"I wonder how Goldberg would react if the genders were flipped — if the discussion were about 'Andrea Yang,' a 46-year-old woman who's a successful businessperson vs. 'Alexander Ocasio-Cortez,' a 31-year-old man who..."

"... surprised everyone by getting elected to Congress when he was a 20-year-old bartender with an economics degree. I'm going to guess that if a male AOC and a female Yang were running in the same election and taken equally seriously, Goldberg would say that shows that women are systematically disadvantaged."  

Writes my son John (at Facebook), critiquing the NYT op-ed by Michelle Goldberg titled "There Could Never Be a Female Andrew Yang/No woman with his résumé would have a chance of becoming New York’s mayor." 

Goldberg herself brings up the comparison to AOC: "Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is one of the great political talents of her generation, but I doubt she’d be taken seriously if she ran for New York mayor, despite being far more politically experienced than Yang." 

FROM THE EMAIL: James writes:

Has Goldberg never heard of Carly Fiorina?

MikeR writes:

"Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is one of the great political talents of her generation, but I doubt she’d be taken seriously if she ran for New York mayor, despite being far more politically experienced than Yang." 

Non sequitur. Being very talented politically is a good reason to get elected to Congress, where politics is most of what you do. It is no reason at all to be elected mayor of New York City, where you have to run things competently. AOC has shown no talent for that and in fact has never even tried to do that in any phase of her life.

AND: bb says:

Bartending gets no respect. I've spent some time watching bartenders up close and I think bartending should be a prerequisite to being NYC mayor.

"Music streaming platforms have sexism wired-in."

Jawad Iqbal writes in the London Times: 

Their algorithms, which recommend things you might like based on your listening habits, are basically sexist, generating playlist after playlist dominated by male musicians.

Isn't it like sexual preference — you really do respond to the sex of the singer? With no machine helping me at all, I can see in the music choices I am making that I prefer a male voice. 

Those damning findings...

Damning!!

... come from research conducted at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. Academics analysed the listening patterns of 330,000 users over nine years: only a quarter of the artists they listened to were women, because on average the first algorithm-recommended track was always by a man; listeners had to wait until the seventh or eighth song before hearing from a woman.

It's a problem only if you assume that the outcome should be equal. But isn't the algorithm attuned to what people have responded to?

Some of this bias is a reflection of historical failures in the music industry, which has always been dominated by male acts, save for occasional superstars such as Taylor Swift or Beyoncé.

Maybe we respond to what we respond to because it's familiar, and what is familiar is a consequence of sexist decision-making within the music industry. Why do we like what we like? Is it deep or is it shallow?

There's something called the "mere exposure" effect (Wikipedia):

"All that transpired played a role in his condition," said the medical examiner, in the case of Officer Brian D. Sicknick, who died after the January 6th breaching of the Capitol.

"His office said that it attributes death to natural causes when it can be ascribed to disease alone and that 'if death is hastened by an injury, the manner of death is not considered natural.'" Yet the medical examiner, Francisco J. Diaz, determined that Sicknick died of "natural causes."

I'm reading "Officer Attacked in Capitol Riot Died of Strokes, Medical Examiner Rules The determination is likely to complicate efforts to prosecute anyone in the death of the officer, Brian Sicknick" (NYT).

"The determination is likely to complicate the Justice Department’s efforts to prosecute anyone in the death of Officer Sicknick, 42; two men have been charged with assaulting him by spraying an unknown chemical on him outside the Capitol. But an autopsy found no evidence that Officer Sicknick had an allergic reaction to chemicals or any internal or external injuries.... Two men were charged last month with assaulting Officer Sicknick, but prosecutors have avoided linking the attack to his death...."

That's written confusingly. If "prosecutors have avoided linking the attack to his death," then what are the "efforts to prosecute anyone in the death of Officer Sicknick"? The assault is an assault regardless of whether it caused a death that happened to occur soon afterward. But there's also that discrepancy between what the medical examiner said — "All that transpired played a role in his condition" — and the assertion that the finding of death by "natural causes" excludes the idea that death "was hastened by an injury."

Not discussed in the New York Times article is the way the media ran with the notion that the Capitol protesters had killed a cop. That's the legend they created, and I bet that legend will live.

FROM THE EMAIL: I'm getting a lot of email, much of it expanding what I've already said in that last paragraph. I get the sense many readers need that to be said more elongatedly, more emphatically. But let me give you this emailed comment, from James. It's short and pithy, and it kicks things up with an observation that I didn't make — speculation that there was deliberate delay to give life to the legend:

Maybe the reason prosecutors have not tried to link anyone to Officer Sicknick’s death or charge anyone with homicide is that they have known for months that he died of natural causes and there was no homicide. The powers that be just did not bother to let the rest of us know this until after the “they killed a cop” narrative was firmly rooted in the public mind.

ALSO: Glenn Greenwald is especially outraged for the way other journalists treated him: 

"Strange to see Althouse on-board with AnCaps/libertarians about the right of businesses to discriminate as much as they like."

Writes James in the comments to yesterday's post about the female-only showings of "Wonder Woman," which I'd discussed in terms of PR for a movie I find mind-crushingly boring. I'd quoted a writer at Wear Your Voice/Intersectional Feminist Media who made hyperbolic fun of the "cishet men" who are acting (feeling?) outraged over the exclusion.

In blogging the controversy, I quite consciously chose to ignore the legal issue. Not everything has to be approached from a legal perspective. There are many paths into a subject, and opting for law talk can foreclose other interesting insights. Teaching law school classes, I would often begin a discussion of a case with the question whether we (or anybody) should want a particular matter controlled by a legal restriction, monitored by the government. It can be more enlightening to open up that inquiry before you get to a discussion of whether what was done in fact violated a statute and whether a constitutional right trumps the statute. It can help you think about how broadly to interpret that statute and that constitutional right.

I didn't want to talk about the law yet. Other bloggers have announced flatly that what the theaters are doing is against the law, and I acknowledge that those laws exist and should be taken seriously. The theaters are exposing themselves to legal proceedings. I can see some plausible defenses. We could talk about freedom of association cases like Boy Scouts v. Dale. This isn't like a restaurant wanting to exclude a particular type of person. The exclusion has to do with the expression of ideas. But I'm not the movie theater's lawyer, and I haven't worked out the argument. 

In any case, there's a such thing as civil disobedience. I don't know if the freedom of women to assemble in a public space and watch a super-hero movie without men in the room is the sort of thing that's worth risking the consequences that are part of civil disobedience, but it's one way to behave in this world and sometimes good things ensue. For example — to get back to the aspect of the controversy I forefronted — PR.

Anyway, thanks for the challenge, James. I had to look up "AnCaps."

Anarcho-capitalists hold that, in the absence of statute (law by centralized decrees and legislation), society tends to contractually self-regulate and civilize through the discipline of the free market (in what its proponents describe as a "voluntary society").

You know, I'm not the type.

A Meadhouse conversation about blogging/broadcasting and marriage.

I read that last post out loud and said "I sent that to Glenn."

Meade: "Oh, you emailed it to him." I see the concerned look on his face.

Me: "I wrote it as a post, and then I emailed the link to Glenn. What?! That look! What if Rush Limbaugh ran everything past his wife before he said it on the air? 'I'm thinking of saying this... what do you think?' His show would be horrible!"

Meade: "You should post that. This conversation. Exactly that."

Me: "Shhh!"

Meade: "You..."

Me: "Shhhhhh! Don't say anything. I won't remember the quotes."

ADDED: Actually, I can imagine that Rush's Fluke floundering did involve some consultation with his wife. I can imagine a woman egging him on, making him feel licensed to attack a woman in a truly bitchy way. My other theory about Rush — which Meade doesn't want me to publish — is that he just had to seize the spotlight back from Andrew Breibart, who'd gotten so much attention by dropping dead at the age of 43. Everyone was talking about Breitbart, as if Breitbart had been the biggest thing in right-wing media. We'll never see his like again... and Rush felt compelled to say something truly outrageous. He's always saying he knows how to play the media, to do his "media tweak of the day":

This was our Media Tweak of the Day yesterday, April. You know, what we do here on this program is, purposely, play the media like violin, like a Stradivarius. And I love tweaking them. I love irritating them, and I love upsetting them and all you do is take words uttered by liberals and apply them to current events.

And he tweaked his damnedest.

IN THE COMMENTS: James correctly points out that Rush started talking about Fluke on his February 29th show, and we did not hear of Breitbart's death until the morning of March 1st. So the basic "prostitute" idea was out there already, but Rush, having heard criticism, pushed back hard on the March 1st show, and then again on March 2nd.

"RECALL WALKER/Tell him: Keep it up/IT'S WORKING!"

Photo taken today by the commenter James.