The 20 questions every woman MUST ask to see if she's compatible with a man - by a woman who says she's found the perfect formula for love
There are a lot of articles online of this kind and this list is pretty idosyncratic. I would meet a lot of her criteria but my liking for hamburgers would rule me out. It would rule a lot of men out. So she is good at reducing her options, which is rarely wise. She actually seems rather nutty to me. No wonder she is single
But the whole assumption underlying her ideas is false. You can find many tales of people who have large incompatibilities but who nonetheless get on well. "Shopping-lists" for a partner are simply foolish. I am a psychologist and I know well the broad outlines of successfil matches but broad outlines are all that you can reliably find. I am sorry to be corny but Cupid's arrow strikes where it will. "Good" matches will often not work and "bad" matches sometimes will.
In my last 60 years I have had many relationships, including 4 marriages, and there have been many differences between the ladies concerned.
And my current relationship is an extreme example of that. She has many autistic characteristics and our incompatilities are huge. For instance, I am an orthodox scientist but she thinks the earth is flat! And yet the arrow has struck. We have a laughter-filled relationship that gives every signs of being "until death do us part". It is in some ways the worst relationship I have ever had but in other ways the best. But I am very glad of it. We are in our third year together and have certainly had storms between us but there is a glue that keeps us together despite that.
I have always worked on a very simple assumption. If the lady is very intelligent and likes classical music that is enough. My present lady scores on those two things. Beyond that, I think all differences can be negotiated. But that is just me. It is no guide to anyone else.
I am not alone in being skeptical of "red flags" There is an article below by Hannah Vanderheide, a much wiser woman, who is MARRIED and loves her husband despite his imperfections
But on to a lady of the lists:
By Julie Silver
You may imagine the perfect first date should include flowers, candles and perhaps some sultry background music to set the mood.
My first date must-have, however, is something rather different: a list of 20 questions for any potential suitor, enabling me efficiently to weed out any dating duds, and easily identify those precious ‘keepers’.
Among other things, my dating questionnaire allows me to discover whether my potential Mr Right likes quinoa or chips, is in bed by 9.30pm, like myself, and, vitally, whether he speaks kindly of his mother.
On a deeper level, it helps me quickly establish a picture of the heart and soul of the man, whether he is trustworthy and if we might be compatible. Time is of the essence when you get to 54 and are still single, after all!
Clearly, I am very fussy when it comes to dating. But why shouldn’t we women of a certain age be fussy? After all, I’ve been dating for nearly half my life, now, and simply haven’t the time or patience to leave much to chance any more. That’s why I wholly agree with TV presenter Trisha Goddard who — with two divorces, and 64 years on the clock — said last month that she gave a questionnaire to the man who is now her fiance in order to ‘cut the c***’. She said her questionnaire meant she didn’t waste time dating someone who would ultimately not be the right fit for her.
Some might think this approach is unromantic, or impatient — but to me, it just sounds like good sense.
Because there are some definite romantic red lines for me that instantly rule out potential Romeos. For example, as a nutrition and wellness consultant, it’s important any partner of mine doesn’t mistreat their body or drink too much. I also prefer to sleep with my head on an incline — raised higher than my feet — as studies have shown it can be good for your health. So if a man couldn’t get comfy in my specially adapted bed, that would be something of a deal-breaker for me.
Aside from this, I’d love someone with whom I can enjoy day trips and holidays. Someone to laugh with. Looks? I admit I prefer dark features, but they must have a friendly, smiley disposition. And if a man remembered my favourite flowers are freesias, then that would mean the world to me.
In my 20s, I told my father about the kind of qualities I wanted in a man and he replied, ‘Julie, enjoy spinsterhood!’ But the reality is, like so many middle-aged women, I’m at the stage of life when looks just aren’t enough of a pull any more
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Attacking Leftist racism
Two books: Andre Archie (The Virtue of Color-Blindness) and Coleman Hughes (The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America)"
Their object is the racialism that has poisoned America. It goes by different names: critical race theory, antiracism, and diversity, equity, and inclusion. Whatever it’s called, it holds that color, not character, is the locus of moral merit; that differences in material outcomes among color groups are the prime evil; that these differences come from oppression; and that to cure this oppression, society must discriminate against oppressors. In short, it holds that individuals of certain colors ought to be sacrificed to benefit groups of another color.
Hughes calls this ideology “neoracism,” and Archie, “corrosive barbarism.”
Each frames his book as a defense of color-blindness—the principle, in Hughes’s words, that “we should treat people without regard to race, both in our public policy and in our private lives.” Yet both authors are frustrated that their books are even necessary. How on earth, Archie seems to wonder, could the “noble racial tradition of color-blindness” retreat in the face of race hucksters peddling “intellectual nonsense” to “useful idiots” who go along with it to get along? How on earth, Hughes seems to wonder, could the ideas of Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr., find themselves labeled “white supremacist”?
Hughes and Archie have shaken off the shellshock, and now stand ready to fight back. Their books are therefore better characterized as counterattacks than as defenses.
The authors pour fire and scorn on the “sophistry,” “absurdity,” “bigotry,” “defeatism,” and “nihilism,” of the “depressing and debilitating belief” that every American is defined by his race label. Both books explore the origins of this evil idea, paying special attention to the prominent race hucksters who popularized it. After that, however, the authors’ avenues of attack diverge.
Hughes attacks on logical and empirical grounds. He argues that the defining features of the racialist worldview are arbitrariness and fact-blindness. The hucksters are wrong, he reasons , because they cannot produce the quantitative outcomes that they say they want. Worse, they will harm the very people they claim to want to help, to say nothing of everyone else.
Consider the racial categories with which we’re all so familiar. They may work in casual conversation, but try to use them as the basis of policy, and you will immediately realize that they are spectacularly arbitrary. To give slavery reparations to black people, for example, you run into a host of unfixable problems. One-in-five black Americans are recent immigrants, only one-in-four black Americans say their ancestors were enslaved in the United States, and many, like former president Barack Obama, are descendants of both slaves and slaveholders. Most vexing yet is the problem of deciding who is black. One-half? One-eighth? One drop?
And then there are the neoracists’ empirical claims about the causes and cures of racial disparities. Here, Hughes channels Thomas Sowell and launches a fusillade of data at his opponents’ myths and absurdities. If we discriminate on the basis of race, as the neoracists do, the results will be arbitrary, and arbitrary policies can’t help anyone. Instead, Hughes argues, they will “create an enormous amount of justified resentment,” and breed the “racial tribalism” that has “marred and disfigured human societies throughout history.”
The core of the problem, says Hughes, is that the race hucksters are trapped in cognitive dissonance. They say race is a social construct but enforce “the rules of race” with a zeal matched only by “old-school racists.” They decry stereotypes but use stereotypes. They demand justice but mete out injustice to punish “racial-historical bloodguilt.”
Hughes’s argument is thorough, his logic relentless, and his use of data rigorous. These strengths, however, are also weaknesses. His opponents’ arguments are neither logical nor empirical. They speak in the language of morality warped by emotion, and Hughes has responded to them in a different language.
Still, there are many people who are not in thrall to the misbegotten morality of the neoracists. They speak Hughes’s language, and his message is powerful.
This brings us to Andre Archie.
Unlike Hughes, Archie attacks the racialist worldview on ethical grounds. It is no coincidence that a professor of Greek philosophy called his book the Virtue of Color-blindness. The hucksters are wrong, he argues, because they promote ascriptive qualities over character. They assign moral worth to the body, not to the soul. In so doing, they tear at the creed and culture that sustain America and, if left to it, will “destroy completely the ordered liberty that has defined our way of life for nearly three hundred years.”
Archie’s book is aimed at conservatives. In his telling, the race hucksters successfully beat back and bottled up the color-blind principle mainly because conservatives failed to fight. Conservatives didn’t want to fight when the race hucksters falsely claimed the moral high ground. Conservatives didn’t want to be called racist.
Left unsaid by Archie, but true, is that many conservatives failed to defend color-blindness not only out of fear of being called racist, but also because they forgot how to make any arguments but utilitarian ones. And those are hard arguments to make; who has the time to read everything by Thomas Sowell?
But Archie’s point—and this is his profound contribution to a genre over-saturated with data analysis—is that data don’t matter. Even if the hucksters were right that “antiracist discrimination” would usher in a utopia of material equality, Archie would still oppose them because material ends cannot justify immoral means. There are souls within these arbitrary racial groups, and when souls are at stake, “quantitative judgments don’t apply.”
At this point, we find a potential weakness in Archie’s book: its highest authority is the ancient Greeks. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were three of the greatest minds in history. Their philosophical tradition served as a cornerstone of America. But what those great Greek minds said about human nature, character, and choice—about the soul—is not worth believing simply because those great minds said it, but because it was first written on their hearts by a higher authority that Archie only hints at, leaving his reader wondering whether the Greeks’ greatness alone is enough to rally wavering conservatives.
In Archie’s defense, however, because the truths that the Greeks found are written on our hearts, people will respond to them no matter what they believe about their source. Truth moves us. We can’t help it.
At any rate, it is very good luck, if luck it is, that these books came out at the same time. Like hammer and anvil, both are needed to smash what lies between them. Hughes’s book is needed because Americans have forgotten how to make moral arguments. We are utilitarians now, so empirical books remain essential. If, however, empirical books were enough to defeat racialism, then Semple, Sowell, Steele, Loury and countless other data wizards would have dispelled it ages ago. Unfortunately, empirical analysis is not enough: “The race problem is a moral one,” wrote Alexander Crummel in 1889, “its solution will come especially from the domain of principles.” Thus, a rebirth of moral reasoning is needed. Thank heaven for Archie.
Maybe, if we storm racialism from both sides, then color-blindness can retake the offensive and beat back and bottle up its foe. We might not kill racialism outright on this side of eternity, but we might just manage to make color-blindness our “North Star,” as Hughes said in a recent interview. If we do, we will have done ourselves and our country a lot of good.
But only, as Archie reminds us, if we are willing to stand up and fight. So up, and over your barricades. There is joy to be found in this fight.
https://www.heritage.org/civil-society/commentary/the-colorblind-counterattack
**********************************************Hollywood’s One-Sided Narrative on "Conversion Therapy
Hollywood is presenting only one side of the debate over counseling for those who experience unwanted same-sex attraction, and it is seeking to silence those who can offer help to the struggling.
Recent films like “The Miseducation of Cameron Post” and “Boy Erased”—both based on true stories—tell the stories of individuals who had negative or even abusive experiences in these kinds of therapies. Activist groups like the Human Rights Campaign and GLAAD are pushing these films to argue for so-called “conversion therapy bans” for minors and for adults.
However, these kinds of laws fail to take into account important concerns about individual freedom—particularly the freedom of patients to have access to all available information that can help them.
Absent from Hollywood’s portrayal of these therapies are the stories of people who actively sought out counseling and had positive experiences.
Take Ken Williams. He bravely shared his story with the California state Legislature earlier this year when the state considered an expansive bill that banned “sexual orientation change efforts,” with expansive and often unclear implications for freedom of speech.
Williams was attracted to men for most of his life, but wanted to change. So he found a therapist and a support group who helped him to pursue that.
“Some of us experienced the change we were looking for in that group, but not everyone did,” he shared. “Despite years of homosexual identity and behavior, my sexual desires did change. I am no longer sexually attracted to men,” he said.
Williams soon met a girl he was attracted to, and they married in 2006.
“Not everyone who finds themselves with same-sex desires [wants] to pursue that,” he said. “So I am trying to understand why people would want to take away the rights of my [group], which is people finding themselves with desires they would like to see changed.”
The California bill would have defined sexual orientation change efforts as “any practices that seek to change an individual’s sexual orientation. This includes efforts to change behaviors or gender expressions, or to eliminate or reduce sexual romantic attractions or feelings toward individuals of the same sex.”
Such broad terminology that includes not only attractions, but actions, has drastic implications for individual freedom.
Such counseling bans completely dismiss the needs of individuals who genuinely desire to pursue counseling, sometimes because of inner conflicts. It also limits the speech of counselors or ministries that support individuals in their personal choice not to act on these desires.
This bill, and others like it, would have granted state government the power to punish counselors or religious leaders acting as licensed counselors who counsel patients who do not wish to act upon their same-sex attraction for legitimate personal reasons—for example, someone who wants to live by their religion’s teachings on sexuality or to remain faithful to their spouse and children.
Ultimately, the representative who introduced this bill into the California Legislature pulled it due to its overly broad language and sweeping implications.
But this will unlikely be the last time state lawmakers consider an outright ban on counseling that they do not consider sufficiently LGBT-affirming.
Fifteen states plus D.C. already have such counseling bans for youth in place, and activists are using these latest films to call for even more bans.
No one is in favor of allowing any kind of abuse to masquerade as “therapy.” But counseling bans are the wrong tool for addressing actual cases of abuse. Silencing speech only limits the options of people who wish to live consistent with what they believe about sexuality.
Banning one side’s speech is not the solution. Unfortunately, the incomplete narrative offered by Hollywood only buttresses these efforts.
We should take into account the legitimate needs of those who wish to pursue therapy that supports their lifestyle choices, even if they don’t conform to the latest cultural trends.
Only then will our public policy simultaneously protect and respect the freedom of everyone.
https://www.heritage.org/gender/commentary/hollywoods-one-sided-narrative-conversion-therapy
******************************************************The pay gap between men and women is a choice gap
What’s behind the wage gap between men and women?
It has narrowed recently. In 2023, women’s median weekly wages of $1,005 equaled 84% of men’s $1,202 in weekly wages. That’s an all-time high, and a distinct uptick from a fairly steady 80% to 82% between 2004 and 2020.
Yet 84% is still not 100%, even though equal pay for equal work has been the law of the land since the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
So what gives? Are women really being paid only 84 cents on the dollar to do the exact same jobs as men?
Of course not. In this day and age, that simply wouldn’t fly. For starters, there are currently 2.3 million more job openings than there are unemployed workers. So any woman who is being paid less than a male co-worker for the exact same job has a good shot at finding a new job where she will be paid equally.
And even if workers didn’t have the upper hand in the labor market, it never profits employers to underpay women or overpay men. Employers who discriminate based on sex—or age, or eye color, or shoe size, or any other biological factor—will disproportionately attract the types of workers whom they overpay. Excessive employee costs translate to lower profits, less investment and higher prices for customers, who will flock to businesses with lower prices.
Then what is behind the significant difference in pay between men and women?
The short answer is that the pay gap is a choice gap.
The data cited in the gender pay gap looks only at the median earnings of full-time wage and salaried workers. It doesn’t account for important factors such as education, occupation, experience and hours, which account for nearly all the difference in earnings between men and women.
Accounting for all these measurable factors all but eliminates the pay gap to a mere one-cent differential.
Even that “controlled pay gap” doesn’t account for difficult-to-measure factors such as workplace flexibility, which women, and particularly mothers, tend to prioritize. An analysis of Uber drivers estimated that they value the flexibility the platform provides at $150 per week.
Although the true pay gap is miniscule, some policymakers still want to see women earning the same amounts as men. The problem with trying to force equal earnings is that it could only be done by forcing women to make the same choices as men, or vice versa.
Take the Massachusetts Transportation Bay Association, for example. Despite rigid pay scales that precluded pay discrimination, the association had an 11% pay gap because women took more unpaid leave and worked fewer overtime hours. When the company restricted flexibility in hours worked, the pay gap fell to 6%, but the lost flexibility was “especially costly” for women.
Both Sweden and Norway tried to help women by passing “daddy quotas” intended to push men to take on more of the responsibilities of parenthood. Norway’s daddy quota had “strong and statistically significant negative effects on women’s labor market outcomes.” Sweden’s daddy quota didn’t increase men’s household roles or improve women’s labor market outcomes, but it did increase the probability of divorce and reduce household incomes because women took more unpaid time off.
Google, in an attempt to remedy pay gaps, began conducting a pay audit every year and established a fund to compensate employees who it found had been unfairly compensated. Google’s analysis had a surprising result; the company was underpaying men. Consequently, the majority of Google’s $9.7 million in gender-compensation awards in 2019 went to men.
While it can be tempting for policymakers to try to “help” women or minorities by imposing top-down government controls that attempt to equalize pay across gender or race, those policies could end up hurting the people they intend to help.
At the end of the day, most workers—men and women alike—want to be paid based on what they produce, and they want job opportunities that align with their personal and career priorities.
Instead of telling companies how much to pay their workers, and limiting the types of jobs available, lawmakers should work to reduce barriers to work and burdens on job creators so that more women and men can attain the type of work that’s best for them.
https://www.heritage.org/jobs-and-labor/commentary/making-sense-the-wage-gap
****************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See
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