May 9th, 2007, 01:59 AM
Civil society should reclaim the burden of males by imposing a tax? Don't you mean by aborting male fetuses? Or do you know what civil society means? Or was it just a joke?
I only ask because it's curious why you don't just say, 'the state should... tax', when that's obviously what you mean there. Does the word 'state' sound too conservative or perhaps 'old-left' for you? What makes civil society sound better than state anyway? I mean, we all know what a state is, if we in fact know, but civil society, that's a slippery little sociological concept. A state is an institution that does certain things if certain people (and political scientists more or less know, if they do in fact know, who these certain people are in different types of regimes, but basically their the people we call 'politicians') want it to. So if 'certain people' include 'us', then 'we' can get the state to impose a masculinity tax. Easy and straightforward really, all 'we' have to do with a state is become 'politicians' to get what we want from it. But what about civil society? What does it do, and why does it do it? I mean, it's a weird term, it doesn't refer to anything that a man can point to and say 'that's it, civil society, it employs these and those people and intends to do such and such because this and that person in charge of it want it to for various self or non-self generated reasons'. What can you say about civil society then? It would seem the appeal of it is that it isn't a state, or a corporation, or any other kind of 'hierarchal organization'. Civil society has no rulers, so it can have no subjects, so there can be no subjection from it. And whenever 'it' 'does' anything, it was not because 'certain people' with certain names and interests and political parties wanted it to, but because the illustriously benign 'we' willed it to.
On a related note, who in fact is the 'we' in the 'we should encourage couples to have kids before or after...'? And what is the 'encouragment' that should be given? And to ask the sort of obvious question, what about couples that want to have kids during that period that mother nature (cruelly) says is crucial for reproduction, while 'we' say that it is 'crucial' for 'a future of professional success'? Ah, the whole situation looks kind of like a peculiarly modern tragedy, where people are forced to choose between the demands of nature and the demands of... well, I don't know who or what exactly, I guess the 'us' you referred to when you were talking about that ambiguous 'we' earlier. Although I guess that's just a silly sort of tragedy, since we all know that 'we' are right about these things, and that mother nature was always just a cruel bitch in any case.
"Most women, however will not [make the right decisions], and for resons that are not entirely self-generated. For this reason alone this controversy will not abate any time soon."
I think you hit on a general truth about controversies there. When people claim that their own decisions aren't 'entirely self-generated', contreversy will probably never abate. Could such a contreversy really be resolved? What would have to happen? The elimination of non-self-reason-generators? Perhaps, but if people continue to fail to make the right decisions, what's to stop them from continuing the contreversy by claiming that not all the non-self-reason-generators were eliminated, i.e by making new claims about what constitutes such a non-self-reason-generator? I mean, they might just be making stuff up at that point, but that wouldn't stop them from continuing the contreversy. It's easy to make up ideas to continue a contreversy, especially in an issue such as income disparity where you've got real people with real money on the line. Unless of course, one fine day, when 'we' have succesfully eliminated all the real non-self-reason-generators people actually stop failing to make the 'right' decisions.
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