How's this for an idea: some form of visual media (video or drawings, whatever) depicting Muhammad and Islam in a very positive light, marketed and clearly honestly intended to educate westerners about the positive elements of the Muslim community and their history.

Then see if the kind of people who try to shoot people for drawing Muhammad throw a fit over even something like that.

Please note that I didn't say anything at all about men not getting a fair shake.

I said that people would be rightly skeptical of an article that was written entirely by men claiming men were not getting a fair shake, regardless of the rest of the article's merits. The fact that it's coming from an all-male source would raise some eyebrows, and quite understandably. Now apply gender equality to that and ask why it's wrong that that should be true with all the genders reversed, as is the case here.

I also suggested that if a reviewer said, of such a hypothetical gender-swapped scenario, "maybe the reason why men aren't apparently aren't getting a fair shake isn't due to bias against them but just because men generally don't measure up in this area" -- suggesting an alternative hypothesis, as academic reviewers frequently do -- that would (and I think should) be considered a sound critique, something that at least should be addressed in the paper. Now flip the genders again and you get the second part of this story, and suddenly that's an atrocity?

You're right, the comma after the second parenthetical should have been a semicolon for improved readability.

I'm sure if a paper with the opposite conclusion authored only by men was submitted for review, women (both reviewers and others) would be decrying that fact, implicitly because of the assumed tacit bias of the all-male authors (a plausible concern to be fair, but in both directions), and, if it was in fact the case that women had more articles published than men, suggesting that perhaps an alternative conclusion to systematic bias could be that women just are better in that respect would be a perfectly acceptable critique of the paper.

I think GP meant the denialists should just invest in green energy instead of spending so much money money protecting their fossil fuel interests.

As an American who agrees that the American view of the political possibilities is myopic, there is still a difference. To put it figuratively: one side thinks all kittens should be fed to vicious ravenous dogs to be maimed and devoured as the dogs see fit; the other side thinks there should be some limits on how much the dogs can maim most kittens and how many can be devoured in what circumstances, and further special protections for certain classes of kitten.

What do you mean, lets not feed kittens to the dogs in the first place? What are you, some kind of communist?

Yeah, it really is quite hard to explain answers to incoherent questions. Science can't even answer a simple math question like what do you get when you multiply 37 times the square root of giraffes?

This so much!

I am always ranting on the injustices of how we do housing in the world today and so many people reply that poor people should just move somewhere cheaper if they ever want to escape the cycle of working their asses off and not keeping a cent of it because it all goes to paying for rental housing because they can't save to buy because all their money goes to paying for rental housing ad nauseum.

I like to retort that if all the poor people really should move out of nice places, then the rich people living in nice places had better get used to waiting each other's tables and bagging each other's groceries. Of course, if they did have to do that, then they would either not be rich for long, or else those jobs would have to pay enough to afford to live there, in which case the poor people who left could come back to work them and then afford to live there again.

Either wages go up or prices come down, either way, the people working the shit jobs no rich person wants to work have to be able to afford to live where they're needed otherwise those jobs just won't get done.

I'm sure he does, but nevertheless employers withhold taxes from your checks via a formula that assumes you get that kind of check regularly all year long, so if you DON'T, the taxes withheld will be higher than necessary and you get a refund whether you wanted to do it that way or not.

Oh and I guess I forgot to tie it back in to the topic at hand: the average person only needed to work two hours a day to live a comfortable lifestyle, there'd be a lot more need for more people working the rest of the day to keep up productivity, labor would be more in demand, and more people would be employed for the few hours a day they'd need to get by, so there wouldn't really be the need to worry about either a right to employment or a right to welfare because work would be plentiful and easily cover one's own needs.

Or we could stop charging people to live. (read: stop allowing those who hold all the cards to charge others to live, or at least, stop enabling their ability to do so).

I make about the mean US wage and consume very comfortably, and if it weren't for rents I have to pay and money I have to save as quickly as possible if I ever want to stop paying those rents, I could continue consuming at that level for around a full time minimum wage, or working half days at the median wage, or two hours a day at my wage.

An average (mean) American like me has to work about four times as much as I need to just to pay for quite comfortable consumption, just because so few people control all the assets and the rest of us have to spend our income renting those assets and struggling (if we're lucky) to stop renting them.

It's just adding insult to injury that about half of Americans make half or less of that average. (The median is about half the mean).

Fix both of those problems (make mean and median income coincide, and get the assets like housing distributed so that the people who actually use them actually own them and don't have to borrow them from others at a fee) and we could all be living very comfortable lives of luxury very easily.

And the Machete Order of Reformed Jedi-ism watches the same canon as the rest of that denomination, but specifically in the sequence IV, V, II, III, VI.

Oh noes, Apple had to pay almost as high a tax rate as someone making a mean income would, that's soooooo high.

No, that's the older religion, Judi-ism. Full-fledged modern Jedi-ism still holds to the Old Testament of IV-VI, but also has a New Testament of I-III as well.

which is what you'd get with absolutely unregulated governance-by-contract set up by those who have the assets that everyone needs to live and won't let them borrow or even buy it from them without agreeing to such dictatorial terms.