Monday, November 14, 2016

DOUBLE STANDARDS AND FALSE EQUIVALENCIES

Our culture has long accepted double standards as standard operating procedure.
It is pervasive in our humor:
            Man on park bench talking to friend:             “I know a place where for $5 they give you a beer a sandwich and take you in the back to get laid.”
            Friend: “What? For $5 you get a sandwich a beer and get laid?”
            Man: “That’s right, a beer a sandwich and get laid FOR $5!”
            Friend: “So you’ve been there?”
            Man: “No, but my sister goes all the time!”
The double standard is also evident in our general parenting culture.
Consider stories of a father warning his daughter to stay away from aggressive boys at parties or on dates but congratulating his son for ‘getting lucky!’
One wonders with whose daughter the son is having that luck!
And of course the double standard has been in our business world since, well forever!
According to statistics women on average get paid 78% what men do for the same work! 
That appears to be up from previous polls.
So at least we are moving in the correct direction, right?
Wrong!
It is clear that our political world views women as inferior or at least the electorate feels that way.  And that does not bode well for equality.
And if you wish to analyze why the people who voted in the last election felt that a woman could not do the job a man could you don’t have to look too far.
The answer is in front of your face and in nearly every newspaper.
Look at the media!
The man lied every time he opened his mouth but the media never once held his feet to the fire. He was given a pass even when his lies contradicted his previous lies from a few minutes earlier.
But the media pursued and harped on allegations that the woman lied because she had said she was a different person in private than in public.
Really?
Is this earth shattering news?
Who among us are not different in that way?
In fact if you wish to be honest at least with yourself think about how you act with your parents; your children; your best friends; your casual acquaintances; your boss; or your siblings.
Forget the Three Faces of Eve; most of us are more akin to Sybil!
And as for false equivalencies let’s use the father-son-daughter analogy from above let’s look at the two candidates for the highest and most important office in America.
On the one hand we have a man who is alleged to have had sex with several underage girls and does in fact have a court date to discuss this disgusting predatory behavior.  He has also allegedly assaulted, groped and possibly raped many of age women.  He certainly bragged about his prowess in that regard noting that his celebrity afforded him carte blanche when it came to women and their bodies.
And then on the other hand we have a woman who has done none of those reprehensible things but whose husband had fooled around, consensually with other women.
How could these stories be reported with anything like a similarity?
CNN constantly had well respected knowledgeable reporters and analysts who favored the woman paired against the most racist lying team of supporters for the man as if they were equals.
The woman’s side discussed policies and fixes for all our problems in America while the man’s group merely said “Wrong!”
And for every new scandal or absurd utterance or non policy statement made by the man the media also reported their concern over 6 year old emails by the woman.
And when the woman apologized for the very slight error of doing what her predecessor had done with her emails it received very little air time. It remained the single most damning thing she had done in 30 years of public service.
Of course over the same 30 years the man did nothing to promote mankind and in fact harmed humanity with his deliberate frauds.
But through it all the media placed both the man and the woman on equal footing.
This ultimate betrayal of our trust allowed a man with the least qualifications to be anything other than what he is and always will be, a con man to be considered the equal to a woman who far out shined him in every possible important way.
One media company that cannot or should not be allowed to use the word ‘news’ anywhere in its title has stayed the course in their incredibly unfair and biased coverage of the man and the woman.
On Fox and Friends Thursday, November 10 at 8:30 am Elizabeth Hasselbeck, Steve Doocy, and Brian Kilmeade, those pillars of lies, injustice and the un-American way insisted that the Department of Justice under President Trump indict, convict, and imprison Hillary Clinton for her use of a private server.
Equivalency alert!
There is international precedent for governments imprisoning their opposition.
These include Putin’s Russia, Yanukovych’s Ukraine, Maduro’s Venezuela, Military Junta’s Myanmar, Kim Jong-un’s Korea, Khamenei’s Iran, Museveni’s Uganda, Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, Sen’s Cambodia, and Mubarak’s Egypt.
On final equivalency and this one may be the scariest of all.
What is happening here and now in America is eerily equivalent to 1930s Germany.
And so we now must face a future with a disgusting evil racist pig in the White House who has already surrounded himself with a team of even worse disgusting and evil racist pigs.
Shame on all of you who voted for the man because of his gender.
Shame on all of you who voted for candidates that had no chance of winning.
And even more shame for those of you who did not vote at all.  You may not want your freedom but your apathy could very well be the reason the rest of us lose ours!
Is this our new standard?

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