Category Archives: Philosophical and speculative

“Love today has become a power struggle”

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This is apparently news:

Here’s what we know: Females, in general, are nurturing and relational beings. They like to gather and nest and take care of people. They like to commiserate with other females – a lot. That’s why girls can talk for hours on end. It’s why more women stay home with their children than men. It’s why the teaching and caregiving professions are still heavily female. Not every single woman in the world falls into this category, but that doesn’t make the generalization any less true.

Males, on the other hand – in general – are loners. They’re content to mill about in their man caves. They like to hunt. They like to build things and kill things. If you don’t have a son, this may sound strange. But again, that doesn’t make it untrue – nor does the fact that not every single man in the world is like this. Men also take pride in caring for their families. They can’t carry babies or nurse them, but they can provide for them. So let them.

From an article by Susan Venker in a follow up to an earlier post on The War on Men which dealt with why men were retreating from marriage. I discussed that article here. In the present article, Venker gets to the heart of the matter in ways, that if true, would make anyone thinking of marriage run for the hills:

Love today has become a power struggle, largely because women have been conditioned to keep their guard up – as though men and marriage will swallow them whole. As Sandra Bullock once said to Barbara Walters, ‘I’d always had this feeling that if you got married, it was like the end of who you were.’ That attitude is commonplace, and it’s the direct result of a generation of feminists who told their daughters never to depend on a man. . . .

Surrendering to your femininity means to put down your sword. It’s okay if your guy’s in charge. It’s okay if you don’t drive the car.

In fact, it’s rather liberating.

She has written a book, How to Choose a Husband and Make Peace with Marriage, the research for which has driven the conclusions. But it’s the culture and this is how it is and will be for a long long time whatever common sense anyone tries to intrude into the argument.

The working class and the voting class

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Ann Coulter does the numbers and it is now a demographic battle in the US about who comes and who votes. It wasn’t the young after all who has voted to subvert the America of individual effort and personal responsibility. Ann tells a quite disturbing story:

On closer examination, it turns out that young voters, aged 18-29, overwhelmingly supported Romney. But only the white ones. . . .

What the youth vote shows is not that young people are nitwits who deserve lives of misery and joblessness, as I had previously believed, but that America is hitting the tipping point on our immigration policy.

The youth vote is a snapshot of elections to come if nothing is done to reverse the deluge of unskilled immigrants pouring into the country as a result of Ted Kennedy’s 1965 immigration act. Eighty-five percent of legal immigrants since 1968 have come from the Third World. A majority of them are in need of government assistance.

Whites are 76 percent of the electorate over the age of 30 and only 58 percent of the electorate under 30. Obama won the “youth vote” because it is the knife’s edge of a demographic shift, not because he offered the kids free tuition and contraception.

There is even this, which does seem to show there is a way out, as difficult as it may be:

Nearly 20 percent of black males under 30 voted for Romney, more than three times what McCain got.

It is working and paying taxes that may be the divide that matters. As she points out, it is immigration policy that is in the middle. And it will be the big issue of the future as the US does or does not submerge itself under a flood of migrants from places where no one can even conceivably be employed in a high tech, English speaking nation as the US for the time being now is. This is how she concludes:

Romney got a larger percentage of the white vote than Reagan did in 1980. That’s just not enough anymore.

Ironically, Romney was the first Republican presidential candidate in a long time not conspiring with the elites to make America a dumping ground for the world’s welfare cases. Conservatives who denounced Romney as a ‘RINO’ were the ones doing the bidding of the real establishment: business, which wants cheap labor and couldn’t care less if America ceases to be the land of opportunity that everyone wanted to immigrate to in the first place.

My previous post on Australia becoming a third world country has as the subtext that the parties of the left are actively ruining their countries for political advantage. Most of these people will never pay more in taxes than they take in welfare. But they’re not being brought here to work. They are being brought here to vote.

Self interest, as ever, rules

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I can only think that women are seen by women as different from men. The head of the National Organisation of Women in the US, Terry O’Neill, wants parity of gender in Obama’s cabinet:

I think that if half of the cabinet were women and half of the Supreme Court and half of Congress were women, we would see a lot more policies for expanding education and health care and social services that allow communities to thrive,’ O’Neill explained. ‘We’d see a lot less spending on military weapons systems, and we would also see a lot less of the most powerful, moneyed people not paying their fair share.’

What happened to the best person for the job? Don’t even ask. And yet there is this other side of the story which suggests that women don’t get to the top because they don’t want to.

‘Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,’ a recent, widely discussed Atlantic cover story, should help redirect the conversation to the obvious: it’s the kids. The author, Princeton professor Anne-Marie Slaughter, described leaving ‘work I loved’—being the director of policy planning at the State Department, and the first female one, at that—to spend more time with her troubled teenage son. She had discovered, you see, that running a government agency means that you don’t see your kids much.

Slaughter stumbled onto a truth that many are reluctant to admit: women are less inclined than men to think that power and status are worth the sacrifice of a close relationship with their children. Academics and policymakers in what’s called the “work/family” field believe that things don’t have to be this way. But nothing in the array of work/family policy prescriptions—family leave, child care, antidiscrimination lawsuits, flextime, and getting men to cut their work hours—will lead women to infiltrate the occupational 1 percent. They simply don’t want to.

And the conclusion after a very long article:

Most women will continue to prefer long maternity leave, reduced hours, and part-time and flexible jobs. The end of men? Not in Alphaville.

The world of work is long, hard, exacting, tedious and competitive especially at the top. It wears you down. If there’s a nicer, sweeter, more gentle alternative it is not surprising when someone chooses that alternative instead.

Political systems

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I’ve never liked the American political system since like all complex social contrivances built to human specifications there are serious flaws. Here in Australia, because of the organic growth of the system we have inherited through the development of the Parliamentary system in the UK, at least we have a permanent leader of the opposition and a party that collectively determines its policies and then lines up as one behind its leader.

But in the US Romney is as old news as he can possibly be. There is therefore no single person to focus the opposition to Obama, least of all the media. The media here may well turn out as poisonous for the right as they are in the US. But we do have an official opposition and they do have a single policy and their views can be made known and their views are being made known, and we have compulsory voting so many of the flawed elements of the American system don’t apply. We may have others of our own, just not those.

But it’s likely to be a close election. Gillard is not yet to be written off.

I’ve been up so long it looks like down to me

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From a review of The Victims’ Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind by Bruce Bawer:

In what must be reckoned a martyrdom operation, Bawer has spent countless hours not only reading the collective oeuvre of the leading luminaries in Black, Women’s, Gender, Queer, Fat, and Chicano Studies, but also traveling America to attend their conferences. At a gathering of the Cultural Studies Association at the University of California, Berkeley, for instance, Bawer encounters the young Michele, who’s ‘like, a grad student at UC Davis?’ She’s ‘sort of reviving a Gramschian-style Marxism,’ involving the idea that global warming is ‘sort of, like, a crisis, in the human relationship to nature?’ Bawer claims that his heart goes out to her. (His heart is bigger than mine.)

This inability of many young Americans to express a simple or even grammatically coherent thought, in Bawer’s view, owes to a variety of academic fads that in the early 1980s captured the American university. One was postmodernism, of course, which traced its roots to the great anthropologists, but from which, alas, was derived a form of crude cultural relativism that achieved the ignominious trifecta of insipidity, incoherence, and blithe ignorance of a philosophical literature treating the idea of relativism from the Sophists to, at the very least, G. E. Moore. From this followed the conclusion that values, such as individual liberty, were not universal, and as the Canadian poet David Solway put it, that we must perforce believe that ‘[t]here are no barbarians, only different forms of civilized men.’

Then arrived the minor idea of hegemony, conceived by the minor Marxist intellect Antonio Gramsci, who argued that modern liberal democracies are no freer than the most ruthless of totalitarianisms. The oppression was merely unseen. That this idea is absurd—engineers don’t waste energy worrying about plane crashes so subtle that passengers neither notice them nor complain of them—was no obstacle to its advancement. Bawer notes as well the Leninist Paulo Freire, who gave us the common jargon of the contemporary humanities—dialogue, communication, solidarity—and the idea that the point of education is to recognize one’s own oppression so as better to resist it. The Marxist post-colonialist Frantz Fanon completes the intellectual trio.

The chief objective of an education in the humanities today, Bawer argues—with abundant anecdotal evidence to support the claim—is to appreciate that life is all about hegemonic power and to use ‘theory’ to uncover its workings. Depending upon their sex, skin color, or sexual orientation, students are asked to accept as axiomatic that they are either the unconscious instrument of such power or the repository of its collective grievance and victimhood.

Sounds pretty familiar to me. The reviewer, on the other hand, doesn’t actually like the book’s conclusions since it visits much of the problems of our youth culture on the social science and humanities as taught at the institutes of higher learning they attend. Sure there’s lots more to it than that, but that is also a big part of the problem. Will now track down the book and read it for myself.

Married to the state

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The American election has put up some interesting demographic effects for the future. Thinking about the American election once again, some depressing thoughts about the gender gap in the US which is emphasised by the marriage gap:

You don’t hear nearly as much about the rise of single voters, despite the fact that they represent a much more significant trend. Only a few analysts, such as Ruy Teixera, James Carville, and Stanley Greenberg, have emphasized how important singletons were to President Obama’s reelection. Properly understood, there is far less of a “gender” gap in American politics than people think. Yes, President Obama won “women” by 11 points (55 percent to 44 percent). But Mitt Romney won married women by the exact same margin. To get a sense of how powerful the marriage effect is, not just for women but for men, too, look at the exit polls by marital status. Among nonmarried voters​—​people who are single and have never married, are living with a partner, or are divorced​—​Obama beat Romney 62-35. Among married voters Romney won the vote handily, 56-42.

Far more significant than the gender gap is the marriage gap. And what was made clear in the 2012 election was that the cohorts of unmarried women and men are now at historic highs​—​and are still increasing. This marriage gap​—​and its implications for our political, economic, and cultural future​—​is only dimly understood.

Why is there a reluctance to marry? According to the article:

How did we get to an America where half of the adult population isn’t married and somewhere between 10 percent and 15 percent of the population don’t get married for the first time until they’re approaching retirement? It’s a complicated story involving, among other factors, the rise of almost-universal higher education, the delay of marriage, urbanization, the invention of no-fault divorce, the legitimization of cohabitation, the increasing cost of raising children, and the creation of a government entitlement system to do for the elderly childless what grown children did for their parents through the millennia.

There are, however, other considerations of first grade importance that have been left out. First is the changed moral climate that surrounds sexual relations. Boys like playing the field and girls find it more difficult to get some chap to commit. Secondly, since no-fault divorce also now includes divide-all-assets-in-half divorce and support-your-children-till-they’re-at-least-18 divorce, the potential costs of a failed marriage are ruinous. And because we live longer while the potential for extra-marital adventures are becoming more readily available, there is less to induce anyone to take the plunge. And since it is becoming easier to have the state pick up the tab on so many of the costs that were once a family burden, the financial advantages of marriage is melting away.

The wisdom of youth

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First let me start with this:

global temps - dec 2012

The text below is from a different article with a different chart but the result is just the same:

The apparent ‘decoupling’ of global heat from atmospheric CO2 concentrations — with the clear divergence of observed temperatures from projected temperatures — provides mounting evidence for falsification of IPCC climate models.

The conclusion:

Some observers of climate data are expecting the Earth to pass through at least a 30 year climate cooling period.

But if you are young you are generally less knowledgable. You therefore need something to show your independance even if that something is totally preposterous and impossible to believe if the facts are closely examined, But it is useful as a means to show independance and to differentiate yourself from your elders off you go. But really, why pick something so damaging that continuing along these lines will wreck your own life? The world is not apt to stay as it is, and your futures are not likely to be as rich and rewarding as were the lives of the generation now heading into retirement if by the policies you support you ruin our energy producing industries and raise production costs that send industry offshore. You may think you are being self sacrificing by your willingness to accept lower living standards for a better world with less carbon in the air. I just think you’re fools.

Which brings to mind this letter to the editor at Barron’s following the election. It was published under the heading, “A Warm Thank You” and so it is.

To the Editor:

This 50-something, white, conservative Republican wishes to thank America’s youth for sacrificing their financial futures and standard of living so that boomers, such as my wife and I, can look forward to a long and comfy retirement, which we could easily have afforded on our own. Now we have the youth as our guarantors and providers of a little something extra.

As reported by the national exit poll conducted by Edison Research, Americans aged 18 to 29 voted 60% to 36% for Barack Obama. Prior to Obama’s re-election, I believed that it was morally wrong for my generation to pass a crushing national debt on to the next one.

The debt will top $20 trillion before Obama moves out of the White House, and it will include spiraling retirement-related costs that the administration has shown zero interest in bringing under control, largely driven by baby boomers piling into the Social Security and Medicare systems.

With the president’s electoral crushing of Mitt Romney, my overriding sense of morality and guilt have vanished. Thank you, kids!

Edwin D. Schindler

The sad part for these fools is that they have shown little appreciation for irony. Such a bunch of nitwits, but at least there is that one silver lining that we will not have to live most of our lives led by such dumbells as these.

Martian men, Venusian women

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From the first moment I saw the title, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, the very idea of feminism as I understood it died. The only feminism that actually made sense, if you wanted to argue that there ought to be no reason for a woman to be seen as anything other than exactly comparable to a man, is to say that all differences are due to socialisation and none to genetics. But if men are from Mars and women are from Venus, then there are differences in the DNA that might well end up reflected in social outcomes. Quoting stats about different outcomes for men and women would only demonstrate the nature of the world, not some inbred discrimination.

All this by way of a lead in to a fascinating piece of transcript from Rush Limbaugh which he titles, “‘War on Men’ Column Causes Stir, Illustrates the Left-Wing Stuff We Laugh About But Lots of People Believe”. We used to laugh at these leftist idiocies, he points out, but as he looks at the opinions of the young, their views match these very delusions. What has touched off these reflections are Susan Venker’s piece on “The War on Men”. This is Limbaugh talking.

I was of the opinion that no rational majority of people is ever gonna subscribe to this radical feminism. For example, portraying men as natural predators. All sex is rape. Remember Catharine MacKinnon, all sex is rape, even the sex in marriage. And she was a professor of something at the University of Michigan. She was teaching this stuff and I remember do feminazi updates about it, laughing, ‘Okay, there’s always gonna be some small group of unhappy people.’

No, it’s not a small group. It has become reality for a whole lot of women. That and a lot of other things. The man, as a natural predator, had to be shielded, the children had to be protected from him. At the slightest raising of his voice, they called child protective service and said, “Come over to the house.” Maybe take the kids away if the husband was out of whack, and being out of whack didn’t take much other than raising your voice. All these things. I mean, I can’t remember, but some of them were just ridiculous. But they’ve become mainstreamed, and it’s not just with feminism. It’s a lot of other liberalism. The same kind of thing with environmentalism. The whole hoax of global warming.

However it has happened, the world is now filled with such ignorant and arrogant beliefs about just what ain’t so which has affected the politics of the West. Do people like Obama or Gillard believe these things too? It’s all possible, but there are plenty of those in the younger demographics who with certainty do, and many of these have been university educated.

And that’s why you get ads run by Obama on Julia. She’s single her whole life. And it’s why it works. We laughed at the Julia ad. That ad worked. The War on Women, this whole business of giving away contraceptives, we’re laughing at it. It worked. I don’t know on a majority, but it worked. There were actually enough women in this country who were made to believe that Mitt Romney was gonna take their birth control pills away from ’em, not let them have them. And then after they got pregnant he was gonna make them not have an abortion. They believe it. They’ve been told it. They’ve been educated this way.

I often wonder about what it was that I was taught that wasn’t so and has turned out that way. Nothing at all comes to mind. Scientific opinion does shift and new ideas become predominate. And the metaphysical will always be metaphysical. But something as obviously untrue as global warming does not exist in anything I was taught that I can think of. A non-reality-based political culture cannot survive. We are heading for the rocks.

Voting for revenge – Australian style

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A very interesting article by Paul Kelly and expanded on by Andrew Bolt. The real Julia is a far left socialist filled with anger at the ways in which she has been treated by who knows who. She has, moreover, discovered there are no votes in good policy aimed at making Australia a better place. She now builds a constituency around a shared sense of resentment supplemented by taxpayer funded handouts of every description. From Bolt:

Abbott is now struggling to respond to Gillard’s screams of ‘sexism’ ‘smear’, ‘slime’ and ‘negative’ – with the disengaged, especially women, drawn in by the yelling and, with no context to guide them, taking Gillard’s description of events at face value. Yes, Abbott must have been attacking her just for being a woman. Yes, he must not have evidence for his ‘smears’. When did we last have Prime Ministers who’d say with such certainty what was not true?

Gillard has also taken the Obama playbook to pitch to identity groups and the great masses of welfarists. The handouts – largely funded by borrowings and taxes now found to raise no revenue – have been extraordinary, from cash splashes to extra payments just for having children at school.

It’s brought her back from the dead. A Prime Minister who does not deserve to win and should be excoriated for her deceits, policy disasters and divisiveness is now back in the contest. [my bolding]

There is plenty of identity politics out there and the national interest be damned. It is the beginning of the end in the new world being created before our eyes, both here and in the US.

It must be their lousy handwriting

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More of that settled science:

Female teachers mark male pupils more harshly than they do their female students, research has claimed.

Additionally, girls tend to believe male teachers will look upon them more favourably than female teaching staff, but men treat all students the same, regardless of gender.

This is part of a story titled, “The War on Men, The War on Women?”.