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>these societies were some of the most disturbing and violent ever

They weren't the ones who committed genocide on the entire continent.

Raising a child is not just "being alive". It requires a tremendous amount of uncompensated labor.

I guess "people that aren't rich have the right to comfortably raise a family" is an axiom that I had that I didn't really expect to have to defend.

unplanned pregnancies exist, and abortion access is spotty at best, especially for poor people

Because unless you’re an antinatalist, some people having children is socially necessary. If the next generation had no children, society would collapse. Also, many women have unplanned pregnancies.

Well yea, healthcare should be a right of all people and not contingent upon employment but that wasn’t really my point

Some, but not enough. Men and women should be absolutely equal in terms of economic power, they currently are not.

There’s a lot of things that are irrational to an employer, ie providing health insurance or limiting the hours their employees work. Fortunately labor laws exist and are enforced. And just to emphasize, I said the primary caregiver, who is usually but not slways a woman.

I’m speaking on the level of principle, not implementation. There are a variety of ways you could implement this, but I think that is a secondary question to the basic principle that donestic labor exists, is socially necessary, and is, unjustly, not compensated financially. Most people in this debate, even left-leaning people, don’t acknowledge that.

Women are paid less not because their jobs are worth less, but because employers can get away with paying them leas. There are values other than market value. Society needs both nurses and engineers. Women and men should be equal not just in opportunity, but in outcome (ie, economic power).

In addition, women are usually the primary caregiver and disproportionately spend more time doing domestic labour (raising children, taking care of the home) which they are not compensated financially for. Women (or whomever is the primary caregiver in a family or does more domestic labor at home) should be paid more for fewer hours in the workplace.

The problem with this kind of "gene-centered" social thinking is that the implication, almost always, is some sort of regressive or conservative politics about social problems and inequalities being a result of natural forces. A horrifying example of this is, for example, the book "A Natural History of Rape" which makes a biological deterministic argument that explains rape as a natural and evolutionarily selected-for behavior in men.

Show me a controlled longitudinal study where (eg) men and women are raised in an identical environment, treated identically, and not even informed of the concept of gender. That doesn't exist, and never will exist. There are massive emergent cultural forces that make biology a pretty useless tool for doing sociology, much like chemistry studies the emergent properties of physics principles, but trying to account for emergent properties of atoms and molecules in terms of quantum mechanics is totally useless. Human societies should be studied on sociological terms, not biological ones. With even the smallest amount of effort, you can see that there are HUGE confounding factors that make any attempt to explain social outcomes biologically totally useless.

Every person under capitalism has to sell their labor in order to survive. This means that the employee and employer are not on equal footing - I cannot reasonably refuse to work and live a comfortable lifestyle, which means I have to make certain sacrifices (ie, working 40 hours a week in order to survive). This is all fine if I feel like I am treated well and compensated fairly, but if I feel like I am not, as an individual I have very little power. I can quit, but if I feel like most workers in my industry are not treated fairly, there's nowhere to go. However, if I organize with other workers, I have the bargaining power to make certain demands: suddenly employers realize if they want to employ people who have my skills, they have to meet certain reasonably requirements with regards to hours, compensation, etc.

Things like the 40 hour workweek aren't just a result of market forces. Market forces by themselves literally worked people to death - life expectancy in Liverpool during the industrial revolution was 15. It was through organization and struggle that workers achieved the rights they have today.

> Why would I want my salary to be the same as everyone else? If I am better than the next person and I am a better negotiator, why should my salary be identical to the lazy fuck that has the same number of years of experience?

Why do you have disdain for other workers, who largely share your economic and political interests?

>If a correlation is completely explained by controlling for a third factor, that doesn't make the original correlation a lie.

The implication of "black people commit more crimes" is that there is something about being black that involves a degree of criminality. It is a very poor way of describing the issue. A much better framing is "black people in the US are disempowered socially, politically and economically and black communities are ignored by US social policy." Another, far more useful framing of the issue, that I hardly ever hear is that black people are more often the victims of crimes.

>blacks disproportionately commit crimes, especially violent crimes.

This is a racist lie. If you control for socioeconomic factors, the difference totally vanishes.

The united states prison system is designed to systematically incarcerate and disempower black americans. It has nothing to do with "breaking laws". Incarceration is not correlated with crime rate, and nearly everyone breaks laws, but a small segment of the population is incarcerated to a large degree (black men).

I agree -- I think that right wing economics falls apart under debate and scrutiny (ie, it reveals itself to be based on the interests of the wealthy and powerful and to the disadvantage of the poor and middle class) and discussion is a good thing. But I haven't seen many economists becoming subject to deplatforming in the way that racist or misogynistic speakers like Ann Coulter, Milo Yiannopoulos, Richard Spencer, etc have (rightfully) been, so I don't see this as really an issue.

>But how much of politics is economic theory?

A tremendous amount. In fact, there's a pretty famous book about it: https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Critique-Political-Economy-Vo...

>It's unfair to the socially liberal and fiscal conservatives to shut down economic conversations on the basis of "you must hate blacks and women".

Perhaps, but how fine is the line between "you advocate for economic policies that disenfranchise black people and women" and "you hate black people and women"?

>...and men with similar stories of being on the receiving end are ignored or told to shut up and sit down.

That is not true at all. It's just that these events are much rarer (women rarely occupy positions of power and abuse that power sexually).

>...and people trying to bring up actual statistics, or examples of non-black men getting murdered by police, get shouted down.

Again, you're fighting strawmen. Most leftists are anti-police in general and certainly care about violence against white people committed by the police, especially white people who are marginalized in other ways.

>it has to be solely and directly about racism.

It isn't solely about racism, but racism is a huge, primary component.

>I have no support for trump, but the level of identity politics was nowhere near comparable. This is when the phrase "check your privilege" became a meme - because it was being used to shut down the conversation. Progressives literally had a scorecard for if they'd consider talking to you. (Gay +1, Trans + 3, Black +2, Female + 1.5, Hetero Parents -5).

This kind of PC-obsessed SJW seems to me to be a total fabrication of the right disconnected from what actual leftists and progressives are fighting for.

#metoo wants men to stop harassing and assaulting women with impunity

#blacklivesmatter wants cops to stop murdering black men with impunity

You know what, I think these are issues where people should be polarized "morally righteous" about, whatever that means. They are real injustices that affect a large number of people on a daily basis. Activists rightly view these struggles as ideological battles to be won, not conversations to be had. What is the "other side" to affirming the basic humanity of women or black people?

Maybe it has something to do with the systematic impoverishment of black communities and the destruction of black families through mass incarceration, and "innovative teaching" will do little to fix these inequalities, which require much deeper and more structural policy change.

On a related note, Washington D.C. specifically has a massive lead pipe problem which has been ignored for decades.

If you think that neck width hair and eye color are traits which have as much historical social and political significance as gender we aren’t really having the same conversation.

Women should have money and power they shouldn’t have to marry into money and power. That point alone shows me we aren’t really having the same conversation, that your idea of a female power is “marrying a rich dude”

What does conservatism mean to you? When you say 'conservative', what beliefs are you describing?

Thanks!

I recall several articles defending the “women are biologically inferior at tech, it’s science” position on the front page.

I appreciate your comment and I think that you make a lot of valid points. Anyway my original account was certainly shadowbanned without warning (logging out and viewing my page made recent comments invisible), I assume bc I had -70 net comment karma. I don’t feel bitter towards the mods about it but am curious what’s up

Well there’s more than 2 genders but that’s another issue. The point is we live in a male-dominated society where men have controlled a majority of political and economic power since this country’s inception. In terms of gender, here’s a few policy proposals:

-financial compensation for housework/child-rearing -reduced hours for the primary caregiver at the same level of salary after childbirth (usually the woman) -equal pay for women mandated by law (pass the ERA) -much stronger policies against sexual harassment -more women in positions of power -full subsidy for menstruation products & birth control -paid maternity leave for all workers -universal healthcare -comprehensive sex positive and consent focused sex education in public schools

I could go on, but the main point is men & male society control politics, science, the economy, etc, so the whole society is predominantly oriented around men. A lot of shifts are more cultural (like attitudes towards harassment and sexism) which is harder to make into concrete policy proposals.

My values aren't "everyone should be able to say everything in every space everywhere without any consequence!", and I don't think even the most radical free speech libertarian would believe that. In either hackernews or at Google, if you started arguing for Holocaust denial, you can bet you wouldn't last long, no matter how hard you defend yourself with "free speech". In all spaces, there are rules of acceptable and unacceptable discourse. I am no more pro or anti free speech than anyone else, I just have different ideas of what the boundaries of that speech should be.

What concerns me most is equality of all people, and liberation of all people from systems of oppression. James Damore furthered an oppressive system (patriarchy) by perpetuating sexist ideas that attacked and hurt women at Google. With all the stuff about free speech or whatever, the opinion that he wanted to advocate for was nothing more than old school sexism: women are on average worse engineers because of their biology, so any discrepancies of outcome is a result of their natural inferiority, not broken social and economic structures. Is that really a valuable, constructive opinion that should be inside the marketplace of ideas at Google? What kind of company culture does that lead to? One in which discrepancies and injustices can be rationalized and justified through "innate differences" and where women who experience sexism and discrimination would feel more uncomfortable expressing their concerns.

Maybe, but really the point isn't about me. The point is the dominant opinion on Hackernews is "James Damore was right!" or at least "James Damore made some good points", which, whether you believe it or not, is absolutely a right-wing, conservative opinion, not the kind of "liberal SV PC culture" that is supposedly dominant and oppressive.

I was shadowbanned for getting downvoted too much for saying James Damore had terrible sexist opinions and should have been fired.

Hackernews is predominantly right wing & conservative.