Same rules as the first one. This one will be linked in the sidebar.
Update: Other sidebar tweaks:
Added (which I thought I’d done) Say no to Crack and also Teri’s site, The road lester travelled.
Renamed “Wonderful Luka” to the more accurate “Engender Truth”, though I don’t think she’ll be posting much til post-Christmas.
Removed, alas, Dakota Smith’s blog link since he doesn’t seem active. If he does become active again, back up it shall go.
If you’re a regular reader and commenter and you’d like to be blogrolled, please let me know.
-wolfe
Wolfe, you had stated an intention earlier somewhere on this sprawling site that a topic on your blog here would be women and voting, or how the privilege of voting should be bestowed.
Here is a thing I am wondering about: On the main site, some (maybe including you, I cannot remember) imply that women, through “over-reaching” have demonstrated themselves to be unworthy of certain rights, voting perhaps being among them.
Why then is this argument not extended to African-American men (I leave the women out, as they are women), as there is arguably similar over-reaching, according to some? I cite the examples of affirmative action, which some would call “reverse discrimination,” and a propensity, some would say, to reflexivily use the “race card.”
I must state that I in no way endorse the above- stated examples on race as being truisms. I also acknowledge that the subjugation of women is in a great many ways a “soft subjugation” in comparison to the systematic enslavement and brutalization of African-Americans in our past. Both, however, have been disenfranchised in US history.
I would argue that in any redressing of wrongs or imbalances there is a tendency to over-correct (we humans just cannot seem to learn the lesson of the pendulum), and I agree, this must be guarded against. As an example, I believe the family court system to be profoundly flawed and in dire necessity of remedy (and I speak through some personal experience).
However, I ask you this. Should Colin Powell or Barack Obama have to answer for the extremism of Louis Farrakhan or the publicity-courting antics of Al Sharpton? And if they do not, why should I have to answer for the extremism of Germaine Greer? Nuts and opportunists do abound in every walk of life. Must I apologize for Father Charles Coughlin and Joe McCarthy because of my shared Irish ancestry? Heavens, given the mongreldom of US bloodlines, it could go on and on…
Hmm…the above post has a certain surliness, I now realize. I admit I AM feeling surly…a certain Black Irish mood. I had to work today, and I hate working on Sunday, but Mammon demands obeisance even from atheists.
@AllyC Good questions. And I didn’t read it as surly, but then I’m partly of Irish ancestry myself.
Briefly, I don’t agree with the idea of collective responsibility for an entire gender, religion, sexual orientation, nationality or ‘race’ in most circumstances.
As you say, why should Colin Powell — who manifestly does not align himself with the Farrakhans or Jacksons of this world — have to answer? I do think the leaders of the Democratic party should have to answer to some degree for Jackson — and Kennedy for that matter, just as the Republicans had to answer for Abramoff. But that’s a somewhat different matter.
Yes, I did leave myself an out with the ‘most circumstances’. Things like genocide conducted by an organized country on a large scale certainly trouble me (in terms of raising an argument for collective responsibility), especially if it’s an elected government. Germany 1933-1945 springs to mind. There might be some degree of collective responsibility there.
I am gravely troubled by the extent to which the court system and society appears to be not merely biased against men but destructive towards men. I do not quite think that women bear ‘collective responsibility’ for this, but I have no trouble asserting that most feminists do.
Let me turn this around, though. We regularly have government and the ‘great and the good’ telling us things like ‘all men are rapists’, ‘every man is a potential abuser’, ‘every man is a potential child molester’. This is an obscene level of collective responsibility that appears widely supported. How do you feel about such messages and what they say to young men?
As for women voting, I sometimes lean to the view that the results are a net negative for society, but on the grounds of respect for individual human beings, I don’t see it as practical to change; indeed, for that very reason, I’d have supported (and support today) universal franchise regardless of race or gender.
While I think it is possible there are superior systems to ‘one person, one vote’, I think that a system which is anything other than blind to color, creed, gender (and several other things which I’m too lazy/tired/hurried to set down at the moment) on the basis of permitting votes is evil and anathema.
Hope that answers your questions, though it may well raise more.
Best,
-wolfe
Which Kennedy? We had 2 things on the walls when I was growing up, crucifixes and pictures of JFK, and we genuflected to both. Hey, man, you leave Jack outta this.
No, I meant Edward Kennedy. JFK died long ago and was neither an embarrassment to his party or country. Quite the reverse.
JFK? Pretty good. Cheated on his wife, wasn’t what history thought he was, but then who is. Good policy on taxes. By and large good on civil rights, probably moved about as fast as he could. Horrible on Cuba for which he wasn’t ready, (and the CIA tried to manipulate him into going further than he was willing) and arguably muffed the Berlin Wall crisis. Not happy about the family connections to the mob, or the way he won the election, but what is, is.
All in all, a good man who served his country honorably and, like his elder brother Joe, died far too young in the service of his country.
-wolfe
I’m back and very well done gotten laid! TMI?
Thank you for creating the sidebar link, wolfe. Very considerate of you. Also, I thank you for my blog link, albeit misspelled. Hehehe… yes, the spelling is accurate enough, but I chose to use the same spelling as the Rober Frost poem and the M. Scott Peck book, which makes reference to the poem, of course. I mean, since my title is playing on that title.
So, not only did I get a good roll in the hay this weekend, but also got blogrolled! Can’t beat that for good, clean fun!
(and then there’s me, who can’t even spell Robert)
Ally wanted to have a thread or discussion about books. I think a conversation on this did happen somewhere, but unfortunately I don’t know where to look for it, so if Ally is still interested in this discussion, I thought we could have the chat here.
My preferred fiction are crime thrillers. I love a good murder mystery or law drama, a la Grisham.
I’ve bought three books to read while lazing on the beach getting skin cancer. If anyone has read them, please don’t give me any spoilers but I would still like to hear your opinion on them.
They are:
The Colour of Law by Mark Gimenez; Immoral by Brian Freeman and The Rosary Girls by Richard Montanari.
Yah, I always like to talk about books.
However, right now I have this to say:
@wolfe-Re your discussion with Alex about leisure time, I’ll keep the 20 hours a week and somebody can put a bullet in MY brain when I’m 69, so I’m even-steven with the statistical male. I worked in a nursing home, I know what it’s like-no thanks.
@Ally I agree with you on nursing homes. It’s my observation that the last year or so of male or female life is roughly equally bad. Check the ages of your patients by gender. I bet the men are statistically younger.
In any event, most males in my family never lived long enough to get to nursing homes.
-wolfe
Yes, it is mostly females in nursing homes, and like I said, no thanks, but I’d personally take euthenasia, were it an option.
Thankfully, my better half and I have mostly worked it out, without keeping score in that particular way, which would be quite the crapshoot from an individual woman’s perspective.
I used to visit nursing homes. I always left depressed, wondering where the hell those people’s families were!
I also would rather just die. Besides, I’ve lived enough for three lifetimes already! I figure I’m on borrowed time.
It was probably physically the hardest job I ever had. I started when I was in high school, and I remember taking care of this guy who in his earlier life had been a lumberjack. He was blind, going deaf, and eventually went senile. He was still a big man, even though much diminished. He packed a punch, let me tell you. I used to come home with bruises the size of softballs on my legs and arms when I took care of him. I felt bad for him, though. He must have been so confused.
Anecdotally wolfe, looking back (and it was a while ago), it seems to me most of the men I took care of were not much younger than the women. It was as though if they made it that far, they tended to just keep on ticking…but there were far fewer of them.
I dunno. My dad is 91 and still mows his lawn (but we all stay inside - he’s also legally blind). My gran lived to 95 and HER mother to 97. My mother was healthy as a horse until cancer brought her down to her current diminished state.
Too many (young) suicides have I known to talk about a bullet to the brain or even euthanasia. I’d be a lesser person had I not known all these people in the last years of their lives, and I don’t think it’s for me to decide when my sons are to lose their mother, as they feel they’ve already lost their dad, to a great exttent.
May change my mind when I lose my marbles, of course.
I feel like I’ve come back to an old, abandoned house and can toss a pebble from end to end or holler in the dining room, as there’s no one here to tell me not to. Can’t post on the new site so I have to get my yah-yahs out.
Hi Z, you’re ‘fixed’ (no not in that way!) in the new house.
-wolfe
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