Tag: society

Working mothers harm children

Working mothers are quite literally damaging their children by chucking them into childcare rather than raising them:

The study, being presented today at the Royal Economic Society’s annual conference, suggests that childcare leads to a substantial drop-off in parents’ involvement in their children’s upbringing. The damaging effects are most marked for boys and for youngsters aged from birth to two, prompting the researchers to suggest that childcare may not ‘be suited for children aged zero to two’.

Children were assigned a series of scores for their development and behaviour, based on the results of assessments and questionnaires. Childcare was found to significantly improve development for disadvantaged children. But the ‘lion’s share of the population experienced significant declines in motor-social development and health measures as well as increased behavioural problems’, the study found.

In other words, unless you’re a dysfunctional single mother who spends her days living off the state, doing drugs, and entertaining thugs, in which case the minimal childcare provided by indifferent minimum-wage workers is actually an improvement, your kids will be worse off.

The tragic thing is that most of these absentee mothers historically did not work and the main reason they are working now is in order to provide what they imagine will be to their children’s advantage. But what is the point of being able to afford an extra car or give your child a computer and a smartphone if you’re going to handicap him with “significant declines in motor-social development and health” from an early age?

Throw in the reduced wages produced by the entry of middle class women into the labor force and the 30 percent increase in female labor force participation from 1950 to 2010 and it’s not hard to understand why the USA is now facing a perfect storm of children’s issues combined with marital and familial problems.

WND column

Hispanic kills black, whites to blame

The overwrought response of America’s blacks to the shooting death of one Trayvon Martin has been illuminating, indeed. What it demonstrates is that what passes for black political leadership has absolutely no intention of giving up the race card until the last individual of European descent has disappeared into the multiracial melting pot that is pushed so assiduously upon the American public by the mainstream media. And the media response to their usual histrionics indicates that these intentions are entirely irrelevant.

Observations at the theme park

1. Where did the chavs go? There were two orders of magnitude fewer neck tattoos? The vibe distinctly changed from high prole last year to low bourgeois. Lower traffic too. Conclusion: economy is not recovering.

2. Saw many white families, black families, and Arab families. One interesting observation: the multiracial couples did not have children. And with one exception, the multiracial children were there with a white mother without any adult male figure in sight.

3. European children are by and large pretty well behaved.

An ominous sign

It’s readily apparent that the women calling for a sex strike haven’t actually thought through the implications of their modern-day Lysistrata:

A group that supports health care coverage of contraception is calling for women to withhold sex from their partners between April 28 and May 5.

“This will help people understand that contraception is for women and men, because men enjoy the benefit of women making their own choices about when and if they want to get pregnant,” Liberal Ladies who Lunch says on its website. “Once congress and insurance agencies agree to cover contraception, we will then resume having sex. Until then men will have to be content with their left hand.”

On its Facebook page, the group charts a brief history of similar “strikes,” starting with Aristophanes’ ancient Greek play “Lysistrata,” where women refuse to have sex until the end of the Peloponnesian War.

Settling aside this ridiculous and totally obnoxious attempt to exert political control over men – and I recommend that any man immediately rid himself of a woman who would ever attempt to run this sort of power move on him – the basic concept of a sex strike is palpably stupid.

Six years after Aristophanes produced Lysistrata, which of course was written as a comedy, the Athenian fleet was destroyed by the Spartan admiral, Lysander. A year later, a starving and besieged Athens surrendered and lost its walls, its fleet, and its empire. And were it not for the unexpected mercy of the Spartans, granted in gratitude for the Athenian resistance of the Persian invasions, the Athenian women would have been enslaved by the men of Corinth and Thebes.

The lesson is that the society whose women attempt to use the crudest form of what John Adams once describes as “the tyranny of the petticoat” is a society that is unlikely to survive for long.

The chickens begin to roost

Many will find this latest innovation in American law to be an upsetting or ominous development. I simply find it to be an entirely predictable and tremendously amusing one:

I have made a transcript of the Pennsylvania case in which state judge Mark Martin, a Muslim convert and U.S. Army reservist who served in Iraq, relied on a sharia law defense (as well as some evidentiary contortions) to dismiss an open-and-shut harassment case against a Muslim man who assaulted an atheist activist at a Halloween parade.

The victim, Ernest Perce, wore a “Zombie Mohammed” costume and pretended to walk among the dead (in the company of an associate who was the “Zombie Pope” — and who, you’ll be shocked to learn, was not assaulted). The assailant, Talag Elbayomy, a Muslim immigrant, physically attacked Perce, attempted to pull his sign off, and, according to police, admitted what he had done right after the incident. The defense argued that Elbayomy believed it was a crime to insult the prophet Mohammed (it is, under sharia law), and that because he was in the company of his children, he had to act to end this provocation and set an example about defending Islam.

As you will see, Judge Martin did not lecture the defendant about free speech or how disputes are resolved in a civilized country. He instead dressed the victim down for failing to appreciate how sensitive Muslims — including the judge himself — are about Islam.

Liberals and atheists have methodically waged war against Christianity while simultaneously attempting to limit free speech through enforcing politically correct sensitivity and free association through anti-discrimination laws. Apparently they never stopped to think that others were perfectly capable of learning from their example, others who are far more numerous, ruthless, and dedicated to their cause.

I believe it is now time for Western Christians and non-Christians alike to acknowledge that men such as Alexis de Tocqueville were correct and various concepts such as free expression, freedom of association, and other hallowed concepts of Western civilization simply do not translate outside of Western Christian culture. What was once theoretical is now empirical thanks to more than sixty years of evidence that strongly suggests conventional Western views of human liberty are simply not compatible with non-Christian, non-Western cultures.

For example, the concept of freedom of religion only functioned reasonably well so long as it was applied to a range of Christian denominations with a structural tendency to resist control by the state. It can no more be successfully applied to religious and quasi-religious belief systems that are closely intertwined with the state such as secular humanism, socialist atheism, or Islam than democracy can successfully encompass the participation of ideological parties devoted to communism, national socialism, or hereditary monarchy. This will, of course, fly in the face of many individual’s ideals, including my own, but observable reality has to trump the Platonic Forms when one is addressing practical public policy.

This doesn’t mean sacrificing any principles, quite to the contrary, it simply means ordering them in terms of their priority. And the primary principle of any Western society should be maximizing net human liberty within a structurally sound society capable of sustaining itself.

There are more deadbeat moms than dads

At least on a percentage basis:

Census figures show only 57 percent of moms required to pay child support — 385,000 women out of a total of 674,000 — give up some or all of the money they owe. That leaves some 289,000 “deadbeat” mothers out there, a fact that has barely been reported in the media. That compares with 68 percent of dads who pay up, according to the figures….

The Census Bureau last month also released numbers showing fathers paid an average of $3,000 to custodial moms in 1997. Women paid little over half that. Moms also get about 60 percent of what they are owed, whereas dads only get 48 percent. Not only are the dads paying up more when they don’t have custody, but when the court does hand the kids over to dads, they work more than moms who have custody.

I’d heard this was true but I didn’t have any statistical evidence for it before. I would expect that whereas men who don’t make child support payments are subject to the modern form of debtor’s prison, very few, if any women are similarly incarcerated.

The consequences of post-Christianity

One of the things I find so eminently fascinating about atheist evangelicals is the vast gulf between what they say the believe concerning science and evidence and their observable behavior. The hypocrisy they reliably reveal is not only every bit as great as that exhibited by the likes of Jim Bakker, it’s actually far greater because they engage in it much more often than the average shamed televangelist. Ever since Freud, we have been told that religion is injurious to the individual. Ever since Jean Meslier, it has been asserted that religion is deleterious to society. And we are still hearing this despite the fact that all the evidence, documentary, testimonial, and scientific consistently demonstrates that religion is good for the individual and a significant positive for society.

And yet, despite literally hundreds of years of evidence directly contradicting their blind faith in the benefits of irreligion, evangelical and militant atheists are still extolling the promised wonders of their sexy, secular science fiction society. And they are doing so even as its reality begins to take shape around them:

Lying, adultery, drug taking, breaking the speed limit, drink-driving, and handling stolen goods are all seen as more acceptable than they were at the turn of the century, it suggests. Disapproval of so-called “low level dishonesty” has [decreased] irrespective of social class, income level or education, according to research by Essex University. Integrity levels were slightly higher among women than men but the most significant variation was by age with noticeably higher tolerance of dishonesty among the young.

I’m not sure if it is more amazing or amusing that the academics who produced the report, who are most likely advocates of secularism if not outright atheists themselves, fail to connect the observed phenomenon to the obvious. Instead, they cast around for ridiculous explanations. “We think it is because their role models are not very good.”

And why might that be? The idea that a society can simply abandon one of its central foundations with only minor consequences is absurd on its face. Genetic science has amply demonstrated the powerful limits on environmental modifications to human nature. Atheists can continue to produce a panoply of illogical arguments meant to decouple morality from God, but scientific observation, historical analysis, and thousands of years of philosophical exploration clearly demonstrate that this cannot be successfully done.

A man of the people

Or not, as it happens:

On a scale from 0 to 20 points, where 20 signifies full engagement with mainstream American culture and 0 signifies deep cultural isolation within the new upper class bubble, you scored between 0 and 4. In other words, your bubble is so thick you may not even know you’re in one.

In fairness, I haven’t even lived in the United States for more than a decade. But this result illustrates why I always find it tremendously amusing when insufficiently informed critics attempt to lump this blog in with the conventional conservative Red State crowd.

Anyhow, what do you say about lunch in Davos on Friday, Bertrand?

The hidden costs of socialized medicine

It doesn’t even sound good in theory, and unfortunately, it gets even worse in practice:

Doctors in America are harboring an embarrassing secret: Many of them are going broke. This quiet reality, which is spreading nationwide, is claiming a wide range of casualties, including family physicians, cardiologists and oncologists. Industry watchers say the trend is worrisome. Half of all doctors in the nation operate a private practice. So if a cash crunch forces the death of an independent practice, it robs a community of a vital health care resource.

The good news is that government is limiting the cost of medical treatment through its various policies and programs, especially Medicare. The bad news is that the outcome of this trend is that while medical care will be free, you won’t actually receive any.

And the combination of doctors going broke while bailed-out banksters receive massive bonuses would appear to suggest that we’re going to see more graduates going into the financial rape industry and fewer into medical care. That should work well.

Feminism and technology

Athol Kay explains that the societal and legal changes that are collectively described as Marriage 2.0 rest primarily on a technological foundation, not an ideological one.

The entire Marriage 2.0 edifice is driven by technology not ideology. For sure the ideology is there, but without the technology creating the environment to support the ideology, the ideology simply would have been nothing more than a handful of intellectuals thinking about possibilities rather than reality.

There are three primary technologies involved in creating Marriage 2.0.

(1) Nuclear Weapons…. Now we have a situation where it’s probably only the prison population of young males keeping the sex ratio of young men and women in check. In plain English, if everyone makes it to adulthood, there’s going to be 105 men for every 100 women, so even with a perfect monogamy system, a small number of guys are never going to have a wife. As a result, women can be pickier about who they marry and there’s generally always someone willing to step up and replace a deposed husband.

(2) Birth Control…. the short version is…. birth control allows sex to not be a socially bonding experience, where before it was a bonding one.

(3) Computers…. The downside to computers is that they save labor, and in particular the labor of males. Entire industries have gone by the wayside, or overseas, in the staggering societal changes. Cars used to be made by men, now they are for the most part made by robots. Broken cars used to be fixed by men, now they pretty much just ask the computer in the car “Where does it hurt?” and replace that.

While I don’t know if I would necessarily agree that these three technological factors are the three primary factors that have driven the social change, they are certainly three significant factors. I would venture to say that women’s suffrage has been at least as influential as nuclear weapons and computers, especially given the way in which some of the social patterns that are now obvious were beginning to develop prior to the invention of computers but after women’s suffrage. Another significant factor is the decline of religious influence, which I believe is the underlying problem upon which birth control has acted as a force multiplier.

But Athol is definitely on the right track, as he points out how the collective changes that will eventually lead to Marriage 3.0 – or as I usually refer to it, the Brothel/Burqah option – will not be driven by ideology, but by the same technological and demographic factors that drove the change from Marriage 1.0 to Marriage 2.0. I see several potential game-changers, including:

Male birth control
Robot sex dolls
Artificial wombs
Sex-aware “week after” pills
Economic collapse
Expensive electricity
Continental and/or global war

The myth of ideological progress assumes that Man will continue to become wealthier and that technological advancements will continue to become widely available to the masses. But for the first time in a very long time in the West, we are seeing that a generation is leaving the generation behind it less wealthy. (Thanks, Baby Boomers!) And while we can’t possibly expect to anticipate all the changes that will result from this historical event, it doesn’t seem too far-fetched to suppose that some form of societal “regression” will be the eventual consequence.

On this basis, we can conclude that men’s rights activists will be more effective if they take the first-order approach and focus upon creating the technologies and events that will drive the societal change they seek instead of taking the second-order of appealing to the government in order enforce the desired ideological changes.