worth equal pay?
Thirty-four years after Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs in the "Battle of the Sexes," Wimbledon bowed to public pressure on its unequal prizes between men and women.
some comments on this i've read say that it's not fair… women don't earn that equal pay since they don't bring in the same crowds as the men, they don't play as long as the men, they aren't as….insert your weird excuse, as the men. seems like serena williams sure brings in the crowds… and the men who've whined over this issue dare to put their letters after their name! as if being educated qualifies them for such an opinion of entitlement.
i still don't get how some educated men don't support equal pay. don't they have daughters/sisters/wives/friends who deserve the dignity? Especially when one considers that many women take time off in their careers to be caregivers and their overall income suffers as a consequence, regardless if they have children.
i still don’t get how educated men don’t support equal pay.
Some do, or I do. And in the public sector–say Education, Inc., state or phed jobs—employees are compensated equally, regardless of sex. The disparities are found mostly in the private sector (aka laissez-faire economics): downtown shysters (whether in law, business, IT, etc) make 300 bucks just to pick up the phone. But then Jennifer Aniston makes probably 300 grand a month for a bad re-run of Foes, er, Friends.
Comment on February 22, 2007 @ 11:36 am
i fixed my words, i should have typed, and i meant to type, some men…
Comment on February 22, 2007 @ 11:46 am
It’s kind of pathetic how large swaths of our society still values individuals according to some primitive tribal upper-body-strength/agressiveness standard, regardless of how irrelevant that is for most fields. Women are demonstrably better managers and CEO’s, especially over time. Perhaps professional wrestling could still argue for a ‘sweat ceiling’, butttt…
I myself find male professional wrestling to be vaquely homoerotic and kind of childishly weird. Female professional wrestling would be far more appealing, if I would actually be willing to admit to such a dispostion, which I am not, in case my wife reads this blog.
Ahem.
Comment on February 22, 2007 @ 1:25 pm
Some people chat about the problems of laissez-faire economic models in regards to disparity of income–or inflated management salaries—and others mention…. rasslin.’ C’est le guerre.
The disparity of income issue is in a sense related to division of labor questions. Not to like bring up any old socialist ideas, but the market–whether in regards to consumer goods, resources, or employment–has little or no relationship to what is known as “ethics”, or really the ideals of Jefferson & Co. And most economists refuse to grant ethical types of arguments: for example, Esmeralda, an RN (or substitute teacher, etc), might have demonstrably superior technical skills and knowledge than say Larry Ellison (who dropped out from college after one year), and yet she makes 30 grand a year, and Lar. makes 3 mil. a year. Yet to most traditional economists—that is, defenders of supply-demand models— that is kosher. C’est le guerre.
Comment on February 22, 2007 @ 2:01 pm
And–if you will permit a bit more cynical commentary—the issue is not only equal pay between men and women with the same skills, experience, etc., but of say the relationship of job to salary. Having been employed in a few corporate offices in LA and Valley, I was amazed at how often management was relying on “underlings” to help them put together reports, explain technical issues, networking etc.
As a tech. editor, I worked alongside the supposed visionaries (and technical people), yet most of them could not deal with the reports, the stats programs, the demographics, or the tech-speak (as well as English syntax, and french/spanish if need be). A few programmers could understand it, yes: but it’s rather ironic when a $15 an hour tech. editor schmoe has to explain OSI standards or VB scripts to an $150 an hour management goon. Yet that happens quite often (and a few people I’ve worked with have verified that–some of them programmers forced into tech editing/writing). Corp. management is sort of a quasi-royalty.
Comment on February 22, 2007 @ 2:56 pm
If I could only dispense with the silly desire to actually DO things at work, I could be quasi-royalty too. Of course, those folks are capable of doing things I can’t, like wearing those stuffy suits and getting excited about powerpoint presentations.
Comment on February 22, 2007 @ 3:15 pm
As always no time to post
On my way to NYC with one of those stuffy powerpoint presentations
Equality –
Anyway – just look at the women’s soccer league – what a shame –
Some would like to think that the US is liberal and forward thinking but really
the high-fivin’-white-guys still run the Show in most venues.
Comment on February 22, 2007 @ 10:37 pm
So much for Free Enterprise. The way They use it, it’s code for ‘Billionaire Boy’s Club’.
Comment on February 22, 2007 @ 10:47 pm
“On my way to NYC with one of those stuffy powerpoint presentations”
Who can’t I insult these days?
Comment on February 22, 2007 @ 10:52 pm
Pick on me! Pick on me!
Comment on February 22, 2007 @ 11:56 pm
“”the high-fivin’-white-guys still run the Show in most venues.”"”
Perhaps in some corporations that is the case, but El Lay movers and shakers are not only WASPs, but many jewish people, arabs, and asians, and some blacks (and it’s much the same in SF). Unlikely you would find many WASPs in Hollywoodstein production companies anymore. And in some sense MGM, Paramount, viacom, Sony, etc. are political forces.
The corporate mafia are fairly multicultural these days; and given the presence of Ellens, Oprahs, Hillarys, Rosie O’s, etc. it’s not jus’ good ol’ boys, but good ol’ gals……………..
Zizek , not without shortcomings, takes on some of the corporate elite, of all types:
http://new-worlds.org/blog/?m=200702&paged=5
Comment on February 23, 2007 @ 5:11 am
Senrab wrote,
No, little Senrab, you’ve had your turn. Let some of the other little girls and boys be victims for once.
Comment on February 23, 2007 @ 7:13 am
“The corporate mafia are fairly multicultural these days; and given the presence of Ellens, Oprahs, Hillarys, Rosie O’s, etc. it’s not jus’ good ol’ boys, but good ol’ gals…”
I’m sure women and non-whites aren’t excluded from all avenues of greed and criminality, but you’ve still got a much better shot at fleecing the world if you’re a white male.
(picking on you again Senrab- but you get to share the attention with myself and a few hundred million others)
Comment on February 23, 2007 @ 7:23 am
If you hung out for a few days around Wilshire, or in Century City, say, next to the Sun America tower, or watched the asian and jewish deep pockets come and go in their Benzes (windows of course blackened out), you might think differently.
Comment on February 23, 2007 @ 8:59 am
I doubt it. It takes more than a little exposure to “others” to get me to think differently. Don’t confuse lacking faith with lacking principles.
Comment on February 23, 2007 @ 1:06 pm
Who was referring to faith? Being against racketeering, insider trading, mobsterism is a fairly sound principle. It’s a myth that WASPs are the big mover and shakers; you need only refer to the Forbes list to see that. Ellison is of jewish heritage, as is Paulie Allen; some have said Gates is jewish, or partly. There are a few WASPs on the list, but mostly non-WASPS. That’s not anti-semitism: just an observation; and Hollywood bidness is run by jewish-owned production companies. US universities–west or east coast—are chock full of jews, muslims and marxists: even though jewish people are only like 5% of the population.
Comment on February 23, 2007 @ 1:27 pm
The original post here was about pay equity between genders. There are definitely related issues, such as the perennial issue that the highest-paid people often rely on the low-end-of-the-pay-scale people to do “actual work”.
I have little problem with the latter issue. True, Jay Leno is nothing without the camera-persons, yet he gets the BIG BUCKS. But it’s also true that the camera operators are nothing without Jay Leno. There are many creative folks who, like Erle Stanley Gardner did, keep plural staff busy as they create.
It’s all about free market (sorry, other commentors, but the evidence is all for this), supply and demand. It takes eight years or more (after 12 of straight A grades) to become an MD, only 3 or 4 years to become an RN; why shouldn’t the docs be paid more?
Quick! Call the union hall and get me a camera operator! Quick! Call the union hall and get me a nationally-known and popular comedian!
Quick! Call the temp agency and get me a software inventor and marketer! Make sure to get one who can see what the market will want in the future!
Case closed.
Now this gets me back to the original question: I have believed since way before Women’s Lib that there should be equal pay for equal work, and that there should be equal opportunity in employment. However, that’s equal opportunity to be employed when the candidate is QUALIFIED, CAPABLE of doing the job. I oppose Affirmative Action as discriminatory, as demeaning to “protected minorities”, and as dumbing down the workforce as less-qualified people are hired to fill quotas.
Equal pay for equal work: Absolutely! The only problem I have here is that the statistics usually cited pertain to median income for each gender, which gives an inaccurate picture of the issue. Women, even in “these enlightened times”, choose to get some sort of job while waiting to get married. Still, they count toward the median (thus lowering it). (The issue I’m raising here, understand, is statistical only; if women CHOOSE such a path, they have the right in my book; if they opt for an education and career, that’s fine with me, too.)
If we’re trying to get away from skewed opportunities, let’s also get away from skewed statistics.
Maybe someday we’ll have equality and we won’t be having this kind of discussion. One can hope.
Comment on December 24, 2007 @ 3:31 pm
“Quick! Call the temp agency and get me a software inventor and marketer! Make sure to get one who can see what the market will want in the future!
Case closed.”
I wouldn’t rush to close that case. Some potential inventors are only unavailable because they lack the opportunity to apply their creativity in the right environment- like seeds without the right soil. That’s, to me, the essence of what is valuable about affirmative action. It should not be seen as simplistically as equal pay for equal work, but as a means of opening the doors of opportunity for those who are institutionally deprived of the resources to fully develop their potential. How to do this without unduly handicapping the advantaged is the challenge. When a white male who does have talent and skills developed through hard work is passed over for a promotion because the employer has financial or legal incentive to hire a woman or a minority they have a right to feel screwed. It doesn’t mean it was wrong to give the disadvantaged person the opportunity either, necessarily. It’s a matter of balance. Historically the situation has been unbalanced to the favor of the white male. Sometimes it’s bound to go too far in the other direction. When it does the white guy should squawk, but it doesn’t mean there’s no value to affirmative action.
Comment on December 24, 2007 @ 5:30 pm
so. the first case… if you have 2 professional athletes. top of their game, playing their own gender in the comps… say the us open… do you think they should be paid the same prize money for 1st, 2nd, 3rd place, regardless of gender? At these comps race is irrelevant by the time they get to the top level, they’ve generally overcome whatever struggle they’ve had to face to get to where they are.
why do you think it took so long not to see men and women financially deserving of equal pay in the sport of championship tennis?
women have been actually losing ground in equal work for equal pay. i once had a full time job where i was in a department with all males and i was the ONLY degree holder, i graduated with honors, had more responsibility, worked longer hours (on salary, not an hourly wage) and was on several committees.
when a new male employee was hired that irritated me, didn’t even have a year of college under his belt (drop out) and his mistakes were constantly adding to my workload, and i found out he was making $5 more an hour than me, i decided maybe it was time for me to look for better opportunities.
Comment on December 25, 2007 @ 8:00 pm
Max, 2 things:
1. My example of getting a software genius via a temp agency was in support of my argument re what people are paid, esp. the economic basis for people like Larry Ellison (mentioned by one commenter) making millions while much of their grunt work is done people who are paid far less (mentioned by another commenter); that example had nothing at all to do with AA.
2. Re AA, I tried to be brief, and therefore was forced to be simplistic. Here’s more on AA (IMHO):
AA has in many venues been applied by setting quotas and hiring less-qualified applicants if that’s what it takes to meet said quotas. Bad on two counts:
1. It’s discriminatory by race and gender, which is declared wrong. So why are we sanctioning it?
2. In a era of declining worker quality, when we’re off-shoring most of our manufacturing and phone customer “service”, here we are hiring anybody who can fog a mirror held under his or her nose so long as he (or better, she) is a “protected minority”. Way to compete, America!
Actually, bad on 3 counts, the very worst of which is this: The minority hired through AA has been robbed of the opportunity (the opportunity you talk of, Max) to succeed on merit. Here’s what happens when the hiring is done on the basis of “minority” status:
If the worker succeeds, his/her success is attributed to AA; his/her ability and job performance is discounted and s/he gets no success on merit. If the worker is unqualified but is hired by race/gender alone, and then, predictably, fails, that perpetuates perceptions that the minority group represented is not equally capable. Therefore, the minority (depersonalized into group membership by now, since s/he was hired as such) cannot truly succeed, cannot even be seen as a person and judged on merit alone, because the very environment has been charged with racism/genderism.
Now, there are and have been AA programs that are much more enlightened. Employers have re-evaluated jobs as to what actually makes a worker successful and have set standards and made entry testing “job-related” (see my further comments), and then have made a real effort to recruit capable minorities, and also to pre-train some potentially capable minorities so they could honestly pass the tests.
When AA is done like that, I’m absolutely for it.
I am absolutely opposed to bias on the basis of race, ethnicity, creed, color, gender. I am opposed to it when it favors white males. I am opposed to it when it favors a Spanish-surnamed black woman (one hire, 3 AA points). I am absolutely for the awarding of the job to the best-qualified applicant, based ONLY upon a demonstrated predictor of job success. That’s how we’re going to get our America back.
Comment on December 25, 2007 @ 8:23 pm
Max, an addendum: On my blog*, a person who read our dialog posted quite an opinion of AA. I consider it an excellent example of the type of negative feelings which I think the “fraidy-cat” version of AA has engendered.
If we could somehow finally get beyond racial/gender separations, we could finally settle into being the great nation we have always said we were. How about it, folks? Can we do “One Nation under God, with Liberty and Justice for all“?
———
*Link is to the main blog; I’m not going to promote this commenter’s comments by giving a direct link.
Comment on December 26, 2007 @ 7:46 am
Oh, raison detre, I agree completely! Even so, some thoughts for you to consider:
1. Pro sports (and other applicable areas): In a sport like tennis, where men’s and women’s competitions are pretty much equally popular, pay/prizes should be pretty much equal.
However, there are sports where the men’s version is very popular (sold out in a large venue, seen on national network TV, etc.) and the women’s version is not; in such cases, the economics just don’t work out, not yet at least. I think it’s unfortunate that the WNBA is not all that popular; maybe someday it will be. Until then, the sport’s total income doesn’t justify the mega-pay some mNBA players get (notice I didn’t say “are justified in getting”).
I would conclude, then, that men’s tennis and women’s tennis are “equal work” and therefore should get equal pay, but that (so far) WNBA and NBA are not “equal work”.
2. Idiocy should not be rewarded. My daughter keeps having to report back to her boss that she didn’t complete her assignment but that she did complete the assignments of two, three, of more of her co-workers, or that she did the above but had to take some overtime to complete her own assignment. Fortunately for her, her boss understands completely (and is in the painfully slow process of replacing the goof-offs). In her case, gender has nothing to do with it, but I certainly commiserate with you regarding your experience.
2a. Just a note re what should get rewarded: A college degree should not get rewarded on the job (though it’s fair to consider it in the hiring process). Gender should not get rewarded on the job. Experience should not get rewarded on the job (let alone mere seniority). The only factor that should be rewarded is job performance. The person who is bringing value to the company should be getting rewarded. This is basically true in pro sports, why can’t it be true in business?
Comment on December 26, 2007 @ 8:15 am
I read “Phritz”‘s comment, assuming it’s the one you were referring to. That was not negative at all for that particular individual, who I recognize as one who appears here quite frequently under various disguises (including early in this thread). His racial and cultural xenophobia is one of his chronic traits. Any time the subject turns to the non-white portion of the populace he can be counted on to erupt into slurs and stereotypes. I think he’s pretty scared of those brown and black people, to be honest.
AA is a complex issue and one that is highly prone to difficulties with implementation. The liberal impulse that gives birth to these policies can backfire in unintended ways. I don’t feel, though, that the reverse discrimination the right decries is a particularly pervasive and chronic problem for society anywhere close to the magnitude of the original problem these policies seek to solve. It seems to me to be more of a nice emotional handle for those who are already predisposed to wish to keep the status quo and who irrationally fear the emerging power of the historically disadvantaged and oppressed.
Comment on December 26, 2007 @ 8:23 am
Mr. Dooz: I read your blog. Specifically this one –
This is deeply offensive to me. Pathetic, anti-historical, freeperesque, backwards bullshit. You sound like you watch Fox News religiously. From now one, I’ll filter your semi-sexist, semi-racist ‘reason’ through the revelatory essence of this comment from your blog. At least you’re honest, if ill-informed, inadvertently cruel, and half-insane.
Just sayin’. But hey — post away!
Comment on December 26, 2007 @ 10:37 am
Had a feeling that was coming.
The French have made enormous contributions to western thought and culture and only fools- and Fox News viewers- can disparage them so easily. They’ve also kicked butt militarily from time to time. If aggression is what you value you may want to read up on a little-known guy named Napolean.
The liberals, well they only founded this country- with significant help from the French of course.
Comment on December 26, 2007 @ 10:50 am
There’s also that little often-avoided-by-freeper fact that without massive French military assistance, Washington would never have retaken New York.
The French gave us the United States of America. This would be English soil without them. Fact. Unless you’re reading ‘Right-Wing Alternate Non-History’, like O’Reilly, Limbaugh, et al.
Comment on December 26, 2007 @ 11:16 am
A former poster has remarked elsewhere that we are ‘censoring and moderating’ Mr. Dooze; but I think we’re just responding. I may not look forward to Mr. Dooze’s response, but I’ll read it, respond to it, and encourage further discussion.
Plum (the former poster) is still, to date, the only censored or moderated poster in the history of this blog. He wants company, as misery always does; but Dooze is simply expressing opinions, however objectionable they may be. I don’t have a problem with that, as long as I get to point out the Crap. I should be more reasoned in my response, but I’m not really a reasonable person, especially when confronted with the whole French=bad/Liberal=traitor meme, since I think it’s directly responsible for the uninterrupted decline of fortunes of the USA.
Lonely Plum. Sad.
Comment on December 26, 2007 @ 2:31 pm
Wow, I’m feeling the heat! Some flaming! (Even spelling my name wrong. Nice touch!)
byronius, you do NOT have to agree with me. However, it seems only fair if you’d at least stick to attacking what I’ve actually said. (Up until now on this thread, that has been my experience.) Instead, you’ve seen fit to categorize me, call me names, dismiss me as a person, because you disagree with my statements on some things. It seems to me that the only case you’ve made by this fairly tasteless personal attack is to lend support to “Phritz’s” opinion of liberals. I certainly don’t think your series of diatribes here encourages further discussion, at least not with me.
Ironic, really: IMHO, you’ve sunk to Phritz’s level (and on my blog, I block that stuff [incl. 3 more comments from Phritz]).
Comment on December 26, 2007 @ 7:06 pm
It isn’t really hard to come to byronius’s conclusions from what has actually been written there. Take the latest post. It presumes chemical addiction, school shootings et al. are on the rise. The is so obviously an infotainment blunder. There were school shootings in the 1950s. There were school shootings in the 1920s. There have been school shootings almost as long as there have been civilian firearms. What has changed is not that these events are more commonplace. What has changed is that Chicken Littles yammering away in the media gain ratings by exploiting a tendency for emotionally overwrought viewers to flock around alarmist claptrap. Journalistic responsibility, not schoolroom tranquility, is what we have lost in recent decades.
The comments about the French and liberals also seem to come from the same well of misinformation. Which is truly a greater sign of strength — being cajoled by allies into supporting a murderous folly of catastrophic proportions or giving those allies sound sensible advice about crucial realities (like the fact that Saddam Hussein was not at all a grave threat to American national security or the fact that unprovoked military aggression in the Middle East could generate an actual threat to American national security?)
This notion that the French are craven and/or pacifists is a downright stupid belief to hold in a world where the French supported a regime change policy in Afghanistan (a place where an actual threat could be found) and bodily joined that fight. The only way to arrive at such a profoundly stupid belief is to chuck reality right out the window in order to cling to the satisfaction provided by the hate and fear that are the stock and trade of political misinformation vendors. To suggest that someone with such views is not hoodwinked by Fox News et al. is only erroneous if, by some unfathomable coincidence, someone somehow independently arrived at the same blatantly bogus conclusions popularized by those sources.
Regarding the original issue in the thread, I support affirmative action as a means to address residual racism and sexism. Those are still real social forces in the modern United States, and they do really impede the efforts of minorities citizens to achieve up to their personal potentials. We do well to recognize that reality and take corrective action.
That said, it can go too far. No one playing a match at Wimbledon is being oppressed by The Man. To listen to the lunatic right wing on this issue, one would think governments were imposing heavy-handed affirmative action policies on every private enterprise around the world. At least in the U.S., such policies are either voluntary (and what sort of logic would forbid entrepreneurs from freely using their positions in that way?) or a function of partnerships with government. For example, broadcasters and defense contractors normally must satisfy Equal Opportunity Employment regulations. That does not even approach the strictness of a quota system, though it does involve a little extra paperwork and permitting government inspectors to scrutinize employment records to verify that racist or sexist hiring practices are not in effect. For businesses that profit from public resources, this is an unbearable burden how?
Again though, I don’t think world class sporting events need to be policed in this way. Beyond a certain level, the marketplace actually is effective at promoting merit. Also, beyond a certain level, cries of oppression no longer ring true. If a particular high end sporting institution were actually racist or sexist, loss of quality due to those biases, not to mention loss of revenue from organized boycotts, should work well enough to induce remedy without government intervention . . . and if someone actually wants to run an all-white golf league or an all-male tennis tournament, I still believe what momentum exists to address problems of workplace discrimination would be better directed elsewhere.
Comment on December 26, 2007 @ 8:26 pm
Dooz is correct, though; I should have refrained from responding so. Why did I explode? Because I’ve heard it all before, all my life, and I’ve had enough. Small thoughts from Small People. Sophistry that purports to be Reason. I’ve just had it with this kind of dialogue; it accomplishes nothing, except for exasperating me. A grown adult who wants to discuss the terrible problem of affirmative action — not domestic spying, or environmental collapse, or constitutional betrayal — oh, it’s the Democrats who are the traitors? Because they will not submit to the Mad Reaper? Tell me more. Not. I’ve heard enough that I could argue their side of it better than most of them.
I’m not willing to educate poisoned minds anymore; I have truly given up at this point on any adult who is still capable of such misinformation, so I should just remain silent, if not acquiescent. My Well Of Understanding for Right-Wingers has run dry.
But — if I won’t do the work of trying to communicate, if I’m just going to lose my temper and attack, I shouldn’t participate in the discussion. Truth is, I’m so angry about all of this — I don’t have the spirit for it anymore, because I’ve lost the faith. I’ve lost my faith in the ability of some people to grow. Affirmative action, immigration, gay marriage, welfare — the endless drivelly-but-well-coordinated CRAP that spews forth from Rovians on these favorite subjects, in whatever ‘reasoned’ dress they hang on it, makes me understand how early abolitionists felt when confronted with the ‘reason’ of pro-slavery cottonmouths.
Shall I employ Dooz’s methods and factual content towards slavery, as Ron Paul has so recently done? Abraham Lincoln should have just waited, it woulda happened in the free market — been reasonable, you know…Economic collapse! Social unrest! They’ll rape all our women! Depurify the o-so-pure italogermanfrancoscottish non-slavic gene pool! Horrors! Too much freedom is bad for them — they can’t handle it! Here, let me tell you a personal anecdote about a black guy who couldn’t handle freedom — there! See? What? Can’t handle the Politically Incorrect Truth?
Shall we discuss the women’s right to vote, then? SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO many Reasonable Men of the 1800′s, having reasonable conversations over beers at the local tavern about the Dangers of the Feminine Nation, and guess what? I still hear this CRAP, in 2007, from many men. Racism and Sexism beat less strongly in most hearts, I think, but even more strongly in the hearts of Small Men, though they cloak it so cleverly. So few of them ever change, or grow out of this dogmatic, repetitive meanness. Sometimes we only progress when Small Men die of old age. Pathetic, but true. Take Bobby Cherry, for instance. We jumped up a whole notch when that bastard croaked.
Smallness is a way of life. Hard to escape. I can’t help Dooze, so I shouldn’t hurt him with a loss of temper, at least until we’re facing each other across the barriers in a proper civil war, which I sometimes think is inevitable. Dooze, I’m sure, will eschew election fraud as a Bad Thing; but will find another reason to vote for his favorite Republican anyway — or perhaps even ‘Independent’, a term I have found increasingly used by former Bush-lovers — perhaps the evil spectre of hordes of mediocre blacks, hispanics, and women swarming over the ramparts of efficient white male operations, eager to consume the fruit of centuries of lily-white accomplishment weighs heavily enough on Dooz’s mind that he or she will accept a little non-democracy for the cause, hey?
Sounds reasonable.
I feel a little hopeless, I admit, and it is a shameful and bristly hopelessness, because so many have given their lives and happiness to inch the world just a little further forward, and here I sit, bristling at an adult named Dooz who feels the need to elucidate to the treasonous liberals on the Small And Reasonable Thoughts of the French-Hating Sub-Semi-Non-Racists — I took the bait, and it tastes just as fecally as it ever did, and I’m embarassed for my lack of spirit, and embarassed for the human race that such rotting words still float around.
Ever more convoluted, ever more coded, but still — the Heart Of Darkness.
Dooz, I apologize. You’re a prisoner, and I can’t free you. Someone else who has the spirit for it may yet still lift you up; but not me, because I’m full of hatred for election-stealing Rovian-police-state lovers, of whom you truly do appear to merge with, since you use all their words and phrases and mis-history, be it ever so reasonable-sounding to you.
I’m just not the guy to chat with on this. Affirmative Action is a tiny drop of base in the vast vat of racist acid; you should not fear it. The GOP has made sure it is almost wholly ineffective. Congratulations.
Comment on December 26, 2007 @ 11:00 pm
There is no greater fallacy in Dooz’s latest post, to my mind, than the unjustified assumption that one needs a belief in God to be a good person and that lack of such a belief is the entryway to all the evils he lists. The fifties seem to conservatives to represent some golden era, characterized by a strong consensual belief in God and family values and a nearly total lack of crime. Mr. Dooz needs to pick up a book by Jack Kerouac or William S. Burroughs and get a sense of what was really going on in those days. The bulk of the population may have been in a zombified stepfordesque family values Ozzie & Harriet wear your Sunday best and don’t spit on the sidewalk stupor while pledging allegiance to God and country. The real people, the ones who were actually alive and had functioning senses, went underground. The media of the time didn’t mention them and that’s why they are believed to have never existed by the conservatives who long for the good old days. Drunks, bums, hookers, addicts, artists, jazz musicians, existed and thrived in the underworld as they do today. Belief in God, or the lack of it, had nothing to do with it then and it doesn’t now.
Like Demonweed says, it’s the media that knows there is a hunger for the dark side and they will bring out as much as they can to sell whatever garbage they’re offering up and rake in the profits.
Comment on December 26, 2007 @ 11:06 pm
As a little aside, there are many complex factors that create a profound disconnect between people who long for “the good ol’ days” and what the past was actually like. The strongest among them is growing up. As children with few or no responsibilities and very little interest in weighty issues, life tends to be carefree and fun. Taking on responsibilities and developing an interest in civic life creates sensitivities and awareness that are not typical in childhood. The idea that modern times are fraught with social and moral decay is often, at its core, nothing more than an inability to let go of childish things.
After all, “the gold ol’ days” were really not so good. Dial it back to the 50s and we have racial segregation, secret testing of nuclear and chemical agents on unwitting civilians, an icepick to the brain passed for mental health care, etc. Dial it back another 50 years and we have public support for lynchings, banned importation of “obscene” literature, children working in coal mines, etc. Certain things about modernity suck, but certain things about any period in history sucked as well. I believe the best we can do is recognize what is wrong in our own times (the same corporations that make weapons also control news organizations promoting unnecessary warfare, civil liberties and economic soundness are both deeply compromised in response to the actions of twenty men with boxcutters, millions of people do not see Rush Limbaugh as a clown, etc.) and then advocate change for the better.
Comment on December 27, 2007 @ 3:06 am
may i remind you we still have public support for lynchings, they’re just different now, banned importation of “obscene” literature, children working in coal mines, etc.
really, we do.
and terrorism. it’s still ok to do some bombings… especially if it’s targeted towards women’s clinics, especially if it’s on july 4th…
remember, your baby has fingernails! fingernails! (juno reference)
Comment on December 27, 2007 @ 9:14 pm