Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published on 10 May 2019Visit PhilosophicalPhridays.com to learn more about Blue’s BOOK!
“History-Makers” is a new series from Blue, digging into the backstories of history’s most influential writers and their great works. We begin at the beginning, with the Greek poet Homer, trying to figure out how exactly he wound up with the Iliad and Odyssey!
Let me know which History-Maker you’d like me to cover in the comments below!
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May 12, 2019
History-Makers: Homer
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Mechanisms for redressing employment gender imbalances
We’ve often been told that too many men occupy positions of power and influence in the working world, but what would it take to meaningfully address those imbalances?
Equity … is based on the idea that the only certain measure of “equality” is outcome — educational, social, and occupational. The equity-pushers axiomatically assume that if all positions at every level of hierarchy in every organization are not occupied by a proportion of the population that is precisely equivalent to that proportion in the general population that systematic prejudice (racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.) must be at play. This assumption has as its corollary the idea that there are perpetrators (the “privileged,” for current or historical reasons) who are unfair beneficiaries of the system or outright perpetrators of prejudice and who must be identified, limited and punished.
[…]
Now it doesn’t seem like mere imagination on my part that all the noise about “patriarchal domination” is not directed at the fact that far more men than women occupy what are essentially trade positions. Nor does it seem unreasonable to point out that these are not particularly high-status jobs, although they may pay comparative well. It is also obvious that none of these occupations and their hierarchies, in isolation, can be thoughtfully considered the kind of oppressive patriarchy supposed to constitute the “West,” and aimed at the domination and exclusion of women. By contrast, the trade occupations are composed of cadres of working men, with difficult and admirable jobs, who keep the staggeringly complex, reliable and essentially miraculous infrastructure of our society functioning through rain and snow and heat and gloom of night and who should be credited gratefully with exactly that.
Let’s assume for a moment that we should aim at equity, nonetheless, and then actually think through what policies would inevitably have to be put in place to establish such a goal. We might begin by eliminating pay scales that differ (hypothetically) by gender. This would mean introducing legislation requiring companies to rank-order their sex representation at each level of the company hierarchy, adjust that to 50:50, and then adjust the pay differential by gender at every rank, so that the desired equity was achieved. Companies could be monitored over a five-year period for improvement. Failure to meet the appropriate targets would be necessarily met with fines for discrimination. In the extreme, it might be necessary to introduce staggered layoffs of men so that the gender equity requirements could be met.
Then there are the much broader social policy implications. We could start by addressing the hypothetical problems with college, university and trade school training. Many companies, compelled to move rapidly toward gender equilibria, will object (and validly) that there are simply not enough qualified female candidates to go around. Changing this would mean implementing radical and rapid changes in the post-secondary education system, implemented in a manner both immediate and draconian — justified by the obvious “fact” that the reason the pipeline problem exists is the absolutely pervasive sexism that characterizes all the programs that train such workers (and the catastrophic and prejudicial failure of the education system that is thereby implied).
The most likely solution — and the one most likely to be attractive to those who believe in such sexism — would be to establish strict quota systems in the relevant institutions to invite and incentivize more female participants, once again in proportion to the disequilibria in enrollment rates. If quotas are not enough, then a system of scholarship or, more radically (and perhaps more fairly) women could be simply paid to enroll in education systems where their sex is badly under-represented. Alternatively, perhaps, men could be asked to pay higher rates of tuition, in some proportion to their over-representation, and the excess used to subsidize the costs of under-represented females.
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Hitler Strikes in the West – WW2 – 037 – May 11 1940
World War Two
Published on 11 May 2019As the Allied troops in central Norway are evacuated and the Norwegian troops there surrender to the Germans, the Allied position around Narvik is still quite strong. With the addition of roughly 5000 Polish soldiers, the French, British and Norwegian force will prove to be a formidable foe for the Germans up North. This week however, the war drastically changes as not three but four Neutral countries are invaded. The Phoney War is ultimately over.
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Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sourcesWritten and Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Produced and Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Research by: Indy Neidell
Edited by: Ben Ollerenshaw and Wieke Kapteijns
Map animations: EastoryColorisations by Norman Stewart and Julius Jääskeläinen https://www.facebook.com/JJcolorization/
Sources: IWM (A 7644), IWM (A 7637), IWM HU 55505, Bundesarchiv, Photos from the Jonatan Myhre Barlien photo collection.
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Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
From the comments:
World War Two
The Phoney War is over. This is the week that many have been anxiously waiting for (how did they know something big was going to happen). We have some great episodes coming up, which are like this one only as great as they are because of the amazing effort that our team puts in creating them. As is very apparent in this episode, Eastory’s maps take these videos to the next level. Every week we’re stunned by his level of detail and the amazing value that is added by these maps. As the war enters a new phase, so do we. Next week will see the first of our roadtrip to France specials going live as well as the longest weekly episode we have written up until now.Cheers,
Joram
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CRAZY easy way to straighten a rough board or cut a taper
Stumpy Nubs
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QotD: The British Army between the wars
In the nineteenth century the British common soldier was usually a farm labourer or slum proletarian who had been driven into the army by brute starvation. He enlisted for a period of at least seven years – sometimes as much as twenty-one years – and he was inured to a barrack life of endless drilling, rigid and stupid discipline, and degrading physical punishments. It was virtually impossible for him to marry, and even after the extension of the franchise he lacked the right to vote. In Indian garrison towns he could kick the “niggers” with impunity, but at home he was hated or looked down upon by the ordinary population, except in wartime, when for brief periods he was discovered to be a hero. Obviously such a man had severed his links with his own class. He was essentially a mercenary, and his self-respect depended on his conception of himself not as a worker or a citizen but simply as a fighting animal.
Since the war the conditions of army life have improved and the conception of discipline has grown more intelligent, but the British army has retained its special characteristics – small size, voluntary enlistment, long service and emphasis on regimental loyalty. Every regiment has its own name (not merely a number, as in most armies), its history and relics, its special customs, traditions, etc., etc., thanks to which the whole army is honey-combed with snobberies which are almost unbelievable unless one has seen them at close quarters. Between the officers of a “smart” regiment and those of an ordinary infantry regiment, or still more a regiment of the Indian Army, there is a degree of jealousy almost amounting to a class difference. And there is no question that the long-term private soldier often identifies with his own regiment almost as closely as the officer does. The effect is to make the narrow “non-political” outlook of the mercenary come more easily to him. In addition, the fact that the British Army is rather heavily officered probably diminishes class friction and thus makes the lower ranks less accessible to “subversive” ideas.
But the thing which above all else forces a reactionary view-point on the common soldier is his service in overseas garrisons. An infantry regiment is usually quartered abroad for eighteen years consecutively, moving from place to place every four or five years, so that many soldiers serve their entire time in India, Africa, China, etc. They are only there to hold down a hostile population and the fact is brought home to them in unmistakeable ways. Relations with the “natives” are almost invariably bad, and the soldiers – not so much the officers as the men – are the obvious targets for anti-British feeling. Naturally they retaliate, and as a rule they develop an attitude towards the “niggers” which is far more brutal than that of the officials or business men. In Burma I was constantly struck by the fact that the common soldiers were the best-hated section of the white community, and, judged simply by their behaviour, they certainly deserved to be. Even as near home as Gibraltar they walk the streets with a swaggering air which is directed at the Spanish “natives.” And in practice some such attitude is absolutely necessary; you could not hold down a subject empire with troops infected by notions of class-solidarity. Most of the dirty work of the French empire, for instance, is done not by French conscripts but by illiterate Negroes and by the Foreign Legion, a corps of pure mercenaries.
To sum up: in spite of the technical advances which do not allow the professional officer to be quite such an idiot as he used to be, and in spite of the fact that the common soldier is now treated a little more like a human being, the British army remains essentially the same machine as it was fifty years ago.
George Orwell, “Democracy in the British Army”, Left, 1939-09.
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