HereAndGone
10mo ago
I think Andrews has not thought through what she is proposing. She seems to imagine that "taking the thumb off the scale" will mean ladies like her get to keep the positions they have colonised, because she's just so smart and male-brained. I think it's entirely possible that junking anti-discrimination laws will result in "well it was great knowing you, Helen, but we need new blood and new male blood in particular so say hello to Tim, who will be replacing you".
And again, nobody is answering the real question I am genuinely asking: what is the perfect ratio for society? 50/50 male/female? Majority male? The ladies get to run their little cafés and knitwear shops, bless their hearts, while the men do the real work of the world? Given that Andrews is a political commentator amongst other things, I imagine she feels her views, opinions, and insights are valuable, but in the Men's World Redivivus, is there a place for her?
HereAndGone
10mo ago
Okay, that was novel. I don't think I've ever been banned for an hour - it's generally a week or "get the hell outta here, ya bum".
No emojis - gotcha!
HereAndGone
10mo ago
Men should be allowed to only hire other men, as women are allowed to hire all-female workplaces without concerns of successful diversity lawsuits.
I don't think that is the argument Andrews is making, because she sticks in some caveats about "I'm not saying women shouldn't work in these fields". She wants meritocracy, which means "if Susie is better than John, then hire Susie". She doesn't want "it doesn't matter if Susie is better than John, John went to the same school as Mike who is doing the hiring".
I do think it would be interesting to roll back society to 1930 or so, before women were in the workplace in the same numbers and the same professions. But I don't think that is what Andrews wants, and she does need to put a number on it rather than just vague handwaving about "too many girls".
HereAndGone
10mo ago
the removal of rules and policies that drive artificially higher representation of women in certain roles.
Yeah, but before we can say "artificially high" we have to first establish the "natural level" and if we haven't done that, then we can't talk about "there are too many female lawyers".
HereAndGone
10mo ago
The laughable solution to Mrs. Andrews' dilemma is to have only transwomen in those jobs. Like software engineers, best of both worlds: male interests, male socialisation, female presentation!
HereAndGone
10mo ago
It's like I said: it's the Land Acknowledgement farrago. "Yes the problem is now women are going for men's jobs and there are too many women in those jobs, but not me! I may be a woman but I'm different! It's okay if I have that male-coded job and my sons see me taking a position from a man!" She could start by giving example by stepping down in favour of a guy, but she likes her career too much. So why should other women not like having a career, as well?
I disagree with her but her argument is sawing off the branch on which she sits: if there are too many women in male professions, she's one of the too many women. So what is she going to do about it, apart from telling other women to quit their jobs or not go into that profession in the first place?
HereAndGone
10mo ago
She's one person, but one of the wrong sort of people by her own argument. "I'm not like the other girls" never works. If the problem is "too many women", then you can't take the risk of carving out exceptions for "just this one woman here".
HereAndGone
10mo ago
Yeah, but she nowhere gives a solution to the problem. How to prevent a feminised society? Well the simple and quick answer is: bar women from those jobs and those positions. How many women in a profession is "too many"? If the answer is "compete on meritocracy" then let Mrs. Andrews show that she is better than the men she beat out for the job. That there is no man at all in the entire USA better qualified or better at the job than she is.
I do wish there was more respect given to honour, but men have cast that aside just as fast as women did. See how "honour culture" is not a compliment, but has connotations of inequality and fast resort to violence instead of negotiation. Conflict versus mistake, if you will.
HereAndGone
10mo ago
Sure, but if the argument is that "society is becoming too feminised", then it doesn't matter if she got her position on merit: she's one of the feminising forces. Her argument rests on "I'm different" which, uh, is not very convincing: the only women who should have male jobs are women who behave like men. Fine, great, but how do we get women who behave like men? Because she starts off with the difference between male qualities and female qualities, which is biological essentialism and which does boil down to "there may be some exceptions in women who behave like men, but in general don't hire women because too many women in the professions spoils the profession".
So again I have to ask: what is the correct ratio of men to women in any job, profession, or field? How many is "too many"? What is the tipping point? And the only way to be sure (maybe the tipping point comes at 51% women to 49% men, but maybe it comes at 33% women to 66% men! we don't know!) is to have no women in the profession, or at least not above a relatively low level. Lots of female secretaries, to lots of male bosses. Lots of nurses, to lots of male doctors. Lots of kindergarten teachers, to lots of male professors.
If she is the mother of sons fearful for them in a feminised world, then she has to give the example of stepping down to be replaced by a man. And if she doesn't do that, then her argument is the old problem that feminism has dealt with before: pulling the ladder up behind you. She's okay, she's One Of The Boys, she values all the male values so it's okay for her to get that senior position, but other women just aren't the right fit, not trustworthy, too... female.
HereAndGone
10mo ago
Yes, drinking to excess is bad, which is why the drunk is in the wrong. You can't be both "don't drink" and "I am a drunk", and if the drunk persists in being a drunk, you get rid of them. You don't let the drunk pilot fly the plane or the drunk surgeon operate, and that's the argument she's making: women dominating the professions is harmful, female-values dominating society is harmful.
So the answer is "get the women out of the professions", the same way you would get the drunks out of air traffic control or operating heavy machinery.
HereAndGone
10mo ago
What is artificially high, though? If being majority female is wrong but majority male is right, how much admixture of female into a profession can you have before it tips over into "too much"? She claims that now women are flooding into professions and fields they are ruining those, but she also says that it's not a problem of having women in those fields as such. So we're back to "what proportion of journalism or medicine or law or education or working on an oil rig should be female?" and she doesn't answer that.
She's happy enough to be one of the women in the professions, which as I point out makes her part of the problem. Her answer seems to be "meritocracy! let men and women compete on equal terms!" Great, but what then if it still turns out more women than men make the grade?
HereAndGone
10mo ago
Thanks for fixing this! I too was having the very slow loading and then timing out,and last night I got the ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH error message, and everything I tried on my end did nothing.
Good to know it wasn't me that broke it 😀
HereAndGone
10mo ago
Executing prisoners, attacks that violate the local rules of warfare, assassinations, these things are regarded as unacceptable.
Codes of honour differ in different societies, and those are male-run societies as well. There are very few universal rules that all cultures accept. Politics means friends today, enemies tomorrow. Spying may be disgusting and dishonourable, but you need a secret service. And that includes state assassinations of the bothersome:
The goals of the secret service, in Arthashastra, was to test the integrity of government officials, spy on cartels and population for conspiracy, to monitor hostile kingdoms suspected of preparing for war or in war against the state, to check spying and propaganda wars by hostile states, to destabilize enemy states, to get rid of troublesome powerful people who could not be challenged openly. The spy operations and its targets, states verse 5.2.69 of Arthashastra, should be pursued "with respect to traitors and unrighteous people, not with respect to others".
Political advisers may recommend the role of virtue, but they always have a touch of Machiavelli about them, as see Chanakya (the so-called "Indian Machiavelli") and the popular legends that grew up around him:
Chanakya had two potential successors to Dhana Nanda: Pabbata and Chandragupta. He gave each of them an amulet to be worn around the neck with a woolen thread. One day, he decided to test them. While Chandragupta was asleep, he asked Pabbata to remove Chandragupta's woolen thread without breaking it and without waking up Chandragupta. Pabbata failed to accomplish this task. Some time later, when Pabbata was sleeping, Chanakya challenged Chandragupta to complete the same task. Chandragupta retrieved the woolen thread by cutting off Pabbata's head. For the next seven years, Chanakya trained Chandragupta for imperial duties.
Picking someone as future emperor on the basis of "ruthlessness in achieving objectives, including murder" is not really inclining towards "dishonour is the worst thing of all!"
HereAndGone
10mo ago
it's hypocrisy if you say "the important professions, including journalism, have been taken over by women and this is bad for society" while holding senior positions in journalism as a woman. It's the alcoholic surgeon: "drinking is bad for you, you should give it up" "but you show up for work drunk every day!" "yeah well do as I say, not as I do". Who wants an alcoholic surgeon, no matter the level of their qualifications, operating on them? How am I to believe her cure for society's ills when she is taking jobs from men?
(That reminds me back when my class was fourteen and having debates on 'how to solve unemployment?' and one notion we got was "all the married women should stop working, that would then free up jobs for men". Yeah, it doesn't work like that. Society now requires both partners in a couple to be working, else you can kiss any chance of a mortgage, for one example, good-bye).
What makes you think this is sarcasm? I am going to the logical end of her argument. Granted, it's a reductio ad absurdum but it does follow on from what she claims.
(Also, I get to luxuriate in the gender essentialism of it all. You, dear mod, can't understand what is going on when it's woman versus woman! You are man-brained with man qualities and man virtues, you have no idea what the mysteries of the feminine mind entail, so you cannot intervene in our disagreement! 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 This is not a matter of rationality, which is something reserved clearly and solely for the male of the species, but the mystic crystal revelation of feminine intuition and the rest of the blah Mrs. Andrews argues herself: "In short, men wage conflict openly while women covertly undermine or ostracize their enemies." Step back and lemme get on with the undermining in my sneaky female way!)
If the professions are becoming increasingly feminised, if many are now majority female, if society is following suit and this will lead to disaster, then she is part of the rot herself. It doesn't matter if she's trying to argue "oh no, I got here on merit". It doesn't matter if she's One of the Good Ones. It doesn't matter if I'm Not Like Other Girls. By entering formerly male-dominated/majority male professions, she is part of the creeping tide of turning them majority female. By taking senior and leadership positions, she is undermining men by displacing male role models for young men and by blocking the career advancement of more senior men. Can she, as a woman, really claim to be able to mentor subordinate male employees and model leadership to them, in the way that is both appropriate and increasingly necessary in today's feminised world?
She should, if she is sincere, step back and step down. But this is the Land Acknowledgement trope. "This territory was unfairly and unjustly taken from the unwilling". "So are you going to give it back?" "Of course not!" So she's being a hypocrite.
Strong words, you say? Nothing more than her own argument turned upon her.
If wokeness really is the result of the Great Feminization, then the eruption of insanity in 2020 was just a small taste of what the future holds. Imagine what will happen as the remaining men age out of these society-shaping professions and the younger, more feminized generations take full control.
...Other fields matter more. You might not be a journalist, but you live in a country where what gets written in The New York Times determines what is publicly accepted as the truth. If the Times becomes a place where in-group consensus can suppress unpopular facts (more so than it already does), that affects every citizen.
The field that frightens me most is the law. All of us depend on a functioning legal system, and, to be blunt, the rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female. The rule of law is not just about writing rules down. It means following them even when they yield an outcome that tugs at your heartstrings or runs contrary to your gut sense of which party is more sympathetic.
...The problem is not that women are less talented than men or even that female modes of interaction are inferior in any objective sense. The problem is that female modes of interaction are not well suited to accomplishing the goals of many major institutions.
...The most obvious thumb on the scale is anti-discrimination law. It is illegal to employ too few women at your company. If women are underrepresented, especially in your higher management, that is a lawsuit waiting to happen. As a result, employers give women jobs and promotions they would not otherwise have gotten simply in order to keep their numbers up.
...A lot can be inferred from the way that feminization tends to increase over time. Once institutions reach a 50–50 split, they tend to blow past gender parity and become more and more female. Since 2016, law schools have gotten a little bit more female every year; in 2024, they were 56 percent female. Psychology, once a predominantly male field, is now overwhelmingly female, with 75 percent of psychology doctorates going to women. Institutions seem to have a tipping point, after which they become more and more feminized.
That does not look like women outperforming men. It looks like women driving men away by imposing feminine norms on previously male institutions. What man wants to work in a field where his traits are not welcome? What self-respecting male graduate student would pursue a career in academia when his peers will ostracize him for stating his disagreements too bluntly or espousing a controversial opinion?
Right now we have a nominally meritocratic system in which it is illegal for women to lose. Let’s make hiring meritocratic in substance and not just name, and we will see how it shakes out. Make it legal to have a masculine office culture again. Remove the HR lady’s veto power.
Very well then, but what is the "right" or "correct" proportion of men to women in the workplace? What ratio of men to women in a profession or field? Forget meritocracy, because now we're talking about quotas, and those are every bit the fruit of wokeness that she decries. 50/50? Two-thirds male to one-third female? Three-quarters to one-quarter? It depends? Kindergartens should be majority female but going up the scale of schools, we end with high schools majority male teachers (the ladies can teach home economics) and colleges (save for specialised fields like nursing) all-male?
She convicts herself out of her own mouth: "What man wants to work in a field where his traits are not welcome?" And what man wants to work under a lady boss, even if that lady boss is Mrs. Andrews, former senior editor here and former managing editor there? If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem!
I am the mother of sons, who will never reach their full potential if they have to grow up in a feminized world.
And so she should yield the positions she has usurped to the rightful holders, men, and remain within the feminine sphere of domesticity, supporting the man in his career of risk-taking rationality, and raising those sons with the little feminine graces that soften the harsh edges of the competitive, striving male psyche so that they will be gentlemen as well as scholars. Let her lead by example! Has she ever considered she may have benefited from being a diversity hire as per her "anti-discrimination law" example? If she had to compete on strict merit, there were no men better than her? Part of Larry Summers' ill-expressed but not incorrect point about "“different availability of aptitude at the high end” applies just as much to her; it makes little difference that she is competing in the world of letters, since that world not so long ago was majority male and women's talents were held to lie in writing novels, if they must write, rather than factual reporting and scholarship. Even if Mrs. Andrews is smart (for a woman) there are still men out there smarter than her and thus better qualified for those jobs.
HereAndGone
10mo ago
In September, I gave a speech at the National Conservatism conference along the lines of the essay above. I was apprehensive about putting forward the Great Feminization thesis in such a public forum.
That's the problem right there. This lady should step down and stop taking a place that rightfully belongs to a man, with the masculine qualities of rationality, risk, and competition, rather than cluttering up organisations and forcing them to stagnate with her feminine qualities of empathy, safety, and cohesion.
She should know her place and be content with being a secretary to the (male, of course) "senior editor at The American Conservative" and the "...managing editor of the Washington Examiner." Imagine the effrontery of this lady to take over such senior roles! Much better suited to support roles to enable the man to function efficiently as she uses those feminine qualities to ensure good office manners.
HereAndGone
10mo ago
Oh, definitely grabbing for any kind of parallels, and if they can't find one, just invent it. There's enough fools out there who will believe it because someone on the Internet said so, they will never bother checking "what does an Iron Cross look like?"
HereAndGone
10mo ago
That's why I think the best response is to say "No it isn't" and keep the merch up on the site. Some ambitious little wannabe influencer on TikTok sees a prime opportunity with Swift's new album out now to grab a piece of the attention economy pie with "this is Nazi!" (just like our kittykat pal here with the original post) and by reacting in such a manner, it's setting her/her business up for "well if it really was innocent, why did they take it down? it must be true!" further accusations.
Ignore the idiots is the only way to maintain any sanity.
HereAndGone
10mo ago
I don't know, I was getting a hint of Impassionata, who has indeed recently popped back up over on rdrama.net with the same old song about TheMotte, ACX, Scott, and so forth.
HereAndGone
10mo ago
So now we've moved from "they're Nazis, Harold" to "they're conservatives (which is the same thing)".
Why am I getting subtle hints of motte and bailey here?
HereAndGone
10mo ago
News just in: well-known White supremacist Nazi dogwhistler Taylor Swift has been forced to remove an offensive necklace from her product line, due to the eagle-eyed TikToker who was able, with no margin of error at all, to identify it as offensive blatant Nazi symbolism:
The backlash began when TikTok user @Sampire1513, a self-described former Swiftie, posted a viral video dissecting the necklace’s design. She claimed the lightning bolt links resembled “SS bolts,” a symbol historically used by Nazi paramilitary groups.
She pointed out that the necklace contained eight bolts, which some white supremacist groups associate with the number “88” — code for “Heil Hitler.” She alleged that whether the resemblance was intentional or not, it reflected poor cultural awareness.
According to the Anti-Defamation League, both the SS bolts and the number 88 are widely recognised symbols of white supremacist hate. The TikTok creator also compared the star-shaped pendant to the Iron Cross, a German military medal later adopted by Nazis.
Just like them swastika flags, right? It had to be done on purpose, no way this could have 'just happened'. After all, she is an infamous alt-right icon!
HereAndGone
10mo ago
Even Alexander can make reasonable points with which I agree every so often. Granted, it's a blue moon type of thing, but it does happen. So far, magicalkittycat is not even in "when all six planets line up" frequency.
HereAndGone
10mo ago
Thanks for making my point for me. Don't hurt your backside as you plop down on the fainting couch.
HereAndGone
10mo ago
If adopted, it certainly would make reading the Gospel at Sunday Mass a lot of fun 🤣
"4 Jesus answered them, “Go and tell John what you hear and observe: 5 the blind persons of low vision see, the lame persons with a mobility impairment walk, lepers those who are in need of dermatological services are cleansed receive appropriate medical care, the deaf persons with a hearing impairment hear, the dead are raised, and the destitute people whose incomes are below the federal poverty threshold hear the good news are empowered by targeted aid regarding their circumstances. 6 How blessed is anyone who is not offended by me does not commit microaggressions by the use of ableist language!”
She presumes she is the Good Type of Woman, but what if she is not? What if the meritocratic male workplace decides she is a drag on the organisation? It's very easy to plan out the golden age of the future when you imagine you will be one of the rulers, not one of the ruled. Same problem with all the "after the revolution, what will your job on the commune be?" fantasies.
More options
Context Copy link