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NBC News Op-Ed: Efforts to Colonize Mars Driven by ‘Male Entitlement,’ ‘Patriarchy’
[FREEBEACON] An op-ed published Thursday on NBC News' "Think" platform argued that the desire of several billionaires to colonize Mars is "patriarchal" and driven by male privilege.
Turble. It's just turble. Ummm... Howcome?
"The Patriarchal Race to Colonize Mars Is Just Another Example of Male Entitlement," wrote Marcie Bianco of the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University.
She's the Winner of the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association's Excellence in Online Journalism Award in 2016, so we can believe what she sez.
Bianco argued that SpaceX founder Elon Musk, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, and Virgin Galatic's Richard Branson are driven by a "Columbusing attitude" and an imperialist ethos" in their efforts to establish a human presence on Mars, arguing that "the impulse to colonize ... has its origins in gendered power structures."
There aren't, as far as we can tell, any primitive folk on Mars to be exploited, so it would really be nothing but a real estate grab. We've only been talking about colonizing space since Cyrano de Bergerac, maybe earlier. I suppose going where no man (or woman or child) has gone before is a pretty manly thing, but it really can't be helped that those who aren't good at math would be excluded from the project.
"These men, particularly Musk, are not only heavily invested in who can get their rocket into space first, but in colonizing Mars," she wrote. "The desire to colonize‐to have unquestioned, unchallenged, and automatic access to something, to any type of body, and to use it at will‐is a patriarchal one."
It doesn't sound real matriarchal, does it? I'm still stuck at why matriarchal would be preferable to patriarchal, since matriarchal societies don't seem to have been particularly successful in human history, but that's probably because I'm not a lesbian and I've never taken a gender study.
So if instead of shooting his old red sports car to Mars, Musk had shot a statue of an Amazon to Venus, would she have had the same opinion?
"It is the same instinctual and cultural force that teaches men that everything‐and everyone‐in their line of vision is theirs for the taking," she continued. "You know, just like walking up to a woman and grabbing her by the pussy. It's there, so just grab it because you can."
When I was sixteen I had a girlfriend who used to shut me up by accusing me of gross generalization. I suspect this gal doesn't have the good manners I had back then. Rita, if you're reading this, tell her, okay?
"Houston, we have a problem," Bianco concluded. "And it's the patriarchy."
"Houston, we have a problem” has become such a cliche, especially among the STEM-challenged.
Posted by: Fred 2018-02-24
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=508807