Abortion and authoritarianism: Why women’s freedom threatens male supremacy
The notion that men are superior to women is the root of all human inequality. That’s why we must fight it
By ROBERT S. MCELVAINE
I didn’t even bother to read this piece.
I know people who have worked with/for Enoch Powell, for Bill Gates. The thing both have told me is that it was scary being in the room with someone so obviously, viciously, intelligent. That three steps ahead in the 4D chess game.
That inequality of outcome in life depends upon the fact that men consider themselves superior to women – something which isn’t true, either in fact or as a belief, obviously – is just so stupid that only a progressive could believe it.
Me, I blame those soy-caused noodle arms which make the bearer incapable of picking up logic.
Just as an aside, it also doesn’t get you laid Robert. Swaggering around with pecs and a bulge is still what achieves that.
At a time when right-wing extremists are hellbent on making American states — or, as many intend the whole nation — into the fictional Republic of Gilead
Holy shit, they wish.
Margaret Atwood’s rapey stealth knickersoaker would be a far sexier outcome than the average outcome for ageing liberals: dying alone, fat and unloved, except by poor Mr Tibbles, who is forced to subsist on the corpse.
How much of leftwing politics is just outwardly projected sexual frustration that the rightwing is never the unapologetic fascist bastard leather daddy lefties secretly yearn for?
“Ooh, that’s racist.”
“scary being in the room with someone so obviously, viciously, intelligent”
I think it would be really invigorating to work with someone who functions at that level (leaving aside the question of whether that is/was really true of Gates or Powell). Throw an idea at them, get it bounced back from all sorts of angles that you’d never considered, learn things from every interaction, and also influence them in the process. Bring it on!
As for Powell, I see him as the right’s equivalent to Tony Benn. Two self-indulgent posh windbags who elevated ideological purity over political effectiveness, were rather too fond of their own voices, and who would probably have been both happier and more useful as eccentric dons in one of the older Oxford or Cambridge colleges.
“As for Powell, I see him as the right’s equivalent to Tony Benn. Two self-indulgent posh windbag”: you could scarcely be more wrong.
Nothing posh about Powell: joined up as a private, ended the war as a Brigadier. And bright as buttons: I saw him get a hall full of cocky undergraduates eating out of his hand by deploying intelligence, courtesy, and charisma. What a waste the end of his political career was.
Benn was a dim child of privilege. Too dim even to be of interest to the KGB, apparently.
I realised that “older” might be a bit ambiguous in my previous comment, considering just how old many Oxford and Cambridge colleges are. To be clear, I meant older in soul, the kind of places where time and ivy hangs heavy, much like the food at High Table, and M. R. James will be reading a new ghost story at Whitsuntide while a Douglas Adams character tinkers with his time machine. That’s the world in which characters like Powell and Benn belong.
“Just as an aside, it also doesn’t get you laid Robert.”
Ah, but it does. It allows one to get close enough to roofie a drink.
Cover your drink and never be alone with a guy who says he’s a feminist ally.
@dearieme – “What a waste the end of his political career was.”
Having read about his Hola massacre speech (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enoch_Powell#Hola_Massacre_speech) which seems to be full of modern advocacy of equality, I wonder what happened to lead to his disastrous change of heart.
My maths tutor was of similar (possibly higher – I was not intelligent enough to measure it) intelligence but gently so: hence it wasn’t scary albeit occasionally embarrassing.
But Tim’s core point remains: inequality exists and is real and unrelated to any views about gender inequality. Do they claim that Usain Bolt only beats the top women over 200m because they believe men are superior?