Cultural anthropology is not a scientific discipline because it doesn't use the scientific method; hence it can't give you objective answers about questions about the use of power and dominance in hunter-gatherer societies.
Um, huh? You're spinning theories that say there's dominance and hierarchy in hunter-gatherer bands, despite the fact that people who have actually looked at such bands report otherwise. It can give you objective answers. It's harder than in physics, because people and societies are really, really complex. Why don't you try to find actual observation of hunter-gatherer bands before making sweeping pronouncements about them? Your talk about evolutionary psychology is nothing but people looking at primate behavior and attempting to extend it to human behavior without actually looking at humans.
If they break down, that means that large organizations based on dominance hierarchies couldn't function.
I said the sort of interactions we evolved doing break down. It is possible to run organizations on the basis of dominance, competition, and power struggles, but that's not a healthy environment. For example, hunter-gatherers do not get clinically depressed. Depression is a result of working in an unnatural manner like a dominance hierarchy.
Men are forcing themselves on women whether there are dominance hierarchies or not, whether they have been taught about toxic masculinity or not. We know that because many of the men accused in the #MeToo movement were feminists and progressives, and many of the abuses occurred outside dominance hierarchies.
Note that not all accusations in the #MeToo movement had any confirmation, and I'd bet that a fair number of them were women piling on people whose politics they didn't like. There are also hypocrites and people with good intentions and blind spots. Whether a man has been taught about "toxic masculinity" is not really relevant to what he does; whether he's been taught to respect people and not need to establish dominance in a small group is relevant.
You believe that because you believe that dominance hierarchies are about bullying people, and telling them what to do, and abusing women.
They can be. The hierarchy of a company is ideally something different. I don't acknowledge dominance, I just do my job. It's other people's job to establish priorities and coordinate things. If the company attitude became toxic, I'd quit. So would most of the rest of the developers, particularly the good ones who can normally get other jobs. By fostering a sense of common purpose, and not saddling lower-level employees with extraneous crap, the company works very well. To put this another way, we're operating day-to-day without such hierarchies, interacting more as we evolved doing. The company does well by minimizing the hierarchy.
I don't attribute your views to ignorance, I'm pointing out your ignorance when it occurs (I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt; of course, you might simply be lying or equivocating). For example, you denied the connection between neo-Marxism and third wave feminism; you talk about "equal opportunity" as if it were synonymous with "fairness"; you ignore issues like the information problem; you consider anthropological results to be scientific.
Really? I'm explaining my views as best I can, and I've considered them a lot. When did I deny a connection between neo-Marxism and whatever third-wave feminism is? I've been describing feminists I know and interact with. I don't remember making any claim about third-wave feminism. As far as neo-Marxism goes, there's people who believe in Marxism, just like there's people who believe in libertarianism. Both promise attractive societies, and neither of them actually work on any reasonable scale when applied to human beings.
I support equal opportunity, but I recognize we're not going to get it. I want more nearly equal opportunity. Government action can be very useful. Public schools are a function of government, for example, and pupils at bad schools don't have the same opportunity as students in good schools. This is a form of inequality of opportunity the government can address. Fair and equal treatment by society would be a good thing, but that's really beyond what a government can manage. Government action is a blunt instrument. Back in the sixties, government pushes towards fair and equal treatment were useful, since the inequalities were so strong. Nowadays, for most such purposes, it's inappropriate.
You probably aren't qualified to judge whether women grew up with more opportunities and privileges than you had, since it's really difficult to see and understand one's own privilege and compare it to others. I'm not real keen on government action in selectively opening up opportunities in general, since as far as I can see that's largely been accomplished.
Government interference can't force social equality for more reasons than lack of information. Government can limit your options in dealing with other people (it's illegal for me to shoot you under most circumstances), but it can't force attitudes. One of the big barriers to men becoming nurses is that lots of women are seriously uncomfortable with male nurses without a woman around, and that's not something that can be legislated away. It requires a cultural change.
I'm not trying to be evasive with the lack of opportunity. From what I've seen, women don't have the same opportunity as men to get into technical fields due to social factors that happen before maturity. I can't back that up very well, but if true it's an example of a fairly large-scale inequality of opportunity.
Okay. Pick one of your favorite directors. Now, do a slight reality shift and turn that director female, but still making the same movies. Would this woman now be one of your favorite directors, or would you relegate her to second tier? Go to a topless bar and pick out your favorite waitress. Now, do a slight reality shift and make her male, changing nothing except physiology. Would this person still be your favorite topless server?
I'm going to guess that women at topless bars are there because they're female, and so the customers can see boobs. This is a legitimate form of discrimination in a somewhat seedy occupation. Even if I were to lose my washtub abs, the employers wouldn't hire me for that role.
I'm also going to guess that movie-goers like movies made by some directors more than others (it's true in your case). These directors are favorites because they make movies people like. The role of director doesn't call for penises, vaginas, boobs, chest hair, etc. There's no good reason to think that a woman couldn't be a good director; indeed, you've said you've liked some movies from female directors. This indicates that the sex of the director doesn't normally affect what people judge the movie on.
It's another available campaign tactic. It is likely to prove at least somewhat useful in a few races. It's cheap, and it's at least a slight wedge between Republican congresscritters and most of the US public.
Can we get an itemized bill showing what expenses society suffered as a result?
Nope. We're not at that level of detail yet.
I understand that reducing emissions is good for the environment and that has some kind of value, but it's more an ideology than a business ledger
Nope. We know that burning fossil fuels in cars causes a lot of external costs. We don't have a good grasp on what the costs are, but ignoring them completely because we can't know how much the costs are is worse than imposing reasonable costs to eliminate at least some of the externalities.
What's wrong with letting the market decide what sells and what doesn't?
Burning gasoline in cars actually inflicts a lot of external costs on other people. Use some means to internalize the cost, and I'm happy to let the market sort itself out.
(One problem is that nobody has a good idea as to exactly what the externalities cost, but we can make estimates.
The main reason for selling the credits is to let the market help allocate resources efficiently. If Tesla can do something good more cheaply than GM, then Tesla can make more money by doing the good and picking up payment from GM.
Tesla has been moving towards cheaper cars. They started with the luxury market, and are going for less and less expensive cars. Currently, they sell cars that are only moderately expensive. They're not going to drop the Model 3 just because they can make some money selling credits.
GM is going to try to make its cars cleaner, so they won't have to buy credits, or at least won't have to pay as much for them. GM cars are not directly killing people in the sense that you mean, and we simply don't have what we'd need to eliminate burning fossil fuel for transporation.
No, HornWumpus is correct in general. Companies won't pay an employee more than that employee is worth to the company (not outside management, anyway). They'll pay the minimum they can get away with, but not more than what the employee is worth.
Do you have a citation for that that won't fizzle out if I dig into it? Alternatively, how many welfare recipients have you known, and how varied were they?
Ballistic missiles? Who's going to launch them? Presumably, any defenses in place would shoot at any rocket aimed at the US, no matter whether they're confirmed ICBMs or not. In any case, launching ICBMs at the US, and having them hit before the US reacts, is suicide. The US spends what it has to to maintain credible devastating second-strike capability.
Why would Trump shutting the government down reflect badly on the Democrats? The Republicans have both houses and the Presidency, and some Rs still have some faint sense of personal responsibility.
The Affordable Care act provided health insurance that tens of millions of people could afford. My best guess is that it had to do with the state governments, so governments that worked with the ACA got reasonably good results while governments that didn't got bad results, just as they wanted. I'm not saying it's a good system, because it isn't, but it helped lots of people.
As far as the Net Neutrality bill goes, it's going nowhere and so it doesn't really matter what it says. The purpose is to get names of people who are for or against NN and use that as a campaign issue.
Which original purpose? The appropriate Federalist paper explained in detail why the EC would never vote for Trump, so any such purpose is no longer relevant (and hasn't been for a couple of centuries). Another original purpose, less publicized at the time, was to give slave states more say in picking the President. That's irrelevant now. Any other original purpose is speculative at best.
1. I'm not saying that women are awesome (well, they are in some ways). I'm saying that there are women who are likely to be awesome in some field or other. In this case, I'm saying that it's easier for a man to become a director than for a woman to become a director. This means we're being unfair to women in general, and we're not getting as many good directors as we could be getting.
Big businesses tend to survive and make reasonable profits. Therefore, doing what everyone else does in fairly safe, and deviating is risky. (This is in contrast to startups, where doing what everyone else does gets the most common trajectory, which for startups is to fizzle out.) If everybody in Hollywood is trying out male directors rather than female, then trying out female ones is different and therefore risky. This is exacerbated by the agent problem, since what's good for the executive is not actually what's good for the business. It the exec takes a chance on a male director who turns out to be a dud, that's what happens. If the director is female, there's going to be thinking that the exec should have known better.
As far as marketing goes, we're in a period of transition. It wasn't that long ago that men were supposed to be in all the decision-making roles. It would take time for even the best marketing to overcome that.
2A. How much of an edge is it for a movie company to draw its directors from a larger talent pool? How does this compare to the effect of other business practices? How much would that raise profits? In some cases, it's quite an impact. In Major League Baseball, the Washington Senators started recruiting Cuban baseball players roughly around 1960, which meant that (as the Minnesota Twins starting in 1961) they had access to some very good players that other teams didn't at the time. In some cases, much less of an impact. Cuban baseball players and the iPod proved to be great successes. Drawing directors from a bigger talent pool might have a lot less impact.
2B. We're not talking about looking at women and picking out one who's going to be a great director. We're talking about expanding the prospect pool. Give one woman a million-dollar chance, and she might prove to be good enough to take further or she might not.
3A. Big inefficiencies break down eventually. It's harder to point to smaller inefficiencies, because they aren't as obvious. I took an example of a big one that eventually broke down, showing that it was seriously inefficient, and had lasted for decades. For a smaller one, consider industry handling of software developers. Typically, it's inefficient, despite the fact that resources on how to improve are widely available.
3B and 3C. I'm not claiming that middle management was useless. I'm claiming that its financial benefits for the company were a lot less than the expense. This is why I used an example that broke down, because otherwise it's a lot harder to demonstrate inefficiency.
The ONLY way race and gender would create diversity in art is if race and gender have a causal relationship with MIND.
Which, at least in this society, they do. Men and women have different experiences, Blacks and whites have different experiences. Art is heavily based on the experiences of the artist. A mix of races and genders is likely to produce diversity of experience, and hence diversity of art. (This is all statistical, of course. One group I was in for a while was academic - and, despite different genders and races and national origins, it felt really lacking in diversity.)
Now, you do NOT want to make that argument. Because if you argue that race and gender cause a prescriptive causal change on MIND then it can be argued that given races and genders are more or less suited to certain mental tasks.
I'd have to see some really good evidence to believe different races were suited to different mental tasks. All the evidence I've seen for that has been seriously flawed. One of the big problems is in trying to keep other factors from interfering. As far as different genders, it's quite possible, on a statistical basis. I'd expect differences between individuals to be large compared to differences between genders or sexes (there is a difference). Again, it's extremely difficult to try to find what's social and what stems from biology (and, for that matter, exactly what that means).
You can't do that without imploding in a cloud of hypocrisy.
I still appear to be solid. I think you mean that my argument would be hypocritical given the mistaken ideas you have about what I think and have said.
I find it entirely plausible that men and women tend to think differently and want different things. I also know that there are various sex-specific problems keeping men and women out of female- and male-dominated fields. So, while more women than men might want to be nurses, there are prejudices and discrimination against men trying to enter the field. In Utopia, it may well be that female nurses would outnumber male ones by a lot, but the disparity would be less than what we have now.
Therefore, equality of outcome is not actually desirable. What I want is equality of opportunity. However, equality of outcome is far easier to measure than equality of opportunity, and significantly unequal outcomes usually turn out to have restrictions on opportunities attached. Inequality of outcome can be used for probable cause, to use a legal analogy, but is insufficient to convict.
If you're looking for intellectual mismatches, consider transgender. People on the right tend to think that (a) men and women have different sorts of minds, and (b) gender is based on sex, and transgender people are mentally ill. People on the left tend to think that (a) men and women have more similar minds, and (b) gender can be independent of sex, and transgender people need to be treated as members of their chosen gender. (Yeah, I'm overgeneralizing like mad.) Being transgender is basically having a male body and female mind, or vice versa, so it depends on male and female minds being different. Those who believe they are should realize that there are screwups, if rare, in most human situations, so it's likely that a rare individual will have a body and mind that don't match.
Which means there is no prescriptive causal relationship. Which means the diversity argument is at best irrational.
Which means you're reasoning, not from facts, but from projections from what you erroneously think I think. Try again.
Perhaps. She didn't say. I'm using anecdotal evidence here. Do you have an anecdote that illustrates men not caring about a woman's appearance? Women in male-dominated fields seem to worry about their appearance in ways men don't. (I assume you have anecdotes about women caring about other women's appearances; those are easy to find.
That means this has nothing to do with gender bias. Women want women to be judged that way.
Non sequitur. Gender bias is when one gender has more difficulties than another for some actions that don't depend on biology. If it costs money and effort for women authors to look acceptable at conventions than men, that's gender bias.
And then we hit your big fallacy: you're dividing humanity into two groups (and a few outliers) and treating people as members of their groups rather than individuals. If the proper way to judge a woman is to see how other women judge her, then the proper way to judge a redhead is to see how other redheads judge them, or left-handed people, or baseball fans....
The writer would like to change how urban fantasy and horror fans judge her, not how women judge her.
Your fallacy is in assuming that people prefer to watch movies directed by men instead of women. People prefer to watch movies they like, and (in my experience) typically don't give much attention to the director. They go to see the story, or the special effects, or the actual actors, or whatever. None of this is dependent on the director. A good director will normally make a much more enjoyable movie than a bad one, but that isn't inherently gender-based.
Directors have to start their careers somehow. They're not going to progress without being able to point to actual movies they've directed. Movies cost lots of money, so someone has to be willing to front lots of money to give a wannabe director a chance. If men get that financing more often than women do, then there will be more male directors than female, regardless of their respective merits.
The fact that a woman could be a famous scientist didn't mean that women were treated equally in the sciences. Despite Marie Curie, Emmy Noether wasn't necessarily allowed to schedule lectures under her own name. The fact that women aren't barred from X field entirely doesn't mean that there's any fairness in the treatment.
I pointed out a minor effect that's thoroughly nailed down. Most social science experiments are fuzzy. It's a very difficult field to be rigorous in. That one is clear-cut. It doesn't mean it's the only effect.
The natural state of humanity is gender-specific dominance hierarchies and competition. That is hardwired into human biology and brains, just like that of all social animals. To believe what you do, you have to throw all of evolutionary biology and psychology out the window and assume that humans are not what they actually are, namely slightly modified apes. In effect, your beliefs (like those of Rousseau and Marx) are pretty much the atheist equivalent of young earth creationism.
Or talk to people who are into anthropology, I guess. Hunter-gatherer bands do not generally have power hierarchies, despite whatever theoretical reasoning you can find. We pretty much evolved in hunter-gatherer bands. Them's facts. I got Sahln's "Stone Age Economics" pushed at me by people who know what they're talking about. We're closely related to chimpanzees and bonobos, but we're not them. There's differences. (It's conceivable that I'm wrong, but I've got solid sources and evidence saying that I'm not. Comparing anthropology to young-Earth creationism is stupid.)
Even you admit that dominance hierarchies and competition arise naturally in large groups and societies and are a cultural universal.
The dominance complaints were largely about individual interactions. These take place in small groups, and so the hunter-gatherer results apply. What you seem to be saying implies that the unnatural function of humans in large groups poisons the small-group interaction we evolved with. This doesn't end well for the humans.
You don't have to compete for power, you're perfectly free to try to found your own community/business/family that is free of power and hierarchy.
Human communities are generally larger than 150 people, and at that point the sorts of interactions we evolved doing break down. Some businesses thrive on low-hierarchy conditions where the people getting things done aren't in power struggles. Families are certainly small enough to function naturally, and lots of families that don't have internal power struggles or domination between husband and wife work very well.
What you demand, however, to share in the rewards of other people's dominance hierarchies without the inconvenience of conforming to them or competing in them.
Wrong again. What I'm asking for is for the power and dominance struggles to not carry down to the individual level. People competing for power can work well in a business. That doesn't mean a businessman should force himself sexually on a subordinate woman. There's people at work who tell me what to do. They pay me a good amount of money for the privilege, and don't try to dominate me in other ways. The company, BTW, has a market cap in the billions and had about 35% growth this quarter from 1Q 2017, and maintains high growth rates and profit margins, so it isn't exactly unsuccessful. I'm not trying to work my way up management, because I don't want to.
You erroneously believe that dominance, competition, and aggression are intrinsically bad
You erroneously believe I'm a straw man, apparently. You'd have a better chance in arguments if you addressed what I write, rather than what views you attribute to me out of ignorance. Dominance, competition, and aggression have their roles. They're harmful in families and friend networks.
Rhetorical trick? What would be the point? No, the reason why you don't understand me is because you are still steeped in the progressive mindset with its false and inconsistent assumptions about the world. That won't change until you actually start reading some conservative and libertarian writings with an open mind
Done that. Some of them have valid points, some are charmingly naive, some are useless. I've looked at the miserable intellectual mess Ayn Rand used as a philoso
Did the Steele dossier invent everything, or did it contain incriminating facts? Facts are facts regardless of the source.
Suppose one partisan source says politician X was caught doing illegal things with hamsters. Another different unreliable source says X is no longer allowed in pet stores. There's a bitter complaint from one vet. All of this is biased and untrustworthy, but if they're independent sources saying very roughly the same thing then there's reason to investigate further. That's all this is: reason to investigate further, not reason to file charges, and a FISA warrant shouldn't be made public, so there's not likely to be public consequences of the investigation. Law enforcement does a lot of investigating, and people in the field are used to unreliable information. As Ambrose Bierce pointed out, once a man starts murdering he will proceed to assault, and then to lying and cheating at cards.
Making up stuff out of whole cloth is not the mainstay of political campaigns (well, unless you're a current Republican, I guess). It's generally better to take actual things and exaggerate and slant them, and make a mountain out of a molehill if necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, huh? You're spinning theories that say there's dominance and hierarchy in hunter-gatherer bands, despite the fact that people who have actually looked at such bands report otherwise. It can give you objective answers. It's harder than in physics, because people and societies are really, really complex. Why don't you try to find actual observation of hunter-gatherer bands before making sweeping pronouncements about them? Your talk about evolutionary psychology is nothing but people looking at primate behavior and attempting to extend it to human behavior without actually looking at humans.
I said the sort of interactions we evolved doing break down. It is possible to run organizations on the basis of dominance, competition, and power struggles, but that's not a healthy environment. For example, hunter-gatherers do not get clinically depressed. Depression is a result of working in an unnatural manner like a dominance hierarchy.
Note that not all accusations in the #MeToo movement had any confirmation, and I'd bet that a fair number of them were women piling on people whose politics they didn't like. There are also hypocrites and people with good intentions and blind spots. Whether a man has been taught about "toxic masculinity" is not really relevant to what he does; whether he's been taught to respect people and not need to establish dominance in a small group is relevant.
They can be. The hierarchy of a company is ideally something different. I don't acknowledge dominance, I just do my job. It's other people's job to establish priorities and coordinate things. If the company attitude became toxic, I'd quit. So would most of the rest of the developers, particularly the good ones who can normally get other jobs. By fostering a sense of common purpose, and not saddling lower-level employees with extraneous crap, the company works very well. To put this another way, we're operating day-to-day without such hierarchies, interacting more as we evolved doing. The company does well by minimizing the hierarchy.
Really? I'm explaining my views as best I can, and I've considered them a lot. When did I deny a connection between neo-Marxism and whatever third-wave feminism is? I've been describing feminists I know and interact with. I don't remember making any claim about third-wave feminism. As far as neo-Marxism goes, there's people who believe in Marxism, just like there's people who believe in libertarianism. Both promise attractive societies, and neither of them actually work on any reasonable scale when applied to human beings.
Equal opportunity
I support equal opportunity, but I recognize we're not going to get it. I want more nearly equal opportunity. Government action can be very useful. Public schools are a function of government, for example, and pupils at bad schools don't have the same opportunity as students in good schools. This is a form of inequality of opportunity the government can address. Fair and equal treatment by society would be a good thing, but that's really beyond what a government can manage. Government action is a blunt instrument. Back in the sixties, government pushes towards fair and equal treatment were useful, since the inequalities were so strong. Nowadays, for most such purposes, it's inappropriate.
You probably aren't qualified to judge whether women grew up with more opportunities and privileges than you had, since it's really difficult to see and understand one's own privilege and compare it to others. I'm not real keen on government action in selectively opening up opportunities in general, since as far as I can see that's largely been accomplished.
Government interference can't force social equality for more reasons than lack of information. Government can limit your options in dealing with other people (it's illegal for me to shoot you under most circumstances), but it can't force attitudes. One of the big barriers to men becoming nurses is that lots of women are seriously uncomfortable with male nurses without a woman around, and that's not something that can be legislated away. It requires a cultural change.
I'm not trying to be evasive with the lack of opportunity. From what I've seen, women don't have the same opportunity as men to get into technical fields due to social factors that happen before maturity. I can't back that up very well, but if true it's an example of a fairly large-scale inequality of opportunity.
Okay. Pick one of your favorite directors. Now, do a slight reality shift and turn that director female, but still making the same movies. Would this woman now be one of your favorite directors, or would you relegate her to second tier? Go to a topless bar and pick out your favorite waitress. Now, do a slight reality shift and make her male, changing nothing except physiology. Would this person still be your favorite topless server?
I'm going to guess that women at topless bars are there because they're female, and so the customers can see boobs. This is a legitimate form of discrimination in a somewhat seedy occupation. Even if I were to lose my washtub abs, the employers wouldn't hire me for that role.
I'm also going to guess that movie-goers like movies made by some directors more than others (it's true in your case). These directors are favorites because they make movies people like. The role of director doesn't call for penises, vaginas, boobs, chest hair, etc. There's no good reason to think that a woman couldn't be a good director; indeed, you've said you've liked some movies from female directors. This indicates that the sex of the director doesn't normally affect what people judge the movie on.
So, invalid comparison.
It's another available campaign tactic. It is likely to prove at least somewhat useful in a few races. It's cheap, and it's at least a slight wedge between Republican congresscritters and most of the US public.
Nope. We're not at that level of detail yet.
Nope. We know that burning fossil fuels in cars causes a lot of external costs. We don't have a good grasp on what the costs are, but ignoring them completely because we can't know how much the costs are is worse than imposing reasonable costs to eliminate at least some of the externalities.
Burning gasoline in cars actually inflicts a lot of external costs on other people. Use some means to internalize the cost, and I'm happy to let the market sort itself out.
(One problem is that nobody has a good idea as to exactly what the externalities cost, but we can make estimates.
At the moment. The US used to be a net oil importer, and could be again.
The main reason for selling the credits is to let the market help allocate resources efficiently. If Tesla can do something good more cheaply than GM, then Tesla can make more money by doing the good and picking up payment from GM.
Tesla has been moving towards cheaper cars. They started with the luxury market, and are going for less and less expensive cars. Currently, they sell cars that are only moderately expensive. They're not going to drop the Model 3 just because they can make some money selling credits.
GM is going to try to make its cars cleaner, so they won't have to buy credits, or at least won't have to pay as much for them. GM cars are not directly killing people in the sense that you mean, and we simply don't have what we'd need to eliminate burning fossil fuel for transporation.
No, HornWumpus is correct in general. Companies won't pay an employee more than that employee is worth to the company (not outside management, anyway). They'll pay the minimum they can get away with, but not more than what the employee is worth.
Do you have a citation for that that won't fizzle out if I dig into it? Alternatively, how many welfare recipients have you known, and how varied were they?
Allowed to know the theory by whom? Such things do not stay secret. Eventually, someone would publish.
Ballistic missiles? Who's going to launch them? Presumably, any defenses in place would shoot at any rocket aimed at the US, no matter whether they're confirmed ICBMs or not. In any case, launching ICBMs at the US, and having them hit before the US reacts, is suicide. The US spends what it has to to maintain credible devastating second-strike capability.
Why would Trump shutting the government down reflect badly on the Democrats? The Republicans have both houses and the Presidency, and some Rs still have some faint sense of personal responsibility.
The Affordable Care act provided health insurance that tens of millions of people could afford. My best guess is that it had to do with the state governments, so governments that worked with the ACA got reasonably good results while governments that didn't got bad results, just as they wanted. I'm not saying it's a good system, because it isn't, but it helped lots of people.
As far as the Net Neutrality bill goes, it's going nowhere and so it doesn't really matter what it says. The purpose is to get names of people who are for or against NN and use that as a campaign issue.
A Democrat suggested doing a crappy thing. Democrats as a whole didn't go along. Then, Republicans decided to adopt that crappy thing.
(It isn't failure to endorse. The Senate has not confirmed all nominations. The issue is failure to even consider a nominee.)
It's a cheap way to generate issues to use against Republican Senators. Since the I is low, the ROI is likely to be reasonably high.
Which original purpose? The appropriate Federalist paper explained in detail why the EC would never vote for Trump, so any such purpose is no longer relevant (and hasn't been for a couple of centuries). Another original purpose, less publicized at the time, was to give slave states more say in picking the President. That's irrelevant now. Any other original purpose is speculative at best.
Really? I haven't noticed that on Amazon Prime, although to be honest we've been watching TV series more than movies.
1. I'm not saying that women are awesome (well, they are in some ways). I'm saying that there are women who are likely to be awesome in some field or other. In this case, I'm saying that it's easier for a man to become a director than for a woman to become a director. This means we're being unfair to women in general, and we're not getting as many good directors as we could be getting.
Big businesses tend to survive and make reasonable profits. Therefore, doing what everyone else does in fairly safe, and deviating is risky. (This is in contrast to startups, where doing what everyone else does gets the most common trajectory, which for startups is to fizzle out.) If everybody in Hollywood is trying out male directors rather than female, then trying out female ones is different and therefore risky. This is exacerbated by the agent problem, since what's good for the executive is not actually what's good for the business. It the exec takes a chance on a male director who turns out to be a dud, that's what happens. If the director is female, there's going to be thinking that the exec should have known better.
As far as marketing goes, we're in a period of transition. It wasn't that long ago that men were supposed to be in all the decision-making roles. It would take time for even the best marketing to overcome that.
2A. How much of an edge is it for a movie company to draw its directors from a larger talent pool? How does this compare to the effect of other business practices? How much would that raise profits? In some cases, it's quite an impact. In Major League Baseball, the Washington Senators started recruiting Cuban baseball players roughly around 1960, which meant that (as the Minnesota Twins starting in 1961) they had access to some very good players that other teams didn't at the time. In some cases, much less of an impact. Cuban baseball players and the iPod proved to be great successes. Drawing directors from a bigger talent pool might have a lot less impact.
2B. We're not talking about looking at women and picking out one who's going to be a great director. We're talking about expanding the prospect pool. Give one woman a million-dollar chance, and she might prove to be good enough to take further or she might not.
3A. Big inefficiencies break down eventually. It's harder to point to smaller inefficiencies, because they aren't as obvious. I took an example of a big one that eventually broke down, showing that it was seriously inefficient, and had lasted for decades. For a smaller one, consider industry handling of software developers. Typically, it's inefficient, despite the fact that resources on how to improve are widely available.
3B and 3C. I'm not claiming that middle management was useless. I'm claiming that its financial benefits for the company were a lot less than the expense. This is why I used an example that broke down, because otherwise it's a lot harder to demonstrate inefficiency.
Which, at least in this society, they do. Men and women have different experiences, Blacks and whites have different experiences. Art is heavily based on the experiences of the artist. A mix of races and genders is likely to produce diversity of experience, and hence diversity of art. (This is all statistical, of course. One group I was in for a while was academic - and, despite different genders and races and national origins, it felt really lacking in diversity.)
I'd have to see some really good evidence to believe different races were suited to different mental tasks. All the evidence I've seen for that has been seriously flawed. One of the big problems is in trying to keep other factors from interfering. As far as different genders, it's quite possible, on a statistical basis. I'd expect differences between individuals to be large compared to differences between genders or sexes (there is a difference). Again, it's extremely difficult to try to find what's social and what stems from biology (and, for that matter, exactly what that means).
I still appear to be solid. I think you mean that my argument would be hypocritical given the mistaken ideas you have about what I think and have said.
I find it entirely plausible that men and women tend to think differently and want different things. I also know that there are various sex-specific problems keeping men and women out of female- and male-dominated fields. So, while more women than men might want to be nurses, there are prejudices and discrimination against men trying to enter the field. In Utopia, it may well be that female nurses would outnumber male ones by a lot, but the disparity would be less than what we have now.
Therefore, equality of outcome is not actually desirable. What I want is equality of opportunity. However, equality of outcome is far easier to measure than equality of opportunity, and significantly unequal outcomes usually turn out to have restrictions on opportunities attached. Inequality of outcome can be used for probable cause, to use a legal analogy, but is insufficient to convict.
If you're looking for intellectual mismatches, consider transgender. People on the right tend to think that (a) men and women have different sorts of minds, and (b) gender is based on sex, and transgender people are mentally ill. People on the left tend to think that (a) men and women have more similar minds, and (b) gender can be independent of sex, and transgender people need to be treated as members of their chosen gender. (Yeah, I'm overgeneralizing like mad.) Being transgender is basically having a male body and female mind, or vice versa, so it depends on male and female minds being different. Those who believe they are should realize that there are screwups, if rare, in most human situations, so it's likely that a rare individual will have a body and mind that don't match.
Which means you're reasoning, not from facts, but from projections from what you erroneously think I think. Try again.
Perhaps. She didn't say. I'm using anecdotal evidence here. Do you have an anecdote that illustrates men not caring about a woman's appearance? Women in male-dominated fields seem to worry about their appearance in ways men don't. (I assume you have anecdotes about women caring about other women's appearances; those are easy to find.
Non sequitur. Gender bias is when one gender has more difficulties than another for some actions that don't depend on biology. If it costs money and effort for women authors to look acceptable at conventions than men, that's gender bias.
And then we hit your big fallacy: you're dividing humanity into two groups (and a few outliers) and treating people as members of their groups rather than individuals. If the proper way to judge a woman is to see how other women judge her, then the proper way to judge a redhead is to see how other redheads judge them, or left-handed people, or baseball fans....
The writer would like to change how urban fantasy and horror fans judge her, not how women judge her.
Your fallacy is in assuming that people prefer to watch movies directed by men instead of women. People prefer to watch movies they like, and (in my experience) typically don't give much attention to the director. They go to see the story, or the special effects, or the actual actors, or whatever. None of this is dependent on the director. A good director will normally make a much more enjoyable movie than a bad one, but that isn't inherently gender-based.
Directors have to start their careers somehow. They're not going to progress without being able to point to actual movies they've directed. Movies cost lots of money, so someone has to be willing to front lots of money to give a wannabe director a chance. If men get that financing more often than women do, then there will be more male directors than female, regardless of their respective merits.
The fact that a woman could be a famous scientist didn't mean that women were treated equally in the sciences. Despite Marie Curie, Emmy Noether wasn't necessarily allowed to schedule lectures under her own name. The fact that women aren't barred from X field entirely doesn't mean that there's any fairness in the treatment.
I pointed out a minor effect that's thoroughly nailed down. Most social science experiments are fuzzy. It's a very difficult field to be rigorous in. That one is clear-cut. It doesn't mean it's the only effect.
Or talk to people who are into anthropology, I guess. Hunter-gatherer bands do not generally have power hierarchies, despite whatever theoretical reasoning you can find. We pretty much evolved in hunter-gatherer bands. Them's facts. I got Sahln's "Stone Age Economics" pushed at me by people who know what they're talking about. We're closely related to chimpanzees and bonobos, but we're not them. There's differences. (It's conceivable that I'm wrong, but I've got solid sources and evidence saying that I'm not. Comparing anthropology to young-Earth creationism is stupid.)
The dominance complaints were largely about individual interactions. These take place in small groups, and so the hunter-gatherer results apply. What you seem to be saying implies that the unnatural function of humans in large groups poisons the small-group interaction we evolved with. This doesn't end well for the humans.
Human communities are generally larger than 150 people, and at that point the sorts of interactions we evolved doing break down. Some businesses thrive on low-hierarchy conditions where the people getting things done aren't in power struggles. Families are certainly small enough to function naturally, and lots of families that don't have internal power struggles or domination between husband and wife work very well.
Wrong again. What I'm asking for is for the power and dominance struggles to not carry down to the individual level. People competing for power can work well in a business. That doesn't mean a businessman should force himself sexually on a subordinate woman. There's people at work who tell me what to do. They pay me a good amount of money for the privilege, and don't try to dominate me in other ways. The company, BTW, has a market cap in the billions and had about 35% growth this quarter from 1Q 2017, and maintains high growth rates and profit margins, so it isn't exactly unsuccessful. I'm not trying to work my way up management, because I don't want to.
You erroneously believe I'm a straw man, apparently. You'd have a better chance in arguments if you addressed what I write, rather than what views you attribute to me out of ignorance. Dominance, competition, and aggression have their roles. They're harmful in families and friend networks.
Done that. Some of them have valid points, some are charmingly naive, some are useless. I've looked at the miserable intellectual mess Ayn Rand used as a philoso
I am serious.
Did the Steele dossier invent everything, or did it contain incriminating facts? Facts are facts regardless of the source.
Suppose one partisan source says politician X was caught doing illegal things with hamsters. Another different unreliable source says X is no longer allowed in pet stores. There's a bitter complaint from one vet. All of this is biased and untrustworthy, but if they're independent sources saying very roughly the same thing then there's reason to investigate further. That's all this is: reason to investigate further, not reason to file charges, and a FISA warrant shouldn't be made public, so there's not likely to be public consequences of the investigation. Law enforcement does a lot of investigating, and people in the field are used to unreliable information. As Ambrose Bierce pointed out, once a man starts murdering he will proceed to assault, and then to lying and cheating at cards.
Making up stuff out of whole cloth is not the mainstay of political campaigns (well, unless you're a current Republican, I guess). It's generally better to take actual things and exaggerate and slant them, and make a mountain out of a molehill if necessary.