Bossy Women

Bossy, pushy, bolshie, stroppy, mouthy and strident. I keep reading stuff about these words. Apparently they are words used dismissively to describe women but are behaviours applauded in men.
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Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, has a particular problem with the word ‘bossy’. It’s a negative way to describe a women but apparently not used for men, who are never described as bossy but as assertive which is a positive description.

I’d just like to say that from a male perspective, this is bullshit.

Nobody likes pushie, bossy or assertive in anyone: man, woman or child. Men don’t admire other men who are bossy, we think bossy men are ‘wankers’, which they are. They may be rich. They may be successful. But they’re still ‘wankers’. The thing is that men (in my experience at least) tend to prefer the general insult rather than the specific, so when we come across a man who exhibits the above characteristics (bossy, bolshie, strident), we tend to use more sweeping adjectives: dick-head, bell-end, twat or douche nozzle.

So ladies, if you don’t like bossy ( and I can see why you wouldn’t ) don’t feel picked on or discriminated against. She’s a ‘bossy cow’ still sounds much better to me than he’s a ‘gobby twat’ and yet they mean much the same thing.

If we really want equality by all means drop ‘bossy’, that’s fine with me, and then we can all get on with being a unisex bunch of ‘strident wankers’.

Paying for the privilege of a private education

Private schools are divisive, unfair and plain wrong. No political party is ever going to put a stop to them, so what is to be done?

The obvious answer is to improve the state system so people will be less inclined to waste their money on private. But improving state schools is not easy and the solution is not to bring back grammar schools which were also divisive and unfair. No…the answer is to invest in; well run, secular, comprehensive schools. It’s a novel idea but this is the best chance of giving every child an equal chance regardless of wealth, class, religion or innate IQ.

This isn’t enough though, we also need to accept the obvious advantages of private schools and recognise the greater effort that state schools pupils require to achieve the same results. Universities need to positively discriminate in favour of state schools pupils to rebalance the fairness equation. Employers should look to state schools for their high fliers and elitist ghettos like politics and city institutions need to break the stranglehold on top private schools filling their seats.

For too long the UK has been afflicted by division based on privilege and demography and the private school system lies at the heart of the problem. It is now time for change.

David Cameron’s Christian Country

shutterstock_145450387I don’t really care about the semantics, although it seems to me from every statistic I have seen that we are not really a Christian country; more a country which has been heavily influenced by Christianity.

Hopefully, at some point we will look forward rather than backward, disestablish the Church, get the priests out of the House of Lords and get the Queen to give up her role as head of the Church of England. Let’s get rid of state funded faith schools while we are at it.

That said, I do think it’s important that politicians come clean about their religious beliefs. It’s no good pretending that your religious beliefs don’t affect your world view, which in turn will affect your views on society and policy. They simply cannot be separated.

In the US, knowing that Mitt Romney was a Mormon would certainly have influenced me if I had been an American citizen. Surely you have to doubt the judgement of anyone who believes that Jesus magically went from the Middle East to America to spread the word and that the 10 lost tribes of Israel will one day come back and gather in Missouri!

So I am grateful to David Cameron for showing his Christian hand. I wish Tony Blair had been more open about his faith. Had I known how much he thought God was on his (and our side) I would have been even more suspicious about his foreign policy, his ideas on family and education. I am sure he is a decent man and a great believer in peace but like all religious leaders, peace only comes on Gods terms and if you don’t see the world in the same way as ‘my God’ sees it you may have a problem.

So David, we know you are a Christian and you see this as a Christian Country, now tell us how you see this influencing policy.

Specifically:

Constitutional reform
The monarchy
The justice system
Family and taxation
Discrimination laws
Foreign policy, particularly in countries where religion is the problem
Education and faith schools
Defence
Foreign Aid
Environmental policy

I’d also be interested in Gods’ views on all of the above.

If a pharma company had discovered alcohol

Imagine if alcohol had been discovered by a pharmaceutical company.

This is what I imagine.

A chemical called ethanol was discovered by scientists at a leading, global, pharmaceutical company.

It seems to be very effective at reducing anxiety and aiding sleep. In trials nothing turns up to prevent it going to market.

Only when it has been on the market for a while do they discover that at high doses it has a very different effect. It makes people incoherent, tense and aggressive. Worse than that it irritates the stomach, causes dehydration and leads to severe headache.

Subsequently it is discovered that in overdose it can be fatal and long term use causes brain, skin and liver damage.

The nail in the coffin is when they discover it is also highly addictive.

The pharmaceutical company withdraws the drug from the market but the damage is done. Hundreds of thousands of people sue the company and the costs become so enormous the company has no choice but to close.

It goes down as the most dangerous drug ever licensed by the pharmaceutical industry. The result is all future trials are faced with new regulation to prevent the same mistake ever happening again.

Could this have ever happened? I think it could.

The trouble with capitalism

Capitalism rewards those that don’t really deserve reward. It allows the power hungry, the megalomaniacs, the overcompetitive, the uncaring and the psychopaths to the top, to succeed and to be rewarded.
You can argue that it works, that it delivers an overall better standard of living for the populace, that it is the best system we have tried, that the market is better than the state, that competition and survival drive efficiency and countless other economic cases.
But its fundamental problem is that it rewards the wrong people, the wrong behaviours and the wrong worldview. It rejoices in inequality, in status and in a belief that unfairness is part of the human condition.
It borrows this from our tribal past, from the idiocy of religion and from a moral laziness that is no longer challenged in mainstream discourse.
Maybe it’s time to think again.

Whose God is right?

So, there are about 2 billion people on the planet who think Jesus was the Son of God.There are 1.5 billion people who think Mohammad was the last prophet and that it’s a sin to believe Jesus was the Son of God.There are around 15 million Jews who don’t believe Mohammad was a prophet or that Jesus was the Son of God and think it’s a sin to believe in many Gods. There are 1 billion Hindus and 65 million Shintos who believe in many Gods. Then there are 1.2 billion Buddhists, 5 million Jains and hundreds of other Gods and religions.
It would appear that there are an awful lot of people who have got it wrong.
And most of them are pretty certain that they are right and everyone else is going to some sort of hell.
Well, they can’t all be right. But they could all be wrong.
Surely if God does exist he would have made it easier for us all to spot the true God. As Ricky Gervais said “if there is a God why did he make me an atheist?”

If there is a God…

If there is a God, why would he (or she) be so obsessed with being worshipped? with being prayed at, day in, day out; with being obeyed, and adored: with sacrifices, rituals and forgiveness?

I just don’t get it. Why would a deity be that needy and insecure? Egotistical, bordering on megalomaniacal?

Can an Old Etonian lecture us on ‘grit’

Nick Hurd’s comments suggesting that out of work young people don’t have the ‘grit’ to find themselves a job have been met with derision and anger.

Whether there is any truth in what he said is in some ways less interesting than the fact that he shouldn’t have said it. Why?Well because he went to Eton. That makes him privileged, so how can he possibly know what it’s like to be an ordinary, out of work young person.

Maybe we should feel a bit sorry for him, after all it’s not his fault he was born into a family that sent him to Eton and set him on a path where he couldn’t possibly understand what it was like to be normal.

So, can an old Etonian lecture us on ‘grit’? Sure he can, he is entitled to say what he pleases. The important thing is that none of us ordinary people listen to him and yes I particularly mean you Daily Mail readers.

And let’s not get too bent out of shape about it. It’s much more fun to see the funny side. As Mitch Benn, comedian and songwriter quipped, “If you don’t have the grit or gumption to be born into a rich and important family, you’ve no one to blame but yourself.”