Butter emails - the double standard that women in politics must be held to

I’m not demanding anything, but I am questioning where this is heading - I feel like we’re going off the rails a little here.

For instance, I just looked at this topic Televangelist Kenneth Copeland, worth over $750 million, doesn't pay property tax on his $7 million home: it's a "clergy residence" Just looking through the 46 comments about a third are about Kenny and his finances.

There are also posts about he’s a POS in general. There’s a discussion about how Christianity sucks as a whole, there’s a conversation debating how much Christianity slowed the advancement of science through the Dark Ages, a subconversation pointing out that science kept chugging right along in the non-Christian world, even a few posts about Mormonism. This seems like a healthy thing to me! It’s a bunch of people reacting to the original information and having overlapping conversations that anyone can dip in and out of.

The only difference I see here is that no one got upset by any of the comments. Heck, on a topic that is (narrowly) about one person’s use of a tax loophole to avoid paying taxes, and (more broadly) about tax exemptions for religious entities, the very first comment is Papasan (god bless him) disparaging Christianity as a whole! Far from being flagged, it got 32 likes. By the standards you seem to be setting here, this would’ve been WAY off topic, as would at least half the posts in the conversation. Again though, no one (who’s vocal on BB) disagrees with that sentiment.

Also, none of this has been whataboutism at all. Whataboutism is when someone responds to an accusation or difficult question by making an unrelated counteraccusation. (“You want to engage in whataboutism!” “well what about the other day when you spelled obsequious wrong?!”)

What? No it isn’t! It’s the equivalent of walking up to a discussion about how awesome Jen Psaki is and saying “True, but I was bummed with how she handled that at-home test thing”. Reasonable people might reply “she still rocks though” or “I thought she handled it exactly right” or “yeah, me too”. Reasonable people would NOT wave down the host of the party and request that the person who disagrees with them be moved to another room.

Well, let’s see. I posted “I was really bummed when she whiffed so badly (and really, so flippantly) on the at home test kits.” You broke that off and made it the first post of a topic titled “the double standard that women in politics must be held to”. That felt a little persecutie to me :grin:

Then there was this post -

Some here seem put off by general admiration of a smart woman doing an overall kickass job.

Suggesting that anyone who is critical of someone in the public who happens to be a woman is automatically uncomfortable with a smart woman doing a good job is just lazy.

They don’t seem to see the embedded misogyny in turning any thread that says, “hey, look at this cool woman,” into an opportunity to discuss the one thing they can point to that she did less than a stellar job at messaging.

Someone who does indeed turn any positive thread about women/a woman into an opportunity to bash them is clearly misogynistic. I don’t think that person would last very long here in the BB community, and good riddance.

I don’t seem to see them turning up on the Elon Musk threads pointing out all the shitty stuff he does.

Okay, this person is either being disingenuous or just hasn’t read the comments on Musk threads; he gets regularly, and deservedly, thrashed here at BB.

Anyway, there are maybe FOUR posts in this topic that are actually about the double standard women face in politics. Like it or not, that’s not what this thread is about. If you’re going to impartially wield the BanHammer for every comment (on every topic) that’s off a very narrow definition of what the topic is I think you would do a lot of damage to the culture here.