Posted on 02/23/2006 4:37:38 PM PST by aculeus
After years of battling with Harvard's notoriously hard-left arts-and-sciences faculty, Lawrence H. Summers has admitted defeat. He was forced out of his position as president of Harvard University despite overwhelming support from the faculty at other Harvard schools, as well as from the university's undergraduate students and alumni.
[snip]
The Washington Post editorialized that Summers's defeat might "demoralize" other outspoken academics who, like Summers, dare to challenge the reigning orthodoxies of political correctness. Apparently, even mentioning doubts (not defending them, mind you) about whether men and women are exactly identical except for a few superficial reproductive differences will not be tolerated. Are there few women Nobel laureates in physics? It must be due strictly to sex discrimination and pervasive societal misogyny. The editors of the Post need not have used the potential mood. The demoralization, and the silencing, has already set in.
Just a few weeks ago, the U.K. Telegraph revealed that the prestigious journal Science had, just before press time, decided not to publish an essay it had earlier accepted by a molecular biologist and Royal Society fellow Peter A. Lawrence. The essay made exactly the same assertions that Summers had gotten into trouble for making last year. [snip]
Fortunately, the Public Library of Science, an online journal, picked up Lawrence’s article, which reads, in part, as follows:
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0040019
Lay down with dogs, you get fleas.
I think the real problem is exposed in the article I posted:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1584203/posts
It's bad enough to offend feminists, but when you start telling tenured professors they have to justify their research, and start teaching a few classes, why, dammee, it's too bad!
"What happened to Larry Summers is a travesty. I am a woman and agree with the comments that got him into trouble. I don't know when this kind of thing is gong to end, but it's got to at some point. There are just certain groups of people in this country one cannot offend, however slightly."
I have been saying for years now that "Political Science is Junk Science."
All the Junk Science I'm aware of is certainly political; feminism, enviromentalism, and scores of other things of a like nature.
Problem is Junk science is being employed for junk legislation and court decisions.
My old pappy, God rest his soul these past many decades, told me during WWII that the worst mistake we ever made was giving women the vote. I thought he was way off the beam then, because I was young and inexperienced. Now I know my old pappy was right.
The women's vote brought us Prohibition and the decay of our law and respect for it. It brought us women legislators, and God forbid, the possibility of someone like Hillary to grabbing the golden ring of the presidency.
Afterall, it was the women's vote and much, much more that brought Christine Gregoire into theWashingrton State governor's chair, Patty Murray and Late Count Maria Cantwell to the other Washington, and a legislature full of feminists and feminized men, or whatever flags they run under.
So, my old pappy was right: listen to yours
He thought the problems began with among other things, women going out to work in WWII and remaining there.
I agree with him that it took the focus off family life and children.
Of course, Liberalism began in many ways to affect our daily way of life after WWII.
There was an excellent television show, only on for two seasons called, "Homefront" which depicted the above very well.
I can't agree that women shouldn't have the right to vote. Most women, when they are as well-informed as men, tend to vote the way men do. I'll be happy to compare my voting decisions to any man's any day, and be willing to bet they'd measure up.
Right now only men are required by law to register for the draft. If they don't they face up to 5 years imprisonment and a 100,000 dollar fine. Although these extreme measures have rarely been used, a young man who refuses to register loses access to a host of grants, aid, loans, etc. that are automatically available to all women without suffering the (very real these days) risk of being called to serve.
I have no problem with drafting only men when the need arises, but why should men suffer the stick without the carrot? How bad would it be for you personally to give up the vote at the national level? The chance of your individual vote ever making a difference in a presidential election is certainly less than the chance of a young man being drafted into service and killed. And dying is certainly a lot worse than not voting.
Remember, men as a class suffer the risk of being drafted, women do not. Based on past U.S. history, this risk of being drafted to one's death is random but very real. How real? Let's say something like one half to one million men have died in military service over the last sixty years or so. That very roughly comes out to ten thousand deaths per year.
Those death are born on average by the one half to two million men who come of age each year. Let's use one million to make the math easy. One million divided by ten thousand comes out to one percent. True, this number includes men pressured by society into volunteering as well as those who did it for selfish reasons (e.g. just to get a college education - nothing wrong with that, BTW).
All men are required by law to register for the draft, essentially a death lottery where each player has a one out of hundred chance of "winning", this is, loosing his life. Women simply don't share this risk or anything comparable. You look me straight in the internet eyeball and type to me that it won't be almost exclusively men doing the real fighting and dying when the next big war comes along. The stick society applies to men is very real. Where is the carrot?
Women who have actually served in the military have earned their national voting rights, IMO. As for the rest, let them put a one or two hundred chamber revolver with one round in it to their heads, spin and pull. If they survive, they get to vote for president. Is your vote worth that much to you? It is for men.
And don't even talk to me about women earning their voting rights by bearing and raising children - not at all comparable. Only about three hundred women die in or of childbirth in America each year and none of those were conscripted into birthing babies for their country. Almost all U.S. women have children for purely family centric selfish reasons (nothing wrong with that - it's just in no way comparable to military duty). Women choose to have families precisely because it is its own reward. You get back to me when the government starts requiring women to register for mandatory duty in the National Birthing Service or in the Concubine Corps to support our servicemen.
It is true that at this moment in history our armed forces are all volunteer, but men and women volunteers neither bear an equal risk nor are rewarded in proportion to the risks they do bear. As it stands, even though over 80 percent of the military is now wide open to women, women comprise only 15 percent of enlistments and fill only 2 percent of the body bags coming home from Iraq. That amounts to a thousand or so women whose lives have been spared by men dying in their stead - and this is almost the way it should be (no women should be put in harm's way, IMO).
Actually there is one exception to this that I would love to see - a bunch of whiny, "died" in the wool feminist harpies living up to that name. :)
The feminist women of this country would gain a valuable perspective on citizenship if they had to face the very real prospect being called to give their lives for their country, even if most of them never actually ended up getting shot at.
Women are not interchangeable for men. The end station of our country's current course of feminist folly would be a law that mandated the creation (via a female only draft if necessary) of a completely separate all female military - female troops, female officers, female generals - no men at all. Equipment would be specified by and for women. Guns could be smaller, etc. All the rules would be made by women for women, but the only immutable rule would be that the female corps would have to take on (separately, of course) enough difficult and dangerous assignments to fill as many body bags as the men. (I wonder then if women would choose to let their fellow soldiers shirk their duty by getting themselves pregnant as is now the case?)
It is because women as a group do not (and should not) carry an equal share of the burdens of national citizenship, that women should not have the right to directly participate (vote, run for office, etc.) in national politics (state and local, yes, but not at the national level), IMO.
Again, why should men have to put up with all stick and no carrot? It's either time for men to start handing out white feathered[1] draft notices to the little ladies or for our pampered princesses to act like real ladies and acknowledge and justly compensate (with law, not just lip) the greater sacrifices of men.
___________________
[1] During WW1 British women, safe from death in the trenches themselves, routinely goaded and shamed young British men into enlisting (and getting killed) by presenting them with the symbol of cowardice, the white feather.
Women historically have taken on burdens which men do not. And nature has given them the responsibility of bearing and birthing children, and in most instances women have more of the responsibility for raising them. This reality gives them equal rights of citizenship and more than entitles them to the right to vote. And one shouldn't forget, that many women have sacrificed the lives of sons and husbands to their country at great hardship and personal cost.
Your anger at all women for feminism is most transparent.
The above sentence should read like the one below.
"There have been several elections in recent history, which reveal how important each VOTE is."
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