Misleading on Marriage: how gay marriage opponents twist history to suit their agenda

boing
102

Yes, there are several processes.

But first let us look at the basics of statistics…

Let us divide the world into people with an odd number of letters in their names and those with an even number, call them @'s and #'s

I shall assume that there is no correlation between having an even number of letters in your name and ability.

So if we have two @s and two #'s and we choose the the best of the @'s they will be on average the same as the best #

But what if we have three @'s ?

There is a non zero chance that the extra @ is better and so the chances of the best person being a @ goes up.

Adding more people makes this ever more likely that the best @ is better than the best # and of course this logic applies in both directions.

Here’s where you need to set your prejudices aside, this applies to groups of men and women as well, the labels don’t matter, you can have a set of men whose best is better than a set of women.

This is of course why big countries win more Olympic medals than small ones. They have more to choose between.

So back to judges…

In the UK, unlike the USA judges aren’t chosen by any sort of political process, Butler Sloss wasn’t chosen to be a judge by a politician, she was chosen from amongst senior retired judges to run this enquiry.

Given that nearly as many women as men enter the legal profession, but that at each level of the judiciary you find fewer women, it is reasonable to suspect sexism. But given that it literally takes decades to get to the highest levels, part of this reflects the world of the 1970s and 1980s more than today. However there is still imbalance at the lower levels.

Her rise as you can see from the article I referenced was marked by an indifference to sex crimes, dodgy judgements and covering up of sex crimes when they were committed by fellow Christians.

The question is how did someone like that rise so high ?

One factor is of course nepotism, she is related to some powerful people, who it won’t shock you to learn also helped Christian priests escape punishment, leaving them free to rape again.

But also, one has to allow for the possibility that her grievous shortcomings were ignored at each stage of promotion in order to bump up the number of women, since once you have a mid-level judiciary that is mostly men, the only way to get a bigger number of women at the next level up, you have to lower your standards. Again before your prejudices cut in at the idea that a set of women could be inferior to men, go back and read what I said about odds and evens. The top 10% of women may be exactly as good as the top 10% of men, but if you take the top 20% of women it will on average be less good than the top 10% of men.

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That works if we are selecting people at random from the population but we aren’t. We are selecting people who are fit to be judges, and we are determining that using a metric that is prejudiced against #s. We have three @s and two #s because despite the fact that @s and #s have equal ability, we systematically rate the ability of #s lower.

If @s A, B, C, D, E and #s Z, Y, X, W, V have fitness of 10, 9, 8, 7, and 6 respectively, but we devalue #s by one, then if we form a group of the top five people we will get A, B, C, Z and Y. But our assessment of Z and Y was inaccurate. In this sample we are more likely to get the best person by choosing from the #s than from the @s and the average # is better than the average @.

If we needed to hire a 6th person we would think that D and X are equal, but they aren’t. If we were forced to pick a # then we would actually get the equitable result.

Reality is more complicated. If 51% of judges are men and 49% are women we might reasonably say that’s probably natural variance. If it’s 2/3 and 1/3 then you unless you posit an actual difference in ability, being forced to hire a woman will result in a better candidate than hiring a man (or continuing to hire on using the same prejudiced metric).

Basically your example is exactly reversed. There are 50 men and 50 women who are suitable to be judges, but 30 of the men are already judges and only 20 of the women are. That means that we are selecting from a pool of 30 women and 20 men, so expected result is that the best candidate is a woman.

If women are filtered out of the process at an earlier stage that doesn’t change the result. If they were filtered out because of prejudice then that still leaves the remaining women being better than the remaining men. The reality is if we have 30 male judges of an apparent pool of 60 and 20 female judges of an apparent pool of 40. But in reality we have 30 male judges out of the entire population of men and 20 female judges out of the entire population of women. If there are 10000 men and 10000 women then we are choosing among the best 30 of 9970 men or the best 20 of 9980 women. But if we can actually tell who the best are then that’s the same as picking between 9970 and 9980. Advantage women again. If the lack of female candidates was because of prejudice then we should expect the next female candidate to be better than the next male candidate.

The problem, as I said above, is that when sexist people encounter a affirmative action program, they don’t necessarily hire the next best candidate. In this woman’s case, it sounds as if they might have used nepotism. Now if nepotism is the standard then as long as there is a little bit of merit-based thinking in there somewhere it affirmative action still works. If, however, the normal hiring process is much more merit based and the nepotism was used as a shortcut by a person who was too sexist to actually evaluate the talent of one woman against another (because they are still all women) then the problem is that person’s inability to evaluate candidates for the position. That “token woman” may be an actual token woman, chosen merely for her sex and not for her ability. If that is the case it because the person who made that decision is an idiot. The reality ought to be, and in most cases probably is, that that “token woman” is better than the men who would have been hired had she not been chosen for being a woman.

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104

In response to that I have to post this information:

The reason there are fewer women judges is because even during the 1980s, fewer women bothered to attempt entering law school. Here’s a good - and positive - article on the fairly recent history of women barristers in the U.K. and the sexism they’ve had to put with.

During pupillage in the 80s, not only did women make the tea, they had to avoid being groped in the process

The same article records pupillage in 2010’s for women as about 35%, and according to it that’s near twice what it was in the 1990’s. So you’re looking at 17.5% just 20 years ago, and that’s of the total amount of people entering law!

The reason why I’m pointing this out is to make clear that this idea:

is currently - most likely - a false one. There isn’t a big enough pool of candidates who were good enough to be accepted as solicitors and barristers 20 and 10 years ago for many of them to really be the dregs. A few will get by (and even excel) because of things like nepotism, but in most cases, a woman in that kind of environment would have to be as good or better than the men she’s working with just to keep her job.

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105

I’m just confused here:

"He who desires to fornicate (with) himself (i.e., to masturbate) and is not able to do so, he must fast for 40 days or 20 days."

I’m not sure that such a situation could possibly arise, short of having the penis completely removed. Carpal tunnel ain’t got nothing on my desire to masturbate. I’m positive I’d figure out a way to do it if I even lost both my arms.

Are they talking about having an unintentional erection? Or are wearing a new pair of really nice corduroys and get an effect from the friction?

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Not to worry. I’ve long been sure that set of rules was the origin of the idea that someone should just “stick in your ear”. It’s about the only place they didn’t cover.

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I’m pretty sure that if the authors of the Bible could be assured of anonymity in their response (as in, even God couldn’t trace it back to them), if they were presented with the following question [quote]Did God make a mistake when He invented orgasm?[/quote] they would, to a man, respond in the affirmative.

Sexual pleasure of each, any, and every sort seems to have been — in the minds of these guys — poised on the brink of the Abyss. The only thing that (barely) legitimized it was the purpose of procreation.

Any contact with semen created a condition of ritual uncleanliness.

Leviticus 15:16 (emission, bathe whole body, unclean 'til evening)
18 (lies with a woman, emission, both bathe, unclean 'til evening)
32 (emission, becoming unclean thereby)
22:4 (puts contact with semen on the same level as handling the dead)
Deuteronomy 23:10 (wet dream? get out of town, stay out 'til nightfall)

EDIT: I cribbed this all from this place.

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First, EVERYONE modifies history to further their own agendas. Second, same-sex marriage is a self-limiting affliction. They can’t reproduce without third-party intervention, either a friend or the turkey baster or adoption.

Therefore, what’s the problem? If they want to live that way, let them. It’s not hurting you or me. And, don’t throw 2000+ year old religious crap at me as an excuse. Those conditions no longer apply, and haven’t for at least 200 years. Wake up, people.

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As I like to remind people - there would be no same-sex marriage if it weren’t for all those straight people having sex. I think we know what the root of the “problem” is.

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110

Shuck, the real question is whether the state should be granting a marriage license at all, as opposed to just handling registrations of marriages the way they handle birth certificates. And Quaker weddings don’t have officiants - the couple marry each other with the congregation as witnesses - and are legal in all states, AFAIK.

If I’d done much as thinking about the philosophical and political issues back when I got married as I have now, my preference would have been to have had the wedding ceremony in the church (which we did) and deal with the legalities as a common-law marriage, rather than asking the State of New York for their permission first.

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A birth (or death) certificate and a marriage license are two very different things. A birth/death certificate is merely recording a fact (the state can’t exactly say, “No, you’re not allowed to be dead,” can they?), but a marriage necessarily requires conditionals, if for nothing else than to make sure a) neither party is already married and b) both parties are of legal age and consenting. It’s a legal contract that has legal ramifications related to the state’s activities. So the state can’t not be involved. It’s just not possible unless we’re going to eliminate all legal aspects of marriage entirely.
As far as I know, most states require officiants - only a few states, possibly only Pennsylvania (in fact, possibly only parts of Pennsylvania), allow weddings with no officiant at all, so traditional Quaker marriages aren’t actually possible in most of the country. (And up until fairly recently you had to be Quaker to have an officiant-free marriage even in Pennsylvania.) Which is absurd. Also, common law marriages aren’t fundamentally any different from official marriages, except that the state is granting permission at a later stage. They’re still making that decision.

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Because gays having babies is how all gays are born. Okay then.

It’s not like a gay guy could occasionally sleep with women, and get one pregnant. It’s not like a straight couple could have a gay kid. It’s not like… oh I give up.

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113

It’s also not only gay couples who may find themselves needing medical intervention to get pregnant. Since the first babies were born via in-vitro fertilization (IVF), over 35 million more have been born that way internationally. The majority of those children were born to straight couples who couldn’t otherwise conceive. For some time, gay couples (and single parents) were totally prevented from access to the process because law required the couple using it be married, so that 2000+ year old religious crap was affecting the application of modern medicine.

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114

Nice to see someone was able to treat that comment with the sensitivity it deserved.

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