I am going to be ungrateful
Today is International Women’s Day.
Meanwhile, men (with female assistance, you can always find some who assist in any underclass, as well as some men who do not) use every tool in the book to make sure women don’t count. Women should be baby-producing chattel who shut up and are nice about it. There is a mountain of daily murders to make sure they are, as well as sexual terror. Such crude methods should not be mentioned in polite society, so they’re often denied against the evidence. (Yes, it’s worth noting that those two examples are from the US, where the mass of crimes is not as massive as other examples that are easy to find.) The list goes on. Genital mutilation. A slave trade that spans the globe and sells mostly women and girls.
There are forced marriages of girls. They’re not sold, of course. There are just economic incentives. The women are beaten to force compliance, can’t leave, and get nothing for their work except permission to go on living (sometimes not even that). But people don’t call it slavery because it’s labelled marriage.
Women do some 70% of the world’s work, lots of it totally unpaid, get some 30% of global income, and own a small fraction of the world’s assets (WEF 2016, and estimated at 1% in this WSJ summary of a World Bank Development Report on Gender Equality 2012.). That is trillions of dollars every year robbed from women.
One day a year is not enough for half the human race.
Quixote, I admire your tilting at these windmills. Also your valiant efforts at bringing women’s equality to the attention of other self-styled feminist blogs, one in particular, that makes no apologies for being apologists for the worlds most enduring supremacist minority government, the Catholic Church.
Women are the majority of people on this planet. We own the most invaluable, irreplaceable, resource on this planet: the ability to create other human beings. When we are silenced, our silence determines the fate of countries. Where we have a reedy, small voice in soi-dissant democracies, even that voice matters, as witness the U.S.
Vocal or not, counted or not, we determine the fate of this planet.
PDXPat on March 14th, 2018 at 20:44
Hey PD, good to see you around.
I’ve seen one thing lately that’s giving me pause. In some Twitter threads (I’m not actually on Twitter, but I can access public accounts in a browser so I do) and on for instance Feminist Current, I’ve started seeing male commenters who actually support women.
:boggle:
Maybe the shouting from the MeToo crowd about “*you* call out bad behavior” is actually having an effect? Dare we hope?
About the windmill tilting, yes, that’s why I took that handle. It all started back in 2002. The King of Spain funded a site for Middle East – and – West understanding. (Early days of the Iraq mess. People were racing around trying to DO something.) The idea was a set of freewheeling forums where we could exchange ideas and argue (politely) about viewpoints. And it was moderated by about five or so expert journalists from the BBC and the like. We’d have sustained interesting discussions that went on for weeks. It was a real this-is-what-the-web-could-be experience. Never happened again.
Anyway, back to the handle. Needless to say, women were somewhere so far in the background most commenters couldn’t see them with a telescope. And I was constantly bringing up the subject because women were (are!) so central to most of the issues. I’d meet with this wall of not-getting-it that, together with the King of Spain connection, made “quixote” seem like the logical name.
quixote on March 15th, 2018 at 15:03
Just popping back in to say I love that story about how you came up with the name.
Sigh – I miss the early Internet. Not many people – and most of those geeks, nerds and dorks – information that may not have been as easily available, but a 1000% more trustworthy…even the sexism seemed more innocent 😛
Just finished a truly nerdy book recommended on a bboard run by a vestigial entity that’s been around since the mid-80’s, operating a low-cost BSD *Unix* shell (guy’s quite emphatic that it’s not Linux) you ssh into, where Pine, Lynx and even Gopher are available and fully functional… where was I?
Oh, yes, the book. “Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet” by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon. Lots of fun to pinpoint exactly where on the timeline from Eisenhower to now one became aware of the thing and then became fully involved. Also good for escapism, with the current news getting weirder and more depressing by the hour.
PDXPat on March 20th, 2018 at 02:14
Uh, what? re last comment.
Re next to last, I agree, the misogyny against women is so all-encompassing people can’t see it. It’d be like seeing air. It takes an understanding of what the stuff is to realize it’s everywhere. That consciousness is gradually seeping into more and more people, but the cynic in me says, “Yeah. Just in time for climate change to throw us back a few centuries and have to start all over.”
quixote on April 1st, 2018 at 16:38
Whatever you say, PD(soon-not-to-be-an)XPat (?? exciting!). Comments deleted. I thought the long comment had good points, so I’m leaving my response, which will eventually be confusing, but what the hell.
And nobody who knows me would agree that I’m patient. I like to think I try to avoid jumping to conclusions, but honestly I’m not sure even that is true.
As for getting yourself to the PACNW, go for it. In my vision of the future, that’s one of the areas likely to make it through the Time of Troubles. They have water — which is going to be the biggie — and people who are sensible and socially conscious enough to keep society glued together. Which is the other biggie.
It’s a tough decision to make when you’re pretty much having to jump off a cliff and hoping you have a working parachute, but if you’re otherwise on quicksand getting swallowed by Trumpaloes certainty may be a bad thing and risk a good one.
Anyway. GOOD LUCK! All best wishes! Drop into comments when you can to let me know how you’re doing.
quixote on April 2nd, 2018 at 08:55
Thank you! I did take the plunge and hand in my notice, but this is a typical very corrupt NC company, so it may take a couple of go-rounds before it actually takes effect. Fortunately, there’s no reason yet that that’s a real problem. The key thing is it’s started – YAAAAAAY!
So while I still have stable internet, I have to ask:
What about desalinization? I understand Israel relies heavily on that, and have wondered why Southern California, down at the end of the Colorado as it is, doesn’t.
(I hope I have that major waterway’s name right. One result of being, as my sister once put it “A smart fish in a dumb pond”, is that there’s no one else to keep one’s own web of knowledge intact by frequent reference)
So when you have a spare minute or two – desalinization? Or if I’m just being lazy and should ixquick it, feel free to say that, too.
PDXPat on April 2nd, 2018 at 17:52
Okay, so maybe only a medium bright fish in a *very* dumb pond.
Not only did I get the noun form of “desalinize” wrong (damned English!), but the answer’s fairly obvious – expense. Hrmmph. But at least MIT Journal of Technology, Peter Gleick in Scientific American, and various other actually smart fish had the same question, and answered it for me. (It looks like there have been some plants built in SoCal, though, and more contemplated as water becomes more scarce. I can see those giant kidneys strung all along the coast in a few decades time.)
One answer they never seem to address, though, is -the- most obvious one: stop coddling those religions (male owned and operated all) that sell women as breeding stock to men as the source of those religions’ power. THE biggest problem for the world’s resources is still overpopulation, no matter how much those left-wing sexists cry “cultural freedom”.
When given a chance and a choice, women do not want to be forced to start having babies before their bodies are even ready, and to have one baby after another after another for most of their adult years, just to support men’s egos and obey churches that don’t even consider them fully human.
Rescuing women from that religion imposed physical bondage would be a two-fer: half of all human beings would be that much closer to actually having human rights, and the pressure of too many people on the planet wouldn’t continue on its merry asymptotic way.
But I suspect the male owned and operated churches will just keep trusting to the traditional way of balancing resources with population: war.
PDXPat on April 6th, 2018 at 02:32
Q, those deleted comments reappeared when I posted the last one, dated April 6th. Could you please try again to delete them? Thank you.
Have the Ruskies got to your blog software? I somehow don’t think the fundies I’ve been so critical of would know how to, so this must be them Russians.
PDXPat on April 6th, 2018 at 02:43
PD, they’re not showing up on my system. ?? Maybe they’re visible on yours because they’re your comments? I’ve had that happen every once in a while with my comments on other blogs: I can see them even though nobody else can. WordPress can be Weird.
Re desalination. yup you got it. Expense. (and sorry to be so slow noticing what’s going on here!) Although there are about three really interesting methods at the lab stage which could work better and cheaper. (I’ll have to dig the links out of my mountain of bookmarks. I think I remember it was research associated with MIT and/or Stanford.)
If they want to keep urban-levels of population in Southern California, desalination is going to be their only option.
About the “cultural freedom” BS. That’s like being a climate denier. Aside from any issue of human rights (which you would think leftists ought to care about), the environment has a carrying capacity for any given species depending on its requirements. Once the species exceeds that, you get a choice of birth control or death control. Talking about “culture” makes as much sense as shouting at a tornado.
I’m pretty sure they actually know that. But upper caste people trying to keep a lower caste in place as servants don’t have the luxury of making sense. Because there isn’t any sense in where they stand.
quixote on April 6th, 2018 at 07:55
Thanks for checking back! “Birth control or death control” – sums it up perfectly.
Those must have been either Heisenberg or Schroedinger comments. They’ve vanished again (for now).
PDXPat on April 6th, 2018 at 14:07
Dropping in again to rant. (BTW you’re the only one who ever got my nym’s pun)
I’m seeing in the stunned reaction of the media to just how horrible Trump is, an ongoing refusal to admit that he is President precisely because of their sexism. It’s part of the psychology that enables sexism, that will continue to enable it.
Unlike -some- wife beaters and -some- rapists, media owners and employees don’t even have the self awareness to whine “But..but..but..we never saw a human being at the end of any harm we did. You can’t really blame us”.
But it’s there in every frantic effort to substitue racism for sexim, every desparate attempt to erase Hillary Clinton and her huge majority of voters and supporters.
They still can’t admit that their abandoning responsibility in 2016 due to sexism had any real world consequenses. Certainly not the destruction of the country they live in.
PD(soon-not-to-be)XPat on April 9th, 2018 at 20:14
If you read some of the 19th and 18th century gumballs on the subject of black slavery, there’s that same inability to see it as a problem. Permeating that “thinking” is the assumption that “those” people were put on earth by god to be slaves and it’s good for them and, really honest cross-my-heart, they like it.
Transpose that crap to now, modernize the language, and that’s a lot of the current thinking on women. (Aside from feminists who Get It.)
We’re in a pre-abolitionist mindset when it comes to women. Meanwhile everybody is overcome with how terrible racism is and how far we have to go.
It is terrible. No question about that. We have light years to go before deeds catch up with words on that.
But it’s at least as important that so many don’t even notice women are people. To say nothing of treating them like actual human beings.
Anyway. Longwinded way of saying I agree with you!
quixote on April 10th, 2018 at 09:02
Never too long-winded for me!
Yep, same mentality. It was even explicitly there in 20th century dreck like the intro to “The Story of O” (“women *like* abuse and strong masters – just like all the black folks who’ve been begging for the return of slavery.” Feh.) and almost as obviously in “Gone With The Wind”.
PDXPat on April 10th, 2018 at 11:32
One more teensy little comment and then I’ll stop spamming your blog:
“Wooden Ships” is playing on infinite loop both as an earworm and on my laptop 🙂
PDXPat on April 11th, 2018 at 10:55