1. A Fucking Insane Idea That Has Taken A Strong Hold on Western Minds
Bear with me as a I explain how this whole framing is so stupid. Assume the data is correct. Just look at the news commentary.
Headline: Jaw-dropping Gender Gap for Jobs
2. "This appears to be about child care. Issues with schools and daycare centers kept women, who are typically primary caregivers to children, out of the workforce throughout the pandemic — and it's still happening," explains Axios Markets co-author Emily Peck.
3. Now it is reasonable and productive to discuss why women are primary caregivers to children. That would be a worthwhile discussion. But that is not the focus of all news commentary today. What is the focus? Read on.
4. "That reality [childcare needs] holds back the economic recovery, keeping women on the sidelines at a time when companies are desperate to hire.
Women with young children at home, who might have considered going back to work, likely couldn't because of child-care schedules."
5. WTAF! Taking care of one's own children is somehow a negative for the economy. Whatever else you may justifiably complain about the burden of childcare primarily falling on women, its effect on the economy should be the last thing anyone should complain about.
6. By having a stranger take care of your children while you go off to a desk job in some office doesn't create any new real value for the economy. It just pads up infertile, useless numbers on a spreadsheet, because more money changes hands and thus shows up in the GDP.
7. Children still need to be taken care of no matter who does it, and the quality of care presumably always suffers when children are taken care of by strangers than parents. Who in the world cares more about the children than the children's own parents?
8. Let me illustrate with a specific example. If A and B are two mothers with young children (I will use mothers in the example because of the topic at hand). If both of them stay at home and take care of their children, they add nothing to the "official" GDP numbers.
9. But if A drives to a childcare facility where she "works" to take care of B's children and B drives to another such facility where she "works" to look after A's children, they have both "contributed to the nation's economy" because their mutual payments show up in the GDP.
10. Is the nation somehow better off? Are the children? I would say the answer is an emphatic no, on the whole. Of course it gets complicated if you start bringing in the psychological needs and financial independence aspects, etc.
11. I am keenly aware and totally supportive of the benefits of work and careers in and of themselves for all members of society, and we should do our best to maximize opportunities for everyone. There has been great societal progress on that and may it continue apace.
12. My only point in this thread is that we should not insanely portray women taking care of their own children transiently as we come out of a pandemic as some "great loss to the economy." What is the economy for if we cannot even pause to ensure the welfare of children.
13. A society that considers children being looked after by strangers as preferable to being looked after by children's own parents, in and of itself, because it "adds to the economy" is sick in its head.
14. Childcare provided by strangers is a necessity for a whole lot of reasons but not an ideal to aspire to.
15. Societal structures that enable mothers to pursue independent aspirations and careers are needed and good in their own right. We should promote them, but not because they artificially pad up the GDP. There is more to a wholesome society than a spreadsheet rigmarole.
The End
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Supreme Court accepted a petition to hear Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard on Jan 24.
The case was filed by a group of Asian Americans who allege, with strong evidence, discrimination by the nation’s most prestigious school. dailysignal.com/2022/01/31/har…
"Central to the case is Harvard’s especially distasteful method of discrimination: the creation of a “personal score” that, evidence shows, the school manipulates to give Asian applicants the lowest scores."
Harvard’s discrimination is discrimination via character assassination. For Harvard to suppress the vast quantity of qualified Asians (who make up 50% of the top SAT scores in the nation) from its admissions books, it questions their character and minimizes their accomplishments.
It may surprise you (considering how intensely I dislike NY Times ethos in general) that I do like a few NYT columnists whom I find to be very thoughtful and insightful (remember Bari Weiss worked for NYT for a while and I loved her columns)...
2. Another one of my favorite NYT columnists is David Leonhardt. I don't always agree with him but I always respect his writing and pay attention to it. He has written a thoughtful column based on some recent polling on Covid that I am serializing in this thread.
3. Two Covid Americas
Covid’s starkly different impact on the young and old has been one of the virus’s defining characteristics. It tends to be mild for children and younger adults but is often severe for the elderly.
1/3) How Twitter Collaborates with NYT to Suppress the Truth
When you try to access an article detailing the horrors of Holodomor in 1932-1933, Twitter serves up a stern warning. You have to click on "continue" of "Ignore this warning and continue" to see the article linked.
2/3) How Twitter Collaborates with NYT to Suppress the Truth
You know why Twitter throws up that scary warning? Because the linked article contains this paragraph exposing the utter debauchery and villainy of New York Times.
3/3) How Twitter Collaborates with NYT to Suppress the Truth
The article is linked below. Read it and weep.
[Holy smokes! Twitter just refused to let me link the article, saying that Twitter or one of its partners has identified the linked article as being potentially harmful.]
Five years ago, the FBI boss was busy selling the bogus Steele dossier.
This week marks the fifth anniversary of perhaps the greatest media scandal of our age.
2. Outlets like CNN and BuzzFeed flogged a bogus dossier of salacious claims funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign, even while admitting they didn’t know whether the dossier’s allegations against Donald Trump were true or false.
3. It wasn’t necessarily that reporters had mistaken fake news for the real stuff—they simply didn’t care or acknowledge that they had an obligation to vet anti-Trump claims before disseminating them.
1. WSJ: Amid a mounting pile of unfulfilled Biden promises on Covid, from his pledge to shut down the virus to his assurance of abundant testing, Biden’s experts are suddenly sharing relevant facts that were too inconvenient to mention during his predecessor’s administration.
2. Two years, $4 trillion of federal debt and millions of isolated children too late, White House Covid czar Dr. Anthony Fauci has discovered the massive costs of pandemic restrictions.
3. Now we have Dr. Rochelle Walensky, head of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, implicitly making the case for a strategy she once disparaged.
1. Trump's Response To Democrats' January 6 Commemoration
Since an article containing Trump's response to yesterday's proceedings is being suppressed by Twitter as "suspicious content," I will serialize a few key quotes from Trump in this thread.
2. “What we witnessed yesterday was the last gasps of a discredited left-wing political and media establishment that has, for decades, driven our country into the ground—shipping away jobs, surrendering our strength, sacrificing our sovereignty, attacking our history & values.”
3. “These radical leftists in Washington care NOTHING for American Democracy. All they care about is control over you, and riches for themselves.
But they are failing. No one believes them anymore. And the day is coming when they will be overwhelmingly voted out of power."