And then it all went to hell.
Is there some rule that says you can only be a Republican candidate for office
if you've said some outlandish, deeply nutty things in public—a sort of foot-mouth litmus test? Because in state Sen. Jim Rubens, New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen has a new Republican challenger who is apparently of the opinion that all them
females having
jobs is one of the reasons the menfolk
are going off and shooting people these days.
A “collaborative” and “flexible” economy is one that has opened the door to more women working, Rubens wrote. And the nature of the changing economy has had a detrimental effect on men, including an increase in violence.
“The collapsing number of male jobs in the increasingly female-centric economy just adds to the already harsher impact of OverSuccess on males,” he wrote, referring to the title of his 2008 book.
All right, even if I could buy for the moment that men are becoming more violent these days because women took der jahbs, I think the invention of a word like
oversuccess is probably an even bigger crime. People have been burned at the stake for less.
The cure for what ails the violent menfolk, however, is the most Republican thing ever. Want to guess what it is? Yep, you're right. Over the fold:
Tax cuts!
The loss of manufacturing jobs that men often held in favor of “collaborative” jobs that favor women, Rubens said, “has increased stress in males.”
“It’s a tiny fraction of males that become stressed for whatever reason and engage in acts of extreme violence,” he said. “If you look through individual psychology of mass shooters over the past 10-20 years, you can see that in the profile. Often its a person who has been subjected to extreme stress in the form of social rejection, job loss and associated mental health issues.”
Tweaking the tax code to add manufacturing jobs would be one way to reduce this “stress” on men, Rubens said.
Wimper. No, please stop. I can't do this right now.
Rubens is defending his 2008-2009 premise, though he wiped the offending post from his old blog; mixed signals, that one. And he promises he's pro-women-in-business, rejecting the notion that he is "seeking to in any way make a claim" that women shouldn't be playing a bigger role in the economy. It's just that menfolk are, let's be honest, violent dullards who are only kept in line by repetitive, manly factory tasks that do not require "collaboration" or social skills.
Look, I'm perfectly willing to believe that Jim Rubens is not one of the insane Republicans that are going around chewing the Capitol woodwork these days—this sounds much more like old-school conservative thought, the amorphous feeling that all problems everywhere have been caused by the stress of treating women or minorities better when, goddamn it, it's just so hard on the white menfolks to do that. Still, can't we do better? Isn't there some Republican out there that has not written up their theories on why mass shooters were influenced not by easy access to weaponry, but by the woes of facing a "female-centric economy"?
