Our waitress in Orlando last month was a young Venezuelan. Her father owned a business and had sent all of his children abroad to study and, he expected, ultimately to settle. One child was in London, one in Portugal, and one a student at the University of Central Florida (this state-run school is supposedly the largest university in the U.S. for undergrad enrollment, though presumably that excludes University of Phoenix) and working nights in a more or less Asian strip-mall chain restaurant.
“Sanders says exactly the same things as Hugo Chavez,” she pointed out. “Even his hand gestures are the same.”
Fortunately for Hillary, this young woman is currently ineligible to vote due to her lack of citizenship.
My liberal friends on Facebook are suggesting that woman are required to vote for Hillary because she is a woman and it would be “revolutionary” to have a woman as a political leader in the U.S. I like to cut and paste the following responses: “Maybe if we show them the way, even the U.K. and Germany might be inspired to elect female leaders” and “It would be amazing if a wealthy white American aged 60+ could be elected to the White House” and, finally, since all of them are also passionate transgender advocates, “How do you know that Hillary will still identify as a woman when he or she takes office in January 2017?”
[Could Bernie Sanders assure a victory by changing his gender identity to “female”? Then Bernice Sanders could get both votes from people who support the Sanders policies and from people who would like to see a female president in the White House.]
Readers: Especially given the common practice of former presidential wives winning elections in Latin America, Would it be interesting from a feminist point of view if Hillary becomes president? And, more seriously, in an age where we are not supposed to be making cisgender assumptions, is it even meaningful to “vote for a woman”? How does the voter know that the candidate will continue to identify as a woman?
Related:
- Piketty, Democracy, and Hugo Chavez
- Hugo Chavez: Great politician; poor administrator
- Hugo Chavez’s legacy
- Amy Alkon on women voting for women
- Venezuela’s Collapse Brings ‘Savage Suffering’ (WSJ, February 12, 2016): “Dying infants, chronic power outages and empty shelves mark the world’s worst-performing economy … Inflation in this oil-rich country is expected to hit a world’s-worst 700% this year, according to the International Monetary Fund. The economy shrank by 10% last year and is expected to decline another 8% this year, according to the IMF, the worst performance in the world.”
Your disingenuous puncturing of liberal shibboleths is usually amusing, but in this particular case it’s so crashingly obvious to everyone that Hillary is only running on this basis because she’s got nothing else that a more interesting question than “why would anyone believe this crap” is “why would anyone believe that anyone would believe this crap”.
Much of what passes for political argument is not merely fallacious and unconvincing, but not even intended to be convincing. It’s only a fig leaf so people can pretend to have a reason other than their real reason for voting as they do. It’s not intend to be analyzed, it’s merely to be pointed at.
I’m not going to be drawn into this Hillary–Bernie seesaw, but in case you, Phil, are in touch with that opinionated young Venezuelan waitress (who otherwise would probably hate to be unaware of her views being commented upon), maybe you could point her to a suitable future rôle model of her shared gender/ ethnic/ student-waïfy origin.
I’m thinking of the fictitious “Lidia, a young Ecuadoran beauty from Jackson Heights who prosecutes drug cases for the Manhattan district attorney” in Ron’s segment of the “Breakup Stories” in The New Yorker (2004). Worth noting here is that this figment of author Franzen’s imagination manages there to secure a sizable Manhattan real estate and/or financial divorce settlement WITHOUT ever exchanging marriage vows with her formerly betrothed benefactor. Yes, it’s fiction, but haven’t we all heard of Life imitating Art once in a while?
Haven’t your liberal FB friends heard of Angela Merkel? Or does (s)he no longer identify as a woman?
It’s amazing how people get so wrapped up in their ideology that it really gets absurd. That goes for both the liberals and the conservatives. I’m all for removing barriers to women in high positions (and also removing barriers to women in garbage collecting or construction, or sewer maintenance), but to vote for someone simply because of their genitalia is just absurd. I understand that getting Hillary as POTUS would be a symbol of how the USA has finally broken the one big remaining barrier to women. I get it. But then next will gay barrier (what if Hillary were running against a lesbian instead of Bernie? Maybe the liberals would think the lesbian deserves it more?), the transgender barrier, maybe the mental illness barrier, who knows. On the other hand, maybe these people are smarter than their statements and they too realize that the candidates are pretty much interchangeable, so you might as well just swap the one with a penis for the the one who has a vagina anyway, you know to promote diversity and all that. Nevermind they have no principles and just look at the polls and turn towards the wind like a weather vane.
Btw, philg, what you do think happened with the helicopter in Hawaii? This is exactly the scenario I would be afraid of if I were to go on a helicopter. Please tell me this is an extremely rare accident:
GermanL: A couple of friends sent me that video. It is tough to say from the video. It sounds as though the engine was running. The helicopter was fairly low and slow when things began to go wrong so a standard autorotation wouldn’t have worked (though perhaps one could do a bit of a hover auto near the ground, using the energy stored in the blades).
What could cause a crash like this with a running engine? Either the engine was not delivering power to the rotor system due to a transmission failure OR the helicopter got stuck in its own downwash (“vortex ring state” or “settling with power”), which happens more frequently with a tailwind or no-wind situation. It didn’t look as though, prior to the rapid descent, the helicopter had been descending quickly enough to get into settling with power. Typically a minimum of 300 feet-per-minute is considered necessary to induce vortex ring state.
I’m not enough of a JetRanger expert to know what it would sound/look like if the transmission failed. But I do know that this is a reasonably common reason for JetRanger power losses. The turbine engine as reliable as low-power turbine engines in turboprop aircraft but the transmission is much more complex and less reliable than the engine-to-prop coupling in an airplane. So you never do get “jet reliability” in a helicopter, even when the source of power is a jet.