I want to add a little more to the post from a couple of days ago, about Zerlina Maxwell getting slammed for trying to explain that arming women is not rape prevention. What would a rape prevention program look like?

It probably is true that men with a propensity to rape cannot be educated out of it. But one of the things that set sexual assault apart from other kinds of assault is that there are a lot of people who are outraged by it in theory, but not in practice. In other words, they exhibit all manner of outrage about rape until confronted with an actual rape victim. And then they decide it was her fault, or she is lying.

And then there’s the common phenomenon of witnesses who do nothing. Right now two teenage boys are on trial in Steubenville, Ohio, for multiple assaults on a drunken 16-year-old girl last summer. A number of other teenage boys witnessed the acts and are testifying. But they didn’t try to stop it while it was going on.

There are videos of the incident showing the girl was barely conscious. The defense attorneys are arguing that she didn’t say no, and anyway, she went out partying with a group of boys, so she was asking for it. Certainly, her attackers were not mentally incapacitated; they were capable of making an informed decision. Why does the responsibility for what they did fall on a semi-conscious girl?

In what other kind of crime does that happen? When is a mugging victim “asking for it” because he was carrying a wallet?

Years ago, it was commonly said the only time a rapist was convicted is if the victim was a dead nun. Second wave feminism inspired legal reforms to protect victims from being turned into sluts at trial. So I understand it’s not quite so bad now, but it still seems to me there’s way too much enabling going on, as well as an attitude that it wasn’t rape unless she fought back, or if she knew the attackers, or if she’d been drinking.

Sometimes institutions enable. American Zen has had a few sex scandals already. The worst of which involve two teachers who came here from Japan decades ago (one wonders if their superiors shipped them out of Japan to get rid of them) and who have a long-standing pattern of sexual predation. But for years their senior students, mostly men, made excuses and ignored the complaints. One woman has said that when she complained he had groped her, senior students laughed about it. That Roshi! What a guy!

Irin Carmon writes of the Steubenville trial,

According to the prosecutor’s opening statement Wednesday, these witnesses saw one of the defendants, Trent Mays, try to force oral sex on the girl, but her mouth wouldn’t open. They saw the other defendant, Ma’lik Richmond, digitally penetrate the girl while she was passed out on a couch. Though the girls’ friends apparently tried to prevent her from continuing on with the boys, so far there’s been no indication the witnesses intervened with the boys who no one has disputed were capable of decision-making. And preliminary research shows that the intervention of such bystanders could make the difference in preventing rape.

Last week, an inexcusable torrent of abuse was hurled at commentator Zerlina Maxwell after she appeared on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show and sensibly pointed out that arming women is not effective rape prevention tactics, for multiple reasons. (“If firearms are the answer, then the military would be the safest place for women,” she said.) It was her message of “tell men not to rape” that seemed to most inflame the trolls. Hannity found it self-evidently ridiculous: “You think you can tell a rapist to stop doing what he’s doing? He’s going to listen to an ad campaign to stop?” He also said, “Knowing there are evil people, I want women protected, and they’ve got to protect themselves.”

It was a clash of ideas of who commits crimes in the world. For Hannity and his ilk, rape is committed by “evil people,” an immutable fact that can’t be educated away, that isn’t about social norms. For feminists who are weary of victim-blaming — including blaming women for not just shooting their rapists in the moment — and who have for decades been pushing against the idea that rape is only committed by strangers lurking in the bushes, this is tantamount to giving up the fight. Or, as Jessica Valenti recently put it, you’re “saying that rape is natural for men. That this is just something men do. Well I’m sorry, but I think more highly of men than that.”

As I wrote in the earlier post, nearly 80 percent of the time the rapist is someone the woman knows, not a stranger who jumps out of the bushes. He may not be someone she had perceived as “evil.” He probably doesn’t think of himself as “evil.” He may not consider what he did “rape,” but just “taking advantage of an opportunity.” And it’s probably true you can’t educate such a person.

But it’s also the case that if their intended victims started shooting these guys in self-defense, most of these women would find themselves facing charges, and convictions, for it. Too many people simply wouldn’t believe her story.

So, while I don’t expect that rapists can be educated, it would be nice if we could educate society at large to stop enabling.

Gun rights absolutists in Oregon are physically intimidating legislators who support gun regulation. Joe Nocera writes that pro-gun control legislators are being stalked and harassed, and some are calling off town hall meetings because they are literally afraid of being shot.

Burdick began receiving, as she puts it, “the usual threatening e-mails” — as did a fellow gun control advocate in the Legislature, Mitch Greenlick. He told The Oregonian that the e-mail he received from gun extremists was often abusive, obscene and anti-Semitic. He predicted that gun legislation would go nowhere because legislators were too frightened to act. “Politics by intimidation,” he called it.

And then there was Burdick. She was scheduled to hold a town-hall meeting on March 4. But at an earlier town hall held by several other legislators, gun advocates badgered them with angry questions. One of the questioners admitted he was carrying a concealed weapon. Fearing that someone might show up with a gun at her town hall, Burdick decided to postpone it. Not wanting to inflame the situation, she said she had a scheduling conflict.

On the evening of March 4, two men sat in a car across from her home and videotaped her. They showed her driving into her garage and taking out her garbage. Having “proved” that Burdick did not have a scheduling conflict, they then put together a short video of Burdick at home. Jeff Reynolds, the chairman of the Multnomah County Republican Party, who also claims to be a citizen journalist, posted the video on a Web site he runs.

See also the most recent gun report.

Paul Ryan has come out with another Underpants Gnomes budget; short on specifics, long on assumptions. Ezra Klein writes,

Here is Paul Ryan’s path to a balanced budget in three sentences: He cuts deep into spending on health care for the poor and some combination of education, infrastructure, research, public-safety, and low-income programs. The Affordable Care Act’s Medicare cuts remain, but the military is spared, as is Social Security. There’s a vague individual tax reform plan that leaves only two tax brackets — 10 percent and 25 percent — and will require either huge, deficit-busting tax cuts or increasing taxes on poor and middle-class households, as well as a vague corporate tax reform plan that lowers the rate from 35 percent to 25 percent.

But the real point of Ryan’s budget is its ambitious reforms, not its savings. It turns Medicare into a voucher program, turns Medicaid, food stamps, and a host of other programs for the poor into block grants managed by the states, shrinks the federal role on priorities like infrastructure and education to a tiny fraction of its current level, and envisions an entirely new tax code that will do much less to encourage home buying and health insurance.

Ryan’s budget is intended to do nothing less than fundamentally transform the relationship between Americans and their government. That, and not deficit reduction, is its real point, as it has been Ryan’s real point throughout his career.

Same old, same old.

See also Ed Kilgore “Ryan’s Latest Bait-and-Switch“; Eugene Robinson, “Paul Ryan’s Make-Believe Budget.”

See Breitbarted.

Josh Marshall writes about the hate swarm attacking Zerlina Maxwell for having suggested, on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show, that women shouldn’t be expected to arm themselves to protect themselves from rapists. As Zerlina said, telling women to get a gun is not rape prevention.

Another point Zerlina’s made on Hannity’s show is that it may not be so easy to shoot someone if you know them. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in data for 2005-2010, the rapist was a stranger to the victim in only 22 percent of cases. In 34 percent of cases the rapist was an intimate partner, a current or former husband or boyfriend; in 38 percent of cases the rapist was a well-known casual acquaintance. And in 6 percent of cases the rapist was a family member.

BTW, in the same time period, 55 percent of rapes occurred in or near the victims’ homes; 57 percent of the perpetrators were white men.

Hannity kept saying that teaching men to not rape would not stop “criminals,” but like many men Hannity misses what rape really is. Most of the time, the “perp” is not just some faceless, generic “criminal,” but a man the victim knows, and possibly trusted, and may be in a relationship with, and who may have no criminal record and wouldn’t dream of committing any other time of crime. Indeed, from what I know of the psychology of rape, especially in the case of intimate partner/acquaintance rape, the perp may not perceive his act as “criminal.”

As far as using guns to prevent rape, other stats show it doesn’t work. Again, through the miracle of Google, we can easily find which cities in the U.S. have the highest and lowest rates of rape. New York City has among the lowest rates; Anchorage, Alaska among the highest. But there’s no real pattern I can see, except that the U.S. does have an unusually high rate of forcible rape to go along with our unusually high rate of homicides and our unusually high rate of firearm possession.

Several European governments responded to the financial crisis by applying austerity economics more rigorously than the U.S., and they have suffered for it. See “Where Austerity Really Hits Home” and “Austerity: Another ‘Policy Mistake’ Again“: “Europe’s three-year austerity program pushed its unemployment rate in February 2013 to 11.9 percent.” For recent political rifts in Britain, see “Vince Cable exposes coalition divisions over austerity.”

Krugman writes in “The Market Speaks” that the anti-tax, pro-austerity crowd keep predicting that “the market” will suffer if their advice isn’t heeded. And their advice has been consistently wrong.

So what the bad predictions tell us is that we are, in effect, dealing with priests who demand human sacrifices to appease their angry gods — but who actually have no insight whatsoever into what those gods actually want, and are simply projecting their own preferences onto the alleged mind of the market.

Right-wing ideology really is more like religion than political science. The real-world consequences of ideology are no longer important; what’s important is loyalty to the ideology for the sake of the ideology.

In response to another in a long line of studies showing that higher rates of gun ownership correlate to higher rates of gun death, Power Tool John Hinderacker responds,

But what jumps out at you when you read Fleegler’s article is that the decrease in fatalities that he documents relates almost exclusively to suicides. What his study really shows is that strict gun laws have little or no impact on gun homicides.

See, only homicides count. Suicides, accidents, all the times small children take Dad’s loaded gun out of the night stand and shoot themselves, those don’t count as problems. Only homicides are problems.

My responses: First, it’s common to dismiss suicides in gun violence statistics because it is assumed that if people didn’t have guns, they would just find some other way to kill themselves. And that’s logical. But data say otherwise. The data show that where there are more guns, there are more suicides.

There are several reasons for this, the first one being that other methods are less reliable. People don’t take enough pills, or they are found and revived. It is speculated that some suicides by firearm are impulsive, spur-of-the moment actions; other suicide methods require some planning. It’s also noted that suicide rates are higher in rural than in urban areas, and rural areas also tend to have higher rates of gun ownership. Or maybe a few of those suicides weren’t suicides. Many things are possible.

However it happens, I find the attitude that suicide deaths don’t count as a factor in gun violence to be, well, cold. Where there is someone still alive who wouldn’t be alive if he had access to a gun, that counts.

But moving on — The Power Tool’s headline is “NEW STUDY FINDS FIREARMS LAWS DO NOTHING TO PREVENT HOMICIDES.” We could easily turn that around and say “NEW STUDY FINDS INCREASED GUN OWNERSHIP DOES NOTHING TO PREVENT HOMICIDES.” One of the things the absolutists keep saying is that arming society prevents violent crime, because criminals fear “good guy” citizens with guns. We’re told over and over that millions of Americans have defended themselves with guns; that if citizens cannot carry weapons everywhere they go they risk becoming victims; that “an armed society is a polite society”; that more guns equals less crime.

And I’ve been saying for years that these claims are hooey. You can easily dig up data going back years on which cities/states have the highest and lowest rates of homicide and assaults in the U.S., and there is no clear and consistent correlation between violent crime rates and gun laws in those places. Glad to see the Tool agrees with me.

A big reason for the lack of correlation, of course, is that lax gun purchasing laws in some states put a big hole in the effectiveness of gun laws in other states. It’s just way too easy to legally purchase firearms in the Southeast and re-sell them on a black market in the Northeast. It’s long been known that most guns used in violent crimes in New York were purchased legally in the South, primarily Virginia. There’s every reason to think that some national regulation on firearm purchasing would dry up some of this supply, and then we might see a stronger correlation between gun laws and violent gun crime.

And I also keep reminding people that accidents can kill you just as dead as crime. The absolutists keep bringing the conversation back to gun crime, as if accidents and suicides don’t count, because as long as the argument is about scary bad people who are about to break into your house and kill you, they feel they win the argument.

See also Prairie Weather.

I don’t have anything clever to say about Hugo Chavez. I’ve felt for a long time that many on the U.S. left were too quick to embrace him as a kindred spirit, when he actually was more of an ego-maniacal mess. People often admired or hated him more because of their own agendas rather than anything he actually did.

Various perspectives:

Zack Beauchamp, “Why Democrats Shouldn’t Eulogize Hugo Chavez”

Rory Carroll, “In the End, an Awful Manager”

David Sirota, “Hugo Chavez’s Economic Miracle“

Sorry about light posting; I have a nasty head cold and just want to nap now. But here’s a post to tide you over for awhile.

The White House and Republicans in Congress can’t negotiate so much as an order for pizza. So the sequestration kicked in on March 1, and there seems to be no movement in Washington toward cancelling it before it does all kinds of economic mischief. Both the White House and congressional Republicans seem confident that their side is holding the winning political hand in this mess.

Jonathan Chait, Ezra Klein, and others are documenting that what’s going on here is way more than a failure to communicate. Republicans seem to be operating in a complete vacuum of information about what the President is proposing. Ezra provides an example:

My column this weekend is about the almost comically poor lines of communication between the White House and the Hill. The opening anecdote was drawn from a background briefing I attended with a respected Republican legislator who thought it would be a gamechanger for President Obama to say he’d be open to chained CPI — a policy that cuts Social Security benefits — as part of a budget deal.

The only problem? Obama has said he’s open to chained CPI as part of a budget deal. And this isn’t one of those times where the admission was in private, and we’re going off of news reports. It’s right there on his Web site. It’s literally in bold type. But key GOP legislators have no idea Obama’s made that concession.

Jonathan Chait adds,

…if Obama could get hold of Klein’s mystery legislator and inform him of his budget offer, it almost certainly wouldn’t make a difference. He would come up with something – the cuts aren’t real, or the taxes are awful, or they can’t trust Obama to carry them out, or something.

Ezra provides the real-world example of Republican strategist Mike Murphy, who wrote in Time that the sequestration impasse would melt like snow if only the President would make some simple concessions. “…six magic words can unlock the door to the votes inside the Republican fortress: Some beneficiaries pay more and chained CPI, budgetary code for slightly lowering benefit increases over time.”

And, of course, the President has already said those words and put those issues on the table, must to the distress of most progressies. In a series of Tweets Ezra posted, we see Murphy going from denial the President made those concessions, to saying, well, yeah, means testing, but he rejected chained CPI. When informed the President never rejected chained CPI, and in fact has expressed support for it, Murphy moved the goalposts and brushed off chained CPI as a “small beans gimmick” that Republicans really don’t care about. What Republicans really want is to raise the Medicare eligibility age and, oh, yes, no tax increases. And the President needs to “earn back their trust.”

Ezra explains,

The bottom line on American budgetary politics right now is that Republicans won’t agree to further tax increases and so there’s no deal to be had. This is not a controversial perspective in D.C.: It’s what Hill Republicans have told me, it’s what the White House has told me, it what Hill Democrats have told me. The various camps disagree on whether Republicans are right to refuse a deal that includes further tax increases, but they all agree that that’s the key fact holding up a compromise to replace the sequester.

But it’s unpopular for Republicans to simply say they won’t agree to any compromise and there’s no deal to be had — particularly since taxing the wealthy is more popular than cutting entitlements, and so their position is less popular than Obama’s. That’s made it important for Republicans to prove that it’s the president who is somehow holding up a deal.

This had led to a lot of Republicans fanning out to explain what the president should be offering if he was serious about making a deal. Then, when it turns out that the president did offer those items, there’s more furious hand-waving about how no, actually, this is what the president needs to offer to make a deal. Then, when it turns out he’s offered most of that, too, the hand-waving stops and the truth comes out: Republicans won’t make a deal that includes further taxes, they just want to get the White House to implement their agenda in return for nothing. Luckily for them, most of the time, the conversation doesn’t get that far, and the initial comments that the president needs to “get serious” on entitlements is met with sage nods.

So, no, what we’ve got here is not a failure to communicate. It’s willful, premeditated pig-headed ignorance.