I’m not condoning slavery in any shape or form, but that never occurred to me. It certainly is weird how history works out. OTOH, one might speculate how Senegal etc might have turned out if they hadn’t been swarming with slave-traders (bearing in mind, of course, that most of the ground-level slave-rounder-uppers were locals, not foreigners).
My father’s country is an ex-British colony. It’s a bit of a shithole, but to those locals who didn’t take a British passport and leave, the invaders bequeathed a few ideas which they adopted as Good Things. Not, it should be said, with any great enthusiasm - corruption, incompetence and laziness are still the order of the day - but they nevertheless recognize that not being corrupt, incompetent and lazy are Good Things, even if as a distant ideal. “Oh Lord make me pure … but not yet.”
I lived in a communist state. That state had the highest standard of living than all the Eastern Vloc states. The democrats are nothing like it. Dear Osiris. While the DNC may be accused of fouling up a nominating process, they are hardly land-grabbers making political enemies “disappear.”
Was it the passing of the deeply flawed ACA? If you do not like the idea of a national health insurance system, why are you in TW? I guess here is where you tell me that everyone here HATES the NHI.
Making that comparison makes as much sense as comparing Trump to Hitler. He is more Milošević than anything. Maybe Karadžić.
VNese and Hispanics are also largely Catholic. What lefty issue could the Catholics get all up in arms about? Oh…same sex marriage. Damn that constitution!
Someone took offense at my usage of that term, so I will refrain from using it.
National Socialists called themselves National Socialists, and republics of all sorts have done the same. What’s funny about “SJW” is that it seems only people who don’t like the concept actually say it, yet there’s no inherently pejorative element (unlike the words feminazi or democrazy for instance).
This phenomenon is not entirely unprecedented, and SJW isn’t actually a new term, but it sounds like a new term because it was so rarely used until recent years. It’s not like the World Congress of All Kinds of Leftish Causes proclaimed a World Charter of Social Justice Warfare, and then and only then people started saying SJW pejoratively.
Indeed, that’s what warriors do: they fight. If it wasn’t social justice he was fighting for, what was it?
You clearly think that it is justified for women to be submissive, stay-at-home moms while men should be out there doing the “boring jobs”. What else is there to say?
Again. You’re just using seemingly zen yet quintessentially vague and empty words to cover up your agenda of “gender inequality is ok”. The truth is plenty of women want a successful career, and it is much harder for them to advance in various professional fields because they keep getting held back by their family, pregnancy, and gender script.
Why do I reckon? I think what you wrote is vivid showcase of how societies expect mothers to be in charge of children, while fathers are subsiditiary and complementary.
It doesn’t need changing and it doesn’t matter because you are a (straight) man, hence a beneficiary to this multiple-millenia long institution. 'Nuff said.
You guys keep saying as if this was happening, when the minorities are clearly not getting promoted for their skin colour/gender/sexual orientation/disablities. The doors are often completely shut down.[quote=“IbisWtf, post:72, topic:160519”]
Why? Do you really think that males and females are able to do all the same things with the same level of competence? There are countless studies that clearly show how males are on average better in some things and females are better in others, either from a physical or attitudinal point of view. Expecting equality is nonsense because people are not made with equality in mind.
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In sports, no, because there’s physicality and nature involved; but in other fields, the notion that men are better in these things while women are better in those things is just information manipulation and bias.[quote=“IbisWtf, post:72, topic:160519”]
Forcing equality of outcome, rather than equality of opportunity, is at the base of some of the worst social and economical doctrines of the last two centuries.
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There is no equality of opportunity now.
There are no more women than men in social studies. The leaky pipeline is a well-known phenomenon that the higher up on the academic ladder you go, the less the women are, even in fields that are deemed “feminine” like literature, history, and social studies.
And why do you think that the medical field is dominated by men while the nursery is mostly women? Because it follows the gender script that men should be in charge, while women should be the help. Nursing is an extremely demanding job both mentally and physically, there’s plenty of heavy-lifting involved, by nature, it should be men’s job, not women’s.
Um, no. Strawman. You didn’t answer my actual assertion.
There’s nothing vague about the inevitability of death and satisfaction with a life lived to the full. Conversely, you’re using phrases like “gender equality” that have no natural definition. The genders are not “equal”. I, as an individual, am not “equal” to you, so how could an entire class of people be “equal”?
As do plenty of men. And the truth is that none of them get it. 99.5% of women in the workforce are employed in what Graeber calls “bullshit jobs” - pointless make-work whose only purpose is to get the plebs paying more taxes. Those childless university academics you mention are 0.1% of the population. They do not represent the aspirations and abilities of the ordinary man or woman in the street. And I bet half of them lie awake at night thinking, What’s it all about, Alfie?
My sister is at the top of her career in academia. She’s a fairly well-known name in her particular field. She’s trapped by the poisonous nonsense that your sort gleefully fling around: she believes it’s her duty to do the best job she can, while feeling desperately guilty that she’s not always around for her kids. Ultimately, what she does at work is unimportant. It might be interesting (to her), but it adds nothing to the sum of human happiness. Spending five minutes reading with your kids, OTOH, does.
Rubbish. They’re held back by the fact that they’re mediocre human beings, just like the majority of us. I’m not Prime Minister because I’m not Prime Minister material, not because I’m being held back by racism.
Has it never occurred to you that somebody has to look after the children? Were you decanted from a vat? Didn’t you ever cry for your mum when you fell over? When everybody is out at work - mothers and fathers - kids can only run to whoever’s in charge of whatever Matrix they’ve been plugged into, and that’s not a smart arrangement.
I have no problem at all with individuals making their own family-funding arrangements, but it’s none of your business if the majority of women prefer to spend more time with their kids than with their bosses and ugly co-workers. Kids with sociology degrees have probably done nearly as much damage to society as kids with economics degrees have done to the economy.
Seriously, Gain, I can’t even tell if you’re pretending to be a Student Grant-like caricature, if you are actually are one.
And yet, funnily enough, I keep getting promoted. So it’s because my straightness and maleness somehow outweighs my non-whiteness, like the silly video someone posted back there? How about my gay, female colleague, who also keeps getting promoted? Does she have some ace card that negates her sexuality and gender? Ah, she’s white, so that must be it. No, wait, all the other people are white too … oh, and she’s married and she has a kid, so that’s got to count against her … her wife must feel so oppressed, stuck at home looking after the baby … ooh, my head hurts. Anyway, her success is clearly nothing to do with the fact that she’s an astoundingly talented individual, right?
The problem here is that it’s so easy to blame one’s failure in life on external factors. Oh, it’s not because I’m a lazy, unreliable cnut, it’s because I’s black!
Your position was demolished long ago by actual research. The stuff I mentioned to (JB?) was well-known even when I was sleeping through my psychology lectures. Funnily enough, my gf at the time was a sociology student. Very smart. She was quite taken with all the same bullshit as you are, at the time. We had long drunken discussions about it. About 10 years later, she just laughed about it all and dismissed it as bullshit. She knew it was bullshit because she had a successful career and well-brought-up kids.
Wrong again. You’re just wheeling out the ‘blank slate’ argument - that humans are just sponges that absorb whatever culture imposes on them. This is self-evidently untrue from various hard-science perspectives, and has been confirmed as implausible from psychological research.
Men and women differentiate themselves; they want to emphasize their maleness or femaleness, not equalize it away. They do it with ‘male’ and ‘female’ careers just as they do with ‘male’ and ‘female’ modes of dress. The choices they make might be arbitrary, but they’re intentionally different. In my father’s culture, a skirt is proper working attire for a (male) manual labourer. Women wear noticably different garments. Apparently there’s a tribe in North Africa where hairdressing is a macho career. Every red-blooded male wants to be a hairdresser, and well 'ard warriors sit around chatting about their latest 'do. Women don’t.
My class was about 70% women, and that was at a university relatively famous for social sciences. If you couldn’t get laid in social sciences you were either gay or had no game.
My niece is in medical school right now. Nobody discriminated against her, despite her rather dodgy grasp of physical chemistry. OTOH, perhaps this is an instance of unfairness: she’s skinny and blonde, so in theory she should have been rejected in order to give that place to someone fat/black/gay/disabled, right? My goodness, doesn’t this get complicated?
At this point I’m not sure what else can be done to make everyone equal that hasn’t already been tried. Positive discrimination, norming, the Homer Simpson movement and endless proselytizing about girl power all seem to have run their course without much really changing. One problem I see is that people still have too many options. I remember, for example, one city government in California that announced it was going to summarily end the gender pay gap by freezing the salaries of city engineers and technicians, who were primarily male, and only giving pay raises to office assistants and desk clerks, who were primarily female, until parity was achieved. The city manager presciently remarked at the time that she hoped the engineers and technicians would see the fairness of it all, but unfortunately, being male, they didn’t and the whole thing soon fell apart.
Maybe that’s where we need to go next then if we’re ever going to all be equal – limit options. I won’t be much help there though because I already exercised my option by emigrating so I won’t be much more than an interested observer from now on.
I take it you are not familiar with facts. Most Vietnamese if they are religious, are Buddhist, not Catholic. Where on earth did you dig up the statement that most are Catholic from? Even a quick look at wikipedia can tell you that 85%+ of Vietnamese are Buddhists.
I admit I didn’t really look into what NHI covered before I moved here. I didn’t realize that the quality was sub-par to back home. Yes, it’s more affordable than US health care in some basic things, but the quality is suspect. The dental quality is bad and the coverage for NHI is not really complete. You need supplemental insurance (or pay for yourself) for some things that aren’t covered by NHI like crowns, hospice care.
The doctors have to work a lot and get around 90,000 NTD a month I think. Plus it’s not sustainable in the long term as the system runs a deficit.
You seem to have confused DNC with Democrats / Progressives. The DNC is the Democratic National Committee. I do not believe they actually make the laws. It’s the Congress and the President that does that.
Obama grabbed millions of acres for the US federal government using the BS excuse of environmental protection. If they really cared, they would have taken greater care not to pollute that river in Colorado while cleaning up the mine. The US Supreme court rewrote the eminent domain clause of the constitution by judicial decree to include seizing neighborhoods to build shopping malls. That is pure garbage and is completely unconstitutional. Land grab by the government is happening, just slowly.
Where I live, there is a Catholic Church. Among mass participants are Filipino/as, next is Vietnamese, followed by Taiwanese and then non-Asians.
Where I came from, the bulk of Vietnamese, many immigrants, and first generation US born, were Catholic. They attended mass regularly, and were very vocal, as their Hispanic counterparts, against same-sex marriage.
If you have read the US constitution, you would understand eminent domain is a foundation of the document. The document also says the federal government is the supreme law of the land. The government has allowed states to take property for the benefit of the people. Every thing in due process. The Supreme Court did nothing but state that provision extends to private companies. Instead of taking land for highways and parks, the states can take it for private companies.
The respective NCs control their nominating process. They work with states. I said nothing of the laws.
The care here is subpar? The care here is the same you would get at any public hospital in the West. Most of the doctors here trained there, practicesed there, or learned from such. The NHI is quite sustainable, as long as it is well managed. For the past 20 years, it has been. Rates change as needed. The doctor who runs the clinic next to me, expresses his hatred for the system with his new Benz and BMW. If doctors don’ t like the hours and pay, don’t become one or, open a clinic. The NHI works wonderfully. It is well managed, and the care equates to that of the west. Unless you are one of those people who, if they cut their finger will cut off their arm to save on a band-aid (gun laws don’t work, there is still crime! prisons don’t work, there is still crime! climate change is a hoax, there is still snow! ice could not bring down the Titanic! I have ice in my freezer, no way that could have!) you would see that, while flawed, it works and people are happy with it.
Well, it’s nice that you admit you are a communist (progressive) that wants complete government control over everything.
You might have missed the part in the US constitution where it says “We the People of the United States,”. The power and all rights reside with the people, not the government. The purpose of the US constitution is to protect the people from the government, not grant the government power over the people. You know, since at the time, Europeans governments were abusing their citizens and the founding fathers of the USA wanted to limit government abuse.
The fifth amendment reads
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
Using the courts to seize private property for use by land developers is corruption of the highest degree. “Public use” in the fifth amendment is not a shopping mall. It’s roads, schools, government buildings. And you have just admitted that you are in favor of allowing private developers to seize private property for private development, which is clearly against the US constitution.
So you support a company going to court to seize land from someone who doesn’t want to sell it. It is this type of corruption (which they observed in Europe at the time) that the framers of the US constitution were trying to prevent.
Today, in Germany, the courts seize private property and kick people out of buildings to house “refugees”. Fifth amendment is supposed to protect against this.
In the actual document, not the Breitbart orFox version, there are two words that open the door to interpretation. “Due Process” and that ties into the last 3 words of that you quoted above. “With just compensation”. The constitution is not an absolute document, and there is no such thing as absolute rights within it.
I believe in equality, that makes me a communist, guilty as charged. I’m also an atheist, since religion made no sense to me past the age of 6. I guess that also makes me a commie. At the same time I believe there is no actor above the individual. Meaning, no government at all. Not anarchy. No. Government.
And the current troll in chief has used eminent domain to his benefit more times than can count. Not only in the US, but in other countries as well. So you, and the rest of his supporters, can come down off your high horses and join the rest of us in a lifestyle known the world over as, hypocrisy.
That is where you are 100% wrong. It is an absolute document and the rights are absolute. It is not open to interpretation, that is just a commie excuse to remove rights, which I must admit has been working well for the commies so far as the rights of Americans become less every passing year. Any changes to it are supposed to be passed by amendments, which is what happened for a time until the courts decided to try to rewrite it by judicial decree.
And again, seizing land for private developers is not “due process”. It is outright theft and it is certainly not “public use”, which if you read it, is the first condition for taking it in the first place.
By your logic, private developers should have the right to seize entire neighborhoods and build more expensive houses since they will generate more tax revenue. This is the stuff that the US constitution is supposed to protect against, which you are advocating for.
Wrong, again. In psychology there are 5 major personality traits, referred to as the Big Five. They vary from person to person and they also vary from gender to gender. Males tend to be higher in some of those traits, females tend to be higher in others. The result of this is that male are better at some things, and female tend to be better at other things. This, among other things, is what leads man and women to (on average) different university and career paths. Cut the “mah patriarchy” nonsense and study.
Wrong, again. In the western world man and women of all races are given equal opportunities and rights. Cases of discrimination based on gender or race are not institutionalized and are the result of of bigoted people. Example: in allengineering Universities in the US asian kids (Japan, China, Korea, Taiwan) score higher than whites, blacks, latinos etc. As a result of this, some Universities decided to raise the score required by Asian kids and lower those for other minorities, resulting in african american and latino student being allowed to enroll with a lower grade compared to some Asian kids who have been left out. This kind of thing should not happen, and people should simply stop attending that kind of University.
“No equality of opportunity” would mean that a woman is not allowed to go to some universities, or to drive, or to vote, or to testify in court etc etc, all things that don’t really happen in civilized countries.
Wrong, again. In many western countries the ratio of university students is around 40% men / 60% women. The gap is reduced in engineering and IT courses, and it gets bigger in social classes.
There’s no patriarcal pipeline, there are simply fewer women who decide to be in positions of high responsability. And the reasons for that are:
a) Study the Big Five that I mentioned in the beginning
b) Most women, shockingly enough, have kids (at least those who are deemed attractive by men), and most of them realize that raising your own kids is better than working 10+ hours a day to pay for child care.
In before:“But but…no, it’s because the patriarchy in the Western society is oppressing them!”
There are several female world leaders, both in the Western world and in Eastern Asia. If there was a patriarcal society, they would not be allowed to do what they are doing. It’s pretty much the same argument about Trump’s election:“HE WON BECAUSE THE US IS A WHITE SUPREMACY”…yeah, that had a black man as president for 8 years. Worst white supremacy ever, I guess.
Side note:
Regardless of the lack of moral consistency in your arguments, if you want to discuss these kind of social/economical/political topics you may wnat to inform yourself a bit more. And by “informing” I don’t mean to open up Salon, Forbes or Buzzfeed and read:“10 reasons why women are oppressed by men, number 7 is going to schock you!”. There are many patriarcal societis in the world, where women have little to no rights and gay men are killed on a daily basis. If you want to make the world a better place, that would be a good place to start.
Oh, my Tea Party friend. You are deep in the dark side. Just because the courts hand down a ruling that you disagree with, does not make it unconstitutional.
The document is far from absolute, and you most certainly do not have absolute rights. That is a moral issue, not a legal or constitutional one. You want proof?
You have the right to bear arms. But, you do not have the right to own or manufacture any weapon of your choosing. How many private owners of thermonuclear weapons are there? How many people, on your block, are making or marketing weapons of mass destruction? Who decides what is a weapon of mass destruction? Ah, the courts have. Ergo, not absolute.
The seizure of land must be for the benefit of the public at large. Better security, for example. Like what is about to happen along the US/Mexico border. The federal government will seize private land for a private developer to build a wall, that will be maintained by a private company. As the further privatization of government resources occur, this is what will ultimately happen. As I mentioned, the Slobodan Trump, and his family, have benefited from eminent domain. Not only in the US, but also elsewhere. I am guessing you voted for him.
Everything must have recourse and meaning. It just cannot happen, and compensation must be made. If the constitution was an absolute document and everyone had absolute rights, we would never have advanced past the agrarian stage. There are many Pol Pot types among the right and left who think that we should devolve back to the simpler times. I am not one of them. I do not agree with eminent domain, but then I do not agree with the horribly out-dated and unnecessary electoral college. But, that would have only given us Hillary Clinton and another target to bitch at!
The annual day of segregation at Evergreen State University didn’t work because it was voluntary. If separating the races in order to ensure everyone has equal opportunity is ever going to work it has to be made mandatory by university decree. Better yet it should be expanded society wide and not just be a one day a year thing. It would help too if the courts got involved and gave separate but equal some legal, preferably Constitutional, authority because it’s clear at this point that desegragation was nothing but a ploy to keep oppressed minorities permanently down.
I just want to say, about athletes, what does everyone think of those cases of apparently female athletes being told they’re genetically male and therefore need to compete with men? (I mean the unexpected cases, not transwomen.)
Well, to be fair most of the people he invites are so unbelievably disconnected from reality that even if you don’t like the guy you end up agreeing with him.
“Good” segregation, “positive” discrimination" . . . . It’s pretty clear at this point that the dream never had a chance and homo sapiens is incapable of a bigotry-free existence.
