Here’s yet another quote in response to the ‘women are weak’ meme (lacking in upper body strength yada yada), from Sojourner Truth in 1851:
The key is in how to interpret this. You see, the 1800’s in this country was much more authoritarian than today, what with slavery and the denial of rights to pretty much everyone but rich white guys. Women frequently were controlled and made to be what was wanted. In the case of Sojourner Truth we have an example of a woman who was controlled to work like a man, and lo and behold she worked just like a man. The white women of the time were expected to stay home, not think too hard and raise kids- only. Lo and behold, put 'em in a corset and they fainted like the fragile flowers they were molded into.
Care to mix cite with personal experience? Hmmm, personally I’ve dated an army sergeant, a landscaper, a blackbelt, others… none were lacking the ‘upper body strength’ you hold out as your truthful generalization. All I can say is that if I have a sample like this in my very own personal experience, imagine what colossal numbers of these types are around with whom I never had any chance at all
Bottom line: ‘no upper body strength’ doesn’t work even as a generalization. I’ll grant you than men have an advantage, but you’d do well not to exaggerate its significance IMHO.
I don’t care about Starving Artist or his thoughts on these things. They are different than mine, he isn’t the only person who thinks this way. He is anonymous speck on the Internet, as am I. Nothing he says will change things one whit.
This would be true, except, as we’ve been pointing out to him, there was a huge gang violence hoorah in the 50s. About kids in single family homes hanging out and getting in trouble, gang rumbles, zip-guns, all that. Where do you think the whole ‘tough guy with a leather jacket’ image comes from? 50s gangbangers. Even Hoover was giving out warnings about JDs.
I’m personally curious what SA thinks of the divorce rate. 2/3 of divorces are initiated by women. How do you explain that with your insistence that women just want to be taken care of? Are our silly lady brains just addled by this newfangled liberalism?
If personal experience is such a trump card, by the way, then the strength differentials between men and women don’t matter all that much. I work in a field that requires lots of heavy physical labor, including digging many, many holes. Yeah, I can’t carry in my arms as much as the guys on my crew who are as in shape as I am, but I can still carry as much as or more than them if you put it in a backpack or around my waist. I’m also a faster digger than most of them. Turns out, that increased lower body strength and lower center of gravity make up for my proportionally lesser upper body strength. It’s almost as if arm strength isn’t the be-all and end-all in heavy physical labor! Maybe if we stopped with the “men are strongest, always” nonsense, we could start talking about how different holds or ways of doing things are better for people with different body types.
The “facts” are rarely there, as anyone who looks at them with a non-jaundiced eye can see. It’s one thing to post contrary or insignificant data; it’s another entirely to prove your point.
No. See this is another problem around here, and it’s a major one. People just absolutely refuse to accept things I say no matter how many times I post them. It isn’t liberal policies that promote drug use, it’s liberal attitudes.
Children are better off in homes where their parents didn’t hook up casually and never got married in the first place. Where their mother (the father’s rarely around) is fourteen or fifteen or sixteen years older than them. Where the one parent they do have is working all the time and has neither the time to contend with nor opportunity to recognize problems that are developing. At least with couples who get divorced there was some dual parenting going on while they were married, and I would think people who had children in wedlock would be more likely to get remarried that people who simply bed hop.
No, in point of fact you’re making an ignorant presumption here yourself. It’s one thing not to bother trying to find facts that either don’t exist in internet-findable form (if at all), or because it will lie there like a dead fish while everyone goes on with their arguments anyway. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve posted valid cites only to have them bring not a word of response. You can tell them from the cites where other posters think they see vulnerabiltiy because they’ll respond to them…to try to shoot them down. And when they try to shoot them down, btw, it’s because they’re going by beliefs based on their own experience and are searching for soft spots or supportive data in order to boost their own POV.
I can tell you exactly why not: politicians don’t determine lifestyle. If you’ll recall, Johnson did not sport a Beatle haircut, so where did all that long hair come from? And Nixon certainly wasn’t a hippie, so where did all that come from? Was Reagan a disco-dancing fool? If so, I certainly missed it. Did people suddenly become grinning, head-bobbing hillbillies when Clinton took office or suddenly run out and start sporting suits and ties when GWB took office?
No. Individual behavior and lifestyle choices are guided by many things. Among them are music, movies, magazines and TV shows, peer pressure, a desire to be thought of as cool or with it or, conversely, in the case of liberals, rebellious.
This doesn’t even make sense, luce. Liberal thinking is most certainly the cause of liberal social change. The counter-culture wasn’t made up of conservatives, you know. And what is liberal policy but liberal thinking coalescing and asserting or attempting to assert itself upon society?
Exactly.
No, there wasn’t huge gang violence hoorah in the 50s. Gangs existed, but they were small and mostly bothered only each other. Entire segments of society didn’t emulate them, genres of music didn’t grow up around them (and no, the theme music of The Wild Ones doesn’t qualify as rebuttal), and gang members were people that other kids tried to avoid instead of emulate.
I’m the embodiment of the modern version of all that good old fashioned stuff. I’m a married, stay-at-home mom to 4 well-behaved children and my husband has a good job that supports us comfortably.
Just last night I was telling my children how amazingly fortunate they are to have been born in the present time and not any other time in the past (including the 50s). We have a much higher percentage of people who are living out of poverty that at any other time in history. The average person has access to health care undreamed of by the wealthiest in the past. We have more democracy and freedom, less prejudice, more comfort etc.
Liberal is a very broad term. It just seems to me like you’re lumping a whole bunch of negative stuff together and calling it “liberal” and thus anything advocated by a liberal must be bad by association and opposed as vigorously as if Satan himself was proposing it.
What does Universal Health Care have to do with disrespecting your elders ? Does opposing war lead to teen pregnancies and divorce? If I want to raise the top marginal tax rate from 36% to 39%, does that automatically mean I don’t want to encourage hard work and responsibility?
To add to what Random 6x7 said: And what is the weight limit in moving stuff in warehouses–something like 25 pounds and then you have to get a forklift or other mechanical device(dolly) to do it for you. Not in nursing–I routinely (for 25 years) turned and lifted people in excess of 200 pounds, sometimes by myself, usually with the help of one other person–an aide or nurse (usually both female). And with the epidemic of obesity, 200 pounds is nothing.
One characteristic in which women exceed men is fine motor skills–one of the key attributes for a surgeon. And yet there are still (relatively) few female surgeons, and historically there have been very few indeed. Now why is that? After all, if men succeed on the basis of their superior physical skills alone, that would seem to hold true for women as well, but we all know that is not the case at all…
Quoted for truth. Note that such protection is not necessarily sought by the female; it is male focused and perpetuated.
SA–I am curious if you are aware that the “traditional” family of mom, dad, 2.4 kids is a very recent construct indeed. Throughout history, most mothers have been working mothers, be it on the farm or in the mills. No one here -liberal or conservative-is an advocate for teen motherhood, whether single or married. Liberal thought is not to “blame” for the increase in single motherhood. If anything, liberal thought with its focus on contraception and abortion as a viable choice for all women is more likely to decrease the likelihood of single teen motherhood.
Contrary to popular opinion, Palo Verde, I’m not saying that we should go back. What I am saying is that there were a lot of good things about life back then that didn’t need to go in order to make the positive changes you just spoke of. And not only that, they didn’t go in order to make the positive changes you just spoke of. They went so that people could be free to do drugs and bed hop and adopt alternative modes of dress and behavior without paying a price societally in terms of acceptance and employment.
And of course I’m also saying that liberal attitudes have led to the more serious societal problems we have today and which either didn’t exist then or were mere shadows of their current selves.
I don’t know but I can’t spend another day here arguing about it. I’m out.
Drat, and I don’t think you ever did show us your policy proposals for increasing moral virtue (other than banning alcohol, which is politically not a feasible option).
Can you not come up with, say, five reasonable recommendations that could be feasibly implemented in order to improve the world? If you can’t figure out how you want to make change, you just come off as a whiny whiner who whines.
eleanorigby, isn’t it amazing how the argument that the sexes are different is always used to talk about how women are less than and therefore should not do certain jobs? And by “amazing”, I mean “bloody tedious and annoying”.
Too bad SA left. I’d like to know how the poverty rate decreased without the social safety net that liberal ideas provided. Maybe voodoo economics does work, but in a super-secret sly way that makes it look like it fails every time?
Since this from March 1983, yanno post '68, you at least have some excuse for not knowing it,
From what you learned about self-defense he’d have easily taken that knife from her? Well Sgt Dennis Tueller, of the Salt Lake City, Utah Police Department, would tell you that you’re dangerously wrong.
Using your PR-24, an ASP or Monadnock expandable baton, or your Taser or pepper spray when faced with a non-compliant person holding a “deadly/lethal weapon” instead of your firearm?
Sgt Tueller would warn you that there’s a really significant probability that you’re going to the hospital* before you go home today, and a significant possibility that you’re not ever going home again.
*In un-armed vs armed and armed vs armed hand-to-hand combat there’s a well accepted rule of thumb If your opponent has an edged weapon you will get cut, unless you’re really fucking lucky or really fucking good at “defanging the snake”.
The only gun you bring to a knife fight … is a sniper rifle!
Exactly my ass. There has been enough posted in this thread to debunk your bare assertion about the strength of women, and your response is to repeat your bare assertion without confronting a thing that was said to debunk it.
Women firefighters, yes we have them.
Do you know that they lack the upper body strength to drag a standard training dummy, so the weight was reduced to make the job fit the person? Thats what Rush said, and I believed him. We have less capable firefighters due to womans’ lib.
I knew that wouldn’t be good enough proof for you liberals so I googled reduced training weight dummy until I found a cite.
Reading the page l saw that a city had reduced their dummies from 195 lbs to 175 lbs due to problems and injuries to… older male firefighters!
Wait,what, Rush misrepresented a fact? It was old guys who couldn’t do the job?
Shit, I have to quit hanging around here, you people are affecting my black and white worldview with all these shades of gray.
