Saturday, March 21, 2015

Blog Update

Comments are going to be closed for the next week or so, FYI.

I'll be back soon!

Tuesday, March 17, 2015

Whites Riot on North Side of Chicago (Again)

It's that time of year again!

Pub crawls related to the city's St. Patrick's Day Parade this past weekend led to 17 arrests, battery on a police officer, multiple assaults, 40 ambulance calls, a possible sexual assault, and approximately 20 people transported to area hospitals.

As can be seen from photos and transcripts at the above-cited link, this mob action was primarily carried out by masses of young white heterosexuals, with much of the aggression dominated by young white men.

Surprisingly (not surprisingly) there were no reports of police officers killing, choking, or otherwise assaulting these violent individuals, despite the clear threats these individuals were posing to the community and public safety.

Nonetheless, now is the time to re-examine the white heterosexual family unit.

In what ways are white parents modeling this privileged, aggressive behavior?  How are white parents, particularly fathers, contributing to this mayhem? We mustn't let them continue to fail their children.



Thursday, March 5, 2015

A Correlation

Might this (mansplaining) be related to this (men on average being more narcissistic than women)?

I would speculate yes.

By far, most men who have engaged in mansplaining with me seem to have been motivated by supreme over-confidence in their own intellect coupled with an assumption that my own, a woman's, was beneath theirs.  They have also seen driven by entitlement, both to my time and to engage in aggression when they have deemed me insufficiently pleasant to their attempts to "correct" and "instruct" me.

This being said, I would agree with the speculation that men being, on average, more narcissistic than women is at least partly explained by socialization.

Not all men. Of course.

I also believe that men's on average *ahem* greater confidence in themselves also contributes to women experiencing imposter syndrome.

In my professional life, I have learned to be wary of those, especially men, who often speak with extreme confidence and who rarely express doubt, even when complicated issues arise. I have also learned that, when people are uncertain in professional situations, people who speak confidently can be very convincing, even if they're completely full of shit.   I have seen leaders make horrible decisions, because they listened to the persons who spoke the most confidently rather than the person who expressed uncertainty about a course of action.

When I have been faced with decisions in my own life, I try to remember this, and to therefore trust my gut and listen to my relatively shakier inner monologue that's thinking we maybe don't know all of the facts - even if there's a louder, more confident voice saying otherwise.

Tuesday, March 3, 2015

Ha HA HA, Of Course!

Via Priceonomics:

"The Time Everyone 'Corrected' the World's Smartest Woman"

I grew up reading Parade magazine every Sunday morning and Marilyn vos Savant's "Ask Marilyn" column was, in my opinion, the best part of it.

The above-cited article is chock full of some big-time condescending mansplaining circa 1990, demonstrating that even though the term mansplaining had yet to exist, the phenomenon itself certainly did.

If a Guinness Boom of World  Records holder for Highest IQ can't answer a brainteaser in her column without getting 10,000 letters erroneously telling her she's wrong, where is the hope for the rest of us?