Tag: mailvox

Mailvox: a profound change of thinking

MK writes to tell how she has found the dreadful miasma of misogyny that engulfs this blog to not only have adjusted her thought processes but also aided her marriage:

It occurred to me yesterday what a profound change in thinking I have had as a result of reading your blog and one of the books you referenced (Married Man’s Sex Life). In my youth in the 70’s, I was happy to soak up the happy horse-sh#$ that popular culture sold about roles of men and women. My marriage of [two decades] has been a difficult struggle owing in part to my desire to see my husband as a badly designed female.

For his part, in my assessment, my husband still struggles with the reality that I am not a man – that is, that I lack career ambition, aren’t that good at finishing what I start (except household duties), and would prefer he initiate sex. It might be harder for him to give up the desire for me to share the providing than for him to give up on primary child-care duties (when that was needed) and housework. The upshot: it is a relief to accept I am not the woman Madison Ave. promoted who wants and can bring home the bacon, serve it up in a pan, and also provide hooker style sex services to my man. That never was me and I always felt inadequate.

I hate to say, I think my husband does view me as inadequate (he works with many woman/mothers who earn big bucks alongside him, not to mention his mother was a dynamo working wife/mother out of monetary necessity). The blog has helped me, however, to accept that I am who I am and more importantly, he is who he is as a he. I have a newfound respect for that. Little by little, I am changing my behavior and attitude and while my husband may always feel he got ripped off because I really wasn’t the career woman he thought I was (I had a job when we met, was good at it, liked it, and parlayed it into working from home so I could take full-time care of and homeschool our children, not because I needed to work for my identity or the money; rather, I did it because I knew my husband wanted me to make money).

I am a Christian of [more than a decade], and this has been an area that the church we were involved with was no good at leading (male/female roles). I have a friend who has been a Christian all her life, but struggled in her marriage. She did not marry a devoted Christian and longs for leadership, but from our conversations, it is clear, she’s at least 50% of the problem. I have shared insights with her from the blog and it is changing her too. Thank you and please keep doing what you’re doing.

I’m glad she’s found the blog to be helpful. I think it’s interesting to see how MK’s email shows the flipside of the female employment issue. Whereas many men don’t want their wives to work so that the women can focus on their careers as wives and mothers, those who do marry working women often expect them to continue working so the men do not have to shoulder the responsibility as the sole income provider. This is dangerous ground, because it is a potential deal-breaker should the woman decide she wants to unilaterally change the arrangement ex post facto.

While women tend to feel they always have the right to change their mind, consider it from the male perspective. What wife would appreciate it if her husband told her that he wasn’t happy with his job and had decided to stay home and master Guitar Hero instead? Would she be delighted that he was pursuing his dream or would she be upset that he had, in a single stroke, suddenly put pressure on her to figure out how to increase her salary by at least 50 percent or accept the necessary reduction in the lifestyle to which she was accustomed? Even though MK’s decision was beneficial for both her marriage and her children in the long term, it’s perfectly understandable that her husband would feel as if he had been played with a bait-and-switch, because it would appear that he was, at least to some extent. There are no shortage of men who have discovered that housework isn’t as unpleasant, stressful, or time-consuming as office serfdom and they are more than happy to divide the responsibilities as they have been told that women want them to do. Naturally, they will resist a sudden demand that they to return to a more traditional role for which they are completely unprepared, and indeed, might even consider to be evil and sexist.

It’s also noteworthy that she has found the church to be useless with regards to offering support for traditional male and female roles. Churchianity is relentlessly feminized and feminist, which is only one of the many reasons to reject it as a pale, bureaucratic, heretical imitation of Christianity.

But I am pleased to hear that MK and her friend have derived a modicum of personal utility from this blog, and I’m sure Athol could use the encouragement as well.

Mailvox: aspies and social autism

In which Van Rooinek objects to making a conceptual link between Asperger’s and atheism:

It’s utterly unfair to link “aspie” with “atheist”. An innate defect in social-situational awareness is no way synonymous with either atheism or an inability to grasp the Christian moral duty of charity. Aspie Christians have a tough enough time with fellow Christians assuming that our inevitable social faux pas are intentional sins rather than perceptual accidents; the equation of “aspie” with “atheist” is even more galling.

While I have no doubt that some will manage it, I find it hard to believe that anyone could miss the humor intrinsic in atheists being offended at being labeled socially autistic while aspies take offense at being tarred by association with atheism. Good times. But, since both groups observably have a somewhat difficult time in understanding various aspects of communication and social interaction, I will explain everything in a logical manner that even the most socially challenged individual should be able to follow.

First, let me address a common misunderstanding. The term “socially autistic” is not, as some have imagined, redundant even though autistic people are known to frequently have social difficulties. The reason is that in the English language, the adjective modifies the noun. As von Hayek elucidated in The Fatal Conceit, “social justice” is intrinsically different than “justice”, so “social autism” is therefore different than “autism”.

The observable difference between the behavior of militant atheists and autistic or aspie individuals is that whereas the latter behave in a neuro-atypical manner regardless of whether they are in a social situation or not, the atheist’s neuro-atypical behavior tends to be limited to the social spheres. This tends to indicate that the behavior is, at least some extent, a conscious choice on the atheist’s part, which only underlines the obnoxious nature of the behavior.

And that, obviously, is the crucial difference. The aspie cannot help his behavior; while the atheist may not be able to help his lack of belief, (which, as I have suggested, may stem from a related neurological disorder), he has no similar excuse for the reprehensible behavior that so often accompanies it.

What Van Rooinek would do well to understand and accept is that when non-aspies behave in a certain manner – the excessive literalism with which some students of Game receive the advice of the Game theoreticians to which he referred being but one example – it is perfectly reasonable to describe such behavior as aspie-like, or “aspie” for short. But there is no more condemnation to be inferred in such a description than there is in referring to a sighted person who simply cannot understand something being explained to him as “blind”.

Moreover, given the way in which aspies are predisposed, by virtue of their neurological handicap, to unintentionally offend others, they would be well-advised to be deliberately slow in taking offense, especially when it is unnecessary. Indeed, instead of being offended, they should be pleased by the sufficient awareness of their condition, and therefore recognition of their lack of culpability for any inadvertently maladroit behavior, that casual use of such an appellation indicates.

Mailvox: why do white women choose black men?

The Spartan inquires:

Why is it that in my town, there is a lot of White Women hanging around Blacks. It seems that every Black man in this town has a white wife, white mistress, white girlfriend. Walk into the Salvation Army soup kitchen and every poor white trash woman (or her grandmother) is lugging around some mulatto child.

How does Game answer this? Should not every Beta White male go around in blackface and talk jive? If reproduction is about genes, and moving up the ladder, why are white women flocking to black men, especially on college campuses?

One can never be certain when attempting to ascertain the motivations behind the actions of others. Never forget some of the most important words of Ludwig von Mises from Human Action: “No dialectical artifice can spirit away the fact that man is driven by the aim to achieve certain ends…. We cannot approach our subject if we disregard the meaning which acting man attaches to the situation, i.e. the given state of affairs and to his own behavior with regard to this situation.”

The problem, of course, is that Man in general and women in particular are very seldom able to explain the actual reasons for their actions, they are much better at providing ex post facto rationalizations of them. But, I have made the following observations over time.

1. The media has been pushing multi-racial romance very, very hard for the last 12-15 years, specifically the white female-black male combination. (I would bet that there are at least 10x more WF-BM couples portrayed than BF-WM couples.) There is nary a commercial on television that does not include a token black man with a funky pseudo-afro at the party or a drama that does not feature a romance between a Handsome Black Man and an Open-Minded White Woman. This tends to have an effect on the class most susceptible to mass marketing, the 18-24 crowd, which also the only group without sufficient life experience to understand that the “racist” stereotypes they so enjoy opposing are based on statistical fact.

2. Black men tend to be more aggressive and forward than white men, on the average. They not only take a shotgun approach, but don’t tend to agonize much over being shot down. Possessing -1SD average IQs, they are less likely to be crippled by introspection and second-guessing than white and Asian men. Recall that Roissy has asserted that high intelligence is actually a handicap with regards to sexual status. Also, the observable black male disinclination for monogamous relationships dictates that a higher percentage of them will remain on the market regardless of their current relationship status.

3. Low rank white women tend to be overvalued by black men. The woman who can attract only white 3s is often able to attract black 7s. I know several black male-white female couples where the black man is significantly more attractive than the white woman. This phenomenon is also often seen in white male-Asian female couples. When a woman has the option to increase her sex rank simply by expanding the pool of acceptable men, it should come as no surprise that many elect to do so.

However, it is interesting to note that despite the race-mixing at the prole level, very little of it takes place among the marrying classes. Virtually no white women actually marry black men; even Asian marriages to white men are on the order of 2 percent of all Asian female marriages. As with most cultural degradations such as crime and illegitimacy, multi-racial non-marital relationships are for the lower classes while the shrinking middle and upper classes of all races remain homogenous.

So, on the basis of his email, I can conclude the Spartan’s town is an economically depressed one that is largely comprised of lower class whites with a large minority population. As far as the question about Game goes, the rule is to mimic whatever behavior is proven to be successful. If the Spartan is interested in overweight, peroxide-blonde 3s, he would probably be wise to imitate the behavior of those gentlemen who are presently attracting them.

Stay away from career women II

Yesterday a few working wives took exception to the logic which suggests that because working wives tend to have more affairs than non-working wives, it is wise for the man who is interested in marrying to eliminate career-oriented women from his list of prospective mates. This was entirely unsurprising, but not entirely unamusing.

On a seemingly unrelated note, I have been reading Umberto Eco’s On Literature this past week, and one passage in particular will surely remind the Dread Ilk of why I regard him as a writer worthy of a regard that comes perilously close to idolatry. (Bear with me, this will all make sense soon.)  “Our only commitment is, by serious and continued work, without giving in to any blackmail, to humiliate those who are our inferiors.”

Thus spake Umberto. And as an Award-Winning Cruelty Artist and Internet Superintelligence, I have little choice but to heed the Zarathustranesque call. Hier steh ich, ich kann nicht anders, weil es ist mein Los.

So. With that in mind, let us now consider the claims made by a few of the various female critics yesterday. Connie asserted: “The percentage of men who cheat on women still outnumbers the percentage of women who cheat on men by at least double.”

This is simply wrong; as I correctly concluded on the mere basis of her sex and passive-aggression. Connie is a statistical illiterate. The most recent figures I have seen report that 20% of married men and 15% of married women have been unfaithful. This means that men are 33% more likely to cheat than women, which is significantly less than “more than 100%.” But more relevant given the context of the post is the fact that men between the ages of 25 and 44, (the age range in which most marriage and marital unfaithfulness occurs), are also 21% more likely to be a participant in the labor force. This tends to support the reported link between increased female labor force participation and increased female unfaithfulness.

This link is further bolstered by a 2005 report which shows:

1. “Working women are more than three times more likely to be divorced than their stay-at-home counterparts.”

2. “The longer hours women work, the more likely they are to be divorced.”

3. “Compared to non-working women, those with a full-time job have a 29 per cent higher odds of divorce.”

Now, obviously not all divorces are the result of extramarital affairs, let alone affairs by the wife. But the statistics are conclusive and clear. If a man elects to pursue a relationship with a woman who intends to continue working full-time, he will significantly increase the chances that his wife will be unfaithful to him and that he will eventually end up divorced. Furthermore, he should also know that if his marriage survives, his wife will make for an inferior mother, as his children will be 23% less likely to pass college entrance exams, 29% more likely to be unemployed, and will weigh an average of four pounds more at age 11 than children whose mothers care enough about them to stay at home and raise them.

(For the Nth time, this should not be taken as criticism of single mothers who have no choice but to work and provide for their children. One cannot condemn a nonexistent choice. However, most working mothers who are married do not have to work, they have instead made a lifestyle choice that happens to place a priority on other things than personally raising their children. While it is their right to make such a choice, it is not their right to pretend they have not made it.)

BJ attempted to respond by relying upon the always humorous, but logically invalid Appeal to Individual Nonexistent Hearsay approach, as she wrote: “Sorry, but my husband has yet to tell me that a co-worker hit on him, but rather a customer (i.e., stay at home moms who are good wives and superior mothers).”

BJ’s argument is based on four central assumptions:

1. BJ’s husband as likely to report being hit on by a co-worker, who would be a regular threat to their marriage, than a customer with whom he spends far less, if indeed any, time. This may be true, but it is by no means certain.  And BJ is not a reliable determinant of her husband’s inclination to keep her informed on the subject.

2. BJ’s husband is equally attractive to his co-workers as his customers. This is questionable. Since his work brings him into regular contact with stay-at-home wives, his employment status is probably relatively low, an observation supported by our knowledge that BJ herself works and supplements the marital income.

3. BJ’s husband has a similar number of female co-workers and customers. This is unknown, but unlikely. But it’s an important assumption, because even if he had been hit on 10 times more often by stay-at-home wives than by his female co-workers, the logic would still remain relevant if he had 100 female clients and two female co-workers. While 10>1, 10%<50%.

4. BJ’s husband’s experience is statistically relevant. Since we are dealing with a sample size of one, it is obvious that her entire objection is completely spurious. In my own anecdotal and equally statistically invalid experience, I have never been hit on by a stay-at-home wife while I have been the recipient of definite indicators of sexual interest from working wives on many occasions. Of course, I have always been of relatively high employment status and my work seldom brings me into contact with stay-at-home wives, so it should come as no surprise that my experience would significantly diverge from that of BJ’s husband.

Connie next attempted to appeal to studies that equate women’s “equality” with national “happiness”. “The happiest societies on earth, those that were surveyed quantitatively on quality of life across a variety of factors, correlate strongly with the societies having the most equality for women.”  This is partially true, but as you might correctly conclude, it depends entirely upon how “happiness” is defined. Given that Egypt and Saudi Arabia were rated the 12th and 13th happiest nations on Earth by the New Economics Foundation, (the famously equalitarian nation of Sweden was ranked 53rd), her assertion is as dubious as it is irrelevant to the subject of whether working women are a reasonable bet to make good wives. Most “happiness” metrics are little more than a measure of societal wealth, and since only wealthy societies can afford the economic and societal ills of equalitarianism, (even if only for a few decades before the inevitable structural collapse), it should come as no surprise that the correlation is mistaken for causation by the illogical and statistically illiterate.

But without question my favorite response was the quintessentially feminine one from Betty, who apparently takes an ad hominem approach to ascertaining the truth of any and all things. “After reading vox’s blog about women in the workplace (talk about painting a “Scarlet S” with a wide brush) I can’t in good conscience buy the argument [the column on Herman Cain] above. Being a member of MENSA doesn’t make him unequivocally correct.”

It is absolutely true that my daunting superintelligence is no guarantee that I am correct on any given matter, it merely indicates that those of lesser intelligence, a subset of humanity which includes approximately 6.92 billion people if one rounds up from the nearest hundredth, should at least be open to the possibility that they are wrong when their opinion diverges dramatically from my own. However, neither the vastness of my intellect nor my statistically sound conclusions have anything at all to do with the wisdom of electing a former Federal Reserve executive to fix a problem that was primarily caused by the Federal Reserve, still less a Fed official who believes that the Fed has done nothing questionable, let along wrong.

Mailvox: a leader in spite of herself

Anon writes about the structure of her marriage and wonders how she can modify it:

We are a mix of #3 and #4. My husband has always joked that he “got married so he wouldn’t have to make” certain decisions. Several years later my career blossomed, we moved out of state for my job, and I now make 50% more than he does. I believe that may be the root of his non-committal behavior. Early in our relationship he was very much “in charge” and VD’s post made me realize how much I miss that.

Last year we lost our first child – she was stillborn. Since then he just does whatever I want or ask. I don’t take advantage (seriously), but his lack of leadership is astounding. I can usually get him to make decisions on big ticket purchases, but not much else.

I fully admit that I am a control freak at times – feel I must care for the house, the husband, the pets, and my career. With our recent tragedy I truly want to simplify my life and allow him to take a much larger role in the running of our lives. How??

First, condolences, etc. Miscarriages and stillbirths can be emotionally difficult, but they do happen and should not dissuade a couple from trying again. Second, as the issues this raises are arguably more relevant to Alpha Game, I have responded to it there.

Mailvox: When x is merely x

One of the things that often amuses me about genuinely knowledgeable experts is the way they walk around dragging their well-credentialed hammers behind them, desperately searching for an opportunity to show off their ability to hit nails, regardless of whether the nail needs hitting, or, as happens to be the case here, even exists in the first place.

The Staggering Height of the Logic Midget wrote:

Let X be a logical statement; that is, X is a statement considered to be either true or false, but not both.

Assume X is true. By basic rules of logic, not-X is false. Is a truth table needed?

It could be that you are not requiring X to be a logical statement. But no, because you use standard logic notation such as X and Not-X, X must be a logical statement as I described above.

It could be that you are thinking of a more complicated scenario in which logic quantifiers are involved. For example, if there exists a divine statement that’s true, that doesn’t prove that every divine statement is true.

But regardless, no matter how complicated the statement X is, if X is true, then not-X is false. If X is false, then not-X is true.

It could be that you’re thinking of the common mistake of a person claiming that (A implies B) proves (not-A implies not-B).

But regardless, no matter the form of statement X, if X is true, then not-X is false.

What Logic Midget failed to recognize is that not all discussions of logical conclusions involve formal philosophical logic notation. His increasingly deranged argument with Markku was more than a little amusing; it’s as if an economist overheard a woman say that a certain individual was a GDP, then leaped in and started telling her that she obviously didn’t know anything about trade balances and deflators, little realizing that the acronym simply stood for a divinely doomed bastard. This isn’t merely a failure of an assumption, it’s a failure of basic contextual comprehension.

Logic Midget was referring to a statement that I made in summarizing the example of divine promises cited earlier in the comment thread.

“My position is one of volipotence, which means that God can lie or not lie as it suits Him… But I’ve noticed that very few people who discuss theology are capable of grasping implications… It’s as if they can’t see the negative space that always surrounds the positive assertion. X does not absolutely require Not-X, but it does tend to suggest its existence.”

What I was referring to here was the existence of divine promises in the context of the question of God’s perfect truthfulness. The point I made was that the fact God has explicitly assured that specific statements he has made are true tends to imply that other statements he has made will are not. If we like, we can put it this way: X = divine statement guaranteed to be true and Not X = divine statement not guaranteed to be true. Insofar as the formal logic applies in that way, Logic Midget is correct. But only trivially so, because we’re obviously not talking about a single divine statement here, we’re talking about a comparison between different divine statements, in fact, we’re actually talking about the set of all divine statements and two distinct subsets within it.

(I should note that I was not using X in any formal sense here. X simply served as a variable representing any word with a specific meaning that is limited in a manner that carries intrinsic implications. For example, “afternoon” implies the existence of both “noon” and “before noon” just as saying “what I tell you now is true” implies “what I told you then may not be true”. In this case, when X = afternoon and Not-X = before noon, then obviously X and Not-X both simultaneously exist, the rules of formal logical notation notwithstanding, given that afternoon is not before noon.)

In his myopic focus on the tree of formal logic, Logic Midget has completely failed to notice the forest of the actual subject at hand. Because it is not the logical distinction between the truth or falsehood of a single divine statement that is relevant here, but rather the semantic implication of statements that are promises and statements that are not promises. The two points I was making were as follows:

1. There are implications behind the use of certain specific terms. If God’s promises are guaranteed to be true, then His non-promises are not necessarily guaranteed to be true. Insofar as God makes statements that are not promises, there is an implication that those statements are not guaranteed to be true, as well as a further implication that God makes statements that are not true.

2. On the other hand, the implication that these statements are not guaranteed to be true does not make them untrue, it merely allows for the possibility that they may not be true.

Logic Midget really should have known better, but he was too eager to strike an educated pose. And since I am his logical superior despite knowing far less about formal notation, it’s not hard for me to find his two logical errors, both at the beginning and right here: “It could be that you are not requiring X to be a logical statement. But no, because you use standard logic notation such as X and Not-X, X must be a logical statement as I described above.”

His first error was his assumption that X “is a statement considered to be either true or false, but not both”. He compounded this with his second error in which he stated that “Not-X” is standard logic notation. It is not, as he should have noted that I did not use (¬P), (~P), or even (-P). In fact, if I had been making use of formal logic notation, I wouldn’t have used any of them anyhow, but rather (P –> Q). Sometimes X is just a variable. Note that Logic Midget didn’t bother to ask what X represented, nor did he even comprehend which part of the statement was the logically relevant one here.

So, once more, we see the wisdom inherent in asking a few preliminary questions rather than making assumptions and thereby leaping to incorrect conclusions. But there are few people so predictably prone to making asses of themselves as well-educated individuals eager to exhibit their hard-won educations.

Mailvox: Not so much

What we have here is a failure to comprehend a concept… MD asks about a potential equivalency:

On your thoughts about atheism (in your culture) being a syptom of social autism; presumably in my culture ceationism is also a symptom of social autism (given a tiny minority on the fringes of society hold these beliefs)?

My thought is that it simply doesn’t work like that. There are several problems with this attempt to construct an equivalency, beginning with the assumption that there is “an atheist culture” given the fact that atheists repeatedly avow that there is no such thing, indeed, that such a thing is not even possible. But unless you have reason to believe that creationists are prone to behaving badly according to the mores of the dominant non-creationist culture or that the creationists do not understand those mores or are believing as they do in a reaction to that culture, there is absolutely no basis on which to propose such an equivalency.

The social autism of atheists goes well beyond the mere fact of their failure to subscribe to theism. This should be obvious, given that agnostics too fail to subscribe to the dominant theistic beliefs and yet do not exhibit any signs of social autism.

Mailvox: this should be amusing

Like Sam Harris, DK claims to have solved the ought vs is problem:

I suspect you’re not interested in the fact that I’ve solved the ought-from-is problem,* but I figure I shouldn’t make the decision on your behalf. You call the project ‘futile’ which is to say you have some very good reasons to be uninterested in any particular instance of it. I would
like to know what those reasons are. Especially, is there some reason you shouldn’t be interested, even if I’m right?

As it is true I’ve solved the problem, I should be able to contradict these reasons, except possibly that last reason.

*(More precisely, there’s an irrefutable definition which, when called ‘ought,’ leads to system that looks like morality, based entirely on unmistakable facts like that people have preferences.)

Given the fact that DK wrongly derived “very good reasons to be uninterested” from “belief in futility, this doesn’t bode well for the likelihood that his solution is correct. But, as per my policy of giving everyone, however crazy, a shot, I emailed him back as follows.

I’m not interested because it hasn’t been solved. The solution isn’t a fact, it is simply your opinion at this point, and I doubt your opinion is any more founded in fact than Sam Harris’s opinion that he solved the problem. But if you wish me to dismantle whatever crackpot solution you’ve proposed and illustrate why it is incorrect, I will be happy to do so. Based on the weasel words in your description, I suspect you are simply playing the same sort of logically illegitimate semantic games that Harris does.

“If I irrefutably define “3” as “2”, then I have proven that 2+3=4!”

Brilliant stuff. Anyhow, go ahead and send me the link. I’ll take a look at it.

I’m sure you will all join me in eagerly awaiting our introduction to the first major philosophical breakthrough of the 21st century.

In which we are diminished

One of the old school Ilk has moved on to the next level. Longtime readers will recall Alex, the sharp-witted mother, outspoken Christian, and strong homeschooling advocate who seldom hesitated to share her opinions here. She wasn’t around as much the last two years, as she was increasingly occupied with battling the cancer that ultimately got the better of her last week. She was a fighter by nature, and it came as no surprise to learn that she lived longer than the doctors had anticipated. She and Spacebunny set up the original homeschooling group here together, so if you’re involved in the current one, spare a thought or two for her today.

She was fiercely proud of her son Jake, who by all accounts has grown into a fine young man worthy of his mother. She suffered no fools, gladly or otherwise, and I always admired her spirit. May she rest in peace and in the glory of her Heavenly Father.