With election day here in the US less than two months away, Andrea Hardie has decided that maybe it would be ok if some women were allowed to vote after all.
Hardie — the oft-suspended antifeminist Twitter activist known online as Janet Bloomfield and/or JudgyBitch — has long been a vocal opponent of women’s suffrage, on the grounds that women tend to vote for politicians who support things she thinks are bad, like economic stimulus packages and other manifestations of “Big Daddy government.”
But she’s been making some concessions on this front. Some months back, evidently taking her inspiration from Starship Troopers, she decided it would be ok for women to vote if they were to join the military — or get themselves elected to public office.
Now she’s decided that maybe it would be ok if women like her were allowed to vote too.
In a post on her terrible blog, she declares that
I have already argued that women should be allowed to earn the right to vote, either by joining the military or by being voted into leadership positions by male voters. I think I will now expand my exemptions to some other women with ‘skin in the game’.
Wives of men and mothers of sons.
Perhaps not coincidentally, Hardie falls into both of those categories, as she has regularly reminded her readers.
But ladies like her are still ladies. Why should we let them vote?
Women who are legally married to a man, who by definition is subject to the draft, have skin the game. They have a right to make leadership decisions that could result in their husband’s death. Needless to say, the right to vote is surrendered upon divorce. It can only be regained by remarriage, to a man.
Huh. Never mind that, in the US and Canada at least, there is no draft, and the chances of a draft being reinstated in the forseeable future can be rounded down to zero percent.
And never mind that all women living in a country have “skin in the game” by virtue of, you know, living in that country.
Let’s just accept her premise for a moment and work out the technicalities. Like, for example: would these women be stripped of the vote once their husbands are no longer of draft age? NOPE!
The ages of the men involved don’t really matter. In the US, the draft currently sits at 18-25 years of age, but in war time, draft ages can and do change. Men up to the age of 45 were drafted in WWII, and all men up to age 65 had to register. Men in Ukraine are currently subject to the draft up to age 50. All societies will prefer to draft men of all ages before they will draft women.
That’s quite an assumption, given that there are a lot more young women serving in the military than there are old men.
The second group is mothers of sons. They, too, have skin in the game. Once a woman has given birth to a son, she earns the right to vote on the grounds that her son can be drafted and she has a right to participate in leadership decisions that could lead to his death. The only circumstance under which this right can be revoked is if she surrenders legal custody of the boy. His adoptive mother, if there is one, earns the vote.
What if … oh never mind, it’s pointless to try to discuss this as if actual logic is involved in anything that Hardie argues.
Or facts, as her next “argument” shows:
The truly sobering thought is that even if women’s suffrage were repealed, I doubt many women would care, beyond the initial shock of ‘Muh rights! Muh rights!’ If the 19th were repealed, I sincerely doubt very many women would take any of the paths listed above for the purpose of gaining the right to vote. Women will do all of the above, but based on their personal feelings and preferences, and not because they are vitally, deeply, profoundly invested in the idea of suffrage.
It’s always seemed to me just a teensy bit strange how invested Hardie is in the whole anti-suffrage thing, because all the (admittedly halfassed) arguments she musters against women voting would seem also to apply equally to women trying to influence politics in ways other than voting. Like, for example, writing blogs and tweeting tweets and putting up videos on YouTube in order to push your political agenda — all of which Hardie herself does, of course.
And even if we accept her bizarre notion that the only women who have “skin in the game” are women in the military, elected officials, wives of men and mothers of boys, wouldn’t this exemption only apply to those women trying to influence politics in the countries in which they live?
Following Hardie’s logic to its conclusion, Canadian women like her shouldn’t have the right to publicly campaign for political candidates in the US. No skin in the game!
But who is this dude staring out from the header on her Facebook page?
He looks vaguely familiar. He doesn’t look very Canadian.
Pavlov’s House, I suppose I may have overstated the unlikelihood of the draft being reinstated; it’s just that MRAs like Hardie talk about it as if it’s likely to happen any day now. Also, it seems clear that if it is reinstated, women will be drafted as well.
I would think it’s not very pacifist at all to walk past a violent act in progress without doing something about it. Some pacifists may take issue even with using violence as a defensive or protective measure, but there are non-violent ways of stopping violence. I consider myself to be a pacifist but would not be against using a necessary level of violence to stop violence in progress.
@Alan
Too many letters! We don’t have the time or the patience for any unnecessary letters.
We are a nation that’s Open for Business.
Get busy and spend some money!
With respect, Alan, you miss my point entirely. I’ll try it again but slower.
It is not a case of “I saw something bad happening, so I ended it.” If life were that simple, everything would be easy.
Firstly, you didn’t see something. You thought you saw it. We both know how unreliable unsupported eyewitness testimony is. You may well have been right; equally you may have been wrong. You don’t know, and you can’t make decisions affecting human lives based on that lack of information.
Secondly, you didn’t see a bad thing happen. You saw something happen which you thought was bad. Humans have a lot of cognitive biases, especially humans as privileged as you or I. A lot of people, for example, would see a drunk mixed-race couple kissing and classify it as a rape scene; or would see a brown-skinned student take out a clock and assume that it’s a bomb. With hindsight we know that they’re wrong, but at the time they genuinely believed it. It’s the same for you or I.
(In most violent incidents between two men, allegedly, both of them sincerely believe that they’re defending themselves from the other one. My friend Alan Robertshaw told me that. Humans are really, really bad at working out what’s going on when violence is involved; and without knowing what’s going on, how can they react appropriately?)
Thirdly, you didn’t end it. You do martial arts, so you know how unpredictable violence is, especially when it’s in a non-sporting situation. You have no idea what’s going to happen after you swing a punch. It’s possible that you’re going to hurt the victim, or yourself, or a bystander. It’s possible that you’re going to kill someone, even if you didn’t mean to.
To sum up: you took partial information, ran it quickly through a deeply imperfect reasoning system, then took actions which you thought might possibly result in a good outcome. If someone built a house like that, none of us would dare to step inside it for fear of the roof collapsing.
Panicked bystanders getting involved is a very bad thing. There’s a reason why the NRA recommends that its members do not get involved in heroics: their actions are more likely to harm than to help, and the aggregate impact of all those actions is a net disadvantage to society.
@ EJ
I get what you’re saying. Yes, sometimes situations are ambiguous. Then you might need to make a further assessment.
However sometimes the situation is really obvious, or at least sufficiently alarming. It was a bit sickening that people just took photos of Saachi strangling his wife, whether that was not wanting to get involved in a domestic or the rather bewildering (to me at least) argument that “we didn’t know the context”! The guy was strangling a woman; what context do you need?
I suspect the MGTOW bloke made his example up, but I’ll give you one from real life. I came across two guys kicking and stamping on a woman who was on the ground. What should I have done?
I know what I actually did, and I don’t feel even slightly guilty about it.
(As it happened she turned out to be an off duty police officer and one of the guys was an old client of mine. The events that transpired at the subsequent trial were surreal.)
Indeed they might, but some people have argued that the guys who stopped Brock Turner were violent bullies who misread a nice guy being romantic. I don’t think they were wrong to intervene.
There will always be the possibility of ambiguity as I acknowledged, but I personally (and this is just my view) think that it’s better to intervene in circumstances like Brock Turner than not take the risk because you might be wrong.
Hey everyone, sorry I went so long without posting. New job + move + driving back to Chicago on weekends to spend time with the other Dr. Joekster is taking a lot out of me, and when I get home, all I feel like doing is killing stuff on path of exile.
Anyhow, it’s gone way past my posts back on page 2, but I think I was trying to make two independent points and somehow link them together. It’s a thing I do, especially when my brain is all fuzzy and sleep deprived. It has to do with how my brain works. Sorry 🙁
The two points I was trying to make were:
1) That that portion of the American electorate that shows up on election day is remarkably politically illiterate, and yet they make decisions about the future of this country anyhow. I think this is a failure of our public education system (largely 2′ poor funding, lack of respect for teachers, and conservative politicians forcing their views into the textbooks), and I agree with Dalilama that the first step needs to be fixing those failures.
2) That it’s a huge hassle to legally immigrate to this country, and that it would do our electorate good to have to go through the same process themselves. Someone up above suggested that the appropriate approach would be to drop some of the requirements, and I partially agree. I think it’s somewhat disingenuous to have an English test, for example, when English is not our official language, and the process should be cheaper. HOWEVER, I do think the civics test ‘should’ be in there, and that is the part that I think ‘should’ be part of the franchise. The theory behind requiring it is (to my understanding), that the civics test only tests those things that native-born Americans learn in school, and so it’s only making sure that immigrants have that same level of knowledge. The problem is, most of our electorate would not be able to easily pass that civics test. Again, as Dalilama pointed out, that’s a failure of our educational system that does need to be addressed prior to instituting any ‘test’ for the franchise.
Sorry for the digression, I know the thread has moved on quite a bit from yesterday morning.
My posts are going to be a bit light for the next few months.
Cheers.
Oh, and the fifth-graders note is brilliant.
:):):):)
@occasional reader, capillotracté! A new word! Thank you, I didn’t know that one! Un bon mot!
@Alan Robertshaw:
*laughs* We get those in Toronto as well. Both the mice, and the people leaning over to watch them scurry about.
@Pavlov’s House
Indeed, a hypothesis immediately occurs to me that would explain it: Morale, effectiveness, etc. have a lot to do with buy-in by the troops, i.e. the degree to which there is general agreement that this is something that someone should be doing, even if they might prefer it wasn’t them. My personal favorite example of this with American troops is the U.S. Civil War. Both the Union and the Confederacy relied heavily on conscripts, but the Confederates had a higher proportion. The difference shows when you realize that the Union army had about normal desertion rates for the time period, while the Confederate army was listing up 1/3 of their troops as AWOL through much of the war; they had armed bands of draft resisters roaming the backwoods, shooting at press gangs. (Admittedly, the North had some problems relating to conscription, but not within the actual Army to speak of. The New York Draft Riots were initially about who was going, not whether anyone should go, although this being America, they started taking it out on black people pretty quick.
(As I was writing this, a song came up on my radio about an Irish immigrant dying in the Union Army)
It’s the one I generally make. Admittedly, I usually follow that up with an argument that the U.S. ought to scrap our entire military apparatus with the exception of the Coast Guard, Corps of Engineers (which should simply be detatched from the army and be civil engineers), and, grudgingly, the National Guard and Air Guard, simply because people are very, very stubborn about that kind of thing. ( I ask you, who in the world has, or will have in the foreseeable future, the capacity to launch a military invasion of the U.S. even in the face of no defence whatsoever? I am entirely serious about this question.)
I also am quite fond of Smedley Butler’s proposed ‘Peace Amendment’ to the constitution, which states that no U.S. ground forces are to leave the boundaries of the U.S., sea forces to stay within 200 miles and air forces 500 miles of U.S. territory at all times.
Robert Heinlein was relatively progressive on gender, race, and disability for the 1950’s despite his right-libertarian economic views. The point of Starship Troopers is that the people who vote are the people willing to take responsibility and make personal sacrifices for the common good (which doesn’t sound all that like a Trump supporter). The Federation is required to find a service position for anyone who wants to serve. While the book is definitely problematic, the society Heinlein describes explicitly rejects privilege based on ability, race, or gender.
That’s a really good point. It is also obvious that there is more than one way to sacrifice for the common good than serving in the military.
Agree with Axecalibur, that would make an awesome story.
@Alan
The mind boggles. The head reels.
I’m glad you stepped in. (Also, there’s a short story in this.)
I haven’t observed physical violence on the street — but I’ve heard what could be construed as threats. That’s when I take out my cell phone. Or just stand nearby as a witness. Once I just stood at a distance and caught the woman’s eye — she told the guy they were being watched. She got away and thanked me as she quickly walked by me.
Some people tell me that this is extremely dangerous. My own belief is that these guys wouldn’t dare to touch me. I’m not their girlfriend or wife or sister. If I were, of course, Katie help me!
Of course, there could be exceptions to this. Some strange guy might want to deck me. I play this whole thing by ear.
@ Axe
It’s so weird you say that. I was going to give a bit more detail but I thought, not only was it unnecessary, the surrounding events are so surreal it does sound like a short story.
(Involves my client attacking the judge at a previous hearing and it all kicking off again at the trial following the event referred to, and it all interlinking into a narrative. If it had been a TV episode you’d be thinking it was lazy writing, just too many contrivances)
I don’t mean this as an insult to Kirstie Alley but I can’t help but notice that JudgyBitch looks like her.
Well, accordingly to her logic, sick or disabled men, or men older than 45 should not have the right to vote.