Ancient rock carvings in India hint at a 12,000-year-old lost civilisation

THE DARK AGE

By Maria Thomas | October 11, 2018

Blast from the past.

In the late 1980s, while exploring around the villages of Maharashtra’s coastal Konkan region, Sudhir Risbud came across a big square pattern engraved near the road to the beach town of Ganpatipule.

The electrical engineer and bird-watcher had no idea at the time that it was a petroglyph, a form of rock carving associated with prehistoric people, that was one of the earliest depictions of art created by humans in the Konkan region. Nor did he know that it dated from a time that archaeologists have dubbed the area’s “dark age,” for which no historical information was previously available.

Risbud and fellow explorers Dhananjay Marathe and Surendra Thakurdesai spotted a few more examples over the years, but it wasn’t until a historian accompanied them on one of their trips that they learned about the potential significance of these engravings. So, in 2012, they began to search for more in earnest.

Sudhir Risbud
Risbud and his fellow explorers have uncovered a number of human figures.

“For the earlier period of about two years, we were just groping (in) the dark. The villagers themselves, too, were not aware that such rock arts do exist in their villages,” Risbud, 45, told Quartz in an email. “But then, one day, an octogenarian from the Dhangar (shepherd) community told us about one site, and then on we trudged ahead using the thread provided by him, and hence started our mission of exploring the petroglyphs.”

In April 2015, they stumbled upon a cluster of 42 petroglyphs, depicting birds, animals, and human figures. In the years since then, the trio has uncovered over 1,200 engravings at 90 different sites across Sindhudurg and Ratnagiri districts, the latter best-known for its sweet Alphonso mangoes.

“All these sites are located in remote places on (the) laterite plateau quite far away from the villages,” Risbud explained. Exposed to the elements and out of sight for most villagers, no one had yet investigated the importance of the petroglyphs nor given any thought to their preservation.

“As we started exploring these sites, it dawned upon us that they were under the threat of destruction from various activities such as mining, road construction, and plantation,” he added.

So, they appealed to the Maharashtra state government’s department of archaeology and museums for help.

Tejas Garge, director of the department, says some of the figures had come into official records as far back as the 1990s, when a bystander had spotted a few while a road was being constructed towards the village of Nivali. But it took over two decades before the state department officially got involved in exploring and recording the sites, which it began last year.

“We are documenting them scientifically, and we are trying to gather data from stone tools and other evidence which would be helpful to date them,” Garge told Quartz.

The stone tools they’ve found so far are from the mesolithic era, otherwise known as the Middle Stone Age, dating back to about 10,000 BCE. Based on this, Garge and his team estimate that the petroglyphs could date from between 10,000 BCE to 2,000 BCE.

“They were not done in one shot, there’s successive generations of people who were doing this,” Garge explained. “This activity may have prolonged for centuries.”

So far his team has explored 45 sites in Ratnagiri, where they’ve broadly categorised the figures into fauna, human figures (often seen with their legs spread, believed to have some relation to fertility), and abstract geometric patterns that they haven’t been able to interpret yet. But what’s most interesting is that the animal, bird, and amphibian figurines include a number of creatures that aren’t found in the region today, such as the one-horned rhino, suggesting that they may have once been present in the area.

While the process of documenting and analysing the figures is still in the early stages, archaeologists believe they could solve the mystery of how the Konkan region transitioned from a stone-age society to a settled one.

“If you look at the cultural record of Konkan, you have the Middle Stone Age (upper Paleolithic period) and you have evidence of the early historical era,” Garge said. “In between, there is a gap of 25-30,000 years; there’s no evidence for human habituation. It was sort of the dark age of the Konkan.”

Now, this dark age is starting to become a little clearer.

It will take a few more years before archaeologists can accurately interpret the petroglyphs. So far, 15 of the sites have been protected, and the archaeology department wants to eventually draw tourists to the area. In the meantime, Risbud and his fellow explorers are raising awareness among the people living in the vicinity, so that the public knows they’re in the presence of the rare remnants of India’s ancient history.

Sudhir Risbud
One of the animal figures engraved on the rocks.

Sudhir Risbud
One of the largest engravings, located near the Kasheli village.

  

Sudhir Risbud
Besides animals and human figures, some of the engravings feature abstract shapes that experts are trying to decode.

Source: qz.com

Making It in (Right-Wing) America

Dinesh D’Souza and the shame of immigrant self-hatred

By Jeet Heer

February 20, 2015

I have two shameful family secrets. The first is that when I was growing up, almost all gatherings of my extended clan would include buckets and buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken, a staple of our diet. The second and more serious source of self-mortification is that some of my kin—almost all of whom hail from rural India—sometimes vent anti-black racism.

These two focal points of embarrassment merged when I was 19 and went on a KFC run with a cousin I will call Amandeep. As our car glided into the parking lot, we saw a black family exiting the fast food joint. “Boy, black people sure love fried chicken,” Amandeep muttered. The comment angered as it baffled me: He clearly couldn’t see the irony of stereotyping black culture while heading for one of our regular KFC pick-ups. It was actually one of Amandeep’s more benign remarks. On other occasions he made Charles Murray-like forays into questions of black genetic inheritance and propensity toward crime.

I wish Amandeep’s racial theories were an anomaly, but he’s far from alone among South Asian immigrants. Anti-black racism, I’ve often thought, is one of the more unwholesome manifestations of assimilation. If blacks are near the bottom of the perceived racial hierarchy across North America, some enterprising immigrants find it useful to step on blacks as a way of climbing higher.

Racism among South Asians has some peculiar qualities; it’s not so much hatred of the other but the hatred of the almost-the-same, akin to a sibling rivalry. At the heart of this sort of immigrant racism is the desire to differentiate oneself from the group one could easily be identified with. As it happens, Amandeep is one of the most dark-hued members of my family. When he was small, his nickname in India was “kala” (Punjabi for black). I’ve sometimes thought that some discomfort at being labeled black contributed to his racial fixations.

Dinesh D’Souza, the right-wing provocateur whose history of incendiary racial comments stretches to his undergraduate days in the early 1980s, provides an interesting case study for the intersection of immigrant upward mobility and racism. D’Souza grabbed attention this week for a tweet about President Obama taking a selfie: “YOU CAN TAKE THE BOY OUT OF THE GHETTO...Watch this vulgar man show his stuff, while America cowers in embarrassment.”

YOU CAN TAKE THE BOY OUT OF THE GHETTO...Watch this vulgar man show his stuff, while America cowers in embarrassment pic.twitter.com/C9yLG4QoOK — dineshdsouza 

This tweet was only the latest in a long career of racist hijinks. As student editor of the right-wing newspaper the Dartmouth Review, he published racially charged material. One D’Souza-edited article discussed affirmative action in Amos 'n' Andy dialect. “Now we be comin’ to Dartmut and be over our ‘fros in studies, but we still not be graduatin’ Phi Beta Kappa," the article read. In his 1995 book The End of Racism, D’Souza argued that “the old discrimination” has declined and been replaced by “rational discrimination” based “on accurate group generalizations.” During the Obama years, D’Souza has specialized in writing books and producing documentaries suggesting the President is motivated by anti-colonial hatred of Western civilization. After pleading guilty to campaign finance violations last year, D’Souza remains unbowed, casting himself as the victim of a political witch-hunt by the Obama administration. Amid this flurry, D’Souza continues to tweet ugliness like this and this.

undefined — AdamSerwer 

Obama forcefully asserts his position on Beheading pic.twitter.com/QbVbvE582d — dineshdsouza

It’s tempting to dismiss D’Souza as an outlier. He’s aligned with the right-wing of the Republican party, while the vast majority of American South Asians identify as Democrats. Still, anyone who spends time among South Asians will recognize the popular currency of attitudes like D’Souza's. Moreover, D’Souza indicates a wider problem, given that one of the Republican Party's most prominent Islamophobic voices is Louisana Governor Bobby Jindal, a South Asian. D’Souza's racism and Jindal's xenophobia find a more muted parallel in the career of South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, whose advancement includes suppressing public references to her Sikh heritage and being presented by her campaign as a “proud Christian woman.” The careers of D’Souza, Jindal, and Haley carry an implicit message: Racial minorities can advance in the GOP by erasing their ethnic identity and/or attacking other minorities.

D’Souza’s racism makes sense if we view it as part of his long effort to succeed in a right-wing milieu that is both anti-Indian and anti-black. Within that context, D’Souza has given saliency to anti-black racism to compensate for a potentially embarrassing background as a Mumbai-born immigrant. Is D’Souza sincere in his beliefs or simply an intellectual mercenary? It’s impossible to know for sure. What can be said with certainty is that as an Indian willing to voice anti-black sentiment, D’Souza has carved out a lucrative niche for himself, enjoying a national audience from the time he was an undergraduate.

D’Souza’s mentor at the Dartmouth Review was the English professor Jeffrey Hart, who also served as a senior editor at National Review. The college paper was founded in Hart’s living room, and he was the de facto career counselor who guided D’Souza and other Dartmouth alumni into the world of right-wing journalism. Hart's work from the '70s onward offers a clear philosophical foundation and tactical guide to D'Souza's writings during Obama's presidency.

In 1975, Hart published a startling review of Jean Raspail’s xenophobic novel The Camp of Saints, a didactic tract warning of the dangers of mass immigration from India and other poor countries. The novel celebrates the heroism of a ragtag band of right-wing heroes (including a tank commander and a duke) who wage a sniper campaign against the refugees. “In this novel Raspail brings his reader to the surprising conclusion that killing a million or so starving refugees from India would be a supreme act of individual sanity and cultural health,” Hart wrote in a National Review rave (September 26, 1975) that compared the book to modern masterpieces by James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence. “Raspail is to genocide," Hart continued, "what Lawrence was to sex."

Hart’s praise of Raspail’s novel might seem at odds with his sponsorship of D’Souza’s career. But even in reviewing The Camp of Saints, Hart distinguishes between good immigrants who assimilate to white culture and the refugee horde who must be exterminated. As Hart notes, Raspail’s novel features a character named Hamadura, “a very black Indian” who “has lived in France and become completely assimilated by Western Civilization.” As the character notes: “Being white isn’t really a question of color. It’s a whole mental outlook.” In his prize student D’Souza, Hart found his own version of Hamadura: a “very black Indian” who has the mental outlook of a white conservative.

In its stark division of the world between the West and the threatening chaos of the non-white world, Hart’s review was an exercise in imperial nostalgia that D’Souza later echoed when he complained that Obama suffers from a Kenyan, “anticolonialist” mindset. (Others have followed D'Souza in attacking Obama with that phrase. The latest: Rudy Giuliani.)

Hart's brand of imperial nostalgia pervades the wider National Review conservatism that shaped D’Souza’s worldview. A foundational text in this weltanschauung is James Burnham’s Suicide of the West (1964), which D’Souza cited in his book What’s So Great About America (2002). Thematically, Burnham pioneered many of the themes D’Souza has expanded upon in books like The Roots of Obama’s Rage (2010) and Obama’s America (2012): the insidiousness of white liberal guilt in disarming the West, the underappreciated virtues of imperialism and manifest destiny, the need to affirm the unequivocal cultural superiority of Western civilization. Among the founding editors of National Review, Burnham was second only to William F. Buckley in importance. His book is key to understanding the contradictions of D’Souza's role in the conservative movement as a non-white advocate for “the West.”

As with Jeffrey Hart, Burnham combined a scorn for the great mass of Indians and African Americans with a belief that a few non-whites might be of some service to the West. At one point Burnham offers an anecdote about the folly of liberals who overestimate the intelligence of South Asians and "Africans":

“I recall an evening not long ago that I spent with one of the country’s most distinguished historians, who is a liberal à outrance. As the night wore on, he got somewhat more tight than was his habit; and at one point he remarked, more to his fifth gin and tonic than to the rest of us, ‘In the last ten years I’ve had several hundred Indian and Pakistani and lately Africans in my graduate courses, and I’ve given out many an ‘A,’ and never flunked any of them; and there hasn’t yet been a single one who was a really first-class student.’”

Elsewhere in Suicide of the West, Burnham heaps scorn on the efforts of the Kennedy and Johnson administration to end food insecurity in poor countries—projects which led to the Green Revolution, sparing millions of lives in India and elsewhere.

Yet if Burnham had little use for Indians and Africans as scholars and harbored no concern for preventing their starvation, he does see a use for them as soldiers. “There have been few better fighting formations than the elite brigades of Gurkhas or Sikhs trained and led by professional British officers,” Burnham wrote in Suicide of the West. “Those tall, powerful black and brown men that France recruited from a French West Africa and trained in the tradition of Gallieni and Lyautey were nearly as good, though….These splendid fighting men of the Gurkhas, Sikhs, Senegalese and Berbers are not the least of the grievous losses that the West has suffered from the triumphs of decolonization.”

Burnham’s loyal and fighting trim Gurkhas and Sikhs are the military counterpart to Raspail’s Hamadura. Such figures function in the right-wing imagination in the crucial role of the ethnic sidekick, providing the sort of support that the Lone Ranger received from Tonto and the Green Hornet from Kato. Their skin color might be non-white, but they are trustworthy defenders of the West, as eager as D’Souza to fend off any Kenyan anti-colonial threats.

Thanks to the help of Jeffrey Hart, D’Souza started writing for National Review in 1981, while still an undergraduate. D'Souza adopted the ideological prism of his National Review mentors and carried it duly, proving his loyalty to the American ideal by championing white culture and showing contempt for its black counterpart. Obama's election in 2008 created a niche on the right for a person of color—an immigrant, even—to slag the president as being un-American. D'Souza had been preparing for such a role since college.

One of the saddest things about D’Souza’s racism is that it’s clearly built on some element of self-hatred. By aligning himself with figures like Hart and Burnham, he chose a form of upward mobility that required abasing himself before those who despised his heritage.

Most South Asians do not follow such a dim path. D’Souza and many others have benefited from the African American Civil Rights Movement. Prior to 1965, America set severely restrictive quotas on immigration from non-white countries such as India. The creation of a more generous and less racist immigration policy came about as a direct result of civil rights agitation and the work of liberals such as Ted Kennedy. Going back at least a century, South Asians and African-Americans have made common cause in fights against colonialism and racism: It’s no accident that Martin Luther King Jr. cited Gandhi as a predecessor, or that Bayard Rustin supported Indian independence. In choosing to align with and carry on the imperial nostalgia of Burnham and Hart, D’Souza betrays that less profitable but ultimately richer tradition.

Jeet Heer is a senior editor at the New Republic. @HeerJeet

Source: newrepublic

Hillary Clinton Is America’s Machiavelli

Chris Kutarna | Aug. 30, 2016 

Justin Sullivan—Getty Images

Democratic presidential nominee former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaks during a campaign even at Truckee Meadows Community College in Reno, Nev., on Aug. 25, 2016.

 

And Donald Trump is a fanatic prophet

Though the epic presidential battle between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton may feel unique, these same personalities have clashed before.

More than 500 years ago, the prophet Savonarola enthralled Renaissance Europe while Machiavelli, chief policy wonk of the age, scorned the showman’s demagoguery. Trump and Clinton are replaying those parts—and will leave similar marks on history.

Trump is a prophet. That is the clearest way to understand the man’s methods, his popular appeal and his psychology. His improbable presidential run has followed closely the script set forth by the chief doomsayer of the Renaissance, Girolamo Savonarola.

A friar and political outsider, Savonarola exploded from obscurity in the 1490s to captivate the city of Florence, sweep away a Medici establishment that had ruled for half a century, and incite a mass campaign against liberal values that ended with his historic Bonfire of the Vanities.

How did Savonarola do it? First, by shouting an apocalyptic message that stoked people’s deep anxieties. Ottoman Muslims loomed to the east. The French invaded and carried away the city’s wealth in a lopsided peace deal. In a vague way, Savonarola had predicted both and concluded, to quote Trump: “We don’t win anymore!” The moment called for strong leadership—both moral and political—but as Savonarola said: “O Florence, Florence, your cup is full of holes.”

Second, he owned the news cycle. Print media was just emerging, and Savonarola harnessed its potential better than any. He delivered fiery sermons to crowds of thousands, and then print houses helped him reach thousands more with the sure-to-sell printed version. Popes and princes repeatedly declared him false. Every time, Savonarola answered by flooding the streets with cheap pamphlets—15th-century tweets—that twisted those denunciations into proof of elite corruption.

Third, he believed. Savonarola’s most fervent follower was himself. He believed God had appointed him the task of renewing the city, and so whatever words he spoke, they were true. That ecstatic confidence was his greatest strength. It drew to his every sermon a horde of sensation-seekers, plus citizens who had lost faith and longed to have it restored by the man’s reality-bending powers.

But the same confidence also blinded him to political realities. The Paul Ryans of the day who had supported Savonarola’s agenda—evicting the Medici oligarchs, broadening citizen representation in the city’s councils—shook their heads in frustration at his incapacity to rein in the messianic ego when prudence demanded. (Bad-mouthing the Pope has never been a vote-winner.)

If The Donald is a modern Savonarola, then Hillary is America’s Machiavelli.

Niccolò Machiavelli was Florence’s anti-prophet: a career politico who was too steeped in the nuts and bolts of the republic’s problems to stomach Savonarola’s loose and sudden populism. “In my opinion, he shifts with the times, and colors his lies to suit them.”

Savonarola shouted airy phrases from a pulpit; Machiavelli wrote dry policy papers from the chancery. For years he labored tirelessly as a chief secretary, then as a diplomat. Nine out of every 10 of his thoughts were political, and his close associates praised his astounding intellect and work ethic. Despite all his passion for public service, to quote Clinton: “The service part always came easier than the public part.” Machiavelli himself said it better: “I burn—but the burning makes no mark outside.” 

In opposite ways, the prophet and the policy wonk together reshaped the center of Renaissance Europe—and are reshaping America now.

Savonarola’s legacy was to give voice to the political and cultural tensions of his day—tensions that the Medici had muffled. The prophet himself was silenced (burned at the stake) by his political opponents the moment his popularity wavered. He had made too many enemies: on the “left,” those who rejected his moral austerity; on the “right,” those who feared a trade war with the pope; and up high, those who feared the loss of their privileges. But his death did nothing to reunite the city. His strident indignation could not be unshouted.

For the rest of his life, Machiavelli tried to channel those raw energies into sensible reforms. He may have detested the mad monk’s methods, but he also believed that occasional citizen-driven crises were the mark of a healthy, vital republic.

It was a tough road. Over decades of success and failure in and out of office, the ambitious secretary came to two famously harsh beliefs: that the ends justify the means and that the first rule of politics must be self-reliance—since no one can be trusted fully.

History still remembers Machiavelli best for this cynicism. It forgets that he was driven to continue his service by a deep faith in the people’s power to shape their collective future. Clinton, no stranger to high unfavorables, claims the same drive.

This election cycle has been full of surprises, but how history will remember its chief protagonists is already becoming clear. Trump’s legacy will be how he whipped up the tensions of his time. Clinton’s will be how she spent her life trying to make America stronger.

Source: time

Thinking About Hillary — A Plea for Reason

Michael Arnovitz

Jun 1218 min read

Photo Credit: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque Graph Credit: Nate Silver/NY Time

“In the course of a single conversation, I have been assured that Hillary is cunning and manipulative but also crass, clueless, and stunningly impolitic; that she is a hopelessly woolly-headed do-gooder and, at heart, a hardball litigator; that she is a base opportunist and a zealot convinced that God is on her side. What emerges is a cultural inventory of villainy rather than a plausible depiction of an actual person.” — Henry Louis Gates

The quote above comes from a fascinating article called “Hating Hillary”, written by Gates for the New Yorker in 1996. Even now, 20 years after it was first published, it’s a fascinating and impressive piece, and if you have a few spare moments I strongly recommend it to you.

And I’m reading pieces like this because now that Hillary has (essentially if not officially) won the Democratic Primary, I have become increasingly fascinated by the way so many people react to her. In truth, I sometimes think that I find that as interesting as Hillary herself. And I can’t help but notice that many of the reactions she receives seem to reflect what Gates referred to as “a cultural inventory of villainy” rather than any realistic assessment of who she really is and what she has really done.

To conservatives she is a radical left-wing insurgent who has on multiple occasions been compared to Mikhail Suslov, the Soviet Kremlin’s long-time Chief of Ideology. To many progressives (you know who you are), she is a Republican fox in Democratic sheep’s clothing, a shill for Wall Street who doesn’t give a damn about the working class. The fact that these views could not possibly apply to the same person does not seem to give either side pause. Hillary haters on the right and the left seem perfectly happy to maintain their mutually incompatible delusions about why she is awful. The only thing both teams seem to share is the insistence that Hillary is a Machiavellian conspirator and implacable liar, unworthy of society’s trust.

And this claim of unabated mendacity is particularly interesting, because while it is not the oldest defamation aimed at Hillary, it is the one that most effortlessly glides across partisan lines. Indeed, for a surprisingly large percentage of the electorate, the claim that Hillary is innately dishonest is simply accepted as a given. It is an accusation and conviction so ingrained in the conversation about her that any attempt to even question it is often met with shock. And yet here’s the thing: it’s not actually true. Politifact, the Pulitzer prize-winning fact-checking project, determined for example that Hillary was actually the most truthful candidate (of either Party) in the 2016 election season. And in general Politifact has determined that Hillary is more honest than most (but not all) politicians they have tracked over the years.

Also instructive is Jill Abramson’s recent piece in the Guardian. Abramson, a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal as well as former Executive Editor of the New York Times, had this to say about Hillary’s honesty: “As an editor I’ve launched investigations into her business dealings, her fundraising, her foundation and her marriage. As a reporter my stories stretch back to Whitewater. I’m not a favorite in Hillaryland. That makes what I want to say next surprising. Hillary Clinton is fundamentally honest and trustworthy.”

Notice how Abramson uses the word “surprising”? She’s obviously doing that for our benefit, because she knows that many readers will be astonished at the very thought of Hillary being “fundamentally honest”. But why? In my opinion we need to go back to the time of Whitewater in order to answer that question.

In January of 1996, while Whitewater investigations were underway but unfinished, conservative writer William Safire wrote a scathing and now-famous essay about Hillary Clinton entitled, “Blizzard of Lies”. In the piece he called her a “congenital liar”, and accused her of forcing her friends and subordinates into a “web of deceit”. He insisted (without any apparent evidence) that she took bribes, evaded taxes, forced her own attorneys to perjure themselves, “bamboozled” bank regulators, and was actively involved in criminal enterprises that defrauded the government of millions of dollars. He ended the piece by stating that, “She had good reasons to lie; she is in the longtime habit of lying; and she has never been called to account for lying herself or in suborning lying in her aides and friends.”

I am no political historian, but as far as I can tell this short essay was the birth of the “Hillary is a Liar” meme. Now to be clear, most conservatives already strongly disliked her. They had been upset with her for some time because she had refused to play the traditional First Lady role. And they were horrified by her attempt to champion Universal Health coverage. But if you look for the actual reasons people didn’t like her back at that time, you won’t see ongoing accusations of her being “crooked” or a “liar”. Instead, the most common opinion seemed to be that she was a self-righteous leftist who considered anyone with other views to be morally inferior. In short, the prevailing anti-Hillary accusation was not that she was unrelentingly dishonest, but that she was just intolerably smug.

After the Safire piece however, this all changed. Republicans, who learned from Nixon never to let a good propaganda opportunity pass if they could help it, repeated the accusations of mendacity non-stop to anyone who would broadcast or print them. And if you doubt the staying power of Safire’s piece, type the phrase “congenital liar” into a Google search along with “Hillary Clinton” and see what happens. To this day, that exact phrase is still proudly used by many on the right. This, even though Safire was eventually proven wrong about everything he had written. And despite the fact that he stated himself that he would have to “eat crow” if she were ever cleared, Safire never apologized or even acknowledged his many errors once that happened. Because as we all know, swift-boating means never having to say you’re sorry.

But while conservative propaganda and lies are a constant in “Hillaryland”, if we look at Hillary’s career, and the negative attacks so often aimed at her, it seems clear that more than just political machinations are at play. My current conviction is that the main fuel that powers the anti-Hillary crowd is sexism. And yes I’m serious. So go ahead and roll your eyes. Get it over with. But I think the evidence supports my view, and I’ve seen no other plausible explanation. And just to be clear, I don’t think it’s ONLY sexism. But I do think that this is the primary force that has generated and maintained most of the negative narratives about Hillary.

Of course accusations of sexism always bump up against several serious impediments:
1) Almost nobody will admit to it. Conservatives decided long ago that all such accusations (sexism, racism, homophobia, etc) are standard liberal bullshit whose only real intent is to shut down debate, and liberals tend to possess a sense of moral entitlement which leads them to consider themselves automatically exempt from all such accusations. (Side note: if you did roll your eyes above, there’s a good chance I’m describing you here. Sorry.)

2) Overt sexism is significantly more likely to be tolerated in our society than overt racism. It is a low-risk form of bigotry and discrimination that rarely damages professional or political careers. Because of this, far fewer people worry about crossing that line.

3) We have formed a sort of collective blindness to sexism that allows us to pretend that we are on top of the issue while simultaneously ignoring the many ways in which it actually permeates our society. (Side note 2: There’s a reason it’s called a “glass” ceiling.)

4) Unlike men, women who make demands are still often seen as unfeminine and inappropriately aggressive, bordering on deviant. And if the people most aggressively pushing against the glass ceiling are “broken” or “deviant”, it’s easier to justify dismissing both them and their concerns.

So I’ve made a claim. Let’s look at some numbers. Take a look at the image above. On the right side you’ll see a chart. This is a chart of Hillary’s popularity over time. It was put together by Nate Silver, who based it on over 500 high-quality phone surveys dating back to the early 90’s. If we take a look at the polling data, very obvious patterns emerge.

In the early 90’s her polling was great, which was typical for an incoming First Lady. But Hillary had no interest in being a typical First Lady, and soon took charge of one of the most important policy initiatives of the Clinton Presidency: Universal Health Care. If you look at the first large red arrow I have on the graphic, you’ll see that as soon as she did that her negatives skyrocketed. And yes this was before Whitewater. In fact during the ongoing Whitewater investigations her polling improved dramatically, so she actually became significantly MORE popular during that period, not less.

Now take a look at the second arrow. This is where she declared that she was going to run for the Senate. See what happened? She was at one of the most popular periods of her life, but as soon as she declared a run for the Senate her favorables plummeted while her unfavorables rose sharply. Then once she was elected, her scores stabilized and even improved. Now look at the third arrow. Nearly exactly at the same time she withdrew from the Presidential race her favorables took off again, rising to levels that many considered remarkable. (Or are we pretending not to remember that until very recently Hillary was one of the most popular politicians in the country?) In fact the image on the left of the graph is part of the “bad-ass Hillary” meme that started during this time. And her polling stayed high right up until she decided to run for President again. Her numbers since then are not on this particular graph, but I think we all know what happened to them.

So what do we see in this data? What I see is that the public view of Hillary Clinton does not seem to be correlated to “scandals” or issues of character or whether she murdered Vince Foster. No, the one thing that seems to most negatively and consistently affect public perception of Hillary is any attempt by her to seek power. Once she actually has that power her polls go up again. But whenever she asks for it her numbers drop like a manhole cover.

And in fact I started thinking more about this after reading an article that Sady Doyle wrote for Quartz back in February. The title of the piece was, “America loves women like Hillary Clinton — as long as they’re not asking for a promotion.” In the article Ms. Doyle asserted that, “The wild difference between the way we talk about Clinton when she campaigns and the way we talk about her when she’s in office can’t be explained as ordinary political mud-slinging. Rather, the predictable swings of public opinion reveal Americans’ continued prejudice against women caught in the act of asking for power…”

And yes this is the kind of statement that many people will find reflexively annoying. But that doesn’t make it any less true, and the data certainly seems to support it. Even NBC news, looking back over decades of their own polls, stated that, “she’s struggled to stay popular when she’s on the campaign trail.” If this has nothing to do with gender, then wouldn’t the same thing happen to men when they campaign? But it doesn’t. Why not?

So let’s look at the issues people are currently using to disparage Clinton. Let’s consider the issues of dishonesty, scandals, money and Wall Street.

1) Honesty — In terms of honesty, I’ve already addressed that. Hillary is a politician, and like all politicians she is no stranger to “massaging” and/or exaggerating the truth. And yes on occasion she will let loose a whopper. But is she worse than other politicians? As I’ve already discussed, the evidence suggests that she is no worse, and actually better, than most other politicians. Internet videos like the “13 minutes of Hillary lying” appear to be mostly examples of Hillary changing her position over several decades, combined with annoying but typical political behavior. But similar videos of Donald Trump exist showing him doing an even more extreme version of the same thing. Why is he not being accused of this type of mendacity? In fact there is very little dispute that Trump has been SIGNIFICANTLY less honest on the campaign trail than Hillary. According to Politifact he is in fact the least honest candidate they’ve ever analyzed! So if the issue of honesty is really that important, why are so many people (on the right and left) holding Hillary to such an obviously different standard than Trump?

2) Scandals — Webster’s dictionary defines a scandal as, “an occurrence in which people are shocked and upset because of behavior that is morally or legally wrong.” But here’s a question: Are scandals still scandals if nobody actually did anything wrong? And I think that’s a fair question, because Hillary’s political foes love to point out all the times she has been implicated (directly or indirectly) in scandals. Not surprisingly, however, they fail to point out that she has always been cleared of any wrongdoing.

So if she’s always innocent, why then does she find herself caught up in so many scandals? For that answer, perhaps we should look at the Wikipedia definition of scandal, which states, “A scandal can be broadly defined as an accusation or accusations that receive wide exposure. Generally there is a negative effect on the credibility of the person or organization involved.” Notice the important difference? Perhaps the “negative effect on credibility” is not so much the RESULT of these scandals as it is the INTENT of those who create them.

Did you know that Republicans once spent 10 days and 140 hours investigating the Clintons’ use of the White House Christmas Card list? Because that is a real thing that actually happened. As the Atlantic recently pointed out, “No other American politicians — even ones as corrupt as Richard Nixon, or as hated by partisans as George W. Bush — have fostered the creation of a permanent multimillion-dollar cottage industry devoted to attacking them.” (And for an impressive presentation of this issue I highly recommend Hanna Rosin’s piece “Among the Hillary Haters”, also in the Atlantic.)

Compare for example the treatment Hillary is getting due to her private email “scandal” to that of General David Petraeus. Hillary has been accused of hosting a personal email server that “might” have made classified documents less secure, even though the documents in question were not classified as secret at the time she received and/or sent them. (Side note: some government documents receive secret classifications “at birth”, while other can be retroactively classified as secret.) In order for Clinton to have committed a criminal act, she would have had to knowingly and willfully mishandle material that was classified at the time she did so. After months of investigation no one has accused her of doing that, and it doesn’t appear as if anyone will.

General Petraeus on the other hand, while he was Director of the CIA, knowingly gave a writer, who was also his mistress, a series of black books which according to the Justice Department contained, “classified information regarding the identities of covert officers, war strategy, intelligence capabilities and mechanisms, diplomatic discussions quotes and deliberative discussions from high level National Security Council meetings and [Petraeus’] discussions with the president of the United States of America.” Petraeus followed that up by lying to numerous government officials, including FBI agents, about what he had done. And lets not forget that according to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, adultery is itself a court-martial offense. And I remind you that none of this is in dispute. Petraeus admitted to all of it.

Petraeus’ violations were significantly more egregious than anything Clinton is even remotely accused of. And yet Republicans and other Hillary foes are howling about her issue, wearing “Hillary for Prison 2016” t-shirts while insisting that this disqualifies her from public office. Meanwhile even after pleading guilty to his crimes Petraeus continued to be the recipient of fawning sentiments from conservatives. Senator John McCain stated that, “All of us in life make mistakes and the situation now, I hope, can be put behind him…” Politico quoted a former military officer who worked with Petraeus as calling the entire situation “silly”. Prominent Republicans have already made it clear that they would call him back to work in the highest levels of government if they win the Presidency. And some are still attempting to convince him to seek the Presidency himself.

Why is Hillary Clinton being held to such an obviously different standard than Petraeus? Is it really only politics?

3) Money — OK let’s talk about her money. Hillary has a lot of it. And she has earned most of it through well-paid speaking fees. And the idea of getting paid $200,000 or more for a single speech seems so ludicrous to many people that they assume that it simply must be some form of bribery. But the truth is that there is a large, well-established and extremely lucrative industry for speaking and appearance fees. And within that industry many celebrities, sports stars, business leaders and former politicians get paid very well. At her most popular for example, Paris Hilton was being paid as much as $750,000 just to make an appearance. Kylie Jenner was once paid over $100,000 to go to her own birthday party, and to this day Vanilla Ice gets $15,000 simply to show up with his hat turned sideways.

And let’s talk about the more cerebral cousin of the appearance agreement, which is the speaking engagement. Is $200k really that unusual? In fact “All American Speakers”, the agency that represents Clinton, currently represents 135 people whose MINIMUM speaking fee is $200,000. Some of the luminaries that get paid this much include: Guy Fieri, Ang Lee, Cara Delevingne, Chelsea Handler, Elon Musk, Mehmet Oz, Michael Phelps, Nate Berkus, and “Larry the Cable Guy”. And no that last one is not a joke. And if you drop the speaking fee to $100k, the number of people they represent jumps to over 500. At $50,000 the number jumps to over 1,200. And All American Speakers are obviously not the only agency that represents speakers. So there are in fact thousands of people getting paid this kind of money to give a speech.

For millions of Americans struggling to pay their bills, the very idea that someone can make $100,000 or more for just giving a speech or hanging out at a Vegas nightclub is obscene. But as Richard Nixon used to say, “don’t hate the player, hate the game.” Hillary didn’t invent the speaking engagement industry, and she isn’t anywhere near the first person to make a lot of money from it. And while her fees are in the upper range of what speakers make, neither they nor the total amount of money she has made are unusual. It’s just unusual FOR A WOMAN.

And yes, I’m back on that, because I feel compelled to point out that before he ran for President in 2007, Rudy Giuliani was making about $700,000 a month in speaking fees with an average of $270k per speech. It’s estimated that in the 5 years before his run he earned as much as $40 million in speaking fees. Nobody cared, no accusations of impropriety were made, and there was almost no media interest. So why did Giuliani get a pass, while Hillary stands accused of inherent corruption for making less money doing the same thing?

And speaking of corruption, after leaving the Florida governor’s office Jeb Bush made millions of dollars in paid speeches. This includes large sums he collected from a South Korean metals company that reaped over a BILLION dollars in contracts from his brother’s presidential administration. Speaking to an Indian newspaper about this type of thing Bush said, “This is the life of being the brother of the president.” Do you remember reading all about that while Jeb was running for President? I didn’t think so. Jeb got a pass too.

So if this discussion is really about money in politics that’s fine. But I’m going to need someone to explain to me why we only seem to focus on it when the person making the money has a vagina.

4) Wall Street — First things first. No, the majority of the money Clinton has made from speaking fees did not come from Wall Street. In fact it’s not even close. She has given nearly 100 paid speeches since leaving the State Dept., and only 8 were to “Wall Street” banks. Nearly all of her speeches were to organizations like American Camping Association, Ebay, Cisco, Xerox, Cardiovascular Research Foundation, United Fresh Produce Association, International Deli-Dairy-Bakery Association, California Medical Association, A&E Television Networks, Massachusetts Conference for Women, U.S. Green Building Council, National Association of Realtors, American Society of Travel Agents, Gap, National Association of Convenience Stores, the National Association of Chain Drug Stores, Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, etc.

Corporations and Associations pay large fees for important speakers all of the time. And Hillary got booked fairly often because she is interesting and popular, and because there’s a great deal of status attached to having her speak at an event. Ignoring all of this however, a large contingent of anti-Hillary people continue to insist that all speaker’s fees from Wall Street banks were bribes, and that because of this they “own” her. But by that logic shouldn’t we all be asking what the fuck the American Camping Association is up to?

Also, with the possible exception of one speech given to Deutsche Bank, all of Hillary’s 8 speeches to Wall Street were for a speaking fee of $225,000. That does not even break the top 20 of her highest paid speeches. For example she received over $275,000 each in three speeches she gave to The Vancouver Board of Trade, the Board of Trade of Metropolitan Montreal, and Canada 2020. So apparently Canadians also “own” her. And I don’t know what those nefarious Canadians are up to, but it probably has something to do with goddamn poutine. Which would really piss me off except I just remembered that I kind of like poutine so never mind.

Listen, does Wall Street have influence with Hillary? Grow up, of course they do. Wall Street is one of the key engines of the American economy, and as such has enormous influence with everyone. EVERYONE. Don’t kid yourself on that point. And aside from anything else, she was a 2-term Senator of New York, and this made Wall Street an important corporate member of her constituency. The issue is not influence. The issue is whether or not paid speeches and campaign donations alone are proof of corruption. And they’re not. And the last time I checked there was an important difference between association and guilt, between proof and slander.

And again: why is Hillary being held to a standard that never appears to be applied to her male counterparts? Am I not supposed to notice that a media frenzy has been aimed at Hillary Clinton for accepting speaking fees of $225,000 while Donald Trump has been paid $1.5 MILLION on numerous occasions with hardly a word said about it? Am I supposed to not notice that we are now in an election season in which Donald Trump, a proud scam artist whose involvement in “Trump University” alone is being defined by the New York Attorney General as “straight-up fraud”, is regularly calling Hillary Clinton “Crooked Hillary” and getting away with it?

What the actual fuck is going on here? What’s going on is what we all know, but mostly don’t want to admit: presidential campaigns favor men, and the men who campaign in them are rewarded for those traits perceived as being “manly” — physical size, charisma, forceful personality, assertiveness, boldness and volume. Women who evince those same traits however are usually punished rather than rewarded, and a lot of the negativity aimed at Hillary over the years, especially when she is seeking office, has been due to these underlying biases. There is simply no question that Hillary has for years been on the business end of an unrelenting double standard. And her battle with societal sexism isn’t going to stop because of her success anymore than Obama’s battle with racism stopped once he was elected. These are generational issues, and we are who we are.

And actually, this only makes her victory all the more amazing. And maybe it’s OK if we pause for a moment from the accusations and paranoia and just acknowledge her enormous accomplishments. In the entire history of our nation, only 6 Presidents have also served as Secretary of State. Only 3 have served both as Secretary of State and in Congress. By any objective measure Hillary Clinton is not just the most qualified candidate this season, she’s one of the most qualified people to ever seek the office. The New York Times in endorsing her stated that, “voters have the chance to choose one of the most broadly and deeply qualified presidential candidates in history.” Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg stated that, “she is probably the best qualified presidential candidate ever.” Even Marco Rubio, one-time choice of the GOP establishment (and tea-party love-child) stated in a Republican debate that, “If this is a resume contest, Hillary Clinton is going to be the new President of the United States.”

Hillary is nobody’s idea of perfect. Fine. But in my view if a man with her qualifications were running in the Democratic primary, Bernie would have been done before he even started. And if a man with her qualifications had been running for the Republicans, they’d be anointing him the next Reagan while trying to sneak his face onto Mount Rushmore.

Most of the people who hate Hillary when she’s running for office end up liking her just fine once she’s won. And I have every confidence that history will repeat itself again this November. As for myself, I have been watching Presidential elections since Nixon. And never in my life has there been an easier or more obvious choice than now. Trump is not merely a bad choice, he is (as many leading Republicans have already admitted) a catastrophic choice, unfit in every possible way for the office of the Presidency.

As such, I happily voted for Hillary in my primary. And I will proudly vote for her in November. Yes she will disappoint us all on occasion. Who doesn’t? But I think she’s also going to surprise a lot of people. She will fear neither consensus when possible nor ass-kicking when necessary. She will safeguard us from the damage a right-wing Supreme Court would inflict on the nation. She will stand for the rights of women, LGBT Americans, and minorities. She will maintain critical global relationships, and she will react to dangerous situations with the temperament of a seasoned and experienced professional. And in a nation that didn’t even allow women to vote until 1920, she will make history by shattering the very highest glass ceiling, and in doing so forever change the way a generation of young women view their place in our Republic.

She’s going to be a fine President.

I’m with her.

Source: thepolicy