athena
athena's JournalBeing against the Ex-Im Bank is an extreme right-wing position.
When you oppose the Export-Import Bank, you play right into the Republican party's hands.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/26/business/ex-im-bank-dispute-threatens-ge-factory-that-obama-praised.html
...
The bank offers financing and insurance for American companies exporting products, and most industrialized nations have similar agencies. The Export-Import Bank actually makes money and returns funds to the Treasury. The bank says it supported $27.4 billion in exports and 164,000 American jobs last year. Nearly 90 percent of its loan recipients, the bank says, were small businesses, whose exports accounted for about 40 percent of those supported with Export-Import funding.
The article explains further down that one of the organizations criticizing the Ex-Im bank is owned by the Koch brothers.
Here is further reading that can educate you about what the Ex-Im Bank does and why getting rid of it would put the U.S. at a huge disadvantage compared to countries like Germany:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/01/opinion/revenge-of-the-ideologues-killing-the-export-import-bank.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/19/opinion/joe-nocera-republican-job-killers-and-the-export-import-bank.html
Hillary Clinton respects the public's opinion.
She's not an ideologue. She has her opinions, but if the majority of the people move to her left on an issue, she reassesses, and almost always decides that the people are right. The public opinion is strongly in favor of gay marriage and has been so for a few years now. Ergo, marriage equality will be safe under HRC.
Honestly, I think it is great to have a president who respects the people. President Obama is the same way: he was initially against gay marriage but came around when the public decided to support gay rights. What all this means is that when HRC is president, we should all work hard at the grassroots level to advance progressive causes, to make sure she does not move to the center. FDR himself said, "Make me do it."
http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2010/11/fdr-wasnt-fdr-until-his-hand-was-forced.html
Consider the following scenario.
Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that there are only 1000 people in the country.
450 are conservative, and 550 liberal.
Out of the 450 conservatives, 250 vote for Trump. The rest stay home because they can't be bothered to vote.
Out of the 550 liberals, 200 vote for Hillary. Another 100 vote for Jill Stein or stay home.
Who wins? Who would have won if the 100 disaffected liberals had held their noses and voted for the candidate representing their party? How can you argue that a liberal who is deliberately choosing not to vote, or voting for a write-in candidate, is not helping Trump win?
This really shouldn't need explanation, but I guess some of Bernie's supporters are so new to politics that they genuinely don't realize that not voting is equivalent to letting the opposition win.
Not voting is not an act of activism or revolution. It's the ultimate act of passiveness. When you don't vote, you make yourself indistinguishable from someone who doesn't follow politics or someone who is a right-winger but can't be bothered to vote.
Maybe you should look into her policies and record
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/02/hillary-clinton-women-213649before supporting the man who:
1. does not consider abortion a high-priority issue
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/hillary-clinton-bernie-sanders-abortion
2. and has zero women among the top ten highest-paid staffers on his campaign.
http://theslot.jezebel.com/an-investigation-which-presidential-campaigns-have-the-1762895557
I'm really sorry to say it, but you're being sexist.
First of all, no one is telling you that you owe Hillary your vote. You can vote as you wish. You can even choose not to vote. It may not be a wise decision, but it's your decision.
In the beginning of the race, I also felt exactly like you about Hillary's connection to Bill. Then I read this article by a feminist:
http://www.thenation.com/article/why-im-ready-and-excited-hillary/
It made me realize that the "coattails" argument, the one you made and the one I used to believe, is extremely sexist. We don't hold it against men when they benefit from an unfair advantage. Take the Kennedys for example. But we do hold it against women. Men benefit from an unfair advantage all the time. In fact, I think that being married to Bill has actually hurt Hillary, precisely because many women think that we can only be legitimately successful if we don't get the kinds of advantages men get all the time. We assume she got where she is because of Bill, and that makes us ignore her own accomplishments.
She is an intelligent and capable woman. Intelligent and capable women tend to be married to intelligent and capable men. We can't start holding that against them.
The length of the press conference was strange.
I don't think it suggests he was telling the truth. Quite the contrary.
Put yourself in the position he was claiming to be in. You're governor of NJ. One day, out of the blue, you find out that some of your closest allies have lied to you and been vindictive toward a mayor in your state for not endorsing you, putting your state's safety at risk in the process. Would you give a two-hour-long press conference about how sad you feel? I don't think so. In his place, I would have made a short statement, saying, "Everyone, I'm as shocked by this as you are. We are now investigating exactly how extensive this outrageous act of retribution was. Rest assured that we will get to the bottom of it and hold all responsible parties accountable." I would then excuse myself to work on getting to the bottom of the problem.
The two-hour-long press conference, and the way Christie handled it, is too suggestive of someone doing "damage control." It was too political. That's why I think he wasn't telling the truth.
P.S. On top of that, if he really were innocent, he would surely have investigated this weeks or months ago, when the first reports surfaced.
I'm not sure.
I'm not sure that racism and sexism will end at the same time. I think sexism is much more deeply entrenched. Many people these days can accept that skin color is superficial and that we are all the same underneath our skin. Extremely few people, on the other hand, truly think the differences between men and women are superficial. So I think sexism will be around much longer than racism, although I suspect neither will be gone within our lifetime. Very few people, for example, would not make generalizations about women's supposed maternal instinct, and believe that women's ability to bear children makes them more suited for certain tasks and less suited for other tasks.
Having said that, let me also say that I think racism is currently doing much more harm than sexism. Women are being held back, but not as badly as black people are held back. So, personally, while I'm a white feminist, I'm currently more active in my attempts to fight racism than sexism.
In my view, fighting for race equality goes hand in hand with fighting for gender equality. Both racism and sexism are ugly and abhorrent. I think black people and women need to join forces in this battle.
Take a look at this article for other examples of retribution.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/25/nyregion/accounts-of-petty-retribution-reinforce-christies-bullying-image.htmlHe was surprised to receive a handwritten note from Mr. Christie, telling him that he had heard the comments, and that he didn’t like them.
“I thought it was a joke,” Mr. McKeon recalled. “What governor would take the time to write a personal note over a relatively innocuous comment?”
But the gesture would come to seem genteel compared with the fate suffered by others in disagreements with Mr. Christie: a former governor who was stripped of police security at public events; a Rutgers professor who lost state financing for cherished programs; a state senator whose candidate for a judgeship suddenly stalled; another senator who was disinvited from an event with the governor in his own district.
I understand how you feel.
It bothers me, too.
Ages ago, when I was a grad student in a male-dominated field, I felt this way and always wore conservative clothing (not too tight and form-revealing, no low-cut necks, etc.). I thought I would be taken seriously that way. The result, unfortunately, was that I became a non-person. I wasn't a man, and I wasn't a woman, either. I began to resent that my male colleagues felt free to look sexy (in short sleeves that revealed their muscular arms, tight T-shirts that revealed their form, etc.) and were still taken seriously. So I stopped wearing clothes to hide myself. If someone can't take me seriously as a person, that's his problem. There is nothing I can do to change it.
My point is that wearing conservative clothes is not the answer. We need to change society so that more men see women as people first. And it's only men who can do this. If a man sees another man talk about a woman as a sex object, he should say something. But based on some of the responses to your OP (responses from people who are now on my ignore list, as I am not interested in the opinions of people who are so insensitive as to scold someone who merely stated how she feels about something), I am not hopeful that this will happen any time soon. Men benefit from this system, so they feel no incentive to change it.
A decent model?!!!
Clearly, you haven't even taken an undergraduate-level course in quantum mechanics. It's an outrageous understatement to say that quantum mechanics "allows us to explain and extend (sic) phenomena that otherwise doesn't (sic) seem to have a good explanation." Moreover, it is not true that "we don't fully understand" quantum mechanics. You may not understand it, but that doesn't mean we don't understand it.
The current problem in theoretical physics is that whereas three out of the four fundamental forces (the electromagnetic, weak, and strong forces) can be understood quantum mechanically, the fourth force (gravity) currently is not. The goal of the best theoretical physicists in the world today is to come up with a quantum mechanical model of gravity. So it's completely nutty to claim that quantum mechanics is what is unsatisfactory in physics.
Quantum mechanics is a mathematical theory. You can't claim to understand it or know anything about it based on a few lay-person books or movies. Such books and movies generally aim to demonstrate how "cool" quantum mechanics is. They are not intended to give you the impression that quantum-mechanics is not a rock-solid part of physics.
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