As I said before, I think he’s delusional. His concept of “evidence” is to quote proto-Nazi philosophers and Demonologie. He refuses to recognize that “society” doesn’t mean “that group of people with outdoor plumbing”, and that his metaphor is incoherent. He vaguely recognizes that he might be sociopathic, but refuses therapy.
I’m guessing he refuses therapy because he is, at heart, a coward. He knows that a therapist might make him look straight ahead instead of squinching his eyes shut and shouting venom about women. He suspects that, were he confronted with real live actual facts instead of ancient misogynistic texts, he might have to confront next the causes of his fear and loathing of women. And that’s a thought just too terrible.
BlueJohn, as bad as that’ll be, you’ll come out the other side a better, more coherent person. You’ve got some sort of rotting blockage in your intellectual gut, and I’m here to tell you, it stinks. You need to get it cleared out.
You may not be a misogynist but you are an economic bonehead.
First, all employment “creates wealth.” If it didn’t, the job wouldn’t exist. Employers in the private sector are unable to keep employees that don’t produce output more valuable than the cost to keep them.
Second, you seem to think that only paid employment creates wealth. While it is true that unpaid services aren’t tracked in GDP figures, it is ridiculous to think that women in their traditional, unpaid, roles as housekeepers, cooks and mothers do not “create wealth.” In fact, this failure to track unpaid labour artificially inflates GDP figures as more and more women enter the paid workforce.
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According to the study quoted above, in Nova Scotia at least, tracking unpaid labour in GDP would make women the primary “wealth creators.”
Just a quick word to back up Truth Seeker’s argument about unpaid labour creating wealth.
There’s an old saying that i’ve come across in quite a few economics books. In earlier times, the saying was used to provide a simple demonstration of what type of work contributes to GDP figures, and what type of work does not. Nowdays, it is more likely to be used to illustrate the point that the old distinction between paid and unpaid labour is both arbitrary and, in many ways, nonsensical.
I can never remember the exact wording, but it goes something like this:
"When a man marries his housekeeper, there is a drop in GDP."
Of course, this saying is based on stereotypical gender roles, and is designed to show that when a woman cleans a house for money, she is contributing to GDP, but when she does it for free as a housewife, she is not.
It should be obvious even to someone with no economic training at all that no more or less actual work is done after the transition, and that the woman’s housework is as valuable to the man now as it was before; perhaps more so.
As many economists and economic historians have pointed out, unpaid labour has the effect of freeing up an equivalent amount of labour or money for use in what Blue John and his narrow-minded ilk call the “productive” part of the economy. As such, unpaid labour is a great, and often unacknowledged creator of wealth.
Please don’t take this post to imply that the most appropriate place for women to work is in the home. As far as i’m concerned, women can and should work wherever they want. I’m just trying to refute the ridiculous assertion that those women who don’t work for a paycheck are somehow less productive members of society.
Blue John, you are not really confident. If you were, truly, you would see that women are no threat to you.
Narcissistic Personality Disorder means you see things only in terms of black and white. Anything that doesn’t meet your view of good is complete and utter evil.
“Economic bonehead” is a harsh way of putting it, given that the major bone of contention between us is only that we’re using the same wording to mean different things. By “wealth creation” I don’t mean numbers on a paycheck but the actual production of necessities: food, fuel, raw materials, metals, housing and so on.
Most paid employment, including mine, just involves moving wealth about rather than creating any, or turning necessary raw materials into frivolous luxuries. We’re fortunate in our modern Westernised society that we can afford to have quite a large fraction of the workforce doing what you might call “telephone sanitising”, and we run things that way because it keeps idle hands occupied and provides a rationale for sharing out the necessities in a more-or-less equitable fashion.
Putting a value on what I’ve heard called “wifework” (it’s OK, the usage wasn’t coined by a misogynist but by a feminist anxious to complain that men still don’t do their fair share of it) is hard. I imagine the basic duties of a home-maker and child-carer don’t vary much between Stone Age primitive and 21st-century housewife. (Substitute whatever word you find acceptable if you don’t like “housewife”. I’ll use the term from here on without further apology, if only because we all know more or less what we mean.) The big difference to how you’re housed and what you eat and so on depends largely on the “breadwinning” sector of the population, and in modern society also largely on transportation. That tends to mean, in practice, that the big wins are down to men. It also means that the value of “wifework” is dictated by whatever society can afford.
I actually agree with the point you make about the valuation of homemaking versus paid employment, and the upshot of that is indeed that the impact on the economy isn’t all that great when housewives go out to work instead of staying at home. The work they had to do before still has to be done by someone – it’s just that instead of a woman caring for her own home and her own children, someone else gets paid for it; usually another woman with poorer employment prospects, or less inclination. Putting women in the workforce makes the GDP look artificially bigger, as you say. What’s actually happening is that there are more telephone sanitisers, I’d say, as there are only so many necessities that we can consume.
This isn’t necessarily either a good thing or a bad thing in and of itself. The overall effect on the economy is largely neutral. The childcare issue is an argument in itself that I can’t really address without making this post quite a lot bigger, and I get accused of verbosity enough as it is. The big difference is that more women have cash in hand that presumably spells “independence”. I have absolutely no intention of doing anything so ridiculous as finding fault with this state of affairs.
cjhowarth, feel free not to bother with me. No-one has any obligation to respect anyone else’s opinion.
You may well be more “intelligent”, as you use the word, than I am. Why should that matter to me? I don’t care how well you do IQ tests, or how well you have progressed in your profession.
Your volunteer work doesn’t impress me, either. Anyone can volunteer to do volunteer work, it doesn’t indicate you are charitable or intelligent.
A nice healthy disregard for evidence, too. You women are all the same. Well, maybe not all, but near enough.
hyperjes, you are a woman. Virtually all women today are in slavery to feminism and the dominant ideas in society. You’re like cats. You’ll rub around him when he’s feeding you, but when there’s a break in you’ll be hiding under the table, letting him take the beating. This is not the inescapable condition of all women, merely how most women choose to be.
d_redguy, I’ll answer you anyway.
You must free your mind from her influence because you have chosen to give her this influence. Women have no capacity for consciousness, they will always be puppets, with men this isn’t so. That doesn’t mean men can’t choose to be puppets, to submit themselves to someone or something, that is that you have done.
You have made yourself like a woman, like I said before.
She is a puppet of feminism, the dominant force in society, because this is the most powerful force trying to control her or the one she finds most appealing. You are her puppet because you choose to be so. Free your mind.
Which specific part would you want a cite for? Women are leeches, I gave many reasons to believe this, which do you want proof for? As for being called a bigot, I don’t care what people call me. I just quoted Hitler, what’s so bad about being called a bigot? Doesn’t matter to me. It’s happened before, it’ll happen again.
DanielWithrow, my concept of philosophical insight is Daemonologie, and various anti-Semites. Evidence is something completely different. I know what society is and women take more from it than they give.
Ancient misogynistic texts are my only option, they don’t print this stuff any more. I never shout, though.
You seem to be the only one afraid to look at the facts about women. Always ready to attack the man instead of the argument, though. You might as well be a woman already.
Why would anyone fear or loathe women? I neither fear nor loathe women. There’s nothing to be scared of and nothing to hate, loathe, despise and so on. I’m a tremendous physical coward, always the first to run away from a fight, but being scared of a demographic group? I don’t even see how that could be possible.
Guinastasia, with her third failed attempt at telepathy, makes the same bone-headed claims. Women are no threat to me, nor have I said anything to indicate otherwise.
Feminism is a threat to men as a biogroup, but feminism is not women. George Bush is a feminist, so is Tony Blair. They’re not women.
Like George Bush?
Yeah, I’ve got that.
Truth Seeker, Malacandra argues the economic side better than I can, I’d just like to take issue with this:
They don’t want to factor in her work as a sex worker too, then? Nor, I imagine, the traditionally male forms of housework such as mending broken fences, fixing flat tyres, cleaning gutters, taking the bins out and so on. That’s the trouble with unpaid labour, you can ignore the bits that don’t support your preconceived views.
Malacandra, I’m not expecting to convince anyone.
We see lots of campaigns for “equality for women” (shades of the Pankhursts, “Votes for women, chastity for men!”), that doesn’t mean they want to make up half the army and half on all deaths on the job. Men are still ninety per cent of those. Like the issue of conscription, women are to have the choice to join the army, not the obligation. The right to vote, not responsibilities to defend this right from Johnny Foreigner.
They get what they want, I’ll give them that. We still have a Minister for Women in this country, after all (Patricia Hewitt, Secretary of State for Trade and Industry). Despite women making up the majority of voters and this being a representative democracy, we still need more representation for women, hence women-only shortlists for Parliamentary seats.
Even though a large majority of university students are women there are still initiatives the help women in education. Women are the majority of student in law schools, medical schools and do better at all levels of the education system, largely because of the biassed female, mostly feminist, teachers.
On the other hand men are still 90% of workplace fatalities and the vast majority of the worker in all the shitty jobs out there.
You have no idea how bad things are.
No, I wasn’t serious calling women intestinal worms, I was just following his metaphor. An appendix, maybe. I still say women today, individually and as a group, are more trouble than they’re worth. The whole social system, women especially, need to be reformed.
Women are more likely to fall victim to these sorts of lies and deceptions. They are “the doorway to the devil”, as Tertullian put it.
I’m not saying women aren’t occasionally useful in the workforce, I would just prefer those jobs to be held by men or eliminated all together. There’s quite a lot of waste in modern society, in all areas.
Women, no matter how you look at it, are consumers. They are the consumers of luxuries in the Western world, they do less work in less useful areas and have more leisure time. They take more from the “taxpayer” than they pay in taxes, as a group.
This shouldn’t be a question of choosing between pre-Industrial Revolution England, farming and the plague, or a slow, inevitable slide towards feminism.
Men still die younger, too. Patricia Hewitt has a problem with this. It means women are retiring earlier than men and living longer, which is a problem because they don’t have enough money to live on. Don’t worry, though, she’s fixed it in her usual fashion.
It wouldn’t be so bad if all this funding was properly used. All these health campaigns about breast cancer when lung cancer kills more people and heart disease is the leading cause of death among women.
The BBC has long since developed a reputation for bias on gender issues.
Even these well proven assertions provoke denunciation on these boards, though.
I’m not dehumanising women, I want nothing but the best for women. I never meant to post my opinions of women on these boards. I debunked some rape stats in another thread and appealed, unsuccessfully, for reason from the members of this board. Then someone posted that men have less empathy than women, which I objected to. Then I got drawn into defending Otto Weininger as the feminist apologists attacked the person rather than the argument.
Misogynists are made, not born. It is the behaviour of women that causes misogyny.
I’m not flying off the handle. The reason I think you’re a troll is because what you say is hard to believe, your ideas are so extemist it’s like reading parody. You practically accuse women of being subhuman.
You’re a troll in my eyes.
Let’s try to break this down… Okay. Right. Women are unconcious. Therefore, they can not think. However, genius is concious. Therefore, there is no such thing as a genius woman.
While Cecil’s IQ is immeasurable, the second smartest person in the world is a woman. Very odd.
If women are unconcious, they can not think, or speak. They can not perform complex mathematical calculations, or drive cars, or write.
And yet they can. Perhaps this is some new definition of the word ‘unconcious’ that I am unfamiliar with? I’m afraid, Mr. John, that you need to define your terms. And really, quoting a syphillic, irrational, but charismatic, maniac does not help you very much. If you are saying that women do not think, but merely react emotionally, then Herr Schnicklegruber was born the wrong sex entirely.
i have one reason and one reason only for returning to this thread.
i’m hoping to see BANNED appear under BJ’s name.
then i’m gonna throw me a party.
you’re all invited.
oh, BTW, BJ
if sitting in front of a sewing machine for 8 hours making t-shirts, or on you hands and knees cleaning toilets or cleaning up vomit and human effluvia for minimum wage isn’t a shitty job, i don’t know what is.
irishgirl, I’m guessing that mining, sewer-cleaning and deep-sea fishing would be three good places to start - plus whatever else is in the grab-bag that explains why nine men croak in the line of duty for every woman that does.
That’s enough of bluejohn’s insanity for me; I’m outta here. He’s obviously not going to get the therapy he needs, and I can only hope that he’ll quarantine himself.
Once again, I have nothing of value to add to this thread, other than I am happy with my life as a woman. I work, I pay taxes, I raise children, I keep house, etc. My husband also does these things. We are an equal partnership endeavor.
My reason for pulling out this particular quote is as follows:
Does anyone remember some really cheesy TV movie where Kirstie Ally was a selfish, bad person, and she died, and in purgetory they made her be the Tooth Fairy? Should this sort of afterlife method have any truth to it, I am definitely stating now that I have dibs on the Serious Head Injury Fairy job.
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You have a pretty bizzare definition of wealth – corn meal qualifies but caviar doesn’t. You also seem to adopt the marxist view that things have some sort of intrinsic economic value.
Well, they don’t. “Wealth” is what people define as “wealth.” If people are willing to trade diamonds for dung then both are “valuable” and producing them increases society’s total “wealth.” The most efficient way to determine their relative values is through market forces.
In other words, every job that someone is willing to pay you to do increases wealth. Even your silly “telephone sanitizer” example creates wealth if the free market says so. First, if our telephone sanitizer does nothing, it is obvious that he or she creates no wealth at all. If, however, a company is willing to pay someone to sanitize phones, then that job has value to that company. You might think it silly but it is entirely possible that there is a perfectly sound economic basis for such an activity, e.g., Our workforce costs us 30 GBP/hr. We lose an average of 10,000 hours of work every year because of colds and flu. Our telephone sanitizer allows us to reduce that figure by 10%. Therefore, it makes good economic sense to employ a telephone sanitizer so long as it costs less than 30,000 GBP/ yr.
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Once again, you are espousing an essentially marxist position. Free market economies simply do not create “make work” jobs in order to simulate full employment. Instead, governments provide social benefits through transfers of tax revenues. While these sometimes may involve subsidizing certain classes of workers for brief periods of time, this is an entirely different thing.
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Let’s assume, for the moment, that this is correct. You do realize, don’t you, that this makes women the basic foundation of all wealth creation in society? Building bridges and whatnot is all very fine. But it is, as you say, a “frivolous luxury” when compared to the task of educating and socializing the young. In fact, there would quite literally be no such thing as “society” if the next generation were not socialized and educated. Under your definition of “wealth creation,” one elementary school teacher – a traditionally female job – is worth a thousand coal miners.
The point here is that you can arbitrarily define “wealth” as consisting solely of gold bullion if you want to, but that has nothing to do with what actually makes society “wealthy.”
Actually, Truth Seeker, while i agree with much of what you say, i’m not quite sure that it’s fair to say that Malacandra’s economic analysis is poor because its Marxist. The early argument about wealth only consisting of essentials smacks of a type of reductionist Marxism, but very few Marxist economists adopt such a narrow definition. I think in general the economic argument in that post is poor just because it’s poor.
Many Marxist economists and economic historians have made similar points to yours, Truth Seeker, and one of the key projects of Marxist economics has been to recognize the economic role played by women in society.
I’ll just take a couple of examples from Malacandra’s post to make my point:
Well, the only reason the “big wins are down to men” is because they have traditionally had the time to work on large questions of technology, transportation, etc., etc. And the reason that they have the time to do this is because women have taken care of so much of the other work that needs to be done in society. Women’s labour on essential things has freed men to spend more time and energy on the “big” things that make such an obvious technological contribution to our society. The wealth creation that women do might not appear so obvious because it doesn’t appear in the form of Boeing 747s or Pentium computer chips, but women’s production plays a huge role in the broad social and economic circumstances that allow such innovations to occur. This is an argument that could be made equally well, i think, by a free market economist or a Marxist economist.
Actually, research tends to show that what happens when women go out to work is NOT that “someone else gets paid to do it,” but that the woman ends up working what feminists have labelled the “double shift.” That is, the man and woman each work full-time at a job, but when they get home the work required to keep the house going is still overwhelmingly done by women. And, despite the increasing willingness of (many but not all) men to pitch in and help with household duties, this double shift is still a reality for many women. Despite the prevalence of maids and other service staff in movies etc., the majority of families do not have hired help to keep their households running.
For those interested in reading about any of these issues in specific (American) historical context, there are a couple of really interesting books that i would recommend.
The frst is Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages and the Ideology of Wages in the Early Republic (1990).
This is a history of the economics and ideology of women’s work in America during the period after the Revolution, written from a predominantly Marxist perspective. I don’t consider myself a Marxist, although i do believe that Marx made many acute economic analyses, but i really like this book.
The second is a somewhat lighter read: Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework (1982).
One of the most interesting things about this book is the way that it traces the impact of technology of women’s labour. Strasser points out that, despite the plethora of devices designed to make housework easier (indoor plumbing, electricity, stoves, vacuum cleaners, etc., etc.), the proliferation of such technology often serves more to reduce the amount of work that a man (rather than a woman) has to do, and also raises the expectations of what constitutes acceptable cleanliness, thus leaving women little better off than before.
For example, Strasser points out that, before electricity and indoor plumbing, it was generally the man’s duty to bring the water and the “energy” (in the form of wood, coal, etc.) into the house, and the woman’s job to cook the meal. Well, with the advent of plumbing and electricity, the water and energy came in automatically, thus leaving two fewer tasks for the man, but the woman still had to cook the meal.
This is a very simplistic summary of one aspect of the book, and Strasser makes her points in a much more detailed and convincing manner. She also does not deny the fact that technology has often helped to reduce women’s workloads; but she seeks to argue against an old narrative that sees technology as always beneficial without examining its sometimes less-than-positive effects. It’s a fascinating book.
And I was all set to tell him how I was going to reply to him, but I was overcome with lust for the wife but to get what I wanted she made me go to work. See, I am a phone sanitizer (you insensitive clod!). Actually, I am just a level 1 phone sanitizer. If you don’t know how to wipe down your phone with an alcohol swab, but are a DIY kinda person, I can give you instructions on how to do that. But if you’ve got some serious phone gunk buildup, well, I gotta send a ticket to level 2 sanitation.
Anyway, so she made me go to my phone-sanitizing job, see, because she is trying to raise money for plastic explosives. Yes, you heard me right, plastic explosives. She plans to blow up the local Shriners lodge, because she is a militant feminist and she tried to apply, but they wouldn’t let her in because she is a woman. Hell, she really isn’t even thinking about it. Because she can’t, you see. In fact, Janet Reno told her too. I don’t know what man is giving Janet her instruction.
What she really wanted was to wear the funny hat and drive around at the parade in one of those funny little cars. But they wouldn’t let her. So hyperjes, being the violent militant feminist that she is, is going to blow the joint up. So I have to slave away here, helping people sanitize their phones. All this just because I am a slave to my lust for her.
If you are reading this, Blue John, you SDMB martyrdom has made me see the error of my ways, and will be chopping off my penis when I get off work tomorrow morning. No longer will I be a puppet for the feminist movement. Sig heil, my brother!
I must say that, despite my feeling that Blue John is the most fucked-up person in the world, a psychopath, and/or an offensive troll, i’m a little dissappointed that he was banned. No doubt this banning will do little but confirm in his own mind his delusions about a feminist conspiracy, and provide him with the feeling that he has won a type of pyrrhic victory. While most (virtually all?) of what he said was deeply offensive, i’m not sure that his actions were worthy of a banning.
That’s just my 2c. And i certainly won’t miss him; even my participation in this thread studiously avoided addressing his points directly, because i felt that to do so granted them a legitimacy that i did not feel they deserved.
However, I think my clock is ticking over reasonably adequately, thanks (tho’ you may think it goes cuckoo from time to time).
