Blog description.

Accentuating the Liberal in Classical Liberal: Advocating Ascendency of the Individual & a Politick & Literature to Fight the Rise & Rise of the Tax Surveillance State. 'Illigitum non carborundum'.

Liberty and freedom are two proud words that have been executed from the political lexicon: they were frog marched and stood before a wall of blank minds, then forcibly blindfolded, and shot, with the whimpering staccato of ‘equality’ and ‘fairness’ resounding over and over. And not only did this atrocity go unreported by journalists in the mainstream media, they were in the firing squad.

The premise of this blog is simple: the Soviets thought they had equality, and welfare from cradle to grave, until the illusory free lunch of redistribution took its inevitable course, and cost them everything they had. First to go was their privacy, after that their freedom, then on being ground down to an equality of poverty only, for many of them their lives as they tried to escape a life behind the Iron Curtain. In the state-enforced common good, was found only slavery to the prison of each other's mind; instead of the caring state, they had imposed the surveillance state to keep them in line. So why are we accumulating a national debt to build the slave state again in the West? Where is the contrarian, uncomfortable literature to put the state experiment finally to rest?

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Showing posts with label Feminism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Feminism. Show all posts

Monday, April 20, 2015

Gender Pay Gap [Questions Thereto] | Mansplaining Rodney Hide’s Herald Piece on Paul Henry.



By dint of being a classical liberal, hence an individualist, I am a feminist, married to a very individualistic classical liberal, career feminist. I advocate for the individualist ethic of classical liberalism because only in that will the free (and prosperous) society be founded. The enemy of that freedom is the unbounded statism that has overthrown the West, ironically via the emoting booth, funded by the tax surveillance state. One of the bastions of statism has become identity politick feminism, also called Marxist feminism, and thus my regular - reflecting now regular MSM reportage -  attacks against that tyrannical liturgy foundered too often on falsehoods. On the current course we are not many years from state enforced public (certainly) and private sector gender work place quotas. The following Twitter feed is but one example of how you must always dig deeper into assumptions and statistics.

Note I don’t cite the below Twitter timeline to ‘get at’ respondent Marianne. She’s great, albeit unfollowing me on this. [I will defend my principles until proven wrong by reality; unlike Progressives, sadly – and this is part of the problem – who too soon disengage when their mantras are questioned, either leaving the fray, as Marianne did, or much worse, goose-stepping off to advocate the ban and the boycott, or trotting out that offensive word which overuse has rendered useless; misogynist.] I post the following only because it explicates the theme of this post, being what I think is the massaged wonk behind the statistics being used in the current gender pay gap debate, and, as with the climate change debate, the wholesale unthinking, uncritical buy-in to the agenda of the identity politick by those who are intelligent enough to know better. This post is also, as will become plain, a request for anecdotal information please.

This is the first part of the timeline:












Before moving on that link is important, although there is now a better source here. Senior Fellow in Political Economy and editor at large of The Independent Review, Robert Higgs’s piece is worth quoting directly, my highlighting:


The quality of economic journalism in the United States is terrible. Day after day, journalists write about the causes and consequences of economic conditions and events without understanding the underlying economics of the situation, and their articles are, as a rule, simply bunk. Here is an example.

I have not examined the actual report whose findings are described in the article, but I am familiar with many studies of the same question that economists have conducted over the years. Moreover, I myself have made many applied econometric studies in a variety of areas, and I know how delicate the findings of such studies are to a variety of details—sample period, sample size, sampling method, data collection details, model specification, estimation methods, and so forth. I know, too, that the best studies—those with the best data, most sensible model specification, and most exhaustive set of controls—have found virtually no difference in the amounts that men and women are paid for doing the same work. The key is “doing the same work,” which is another way of saying “providing equally valuable services to the employer” in the sense of adding equally to the employer’s net income.

[Snip.]

In sum, the so-called gender gap is almost certainly a myth, a persistent misapprehension kept alive by leftists—feminist ideologues and politicians posturing as special friends of women—who wish to use the power of government to benefit members of their political constituency. If employers truly discriminate between equally value-productive male and female employees, however, they do so only in cases that are few and transitory, because the systematic, persistent conduct of such discrimination is inconsistent with everything we know about how people make decisions in labor markets and about what we presume business owners in general are trying to do, namely, make profits.


It’s worth reading the whole piece, but I bet that goes against the perceived reality most readers will have on the gender pay gap. Noting I view Higgs as authoritative. From this, to the second part of the Twitter timeline, and my request for anecdotal information please:













Marianne never did confirm she knew of a single case of a female employee receiving less in the same job, same employer. Nor did David Farrar. I repeat I know of no case. And more than that, I professionally have a lot of farming clients; especially when a young farming couple are starting out, off-farm wages are often required. In every case I can think of it’s the female spouse who does the off-farm work, not for any type of sexist reason, but because the female is indubitably better qualified, and can command a higher wage off-farm than the male spouse could.

So, comments are open, I don’t moderate or edit in any way, a respect you won’t see on many statist blogs. Can anyone cite actual New Zealand examples of what would be a true gender pay gap, please: male/female in same job, same employer, paid unequally.

***

While on this topic, Rodney Hide’s Herald piece from this weekend weighing into (New Zealand's) Equal Employment Opportunities Dr Jackie Blue’s decision to publicly scold breakfast TV broadcaster Paul Henry on his Hilliary Clinton comments was spot on. Dr Blue is a tax payer funded identity politick agent shoved down the necks of those of us who know better and are forced to pay for her commissariat. Henry’s remarks were not sexism – judge for yourself:


Henry had said in regard to Hillary Clinton's run for the White House: "Why, if feminism has come so far, does she feel the need to highlight the fact that she's a woman?

"Shouldn't she be selling herself on the fact that she's the best person, the right person, for the job, no matter what her sex?"

Henry also noted other high-profile females had "fallen into the same trap", including Helen Clark in her bid to become Secretary-General of the United Nations.


I’ve written what I think of this tactic so shamelessly being used by Clinton here: let’s not mistake criticism with persecution. Hide makes an exemplary point (my inserted comment in orange):


Henry has a good point. The feminist complaint was "jobs for the boys". The argument was women shouldn't be excluded because they're women. But the argument has become that women must be selected because they are women. [Unless, it’s worthy of note, those women are Margaret Thatcher or Sarah Palin, apparently - and that because this is a Progressive agenda, there being the rub.] Clinton and Clark have replaced sexism with reverse sexism.

Blue declared Henry wrong. "Feminism hasn't come further than Hillary Clinton and Helen Clark, feminism will only ever go as far as they and other women go."

I have wrapped my head in a wet towel, meditated for two days, and still don't know what she is saying.


Of course Hide was castigated on Twitter for mansplaining, but as I’ve always found, those who toss that term around so liberally do so because they don’t have the wherewithal to debate content (after they've normally dropped context). Retorting with ‘mansplaining’ is that Progressive tactic of soft censorship they try on first, able to rely on null-think from the neophytes, before they then go to the full ban and boycott approach and the fist of government, that is, mandatory quotas. Pfui!

I have no clue what Blue is on about in that ‘feminism hasn’t come further than Hillary Clinton and Helen Clark’ sentence either, given Helen Clark was Prime Minister of New Zealand for nine years; perhaps a radfem could inane-splain it to me, but as for my tax money being used so Nanny Blue can monitor breakfast television for thought crimes, bugger off with that, I'll take a refund please.

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Tuesday, April 14, 2015

Hilliary Clinton and Misogyny. Careful Confusing Criticism with Persecution.



Unfortunately the oeuvre of this Seattle Times piece is how the next US presidential race is already derailed as far as politics serving a nation is concerned:


America soon will decide whether to elect its first female president. And amid a techno-media landscape where the wall between private vitriol and public debate has been reduced to rubble, New York Sen. Hillary Clinton is facing an onslaught of open misogynistic expression.


At this early stage I can mainly see the flip side of misogyny - which is the same thing - on my Twitter timeline; namely, identity politickers holding forth Clinton’s importance being (only) vote the first female president in; worse, this a slogan I’ve seen Clinton using herself as an opening gambit, so from the get-go cheapening her campaign to the political shallows. It’s a premise founded on ‘vote for a woman, any woman, just because …’ regardless of merits - when this particular woman has huge demerits starting with misremembering thus untrustworthiness, and with something much more troubling flowing from the violence and murder in Benghazi. Worse, such a platform quickly closes down necessary political debate, because its proponents in the next stride then assert that any criticism of her must arise from a deep-seated misogyny; for them there can be none of that criticism vital for a healthy democracy, because they view all criticism as persecution. This is the same agenda that has turned university campuses from the hotbed and passion of ideas and student anti-authoritarianism to ‘safe places’ where the little dears can’t have their feelings hurt.

To date I’ve not seen a single overt example of misogyny directed toward Clinton’s presidential campaign, only deserved criticism based on the facts arising from her political career.

If Americans let Generation Airhead’s identity politick desire for an identity ‘first’ decide this presidency, then they are beyond the slippery slope of Obama’s socialism to the next level of human hell. And given America’s place in the world, so, therefore, is the world.

This US election, like every other election, is about up versus down, freedom versus the continuing goose-step via the emoting booth into the nanny-hug of a Western big brother statism that suffocates individual volition, and with that, an individual's safety from a state that is no longer benign.

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Sunday, January 12, 2014

[Reality Edition.] Thinking Not Feeling; Fall of France & US; Rape Culture and Identity Politics - Intermission.


The economic woes of Europe and the US are in no way solved, they’re growing, for reality hasn’t finished with socialism yet: not by a long way. 



On September 6, 2012, I penned a blog on how our freedom was being daily suffocated under that socialist fallacy of feeling about issues, rather than thinking them through. Good to see one of the world’s great thinkers agrees:





Talking about feeling on issues rather than thinking them through, New Zealand’s previous Revenue Minister, Peter Dunne, has again highlighted the contradiction of those statists residing in the Fortress of Legislation - and those who support the system they have come to represent - whom have destroyed the Free West. After Christmas Peter posted a link to, of all things, Edward Snowden’s Christmas message about the onslaught of the Western surveillance state. I can never let this double-standard, especially from a former Minister of Taking and the tax surveillance state, go unchallenged.







Of course there was to be no answer. But just as this ex-minister is determined to try and live in the delusion of contradiction, President Hollande of France is determined to show the world the destruction wrought by that Left delusion of feeling a country can live on theft of an individual’s hard-gained earnings, in order a socialist elite can feel good about itself. With that country’s national debt now on 93.4% of GDP, not only are the wowser socialists deliberately destroying their wine industry, but the entire economy. France is on the brink, again, and will most likely fall, again, as those who could save it, the wealth creators, are thinking logically, and prudently escaping with their families and loved ones from the vicious tax surveillance state that Hollande has forced on them:


Since the arrival of Socialist President François Hollande in 2012, income tax and social security contributions in France have skyrocketed. The top tax rate is 75 percent, and a great many pay in excess of 70 percent.

As a result, there has been a frantic bolt for the border by the very people who create economic growth - business leaders, innovators, creative thinkers, and top executives. They are all leaving France to develop their talents elsewhere.

And it's a tragedy for such a historically rich country. As they say, the problem with the French is they have no word for entrepreneur. Where is the Richard Branson of France? Where is the Bill Gates?

"Do you see that man in the corner? I'm going to kill him. He's ruined my life!"

This angry outburst came from a lawyer friend who is leaving France to move to Britain to escape the 70 percent tax he pays. He says he is working like a dog for nothing - to hand out money to the profligate state. The man he was pointing to, in a swanky Japanese restaurant in the Sixth Arrondissement, is Pierre Moscovici, the much-loathed minister of finance. Moscovici was looking very happy with himself. Does he realize Rome is burning?

 

The economic woes of Europe and the US are in no way solved, they’re growing, for reality hasn’t finished with socialism yet: not by a long way. This is further proven by the US’s jobs-to-population ratio stuck at the lowest levels in a generation, despite a US$878 billion fiat money stimulus, that forms no part of a laissez faire capitalism.



Reality, as the saying goes, is a harsh mistress. Although that’s probably sexist, if deconstructed, isn’t it?

Coincidentally, I'm currently working on a piece about rape culture feminism; an -ism based on identity rather than individualism. My thinking has changed on this, from an initial unthinking feeling of a rape culture as correct, as given to me by the media, to a questioning of the underlying assumptions of a rape culture premise based on distorted, and distorting, views of human relations. Readers of this blog will know from my posts over the latter part of 2013, this topic has become increasingly important to me, as it should be to all of us who dream of the free, civilised society. For this is the further inveigling of neo-Marxist brutishness into the lives of individuals: radio announcers Willie Jackson and John Tamihere were silenced by a rape culture seeking not dialectic, but vengeance. I will show it is quite possible these two men were fired from their show for merely doing their jobs - running a talkback show: talking to callers; questioning callers; bringing items of public interest up for debate. But rape culture feminism, in a move pregnant with symbolism, found them guilty in the questioning, so went for the boycott in a campaign instigated and run by white male Marxist Giovanni Tiso. Indeed the instance of a white male strutting in with his righteous indignation to rescue the little women is so full of irony it's hilarious, at least, if it were not so serious. And what Tiso did was serious, because he shut down not only Willie and JT's radio show, but diverted all the properly directed energy there had been in the debate surrounding the horrible Roast Busters, and the violence of rape in our society, to two radio jocks who were paid to be controversial, and there the energy from a useful discussion was dissipated entirely. I've not even heard of the Roast Busters since. What a waste that deflection was. Nothing is ever gained by silencing. Nothing. That point is quite possibly the only point on which I agree with Chomsky:




I will also show, thereby, in this piece I'm still writing, quoting almost wholly two feminists who believe in reason and individualism, how neo-Marxist rape culture feminism has become a feminism seeking only the oppression of an insidious Left-centric conformity which wants forever to stomp on the face of an individual human being, and to do that sadly via the ruthless mechanism of the state - the latter especially regarding the enforced gender quotas, in public and private office, which form part of this agenda, and are possibly only one election away in New Zealand. And as Willie and JT found out, when dissent is made an example of against conformity, the tactic is always initially to sully the reputations of those deemed to be drunk on their privilege, a tactic from which even the Law Review Girls were not immune. Just as for the sin of a single tweet into her timeline, on Twitter - social media - and on a matter not even regarding gender politics, the anonymous Thorny proceeded to write an entire blog on how drunk on privilege I must be, with the clear inference I'm a misogynist. And that ludicrous, slanderous post is still up. I'm calling bullshit to this. Further case in point, a sadly typical tweet by such an identity mired feminism on Twitter:







‘Men attention seeking’ is the catch cry shrilled by this feminism at those who would reason against it, seemingly ignorant this was the very tactic of Edwardian men against the suffragettes - diminishing their reality by calling them attention seekers. These neo-Marxist feminists have become what they despise. Albeit in the face of such a tweet as this, all I can say - meeting matronising with patronising - is stop drawing attention to white men, then, dear. You've scored an own goal, just like Tiso did. More importantly, as I have to mansplain it to you, stop feeling about men so childishly as mere identity – the stereotypical generic male invented by a rape culture feminism – because we men, unsurprisingly like you women, if you care to think about it, are all complex individuals, damn near all of us, not rapists. And understand how rape culture feminism, even this tweet, thus forces society into a confrontational paradigm between the genders. What is gained by that? My piece will show there's a constructive alternative that can set us all, women and men, each race, each religion, free to pursue our happiness - classical liberal individualism; because the opposite of sexism is individualism, just as the opposite of racism is individualism. An individualism, poignantly as regards this debate, that shows gender, race and belief stereotypes for what they are: stereotypes.





Compare that identity-bound tweet above telling generic white men to butt out, thus bringing stereotyped white men front and centre into the very frame the tweeter wants them removed from, to this tweet, informed by an adult individualism of a woman who is thinking, and who is simply, gloriously, herself:







Unfortunately, however, I will not be able to finish my piece until April. Just as with socialism, reality exacts its price on us all. At the beginning of this financial year through boredom and burnout I took my eye too long off the reality of my workflow. Consequently - because under an individualistic ethic there are consequences - I am now having to work twelve and thirteen hour days until the last client’s work is completed. Other than the odd tweet – (follow me on Twitter) – there will be no further blog posts until that time. I won’t even have time, most likely, to answer to comments that you are free to post in the meantime. That said I'll end this post where I began, Mr Sowell. 

Another of my hobbyhorse topics has always been the doublespeak around the notion of fairness. From my post Taxing Language - Fair: What Do You Mean Please?


Liberty and freedom are two proud words that have been executed from the political lexicon: they were frog marched and stood before a wall of blank minds, then forcibly blindfolded, and shot, with the whimpering staccato of ‘equality’ and ‘fairness’ resounding over and over. And not only did this atrocity go unreported by journalists in the mainstream media, they were in the firing squad.


And so, Sowell to that wrecker of a country, President Hollande:







Catch you in April. In the meantime, I'm afraid I have to call intermission ….


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