Q: Why is union dysfunction taken as a reason to abolish collective bargaining, while it couldn't be suggested in polite company that similar forms of corporate dysfunction (rigidity, inefficiency, delusional budgeting, stubborn self-interest masquerading as public-mindedness) be taken as a reason to dramatically change corporate structures and/or legal attitudes toward said institutions?
A(1.0): Why are so many people willing to believe that Sarah Palin thought Africa was a single country, while it was considered in poor taste to mention George W. Bush's public floundering and flubbing of foreign policy facts during his first Presidential campaign? Grant the latter having been far better documented, during his campaign for POTUS, and he having had no special reputation for command of the facts (of the sort that probably explains people's tolerance of exaggerations and misstatements from e.g. Obama on the campaign trail), on the contrary presenting himself as a brash anti-elitist whose favorite philosopher was Jesus.
A(1.1): Because George W. Bush came from money and manners and fancy educational institutions and large private endeavors, obviously, and because he was a man, obviously. And perhaps because his (adopted) Texas twang was more familiar than her (native) MatSu Valley sort of Upper Midwestern Scandinavian thing, so that he sounded "folksy" while she sounded strange, like a backwoods hunter.
A(1.2): Equally obviously, people didn't compare the evidence on the two, weigh and sift carefully, and decide to judge them differently in these ways. Even people who explicitly analogized the two didn't tend to draw it out in this way. No, people just saw and heard him one way and her another way.
A(2.0): Here are other versions of the same question:
A(2.1): When a random Muslim or Arab or Persian man beats or kills his wife, why is it newsworthy, when domestic violence almost never gets much press? Why do people claim that al Qaeda proves that Islam is inherently a savage religion when people have done the worst possible things in defense and behalf of every sort of cause? (Flip side, for the leftists: why does the persistence of violence an unbundle conditions show that the nation-state in general, and often enough Israel in particular, ought to be abolished?)
A(2.2): Why do missing black children go unreported while a blonde girl will be in the news for weeks? Why was the drug bust of a black girl at Harvard several years ago -- which included violence perpetrated by someone she'd let in and culminated in her expulsion, not nearly as widely reported as the arrest of half a dozen white Columbia boys who turned out to be wholesale-level drug dealers?
A(2.3): When Haley Barbour sanitizes his memories of how integration went down in Mississippi in the sixties, why do reporters write blog posts about it? When a man molests a boy, why does that say something about how men who are attracted to men are in general, but a man's molesting a girl shows nothing about what men who are attracted to women are like? If the latter does show anything, why is it taken to show that the longstanding differences in the way we -- meaning people of European descent, in particular -- treat male and female sexuality are based in or even determined by biology?
A(2.4): Why is one anecdote about China sufficient for a columnist to prove a point when the same sloppiness would be laughed off if one person were taken to stand in for the whole of say the UK, which has maybe a fifteenth of China's population and is much more geographically concentrated (in and around London) and is much more linguistically and culturally homogeneous than China?
A(2.5): Why is it that hostile male students try to intimidate me and assume a female friend knows no physics, and friendly ones treat me as their guidance counsellor, feel free to go over my head to the professor (female students probably do this too but they haven't to me), and describe me to a professor in a complaint as "incredibly caring and giving ... That said ... [any and all classrooms silences were the TA's fault]?"
A(2.6): Why do people assume that any so-called "dark" or "cynical" Beatles song is pure Lennon?
A(3.0): Naive epistemic realism is utterly untenable, because there just is no way we "perceive" things that's separate from and prior to our interpretation of events; and that perception-interpretation process depends very much on shortcuts that certainly are cognitively useful (I don't want to have to reason out every night whether I should expect the Sun to rise tomorrow and bread to be nutritious) but by the same token are very much in need of examination and questioning.
A(3.1): Given that Socrates encourages interlocutors to examine separately their underlying assumptions and the systematic interconnections between them, while Aristotle assumes we can more or less rely on heretofore-accumulated human wisdom: Socratic epistemology is much, much closer to how we ought to deliberate than Aristotelian epistemology.
