction.

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