It’s cold out and I want to stay home in bed, so in honor of that, here are a bunch of pics of Maru and Hana in a cozy cat pod.
- Why Does Your Nose Get Stuffy One Nostril at a Time? – I have spent many a night awake (with a stuffy nose) thinking about this one. Thanks, mental_floss!
- What the Ukrainian Crisis Means for Astronauts in Space – An interesting perspective!
- How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Getting Older – I can totally identify with this. Also, sometimes people don’t take you seriously unless you have a few wrinkles.
- Remembering MIT, When There Were Just 50 Women in a Class of 1,000 – “Radia Perlman reflects on her illustrious career in math, computer science, and networking.”
- When wingnuts don’t believe in religious freedom – “The right wants to allow discrimination, but is oddly quiet about seeking exemptions from things like property law”
- Female WestJet pilot receives sexist note from passenger: ‘No place for a woman’ – I hope this isn’t another one of those note hoaxes that have been popular recently. (But if it’s real, that means that the person who wrote this note is a shitty person.) From Angela.
The female pilot should have said the following to the jackass:
1. He knew that there are nondiscrimination laws based on sex, and that women are legally allowed to become pilots. The fact that he did not check out whether Westjet employed female pilots, or investigate to see who would be piloting his flight is his problem.
2. When he found out that she was flying the plane, he could have exited the aircraft and arranged for another flight I think she did point that bit out to him.
3. If he wants to avoid female pilots altogether, he ought to get a pilots license and fly himself to his destinations.
4. If God had meant for people to fly, they would have been born with wings.
5. Go fuck yourself.
6. Repeat number 4.
Err….6 should be “repeat number 5”.
I tuned out of the Salon article after this sentence: “First, they fight against existential equality outright, by limiting, for instance, equal access to schools for women, equal access to hotels for blacks…”
I don’t know specifically what he’s referring to in either case, however it is interesting to note that more Democrats opposed both concepts in the early 60’s than did Republicans. For instance, here’s the vote tally for the Civil Rights Act of 1964: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_Civil_Rights_Act#By_party
From the same wiki article, there’s this interesting paragraph:
“Just one year prior, the same Congress had passed the Equal Pay Act of 1963, which prohibited wage differentials based on sex. The prohibition on sex discrimination was added to the Civil Rights Act by Howard W. Smith, a powerful Virginia Democrat who chaired the House Rules Committee and who strongly opposed the legislation. Smith’s amendment was passed by a teller vote of 168 to 133. Historians debate Smith’s motivation, whether it was a cynical attempt to defeat the bill by someone opposed to both civil rights for blacks and women, or an attempt to support their rights by broadening the bill to include women. Smith expected that Republicans, who had included equal rights for women in their party’s platform since 1944, would probably vote for the amendment.”
Actually, that 1944 date might be a bit off, here’s another blurb from the ERA wiki page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Rights_Amendment
“The Republican Party included support of the ERA in its platform beginning in 1940, renewing the plank every four years until 1980. The ERA was strongly opposed by the American Federation of Labor and other labor unions, who feared the amendment would invalidate protective labor legislation for women. ERA was also opposed by Eleanor Roosevelt and most New Dealers. They felt that ERA was designed for middle class women but that working class women needed government protection. They feared that ERA would undercut the male-dominated labor unions that were a core component of the New Deal coalition. Most northern Democrats, who aligned themselves with the anti-ERA labor unions, opposed the amendment.”
This is not to say that Democrats today would take the same actions as Democrats of 50 years ago, but if you start an article with a premise that is not only historically inaccurate but paints a picture opposite to the one you intended, it doesn’t bode well for the rest of the article. Claim Republicans today are bigots if you want, but they most certainly did not “they fight against existential equality outright.”