Today's Activities Include: church, post church lunch

Therapeutic riding was canceled because of cold/icy conditions. So A. and R. were available for church today. Since yesterday A. decided at the last minute to join T. and me on our train outing, I pre-emptively asked if she wanted to go and she said yes. So off we all went to the UU church in Littleton, arriving about 2 minutes before the service started.

Munro Leaf's Ferdinand was the pre kids go downstairs story. I like Ferdinand, even tho as an adult I recognize it as a bit of a pacifist fantasy. The person relating a summary of the story questioned whether you could still buy the book. Ha! Of course you can. We have a copy. It's a rare instance of pacifist advocacy that I like so much I'll keep it around.

A. and R. went downstairs to do the kids' program, which involved a duck hunter who had a dog that didn't want to bring wounded ducks back to the hunter. So the hunter gave up duck hunting and nurse the dogs back to health. R. said this made him uncomfortable. After I heard the deets, I said there was a decent chance that I would have walked out on that. What's next? Ahimsa? I mean, R. still catches bugs in the house and puts them outside. I kill them. I don't believe in nonviolence towards all living things. That is Not Me. Also, I question any perspective taking exercise that accepts a story in which a duck hunter gives up duck hunting because he has a dog that won't hunt. In my experience, the dog is given to a young relative or friend's kid, and a new dog that will hunt is acquired. You know, I say this as someone who comes from an anti-gun, pacifist background. I got over it.

Anyway. Meanwhile, upstairs the sermon was about integrity, which was nice. I, personally, think that asserting blithely that lying is incompatible with integrity is an overly simplistic view of the moral universe that further blames the oppressed for the limitations they experience in how they express their integrity. Let's make this simple: is it a lack of integrity that causes a resistance fighter to hide Jews in Nazi occupied territory and lie about it? No, no it is not. This isn't even all that hard to imagine. I'm sure we could all work up a few more examples if we took a moment or two.

The lies we tell and the truths we tell (or conceal) are ways in which we express our values. Integrity is when our internal sense of right and wrong aligns well with what we do and say. If you believe that the lie you tell is a lie that you should be telling, that your cause is righteous, that it is in the service of good, or at least balance, then you've got all the integrity anyone could possibly want or need. But I can definitely see that that would be a pretty complicated sermon to deliver. The sermon that was delivered focused instead on lies that people tell for less clear reasons, reasons that are not actually our own, and the resulting damage to our Selves. So, it was good, more or less. There was a bit about oath breaking, which I had very ambiguous feelings about. I think there are oaths that really, really, really shouldn't be kept, and no one needs forgiveness for breaking those, and that was a category that was sort of left out. (The older I get, the more I believe that the people who think oaths of any sort are morally reprehensible are probably onto something. And I don't mean cursing.) But of course a forgiving community that is willing to provide support even to oath breakers is a pretty good thing. And folding under pressure in doing something that you committed to do and really believe in -- that's a problem. A really huge problem of integrity. Do that too much and you won't have much you left.

Nice group of people, very white but with some other kinds of diversity that made me happy. T. says we are going to go to St Matthews next, which should be fun.

We went to the sub shoppe/pub on the common for lunch. The home fries there are amazing! I asked for chips to go with A.'s grilled cheese because she keeps giving me her french fries and honestly it's not that exciting any more. We got a bag of Wachusett chips which were really good, so R. went to the store to get more. And some jam, because being out of jam is the Worst.

I think T. and R. are off to Townsend to go walking in the woods.

Were Paleolithic People Fit and Trim?

BI had a thing about this book:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Resiliency-rEvolution-Solution-Seconds/dp/1940014263

It is available through Kindle Unlimited. Alas! It suffers from a bunch of stuff that is currently popular and that can be summarized as, Our Paleo Ancestors Were In Great Shape. Her version is Caveman Didn't Have Love Handles.

Well, I don't know what we've got in the way of paleo representation of cave _men_. But we have some representations of women from the paleo period.

Just go to images.google.com and type in paleolithic venus. And tell me that woman is the shape you aspire to, with your cavemen didn't have love handles thinking.

I am pretty sure I read past the 10% point in the Resiliency book and equally I am pretty sure I won't finish the book. She may or may not have a great program, but I was unable to slog through the terrible anthro/ancient history/theory part at the beginning, because, So Much Wrong.

Sentences I Cannot Figure Out

The context is the idea of a person as an individual, and that that is a Bad Thing from a certain branch of feminism's point of view. The argument against self-defense for women is that they might start to buy into this idea of a person as an individual, and then they just become part of the problem/display false consciousness/wtf. I actually understand _that_ part of it. Here is the counter argument, which confuses the hell out of me.

"Women who learn self-defense do not and cannot pretend to learn it as gender-free subjects." What McCaughey means by subject (I am certain of this) is like, the subject of a sentence. NOT subject as in dominated. So, you cannot learn self-defense in a gender-free way. You learn it _as a woman_. On the one hand, it is kind of a duh thing (I learned it. I am a woman. Therefore, I learned it as a woman.). On the other hand, it's another one of those things that people who believe in binary sexual identity do as part of their privilege that is fucking infuriating. There really are people who routinely identify theirself as gender free (some of them use alternative pronouns -- I don't mean to impose my choice on them), and telling those people they can't do this one particular thing in their usual identity way is pretty oppressive. THAT also is not the main problem I have with this sentence.

What part of self-defense is women-specific, more so than individual-specific? Your height matters. Your reach matters. How well you can aim and how hard you can kick and punch matters. Your fine motor skills matter. Your understanding of physiology matters. Your ability to manage your emotions in a wide context of highly stimulating interactions matters. Self-defense is _NOT_ generic. But I don't get which part of this is woman specific. I can't pretend to understand what self-defense would be like for a man ... because I can't even generalize my experience to be what is it like as a woman.

Apparently this is another one of my autism moments. (Rant: neurotypical people are the worst, especially when they get on one of these gender difference things.)

Not to be an ass or anything (YES I AM BEING A PAIN), but what about if you are the I in LGBTI and learning self-defense? And believe me, that's a really good idea for you. What about if you are the T in LGBTI and learning self-defense? LIKEWISE.

Ah, another amazing fact pattern

Mary Ellen Nelson 1959, summarized here:

"If cultural stereotypes lead juries to mistrust a woman who has knowledge of self-defense tactics and readiness to use them if threatened -- for instance in the 1959 case of Mary Ellen Nelson, who was convicted of voluntary manslaughter for fatally shooting her battering husband (who had already beat her, blinded her in one eye, slashed her arm with a knife, and came toward her with the fireplace poker with which he had blinded her) with a gun from the dresser drawer which she knew to be loaded and knew how to use -- then juries should be reminded that women, like men, have a right to bear arms"

It REALLY FUCKING CHANGES THINGS if you find out that Mary Ellen Nelson had already shot her husband once the year before.

*sigh*

If you really want me to be sympathetic, try sharing the whole story.

"Where defendant in a murder case testified how well she got along with her husband, the deceased, and had no reason or desire to kill him, it was Held that it was not error for the district attorney in cross-examination to elicit the fact that defendant had shot her husband a year before the killing. [365]"

https://casetext.com/case/commonwealth-v-nelson-39?page=366

_Real Knockouts_, Martha McCaughey, okay, an actual review

The author seems to be a few years older than me, and her experiences exploring self-defense appear to have occurred slightly earlier in her timeline than my experiences did in mine. But they are so close, that the book was interesting to me to buy while I was doing martial arts and taking firearms classes, going to the range and carrying a gun and taking a fencing class and things of that sort.

But my efforts to buy it at the time completely failed. Repeatedly. So it has been sitting on the shelf for more than a decade, surviving purge after purge -- my paper book library is less than a third the size that it once was. In the wake of my dismal failure to read _Smile at Strangers_, I thought I ought to go make a real effort to get through other books I own about women and self-defense.

Here are the problems.

(1) It was written in the first half of the 1990s. So while we had Terminator's Sarah Connor and Alien's Ripley, and we had Thelma and Louise, for whatever that may or may not have been worth, we didn't yet have Long Kiss Goodnight's Sam/Charly, or Barb Wire. And boy that shows in the cultural references. It is hard to really realize just how massive the turn was for women action heroes that occurred in 1996, but it was incredible. In a really good way.

(2) There are a lot of incorrect or very deceptive bits of evidence throughout the book. I've blogged a bunch of them, but notably the summaries of the Inez Garcia and Mary Ellen Nelson cases are incredibly misleading in ways that undermine how they fit into the argument. There are also fundamental misunderstandings of women's power movements of the past (separate spheres) and the interaction of women's activism in the Gilded Age and labor law (the results produce an inaccurate impression of what was actually going on).

(3) Because McCaughey comes at this topic from a Women's Studies perspective, the entire thing is framed through various lenses of feminism. And it turns out that feminism is a truly shitty way to frame self-defense, legally, or as an activity, or as a locus for activism or, really, anything. Who knew? Feminism, especially before same-sex activism beat back gender difference ideology as deployed by several kinds of feminists, was way hung up on rape, and McCaughey spends almost the entire book exploring the potential interaction between rape and self-defense. I spent a lot of time learning a lot of responsible ways to deploy and deflect and de-escalate violence. I am no pacifist and I'm not even particularly anti-violence (I just think you need to carefully consider the amount, type and target). And for all that I was raised to be freaked out about men sexually violating me, my childhood experience was of female on female sexual assault -- no men anywhere involved in it. My self-defense concerns were considerably more ordinary: I worried about property crime pointed at me, and violent interactions with persons experiencing psychotic breaks or otherwise altered. Basically, I wanted to be able to walk around large cities at night by myself and have a reasonable expectation that I would safely arrive at my destination without anything too traumatic happening along the way. If I was with other people, I wanted to be able to also protect them, altho this goal sort of faded as I realized that some people felt emboldened by my presence and their belief that I could cash whatever check their mouth and actions wrote. (Yeah, I got a list of idiot women I won't ever go drinking with again.)

So the book hasn't aged well, has a bad frame, and could have used much, much more rigorous editing for argument and evidence deployed in service of same. There are some nuggets buried here, because McCaughey really enjoyed her exploration of self-defense training and the people she met. She is sympathetic and clearly a really compassionate, earnest person who wants the world to get better, and believes that this is a way that women can make the world better for themselves and others.

If you _like_ women's studies arguments, and you read this book, I'm curious to know whether this qualifies as good, bad or indifferent. I can't tell -- I haven't read enough recently to have a decent sample size. I used to read some gender difference stuff, but I eventually gave up on it all because none of it made any sense to me and it just doesn't seem to have any utility.

If McCaughey had been able to take the perspective of the short, light men she ran into in martial arts contexts, she may have been able to work through their Little Man issues enough to understand that a lot of what we frame as _women's_ issues can be better understood as issues for people who are smaller adults. I know, I know, I'm going to sound all MRA here, and these idiots can definitely deploy white male privilege bravado with an offensively heavy hand, and they are often insanely aggressive. But they are coming from the same place of Easy Target, and at least a few of them are worth connecting with. If she _had_ been able to do that, it would have opened up a whole other area of analysis, particularly in the body work section. But, hey, that's okay.

I can't recommend it, but it's entirely possible that McCaughey's later work (she was pretty young when she produced this) is more careful on the evidence and so forth. I wouldn't walk away from a book she'd written. I'm unconvinced by her advocacy for a different self-defense standard for women than men, but I'm prepared to think about how a "reasonable woman" standard might be different from a "reasonable man" standard or even a "reasonable person" standard.

Well, this is surely complex

http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3574&context=clr

For many, many, many crimes, police decline to send a case off to prosecutors or prosecutors decline to take a case, because the whole thing is too murky and confusing, and the participants decide they aren't happy with the process or its probable outcome or whatever. When somebody actually dies because someone takes a weapon and kills them, however, it is a lot harder to just say, meh. Too complicated. I mean, that _does_ happen, but if the perpetrator is identifiable, murkiness is more likely to lead to prosecution rather than abandonment of the case. (If the perpetrator is uncertain, and the victim sufficiently unsympathetic from a police perspective, I suspect abandonment happens a fair amount.)

It's a little bit tempting to say, you know, when you get one of these intrafamily disputes, and there's clear history of the dead victim damaging the killer, let's just not even bother. Basically, if you have a documented history of beating someone up, and they come back and kill you, it's not a crime. You asked for it, essentially. That would seem to put the responsibility for not beating people up or leaving if the temptation to violence is too strong firmly on the aggressor, rather than the victim.

I'm sure there's a huge flaw with this idea. I just can't think of it at the moment. And I figure if we've written statute to capture Stand Your Ground and Castle, there's no obvious reason you couldn't write statute to capture Justifiable.

ETA: Hey, someone else came close!

https://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Soci/SociScho.htm

This would create a new category below involuntary manslaughter. Not quite the pass that I would give (justifiable, basically).