Not bad, Justin.
Good people with different political points of view ultimately want the same thing. They want success and happiness for as many people as possible. Wealth disparity happens. The biggest difference from one fiscal point of view to the next is whether to view disparities as the glass half empty or the glass half full.
Valkenar wrote:
I think that birthday card does a disservice to both men and women.
Context and perspective are everything.
No... we don't want mating rituals to muck up the corporate environment. Men and women deserve equal
opportunity in their work lives. Companies such as mine have yearly 3-day required courses (complete with tests) on ethics and compliance that deal with such matters. It goes beyond that though. We don't ignore our differences; we celebrate our diversity. I have a multi-colored band I wear on my wrist most days - supplied by my company - to acknowledge that mindset. I'm one of the few who do. If you walked onto my work floor and opened your eyes, you'd immediately get it. In my high-math, high-tech, health services world, I swim with very different fish.
It's ridiculous not to acknowledge the obvious. Liberal academic types have spent decades trying to prove men and women are equal in almost every way, only to show that... wait for it... men and women are often different. We use our brains differently (e.g. to find our way from point A to point B). Our learning styles are different. The amount of words per day we use is different. The way we visualize a problem is different. The way we interact with each other is different. The way we respond to marketing is different. Our purchasing habits are different. The way we seek health care services is different. And our roles and habits in the whole mating rituals thing are different.
Speaking of martial arts... the way aggression manifests itself is different.
Thanks to books like Raising Cain, I'm now able to understand why my boys struggled in today's school environment when they hit puberty. Knowledge is power. Understanding what makes us tick helps us be our best.
Not to acknowledge that men are more visually oriented is ignoring findings from peer-reviewed research, never mind the school of any-fool-knows-that. Not to acknowledge that women know how they affect men -
and sometimes work with it - is naive. This is sociobiology. It explains how homo sapiens DNA gets an opportunity to replicate.
The specific picture I found online (the blonde with the white top above) was in a work environment, so blurred the line. Oops... my bad. The card I spoke of had a more endowed woman in a casual setting with a green purse slung over her shoulder. Never mind the fact that I never would have guessed the color of the purse; I didn't even know she had one slung over her shoulder until I opened the card and saw the punch line. IT'S A JOKE!!! We all need to lighten up and engage in some good, healthy self-deprecation. No matter how much an emotionally-hijacked misandrist wants to make someone feel otherwise, men are men.
We all should acknowledge our respective tendencies and, yes, shortcomings. Without a sense of humor about it all, we're less than the synergistic whole that we can be.
- Bill