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Pay Gap Ruse on Meet the Press

The Jezebelers are high-fiving each other over Rachel Maddow’s supposed pwnership of GOP political strategist Alex Castellanos on “Meet the Press”. 

If you read the short piece and watch Maddow’s gesticulation and response to Castellanos you’ll see that they are mainly concerned with Castellanos’ supposed condescension.  But decontextualized facts need calling out, and if the people making them refuse to understand the full argument, they deserve to be talked to like children. 

Everyone reading this blog can spot where Maddow misses the mark.  She begins with the usual 77 cent trope to suggest, without qualification, that women are underpaid compared to men.  Which is a pointless statement.  I mean, most of us are underpaid compared to Rachel Maddow, but it would be silly to suggest that this pay gap is somehow unfair.   After sticking in the 77 cent figure and getting called out by Castellanos, she slides the “for the same work” statement into the argument even though she should know that the 77 cent statistic doesn’t control for inputs.

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19 Responses to Pay Gap Ruse on Meet the Press

  1. Matthew Walker 04/30/2012 at 7:07 am

    Progressively, pwned == got away with lying. She pwned him. Yes. She lied and he didn’t call her out on it. She won. He’s a establishment gop clown.

  2. A/G 04/30/2012 at 7:36 am

    They never get called out. But their lies are so layered that you would practically have to give the amurkanz and education before you could debunk this one thing. It needs a whole new context.

  3. Average Man 04/30/2012 at 8:18 am

    I like the faux outrage and double take she does when Alex brings context to her numbers.

    I think this post brings up an important point. Now, I don’t understand all the statistics or even know many facts when a lot of topics are raised. Most people probably don’t. They hear these things like women make $0.77 per men’s $1.00 or that according to Cosma Shalizi “G is a Statistical Myth”. Things that may or may not be true (not true in the money case), but things that confirm their a priori biases and make “good” talking points.
    Many people don’t really understand these factoids, maybe they don’t care enough to understand them, but they use them in debates because it affirms their worldview. Those factoids can be used to bludgeon their opponents and appear to be more valid evidence than arguing from anecdotes and experience. It takes time to debunk these factoids and, more likely than not, the people deploying them don’t care enough to see the truth. They’re not interested in the truth, but rather a way to overcome their political enemies. I have met some exceptions, however.

  4. Doc 04/30/2012 at 8:54 am

    I get tired of hearing this liberal non-sense. Women engineers are paid approx 1.40 for every 1.00 males are paid. They have a lot more overall offers, and the part you won’t hear talked about, use sick-leave and otherwise take off 250% more then their male counter-parts. So whenever someone starts spouting this .77 non-sense you can write them off as an uninformed idiot – or having an agenda, and there is no need to waste your time trying to argue with an idiot.

    Since I run my own company, I know what women are offered compared to men straight out of college with corresponding equal (or a bit less) qualifications. The fact that you don’t see it talked about, means that someone is selling something. In this case it’s the liberals and feminists selling their non-sense…

    Of course in general older males make more because they push more and produce more, as well as take greater risks. In my career I have been broke more times than I was as a grad-student, but I always have several irons in the fire so when several crash and burn, one or two come through in the end and make it worthwhile. Women tend to want it handed to them and take no risks – THAT is the difference… Men work for everything they have, women want it given to them. You won’t hear that talked about either…

  5. And Balls 04/30/2012 at 9:13 am

    I don’t understand why women allow maddow to speak on behalf of women. Unfortunately she has the biggest pair of balls in that room.

  6. The fourth doorman of the apocalypse 04/30/2012 at 9:36 am

    I don’t have a problem with women being protected when asking about male wages, as long as men are as well.

    In the tech industries, as well as a lot of other areas that are male dominated, in order to get females in and look like they are not discriminating, they pay women more than they pay men. It is a simple supply and demand situation. That should be exposed.

  7. Heartiste 04/30/2012 at 9:44 am

    give me two minutes on one of these shows with these lying cunts and you will see ownage the likes of which “”"progressives”"” can hardly fathom.

  8. PA 04/30/2012 at 9:57 am

    Chuck, calling out feminists is your forte. On race/national question sort of stuff, I see you as someone who doesn’t want to confront the difficult questions. And you shouldn’t have to. It’s your prerogative to write about what you want to write about. Just understand that when you wake sleeping dogs, they will awaken.

    The weekend’s threads were really a clash between race-realists who wanted to tackle difficult first-cause questions vs. race-realists who did not want to open the floodgates of difficult answers.

    You feel comfortable exposing certain race-specific pathologies: serious one like BBB, trivial ones like racial mentality on display on idiots’ Facebook pages, and institutional ones like Eracing the News. All those, however, beg a “therefore, what?…” You need not take on the job of answering this. You’re doing good work already and someone else can take up that task.

  9. ADS 04/30/2012 at 10:11 am

    It’s such a blatant shameless resource grab.

    Compare this to the fact that men on average fucking *die* half a decade earlier than women. If feminist analysis was in any way applied even-handledly as a tool to understand the world, the default explanation and solution should be legislation and subsidies helping men to even that large disparity.

  10. Saint Louis 04/30/2012 at 10:40 am

    People are entitled to their opinions, but they aren’t entitled to their own set of facts. Maddow doesn’t understand that. Or more likely she does understand (she’s not stupid, after all), but she doesn’t care as long she’s pushing her agenda.

    I was bothered by the host’s statement at the end where he said Obama’s opponents are “turning the clock back on some settled issues.” Well, if a lot of reasonably intelligent and well-informed people are still arguing about them, then clearly they’re not settled issues. The left wants to just declare victory and go home, and they’re upset that the conservativess won’t just shut up about it.

  11. Chuck Rudd 04/30/2012 at 10:56 am

    PA, I still stand by everything I wrote in those posts over the weekend. You have to remember how it got started. I wrote a post about Alex Linder – and if you haven’t read his stuff you should go check out his Aryan Alternative – and called him and his ilk – the guys who are virulent WN, white supremacist, and anti-semitic, the whole gamut – “stupid”. And I called him this for several reasons but mainly because he would rather let people think that he did something he didn’t do than be seen as cavorting with the “enemy”. I point this out and now all of a sudden I’m being a big meanie to WN’s. That doesn’t make sense to me.

  12. Robert 04/30/2012 at 10:56 am

    All Castellanos had to do to win the argument was ask Rachel “why do you hate men?”.

  13. A/G 04/30/2012 at 11:34 am

    @Heartiste
    “give me two minutes on one of these shows with these lying cunts and you will see ownage the likes of which “””progressives””” can hardly fathom.”

    I would love to see that. Can you get on this soft-ball player’s show easily?

  14. Reym 04/30/2012 at 1:07 pm

    I tried to watch the clip, but Rachel Maddow’s face and the fucking bullshit perspective being spouted by that dude at the beginning repulsed me too much. The last thing we need to be doing is asking women, “What do you want,” that type of sycophantic attitude has led to a whole bunch of shit already as women scream for “MOAR.”

  15. namae nanka 04/30/2012 at 2:23 pm

    I read that this interview was from the 70s. His reply begins at 1:30

    who shouts the loudest, gets to make truths.

  16. ADS 04/30/2012 at 4:03 pm

    That clip demonstrates the utter futility of rational debate. This issue were settled, in terms of the data and which side is correct, as long back as at least the seventies.

    Doesn’t matter one bit. Being correct is worth almost nothing compared to being able to cobble together political alliances and create a catchy narrative.

    Which sort of suggests that the alt right should focus less on being correct, and more on constructing useful narratives.

  17. ThomasD 04/30/2012 at 7:17 pm

    I was bothered by the host’s statement at the end where he said Obama’s opponents are “turning the clock back on some settled issues.” Well, if a lot of reasonably intelligent and well-informed people are still arguing about them, then clearly they’re not settled issues.

    That’s not the only reason to be bothered by the statement. The other problem is the whole “turning the clock back” notion in the first place.

    It’s hard to overstate just how important the linear notion of “progress” is to, well, progressives. It’s their essential way of viewing history and reality; it’s so embedded, so taken for granted, they’re hardly even aware of it.

    Thus to the progressive, the present > past (and future > present) by definition. That’s why it’s often difficult to have argument with them about principles. It’s why “dead white guys” is presumed to be an automatic refutation of Constitutional intent. Etc.

    I know Jonah Goldberg probably isn’t the most beloved figure around here, but he’s got some good passages on this point (about progressive conceptions of history) in the introduction of his new book:

    The Whiggish assumption in contemporary politics that today must
    be better than yesterday, this year more advanced than last year, this
    century wiser than the one that preceded it is held most dogmatically by
    so-called progressives. For them history is a vehicle with no reverse gear,
    and the engine that powers it is nothing more or less than the State. This
    is the hardened, metaphysical, dogmatic cliché that makes it possible for
    journalists to glibly describe any expansion of the government into our
    lives as a “step forward” or an “advancement” and any retrenchment of
    government as a step “backward.”

    http://global.nationalreview.com/goldberg/tyranny_intro.pdf

  18. Pingback: Mind the Gap « Gucci Little Piggy

  19. Saint Louis 05/01/2012 at 10:52 am

    Totally agree, ThomasD. I just didn’t have time to leave that long a comment.

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