India's Bihar Province Women Launch Assault On Alcohol With Dramatic Wins For Families

Women in India's Bihar State province are waging battle against moonshine, writes the New York Times. 

Bihar is a state in East India, bordering Nepal. It is divided by the River Ganges, which floods its fertile plains. Important Buddhist pilgrimage sites include the Bodhi Tree in Bodhgaya's Mahabodhi Temple, under which the Buddha allegedly meditated. In the state capital Patna, Mahavir Mandir temple is revered by Hindus, while Sikhs worship at the domed, riverside Gurdwara of Takht Sri Harmandir Sahib Ji.

It's easy to conjure up images of women taking their drunk-husband lives into their own hands in the image of Carry Nation, the temperance advocate who attacked saloons in America, hatchet in hand.

But the reality of everyday life in Bihar state province is that the majority of per capita income of $600 a year is routinely spent on alcohol, rather than to advance impoverished families. 

Bihar’s chief minister, Nitish Kumar found himself in the fight of his political life two years ago against the Bharatiya Janata Party, the party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. A single womanly voice turned the tide of his political campaign, approaching him after an event with the simple words:

“Brother, ban alcohol.”  With a lot of self-reflection on the possible consequences, Kumar agreed with the pledge: “If I get elected, I will ban alcohol.” He was re-elected and his women supporters were poised for action, saying nada to Kumar's plan to introduce the ban slowly. 

As controversial as the ban has been -- and many agree that the punishments are too harsh -- the impact of the alcohol ban cannot be denied. 

Murders and gang robberies are down almost 20 percent from a year earlier, and riots by 13 percent. Fatal traffic accidents fell by 10 percent.

At the same time, household spending has risen, with milk sales up more than 10 percent and cheese sales growing by 200 percent six months after the ban. Sales of two-wheeled vehicles rose more than 30 percent, while sales of electrical appliances rose by 50 percent. Brick houses are rising in villages where mud huts used to predominate.

Women went after the biggest drinkers, men like Omprakash Ram Chandrawanshi, 35, who was interviewed for The Times.

“If I earned 500 rupees, I would spend 200 on alcohol,” he said. He earns the equivalent of about $200 a month as a driver, he said, but “I often wouldn’t bring any money home.”

Now, his family has more money for food, he pays for tutorials to help the children in school, and he has been able to expand the brick house shared by the extended family. Simply stated, he has dignity.

In an unimaginable show of force, more than 30 million Biharis, fully one-quarter of the population, joined hands along 7,000 miles of roadway in January in a show of support for the alcohol ban. This time men were leading the parade, but there's no doubt who supplied the momentum for families in the province to buy books, not booze. The change happened because of India's women.

Military Boys Club Takes Fellow Women Photos To Dark Web

Writing for The Daily Beast, James LaPorta says that nude photos of US military servicemembers, originally shared in Facebook's Marines United 214 group, are now listed for sale on the dark web. 

As the reporting continues into the nude-photo scandal plaguing the Pentagon, The Daily Beast has learned that some of the Marines United descendant groups are not connected to the U.S. military at all, but are copycat groups set up by foreign nationals to profit from the original group’s notoriety. On the private Facebook group Marines United 214, requests for nude photographs are met with demands for payment and links to the dark-web marketplace AlphaBay, where the photo-sets are listed for sale.

This article goes deep into the details of the fallout from the recent military scandal involving military women. Misogyny much? 

Male Supreme Court Justices Mansplain Judicial Law To Female Justices, New Study Concludes

If you thought America's female supreme court justices are spared the growing epidemic of 'mansplaining', think again. A new study of oral arguments from Northwestern University researchers found that as more women have joined the Supreme Court, "the reaction of the male justices and the male (lawyers) has been to increase their interruptions of the female justices."

Interruptions are often regarded as an assertion of power through verbal dominance, according to the study's authors Tonja Jacobi, a professor at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, and Dylan Schweers, a J.D. candidate at the school. If that's the case, then women in positions of power should be interrupted less. Yet at the pinnacle of legal power, female Supreme Court justices "are just like other women," they write for Scotusblog, "talked over by their male colleagues."

The 2015 term marked the apex of inter-justice interruptions, but it was not an outlier. In the last 12 years, when women made up on average 24 percent of the bench, 32 percent of interruptions were of the female justices, yet only 4 percent of interruptions were by the female justices. That means each woman was interrupted on average three times more often than each of her male colleagues.

These results are not limited to the Roberts court. We conducted an in-depth analysis of the 1990, 2002 and 2015 terms, to see whether the same patterns held when there were fewer female justices on the court. We found a consistently gendered pattern: In 1990, with one woman on the court (Justice Sandra Day O’Connor), 35.7 percent of interruptions were directed at her; in 2002, 45.3 percent were directed at the two female justices; in 2015, 65.9 percent of all interruptions on the court were directed at the three women on the bench.

The researchers examined the interruptions from multiple angles besides gender. They found that conservative Republican justices dominate liberals by interrupting them. 70 percent of interruptions were of liberals and only 30 percent of conservatives. Note that currently all three women judges are liberals. 

While it is true that Kagan and Sotomayor are junior judges and juniors are interrupted more frequently than Ginsburg. "However, there is no comparison in the size of the effect between seniority on one hand and gender and ideology on the other: Gender is approximately 30 times more influential than seniority," conclude Jacobi and Schweers.

Don't assume that the women justices lie down and play dead on this rude behavior, write the researchers.

Time on the court gives women a chance to learn how to avoid being interrupted – by talking more like men. Early in their tenures, female justices display a tendency to frame questions politely, using prefatory words such as “may I ask…”, “can I ask…”, “excuse me” or beginning with the advocate’s name. This provides an opportunity for another justice to jump in before the female justice gets to the substance of her question. We found that women gradually learn to set aside such politeness.