athena
athena's JournalThis culture of fear is what is destroying this country.
About ten years ago, when I was a grad student, I was on campus on a Sunday. Just as I was about to enter the building where I had my office, a woman came up to me and said she had seen a man drag a child into that building and was concerned that a kidnapping was taking place. I vaguely remembered that I had seen one of my colleagues enter the building ahead of me; he was divorced and spent the weekends with his daughter. I told her it was no problem, that I knew him, and that he had a daughter. If I hadn't been around, she would probably have called the campus police on him.
What the woman did was disgusting: she assumed that a man spending time with his daughter was a dangerous situation. If my colleague had been female, the woman would not have been concerned. This kind of behavior is sexist: it perpetuates gender-based roles. It discourages men from spending time with their kids. If it's a woman hanging out with a kid, dragging her, or playing with her, it's fine; but if it's a man, we have to make sure he's not a child molester! A man should be either at work or hanging out with his male buddies; children are women's business! 
As horrible a problem as child molestation is, it is not a problem you are going to solve by poking your nose into people's lives. Child molestation does not happen in broad daylight; it is not perpetrated by people who look strange or unusual. It happens in the dark, indoors, and is perpetrated by people -- usually men -- who are believed by everyone around them to be good Christian people, family men, and pillars of their society. Such men appear so virtuous that when a child tries to speak to an adult about what is happening, the adult assumes the child is lying. If you want to do something about child molestation, just be there for the children around you; your children, your relatives' children, and your friends' children; be someone they can trust. (See https://www.rainn.org/articles/how-can-i-protect-my-child-sexual-assault) All you're going to do by "speaking up" in public about people who look suspicious to you is annoy people and hurt them for looking different and defying gender roles.
It's not tragic. It's completely fair.
Americans asked for this. They knew exactly what they were getting into, and they got exactly what they voted for. Too many Americans couldn't stand the idea of being led by a woman, so they chose to be represented by a narcissistic fool. I don't feel sorry for the United States right now. People can repeat as many times as they like that Hillary won the popular vote and that too many minorities were disenfranchised, but it shouldn't have even been close. Trump, being who he is, shouldn't have gotten more than 5% of the vote. Americans made a clear statement when they went to the polls on November 7th, 2016: that they would rather be led by a mentally unstable male bully than by a stateswoman. My only hope is that Americans will learn something from this experience, and that the next time a woman is running against a narcissistic fool, people will be able to vote with something other than their penis or their penis envy.
What about the life of the woman?
Why does that always get forgotten? Why does everyone -- including liberals -- act as though abortion involved only a fetus? The sexism around this issue is disgusting, and I am sick of it. I am sick of the magic disappearing act in which a woman is omitted from the discussion of an issue that involves her life, health, and bodily integrity.
When abortion is banned, women die. Childbirth is much more dangerous than an abortion. If you force women to give birth against their will, you will end up killing women who would not have died otherwise. Banning abortion kills women. Unless you believe that women's lives don't count as human lives, being anti-choice is not "pro-life"; it is pro-death.
No one who is in favor of forcing women to undergo a dangerous medical procedure against their will is "pro-life". They are anti-woman and pro-death.
I used to love Kucinich
and Weiner, and all the liberals who were outspoken and seemed to possess the spine the Democratic Party seemed to lack.
As I have gotten older, I have realized that the true leaders are the boring ones who focus on getting stuff done -- people like Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama. The ones who impressed me in my youth were more focused on looking and sounding good and making a splash than on doing the hard work of legislating and governing.
Comey has a CYA philosophy.
Unlike Sally Yates, who put the country's needs first, Comey invariably put his own needs first. He sent those letters about investigating HRC because he didn't want to be attacked by conservatives for having favored her. And every time he was in a meeting where he was asked to do something inappropriate, instead of doing what was right for the country and disagreeing openly, he merely wrote memos to cover his own ass in case he got into trouble. As much as some people may admire him, he's not a patriot. He's much too focused on his own self-interest for that.
In short, the memos make a lot of sense. I fully believe he wrote them. It makes a lot of sense. But it does not make him a good person. It makes him the worst sort of self-centered loser, someone I wouldn't want to have anything to do with in my personal life.
I'm not surprised.
It was the media that tried to ignore that this election was about misogyny and racism and tried to claim it was about the economy. They tried to argue that Democrats should throw women and minorities under the bus in order to please working-class white men. In fact, anyone who cared about the economy would have voted for Hillary. Her message was clear. She was the one who talked about jobs and about health care. She was the one who offered workable plans. Trump only had, "Make America Great (read White-Male-Dominated) Again".
I am really glad this information is finally coming out. It was sickening, after the biggest demonstration of misogyny and racism in history, to be told that the message sent by the electorate was that we should abandon women and minorities to focus on poor, white men.
The people have to know better than to believe Russian propaganda.
And the media has to learn to be less gullible and less easily manipulated. The French media refused to publish the leaked e-mails until after the election. The American media would have jumped on those e-mails and talked about nothing else.
When Macron got the highest vote in the first round,
Fillon and Hamon told their supporters to vote for Macron. The French recognized the gravity of the situation and voted for a centrist to stop the progress of a neo-Nazi fascist.
If it had been the U.S., there would have been endless complaining about how Macron shouldn't have won, how his campaign had supposedly cheated, how Mélenchon or Hamon would have been stronger against Le Pen, how leftists should stay home because Macron was too centrist, how leftists should vote for Le Pen to teach the Socialist Party a message, how Macron wasn't really that different from Le Pen, how five years of Le Pen wouldn't be the end of the world, etc., etc.
I congratulate the French people. They have succeeded where Americans have failed. May we learn our lesson this time.
Why do so many people assume women can't be sexist against women?
I'm so tired of seeing this assumption made over and over and over. Are liberals really that clueless about feminism? Do they really think sexism is so simple as -- you're a man and you're sexist, and you're a woman and you're not sexist? The vast majority of women are sexist. The vast majority of women are more comfortable with a man in power than with a woman in power. The vast majority of women cannot stand powerful, competent, or intelligent women. There are many men who are less sexist than the majority of women.
When people stop making this argument that being a woman makes one non-sexist, I will be reassured that people are finally starting to understand sexism. Until we understand it, we cannot fight it. And we must fight misogyny together as men and women, just as we must fight racism against Black people together, regardless of the color of our skin.
This was entirely predictable.
When Democrats lose an election, they move right. It happened in 2000, and it is happening again now. Those "progressives" who stayed home or voted third-party should have studied their recent history. The way to move the Democratic Party right is by voting Democratic, and then calling and sending letters to your representatives to make sure they don't forget about your existence. You are not going to teach the Democratic Party a lesson by not voting for them. Unfortunately, it's too late now. And the saddest part is that "progressives" are likely to repeat the same mistake in, oh, twenty years or so. We never learn.
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