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News flash: change takes time.
In my mind, there will always be some deviation from a straight 50/50 split when it comes to choices and gender, if only a statistical abnormality. Not everyone is exactly the same, both nature and nurture play into peoples' behavior. What I'm far more worried about is stamping out institutional prejudice and ensuring that all children regardless of gender get the same quality of education. I think that sort of stuff still exists and we can agree it needs to improve. I'm far more concerned with ensuring that everyone is treated equally under the law, including equal opportunities for employment and advancement. If, after that has been achieved, there are still discrepancies, who will you blame? If there aren't exactly 50% of, say, investment bankers that are female, will you force women who really wanted a nursing degree to instead go into finance, just to shore up the numbers?
Supposing that Lily started working around the same time as her fellow managers, did the same work, but the difference is that Lily didn't make any noise is that fair? Yes and no. I don't think that seems fair, but we live in a system where the market determines the price of goods and services (for the most part) and the price of labor is determined by the bargaining of demand and supply actors, i.e. employers and employees. From a market perspective it's completely fair; if you believe in the power of markets you believe that this type of bargaining is indeed the only fair way to determine prices. But I also recognize the failure of markets, unlike most. I do find that when I see women are paid on average 77 cents to the dollar a man makes I get upset, and when people use statistics and creative math to suggest that woman actually make 1% more then men I get angry. So you believe the people who skew the statistics to make it seem as if your average woman makes 77% of a man doing the same job which absolutely, positively is not what that number represents rather than actually trying to parse the statistics and see a much smaller gap for the vast majority of people. I'm perfectly happy to attribute a 5% or even 10% genuine pay gap to prejudice and institutional sexism, and work to close that gap with social campaigns and/or legislation. It's just, ya know, important to me to be honest about the problem. A priority you don't seem to have.
This is basically my position as well. The gender pay gap 1) is far more pronounced in executive positions, and I have a hard time giving two craps about people who are already rolling in filthy lucre and 2) is largely attributable to, as you say, a disparity in pay for "men's jobs" and "women's jobs," which is not likely something that can be fixed or appropriately addressed by legislation. The answer, short of revolution, is to decide, as a society, that positions like teacher and nurse ought to be paid more, not because of the risk they're put at daily (VSL calculations) but because we like what they do and want more of them and of higher quality.
For the record, it's past 5AM where I am, so if my grammar is garbled and you can't quite grok what I'm saying, forgive me. And if there's two ways of taking something I said, and one of them pisses you off, I meant the other one, surely. Talk to everyone lazzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Actually, this post was so egregious it deserves a live dissection:
it doesn't make front page, it doesn't become a policy priority, etc.Women's issues usually don't. Whereas men's issues literally never do. For precisely the same reasons: our society has trained us to accept that men have more violent deaths, whether on the job or as a soldier in Iraq You didn't read my post, did you? What I'm saying is that it's the same thing. They have the same root causes and the same types of solutions, so separating the two is not a pardonable offense. Many "mens" issues are women's issues...if you're a woman. Such as women on the front lines in the military. Or the vast unlikelihood of men gaining child custody after a divorce is because our society views women as more nurturing, something modern feminists are fighting against. You're arguing that while women not making as much as men is indeed inconvenient it's because of that darned 1% inflating the male wages, women taking frivolous and unimportant jobs like teaching or nursing, or because they're lazy (and not because they can't get the same hours at work). Wrong and wrong and wrong again. The pay gap issue is much exaggerated and, while a genuine issue, is distinctly an issue of the toxic nature of American corporate culture and (Anklebiter ought to love this) a CLASS issue. No struggle but the class struggle! To the rest, I didn't call nursing or teaching frivolous, YOU just did that. Seeing as I'm still entertaining a future in education, it'd be mighty dumb for me to feel that. No, I'm saying those are professions that are undervalued for entirely different reasons than sex or gender, it just so happens that those are fields women dominate. In my experience, and mind you this is just my experience, but women who work time and are single are often in their late teens or early 20s and still living at home. They don't need 40 hours a week because they're not paying rent. Women routinely live at home longer because, among other things, it's socially acceptable for them to do so whereas if you're a guy in the same age range and don't have your own place you're a loser and undateable. And basically you think it's no big deal and you don't understand why women get upset when you're dismissive of their problems. No, I think that there are genuine big deals that face women. The attacks on reproductive rights being the biggest. If I were to make a list of genuine issues holding back the female population from gender parity with males, that would be at the top of the list. Pay discrepency wouldn't be far behind. The size of the t!!! in the new DOA game wouldn't even make the list.
Cancer researchers don't go out of their way to convince everyone AIDS isn't a problem and merely suggesting it might be makes you a rape apologist. More broadly, I think it's incredibly disingenuous to act as if women's gender issues and men's gender issues are entirely separate topics and never the twain shall meet, when the actual question is about gender roles and social expectations and how those infect the legal system and institutional bias...in either direction. My problem with much of the radical left is the inability to actually debate them. You're not allowed to even question assertions or evidence without being called out as misogynist, racist, etc. Someone will bring up the gender pay gap, and that women make 77 cents on the dollar for every man. Now, if I bring up that 1) much of that is the gap of executive pay, the top 1% or top .1% of earners which has long been male dominated and is less an overall social issue than an issue of corporate culture (while still being terrible) that 2) women tend to, all things being equal, take less risky jobs and/or jobs where they can perform a social good (teachers for example) 3) full time women without children tend to work less than full time men without children, i.e. 36 vs. 40+ hours a week, it makes me a misogynist (or so I've been told). There is a gender pay gap, but if you excise the top 5% or so of earners, and normalize for other factors, it's more like a 5-7% gap. I don't see anything wrong with being honest about things; it's clearly something that's still a problem, but if you present it as it actually is it doesn't make front page, it doesn't become a policy priority, etc.
And now we start to show some demonstrations on how men are effected by sexism. If this were a man they would ready the gallows but since it is a woman we got apologists trying to make pseudo medical excuses why it really isn't so badSince you know how we all think about everything, without us telling you, where should I plan my next vacation? Portmeirion
This is my thinking as well, but our dear friend Krensky disagrees. Passionately. To the point of proscribing violence in defense of his opinion.
You mean retroactive?
Oh I dunno. There was that one we turned into a conversation about music.
I'm just happy that a thread I created got more than one post.
The tea party groups are OBVIOUSLY political and not social welfare groups. So you're working for the IRS and there's a stack of 501(c)4 applications on your desk and your job is to vet them to make sure they're on the up and up. Group 1 is called Kitties for Kiddies, a group that purports to fund the adoption of cats to families with small children. Group 2 is called Real America Patriots Against President Blackenstein. And you give them both the same amount of attention?
Impeachment hearings before the end of the term. Except that the GOP are so completely sealed in their bubble that they would never have any notion that it might backfire. They're gonzo. I'll be willing to bet someone will at least make a motion before the year is out. Probably a teabagger.
if asking your opinion on similar attacks that have occurred is moving goalposts, then we have little to discuss. The only reason you have information you have about Benghazi is because 1) The Obama administration is hundreds of times more open with the press than Bush was. 2) Because there have now been 3 hearings about it. The information you have was unearthed through those hearings. The hearings were only launched because of partisan politics. I'll bet you dollars to donuts that if similar investigations had taken place around any of the other attacks, similar malfeasance would have come to light. The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
I think you missed the point. Which is that if Imus has been saying "offensive" things for years, and didn't get in trouble until 2007, and the thing he said wasn't even as bad as other things he has said, it means we've grown overly sensitive.Also, he gets a pass because it's free speech and we're all entitled to be jerks. And you're entitled to not listen to him be a jerk, or to call in and tell him he's a jerk. You're not entitled to never being offended.
Then you'll stand with me in my call to reopen or launch investigations into each of the 54 attacks on US consulates during Bush's 8 years. Right? Since it's not political or anything.
So why wasn't there as thorough an investigation over the 54 attacks that happened under Bush's watch? Why wasn't there a similar if not grander-scale witch hunt for the decision makers in those situations? And yes, people are saying it's Obama's fault, and publicly calling for impeachment.
Those are all good questions *yawn* that totally don't deserve to be answered. Sounds like a lot of internal CIA stuff. Why is it Obama's fault again?
If Benghazi is not a scandal, I want to know exactly why Because the people being persecuted aren't at fault. You're asking why there isn't absolutely perfect and synchronous global response between our military and our ambassadors abroad. It's because, broadly, we have our forces, both military and diplomatic, stretched incredibly thin all around the world. I should rephrase. It's a scandal, but Obama and his cabinet are no more at fault for a poor response to a sudden uprising than the Bush regime was for the 54 attacks under their watch. Perhaps unnecessary loss of life OUGHT to be more of a scandal than it is, but if that's the case where is all the coverage of the men and women who have died in Afghanistan every day since the Benghazi attack that only killed 4. The only reason it is being trumped up is because our involvement in Libya was unilateral under Obama, whereas our presence in Iraq and Afghanistan was under a Republican president. They daren't mention casualties in our other wars.
Basically title. Benghazi isn't what the Republicans need it to be. The IRS "scandal" isn't a big deal either; the IRS audited hundreds of groups with obvious political agendas, on both ends of the political spectrum. What's scandalous to me is that all the tea party groups investigated were cleared and given their c4 status. If the Republicans really want to make a meaningful stand, and regain some (any) respect from the American people, they should be on this DOJ AP story.
No, by rewards he means positive attention. If you cry wolf about something being offensive you're lauded as some hero of decency whereas the offender is decried as, at best, a boorish lout, at worst a fascist a-hole. I think one of the problems is that we all have these private definitions of what is offensive, maybe because offense is subjective but whatever. The point is that, when you hear us talking about people needing to just shut up, you're thinking about someone saying something genuinely hurtful or harassing or an atrocious racial slur or something. About 1% of things people "take offense" at are that clear cut. What I think about are the things that I've said that have made people freak the crap out about my language. Which are saying words like penis, or the f-word in public. People freak the s$&@ out over mundane stuff every damn day, and you seem to be saying it's not okay for us to be bothered by that. We should let ourselves be meekly bullied into not saying any even slightly off-color words or phrases.
stuff Yes. If you don't like what a politician said, call him and tell him. Really! The direct approach will yield far better results, and create less bitterness, than going around their back and trying to get them ousted. If a company makes racist ads, don't buy their product. Also don't organize a million people to ban their product, not over advertising at least. Feel free to write a letter, telling them why you'll no longer buy their product. When you try to boycott, and start some media frenzy, you get a Chick Fil-A situation where the people on the other side of the issue will just compensate (or overcompensate) for your boycott. As for the loudmouth jock, or any other media personality who is directly exercising their own freedom of speech, trying to get them fired isn't saying to the world "I don't like what that guy said". That's your right. What you're saying is "I don't like what that guy said and I don't think he has the right to say, let alone think or feel it" which is moronic. The problem is that people are sheep. They like jumping on bandwagons. Signing petitions is about the most political muscle you'll get your average Joe to exercise. It's too easy to say "sure" and click your name on something, and it's too easy for those organizing said petition to pressure others into joining, even if they weren't offended themselves. If, say, Mountain Dew, has some advertisement you find to be racist or otherwise offensive...don't buy mountain dew. Tell them you're not going to buy their product and why, and feel free to be vocal about how stupid the ad is. If enough people do the same, they will probably change because they want your business. If they don't, it's their loss. But what if you're just an overly sensitive whiner, and people join your boycott just to be nice or to seem like they're in with the good cause? If everyone organizes a boycott for every little thing it inflates the sense of how genuinely offensive or wrong something was. I'd rather peoples voices were precisely as loud as they are, otherwise it's no better than lobbying where a few loud, squeaky wheels get all the damn oil.
People's words dont generally bother me (I'm happy to let people wander around thinking they're right when they're obviously wrong). However, they often do much worse than bother the targets of offensive remarks - some people have killed themselves due to angst over their sexuality/ethnicity or as a result of general bullying. If there is a gang of people running some kid down for being different every day, and it's relentless and merciless and no one will stop it despite cries for help, and he commits suicide, that's a terrible tragedy and those who caused it should maybe share some burden. But where do you draw the line? Some people are stupidly sensitive. People kill themselves over petty things that only matter to them every day. Does me telling some guy on the bus that his haircut makes him look like a lunatic mean I'm at fault if he harms himself? And that's an extreme case. Why am I responsible for other peoples' feelings?
Then you, sir, are part of the problem. You're no knight in shining armor, protecting innocents from having their poor, precious eyes assaulted by a dirty word or an uncouth thought.
If someone is offended by something I say, telling me they were offended and why is the correct course of action. If it bothers them THAT much. The incorrect course of action is boycotting me, harassing me, trying to get me fired from my job, trying to censor me, starting a social media campaign to belittle or shame me, or portraying what is likely just one jerk on the internet as being the manifestation of a system skewed against you. The world will always have asshats. Telling them they're an asshat sometimes works. Trying to eradicate all asshats makes YOU the asshat.
You mean, as opposed to the unrest coming from factory fires that kill 750+?I admit I don't have a link to where osha standards were enacted on a country to see the result. One I've heard of though is were child-labor laws were put into effect in a developing country. The children were found to go into prostitution or starved. I'll post a link when I find it. Here's what you also have to understand. When a country is industrializing it is moving people from poverty subsistence living and usually agriculture into unemployment--due to the industrialization of agriculture and the specialization of labor. That's the first thing that happens: industrialization of agriculture, because it allows for everything else that follows. One machine can easily do what 50 workers could--or more!--leaving vast swaths of unskilled or semi-skilled laborers unemployed. Now, the industrial infrastructure seeks to put them to work again in manufacturing, to increase infinitely the liquidity of labor. They get paid a pittance and live on a street rather than a hut. The people that turn to prostitution or other employment (and mind you, I've heard your talking point before and it has NEVER been sourced, so I take it with a bucket-load of salt) are better off being employed in a factory...probably. Thing is, they're even BETTER off STILL being employed in the agriculture where they were previously. Industrialization is the cause of their woes, and you want us to feel sympathy for the robber barons because it is now their only salvation as well? Poppycock. The money powers have no altruism in mind when they extract wealth from poor nations, and any beneficial side-effects to colonization and industrialization is only to fill the void they themselves have created. I'm with Anklebiter: I see no reason why countries just now industrializing can't learn from America and Europe's mistakes and leapfrog the robber baron/burning rivers of waste/national guard slaughtering laborers part of the process.
It isn't always the case that those with money make more. If an individual invests in a company and hires workers, then the company goes belly-up, it's the individual who takes the hit, and the workers still get paid. Investment is a risk and should be compensated. Work is time with little risk and is compensated differently. I think you're confusing the way it ought to be and the way it is. When a company goes belly up, often those at the top know well beforehand. They cut benefits, try to squeeze as much out of their employees as possible, dangling vacation time or a final paycheck over their heads to compel them not to leave, and then axe everyone in a single day, refusing to pay the employees. And then declare bankruptcy and walk away scott free, burdening the taxpayers.And starting to work for a startup is lesser but still risky for the employee. If it goes under they could be out of work for years in this economy. Yes, investment is a risk and it should be rewarded. No one is arguing otherwise. The question is of proportion. If you create a company and you work 3 times as hard as your employees, but it's your money or startup investment on the line (which is so very seldom the case, as I remarked above, but nonetheless) what portion do you feel is owed you? If you have a company that makes 10 million in profits before paying employees, and you have 100 employees including yourself, what do you each get paid? Socialism would dictate everyone takes home $100k. A fair distribution might be the owner/operator makes 25% and everyone else makes makes $75k. Our current system has the owner take home everything but $1.5 million, enough to pay his 99 workers minimum wage. And don't say they can go somewhere else, because every other company does the same thing. Don't say start your own business because, by its nature, there must be less entrepreneurs than laborers.
I would like to impose two extremely modest and common-sense rules on the trading markets: 1)If you buy something, you must wait one minute before selling it to someone else.
I'm not terribly interested in happiness. I want to know everything.
IT I know you're smarter than this. In no way is what was presented indicative of a slippery slope fallacy. Furthermore not all slippery slopes are fallacies. A slippery slope fallacy arises when there is confusion as to the logical stopping point within the confines of an argument. Example: Santorum says that allowing gays to marry is a slippery slope that will lead to men marrying children, multiple wives, and animals if not furniture. The fallacy is that we have a logical stopping point to stop all this behavior: it is still an agreement between two consenting adults, so his argument is nullified. When you say that we should avoid language that could "trigger" people,you must concede that, not knowing their minds, literally any word or phrase or action could similarly trigger people. Specific examples brought up are good ones, and it is entirely legitimate to ask why not them? If you're contending that rape is a special case, and something about that word sets it apart from all other words in the English language, then you need to make the case for that; the burden of proof is on you.
You better tell that to the town of Tisdale, Saskatchewan.
A lot of the posts in that "one liners that might the whole table laugh" thread are hilarious, but there's so many in there that resort to dodgy sexual jokes that I think makes them lose their flavour. The best lines in there are the ones that can keep it classy. Why is sex as a topic classless?
I personally loathe goat-ropin music but even >>I<< know who George Jones is.
Hmmm.. So if trans dimensional tesseractists RAWR! *has no self control and cannot be reasonable or legally held responsible for his actions when TDTs are mentioned**flies into rage*
Of all the things I was forced to read in high school, there were probably 4 that I really liked: Lord of the Flies, Of Mice and Men, 1984 and Brave New World. And I liked them precisely BECAUSE they were a path to a higher truth. What literature and art do that is worthwhile is expose you to peoples' thoughts, both intellectual and emotional, that you would otherwise be geographically isolated from experiencing and helps you to learn empathy for people who are different from you when you are surrounded by people who are just like you. It broadens your horizons. Philosophy is worthwhile in much the same way. I would not have had the courage to come out as an atheist if I hadn't read Nietzsche, because at the time my school and my social life were all within the "world" of the catholic church. Philosophy is about making arguments, and I found the arguments of Nietzche (as well as Anton LaVey and Harlan Ellison among others) re-christianity to be pretty convincing. Philosophy doesn't claim to be the arbiter of truth, rather, as a discipline, is a kaleidoscope of lenses through which you can choose to view the truth. Only empiricism, which I've already said is the greatest school of philosophical thought, has any claim to be the arbiter of truth. Nonetheless, yes, the march of scientific progress is constrained by philosophy such as ethics, in which it is argued that it is not right to use humans as guinea pigs. Also using ethics, it is being argued that it's no more right to use actual guinea pigs...as guinea pigs. What you see as this monolithic school of thought is really a cacophony of dissenting voices. Philosophy IS debate.
@Scott Betts: Then you'll have to give me a airtight definition of hate speech. As it stands, I've seen and heard the term applied to all manner of things. I've been accused of hate speech on these boards--making legitimate political complaints about the state of Israel, for example, is apparently antisemitic. How about the infamous Mohammed/Bomb Danish political cartoon? Is it protected because it's political speech or no because it is "hate speech?" Is any use of racial epithets hate speech? Should we just start burning our copies of Huck Finn and Mein Kampf now? How about all my NWA albums? The problem with "hate speech" laws is this "I'll know it when I see it" attitude, which is the sort of thing anathema to the rule of law; it gives the authorities trusted with enforcing it cart blanche to interpret it.
And I was on such an uncharacteristic streak of agreeing with you in the recent marriage equality threads. I have to strenuously disagree here though on the same grounds as meatrace. Who gets to decide what speech is censored. Right, but the line has been set at things that cause harm or put others in danger. Like shouting fire in a crowded theater. Or death threats. Maybe we're just not thinking about the same things. There are types or expressions of speech which are able to cross the line, and those the state has the right to police. But the state hasn't the right to police my private thoughts, or my private expression of those thoughts, be it in private conversation or in a personal journal or blog. Preventing free expression, even when we think it deplorable, is the most insidious kind of tyranny.
not to mention freedom of speech. Liberty is messy and you must take the bad with the goodThe free exchange of ideas and thought is not infringed upon by prohibiting hate speech. If anything, hate speech has a freezing effect on others' ability to freely express themselves. Depends on the situation. There's hate speech like shouting someone down in public and using racial epithets, but that's already covered under harassment laws presumably.Printing up and handing out flyers about how group A is inferior and whatnot absolutely should be protected. In fact I'd argue that that type of speech which is antithetical to our collective moral character deserves the MOST protection. As soon as you say some kind of speech isn't allowed, and that speech doesn't directly impinge on someone else's equivalent rights, the game becomes who gets to define that category. Soon you won't be able to read Mein Kampf of unedited versions of Huck Finn.
I always hated math and begrudged being forced to take anything above algebra. To this day Trigonometry is my hobgoblin. Until I took Calculus this semester. It's one of the most eye-opening classes I've ever had. It's like being able to see the matrix! Example: revelation I had today.
Like...integration is like looking at stuff from superposition.
Starting a thread claiming "everybody is picking on me!" is just looking for a fight. And before you try it, being critical of someone's faith isn't hate. Stuff comes up on messageboards, especially Paizo OT, and if you aren't able to rationally defend a position or belief you're going to get shredded.
While there's certainly something to be said for PCness re: racial epithets etc., there are problems with social bullying as a system of censorship. The farther you get from "average", the more marginalized and smaller an outlier community will be. What goes along with this marginalization, apart from a reasonable level of ignorance about them in the mainstream, is that as a particular community becomes more fractious, there is less agreement as to what is or isn't offensive. Any person has the absolute right to feel offended at anything; you're going to feel how you're going to feel. But given that it is a personal, emotional response, it's unreasonable to expect everyone else to know your boundaries. It seems much more reasonable, therefore, for people to grow thicker skins rather than insist that others desist in their practices, assuming such practices are limited to speech. Example: racist jokes. Yes, they're horrible, but, like offense, humor is a completely involuntary and emotional reaction. Where the line is is different for each of us and, by all means, if something offends your sensibilities tell them. It's unreasonable to ask or expect them to stop, however.
Steve: totally not a lycanthrope at all, but has to pretend he loves eating raw meat and junk cuz if anyone finds out he's F*~%ED!
In case anyone was theorizing, due to my recent absence from the boards, I'm totally not Azaelas Fayth. I'm not half as clever a troll as he.
You have to register a car. You have to register to vote.You have to register to get married. You need to have paperwork on file with appropriate authorities to own land or a house. You have to have paperwork on file in order to receive wages. Why is needing to have paperwork filed with appropriate authorities in the case of guns suddenly OMG TYRANNY!? We want to hold people who own firearms responsible for acts done with their firearms, or at least be able to easily trace them back to them...but you're not willing to do a single thing to make that happen. K. We both want to keep criminals from acquiring firearms, but you're (maybe I'm misremembering, forgive me if I am) against mandatory background checks. *throws hands in the air*
Yeah except one increases liberty and the other decreases it. I know which one I would pick. Yes, holding individuals responsible for their own actions decreases liberty. It decreases one's liberty to inflict harm on others without repercussions. That's not a liberty you ought to be arguing for.
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