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The culture of masculinity costs all too much to ignore

Today is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. The phrase “violence against women” calls for comment. It names the victims but not the perpetrators . The fact that men are mainly responsible for violent and health-harming behaviours, not only against women and children but also against each other, is so taken for granted that it slips beneath the radar of commentators and policymakers.

[...]

In 1959 the social scientist and policy activist Barbara Wootton looked at the crime statistics and remarked that “if men behaved like women, the courts would be idle and the prisons empty”. Half a century later the British Crime Survey and police crime figures bear her out. In 2009-10, men were perpetrators in 91% of all violent incidents in England and Wales. The figures vary by type of incident: 81% for domestic violence, 86% for assault, 94% for wounding, 96% for mugging, 98% for robbery. MoJ figures for 2009 show men to be responsible for 98%, 92% and 89% of sexual offences, drug offences and criminal damage respectively. Of child sex offenders, 99% are male. The highest percentages of female offences concern fraud and forgery (30%), and theft and handling stolen goods (21% female).

[..]

On the road, men commit 87% of all traffic offences and 81% of speeding offences. More people are killed and injured in road accidents than anywhere else, and Home Office data reveal the bearing of masculinity here too: men are responsible for 97% of dangerous driving offences and 94% of motoring offences causing death or bodily harm. A World Health Organisation report in 2002 on gender and road traffic injuries cautiously broke the code of silence by remarking that masculinity “may be” hazardous to health.

[..]

Take prison costs alone – an estimated £45,000 per prisoner a year, 95% of whom are male. If men committed crimes leading to custodial sentences at the rate women do, the exchequer would save about £3.4bn a year.

►http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/25/dangerous-masculinty-everyone-risk

Facebook’s ’3.74 degrees of separation’ is a world away from being significant | Matt Parker | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
►http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/23/facebook-degrees-of-separation?fb=optOut

The area of mathematics known as “graph theory” looks at complicated networks and tries to understand their fundamental characteristics. While this is vital work when it comes to building robust computer networks, it does not tell us anything of great note about social degrees of separation. It’s not socially meaningful that a friend of your friends is buddies with an acquaintance of someone else’s pal. It’s just an innate feature of large, tangled networks.

So as much as I hate to maths on a parade, that isn’t actually very amazing. If everyone only had the median 100 friends this report found, that means you already have 10,000 friends of friends. If you include their 100 friends each, you’re at 1 million people within three degrees of separation. At five degrees of separation you have 10 billion people linked to you, which is greater than the Earth’s population.

Syria needs mediation, not a push into all-out civil war | Jonathan Steele (Comment is free)
►http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/17/syria-mediation-arab-league-assad

Syria is on the verge of civil war and the Arab League foolishly appears to have decided to egg it on. The spectre is ugly, as Qatar and Saudi Arabia, the hawks of the Gulf, are joined by the normally restrained King Abdullah of Jordan in taking sides with opponents of Syria’s Assad regime. Where common sense dictates that Arab governments should seek to mediate between the regime and its opponents, they have chosen instead to humiliate Syria’s rulers by suspending them from the Arab League. (...) Source: Comment is free

Un billet très intéressant de Jonathan Steele dans le Guardian, à peu près l’exact opposé de tout ce qu’on peut lire ou entendre ailleurs.

Syria needs mediation, not a push into all-out civil war | Jonathan Steele | The Guardian
►http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/17/syria-mediation-arab-league-assad

It is no accident that the minority of Arab League members who declined to go along with that decision includes Algeria, Lebanon and Iraq. They are the three Arab countries that have experienced massive sectarian violence and the horrors of civil war themselves. Lebanon and Iraq, in particular, have a direct interest in preventing all-out bloodshed in Syria. They rightly fear the huge influx of refugees that would pour across their borders if their neighbour collapses into civil war.

That war has already begun. The image of a regime shooting down unarmed protesters, which was true in March and April this year, has become out of date. The so-called Free Syrian Army no longer hides the fact that it is fighting and killing government forces and police, and operating from safe havens outside Syria’s borders. If it gathers strength, the incipient civil war would take on an even more overt sectarian turn with the danger of pogroms against rival communities.

Moderate Sunnis in Syria are worried by the increasing militancy of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis who have taken the upper hand in opposition ranks. The large pro-regime demonstrations in Damascus and Aleppo over the past week cannot simply be written off as crowds who were intimidated or threatened with loss of jobs if they did not turn out.

[…]

If that were to become a serious effort at mediation, so much the better. The best model is the agreement that ended Lebanon’s civil war, reached after talks in Taif in Saudi Arabia in 1989. Although it was negotiated by the various Lebanese parties and interest groups, Saudi sponsorship and support were important.

Whether Saudi Arabia can play a similar role today is doubtful. Eagerly backed by the Obama administration, the monarchy seems bent on an anti-Iranian mission in which toppling Syria’s Shia-led regime is seen as a proxy strike against Tehran. The Saudis and Americans are working closely with the Sunni forces of Saad Hariri in Beirut, who are still smarting from their loss of control of the Lebanese government this spring.

In Egypt, the stakes have risen | Comment is free | The Guardian
►http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/13/egypt-stakes-have-risen?CMP=twt_gu

The Egyptian revolution of 25 January, as we all know, had no leaders. But in the course of its unfolding, and in the months since, a number of people have emerged who are pushing it forward, advocating for it and articulating its principles. Alaa Abd El Fattah, the activist and blogger (and my nephew) who has been jailed by the military prosecutor in Cairo pending trial, is one of those. And in his character and the role he’s adopted, he embodies some of the core aspects of the Egyptian revolution.

Alaa is a techie, a programmer of note. He and Manal, his wife and colleague, work in developing open-source software platforms and in linguistic exchange. They terminated contracts abroad and flew home to join the revolution. In Tahrir he moved between groups; listening, facilitating, making peace when necessary, defending the square physically when he had to.

The 1% are the very best destroyers of wealth the world has ever seen

| George Monbiot | Comment is free | The Guardian
►http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/07/one-per-cent-wealth-destroyers

Our common treasury in the last 30 years has been captured by industrial psychopaths. That’s why we’re nearly bankrupt

I

If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire. The claims that the ultra-rich 1% make for themselves – that they are possessed of unique intelligence or creativity or drive – are examples of the self-attribution fallacy. This means crediting yourself with outcomes for which you weren’t responsible. Many of those who are rich today got there because they were able to capture certain jobs. This capture owes less to talent and intelligence than to a combination of the ruthless exploitation of others and accidents of birth, as such jobs are taken disproportionately by people born in certain places and into certain classes.

The findings of the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of a Nobel economics prize, are devastating to the beliefs that financial high-fliers entertain about themselves. He discovered that their apparent success is a cognitive illusion. For example, he studied the results achieved by 25 wealth advisers across eight years. He found that the consistency of their performance was zero. “The results resembled what you would expect from a dice-rolling contest, not a game of skill.” Those who received the biggest bonuses had simply got lucky.

Such results have been widely replicated. They show that traders and fund managers throughout Wall Street receive their massive remuneration for doing no better than would a chimpanzee flipping a coin. When Kahneman tried to point this out, they blanked him. “The illusion of skill … is deeply ingrained in their culture.”