While single herself, the always belligerent Ann Coulter seems to have a bit of a grudge against other single women — single mothers in particular. In a recent appearance on Fox and Friends, Coulter complained that the Democrats — and the media — were paying too much attention to what women think, and suggested that Romney could win the election without appealing to women — or at least to single women.
Ronald Reagan managed to win two landslides without winning the women’s vote, but it is as you say, it’s striking, it’s not the women’s vote generically, it is the single women’s vote. And that’s because single women look to the government to be their husbands and give them, you know, prenatal care, and preschool care, and kindergarten care, and school lunches.
Huh. Well, this might answer the central question in that National Review piece we discussed yesterday — why Romney isn’t getting 100% support from women, even though he’s the sort of rich guy alpha that evolutionary psychologists suggest is inherently appealing to “hypergamous” (i.e., golddigging) women. Turns out these women are already married to Obama!
The notion of government as a “substitute husband” is, of course, an old Men’s Rights trope. Warren Farrell devoted roughly a third of his Myth of Male Power — the 1993 tome from which the Men’sRights movement still gets most of its talking points — to explicating this particular theme. And it’s one that MRAs today return to again and again and again and again. (The notion of the “husband state” also, not coincidentally, played a role in the sprawling manifesto of mass killer Anders Breivik.)
As for Coulter, this isn’t the first time she’s singled out the single ladies. In a recent appearance on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox, Coulter went after Obama and the Democrats for focusing on what she called the “stupid single women” vote. “And I would just say to stupid single women voters,” she added,
your husband will not be able to pay you child support. If Obamacare goes through and Obama is re-elected, you are talking about the total destruction of wealth in America. It is the end of America as we know it. …
Great, you will get free contraception; you won’t have to pay a $10 co-pay, but it will be the end of America. Think about that!
Coulter is so miffed that single women don’t like Republicans that she’d be willing to give up her own right to vote if it means these “stupid … women” wouldn’t be allowed to vote either. As she once famously explained,
If we took away women’s right to vote, we’d never have to worry about another Democrat president. It’s kind of a pipe dream, it’s a personal fantasy of mine, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. And it is a good way of making the point that women are voting so stupidly, at least single women. It also makes the point, it is kind of embarrassing, the Democratic Party ought to be hanging its head in shame, that it has so much difficulty getting men to vote for it. I mean, you do see it’s the party of women and ‘We’ll pay for health care and tuition and day care — and here, what else can we give you, soccer moms?’
Here’s a much more appealing take on single women. Well, honestly, it’s as terrifying as it is entertaining:
Addendium: Zoning is a county issue, and this was a city related problem. No disproportionate representative influence there. It was a close run thing to get the county commissioners to let Mi Pueblo build. Pepsi and McDonald’s were saying a grocery, because of the slim profit margins wouldn’t generate enough tax revenue (esp. because food is non-taxable) nor enough secondary traffic to the box stores, to be a good anchor.
It was touch and go, the tons of people showing up to the Board of Supervisors meetings (which aren’t that easy to get to) were probably what swung the vote. Had it been a larger county than San Mateo, Pepsi, McD’s and the bodega’s would have won.
You assume I believe the past was rosy. No dice.
That would be the result of your prattling about how we need to go back to the “single job” family that only existed for a moderate subset of the population for a period of about 25 years.
Is it right to dictate what people can/cannot make? I believe not.
But having a two year period of mandatory labor to the state is just ducks?
That’s dictating how they spend their time, and restricting their income, in a way that taxes don’t.
Helluva sense of what’s fair you’ve got.
If it is a really high rate (50% or higher) what’s the guarantee that you’ll actually get that money in the medium to long term? What’s to stop them from not only offloading labor but their headquarters, etc so that they don’t pay?
They’d have to offload their selling too… it’s not the labor that’s taxed, it’s the profits. The only way to avoid the taxes is to make no money.
Try a mandatory jobs/training program for a person asking for assistance versus a simple check.
That’s what the US has now, as well as a lifetime limit on support. You seem to think that’s too generous.
Curses! How does one get a youtube video to actually show up?
Just drop the URL in with no formatting.
I don’t know how to blockquote here. Expect disaster.
So you *do* buy the part that single women vote Democratic specifically for the benefits and because they think of the government as their father/husband?
So you figure increasing the number of people with STEM degrees will raise wages for those people? I suppose this ties in with your idea number 3, where we become a NASA-based, high-engineering society? So median wage will increase because we will spend lots of money on space engineering? (Or do you mean that to be generalized infrastructure building?)
OK, this reduces the price of energy for people, so I guess that counts as a general increase in living conditions/ability to survive on a single wage.
So basically you want a lot of government funded basic research and technology spending, with the government licensing patents to private enterprise to spin these breakthroughs off to the population at large?
I don’t think the incentives here work quite the way you think they do, but we’ll interpret this as wanting to make education more affordable, although you want it to be primarily work-training and STEM.
All right then. You’ve proposed some specific things you would like to see which you feel will result in a general overall improvement of quality of life, it seems. Thanks.
And yes everybody, I am letting others run the track of the whole mandatory service program to teach men to be role models. He was kind enough to answer me in a fairly straightforward manner, so I will see where that leads. We can try hooking up the two threads of his society later.
And make sure that the http:// part is there, because sometimes they drop out.
And resign yourself to failure, because sometimes you do everything right and it still doesn’t work.
And wow, I knew I could count on you guys to demolish TMason’s weak arguments. I [heart] you guys.
I want to stay up and watch the trollsplosion, but I also want to sleep.
And it has to be youtube.com, not the shortened URL (youtu.be). And it has to be http: not https:
But other than that, it’s totally simple 9_9
So when I refer to it being “easier” for us to do this work, I mean what you write above versus you (or society if you prefer a stand-in) now having to work to pay for someone to do what you wrote above.
Then you are a fool and a moron.
If everyone was making their own food (it can be done on as little as five acres for a family of four, but it takes skill), who is going to do all the other things? Build the roads that move the goods?
And there is a benefit to industrial agriculture; it buffers the individual from the shocks of bad years. I’d hate to be living a subsistence farmer’s life in the Midwest this year. If 90 percent of the population were doing it…? The word is Famine; it’s one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
But your utopia has no internet. No electric power. No cloth of pleasant texture for all. It has a high rate of infant mortality and death somewhere in the range of 55-60 for those who make it past 13.
And your NASA fantasy… would be stillborn.
So you can have it. I’ll take the present.
And what do you think started the push towards putting money offshore?
That it was made possible. When it wasn’t legal, it wasn’t done (because the only way to to do it was to make the money disappear, and that’s a thing a company doesn’t want to do, because they can’t use it later).
I believe CEO’s should be taxed higher but not at 90%
Really? Do you know how a graduated progressive tax works?
Your answer to #2 is an unknown. And I’ll research that paper. I highly doubt they have more income sitting than almost double the debt of the US.
You have a much higher trust in the wealthy than I do, because that’s the lowball estimate.
I’ll save you the work:
Interview: World’s Super-Rich Hide $21 Trillion Offshore
And the papers: You don’t know the half of it
Which is the one I was thinking of, but a lot more can be found here
So doubt it as highly as you like.
Nanasha: It pisses me off that the “social security problem” and the “pension problem” is not really a “expense problem”- it’s a “the government/management promised to contribute X amount of money per month towards this program and they KNEW they needed to contribute X amount of money per month towards this program but instead of doing this, they put in a fraction of X into the accounts and then kept borrowing from the accounts whenever they fancied, and now that it’s come due they’re freaking out that they’ve been caught and have decided to create “reforms” (which is bullshit-speak for “we don’t want to have to pay you the money we rightly owe you and promised you and we ALSO don’t want to have any consequences for reneging on our deal”).
It pisses me off that had the median wage kept up with the cost of living…there would be no problem.
It’s not that the accounting has screwed us (it hasn’t). It’s not that the math is bad (it’s not). It’s not that they didn’t think people would live so long (they did).
It’s that they expected wages to keep pace, and they haven’t.
I want to stay up and watch the trollsplosion, but I also want to sleep.
Would a catsplosion do?
I can definitely see a grocery store taking years to open even in a place where demand is high. When I moved to this area four years ago, Whole Foods had just announced a store was opening. It opens next month. Four years later.
Community gardens for the poor wouldn’t work as a sole source of food even if they did have unlimited time. In many cities (presumably where these services are needed most) the population density exceeds the amount of food people would be able to grow in the available space. Plus, what are they going to eat in the winter and early spring?
Even in a perfect world where no one ever got divorced, there would still be single parents because in some cases one parent is dead or incarcerated. My cousin the sociopath was married with a two year old when he got sent to prison for 15 years for assault and carjacking. They might as well have been divorced for all the interaction he had with the kid. Then again, since he pulled a woman out of her car and drove away with her dragging alongside the vehicle, that’s probably a good thing.
Hesster: From the approval to the opening was eight months. It was five years from when the one closed to the next being approved.
Catsplosion certainly solved all of MY problems.
@katz
omg
MINECRAFT+CATS+FOUNTAIN=WIN
Thanks Katz and Cloudiah! Though it’s so long past the bit about explaining Tmason’s prophecies I’m not sure it’s worth backtracking … though it is Python … hmmm. 🙂
Oh what the heck, let’s see if it works … this guy could totally be Tmason’s ancestor.
http://youtu.be/QqaQ_Bhgmrc
Yes! I is queen of blockquotes and videos! My life has not been lived in vain!
The town were I went to school had many grocery stores, but on the poor side there was only one. When I lived there, the old-school franchised Giant Eagle finally closed (there were two new shiny corporate-owned ones within easy driving, but impossible walking, crazy-difficult bus distance) and was replaced by a place called Sav-A-Lot. So technically, there was a grocery store within walking distance in every neighborhood.
EXCEPT, Sav-A-Lot sold food so shitty and expired the most desperate soup kitchens would have rejected it. And rightfully so – half-decayed vegetables, canned goods that probably got rescued from an abandoned nuclear bunker, the meat in a tube (is your meat half rotten? who knows? Open the tube to find out!). Even the processed foods were funky. I went once to see if it was as bad as my poverty-raised roommate said (yes) and never went back. But, the place was the only store within walking distance to the only hotel in town, where we put visiting students and even professors for short- to mid- range stays. I never did fully convince the powers that be how bad the place was, and how we should stop sending people there. People who have regular access to shiny new grocery stores have no idea the kind of shit it’s still legal to sell to those who have no clout to demand better. If that were my only grocery, I’d have been at Taco Bell everyday too.
Oh geez, did he actually say he’s going to comment on other things? D: Please be more interesting.. please be more interesting..
The local Sav-a-Lots are tolerably good.
Most of us can improve our nutrition by even a few balcony or fire escape plants, but even in places where you can do that year round, it’s not going to meet anyone’s dietary needs. Home canning sounds great for those who have gardens, but it is, as I said, expensive; price a few cartons of mason jars and a canning kettle at even a cheap outlet like Fred’s, and you’ll see. If you’re not experienced, start with acidic foods, like tomatos, or try pickling or preserving, where high salt/sugar/acid content will prevent the growth of Clostridium botulinum. Bland vegetables, especially legumes, are death waiting to happen.
Even so, real food security is going to depend on government intervention for some time, and not just food stamps, school meals, or even government food depots. Antitrust laws and new legislation will be needed to reverse the extinction of owner-occupied farms. Liberty Hyde Bailey once said the United States needed more enlghtenment in the country and more nature in the city, and he was right. The establshment of agriicultural courses in secondary schools, the creation of granges – in effect, farming condos- for young farmers who do not yet have the money for land and farm machinery, the creation of township farm machinery depots for community owned tractors and combines, the expansion of seed banks for crop diversity, are all ideas that should be revived. Rural living, iin ths day of the Internet, no longer needs to mean intellectual isolation. L. H. Bailey’s dream can, indeed, come true.
Reading about other discount grocery stores makes me feel so lucky to have an Aldi’s in Joplin. You can get your groceries for about 3/4 the price of Wal-Mart, even using coupons and ad matching. There is less selection, and sometimes the produce is spoiled or moldy, so you have to be creative in your meal planning. One good thing to do is keep a notebook of food prices per ounce of your favorite items for every store, and then you can easily compare them. Sometimes it works out that the nice grocery stores will have something cheaper than Aldi’s, but then you have to figure out if the extra gas of going to two stores offsets the savings on whatever you’re buying. This is also just a luxury for people in cities big enough to have several stores. My hometown only had one store, so that’s where you went unless you wanted to drive an hour to go to the city. Anyway, it’s not like people don’t already put a lot of effort and thought into making every dollar count at the store. Rather than tell people “Try harder!”, we need to listen to them and find out what they think will make it easier for them to feed their families.