So, I discovered this while I was surfing late last night:
September 30, 2007, 9:54 amTo Readers: Online Politics Question
Hi, readers.
I’m writing a small column item for Monday’s Caucus blog about why more men seemed to be involved in politics online than women. I wondered if you 1) agreed with that and 2) why or why not.
Short answers are best, by 6 p.m. today, if possible.
Just post your comments right here on the blog.
Many thanks,
Kit Seelye
Web Correspondent
The New York Times
She posts this at 10am and wants responses by 6pm. Well, the blogosphere is notable for immediacy, among other things, but honestly now, couldn't she have waited a few more hours? There really are people in this world who don't blog from work. Or am I the only dinosaur?
Several commenters posted late anyway [no, I'm not any of them] and more power to them I say.In spite of my irritation with the short deadline and with the rampant sexism in the comments [even from some of the women!] I was looking forward to reading her article, expecting some insight or analysis, seeing as how she's a woman writing for the Politics section of the NYT.
Bah. Basically she just regurgitates the comments. If you've ever wondered if the MSM is stealing from you, fellow bloggers, the answer is Yes. At least Ms Seelye is openly letting the bloggers and commenters do the heavy lifting, and she provides some attribution.
Anyhoo, somewhere along the line, in the same vein, I ran across The Updated Pew News IQ Quiz in which I prove that I am smarter than both the men and the women. Or not. I thought the questions were ridiculously easy and the answers were ridiculously apparent. It could be that instead of being smarter than you, I just need to get a life.
Take the quiz yourself.
One thing I found interesting, the old folks got more right answers than the under-30 crowd [or even the under-50 crowd, for that matter] except for one question. You'll recognize it when you get there.
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12 comments:
Hey I got a 94 too! Which I guess means I also need a life.
It's too bad all Americans can't get 94's.
I think a large part of the problem is the majority of America is disengaged from politics.
But maybe it's always been that way.
As far as a lack of women blogging politics, I don't see it. Shakes Sis, Femanisting, Fire Dog Lake just to name a few, Digby...
My blogroll is full of women blogging politics.
I haven't done an analysis and maybe there are more men with political blogs than women.
What about gays? What about blacks, hispanics, asians?
Gotta count Coulter, Malkin, and that Atlas loon too even though they are on the right.
people disconnected from politics?! no! say it ain't so! [although i think you're probably correct to some degree]
buried in the stack of draft posts for this blog i have one on a study the pew folks did on what the msm feeds us vs what we really want to read/see. it's a huge disconnect. they're feeding us more and more fluff these days, but people have always over the last 20 or 30 years, i think it was, wanted hard news. it's just that producing fluff is easier and cheaper, so that's what they produce.
i suspect more people would be interested in politics if they could get real information. barack obama's bathing suit and john edwards hair and hillary clinton's cackle aren't reasons to elect or not elect a president, but these get endlessly debated. and i'm supposed to care who raised more money this quarter? that only matters if the donors get arrested, or seem to be buying influence a bit more blatantly than their rivals.
my feeling is that the women bloggers are out there in full force, they're debating politics, and they suddenly become invisible as soon as someone asks this asinine question, just because they are women. suddenly people only remember the men. i can't prove it, it would take some heavy-duty researching, some researching i was hoping to see from kit seelye.
oh well.
yes, everybody should have scored 94.
Since getting everything right means you got a 94th percentile score, if everyone got everything right, wouldn't, uh, that make our scores undefined or something?
I'm not doing too bad, but I still think fewer than half of my link list are blogs by women (and excepting you, about zero of them are hard-core politilal wranglers). A lot fewer than half of hte books I've got listed are by women. It bothers me a little.
K (aghzseiz: agh! spell silsesquioxane!)
and since it's inconceivable that everybody would be right...
but yeah, everybody should score 100 percent and then we could all be in the 0th percentile [does this exist? i'm too lazy to look it up]. i wouldn't find it nearly so ego-fluffing if that happened, but we might have ended up with a better world, like probably not invading a bunch of countries that can't be seen from here.
if you need a list of women political bloggers to read, polishifter's list above is a good place start. on books, i dunno, but especially in earlier times, women writers often wrote under male pseudonyms, so there might be more out there waiting for you than you knew...
Normal distributions must exist, I suppose, as to any particular measurement.
94th percentile. yay.
I always maxed out IQ tests, anyhow.
My wife is smarter than me, though.
and i'm not normal either. :)
I never take such quizzes. Well, "never" is too strong a statement, but as the Captain of the Pinafore sings, "hardly ever."
I've never counted, but I believe my blogroll is about evenly divided by sex (not to be confused with "united by sex"). The blogroll grows like topsy, or like the Tao, so I haven't thought about it a lot. I've never seen even the slightest shortage of women political bloggers, and I'm always amazed and aghast at these posts that turn up from time to time implying that women don't do political blogging. Rubbish! Anyone who thinks that just isn't reading broadly. (Maybe I should rephrase that...)
[prophlgi - prophylactic gizmo]
my blogroll isn't. it's stone soup. thank goddess for sidebars.
i think i've linked more male bloggers than female bloggers, but i probably spend more time reading feminist blogs.
ps to keifus: i out-politic just about all my real-life friends and family members [and that last is going some], of both sexes. i'm probably an outlier that should be discarded from any analyses.
I think like calls out to like, bloggers that I read are all pretty much astronomically intelligent. And I feel dwarfed by someone like Jon Stewart. Holy cow.
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