Cassowaries Rant

Discrimination

(Just a note about this and every post: if it’s indented, it’s a quote. If it’s indented and in quote marks (and, now, italicised), it’s a quote of a quote. These are the general rules of typography.)

Joel Parsons, who I went to school with, wrote this on his blog, The Bench. (Sorry, that’s almost a direct quote from his page, but I felt like doing it :) It is sometimes in response to Julian’s comment to Joel, but this is my site and the only people who can stop me opining on it are Jon Washington and Brandeis University in the US, who provide the bandwidth. Though the US government may be able to because I think the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001 in its wisdom limited the constitutional freedoms to American citizens, and I’m not one of them. But then it’d only be a matter of time before I got another site somewhere else…

Anyway, enough rambling.

Now, leaving aside the question of who created us

God invented the passive for a reason. Who implies a creatorbeing. I think you meant leaving aside the question of how we were created, but that’s just me and irrelevantly included because I’m most punctilious.

Australia has a rich tradition of self-parody, not just among people from anglo saxon backgrounds, but among other groups as well. Just check out a TV show like Fat Pizza, or a movie like The Castle to see this. It would be a tragedy to see this destroyed by the anti discrimination bureacrats.

Anti-discrimination bureaucrats would not seek to destroy self-parody (which is not discrimination). What we did at Melbourne High was not (always) self-parody. It was parodying others. Like you, though, and most sane people, I say that parodying others isn’t wrong. It’s this thing called humor. My younger brother especially bemuses me on this front. He’s not a Yank, a Wog, an Pom, a Frog, so even if there was anything wrong about making a joke about Yanks, Wogs, Poms, Frogs or whatever, I don’t see why he should then turn around and call me racist for it—it’s not like I was hurting someone on the grounds of place of birth (which I would say is utterly stupid). I’m just being more of a pedant, mostly to include some sort of a reply to this section.

The word discriminate means to make a choice. So when we see the Government appointing bureacrats to and giving funding to anti discrimination boards, then you have to wonder why it is they don’t want us to have a choice.

And the word sinister means left-handed (this is more extreme than your example, but that’s it’s point). Going to a very basic and misleading definition of something to prove a point isn’t helpful, to your argument or to yourself. We know what discriminate means. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t be able to discuss discrimination. If discrimination was simpling mak[ing] a choice, then positive discrimination would be making a positive choice, and I think you and I will both agree in disputing that.

Here beginneth a more interesting reply, hopefully, to a later post.

Whilst there is a rich vein currently being used for comedy in regards to the dumb, working father, do you feel at all offended by this? Truly?

I’m personally concerned by the way people think it’s okay to paint me with one brush because I’m a white male, while painting others with a different brush because they’re not.

[Snipping observation of using women to sell things. But by the way—maybe it’s just the train line I’m on (Dandenong), but I would say that the Pepsi ads with the annoying guy are the more common.]

The point is, there’s a hell of a long way to go before the balance of discrimination remotely tips towards the other side. Women are continually in the 21st century in our so-called civilised society used as attention grabbers to sell goods. Making fun of recurring themes is not heading down a misandrist path.

My understanding is that ours is the only society that has tried to be monogendered. Most societies have probably had two, some three, and a few with more. But the idea that a single gender can work seems incredibly stupid to me. There’s but two possible ways it can work, that I can think of:

1. We can all work at home, all looking after the kids etc. While this might seem to be a very nice solution, it would require us to limit what our children can do. In order to have anything like the levels of learning we currently have, everyone would have to be an expert in everything. While being an expert in everything is one of my dreams, I find it highly unlikely that the majority of people would ever care. People who I’m IMing will sometimes ask me what I’m looking at, and when I say I’m reading about konstruktivist typography, they’ll wonder why they ever asked.
2. A child will not receive it’s mother’s love (or some similar equivalent), because childhood caring will be farmed out like a business. Socialist Governments tried this, I understand, and the general picture it was painted in is certainly as negative as I feel towards it. (Not that a mother will never see her child—she’ll just be at work all day and it’ll be being cared by carers. Nor that a mother is the only person who can provide this kind of love, just that it’s the prototypical one.)

I’m not entirely certain that these can work.

Next point, the sexualisation of women. I’m afraid to tell you that there is nothing uncivilised about this. Oh, and there’s nothing that says in the twenty-first century, we have to be at the peak of civilisation. In fact, many people would have it that many of us were uncivilised, because their parents weren’t born in Europe or in America or Australia of parents born in Europe. Kenan Malik wrote an article on why all languages need not be preserved which quite nicely expresses this view, though with a different intent. I think he might have more articles on a similar theme, though I haven’t yet read them. Nonetheless, and while this is a very minor accident by the original poster, but I’ll point to my introductory paragraph, let’s all do away with the ‘in the $n$th century’ argument.

Back to the next argument. It is not discriminating against women when we use them as advertisements. In fact, it’s probably discriminating against men because we won’t be able to pick up these jobs. I can’t entirely argue against this point, and even Joel Parsons’ reply of very true can’t be used because it might relate solely to the last sentence. I’ll just mention the fact that advertising wouldn’t work without attention grabbers. If men and women alike respond to pictures of women (the pictures of men that men are allowed to respond to are limited much more in variety, but this couldn’t possibly by an example of discrimination against men, could it?), it isn’t discrimination to use women. So long as these women made the choice to be used in this advertising (Joel, I think, should agree here if he’s consistent, but to my next conjunction he shouldn’t require) and had ligitimate alternatives, I would go so far as to say there was nothing wrong with it.

(I don’t like those ads using children as sexual items, or in ways that reflect adults being used as sexual items. In fact, and I realise this is being very conservative of me, I would be so bold as to say that it shouldn’t happen. I would say that Condura is an example of using this kind of advertising at South Yarra station, but I’m not entirely sure if it’s Condura or not and don’t want to commit libel or whatever it is.)

Thirdly (I think it’s thirdly), there are many things men aren’t allowed to do by society. These are the unwritten laws of man. We’re much less able to seek the comfort of someone who’s had the same experiences as us because we’re men. We aren’t as able to be as concerned about our health. One of the areas of Health Psychology that Health Psychologists are concerned about is getting men to the doctor. We just don’t go. Sure, it might be stupidity, but it might also be ignorance. How many times have you been to the library and seen advertisements telling women that they should have their breasts scanned for breast cancer?—I haven’t been to the library recently, but when I used to, they were all over the place. Did I ever see warnings about prostate cancer? My sisters and me and my brothers used to argue about which sex was better. They used the argument that women live longer. I didn’t know it then, but the reason isn’t because they’re built better. It’s because of something that obviously isn’t discrimination, but must be bloody similar.

But perhaps it’s not as real. That males commit suicide more often than women is obviously not a fact. We can ignore:

Based on the latest mortality rates, a boy born in 2000 was expected to live to 76.6 years, on average, while a girl would be expected to live to 82.1 years, on average. However, a boy and girl aged 15 in 2000 would be expected to live to ages 77.2 and 82.6 years, respectively.

[Not seeing the source? Perhaps you need to upgrade your browser to one that supports standards.]

can’t we? Of course, I don’t pretend that the entire difference is due to discrimination. But some of it is (I would cite my source, but unfortunately you need a password to access copyrighted information here).

At least discrimination against women in our civilised society doesn’t result in them dying earlier. At least discrimination against minority groups happens by other groups who realise what their doing. At least society (though not necessarily every member) looks upon other discriminations in negative ways.

The line between fair and unfair is so blurry, it isn’t funny.

Actually, in my view, the line is perfectly clear. Those who discriminate with the intention of harming the discriminatee are doing something bad. Those who want to a Dutch helper because their Dutch should be at liberty to do so. I will admit that it might become a bit difficult when a society thinks it’s right to discriminate against a particular people, but generally the reason for such apparent rightness is something like they killed our great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather’s dog or they discriminate against us or they were our slaves; apparent rightness isn’t the same thing as with-no-harm-intended. (Apropos of the Dutch, Oom Harrie en Tante Mien, a great-uncle and great-aunt from Zeeland (Oma’s—grandma’s—brother and his wife) have come over to Australië for a month.)

It is incredibly subjective as well, so that it may seem okay to some people for the medical clinic with Italian patients to discriminate against non-Italian doctors, but the same people would be shocked if a medical clinic with Anglo-Saxon patients was allowed to discriminate against non-Anglo-Saxon doctors.

That isn’t the example of the subjectivitivy of fairness; it’s an example of the double standards some people deem it right to apply. From a more objective perspective, that would be entirely legitimate.

[…] Thus, if a person wants to become an alcoholic and spend their whole life either drunk or hung over, then the liberal government will not stop them, as long as they aren’t infringing on the freedoms of anyone else, because the liberal government understands that this person cannot change until their decisions change, and while the government could force their hand (i.e. banning alcohol) it cannot change the source of that decision (i.e. their heart or mind).

I think, though, there’s the problem that someone might enjoy being a drunk, but not realise that (a) they’re doing themselves a disservice and (b) they can have a better time if they aren’t drunk. Furthermore, what brought them to decide that life seems good drunk has to be countered. If I’m in an ASC when I make the decision, and by staying drunk, I won’t leave this ASC, I think that there’s certainly a responsibility for the government to help correct this (though they might just start an organisation that’s supposed to be as independent as possible). But outlawing alcohol is certainly not the best idea. Are the ads telling us to slip, slop, slap or stop smoking wrong?

Even though I don’t have a headache, I hope that made anywhere near as much sense as Joel’s post, or was anywhere near as eloquent and intellectual as his. I also hope that I did not bore you to death with what is surely the longest post I’ve ever made. Nevertheless, the bulk of this was intended to show that men, and at least as often white men as not, are the butt of sexism, but the very nature of the sexism prevents us from having or seeking out as many avenues of support as women and minority groups have. Additionally, I sought to show that there is a form of discrimination that should be illegal and a form that should fall into the same basket as discrimination based on skill.