Tag: society

Shakespeare had it wrong

The first thing we do is bankrupt all the prospective lawyers.

YOU WENT TO LAW SCHOOL, YOU RAN UP A LOT OF DEBT, and now you can’t get admitted to the bar because having huge debts and no plan to pay them back fails the “character and fitness” test. What the hell kind of legal education system are we running where we charge people more than they can afford to get a legal education, and then prevent them from being lawyers because they can’t pay off their debts?

I don’t know, it strikes me as a rather good way of preemptively punishing those who thought to make a living by leeching off the blood of productive society. Since lawyers are literally officers of the court, which is to say the state, they’re just another unnecessary and unproductive layer of government. We’ve clearly reached that societal stage where, having plundered nearly as much of the private sector as possible, the various aspects of the public sector is now devouring itself.

Men’s rights and historical realism

In Mala Fide lays heavily into The Thinking Housewife, but to my mind, the primary criticism should be the way in which she missed the point of the reader’s question as well as the larger issue underlying it:

We don’t live in a culture where responsibilities can be ‘imposed’ on persons outside of voluntary choice. So, my question would be, how can you possibly speak of men possessing ‘responsibilities toward women’ (and therefore reject the MRM’s self-focus approach) as a group when our culture doesn’t even recognize ‘groups’, it only recognizes individuals?

Men’s rights advocates say they seek equality with women and aim to redress the inferior status feminists have imposed on them. They seek to counterbalance feminism with “men’s rights,” envisioning some hypothetical state of fairness and justice, or at least saying they envision some hypothetical state of fairness and justice. Feminists also claim to seek fairness, but this is a dishonest pose, a cover for the pursuit of superiority for women. Men’s rights advocates say they want equality too and generally do not argue for patriarchal authority. This may be because they labor under a sincere, but misguided belief in radical egalitarianism or because they know that an explicit affirmation of male leadership entails some formal recognition of male responsibility. Some seem to detest the notion of male responsibility because they genuinely detest women and want to owe them nothing.

Male authority, on a practical level, is necessary. But it is more than a practical necessity. It is rooted in human nature and in the nature of God. Men’s rights advocates do not seek the restoration of the traditional father or male head. That generally does not seem to be their goal although certainly there are men who do advocate this, men who do criticize feminism and who do not fit into the mold of the typical men’s rights supporter. Typical men’s rights supporters speak of equality with women, but at the same time relentlessly assert the morally superiority of men. They offer some token acknowledgement now and then that women may be capable of good, but mostly they demonize women and offer virtually no acknowledgement of the good women may do or the harm done to women by feminism. They would just as soon see women sink or swim their own. Just like feminists, they say women should have a choice to be either careerists or homemakers. This is true. Women should have some choice, but our culture must affirm one of these roles as superior since they are mutally exclusive. Men’s rights advocates will argue that women are not very good at being careerists, but they are remarkably silent on the subject of what women are good at and how they might be enabled to do what they are naturally good at doing.

The Thinking Housewife summarizes the matter by naming her post Does Society Need Men’s Rights. Now, regardless of whether one interprets this question overly literally or with regards to the sense in which she and the reader refer to “Men’s Rights” as the male egalitarian response to the legal overreach of the feminist movement, I tend to see the entire discussion as somewhat beside the point. I am not a men’s rights activist nor a men’s rights supporter for the obvious reason that I do not believe in the existence of equality before the law or any other kind of equality. I would simply describe myself as a historical realist, which is why my general sympathies are with all three of them despite their differences.

The simple fact is that restoring Western society to a genuinely equalitarian state will change nothing about its trajectory, it will merely provide for a nominally more equitable period of decline and collapse. Neither MRA atomists nor traditionalists under the influence of quasi-egalitarianism are relevant to the larger scale problem, which is more related to demographics and debt than who gets what after the divorce or whether men should avoid marriage. That doesn’t make the personal issues any less important to the individuals concerned, but let’s not have the discussion under the illusion that it’s actually significant on the societal level.

At this point, I am skeptical that even banning women’s suffrage tomorrow would suffice to salvage the Western society. And that’s not going to happen until Western democracy collapses as completely as Athenian democracy did.

When society is silent

Vigilantes have little choice but to act if they are to do anything other than accept what they deem unacceptable:

An enraged father who disapproved of his daughter’s older boyfriend went to his home and castrated him with a bread knife…. He told police: “I received a phone call anonymously that my daughter was involved with a guy 40 years older than her. You said you couldn’t stop him – so I did.

Those who would condemn his actions as the behavior of a prehistoric father should probably keep in mind that the actions of the overly affectionate Prof. Epstein are the behavior of a post-modern one. If the law is not reasonable, the behavior of those who reject it often will not be either. And neither “the law” nor “the police” are some sort of state deity possessing magical power to dictate human behavior. Their ability to exert control over human behavior is entirely retroactive, so they can do nothing to stop one who has determined that the likely punishment is not as bad as permitting the status quo to remain. This is why the elimination of social stigma in favor of legal criminalization has been so disastrous for civilization.

Of course, one does have to wonder why the young woman would have been so attracted to a man 40 years older as well as why Herr Siefert was inspired to respond in so drastic a manner. It is not impossible to imagine that the pre-modern and the post-modern father have more in common than might ordinarily be supposed.

The Wikileaks rape-criers

In Male Fide posts the pictures and identities of Julian Assange’s two accusers, Anna Ardin and Sofia Wilén.

A few people have sent me the home addresses and phone numbers of Julian Assange’s lying rape accusers. My traffic has ballooned from Googlers seeking info and pictures of Anna Ardin and Sofia Wilén in the past 48 hours, and my posts are being linked all over the place from sites as diverse as Indymedia and Democratic Underground to Pajamas Media and Stormfront….

These two women are accessories to a great evil, an evil that will continue to perpetuate unless someone stands up and does something. They are arguably evil themselves for trying to destroy a man’s life over their feeeeelings. If there’s a part of me that would feel bad for releasing the info, there’s another part of me that would feel bad for not using my power to fight this evil when I am uniquely positioned to do so.

So, guilt or not, I’m posting the info.

I don’t see why Ferdinand should feel any guilt over making available information that should be available given the criminal accusations. Anyone who accuses someone of rape should be considered a public figure in precisely the same manner that the accused rapist is. Crime is a matter of public record, so if you are not willing to go public when pressing charges you should not be permitted to participate in the judicial system. It is a fundamental aspect of justice that it not be hidden in any way. This is why it is important that women who claim to have been raped are not permitted to hide behind the so-called “rape shield” laws because it is readily apparent they find it far too easy to use it to get away with making false criminal accusations without being held accountable for them in any way.

And since female activists have successfully lobbied to impose some form of restriction of public information regarding activity within the judicial systems of many countries, they leave the public with no choice but to identify secret accusers outside the justice system in order to prevent miscarriages of justice from taking place within it.

The brothel or the burqah

The predicted consequences of post-Christian society are already presenting themselves in Britain:

What Alibhai-Brown exposes here is not merely a sexual double-standard, but also an ethnic or religious double-standard, where Muslim men have one standard for “our girls” and another standard for white girls, who are categorically presumed to be immoral.

If Alibhai-Brown has been willing to address the vicious attitudes among (some) British Muslim men that helped foster the environment in which the Derbyshire rape-gang flourished, wouldn’t it behoove someone to examine the problems among British whites that contributed to this horror?

The pimps in Bradford who talked to Alibhai-Brown about “cheap” white girls from “the estates” — British vernacular for government low-income housing, what we Americans would call “the projects” — weren’t just making up a stereotype out of thin air. In 2008, 45% of British births were to unmarried women and, in some low-income areas, the illegitimacy rate was as high as 68%. Such figures certainly indicate that a casual attitude toward pre-marital sex is commonplace in the U.K.

All of the airy secular notions about multicultural societies, sexual equality, universal suffrage, and premarital sex are finally running into the hard brick wall of historical reality. The various hypothetical coulds and shoulds are rapidly transforming into can’ts and don’ts. Now that Christian morality has been abandoned in favor of empty moral relevance, there isn’t any means of rationally arguing with the immigrant pimps who are cheefully turning out Albion’s sluttish daughters while guarding their own with all the primitive paternalism of a dragon guarding his treasure.

Now, set aside your instinctive emotional reactions for a moment and think about which of the two cultures a) truly values its daughters more, and b) is likely to demographically outperform the other. Is it the one that forcibly protects young women from their own behavior or the one that aborts them, deprives them of fathers, and generally abandons them to their momentary impulses? And is there any evidence that the positive aspects of the liberation of Western women, to use the rhetorical phrase, outweigh the negative aspects when viewed from a historical perspective?

As for one common argument to which those who admit the reality of the demographic problem often resort, the idea that the West’s scientific lead will somehow allow it to win any long-term intercultural struggle doesn’t hold water; intelligence agencies wouldn’t be assassinating Iranian scientists if sufficient military science didn’t translate across cultures and the same cultural forces that prevent Western fathers from controlling access to their daughters prevent Western universities from controlling access to their scientific technologies.

Ignoring the elephant

In which the New York Times is astounded to discover that poverty isn’t to blame for substandard intellectual achievement:

An achievement gap separating black from white students has long been documented — a social divide extremely vexing to policy makers and the target of one blast of school reform after another. But a new report focusing on black males suggests that the picture is even bleaker than generally known.

Only 12 percent of black fourth-grade boys are proficient in reading, compared with 38 percent of white boys, and only 12 percent of black eighth-grade boys are proficient in math, compared with 44 percent of white boys.

Poverty alone does not seem to explain the differences: poor white boys do just as well as African-American boys who do not live in poverty, measured by whether they qualify for subsidized school lunches.

The data was distilled from highly respected national math and reading tests, known as the National Assessment for Educational Progress, which are given to students in fourth and eighth grades, most recently in 2009. The report, “A Call for Change,” is to be released Tuesday by the Council of the Great City Schools, an advocacy group for urban public schools.

Although the outlines of the problem and many specifics have been previously reported, the group hopes that including so much of what it calls “jaw-dropping data” in one place will spark a new sense of national urgency….

“There’s accumulating evidence that there are racial differences in what kids experience before the first day of kindergarten,” said Ronald Ferguson, director of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard. “They have to do with a lot of sociological and historical forces. In order to address those, we have to be able to have conversations that people are unwilling to have.”

It is truly remarkable what lengths some people will go in order to avoid the conclusion that is not so much staring them in the face as smashing in their teeth. While there are sociological factors involved – that 72% illegitimacy rate probably doesn’t help foster the development of black mathematicians – it’s more than a little absurd to insist that every group across the human race has precisely the same intellectual capacity. They don’t. This is an observable fact and would be an accepted scientific fact as well if scientists would focus on science instead of politics.

The current state of science is such a joke that it borders on parody. All the charlatans who want to pontificate about the holy theoretical mechanism behind the origin of the species are deathly afraid to admit to the obvious conclusions dictated by that mechanism while sociologists search desperately for an alternative to the completely obvious. If you’ve got one kid who is reading Tolstoy at five and another one who can’t sound out the word CAT, there is a very high probability that the first kid is significantly more intelligent than the second one.

Mailvox: this is “equality”

MP sends along this fascinating job posting:

Assistant Professor, Computer Science
Loyola University Maryland
Posted: 11/10/2010
Tenure Track Faculty

Loyola University Maryland invites applications for the position of Clare Boothe Luce Professor in the Department of Computer Science, with an expected start date of fall 2011 at the level of Assistant Professor. We are seeking an enthusiastic individual committed to excellent teaching and a continuing, productive research program. A Ph.D. in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a closely related field is required. Candidates in all areas of specialization will be considered. The position is restricted by the Clare Boothe Luce bequest to the Henry Luce Foundation to women who are U.S. citizens.

Loyola is an EEO employer that seeks applications from women and members of minority groups.

Did you seriously expect women to stop with genuine equality before the law once they achieved it? As Orwell observed, when equalitarians rule, some are always more equal than others.

There is no equality. It does not exist and has never existed in any material, legal, or spiritual reality.

The economics of polygamy

The Economicon explains why we can expect to see polygamy embraced by the state before too long:

Legalizing polygamy, economist David Friedman wrote in his book Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life, “allows some men who before wanted one wife to try to marry two instead — provided that they are willing to offer terms at which potential wives are willing to accept half a husband apiece. So the demand curve for wives shifts out. The supply curve stays the same, the demand curve shifts out, so the price must go up. Women are better off.”

It’s very hard to argue with the economic law of supply and demand. And the flipside of that is the recognition that most men will be worse off, with the obvious exception of those sufficiently rich and powerful enough to both support and attract multiple wives. Given that the general trend of American society is already in motion towards the economic benefit of women in general and elite men in particular, the fact that legalized polygamy fits squarely upon this progressive trend line would appear to make it all but a done deal, especially if one takes into account the decline of traditionally monogamous Christian culture and its replacement by various pagan cultures that range from openly polygamous African and Arabic immigrant cultures to the practical polygamy of the secular divorce culture in which men financially support multiple wives and families while limiting their sexual involvement to the latest wife.

Keep in mind that from both practical and sociological perspectives, the legal status of a woman as an “ex-wife” rather than a “wife” is largely beside the point so long as the man is still responsible for being the primary provider for the familial unit. And please note that I’m not at all interested in the various arguments that can reasonably be made for Christian polygamy on a theological basis as they are an irrelevant tangent in this societal context.

Being eminently practical beneath their superficially romantic exteriors, women can usually be relied upon to politically press for that which leads to the material advantage of their sex. Notice how the historical commitment to “sexual equality” on the part of feminist activists was thrown entirely out the window once it was perceived that the pendulum had swung in the opposite direction. This isn’t to say that millions of American women won’t be continue to be content in a monogamous state-licensed relationship, only that enough of them will be convinced of the material benefits and potential security of not being limited to one that they will be willing to provide the political horses required to ride through the cracks in the traditionalist wall made by the judidical homogamy advocates.

Moreover, invoking supply and demand again indicates that this is an obvious way to counteract the so-called male marriage strike. As the supply of marriageable men dries up due to male inclination and/or male unemployment, the institution of legalized polygamy can not only make up for this shortage, but essentially render future supply deficiencies nonexistent. If Roissy is correct about female hypergamy and “five minutes of Alpha are better than a lifetime of Beta [Gamma]”, then it can only be a matter of time before lower-status women begin to actively demand legal polygamy in order to expand their access to relationships with higher-status men capable of supporting them and their progeny.

The question ultimately boils down to whether women of the politically active sort would prefer half of Prince Charming’s castle to the entirety of a woodcutter’s cottage. The acquisition of male assets through divorce was never going to work for long, as it only took forty years – a little less than two generations – for growing male awareness to break the traditional marital model and reduce marriage rates among the 25-34 age group from 80% to 45% and the overall rate to 52%. In less than three generations from Ronald Reagan’s signing of the California no-fault divorce law in 1969, conventional monogamous marriage will no longer be the statistical norm.

So, women will either have to become the primary familial providers or they will turn to a different wealth distribution model. Both history and economics strongly suggest the latter.

Time preferences

This should serve as a cautionary tale to those who still believe that giving money to the impoverished is a rational solution to poverty. And yet, we can be confident that it won’t.

A short drive away, Hamon Matipe, the septuagenarian chief of Kili, confirmed that he had received that sum [$120,000] four months earlier. In details corroborated by the local authorities, Mr. Matipe explained that the provincial government had paid him for village land alongside the Southern Highlands’ one major road, where the government planned to build a police barracks.

His face adorned with red and white paint, a pair of industrial safety glasses perched incongruously on a head ornament from which large leaves stuck out, Mr. Matipe said he had given most of the money to his 10 wives. But he had used about $20,000 to buy 48 pigs, which he used as a dowry to obtain a 15-year-old bride from a faraway village, paying well above the going rate of 30 pigs. He and some 30 village men then celebrated by buying 15 cases of beer, costing about $800.

“All the money is now gone,” Mr. Matipe said. “But I’m very happy about the company, ExxonMobil. Before, I had nothing. But because of the money, I was able to buy pigs and get married again.”

Now, not everyone is capable of blowing $120,000 in only four months and winding up with nothing but another notch on the old bedpost. But this sort of behavior is seen all the time, from professional athletes to lottery winners. So long as an individual’s time preference is limited to the short term, he will never amass any wealth because he will immediately spend any amount of money that is given to him or earned by him.

This is why societies that insist on transferring wealth from those with long-term time preferences to short-term preferences are ultimately doomed. One can always eat a heartier meal if one does not save the pigs for breeding and the grain for planting, but there won’t be anything left to eat come the winter. And unfortunately, one cannot instill time preferences though education due to the human talent for rationalization.

In defense of double-standards

Donna Reed complains that women are criticized for the same behavior in which men indulge:

Her wanting to explore and have her fun before she settles hardly qualifies as a tramp. Tons and TONS of men do this same thing but what do we call them?

That completely depends upon how “fun” is defined. Considering that the woman concerned a) needed to break up with her boyfriend, b) was by her own admission envious of her single friends being able to go out with other men, and c) Ms Reed claims that “Tons and TONS of men” are doing “this same thing”, it is perfectly clear that what the little would-be tramp wanted to do was exactly what I described in the original post, namely, spend a few years riding the carousel before settling down.

But that’s obvious and one requires a furiously spinning rationalization hamster in order to claim that the young woman merely wanted to break it off with the perfect long-term relationship guy in order to spend time “taking trips with best friends, dancing, and doing anything silly and fun with your pals”. (Of course, as has been pointed out before, “taking trips” aka “travel” is femalespeak for “have sex with strange men”, so I suppose the assertion is not so much incorrect as an incompetent attempt at camouflage.) There is simply no question that the young woman very much wants to go out and get herself ravished a few times by a few different men. It is the bestial temptation that is there to either be resisted by her reason or justified by her hamster.

The more interesting question that Donna Reed raises is this: how and why can anyone object to a sex-based double standard? There is no double-standard if we are discussing morality; fornication and adultery are considered sins for both sexes alike. Therefore, to assert the existence of a double-standard inherently takes the discussion completely outside the subject of morality and puts it in the realm of mere social acceptability.

Now, the supposed double standard is that men who have sex with many women are studs whereas women who have sex with many men are sluts. But different labels for men and women with similar attributes are not a double standard; is it a double standard that attractive men are called “handsome” and attractive women are called “pretty”? Of course not. The labels derive from the observable fact that men’s attraction to women has a negative correlation with her sexual experience while women’s attraction to men has a positive correlation with his sexual experience.

Note that we’re talking about attraction here, not the reasoned pursuit of a life-long mate. As is usually the case, what a woman says about the men to whom she is attracted is irrelevant as the fact of the matter is that the virginal adult male is a figure of scorn in modern society whereas the virginal adult female is despised only by her fellow women in the same manner that they hate beautiful women.

So, the female standard for men is that men with less sexual experience are less attractive. The male standard for women is that women with less sexual experience are more attractive. This is not a single double standard, but rather two distinct standards held by two different groups of people about two different groups.