Dave Sim's blogandmail #458 (December 13th, 2007)

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Fifteen Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast That Make You a Good Feminist

1. A mother who works a full-time job and delegates to strangers the raising of her children eight hours a day, five days a week does just as good a job as a mother who hand-rears her children full time.

2. It makes great sense for the government to pay 10 to 15,000 dollars a year to fund a daycare space for a child so its mother - who pays perhaps 2,000 dollars in taxes - can be a contributing member of society.

3. A woman's doctor has more of a valid claim to participate in the decision to abort a fetus than does the father of that fetus.

4. So long as a woman makes a decision after consulting with her doctor, she is incapable of making an unethical choice.

5. A car with two steering wheels, two gas pedals and two brakes drives more efficiently than a car with one steering wheel, one gas pedal and one brake which is why marriage should always be an equal partnership.

6. It is absolutely necessary for women to be allowed to join or participate fully in any gathering place for men, just as it is absolutely necessary that there be women only environments from which men are excluded.

7. Because it involves taking jobs away from men and giving them to women, affirmative action makes for a fairer and more just society.

8. It is important to have lower physical standards for women firepersons and women policepersons so that, one day, half of all firepersons and policepersons will be women, thus more effectively protecting the safety of the public.

9. Affirmative action at colleges and universities needs to be maintained now that more women than men are being enrolled, in order to keep from giving men an unfair advantage academically.

10. Having ensured that there is no environment for men where women don't belong (see no.6) it is important to have zero tolerance of any expression or action which any woman might regard as sexist to ensure greater freedom for everyone.

11. Only in a society which maintains a level of 95% of alimony and child support being paid by men to women can men and women be considered as equals.

12. An airline stewardess who earned $20,000 a year at the time that she married a baseball player earning $6 million a year is entitled, in the event of a divorce, to $3 million for each year of the marriage and probably more.

13. A man's opinions on how to rear and/or raise a child are invalid because he is not the child's mother. However, his financial obligation is greater because no woman gets pregnant by herself.

14. Disagreeing with any of these statements makes you anti-woman and/or a misogynist.

15. Legislature Seats must be allocated to women and women must be allowed to bypass the democratic winnowing process in order to guarantee female representation and, thereby, make democracy fairer.

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It's a little bit tangential to Impossible Thing #2 – the exorbitant cost of government-funded daycare relative to what women taxpayers contribute to it – but on a much smaller scale, it presents the same irresolvable problem which Marxist-feminists think they have solved by making it everyone else's problem besides their own. The dust-up started when the Chief Justice of the Canadian Supreme Court presented a paper to the Canadian Bar Association suggesting that large private law firms had to change in order to keep women lawyers.


It's the same argument. Just as for Marxist-feminists there isn't an irresolvable conflict between paying a relative pittance in taxes while expecting the government to expend enormous sums rearing your children for you, for a certain species of Marxist-feminist lawyers (in whose number I most decidedly include Chief Justice Beverly McLachlin) the same concept applies: the only impediment to women simultaneously doing the same great job of rearing children that full-time mothers do while also doing a bang-up job at the highest levels at a prestigious law firm with all the career advancement that entails is the unwillingness of prestigious law firms to, you know, make it happen, dude! What's the hold up? But, let Madame Justice speak for herself:


A recent study has estimated the average cost to a law firm of an associate's departure at $315,000 based on investment costs (such as recruitment and training), and separation costs".


Well, as the teaser said yesterday, Karen Selick studied economics before she studied law and smelled a Marxist-feminist rat. So she checked the report mentioned in the footnote, called Beyond a Reasonable Doubt: Building the Business Case for Flexibility (remember what I said about the length of a title and what it will end up saying about Marxist-feminism that it really didn't intend to?) available online from Catalyst, a non-profit group that describes itself as "the leading research and advisory organization working to advance women in business".


The $315,000 figure, it turns out, includes (among other things) all the salaries paid to associates when they were summer students and articling students. But five pages after it first presents this startling figure, the report confesses "These costs do not capture the revenues associates generate while they are employed by their firms."


In other words, the $315,000 figure is only one side of the coin. Firms pay out that much, on average, over the entire course of each departing associate's tenure. But they also earn income by billing clients for the work the associate performed.


How much income? The report doesn't say. It does say, however, that firms break even on an associate provided that he or she stays at least 1.8 years. After that point, they actually make a profit, not a loss, on associates – even those who eventually leave.


You see what I mean? It doesn't matter what the context is, if it's Marxist-feminism they are going to have to outright lie to you in order to support their contentions and they have no qualms about doing so. And in each case, their motivation is to find some way to make you (or anyone besides themselves) pay for their lifestyle. As Karen Selick goes on to say


If firms had to establish in-house daycare centres, or pay rent on unused office space while associates take sabbaticals or work part-time, the cost of keeping an associate could easily outweigh the cost of losing one.


And that's true across the board. There is no way to make hiring a mother-and-baby combo as cost effective as hiring either a man or a woman who doesn't have a baby.


Karen Selick continues:


What's perturbing is that the Catalyst study not only bamboozled Canada's Chief Justice with its alarming number, but it also apparently took in the crème de la crème among Canadian legal minds. Ten of Canada's leading law firms sponsored this research, but nobody spoke up when Judge McLachlin unwittingly misrepresented it.


Well, where angels fear to tread: the reason ten of Canada's leading law firms sponsored the research was because they would be accused of being misogynists if they didn't. The reason they bamboozled the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is because Beverly McLachlin is a Marxist-feminist and will, consequently, believe anything that will make the conundrum of how to give 100% to child rearing and 100% to career advancement and make it anyone else's problem besides the one trying to do it: in this case Canada's largest law firms. If you lose a Marxist-feminist lady lawyer because she had a baby, it will cost your law firm $315,000, ergo, if you spend half of that on in-house day care, you're still coming out ahead by $157,500.


Nobody spoke up, because if any man did so, pointing out that the numbers were fudged so that there actually is no loss to the law firm if they lose an associate after 1.8 years (Selick found a 1991 study that showed that female lawyers who had quit worked a median of 3.2 years), that man would be denounced as a lying patriarchal misogynist.


All the law firms could do, knowing how the Marxist-feminist game works, was to count the money they invested in the study as what it was: a protection racket. You pay us Marxist-feminists umpty-ump thousands of dollars and we won't denounce you as misogynist swine. They learned it from Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition protection racket: cough up money for us or we'll picket you as racists.


The only reason Karen Selick could call them on their transparent attempt at high-level fraud was because they couldn't call her a misogynist. And, of course, she just reads this as men lawyers being too dumb to see through a transparently fraudulent misrepresentation. The only reason I can mention it (the only reason I'm the only person who CAN mention it) is because the Marxist-feminists have no way to threaten me with their protection racket.


Tomorrow: Actually it's even worse than a protection racket, the closer you look at it. So that's what we're going to do. See you then.





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