There is a reason the Republicans have been pushing more women candidates. Pro-life talking points are a lot less abrasive to women when they come from a woman rather than an old white male.

pacino wrote:how many women are against contraception

how many women are against equal pay

how many women are against controlling their own lives

how many women are against their equality

the answer to all of them is a surprising amount, actually.

pacino wrote:how many women are against contraception

how many women are against equal pay

how many women are against controlling their own lives

how many women are against their equality

Nobody in this country is against equal pay for equal work. I've never heard of someone in this country being against equality, or freedom (ie. controlling their own lives). I'm not aware of there being any movement for banning contraception, but I'm happy to be corrected.

This post is a classic example of not understanding the opposing position.

sydnor wrote:Why is the 77% misleading and divisive?

My personal experience is that it feels wrong - that the companies I work for just care about performance. But wasn't sure how the other 96% live.

The 77% figure is the percentage of the median income of men that is the median income of women, per the 2010 Census, of people who work more than 35 hours per week. It ignores field, overtime hours worked, riskiness of the work, education, experience, etc. Basically, it's worthless for evaluating whether women and men have equal opportunities in the workforce, or whether gender discrimination is impacting women negatively. It's misleading, because speeches that mention this statistic use it as a rhetorical technique to incite emotion, and for the speaker to complain that they can help fix this injustice (before even proving that any injustice exists).

The most recent study I read (I can't find it right now) is that the pay gap unexplained by the set of factors they considered was 0-7% (due to statistical uncertainty).

No politician in the US is against the Equal Pay Act of 1963, which established that equal pay for equal work as the law of the land. The question around recent laws is not whether equal pay for equal work is reasonable, but around the appropriate constraints around lawsuits to enforce it. You wouldn't know it by coverage and speeches of those on the left (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/10/us/politics/senate-republicans-block-bill-on-equal-pay.html).

“For reasons known only to them, Senate Republicans don’t seem to be interested in closing wage gaps for working women,” Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, said in a floor speech.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peggy-dre ... 51267.html

Last Wednesday, Senate Republicans blocked -- for the third time -- the Paycheck Fairness Act, a bill proposing to close the pay gap between men and women. The goal of the bill -- the attainment of equal pay for equal work -- seems like a no-brainer, right? Women with the same job, and same qualifications, as men deserve to be paid the same. They do not deserve to be discriminated against in salary on the basis of gender. Seems obvious. And yet not a single Republican voted in favor of the Act, and many Americans no longer know what to think, either.

Yeah, that's not what the law does. This article actually summarizes some of the reasons to oppose the bill:

Republicans say the bill is simply a Democratic ploy to distract from the disappointment of Obamacare; that it's been against the law to pay a woman less than a man with similar experience in the same job since the Equal Pay Act of 1963. Paycheck Fairness, they say, would make it impossible for employers to tie compensation to work quality, productivity, and experience. Lawsuits would increase. And, well, look, they point out: Even women in the Obama White House earn 88 percent of their male counterparts, according to study conducted by the American Enterprise Institute.

Jeff, perhaps the State of the Union is an example of how this statistic is being used to mislead:

You know, today, women make up about half our workforce, but they still make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns. That is wrong, and in 2014, it's an embarrassment.

Women deserve equal pay for equal work.

The transcript generously broke those lines into separate paragraphs.

swishnicholson wrote:Since when is it news that people often support policies that are actually harmful to their own race, class or situation, through shame or other mechanisms? ?

Like men supporting equal pay!

swishnicholson wrote:

Dajafi, I think you missed Housh's point. It's not that liberals are sometimes anti-women, too. It's that most conservatives aren't either.

As always, dajafi has already said what I thought in much more eloquent terms. Just like to add regarding the statement above that 1)I don't think that was Housh's point at all, though he can clarify. I think he was just pointing out how malfeasance of any sort by a Republican is quickly branded as typical, while that by a Democrat or other liberal figure is either ignored or treated as a special case. And 2) Am I wrong in thinking that in general the conservative viewpoint leans toward protecting traditional gender roles? You don't have to couch this in terms of being "anti-women," and there may be a genuine belief that this is best for society as a whole, but it means necessarily to hang on to a system that has been demonstrably patriarchal for, oh, a few thousand years and must also necessarily limit women's choices biologically and sexually as well as socially and politically. Again, I can accept that adherents believe they are men (and women) of good faith who are doing what is right, but they are by definition doing this by limiting the choices of others, and mainly those who have paid the price of protecting this system through the years. While "anti-woman" is definitely unfair (they don't much like men who undermine the system either), one can definitely smell the fear of change underlying this attitude. Isn't that what a conservative is?

You may be right on 1. I very well may be misattributing my thoughts to Housh. I edited my post a couple times, and it was still barely readable. :/

On your second point, my impression is not that conservatives want to preserve a certain type of society. That may be true for a small minority of old fogies, but that's not true of young conservatives. For us -- and I'm generously calling myself young -- it's about being free to make choices about your own life, as long as they don't negatively impact others. The book "Lean In" is about choice (I've not read it yet, so please feel free to correct me). Sandberg encourage women to make the choice to commit to their career. But it doesn't condemn opting out, or downshifting, or otherwise prioritizing something else besides income. And that's where I feel that liberals and conservatives have oddly swapped. It's fun to joke about greedy GOPers who just want to cut taxes and keep all the money, and for Democrats to tax it all and give it away. But on this issue, it's liberals who tend to worry about the choices that women are making about their careers that negatively impact their income (ie. going into marketing instead of investment banking after their MBA), and are trying to legislate solutions to fix this asymmetry of outcomes.

Abortion is abortion, and I'm not gonna touch that. But on contraception, the question is not whether it's to be banned, it's about who is going to pay for it, and who is going to be forced to provide it. Again, it comes down to choice.

I'm fairly certain that if women's lifespans were shorter than men, all we'd hear about in politics would be around trying to close the "lifespan inequality gap."

Whatever else it has been pitched as, Lean In is mostly about the wonderfulness of being Sheryl Sandberg, and is, I have heard, enough to convert the most hard-bitten culture warriors into straight-up Bolsheviks

eh, i've read it, and it's really not that bad

drsmooth wrote:Whatever else it has been pitched as, Lean In is mostly about the wonderfulness of being Sheryl Sandberg, and is, I have heard, enough to convert the most hard-bitten culture warriors into straight-up Bolsheviks

I am not shocked that you're not a fan of Sandberg. I'm more impressed that you resisted the urge to mention something sexual about a successful woman.

drsmooth wrote:Marissa Mayer, married & a new mother, goes down on Dan Loeb

from the article's account, she swallowed, too

drsmooth wrote:for you see, while some here imagine that "economics" is governed by immutable laws that they and precious few others have divined, it seems clear that in fact economics is governed by forces such as Meg Whitman's cycles of hot flashes

Werthless wrote:

drsmooth wrote:Whatever else it has been pitched as, Lean In is mostly about the wonderfulness of being Sheryl Sandberg, and is, I have heard, enough to convert the most hard-bitten culture warriors into straight-up Bolsheviks

I am not shocked that you're not a fan of Sandberg. I'm more impressed that you resisted the urge to mention something sexual about a successful woman.

drsmooth wrote:Marissa Mayer, married & a new mother, goes down on Dan Loeb

from the article's account, she swallowed, too

drsmooth wrote:for you see, while some here imagine that "economics" is governed by immutable laws that they and precious few others have divined, it seems clear that in fact economics is governed by forces such as Meg Whitman's cycles of hot flashes

you should also excavate a few of the things I've said about some of the male plutocrats I'm sure you've bought the action figures for

My experiences (obviously anecdotal) are they women and men do, in fact, receive equal pay for equal work. However, the 'ol boys network make it much easier for men (and white men in particular) to move up in the ranks, and accordingly, total compensation.

Don't know how you legislate that. As much as I admire the motives and reasoning behind the Affirmative Action laws, in practice they prove nothing but divisive.

most laws most of the time chase around in a direction people were already mostly going. It may be that at best they bolster a flimsy resolve to "do better".

We do a lot of sucky cultural things around "work", arguably in no small part because in our industrial era, guys have basically been in control of how we go about a lot of it, particularly the best-rewarded examples of it.

Of course, most of what we call "work" is not really about anything that merits the term, but is rather tussles about power relationships, but I've gone & wandered into areas where everyone's foreheads get all furrow-y and everyone pretends not to "know" what I'm talking about. Fuck it, go re-read how Tom Sawyer got that fence whitewashed.

there's definitely the old boys network, but there's also the research that shows women don't go for promotions or think they deserve them. There's definitely a combination of things that has to happen

More damning evidence that Republicans hate you and your free market freedoms:

Don Gaetz, the Republican President of the Florida Senate ... thinks it's important to keep regulations in place that prevent Florida breweries from selling half-gallon growlers of beer. He's even supporting a new bill that would force breweries to buy their own beer back from beer distributors at a markup before selling it back to customers.

Chart provides evidence supporting the view that Dems are jerkoffs - but What's the Matter With Kansas, indeed:

So "Pornhub Insights" is a thing. Who knew?

well, if wikipedia search activity can predict flu severity....?

Do "page views" really represent how much porn is being watched by the typical pornhub user? Maybe the fine folks in Kansas aren't watching more porn, they're just more discerning about the porn they do watch. That is, they watch the first bit of many clips before settling in, thus increasing the number of page views.

yeah that's probably it

without looking i'm gonna harken a guess in that kansas is where young ryan madson calls home