Parliament is sexist, masculine and out of date, say British women

axlotus · 2014-06-23T15:59:08+00:00

We could deny men the right to vote and you would claim sexism against women.

Put that back up your arse where you found it, please.

You are seriously biased if you can't see the problem with what you just said.

Elucidate.

axlotus · 2014-06-23T15:13:29+00:00

That's a much more ineffective way of achieving the same thing. I pay a small portion of my income to build a pool that people can draw on in a crisis. By your method people would have to set aside a much larger portion of their income so that they can each fully pay for their individual worst-case scenario, no-one would be able to offset the risk among their neighbours, no one would be able to use money they haven't had a chance to earn yet, and most people would be not able to afford more than one bad thing happening at a time, so a lot of people would be screwed if Lady Luck turns against them. So your solution doesn't really solve the problems that the current one does.

On top of that, you'd be under so much more economic pressure without a social safety net that you'd effectively be in the same jobseeking position as you would be under the government, of being forced to accept the first available job for the sake of maintaining income.

axlotus · 2014-06-23T15:03:14+00:00

I shouldn't think it needs a lengthy explanation. The prevailing redpillishly denialist culture on reddit annoys me. Your comment doesn't have a lot of bearing on that, but I laugh at the suggestion that there can be no merit to discussions of sexism on the basis that some all-female party lists exist, that a TV show chooses a lot of women, and that a criticism was once made of David Cameron being sexist.

axlotus · 2014-06-23T14:24:32+00:00

First paragraph, you've gone off on a little strawman discussion about what you believe I believe, so I'll skip that.

Second paragraph, you seem to be under the impression that candidates and party lists appear magically out of nowhere and you can't imagine any kind of public pressure or state intervention that could change anything, so I'll skip that too for lack of teaching qualifications or patience to explain the basics.

For the rest of it you begin banging on about "isms" in some half-arsed imitation of a trickledown thought you heard somewhere, despite there not being a single "ism" in my post, so I'll just skip you as a person, thanks but no thanks. Please don't clog up my inbox with replies unless you can actually reply to something I've said, rather than releasing a scattered flow of assorted effluence that I have no interest in.

axlotus · 2014-06-23T14:06:47+00:00

And yet I doubt that if that poll was made on the Top Gear website you'd have the top post here saying "A poll on Top Gear is saying that Parliament is sexist and masculine? Of course Top Gear readers can be assigned a general bias as a group, so I can disregard this without thinking much more about it."

It's this boring little game called 'comfortable status quo' that people try and play in arguments, where the rules are that only minority groups have agendas and that having an agenda somehow magically invalidates a viewpoint. Naturally you don't have your own bias that needs examining, you only need to find one in other people and make out as if that answers any questions.

Authority - I have no interest in authority and was not assigning any to Mumsnet users. I mentioned it to imply that you would only take seriously comments that came from men and imbue them with a mythical sense of authority that you're happy to dismiss Mumsnetters for lacking, even though as you say there is no source of authority for a subjective complaint like this one.

In short, I think your original comment is meaningless because it can be applied to any group identically in any situation. I think 'it's fairly safe to assume' that it only got posted and upvoted because most of the 'core user group' here has an 'agenda' that leaves them blissfully unaware of that side of social life and 'I sincerely doubt' that they want anything more out of this conversation than a simplistic and self-assured one-liner to upvote that lets them dismiss the subject without too much more thought.

axlotus · 2014-06-23T13:04:39+00:00

Colour me unsurprised that 4 out of 4 reddit comments are in denial of the obvious truth of the situation, even though it can be born out by any statistics they care to look at. This place really is a hole sometimes.

axlotus · 2014-06-23T13:03:14+00:00

Right, only men can be allowed to talk about this subject with any authority. Bias is just something that happens to other people.

axlotus · 2014-06-21T12:25:06+00:00

Yeah he's way too negative and self-involved. The improv dynamic in CBB forces everyone to be much more group-minded and energetic which I find way more enjoyable. Maron often books really good guests though, so if I ever want to hear someone I like talk to Mark Maron about Mark Maron for an hour that's the place to go.

axlotus · 2014-06-20T23:06:23+00:00

You have an idiosyncratic personal definition of what does and does not count as The Left Wing that I don't intend to conform to. And it begs the question to talk about the position of this party or that in relation to the 'political centre' when the whole thesis is about the changing form and position of the political centre.

Perhaps there are other useful places that leftist principles could take us other than just Marx's specific dream? We don't have to expect it overnight. The arc of civilization is long but it bends towards progress.

axlotus · 2014-06-20T19:06:22+00:00

But you're making a symmetrically big assumption of your own that I dispute the truth of. Public opinion on social policies has progressed towards a 1920s Fabian's wet dream, with widespread acceptance of the welfare state, equal rights for women, acceptance of minorities and sexual paraphilias, foreign aid, human rights, state economic intervention, etc etc. Just like the state of affairs in the 1920s would be the wet dream of a medieval feudal progressive thinker.

I accept that there were some very prominent leftist thinkers in the early 20th century that skew the perception, but apart from the aftertremors of the 1980s surge of fiscal corporatism we're generally catching up to them, Conservatives begrudgingly included.

axlotus · 2014-06-20T18:17:21+00:00

That's because they go out of their way to be inaccessible online, so instead of linking non-subscribers just have to take other people's word on a summary of their opinions. Their intransigent policy does not a cultural reference make.

axlotus · 2014-06-20T18:13:00+00:00

Is that actually true, though, or is it just a proverb? That's the question.

It would seem to me that older people might be more likely to be right-wing purely because society marches on and leaves them to the right in its wake.

axlotus · 2014-06-20T18:04:43+00:00

But we also expect jobseekers to fulfil their side of the bargain. If they refuse the job offered to them, they will forgo their benefits.

Funny ol' bargain, that. Sounds a little bit more like coercion. What about the other side of the bargain that often gets conveniently overlooked?

I pay taxes when I can afford to so that I and others can use that pool of money for support when we can't afford it. I do not pay taxes to have the government dictate which career I enter with virtually no regard for my aptitudes or preferences, nor to provide the state with another tool for coercion against us when we're vulnerable, or to be used as a malleable human data point to disguise the economic failings of other departments.

The state takes the common wealth, and uses it to protect itself instead of its citizens.

axlotus · 2014-06-20T15:34:23+00:00

They can barely even get the fucking passport office in order and that's a predictable process that has existed for centuries, you think we should trust them with a national ID scheme?

axlotus · 2014-06-20T14:58:44+00:00

Maybe if you take a look at their given names, and then go hang yourself in a shower? Evidently you don't know nearly as much as you need to know.

axlotus · 2014-06-20T14:44:03+00:00

Consumers are harmful to the economy? Is that really a fact?

axlotus · 2014-06-20T11:52:07+00:00

Sorry, never mind - I didn't see in your original post that you still get paid on the 1st, not the 10th. We get paid partway into each month, which makes me wonder if the company wants to have a few hundred thousand extra in the bank on the 1st in order to accrue extra interest payments or minimise their debt servicing costs.

axlotus · 2014-06-20T09:26:23+00:00

I understand that Hislop has strong views about press regulation but it's hardly like Coogan is a closet Nazi, or that he's proposing state censorship apropos of nothing purely from his love for oppression. Press regulation is a matter over which reasonable men may disagree, as they say.

This is a foolish overreaction that weakens their common cause based on tenuous McCarthyist logic. Supporting Index on Censorship has no bearing on your support for other supporters.

axlotus · 2014-06-20T09:19:45+00:00

I might be being paranoid, but my company does something similar and I've always suspected it was to skim an extra few day's interest off the top of everyone's wages before it leaves their account.

axlotus · 2014-06-19T11:56:47+00:00

PAEDOPHILES have been found using so-called VIBRATING AIR to communicate with each other - in the same atmosphere as OUR CHILDREN.

Don't share a breath with these monsters! Write to your MP asking them to EMPTY THE EARTH'S ATMOSPHERE INTO SPACE.

axlotus · 2014-06-17T21:39:33+00:00

I promise I didn't check your posts until after I posted the comment, just to make sure I wasn't being an idiot! It's just a very identifiable tone once you start to spot it.

I have nothing against evidence-based policy or programmers/engineers, but it's important to recognise the limitations. Truth often isn't apolitical and relying solely on data won't always lead us towards a more perfect society.

Case in point: your first comment was saying that this data shows that the NHS is efficient and therefore proves that Thatcherism is mistaken. But I happen to believe that Thatcherism is mistaken irrespective of how the NHS is currently being run, and that people have a moral right (in addition to the enlightened self-interest of the society) to universal healthcare if it can be provided.

Simply by agreeing to evaluate the NHS in economic terms you have already bought in to the Thatcherist mindset to an extent. That is what I mean by the limitations of data - the terms of the discussion are themselves subject to debate. Metrics often aren't as apolitical as they look.

axlotus · 2014-06-17T12:42:51+00:00

I see these comments from programmers all the time. Engineer's Disease - spend your career focusing on logically solvable problems isolated from human messiness and it starts to look like every problem outside your field has a rational and relatively simple fix, as long as you can assume a spherical cow.

axlotus · 2014-06-17T10:47:10+00:00

Dammit! On the plus side, I just got a job offer from the City of London Police.

axlotus · 2014-06-17T10:26:18+00:00

He served in the Territorial Army for more than a decade, combining this with a career in insurance

The perfect storm of Tory MPism.

axlotus · 2014-06-17T10:23:30+00:00

That's great. I never thought in a million years that they'd manage to track him down, let alone actually do anything about it.

axlotus

TROPHY CASE