Comments | mmoa: Question Time

mmoa

Question Time

Jun 14, 2010 00:01

I've missed so many of these. There's been so much I wanted to rant about: Melanie Philips and her standard 'we need the best sort of people, regardless of whether they be male or female' as if that's an answer to the problem of the tiny female representation in the House of Commons (oh how that line irritates me whenever the issue arises. It doesn ( Read more... )

bp, oil, obama administration, question time, university, politics

Comments 6

niav June 13 2010, 23:05:46 UTC

Melanie Philips and her standard 'we need the best sort of people, regardless of whether they be male or female' as if that's an answer to the problem of the tiny female representation in the House of Commons

Mmm, and how very convenient it is that the "best people" are all coincidentally rich white guys. But I'm sure that is just coincidence, right?

underlankers June 13 2010, 23:42:17 UTC

That's the UK, though.....

mmoa June 22 2010, 20:01:07 UTC

I lol'd.

mmoa June 22 2010, 20:11:11 UTC

Why do we even have to say this? If in a democratic society, women make up around 50% (in our case 51%) of the population, the fact that apparently 2% of our front benchers (and indeed, the one female acting leader is not even considering running for leadership and the only other female who is running has to be backed in a machiavellian style move by her opposition to remain a contender) are women is not just wrong or worrying, it's really really weird. Really bloody weird. I mean there are even more females in my year of undergraduate physics for heavens sake.

It's that weirdness we're talking about, not about whether men or women are better at the job - though the way so many behave, you wonder how anyone could be significantly worse if it really comes down to it. Putting it all down to merit helps no one, because we're not talking about how one picks from the selection, we're talking about how the selection is made up and why it is made up the way it is in the first place ( ... )

underlankers June 13 2010, 23:41:55 UTC

The problem is everyone expected a President who won 53% of the vote in the 2008 election to be capable of governing effectively except the GOP, whose leadership has no respect for a mixed-race man at the highest-office and except the cynics like me who figured "We're fucked either way." The ones who did expect it are somehow surprised at this......

As to BP-well, as I said, this President won 53% of the vote in 2008.....

mmoa June 22 2010, 20:19:33 UTC

The ones who did expect it are somehow surprised at this......Well, this is it really. Some of us - liberal and conservative - clearly don't this as interesting as others and yes, I suspect it's because we're a little jaded or have a slightly different awareness of the important issues at hand that we were never convinced he - or indeed anyone - even could be the solution. I don't know a great deal - it's hard to get anything through the rhetoric - but I think he's doing alright considering though give it a few months and I'm sure he'll have to be put in his place again (the problem with Presidents/PMs is that they always think they're in charge ( ... )