Memorial Day Open Thread

Welcome to a Memorial Day open thread. I hope everyone is having a good time and is finding parking at the beach. The townspeople of the beach towns are no doubt staying at home to avoid the crowds of tourists. Here are some good reads for you holiday enjoyment.

Jessica Valenti on “The fake feminism of Sarah Palin.”

Today, however, Palin is happily adopting the feminist label. She’s throwing support behind “mama grizzly” candidates, describing the large number of women in the “tea party” as evidence of a “mom awakening” and preaching girl power on her Facebook page.

It’s not a realization of the importance of women’s rights that’s inspired the change. It’s strategy. Palin’s sisterly speechifying is part of a larger conservative move to woo women by appropriating feminist language. Just as consumer culture tries to sell “Girls Gone Wild”-style sexism as “empowerment,” conservatives are trying to sell anti-women policies shrouded in pro-women rhetoric.

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Given that so-called conservative feminists don’t support women’s rights, how can they paint their movement as pro-woman? Why are they not being laughed out of the room?

Easy: They preempt criticism of their lack of bona fides by aligning themselves with a history that most women are proud of — the fight for suffrage. They claim they’re the real feminists, as Palin did in her speech lauding the Susan B. Anthony List for “returning the women’s movement back to its original roots.” (She wasn’t talking about voting rights; she was referring to the debated notion that first-wave feminists were antiabortion.)

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By tying their “feminism” to the suffragists, whose goal was realized nearly 100 years ago, they’re not-so-subtly saying that women in America have achieved equality. In fact, they don’t believe that systemic sexism exists. The conservative writer Christina Hoff Sommers, for example, says that women aren’t oppressed and that “it is no longer reasonable to say that as a group, women are worse off than men.”

Wow, so we solved the problem of sexism? That’s awesome! Can women expect a pay raise then? I just find it very interesting that someone like Sarah Palin, who has benefitted a lot from modern feminism, dismiss the struggles of modern feminists. People like Susan B. Anthony were courageous heroes and we owe a lot to them but they had a different fight than the Betty Friedans and Gloria Steinems had.

Chris Mooney asks how hurricane season will be affected by the oil slick:

It could make things even worse. At least one forecast team puts the chance of a strong hurricane hammering some part of the Gulf Coast this year at 44 percent, and any such storm would threaten to disrupt ongoing containment or environmental protection measures. In an absolute worst-case scenario, powerful hurricane winds might drive the oil slick towards land and push some of it ashore with the ensuing storm surge.

Much depends on the angle at which the storm crosses the slick. In the Northern Hemisphere, hurricanes rotate counterclockwise, with the largest storm surge occurring where the winds blow in the direction the storm as a whole is traveling—that’s in front of the eye and off to the right. (Meteorologists worry over a hurricane’s dangerous “right-front quadrant.”) So if a powerful storm approached the slick from the southwest, say, its most potent winds would push the oil forward, instead of sweeping it off to the side and out of the storm’s path. If the storm then plowed into the Gulf Coast, you’d expect an oily landfall.

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So the storm could move the slick. Could the slick affect the storm? Hurricanes draw their energy from the evaporation of warm seawater—that’s why they occur over the summer and into the fall. Given that fact, you might think that oil on the surface of the ocean would interfere with a hurricane’s access to its power source. Indeed, some have proposed to combat hurricanes by coating the ocean surface with an oily substance (not crude oil, of course) in order to reduce evaporation and quench a storm’s strength.

Alas, this scheme probably wouldn’t work, nor should we expect the oil spill to slow down any hurricanes very much this season. The first problem is that most hurricanes span an enormous area of the ocean. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the typical storm is 300 miles wide, dwarfing even this large spill. Even if a hurricane passed directly over the slick, the oil would cover just a fraction of the relevant sea surface.

What’s more, by the time winds reach hurricane force (greater than 74 mph), they cause so much ocean mixing that any oil slick on the surface would be driven down into the depths and generally broken up.

Of course by the end of hurricane season perhaps the oil slick will be 300 miles wide.