Wierdo, I’ve already addressed that in another thread.
I know your game! You’re going to alert mods to this post for calling you a wieirdo. Very clever.
Except, even the dictionaries don’t all agree on what the word feminism means:
http://encarta.msn.com/dictionary_/feminism.html
Some say “movement for equality of the sexes” while others say “movement to give woman equal rights to men.”
Women have equal rights, in general, to which I say, the battle is over. Isolated instances (and our idiot friend the shopkeeper) don’t disprove that.
I guess we disagree on “isolated” since the have equality in practice (though not constitutionally) in the U.S., have equality in most of Europe, but large parts of Asia, Africa and the Middle East the battle is yet to be won. I wouldn’t consider that to be isolated.
I think someone else mentioned it, but wasn’t this a discussion of U.S. feminism?
That’s what I’ve been basing all my responses on, because only an idiot would argue women are equal everywhere in the world.
I do want equal rights enshrined in law, as that will make it harder to take them away later when the pendulum swings the other direction.
Reminds me of watching the news with my mom about twenty years ago during South Africa’s last throes of apartheid. The news was reporting that black South Africans were protesting for the right to use beaches. Mom said something to the effect of, “Why can’t they just be satisfied with the rights they have?”
I want all the rights, not just the ones that the people in power think I can handle.
If anybody would like to bring up the issue of drafting women, please see my user profile.
That’s a whole 'nother argument unto itself which I think fits into the “we want equal rights… except we don’t want to be that equal!” class of feminism some have mentioned.
Bit of a strawman (as well as a touch of changing the goal posts) as AFAIK no one is claiming that women have equality throughout the world.
-XT
Yeah, us non-politicians are woefully unrepresented!
I don’t think so.
If I only cared about what happened in America it’s possible I might have lost interest in feminism. I’m not American though.
I have to say that I really don’t believe in this argument that people shouldn’t call themselves feminists because Gloria Steinham got on their nerves or because they can’t stand people who go to Indigo Girls concerts or because they consider themselves to be constantly falsely accused of being a sexist. If you come up with a new name there are still going to be people who pervert the concept or have bad ideas. There’s absolutely no way to avoid bad ideas or opportunism associated with some idea like “men are not better than women.” No matter what you call it, there are going to be obnoxious people calling themselves that.
And if you’re going to say don’t call it anything at all and just forget the whole thing, well I don’t think that’s a wise idea at all.
Probably the main reason I think there’s still a reason to be a feminist is this fact that men and women have differences and that a lot of people use it as an excuse to try to perpetuate unhealthy roles. It seems like the bad uses for generalizations overwhelm the productive uses. I don’t really need non-scientists explaining to me why I am naturally better suited to clean the toilet than to drive the truck.
I think that’s always the big question, “what useful thing are you going to do with the information” versus, “how are you going to use that information to try to limit someone or to limit your own ability to understand and relate to that person.”
You’re against femininity? One of those “why can’t a woman be more like a man?” guys?
I would call it indicative. You’re right, a bunch of Republican doormats who always voted the way their menfolk told them to would be no improvement over male Congresspersons, but by far the majority of female Congresspersons are Democrats. So, I’m thinking the numbers may be more representative than you think they are.
No one reported this post. You have hoist yourself on your own petard.
When you insult people, then try to pull some sort of “you made me do it” nonsense, I am going to officially Warn you to stop pulling these sort of pranks.
Muffin, (and everyone else), we do not need to see the discussions about the posters carried from one thread to another. Address any perceived bad arguments in the thread where they appear and leave the discussions of personality for threads where they are the primary focus (as in the Pit).
[ /Moderating ]
Zoggie, you have a point. And that’s the reason that I am not a one issue voter. I take a lot more into consideration than gender when I vote. I still haven’t decided whom to support in 2008. I just know that I am resolved not to vote for two white guys again this time. It’s a matter of principle this go-round.
It would be interesting if the Republicans decided to include either of the Senators from Maine on the ticket.
“In general” doesn’t cut it.
Most teachers K-12 are women, overwhelmingly. Haven’t you ever noticed that most school principals are men? And if you look at a list of Directors of Schools from all over the United States, the women, “in general,” aren’t there.
There are examples of discrimination around you everywhere. Why can’t you see it?
How likely is it that the minister at the church nearest you is a man? How likely is it that the mayor of your city is a man? Gee, I must be clairvoyant!
Why is it that the female parent is more likely to leave work or stay at home with a sick child? It is not genetic. It is not inherent that we do so. It is cultural and that can change. That can become more even-handed and fairly managed. That’s one of the things that social equality is about.
I’m not sure that I consider this argument to be a valid indication of discrimination. The elementary teachers at my kids’ schools were overwhelmingly women–and so were the principals.
The principal at my daughter’s Middler School was a woman. The principal at my daughter’s HS was a man, but the Assistant Principal duties were split between a man and a woman. The principal at my son’s HS is a woman. As far as I can tell, the pay scales between the HS and elementary schools are comparable, (and there are several men teaching in K - 6), so there does not appear to be some sort of steering going on.
Beyond that, it is not sufficient to say more men are principals and more women are elementary grade teachers; you need to demonstrate that it is some sort of discrimination that causes it to happen. Do more women gravitate to K - 8 or are they steered to those grades? Without an accurate assessment of that question, claims of discrimination are premature. (A general trend of women being denied HS jobs while school boards routinely offer lower salaries to elementary grade teachers would be a sign of discrimination. However, that has not yet been presented.)
As to the isue of fathers or mothers responding to school emergencies, I am not the approporaite person to comment: I am the one who responded to all but one medical emergency and every discipline emergency in their combined (so far) 24 years of schooling; I attended every single parent teacher meeting, every open house but one, and every IEP. My job situation permitted me to do that; Deb’s job compelled her to skip a lot of the planning and status meetings.
I am not claiming that no steering or discrimination occurs. However, I think that simply looking at numbers does not make the argument.
Excluded Middle is not the name of a fallacy, its the name of a law–namely, the law that every sentence is either true or not true.
You’re thinking, rather, of the fallacy of the False Dilemma.
-FrL-
There are people who use “fallacy of the excluded middle” to refer to the fallacy of the false dilemma. You can kinda see how the name would apply.
In my opinion, the sort of long lists of names of fallacies on which these things appear are very silly, though I can’t quite put my finger on why.
I have the same feeling you do. (So why did I post what I did? Just to help Shodan avoid confusion in the future, if he’s going to go ahead and use such lists.) I think it is good to know the fallacies, and having names for them is going to be pretty much essential to one’s being able to organize one’s knowledge of these fallacies. But I don’t think these names of fallacies should be used to score points in debate. Rather, one should use one’s knowledge of the fallacies in order to find the flaw in the opponent’s argument (if any of course!) and in order to be able to formulate a counter-argument. So to illustrate:
(I may have the “argument from ignorance” terminology wrong there but hopefully you see what I meant.)
B’s main point seems to be that A is a bad debator. Furthermore, B seems to be concerned not so much with expressing the truth in the right way, making it available to others to take on as their own, but rather, B seems concerned to assert a kind of authoriy over A.
Better would be:
Well, of course, approaches like this latter one, sadly, often don’t work. Add to that the fact that I’m no prose stylist so the above was clunky. But hopefully you see the idea. The right thing to do is to engage the issue. Use knowledge of fallacies to locate problems, but don’t use names of fallacies to accuse the opponent.
-FrL-
What does your user profile do to address that? All it tells me is that you joined the military because you chose to; drafting is about joining the military because you have to.
Someone objected above to the notion that women as a sex can be considered risk-averse, citing Margaret Thatcher as a counter-example. But female risk-aversion is sometimes cited as a positive trait. There was a study a few years back which I saw mentioned in the paper on the subject of female fund managers. It explained how they performed better than males when the markets are bad, because of their disinclination to take risks. (Of course, the article ended there, and left us to entertain the notion that women are superior fund managers in all circumstances; it didn’t present the obvious flip side of the coin, that when the markets are buoyant and reward risk-taking, risk-averse female fund managers lose out to male. But that sort of thing goes on all the time. 
)
Yeah, this is precisely how I feel about it; you’ve isolated what I couldn’t put my finger on before, the silliness of memorizing names of fallacies so that one can blow one’s whistle and hand out figurative red cards in the middle of a debate, rather than discussing logical errors in a manner which could be understood easily by those have haven’t bothered to memorize the same lists of names, and in a context specifically tailored to the matter at hand, thus moving argument productively and cordially forward.
OK, I’ll play. Even though you snipped my quote and made “in general” sound worse than “in general, with a few isolated incidents”, which is what I actually wrote. You’ll notice that men have equal rights “in general, aside from isolated incidents” as well.
But as you asked…
I have not noticed that most K-12 teachers were women. Most of my K-12 teachers were men (graduated in 1999). I also hadn’t noticed that most principals were men either. Yes, the principal of my high school was a man, but both of his assistant principals were women. Neither one became the principal when he retired the year after I graduated because one went on to be a principal elsewhere and the other didn’t want the job (that’s still a valid choice isn’t it?). The school superintendant during all of my K-12 education was a woman.
Hmm, why can’t I see discrimination all around me? Let’s see, for starters, I’m a librarian, which means I’m surrounded by women all day. 95% of the staff is female and I am the highest ranking male in the building (which still puts me #4 overall). I have had five supervisors in my career, all have been women.
In fact, if you want to get technical, I was told that the fact that I was a man was likely one of the things that helped my initial application to library school. Doesn’t that just stick in your craw?
I do not attend church, but honestly, I think whoever can become a minister should be between the church and it’s parishiners. No amount of equal rights laws should change something like that.
The mayor of my neighboring city is male. However, the town supervisor of the town I live in is female and the county executive is also female. Might want to brush up on those clairvoyancy skills.
I don’t know why female parents are the ones to always stay home. My mother was a stay at home mother until I was maybe 10 and after that I never really needed to stay home from school much (so the question doesn’t really apply to me personally). And again, I work with all women and I don’t see a disproportionate number of them skipping work to be with sick children. Most don’t even have school-age children any more.
So how’d I do? Do I live in some feminist utopia? Or is “the battle” a little further along than you’d like to admit because it’s easier to say “Help! Help! I’m being oppressed!” when something doesn’t go your way?