Republican women over the age of 65 are most hostile to #MeToo.

Odd that we must rely on a razor company to make a statement of principle, but on the other hand, apart from Christmas presents, I'm guessing few Republican women over the age of 65 are buying Gillette razors.

What group of people is most hostile to #MeToo? (The Economist)

Republican women over the age of 65

No group has swung against #MeToo more than older women who voted for Donald Trump. They have gone from barely worrying about false accusations of sexual assault, with only 8% agreeing in November 2017 that these were worse than unreported assaults, to 42% saying so, according to two polls conducted for The Economist by YouGov, a pollster. They are now the most likely group to agree that a man who harassed a woman 20 years ago should keep his job, and that a woman who complains about harassment causes more problems than she solves.

Two things stand out. First, even though Americans on average, and Republicans in particular, have become more negative about #MeToo over the past year, the change among this particular group is spectacular (chart). Second, a generational gap now yawns between Republican women who are over 65 and those under 30, the cohort least hostile to #MeToo within the Republican Party.

The conclusion is unexpectedly brutal.

One explanation of this partisan gap is that it reflects a difference of opinion over what true feminism is. Some conservative women resist what they see as special treatment for women as vaguely patronising. There is another explanation, too. Ms Pierotti Lim of Republican Women for Progress remembers campaigning in Wisconsin and Michigan in 2016 and being astonished by the number of older women who were afraid to even talk to her and who let their (Republican-voting) husbands fill in their ballots.

Your Sunday must-read: "Relax, Ladies. Don’t Be So Uptight. You Know You Want It."

As a male of the species, one acknowledging his fair share of missteps and imperfections, it's unclear to me how best to introduce this essay apart from stating that it makes perfect sense.

What has NOT made perfect sense to me over the years are lingering and idiotic notions like male chauvinism, toxic masculinity and the doctrine of women as inferior beings, particularly those attached to some manner of supernatural sanction.

Pfui. That's plain rubbish.

Yes, there were times in my youth when I displayed overt symptoms of misogyny. I have no glib excuses for any of it, and I won't cop a plea. I'd dearly love to forget those times, but cannot, because it simply wouldn't be honest of me; besides, I learned from it. Eventually it dawned on me that I was dead wrong.

Being male is one thing, and being a dick is something else entirely.

Ever since then, I've tried my best to learn and improve. It's a work in progress, and a process of awareness, one that never ends. Who wants to be remembered as a sexist, racist, or homophobic turd? Not me. People are people: full stop. We may disagree, but it won't be because of your sex, race, or sexuality.

Your beer, on the other hand ...

Relax, Ladies. Don’t Be So Uptight. You Know You Want It, by Anastasia Basil (Medium)

Remember the ’80s, when men preferred Hanes and could legally rape their wives?

... Movies, ads, and TV shows of the ’80s were tailored to give your dad a testosterone boost and teach your brothers to be men. Strong, no-bullshit men, the kind who say what they think and take what they want. Grab ’em by the pussy kind of men. No way was your brother gay. Or you. Unless you were into threesomes. A girl could be into another girl, but only to feed the male gaze, then it was hot. If two women truly loved each other they were going to hell. Read your Leviticus, but first, let me ask you a little something. You’ve got pretty red hair. Is it naturally red? Why don’t you let me see if the carpet matches the drapes? Relax. Don’t be so uptight. You know you want it.

snip

We are all byproducts of a collective mindset. Those who question the mindset of their time and shine light on its moral defects are considered malcontents. And yet, it is malcontents like MLK who are (later) lauded as heroes — not for upholding America’s values, for shaping them. Here’s a fun game. Ask yourself: What strongly held opinion of mine will my grandchildren one day struggle to understand?

The 23 percent of Americans who supported civil rights in 1963 knew exactly what they were doing. They didn’t accidentally do the right thing. They weren’t accidentally on the right side of history. Instead of bullheaded allegiance, they questioned, examined, and took a knee to the moral defects of their time.

snip

Have you ever known someone who hasn’t changed their hair style in decades? They still have the bangs they had in seventh grade? There are people who haven’t changed their views since seventh grade, either. We shouldn’t use our present-day ideas and perspectives to judge the distant past (the Parthenon was built by slaves), but if someone drags an antiquated moral norm into the present, they should expect to be held in account.

final snip

I wonder… would today’s anti-feminists be yesterday’s anti-suffragettes? #WomenAgainstSusanBAnthony

Want to know what a feminist is? A feminist is a person who, instead of being the docile pet of their generation, rears back and bares their teeth. The idea that we no longer need feminism is absurd — it’s the equivalent of technology stopping at the floppy disc.

BEER WITH A SOCIALIST: An issue with LEO Weekly's Beer Issue, and a good review for Pints & Union.

The Great American Beer Festival unspools this weekend, and anyone who's anyone in beer circles is out there in Denver, pounding the new generation of Chantilly Cream Custard Stouts.

Meanwhile, I'm right here in Nawbany, getting back to where I once belonged. If I had my druthers I'd be in Europe, not Colorado. In other words, my condition is perfectly scattershot, and therefore normal.

This week's Louisville Eccentric Observer (LEO) is the annual Beer Issue, with an excellent cover story about women who brew.

What's more, our local alternative weekly has started collating its beer news items in one spot.

LEO has a new web page devoted to all things local beer. Our brewery guide, past Beer Issue stories, an archive of I'd Tap That... Beer columns and the latest season picks.

This is helpful, although I'd like to see a new beer column devoted to classicist ruminations on a theme of comfort beer. Then again, edgy youthful writers probably aren't as well versed in such matters.

Speaking of comfort, it's pure joy to see so many of free-lancer Kevin Gibson's beer bylines collected in one place amid LEO's new beer bullpen. Kevin gets the facts right, and he's also been known to quaff the occasional sample for the sake of accuracy.

Concurrently, I must say that LEO's Big Brewery List is somewhat confused -- and Kevin had nothing to do with it.

The Louisville region, including Southern Indiana, has 21 breweries, including 19 locally-owned breweries.

Flat12 in Jeffersonville appears in the list, and Gordon Biersch does not, except that Flat12 is just as non-locally owned as Biersch; however, in terms of actually brewing beer in a physical location, Biersch is more local than Flat12.

That's because Flat12's beers are brewed in Indianapolis, while all of Biersch's beers are brewed at its Louisville location. As proof, here's the first paragraph of Kevin's cover story.

The two men were enjoying the hefeweizen beer that Maggie Bray had brewed as assistant brewer at Gordon-Biersch — and they had questions about it… but not for her.

Let's see.

Flat12 doesn't brew in Jeffersonville, and it's somehow still local. Biersch does brew in Louisville, and it isn't. Flat12 seems always to get this sort of free pass, and it should not. Flat12 accepted economic development incentives to brew in Jeffersonville, and never did. Were these incentives refunded? At the end of the day, Flat12 in Jeffersonville is a tap room, not a brewery -- and coverage should reflect this simple fact.

Finally, what's the 21st (omitted) brewer? Is it those guys in the Oxmoor Mall? Well, doesn't BJ's import its beer in kegs from production central, just like Flat12? It's a taproom, not a brewery -- just like Flat12.

This brings me to an undisputed highlight of the current issue. Robin Garr captures the Pints&union vibe quite well.

Good beer, food boost Pints & Union’s cozy pub vibe, by Robin Garr (LEO)

Every now and then, a new local place to eat and drink makes me exceptionally happy. Sure, I’m always glad to see any new eatery come to town. But, now and then, a fresh arrival delivers such pleasure in its food, drink and mood that it makes me jump up and down in delight.

Consider, if you will, Pints & Union in downtown New Albany, the utterly lovable restaurant … er, no, beer bar? … um, no, not that, nor a brewpub either. It’s a public house, a European-style pub, then, built into the beautifully renovated shell of an 1880s-era general store that later served as a neighborhood saloon.

In an age when most restaurants seem rigged for noise, Pints & Union is… well, not quiet, but tuned for sociability, with soft folk music in the background that’s loud enough to hear but not enough to dampen conversation. What’s more, there’s nary a television in the place. Stop, take your eyes from the screen and turn them to the people at your table. Don’t feel chatty? Grab a book from the extensive collection, or settle down with a friend for checkers, chess or a board game.

Pints & Union takes its beer seriously, without taking it snobbishly ...

Much appreciated. Now if you'll excuse me, it's back to work.

LIVE TO EAT: "Behind the Scenes with Mimi Dabbagh" (from Food & Dining Magazine).

We become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams.
--- Jimmy Carter

Here's the drill: first, I introduce you to the new issue of Food & Dining Magazine, then take a look back at my previous contribution(s), "for the record" here at the blog.

My profile of August Moon Chinese Bistro's co-owner Mimi Dabbagh appeared in the Fall 2017 (Volume 57; August/September/October) issue of F & D. You can read the whole issue at issuu.

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Behind the Scenes with Mimi Dabbagh

The co-owner and manager of Louisville’s venerable August Moon Chinese Bistro steps into the light with a story worth telling.

Some of us want to perform on stage, while others would rather coordinate the performance. Mimi Dabbagh has excelled at August Moon by selflessly setting the table with the timeless cuisine of business partner Peng Looi. Now, digging a little deeper, we see she has a powerful legacy all her own.

---

To dine out in Louisville is to sample a beautiful mosaic of food, sourced from a bountifully diverse planet, to be shaped and purposed by the skill of human minds and hands.

It is to know the names of the people who feed and serve us, and deservedly so – names like Peng Looi.

Looi’s dishes were featured on the very first Food & Dining Magazine cover in 2003. He is recognized in America and abroad both as a chef and as tireless advocate of culinary education and charitable causes.

During three decades at August Moon Chinese Bistro, and later Asiatique Restaurant, Looi has helped pioneer an edible genre, one enjoying such a wide degree of acceptance today that far-flung corporate restaurant chains are built entirely around it.

Call it Chinese with Southeast Asian influences, or pan-Asian, or Asian fusion; according to Looi himself, skeptics originally called it “con-fusion.”

Just know that the planet has embraced Looi’s vision, and his kitchen creations have long since ceased being derived from Asia alone. The cross-cultural value of deliciousness without borders is a concept Mimi Dabbagh still refers to as a “melting pot.”

“The way Chef Looi cooks shows the influence of Southeast Asia,” says Dabbagh.

“It’s not only Chinese – it’s more like Asian, then a Thai background, and then a Malaysian background, a Vietnamese background – then Indian. There are a lot of Indians in Malaysia, too.”

At this point, you may be asking, “But who is Mimi Dabbagh?”

She’s someone you should know. Since 1987, Dabbagh has been Looi’s co-owner and business partner at August Moon, and yet 30 years after the eatery’s inception, she’s almost unGoogleable, having consistently avoided the limelight in favor of tending to the less glamorous aspects of restaurant ownership.

“Chef Looi is like the front man; I’m behind the scenes,” says Dabbagh. “It’s all right, because most people aren’t so interested in the owner. They’re interested in the chef and the food.”

Maybe so, but behind every great restaurant there are numerous stories worthy of telling, and Mimi Dabbagh’s is a tale untold far too long. It’s about melting pots and managing behind the scenes; remembrance and independence; mentoring and family.

It’s about maintaining one’s good humor and grace amid the challenges, consolidating and transcending, and preserving tradition by expanding it.

As always, the logical place to start is the beginning.

The way from Tan Son Nhut to Beargrass Creek.

I’d like readers to establish a mood.

Let your minds wander back in time, to simpler and less complicated days of youth – middle school, perhaps.

If you’re like me, you remember almost nothing about middle school. You slept through class, maybe played sports, and rode to the mall with your parents because you were too young for a driver’s license.

As adolescents, our brains are still developing. The early teen years can be an emotional and paradoxical roller coaster, but we usually move past it soon enough, leaving a handful of sepia-tinged recollections, trip-wire love songs and little else.

Next, imagine that as your 7th grade year is approaching, you suddenly are compelled to depart your country of birth, where the chaos of a geopolitical endgame threatens your settled existence.

You’ll be leaving behind family, friends and everything familiar from childhood for a journey into the unknown, with no guarantee of returning home or seeing your loved ones again.

This was Dabbagh’s experience in Vietnam, her place of birth. It was 1975, and more than three decades of war were drawing to an inexorable close.

A succession of destructive conflicts, first with Japan, then France and finally America, had divided the Vietnamese people. Unfortunately for Dabbagh’s family (she was Mimi Ha then), they were situated in South Vietnam, which was shorty to become the losing side.

Dabbagh, along with an older sister, this sister’s husband and their two-year-old child, were airlifted from Saigon – now Ho Chi Minh City – along with thousands of others in similarly dire straits, just hours before the city surrendered to the North.

Sadly, her parents and seven other siblings stayed behind in a newly unified Vietnam, albeit it under the banner of communism. No one knew what might happen next.

These four Vietnamese refugees went to the Philippines for processing, then to a holding camp in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. In due time they arrived in Dayton, Ohio, where Dabbagh went to live with an older Presbyterian couple who’d volunteered through their church to house immigrants in need.

Happily, they proved to be ideal, nurturing foster parents, and in Dayton, Dabbagh finally was able to resume her interrupted studies, though with only a scant grasp of the English language, and as the only Asian face in her class.

She was all of 13 years old, and she didn’t stop to reflect. Rather, she got on with her life.

A scant twelve years later, Dabbagh and Looi opened August Moon Chinese Bistro on Lexington Road in a small, nondescript building with only 15 tables, located adjacent to the restaurant’s large, modernistic, high-ceilinged current home, which dates to 2002.

The pair’s founding mission at August Moon was Asian-style culinary multi-culturalism, or Dabbagh’s melting pot metaphor, which was an idea that flowed naturally from their own kaleidoscopic backgrounds of synthesizing personal experiences and transcending borders.

Looi hails from Malaysia, where food is a mélange drawn from the country’s ethnic composition of Malay, Chinese, Indian and indigenous peoples. The French cultural presence from colonial times remained prevalent in South Vietnam when Dabbagh was a child, and her paternal grandfather was from India.

Dabbagh and Looi absorbed these and other inspirations, taking differing paths to America, then coinciding as students in Louisville during the early 1980s. She was in pursuit of a marketing degree at Sullivan College, and he was studying engineering at the University of Louisville’s Speed School.

Presciently, they met on the job.

“We both were in college when we worked at Oriental House,” Mimi explains, “just servers, trying to make ends meet – very tough; you never see a rich student!”

“We worked all the time.”

While the budding Malaysian engineer was learning how to cook professionally, and beginning to feel the pull of an entirely different career in the kitchen, the young lady from Biên Hòa pursued her complementary ambition.

Dabbagh wanted to own, operate and manage a restaurant, and toward this focused end, her apprenticeship was served in a half-dozen Asian restaurants around town: Oriental House, Emperor of China, House of Dragon, Golden Dragon and House of Hunan.

“There’s a lot of Chinese restaurant history in Louisville. I worked at them and managed them, and I learned how to do everything, because I wanted to be my own boss. I was very young but they were willing to teach me.”

In due time August Moon became Dabbagh’s and Looi’s first restaurant venture, and the sum of what they had learned. Like so many other start-ups, it was launched with grit, sweat equity and too little capital.

“We started from scratch,” she remembers. “It’s hard when you first open. You’re scrambling.”

At August Moon’s inception, one of Dabbagh’s restaurateur mentors recommended the services of a New York-based Chinese chef, who could come stay a while and get her restaurant off the ground. The deal was arranged, and all she knew was to pick him up at Standiford Field, leaving one small detail to be resolved.

“I said to Looi, we don’t know what he looks like,” she laughs. “Do we just look for an Asian man? Looi thought about it and said yes, we’ll take a sign saying, ‘Chef from New York,’ and ask any Asian man we see. The first Asian man we saw looked very lost, and that was him.”

Obviously, August Moon struck a vital chord in Louisville and has been here ever since, though it’s probably true that 30 years in the restaurant business is 130 in “normal” human years. Consequently, a vital facet of August Moon’s longevity has been a pragmatic, consistent, no-nonsense division of labor.

Peng Looi describes it as symbiotic: “We’ve been partners from day one. She has her strengths and weaknesses, and I have my strengths and weaknesses. We just play off each other. She takes care of the front, and I take care of the back.”

“The person behind the scenes is sometimes like a producer,” adds Dabbagh, “and you’re never going to be on TV, but you make it work. It’s the backbone of the business behind the scenes.”

At this juncture it should be stated that making a restaurant work “behind the scenes” isn’t a red carpet job.

It’s about payroll, clogged toilets, accounts receivable, broken light fixtures, insurance policies, employee satisfaction, product outages, social media fixations, and answering the phone at 3:00 a.m. – always 3:00 a.m. – when the alarm goes off because a ceiling fan or passing truck somehow tripped the mechanism.

Small business owners grow into it, and they get used to it. At times, they remember how pleasant it was to have no responsibilities.

“I knew how to manage other peoples’ restaurants, but when it comes to yours, it’s different,” Dabbagh observes.

“It’s always so different when you work for someone. You think it’s so easy, but when you are your own boss, that’s when the headaches come.”

Overlapping cultures and complementary curries.

The day I met Dabbagh to chat at August Moon was a typically scorching and humid Ohio Valley afternoon.

Relief gratefully arrived in the caramel-colored form of a creamy-sweet iced Vietnamese coffee, an obvious legacy of the French colonial presence in Vietnam, along with baguettes, beignets, palmiers and a form of chili sauce strikingly like that served in France’s North African colonies.

It’s also another clue that Dabbagh’s melting pot began right at home.

“My grandfather was Indian by birth. He enlisted in the French military, and became a French national. When he came to Vietnam (after World War I), he met my grandmother, and she had my dad. So, my dad was a French citizen. Then my grandfather went back to India when my father was two years old, and my grandmother raised my father alone in Vietnam.”

Dabbagh’s grandmother carried on, marrying two other times, though Vietnam’s incessant strife claimed both husbands.

“Visiting my grandmother, I’d see photos of all these men on the wall and ask, who are these men?”

“They’re your grandfathers.”

As a woman, mother and restaurant owner, Dabbagh’s life can be surveyed in terms of recurring motifs, like the melting pot, the producer’s chair and an independence of spirit harnessed to a goal of teamwork.

However, ultimately it’s about family.

Maybe this is because Dabbagh left Vietnam so young and didn’t see her family for so long, a situation finally resolved in 1990 when she and her sister joined to sponsor their elderly parents and all seven of their siblings to reunite in the United States, fully 15 years after the airlift.

Married in 1947, Dabbagh’s parents had been together 70 years when her father died in April, 2017 at the age of 95. She refers to him as her rock, as well as being a rich source of information about Vietnamese history. Once in Louisville, her father reconnected with his own melting pot.

“My dad was infatuated with curry spices because of his father’s background,” she says. “When he came to live with me, I took him to Shalimar – it was like it brought back his childhood. He was so happy just to eat the Indian food.”

Curry almost functions as the Zen running through this narrative. When Dabbagh’s husband Reza, an immigrant from Iran, retired from his job as project engineer for the city of Louisville, the Dabbaghs promptly purchased Saffron’s Persian Restaurant in downtown Louisville, where he inaugurated a second career as a restaurant owner/manager.

“When I go over to his place (Saffron’s), it’s the Middle Eastern spices, and over here it’s the Asian spices, but what we have in common is the curry.”

Fusion, again.

A restaurant at 30, and beyond.

So, 11,000 days later, how’s business at August Moon?

“It’s the same business, more or less,” says Peng Looi. “We go through the same issues, and it’s getting more and more challenging with more competition for customers’ dollars, and the labor pool ... ”

I posed the same question to Dabbagh.

“After 30 years, I guess we’re doing okay. Looi and I are opposites, and I guess they say opposites attract – he’s very different from me, but he’s very good at what he does, and I’m very good at what I do. It’s a long road to get here; as you know, the restaurant business isn’t as rosy as everyone says. It’s very tough. If people don’t see behind the scenes, they can’t know what it’s like to own a restaurant.”

It’s been an eventful road for Mimi Dabbagh, from youthful displacement to professional achievement. She has traveled this often challenging path with determination and resilience, never lacking an upbeat sense of optimism.

The melting pot as art of the possible?

It makes perfect sense to me, and it should to you as well. After all, Mimi Dabbagh has lived it.

Women, sex, socialism and Slavenka Drakulić's How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed.

Published in 1992.

When I saw the NYT article (below) last week about the sex lives of Eastern European women during communism, it immediately brought to mind a book I read a very long time ago.

Her Life Through Their Eyes, by Cathy Young (New York Times)

HOW WE SURVIVED COMMUNISM AND EVEN LAUGHED, by Slavenka Drakulić

 ... One does not have to embrace stereotypes about some uniquely female sensibility attuned to the personal (as if men never write about the personal!) to acknowledge the particular burdens that scarcity in Eastern Europe has imposed on women. Not surprisingly, Ms. Drakulić concentrates primarily on women's lives. Her perspective is that of a feminist, but the Eastern European experience gives her feminism a special edge. She is acutely aware of a larger helplessness that unites women and men: "It's hard to see . . . men as a gender. . . . Perhaps because everyone's identity is denied, we want to see them as persons, not as a group, or a category, or a mass."

For more on the author:

To some, Slavenka Drakulić (4 July 1949--) may not seem like a particularly remarkable figure in European history. She is not often proclaimed to be a hero who might inspire all people; nor was she, arguably, a particularly explosive dissident. However, in reading Drakulić's own accounts of her life under Communism in former-Yugoslavia, we may see that Drakulić herself places great value in what others may deem “the boring parts of the revolution.”

Now last week's article about female sexual pleasure in a time of Marxism-Leninism.

Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism, by Kristen R. Ghodsee (New York Times)

When Americans think of Communism in Eastern Europe, they imagine travel restrictions, bleak landscapes of gray concrete, miserable men and women languishing in long lines to shop in empty markets and security services snooping on the private lives of citizens. While much of this was true, our collective stereotype of Communist life does not tell the whole story.

Some might remember that Eastern bloc women enjoyed many rights and privileges unknown in liberal democracies at the time, including major state investments in their education and training, their full incorporation into the labor force, generous maternity leave allowances and guaranteed free child care. But there’s one advantage that has received little attention: Women under Communism enjoyed more sexual pleasure.

A comparative sociological study of East and West Germans conducted after reunification in 1990 found that Eastern women had twice as many orgasms as Western women. Researchers marveled at this disparity in reported sexual satisfaction, especially since East German women suffered from the notorious double burden of formal employment and housework. In contrast, postwar West German women had stayed home and enjoyed all the labor-saving devices produced by the roaring capitalist economy. But they had less sex, and less satisfying sex, than women who had to line up for toilet paper ...

LIVE TO EAT: Read my profile of August Moon's Mimi Dabbagh in the Fall 2017 issue of Food & Dining Magazine.

The Fall 2017 issue of Food & Dining Magazine is out. You can read the new issue at issuu.

While not billed as such, the magazine's theme this time around centers on local women in the food and drink business.

Speaking for myself, I richly enjoyed my time with Mimi Dabbagh, chatting about her life and career.

I hope readers enjoy the profile.

Mimi Dabbagh is someone you should know. Since 1987, Dabbagh has been Chef Peng Looi’s co-owner and business partner at August Moon Chinese Bistro, and yet 30 years after the eatery’s inception, she’s almost unGoogleable, having consistently avoided the limelight in favor of tending to the less glamorous aspects of restaurant ownership.

“Chef Looi is like the front man; I’m behind the scenes,” says Dabbagh. “It’s all right, because most people aren’t so interested in the owner. They’re interested in the chef and the food.”

Where are they in NA? "Yes, I'm the 'Business Candidate,' and Yes, I'm a Progressive."

This is somewhat the point I've been trying to make since local time began, though of course I'm no longer a business owner.

But Sara Nelson owns a brewery, and this makes me happy, even if I'm aware that not all brewery owners were Sandinista brigadistas.

Hmm. Maybe Seattle is different from New Albany?

Guest Editorial: Yes, I'm the "Business Candidate," and Yes, I'm a Progressive, by Sara Nelson (The Stranger)

Hi, everyone. My name is Sara Nelson, I’m running for City Council, and I’m the business candidate.

How did I — a former Sandinista brigadista who met her husband at the WTO protests — become the “business candidate?" Well, besides the fact that The Stranger and Seattle Times both agree on the label — a sure sign the stars are aligning — it’s really not a surprise. I do co-own a small business. My company, Fremont Brewing, has grown from three full-time employees to 55. I’m proud of that.

I’m also pretty vocal that I think our local small businesses need a seat at the table in politics. With more than 60 percent of King County’s private-sector workers employed by small businesses, they’re incredibly important to growing our economy, tackling affordability, and ensuring we don’t turn into Bellevue. I’m absolutely willing to be the candidate of progressive small business ...

"Why Millennial Women Are Embracing Atheism" -- because there's no better day than Sunday to be a gadfly.

I wrote the following in 2006.

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A few weeks back, as Tribune syndicated religion columnist David Yount wrote carefully erected a straw man out of atheism before predictably and delightedly bashing it to bits, he ventured, “It is no more credible that there is no God than that God indeed exists.”

I submit that this statement is at best an example of logical sleight of hand, and at worst, downright nonsensical.

If I were to write, “It is no more credible that there is no Blue Speckled Hungadunga than that a Blue Speckled Hungadunga indeed exists,” it is quite likely that any rational person would demand an immediate definition of a Blue Speckled Hungadunga in order to proceed with the discussion.

Moreover, lacking persuasive proof for the existence of the Blue Speckled Hungadunga, there would be no need for further debate, and subsequently no need for a syndicated religion columnist to utter a statement that is at base invalid, for it assumes the existence of a conjectured entity, then uses this assumed (and as yet unproven) existence to impugn the allegedly faulty perception of those who insist in pointing to the obvious nature of the theist’s logical fallacy.

In fact, atheists don’t “believe” there is no God; rather, they are absent such a belief. As with the Blue Speckled Hungadunga, the responsibility for proving the existence of God lies with the one advancing a positive belief in the conjectured deity, not with the one who has no belief.

Atheists offer no positive claims with respect to knowledge presumed to derive from outside the realm of human experience and perception. As Yount correctly notes, some atheists go a step further and proselytize in the manner of the religionist, but it’s a very safe bet that during the past two thousand years far more people have been asked to convert to religion at the point of a bayonet, and died as a result of their refusal, than have been forcibly converted to atheism.

After all, if religious belief really remains a matter of heart and soul, isn’t it impossible to “convert” anyone to atheism? Outward symbols and pageantry are superfluous with regard to inner feeling, aren’t they?

In my experience, atheists generally just want to be left alone, and prefer that religious belief remain a matter of private conscience and not a public policy stick. We respect a separation of church and state and take such a division at face value precisely because we’ve studied history, and we know against whom that public policy stick inevitably is wielded – against us, to be sure, but far more often against other religionists who believe in their variant of the supernatural entity just as much as the ones shooting at them from a nearby trench.

The result is a sad continuation of the war, violence and strife that has accompanied religion throughout human history.

To summarize, atheism is a negation in the absence of verifiable evidence, and it is the theist who is obliged to prove that God exists – not the other way around.

---

Ten years later, an excellent link -- and what better day for it?

Why Millennial Women Are Embracing Atheism, by Kyle Fitzpatrick (Pop Sugar)

Danielle Schacter never thought she would become an un-Christian. "I slowly became more and more disgusted by the way I saw people treating others," says the 32-year-old, who was raised Baptist. "I didn't want to be associated with a religion that preached so much hate."

Schacter, like so many millennials, has chosen a secular life, and she's not alone: according to the Pew Research Center, only four in 10 millennials say that religion is very important to them, compared with six in 10 Baby Boomers.

The numbers of religiously unaffiliated support this, too: 23 percent of the population identifies with no religion. This number is up from 2007, when it was only 16 percent. Of older millennials, 35 percent are religiously unaffiliated — and they're driving the overall growth of the nonreligiously affiliated in America.

And this:

What's fascinating is that while millennials are moving away from religion, they are moving toward spirituality. This demographic considers itself just as spiritual as older demographics, even as they represent an exodus out of organized religion and into the throes of secularism. When you consider the issues facing young people today, the reasons for the exodus are easy to understand. In rejecting religion, millennials are asserting their progressive attitudes and passion for social justice. They're committed to the idea that they don't need religion to know the difference between right and wrong.

Perhaps no one represents this cultural shift better than millennial atheist women. While they may sit at the most extreme side of the nonreligious spectrum, atheist women are fueled by the same concerns plaguing millennials in general: a quest for independence and a rejection of the status quo.

Trump's victory encourages women to run for office. Let's hope they do so right here in New Albany, in spite of the Democratic Party's Gahanesque 2015 outrages.

It's instructive for New Albanians to recall the 2015 election season.

In close cooperation with Democratic Party chairman Adam Dickey, Mayor Jeff Gahan targeted 5th district councilwoman Diane Benedetti for kneecapping in the primary; she lost, but winner Dustin Collins was forced to withdraw from the race owing to health issues, and substitute Matt Nash managed to keep the seat Democratic in November.

Meanwhile, again with the enthusiastic help of a forever shameless Dickey, Gahan set about crippling incumbent at-large councilman John Gonder's re-election chances -- and succeeded, though at the cost of collateral damage by flushing Democratic council rubber stamp Shirley Baird's bid to serve another term, resulting in a sweep of at-large seats by Republicans.

Gahan's self-serving back alley machinations brought about an all-male council (until 2020 at the earliest, all-white and with an average age in the mid-to-late fifties) where two women had been seated previously.

Let's not forget Gahan's petty conniving in 2015, although I'm sure Greg Phipps and Bob Caesar already have.

Trump victory spurs women to run for office across US: 'Our time is coming', by Joanna Walters (The Guardian)

Organizations report surging numbers of women mulling campaigns as potential candidates describe motivations: ‘Trump pushed me over the edge’

... (Victoria Oliver) is part of a surge of women across the country who are rushing to run for office in the aftermath of the election – women disappointed that Hillary Clinton lost and disgusted with the sexist and racist rhetoric of Trump’s campaign and the ultra-conservative credentials of his proposed cabinet.

“We are a force to be reckoned with,” said Oliver. “Our time is coming.”

VoteRunLead (VRL), an organization that trains future female politicians, normally receives between 30 and 80 applicants for each of its regular webinars.

“In a 48-hour period after the election, we had 1,100 women sign up for our next webinar and we had to close it and start a wait list,” said Erin Vilardi, executive director of VoteRunLead.

“Most women said they woke up on November 9 and realized they could no longer just spectate or click on online petitions, they wanted to know how to run for office, whether it’s the school board, the city council, state or national representation,” she added.

On being a woman in Iceland.

Not an Aunt Tammy here ... photo credit: The Nation.

Rewinding to a time when it had been only 30 years since the Cubs played in the World Series:

... What made Iceland’s day of protest on 24 October 1975 so effective was the number of women who participated. It was not just the impact of 25,000 women – which, at the time, was a fifth of the female population – that gathered on the streets of Reykjavik, but the 90% of Iceland’s female population who went on all-out professional and domestic strike. Teachers, nurses, office workers, housewives put down tools and didn’t go to work, provide childcare or even cook in their kitchens. All to prove how indispensable they were.

Brilliant.

Why Iceland is the best place in the world to be a woman, by Noreena Hertz (The Guardian)

Since 1975, the Nordic country has blazed the trail in gender equality and now, from infancy to maternity, women and girls enjoy a progressive lifestyle. But how did they achieve it?

Rebekka is so tiny that, even on her tiptoes, arms aloft, she cannot reach. So her teacher lifts her up to the unvarnished wooden monkey bar. “One, two, three,” her classmates count. She hangs on, determinedly. When she reaches 10, she jumps to the ground. “I am strong,” she shouts proudly.

It’s an ordinary morning for this single-sex class of three-year-olds at Laufásborg nursery school in Reykjavik. No dolls or cup-cake decorating on the lesson plan here. Instead, as Margrét Pála Ólafsdóttir, the school’s founder, tells me: “We are training [our girls] to use their voice. We are training them in physical strength. We are training them in courage.”

It’s a fascinating approach to education. And a popular one. In a country of only 330,000 people, there are 19 such primary and nursery schools, empowering girls from an early age.

Miss Representation: "You can't be what you can't see."

Watch the video. I'm embarrassed to learn that it's six years old.

Then, learn more ... and thanks to J for posting the link.

The Representation Project

Wikipedia

Miss Representation is a 2011 American documentary film written, directed, and produced by Jennifer Siebel Newsom. It explores how mainstream media contribute to the under-representation of women in influential positions by circulating limited and often disparaging portrayals of women. The film premiered in the documentary competition at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival.

"What’s driving the growth in cities? Small-business entrepreneurs. And many of them are women.”

"What’s driving the growth in cities? Small-business entrepreneurs."

Except in New Albany. Here, it's parks.

What the Boom in Women-Owned Businesses Means for Cities, by Eillie Anzilotti (City Lab)

... “The economic landscape is shifting,” he tells City Lab. “At a time when large companies are decentralizing their operations or moving overseas or going to cheaper locales, what’s driving the growth in cities? Small-business entrepreneurs. And many of them are women.”

By the sheer numbers, men are still founding more companies, but the rate at which women are doing so is pulling the statistic ever more equal.

What remains decidedly unequal, however, are two things: funding and size.

Zirin on "Louisville Basketball and the NCAA’s Political Economy of Misogyny."

Former University of Michigan and NBA star Jalen Rose, as quoted in the Detroit Free Press on the topic of college athletic recruitment:

"Yes, there is drinking. Yes, there is members of the opposite sex that are present. Remember, they're trying to woo me to the campus ... and as a 17-year-old kid, first off, if I'm not getting laid, I'm not coming. I'm not signing. I'm not coming."

At times like this, as the fanatics rush to decry and defend the coach, I take a deep breath and remind myself that we're about the only country in the world to confuse sports with education.

In this, it's helpful to know that Dave Zirin is out there somewhere, writing about sports and those aspects of it embracing genuine significance. Zirin warns against moralizing and cynicism, and hits the center of the target.

Louisville Basketball and the NCAA’s Political Economy of Misogyny, by Dave Zirin (The Nation)

 ... both of these reactions miss the most urgent issue—the NCAA’s political economy of misogyny. There’s a lesson in this scandal if we’re willing to learn it. It starts with Louisville Basketball, whose use of transactional sex as a method of recruitment produced results and made a small number of people very rich. Louisville has now been at the top of Forbes Magazine’s list of most valuable NCAA hoops programs for four consecutive years. Pitino won an NCAA title in 2013 alongside a new contract that pays him well in excess of four million dollars a year. The connective tissue before us between the political economy of amateurism and misogyny has been written in a neon script. It also shines a harsh light on how the use of women as currency links many of the public relations crises that plague sports and the psychological pain that plagues ex-athletes.

Is (your city name here) a city designed for women?

This may be the first essay I've seen that explicitly applies Jeff Speck's walkability pillars and other urban design theories to the needs of the female population.

Opinion: Is Brisbane designed for women?, by Kathleen Noonan (The Courier-Mail)

... Is Brisbane a city designed for women? What makes a great city for women – and, therefore, everyone else? Because when you make a great city for women, you improve the fabric and experience of human life.

No matter where you are in Queensland this morning, it’s a valid question: is this town a great place for women and children? Because let’s not forget, women and children are the majority.

Is your town a safe welcoming place for elderly women, migrant women, women with disabilities, young female students, for all women? Most women need “porous’’ and connected cities because their lives often meld their two shifts – their work/career and their work/family.

Have you ever sat in a children’s playground or park thinking it was designed by someone who had never met a child? How do we get it so wrong so often?

Don’t worry. It is not just Brisbane or Australia. All over the world, cities have been in the throes of reinventing themselves with fewer cars and more feet. Some of the fixes are so very easy and not expensive.

Women should experience their city exactly as men do. Their city should be utterly, entirely fair.

What they're saying: Roseberry, Knable, Staten and Rutherford.

As the weeks go past in route to May's primary election, I'm providing periodic candidate statements of substance, mostly unretouched, as lifted from social media and news reports. Familiar gems such as "yard signs win elections, not people" and "donate to my campaign first, and maybe I'll have something of merit to say much, much later" will be omitted. That's because it is my aim to determine whether our declared candidates have anything to say at all, and I'll quote all candidates, from any and all parties, whether or not they're in a contested race. Just promising change and new ideas without divulging them won't cut the mustard, aspirants.

---

Hannegan Roseberry (D, at-large council) and Al Knable (R, at-large council) continue to buck the close-lipped traditions of their respective parties by speaking and writing openly about the real world. Hannegan leads off with two postings at her Facebook campaign page.

First, on the topic of standing up for what you believe:

I feel we have a real problem on our hands when our elected officials refuse to give simple yes or no answers to questions. When you are an elected official and you refuse to give your thoughts on a subject, then I politely suggest that you hang up your hat. Whether it be something as obvious as Two-Way Streets in a city like New Albany, or something as colossal (and sinister) as RFRA, you have an obligation to be transparent on your stance. You were elected by the people (granted, a very small amount of the people of Indiana, see my earlier posts about voter apathy in the Hoosier state), and you owe them transparency. This doesn't mean that your opinions can, or even should, please everyone at all times. I think that is another tricky corner that too many elected officials get themselves into, trying to please everyone at all times by committing to nothing and towing every line "just in case." Be bold, be educated, and stand strongly for the things you believe in.

And, on women in local politics.

Wonder Women - Where Are You?

Where are the women candidates? In our upcoming city primary elections, there are a mere five female candidates out of 28, and only two of those women are challengers (myself included). Last time I checked, one out of every two human beings are female - why are we not stepping up to the plate to lead at that same level?

Al enthusiastically riffs on an idea previously discussed by Hannegan.

I won't pretend that encouraging a civic theater in New Albany is my idea. Hannegan Roseberry discussed it on her page a few days ago. Randy Smith proposed the Baptist Tabernacle site as a possible location with me several weeks ago. The thought's been kicked around for years. In fact, I remember Jim Anderson's wife, Mary, advocating this 40 years ago. But heck, I can recognize a great idea!

A civic theater would be yet one more draw to downtown and everyone knows when the show lets out people love to eat or hit their favorite night spot.

The old Tabernacle building might prove multi-functional. When not in use for shows it could easily serve as a site for other public forums.

As NA doesn't have unlimited funds, and as there are numerous pressing needs, I see this as a project facilitated rather than fully funded by the city. Even so, this is definitely a cause I'd support, allowing others (Mrs. R?) to champion.

(OMG -- candidates from opposite parties, agreeing on social media as to the virtues of an idea? I don't know about Al's arbiters, but Hannegan can expect an unannounced visit from Warren "I used to be mayor, pal" Nash's "purity of absolute silence" department)

Over in the 6th district, Democratic council hopeful Dr. Cliff Staten sensibly asks, "What will New Albany do to attract and keep younger generations here?"

Working Today to Build Tomorrow

Elections are about the future. Think about New Albany 5 years from now… now picture it 10 years from now… how about 20? How do you picture New Albany in the future? How would you like to picture New Albany in the future?

To me, the future starts with our young people; it starts with our children and our grandchildren. How do we picture their New Albany?

Meanwhile in the 5th district, Tonye Rutherford is back with a Facebook campaign page. He has an opponent in the Republican primary (Danita Burks), as does the incumbent Diane Benedetti (Dustin Collins).

Tonye Rutherford for New Albany City Council District 5

This is Tonye Rutherford, I am running for City Council in the 5th District. After narrowly losing by 21 votes in 2011, I have been busy ... I have since been appointed to the New Albany Floyd County Library board where I serve as the president, I was appointed to the New Albany Human Rights Commission and serve as the Chairman, I was appointed to the Floyd County Corrections board and elected to the Emmaus board.

Have you spotted substance omitted here? Let me know. The primary's only five weeks away.

ON THE AVENUES: Shelter from the Strom.

ON THE AVENUES: Shelter from the Strom.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

I’ll begin this week’s column with a robust act of good will by saving the little people of New Albany the trouble of griping, grudging trips to their attics to locate moldering thesauruses last consulted during the Ford Administration.

In England (the country, not the ex-mayor), “crackpot” arose several hundred years ago as two separate words, first hyphenated as cracked-pot, and then later joined together as one: Crackpot.

Then as now, something broken or faulty was cracked, and as far back as the Middle Ages, one’s head or skull might be called a pot. Literally, a cracked-pot was a “faulty head,” similar to one of my personal favorite derogations, numbskull, which I’ll always associate with the Three Stooges even if its prevalent usage goes much further back in history than the advent of Larry, Moe and Curly on celluloid.

Which is to say, I ran into one the other day – not a Stooge, but a crackpot.

---

In retrospect, there were warning signs on the road ahead even though the conversation began sensibly enough with a generally benign chat about various aspects of American history. I should have known better, seeing as my point of view tends to differ from the 50-year-old white male demographic, and yet fleeing was not an option. I’d only just bought a beer and lit a cigar, and damn it, it was a clean and well lighted place.

Instead, I shifted into autopilot and imagined myself reading old telephone books and electronics manuals. It’s a sanity defense mechanism of long standing, reflecting too many years of listening to the beer-fueled babblings of barflies.

Soon we arrived at a crossroads of sorts. He’d already made a fleeting reference to the “mistake” of American women being granted the vote. I ignored it, but it was only a matter of time; his tone of voice subtly was changing, and a sense of agitation gradually was becoming palpable. Obviously, we weren’t quite finished with the female franchise, and when it finally arrived, requisitely red-faced, his argument proceeded roughly like this.

Women are innately different from men, which is to say that women are innately superior to men, this being because as opposed to men, women are both “compassionate” and “nurturing.” Precisely owing to the superior nature of women as compassionate and nurturing, they should not be allowed to vote, because voting is about government, and not only should government never should be about compassion or nurture, but it is a misreading of the Constitution to suggest otherwise.

I waited in vain for the punch line, and heard only crickets chirping. Then with resignation, it came to me. The guy was dead serious.

Frankly, this revelation shouldn’t have stunned me. I had expected some manner of illogical utterance, but the fellow fairly pole-vaulted over the bare minimum comprehensibility. In my everyday world, such an argument would have been openly, blatantly satirical – a gag, a joke, a late night talk show skit making the rounds on YouTube, or an anonymous posting at Kitchen Fable.

In fact, if his rant had been uttered in the context of the Seventies-era sitcom “Barney Miller,” Det. Harris surely would have made the usual deadpan remark to the Captain:

“Looks like we have a new customer for the enchanted kingdom.”

The guy was absolutely sincere. I thought to myself, hmm, maybe I need to get out more often.

Or: Never go out, ever again.

---

In truncated form, the preceding anecdote duly was posted on Twitter, and I smugly kicked back my heels to receive the inevitable plaudits from all my like-minded friends who hang out there, except that Bluegill promptly answered by going me one better. Seems he’d been having chats, too.

I was told male dominated gun ownership was the only fair thing do given that women have so much power to murder via abortion.

Now I’d been thoroughly pole-vaulted, both deflated and forced to concede that yes, in the comparative struggle to quantify cluelessness, the derision implicit in the assertion reported by Bluegill rendered it far more disturbing. At least my guy had something good to say about women in the general sense.

Abruptly, I realized that the last time I’d heard such an observation equating women with murder, it had emanated from a woman, one who probably supports her own right to vote.

But perhaps a woman in opposition to abortion would agree with a male who favors stripping women of the vote, seeing as any “real” woman imbued with compassion and nurturing wouldn’t ever choose abortion, anyway, although wouldn’t this stance imply that such anti-feminine traits like “murdering” children actually make her more masculine, thereby entitling her to both guns AND the vote?

If so, would her possession of both guns and ballots prevent a preacher somewhere (Christianity only, please – we’re ‘mericans, not rag-heads) from deciding under which circumstances she might have sexual relations and bear children?

Once again, surveying the world of crackpots, just staying home really began sounding like the best idea of all.

---

Most expository writing instructors would suggest that I come to a conclusion at this juncture. Insofar as any closing point can be reached, mine comes in the form of a memo to my fellow white heterosexual male Americans.

“I know you’re feeling all forgotten, marginalized, excluded, neutered, angry and terrified of a changing world, but seriously, you really need to stop embarrassing me, okay? You’re going to have embolisms and coronaries if you don’t chill out. Worse, you’ll fall off the planet into space like the dinosaurs did. Watch some golf, listen to your old rock & roll records, and have a drink – even ice cold swill’s okay if it calms you the $%@# down.”

Thanks, fellows. I won’t keep you any longer. After all, the ferry to Fantasy Island departs very, very soon.

"Ladies, Don't Fall for Moderate Mitt!"

Until Mitt Romney came along, I thought being religious precluded outright lying. And to think I wasted all those potentially devout years. Meanwhile, Romney has unveiled a new slogan: "Change We Can Deceive With."

I hear it is polling well with white male amnesiacs. That's bad enough, but let's hope women don't fall for it.

Ladies, Don't Fall for Moderate Mitt!, by Katha Pollitt (The Nation)

Dear Undecided Women Voters of America: It’s been fun watching you force the candidates to pay attention to the stuff men really don’t like to think about—equal pay and abortion and “legitimate rape” and all that. I love you, women! as Ann Romney likes to say. But we’re getting down to the wire now, and it’s time for you to make up your minds. Because face it, expecting to figure it out in the voting booth is not very considerate toward all the people who will have been waiting in line for hours to cast their ballot. Fortunately, despite Mitt Romney’s multiple, changing and contradictory statements, there are major differences between him and President Obama on all these issues.

Now, if you believe that the only issue that matters is the economy, and you believe that giving tax breaks to the wealthiest people and firing public sector workers is the way to fix it, you can stop reading right now.