We lose
Who won? Viewers in some "instant" polls gave an edge to Al Gore over George W. Bush. Pundits weren't so certain.
"I'm not sure anybody actually won this debate," said Gloria Borger of CBS. "I do think that Bush managed to help himself, and Gore did too, to a certain extent." Or, as a column by Jake Tapper in the online magazine Salon put it: "Gore's still unlikable; Bush still seems dumb. Feels like a tie." - Pundits, public don't always agree on debate winner, loser, The Olympian, October 5, 2000
Who won? That's easy: the Democratic and Republican candidates won, and the public and third party candidates lost.
Gender and race, or class?
Microsoft Corp. was sued yesterday in a federal class action charging it routinely discriminates against African Americans and women. - Discrimination suit filed against Microsoft, Seattle P-I, October 5, 2000
Discrimination at Microsoft? Wouldn't surprise me. Discrimination targeting only blacks and women? I don't think so. In my experience, the environment at Microsoft encourages discrimination on the basis of who has the power. If you have power, male or female, white or not, you can get away with discrimination.
To put a name on it, it's not race or sex discrimination, but class discrimination.
Abuse excuse for women only?
Female reader: "Why do we scoff at criminals when they claim they are victims of bad parenting, yet accept it when successful people say they "owe it all" to their parents?"
Marilyn: "Maybe it's because we believe that when a person knows enough to blame his parents, he knows too much for it to be the truth anymore, if it ever was. Yet when a person credits his parents, we applaud whether we believe it's the truth or not: There's far too little gratitude in the world." - Marilyn vos Savant, Los Angeles Times - Parade Magazine, Sunday, October 1, 2000
So if a person has a problem, and he learns the cause, or escapes the bad influence, the problem just goes away? There is no behavior so deeply ingrained that it will require any real time and effort to overcome, everything is as transitory as one of Bill Clinton's campaign promises.
This is a remarkable idea coming from a "liberal," for "liberals" usually blame environmental factors for everything. This encourages people to seek outside support for help, for example: from politicians, the courts and Parade Magazine columnists. Why does one suspect that Marilyn would be more sympathetic if there were 16 women in prison for every man - instead of the other way around? Women constantly seek to pin the "abuse excuse" on every man they can; do we think Marilyn will show them the same consideration that she shows men?
And since Marilyn pointed out the fact, let us now ask why there is so little gratitude in this world. Who is it that tells wives to see no reason for gratitude to their husbands, and children to their parents? Whose cynical and hateful views fill the media every day? Are they not those of the feminists? If Marilyn is looking for lost gratitude, perhaps she should begin by looking at herself.
Contributed by Tom Pollock, Editor of The Men's Tribune
Ignoring half the problem
Evidence abounds that men who beat their wives and girlfriends eventually turn on their children. So why won't New York's family courts get in harm's way? - Annia Ciezadlo, City Limits magazine, May 1999
- Each year, nearly 900,000 woman are victims of violence at the hands of an intimate partner.
- Domestic violence is the No. 1 health risk for American women between the ages of 15-44.
- Close to one-third of women murdered each year are killed by an intimate partner.
- Hillary Clinton, NewsMax.com, September 27, 2000
I have no doubt either of the above statements are true. But they only see half the problem. Throughout, they both ignore the increasingly well-documented fact that half of abusers are women.
My favorite reference is Martin S. Fiebert's Annotated Bibliography.
Alive and stinking
According to a report from a Cape Town children's organisation, Molo Songololo (Xhosa slang for "hello luck"), many (child sex slaves) are smuggled in from other African states while some are known to come from eastern Europe and Thailand. Many others are South African children orphaned by AIDS, while some are sold into slavery by members of their own families.
According to (Ms Bernadette van Vuuren, of Molo Songololo), international crime syndicates based in Nigeria, China, Israel and Russia have become involved in the South African trade. The United Nations estimates that up to 4million people are traded as slaves each year, the bulk of them children. - Ed O'Loughlin, Herald Correspondent in Johannesburg, The Sydney Morning Herald, September 9, 2000
While African American and African leaders lament the history of slavery in America, the slave trade is alive and stinking in eastern Europe, Asia and Africa.
Ignoring history
We were slaves, then there was colonization, and we are saying that even with globalization we will never become global slaves again. It took African blood, sweat, and tears to build the West, and now the West, instead of respecting us, is treating us like dogs. - President Yahya Jammeh of Gambia, The Boston Globe, September 9, 2000
Oh, swell, so now, not only are Americans responsible for slavery in pre-20th Century America, we're responsible for slavery in Africa, too? Gimme a break! Slavery in Africa pre-dates Columbus's cross-Atlantic voyage by several centuries.
Concerns of working families should not be subordinated
to the desire of corporate executives for cheap labor
Another Texas Republican, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, is a few steps ahead of Mr. Bush. Ms. Hutchison told members of The Dallas Morning News editorial board this week that an open border with Mexico could be "exactly the right thing." She said that the United States would first have to get control of its borders and that Mexico would have to give its people better opportunities. If that occurred, Ms. Hutchison said, a free flow of labor in the future might help forge an alliance of nations in the Western Hemisphere and help the United States stay competitive in world trade. - Ruben Navarrette Jr., Fox may be generation ahead of U.S. politicians, The Dallas Morning News, September 1, 2000
A free flow of labor would be just what American corporations would like - when the supply of a thing goes up relative to demand, the price for that thing goes down. Open borders mean more workers, more workers mean lower wages, lower wages mean everybody has to work harder just to keep what they already have.
I'm not against Mexicans working here. Heck, I think a lot of American men would appreciate the chance to meet more Mexican women. But if the U.S. and Canada are going to open our borders, the concerns of working families have to take as much priority as the desire of corporate executives for cheap labor.
The hopes of Global Free Trade advocates?
The U.S. income gap is not much different from Latin America's, but the magnitude of poverty south of the border is much greater. ... "You can't operate in a globalized economy with a narrow, tiny elite sector that has absolutely no connection or appreciation of the vast majority of people in society," said Michael Shifter, a Latin America specialist at the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue. - Steven Gutkin/Associated Press, Poverty divides in South America: Elitism widens gulf between poor, rich, The Detroit News, September 5, 2000
Is this what the Global Free Trade advocates have in store for us?
Racial disparity evidence of racism? What of sexual disparity?
Most inmates in every category are male? The talking heads will tell you this is because men are more criminally inclined than women. Pop feminists certainly agree. Indeed, June Stephenson, author of Men Are Not Cost-Effective: Male Crime in America, even went so far as to propose a "testosterone tax" on men to pay for male criminality.
With this in mind, how should we interpret the findings of a new study released by the Justice Department?
Minorities make up a disproportionately large percentage of the people prosecuted for crimes that qualify for the death penalty under federal laws, a Justice Department study released yesterday shows. - Disparities Found in U.S. Death Penalty Prosecutions, Washington Post, September 13, 2000
By the logic society applies to gender, this would be taken as evidence these racial minorities are more inclined to criminal behavior than whites. Instead, of course, they ask if it's evidence of racism. If it is, then shouldn't we ask the same kind of question about the disproportionate number of men in prison?
Guardian columnist guilty of racism?
Everybody knows 21st Century white Americans are bigots. Everybody knows American blacks are oppressed:
The fact is that Britain has always attracted ... numerous blacks who cannot believe the lack of racial segregation that exists here. - Julie Burchill, The Guardian, September 16, 2000
Yep, everybody knows. Everybody, that is, except American Indians. As Native American author Vine Deloria, Jr. pointed out so many years ago, we know about the bigotry of the blacks. And whites, and Asians, etc.
Rather than unquestioningly accepting the prevalence of racial separatism and segregation in America as evidence of white racism, an objective view would address all racist attitudes and actions, whether expressed by blacks or whites.
That Ms. Burchill ignores American Indians' experiences with the bigotry of African Americans is, in itself, racist.
First they blamed men, now they jeer
You have got to laugh, or at least 50 per cent of you do, because the male of the species has just found out what we have always known: that women indulge in infidelity, too. - The rise of female infidelity, Daily Express, January 13, 2000
I reckon my response to this would be:
Theory of the Carousal Class: If heterosexual men are unfaithful to their female partners, and if all of their illicit affairs are with women, then this suggests (remember, you read it here first!) that an approximately equal number of women are having illicit affairs, too. Affairs, 1991-1992 by Rod Van Mechelen
It's not that men haven't known this all along, but that pop feminists have loudly denied it. Or, like Shere Hite, blamed it on men. Either way, it boils down to one thing: they've been lying about it, and now they're laughing at us because they think we believed them.
Sticking our nose in other nations' affairs
American funding of international family planning efforts is important, and Congress should support the more generous Senate levels of funding in the foreign aid bill. But more sweeping efforts are needed. ... Giving a high profile to gender discrimination is key. It should be a foreign policy issue in the current presidential campaign. - Improvements needed in health and education for women, September 23, 2000
Nothing like sticking our noses in other nations' affairs to take our attention off human rights issues here at home.
Outlasting the opposition
ANY day now, a gargantuan wave could sweep westwards across the Atlantic towards the coast of North America. A mighty wall of water 50 metres high would hit the Caribbean islands, Florida and the rest of the eastern seaboard, surging up to 20 kilometres inland and engulfing everything in its path. - New Scientist, October 7, 2000
Perhaps the way to prevail over our opposition is simply to be on the opposite coast.
Family court circus
MIAMI, Sept. 28 ญญ Elian Gonzalez's Miami relatives filed a lawsuit today against Attorney General Janet Reno, alleging the armed raid that took the Cuban boy from their home and reunited him with his father was illegal. - Washington Post, September 29, 2000
The INS action was already upheld all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Gonzalez case has seen more "due process' than any other family law case in the history of America. The attorneys who filed this ridiculous suit should be countersued for barristry. - Stuart Miller, American Fathers Coalition.
This is good news?
Americans saw their incomes grow in August and spent all of it and more, which drove down the nation's savings rate to the lowest point on record. ... "People are remarkably confident," said Paul Kasriel, chief economist for the Northern Trust Co. ... He said Americans are in the mood to spend because jobs are plentiful, incomes are rising and inflation is low. - Seattle P-I, September 30, 2000
Confident? Maybe not. With the income disparity between the richest and poorest segments of the American economy the same as it is in Latin America, there's more to this than consumer confidence.
Sure, some in the upper-middle class have reason to feel confident. They have more than their salaries. But many more Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck than the wizards of Wall Street would like us to know. With no safety net, any lull in the economy could bring a quick end to many Americans' security.
No surprise
According to the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, 16,600 jobs in dot-com companies have been cut in the past nine months. - San Jose Business Journal, September 25, 2000
For a long time I wondered about the dot-com boom. Why were investors so eager to throw money at dot-com start-ups with no business plan and no clear means of making money? And what were the start-ups spending all that money on? I'd go to the websites of many well-staffed companies and find less going on than on this site. Budget of backlash.com, about $4,000/year, not counting my time (not quite 40 hours per week) and the time of the writers and researchers who volunteer their help.
Granted, if we put a dollar value on all that volunteered time our annual budget would be a lot more than it is, but still a fraction of what the bankrupt dot-coms have been spending.
And some not-so-bankrupt companies, too.
A few months ago I read an inside report about a large company with a growing presence on the web expecting to get something like 6 million hits on their site by the end of the year. Meanwhile, I expect to end the year with close to 800,000 hits. They have a staff of 20-some odd people maintaining their site, including managers, programmers, researchers and writers, plus hundreds of salespeople, not to mention the offices and millions they spend on advertising (it's a big company). So, a conservative guess would be that they're spending several dollars per hit, or hundreds of times more than we are here.
In my opinion, they're paying too much. When you spend that much, the money has to come from somewhere to pay for it. But the revenues aren't there, yet.
So, when I read about this dot-com laying off people, or that dot-gone going belly up, I'm not surprised.
What do you think? - Equalitarian Discussion forums.
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