[Conor Friedersdorf]
You can go to places in the world where there are no racial distinctions except everyone is joined together in their oppression of women.
Is this true? Earnest question! I've got my doubts...
The treatment of women is the single biggest problem we have politically and socially in the world. If you look at the extremism and the fundamentalism, it is all about controlling women, at it's base.
That's just absurd. It doesn't diminish the pervasiveness of sexism in the world, or the disgusting treatment of women in many fundamentalist cultures, to point out that were every woman to vanish from Saudi Arabia, Iran and Pakistan tomorrow, the extremist Islamists in those countries would still want to kill infidels, stone gays, etc.
If Senator Clinton's understanding of extremists and fundamentalists is really as simplistic as that she is unfit to head our foreign policy. Oddly a really compelling defense of the above statements is that Senator Clinton, when talking about sexism, can be assumed to be disingenuously spouting anything that might help her politically.
As an aside, a lot of charities are doing their best to help women victimized by religious extremists. If you're looking for a charitable cause it's a worthwhile one.
"at it's base": Dear God, she spoke a feral apostophe; is there no end to that woman's wickedness?
I suspect that if every woman were to vanish from fundamentalist countries, the populations would become even more irascible.
Why would vanishing the women diminish their desire to control them? I don't follow.
"Is this true?"
TR: I think so. In rural parts of Japan and South Korea there are no "racial distinctions" because the society is homogenous and so everyone is of the same race. However they retain sexist attitudes of their Confucian-influenced ancestors. In principle Islam does not believe in divisions by race, but in principle Islam does believe in the submission of women. Although very few Islamic societies actually lack racism.
It'd be wrong though to state that sexism is the only form of oppression they have. Usually the societies I named have prejudices based on religion and sexual orientation.
Meanwhile, Hillary (along with most other politicians) wants to control women AND men.
Patriotism is no longer the last refuge of the scoundrel, but the penultimate one. The last one is accusations of racism/sexism, reserved solely for the truly desperate and the cognitively disenfranchised.
You can go to places in the world where there are no racial distinctions except everyone is joined together in their oppression of women.
Saudi Arabia treats women worse than perhaps any other nation and also had African slaves until recent years.
I think she's confusing "places" with "religions". She will ended up in a nunnery or on a thorazine, lithium, and lamictal cocktail. Look at her eyes. Wow. Is that dex or what? She gets those 'go pills' in the morning and the 'no go' pills at night. As the campaign wore on I thought she was just a sociopath. Now I am certain she is a psychopath.
[signed] A woman who knows a psychopath when she sees one.
So Clinton is losing because of sexism in North Korea and Saudi Arabia? I'm confused. I mean, for a long time in this country, it has been sure a lot better to be a white woman than a black man. Most black men in America would probably switch wages with the average white woman in a heartbeat.
"it has been sure a lot better to be a white woman than a black man." RM
TR: Although true this goes against some fairly long held feminist dogma. Traditionally many feminists have stated black men were better off than white women. Black men could vote before white women. Black men could fully serve in the military before white women. Black men could play professional baseball and basketball before white women. Black men could own property before white women. (I don't know if this is historically true, but I believe they said it anyway) Black men face sexual abuse less than white women.
There's been an intermittent, if longstanding, tension between white feminists and black men. Elizabeth Cady Stanton at one point called blacks ignorant "Sambos" during a heated discussion over whether black male suffrage should come before white female suffrage. Although the incident doesn't fairly represent her overall outlook, race-baiting was occasionally used by the suffrage movement.
Thomas R, good point. One of the reasons why Frederick Douglass has often been one of my heroes is that he recognized the need to fight for both racial equality and gender equality. The elite feminism of the Clinton campaign and of way too many second-wave feminists has been rather disheartening and focusing too much on the problems faced disproportionately by educated white female professionals. Now, of course we should fight for their rights as well, but the life of a well-off female executive banned from membership at Augusta is a whole lot better than the life of a female minority nurse at a hospital in the poor side of town. The feminism of the Clinton campaign was the feminism of white female media/political elites who obsess over pigs like Chris Matthews while ignoring things like how the treatment of women in Iraq has gotten worse because of the very war Clinton helped authorize, which anyone who cared about women's rights and knew anything about Iraqi history and society should have predicted beforehand.
Also, a lot of people forget that although on paper black men were supposed to have been able to vote decades before white women, in practice the bulk of black men - and black women - down South (where a huge number of African-Americans live) couldn't really vote until the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were truly put into practice in the 1970's. In addition, it was the purging of African-American voters from voter rolls in Florida in 2000 after tens of thousands of black voters were wrongly labeled convicted criminals that gave Bush Florida over Gore.
The question isn't whether there are cultures that are sexist and treat women badly ... of course that's true.
The question was whether these cultures exists fundamentally to oppress women. In other words, that female oppression is their reason for existance.
I think that's just a load of self-centered angst and rationalizing (mostly about why she isn't going to get nominated!). These fundamentalist ancient cultures are predominantly sexist because that's the way they evolved ... which is to say that the more primitive the society, the more likely the differentiation of roles of the sexes in those cultures.
Sexual equality owes a huge debt to modernization, civilization, medicine and technology. Without those "equalizers", brute strength is the primary factor of cultural power, and females are at an inherent disadvantage.
Patriotism is no longer the last refuge of the scoundrel, but the penultimate one. The last one is accusations of racism/sexism,
On the contrary Occam, it is their first response.
This is just Clinton screaming for support from NOW etc.
You can see why Obama is winning.