I thought this bijoux little commentette of mine to my post demanding reparations be paid to women, a reply to an irritating factual objection from running dog of the neoliberal neopatriarchy Tim Worstall, was rather good in the insane troll logic line:
Tim Worstall,
“As it happens the majority of wealth is held by women (longer life spans and inheritance etc to blame for that), so, on average women are richer than men.”
You just don’t understand.
Clearly it is a benefit to receive money (such as reparations) without having to work for it.
Therefore possession of whatever quality makes one eligible for reparations is a form of unearned privilege.
Relative group poverty is by definition the result of past injustice, and makes your group eligible for reparations.
Therefore you males, by your relative poverty, are the possessors of unearned privilege.
Therefore it is only justice that you privileged ones make reparations to those like me who are underprivileged.
(Standing orders and direct debits payable to the Natalie Solent Justice for Womyn Settlement Account.)
However Beatrix Campbell has me beat:
Crime is only “free trade” by another means, and since it involves force, it is not free.
Wasn’t Campbell behind the ritual satanic abuse nonsense? If so, why do really, really stupid leftists never fade away? [If not, ignore this comment].
Yes, she was.
At least two of the commenters to the Guardian article question Beatrix Campbell’s credibility and link to this November 1990 article by Campbell in Marxism Today: Seen But Not Heard, and, unusually for references to BC’s past as one the main witch-hunters in Britain, the comments have not yet been deleted, perhaps because the link is to her own words.
Crime is simply non-traditional economics! What is all the fuss about?
“Relative group poverty is, by definition, the result of past injustice”.
There it is – the central LIE upon which the edifice of Social Justice (and its subsets, “racial justice”, “gender justice”, “third world justice” and so on) is based.
If I were a woman, I think I would be rather offended by the suggestion that I could not succeed with the welfare state to support me.
I quite enjoyed the unintended irony – or perhaps revealed truth – of Mz Campbell’s world:
“Therefore possession of whatever quality makes one eligible for reparations is a form of unearned privilege.”
“Eligible” for reparations? Therefore, taxable, and subject to regulation, by virtue of the US “Interstate Commerce” Clause.
As far as I know, in the US, “what an astonishingly ignorant cunt who lost her dictionary but kept her “philosophy” thesaurus” , we’ll call it “The proposed cultural appropriation expansion of the intellectual (look that word up) penis tax”, is currently only collectable from ALL American males upon their 18th birthday, OR from the cismale subset, in “special” family court, with “special” rules of evidence.
Efforts to expand the penis Tax, through “higher” education, are called Title IX, and otherwise rfered to as “Dear Colleague, college girls are entitled to “special” rules of evidence”, in “special” college courts, by folks with “special” exemption from traditional venues, OR “license”, recognizing competence in practicing jurisprudence, previously subject to actual criminal courts, defense counsel, rules of evidence, malpractice penalties, and rarely prosecuted “false witness”/slander/liable consequences.
For rather obvious reasons, this reminds me of the Jennifer Lawrence character in American Hustle (the wife of the Christian Bale character).
Just wanted to say that it was a relief to see that movie.
Somewhere in my subconscious there was the nagging fear that people argued like that only against me. (And why do people have it in for me???)
Now the fear gone.
In her famous Marxism Today article (referenced by Natalie, above), Beatrix Campbell wrote:
“Behind the Nottingham case is an inability to imagine that ‘satanic’ practices actually happen. But why? The secularism of our society is infused by ambiguous tendencies toward transcendental powers which ought to help us think afresh. Hands up all those who never look for their horoscope when they find Woman’s Own at the doctor’s. When we do that, aren’t we searching beyond self-made destiny? Don’t most sizeable towns have New Age shops and alternative networks which inhabit the boundary between the material and the mystical? Search any record shop and won’t you find pseudo-satanic heavy metallers? All this stuff is inside our society. And should we be surprised? Isn’t politics itself a wish to transcend the limits of the self by the strength not of the cosmic but by civic collectivity?”
Within the neoliberal neopatriarchal agenda, isn’t there a neosatanist angle somewhere, waiting to be explored?
First, Huzzahs to Mr. Worstall, for his impeccable logic. *applause*
– – – –
2. While Ms. Campbell doesn’t address the alleged pay gap between the earnings of men and of women in the U.S., what I have read is that when you measure like hours as well as like work, women are in fact better-paid here than are men.
3. It’s often pointed out that motherhood tends to slow down or fully to arrest the woman’s climb up the career ladder, since the prime years for both are the same and the expectation that the career-builder will put 80 hours/week into the career work is impossible. To correct Helen Gurley Brown (Helen? Ellen? Sigh…): Honey, you can’t have it all. Somewhere some aspect of your life is going to get short shrift. Of course, you can always kid yourself about it. Or maybe you neither notice nor care about the loss. But time is a limited resource, and time = money, so sorry. So to complain about this fact of reality as part of the Oppression by the Patriarchy is to confuse the Rule of Reality with the Rule of Men.
I do trust that all of the arch-feminists who clearly infest Samizdata (including the Patriarchs) understand that when I say “career” I use the narrow sense of the word. If your “career” is homemaking and child-rearing, well, that’s no career at all. It’s simple slavery is wot it is. (Out of people’s tender sensibilities, I refrain from quoting the actual quote. :>) )
4. Anyway, the economics is screwy even on Miz Campbell’s terms. If a woman’s career is held back because of her (uncoerced, save by her own conscience or net preferences) involvement with homely affairs, she is also paid for the latter work in the form of bread and board, and certain types of entertainment generally considered a non-negligible part of the job’s Benefits Package. (Yes, yes, I know I know. Who’s telling this story, you or me?)
5. As far as issues such as murder for the breaching of social edicts in India, and in many Muslim, and African countries***, the version of feminism that fights against those is the right kind of feminism. Unfortunately, to insinuate that “globalisation,” the existence of many multi-national companies, is responsible for them is ridiculous.
The same holds for the preferential abortion of girl-babies and other physical mistreatments of women and girls, by law. As in China.
***Such things should NEVER be referred to “honour killings” since they are clearly MURDER and having nothing whatsoever to do with honour, no matter how far you stretch the term. In fact “honour killing” or even “honour murder” degrades the word “honour” and makes it all the easier to twist, so that people can talk about all sorts of wrongdoing and call them “honourable.” In short, such usages give “honour” a bad name. (And help leftist propaganda against various honourable people and professions, such as military service per se. So that societies that do honour them can be pointed to as examples of societies that “honour” evil.)
– – – –
It’s not that all these counter-arguments prevail even throughout the U.S., let alone the Western World. But I just don’t see that on the whole women here are so much worse off than men work-wise. I’ve even read lately, though I have terrible trouble remembering just WHERE I’ve read things that turn out to matter, that the “glass ceiling” here at least is long since shattered and that many businesses actually prefer women for upper-level management, including as CFO’s, COO’s, CEO’s….
This is interesting. I have no idea what Ms. Campbell’s Marxism article says, what its thrust or thesis or conclusion is, nor the context of the quote by Alex Cull (let alone anything about Nottingham and Satanic Abuse scandals).
But leaving aside the first two sentences, the paragraph quoted seems perfectly accurate to me: Basically, the advent of Secularist ideologies as predominant over traditionally-religious ones doesn’t satisfy a normal (i.e., commonly-found) human interest in (or even desire for) the mystical, so the door is open for some other, possibly unhealthy, possibly evil, courtship of mystical forces.
I don’t see what’s so awful about that hypothesis. In fact she strikes me in that para. as being a pretty good observer.
Of course, it’s one thing to entertain the possibility that some one particular case actually is Satanic Abuse is quite different from the argument that R.S.A. is rampant in Arsisiety (or Britsisiety) and must be Stamped Out Now. And maybe that’s her point. I wouldn’t know.
Heck, reading the first little bit of her article pertinent to Feminism, I thought maybe she was writing tongue-in-cheek, somewhat in the manner of Natalie only not as well. Disappointed again….
My wife earns more than me. Good on her. We like share things being like married. The president of Burundi earns more than me. I am not claiming poverty here just that divvying us up is pointlessly divisive. Oddly enough many years ago I read the highest earning group in the UK (certainly London – it was in the Standard) was black african women. Note not Afro-Carribbean. Odd, but there you go. It is probs a bit like a post I did at Cats way back about Israeli fighter pilots having considerably more girls than boys. You take a small group from a large one and you can “prove” anything. I mean what proportion of Israelis are fighter pilots? Exactly.
The post is called “The IAF like girls”.
Am I the only one who thinks Beatrix is a woman balancing a pint pot on her head?
I’ll get my coat.
Nick,
1) Thanks for the ref. I gots to read that.
2) Beatrix, pots, head, pot-hed, Potter, Peter Rabbit. Oh, surely not!
3) Girls, IAF, fighter pilots, marriage-divvying: Please don’t raise the tone by dragging sense into the discussion.
4) If your wife’s earning more than you, she’s a traitor to the Feminist Cause*. She has let down all the Sisterhood. I hope you and she are very happy together.
*Variety PC. There are other varieties less invasive and pernicious, of course. I hope she has no truck with those….
On of my remark at 10:24 p.m.: I wrote,
I meant “accurate” in its reportage of observations: lots of us do check out the horoscope if we’re stuck in a place where it’s there to be read (which might say more about the paucity of interesting reading material, of course); New Age shops are (or were) “on every corner” and some still are, even in these recessively depressive times; as for “pseudo-satanic heavy metallers,” either they’re a bad joke or they’re disgusting, and they hurt my ears, and either way it’s an apt description, if you ask me; and so on.
Now as to whether Ms. Campbell’s conjecture to explain the observations is sewing a vest onto a button, as Mr. Erle Stanley Gardner used to say, that is another matter entirely.
Natalie, I do apologize. I just didn’t properly register your introduction to your wondrous “commentette.”
The huzzahs I handed to Mr. Worstall at 10:04 p.m., May 26, are rightfully yours, since you are the genius who produced the hilariously impeccable, or impeccably hilarious, logic.
Once again, Brava!
PS. Are you sure you’re not a mathematician? 🙂
JnC: “2. While Ms. Campbell doesn’t address the alleged pay gap between the earnings of men and of women in the U.S., what I have read is that when you measure like hours as well as like work, women are in fact better-paid here than are men.” – See here, or, for a source slightly more credible than HuffPo, here.
Plamus, normally I pass HuffPo without even swerving, but in this case the piece is from Christina Hoff Sommers, far more credible than their usual left-minded commentators. A good find; thanks.
That was my second click. First I went to the WSJ, but it’s a Subscribers-only piece.
However, that particular headline and what they do show you look awfully familiar. I think I must have seen it copied somewhere.
Thank you very much for confirming what I thought I remembered, partially at least. It’s nice not to have to retract. :>))
. . .
Continuing, the full WSJ article is presented at
http://www.aei.org/article/economics/the-77-cents-on-the-dollar-myth-about-womens-pay/
at no charge.
Dr. Walter Williams also has a short piece entitled “Wage Discrimination,” about the dreadful wage rates for women. (It even touches on the “age-ist” claims, and how youth are discriminated against.) He’s not arguing whether there’s a pay difference, let alone how much it is, but rather making a few points on comparing apples and oranges when talking about “pay gaps.” And at the end, he reaches an astonishing conclusion. My goodness, what a suggestion!
Be it known, I’m a fan of Dr. Williams. :>)
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/04/walter-e-williams/discrimination-against-white-people/
JnC, I really like Williams. Did you ever see this?
http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/wew/WalterWilliamsAmnestyProclamation.pdf
Ms Campbell is a shrewd operator in the market place.
While millions of women work hard at demanding jobs in schools, shops, hospitals and factories she has made a good living selling her twaddle to various newspapers, magazines and broadcasters.
Dom, a witty and gracious gentleman indeed. The Proclamation deserves to be framed and hung upon the walls of all Americans of European, African, or other ancestry.
Thank you much! :>))