The Answer to a Long-Asked Question

For a long time I am vaguely thinking about the reasons for the obvious gap between what I perceive as justified complaints from American men about the corrupting effect of feminism and women's "sexual liberation", about the disastrous consequences it has for their lifes and society in general, and what I see here, at my end. "Hypergamy" is a concept I always understood only theoretically and which I did not consider part of my culture. Now, at the most interesting Australian blog The Social Pathologist, which I found by chance, as one does, in the Internet, and specifically at the entries The Virgin Bride and The Programmable Sex (including the comments) I found at last an explanation that makes actually sense (plus an interesting sideline about the nature of Islam).

The Social Pathologist, who is a doctor, has a matter-of-fact attitude towards the female nature, backs up his points with a lot of data and is lacking the sneering, cynical and contemptuous attitude of Roissy and his ilk, something I find unsavoury and hard to tolerate.

Here is where I come in:

The_Editrix said...

"Some [pissant artist] burns a koran and it's art, some [non-Christian preacher where Christians are a minority] puts a crucifix in urine and that's a hate crime."

Point taken and yes, there are two sides of that matter -- theoretically. However, the fact remains that no embassies burn and no people die if somebody puts a crucifix in urine. Maybe it's a conservative thing to understand that "equality" isn't the answer to everything.

"The whole divorce end point is complicated by a whole host of variables."

SO true!

IQ (at least occupational status correlated to IQ) does decrease divorce rate........... in America. In other countries it increases it."

I'd wager that is, because American society is in many things lower middle class (or petty bourgeois, if you like that better) in its VALUES. ("What WILL people say!") From my experience -- I am a German who was partly socialised in England -- people above a certain stratum simply don't care what others say about them.

Fascinating discussion. Keep up the good work!

8:09 PM

The Social Pathologist said...

The Editrix, thanks for dropping by.

However, the fact remains that no embassies burn and no people die if somebody puts a crucifix in urine.

That's because Christians don't care. If they did the embassy's would burn. The only reason why the towelheads burn embassies if because they love Allah, we give God lip service.

I'd wager that is, because American society is in many things lower middle class (or petty bourgeois, if you like that better) in its VALUES.

It is both American society's strength and weakness. America probably cannot scale the heights of European glory, nor can plumb the depths of European wickedness.

people above a certain stratum simply don't care what others say about them.

So true, but it's a fatal flaw to have when the criticism leveled against one is legitimate. Sometimes its most beneficial to care about public opinion, most times its not.

11:52 PM

The_Editrix said...

"It is both American society's strength and weakness."

Indeed! I was trying not to be judgemental, just stating a fact. A lot of American traits we tend to sneer at are really strengths.

I find this blog most interesting because it seems to deal with the facts of female nature, different from the Roissy-ites, in a matter-of-fact and non-contemptuous way. Many of the complaints of American men, of which I have no doubt that they are justified, I find as exotic as I might find the the mating rites of some Australo-Papuan tribe.

To make an attempt at putting the problem, as I see it for the European society in which I live, into words: Women are not able to live their sexuality in a self-reliant and responsible way. They simply don't possess the ethical and moral fibre necessary for that and need the confinements of a TRADITIONAL marriage. The most destructive single cause for the decline of our civilisation is the sexual liberation of women. I see a woman at the root of virtual each and every marital and familial failure I am watching. I see sluttiness, idleness, vanity, lack of backbone, morals and common decency. What I do NOT see is "hypergamy". But then, when I first came across the American wedding cult, five-figure wedding dress, diamond ring, the lot, more than ten years ago in the Internet, it was one of those Australo-Papuan culture shocks as well. I am not saying that we are any better in Europe or Germany, we aren't, and the outcome for marriages and families is just as disastrous here. All I am saying is that the underlying motives are different, and that wouldn't be so if "hypergamy" were really a biological given.

I see this as food for thought and further discussion, not as the ultimate truth.

However, and on a different note: I'd like to strongly contradict your statement about Muslims. I don't think Muslims love their Allah, which is not the God of the Bible, as we love the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. They just hate everything and everybody that doesn't fit into their debased world view. I strongly deny that we can learn anything from them. Any similarity with a traditional Christian view, be it the love of God, women's modesty or whatever, is purely pheno- not genotypical.

Off my soapbox now. ;-)

1:49 AM

The_Editrix said...

It seems I ought to have read your entry "The Programmable Sex" first. It goes a long way towards explaining the differences. If one assumes that women's sexuality does indeed reflect societal norms and peer group pressure, it is not so amazing anymore that American woman go for material gain and a diamond ring when looking out for a mate, and German women for (far more frightening) idealistic reasons. Don't take that as a flattering description. Germans are at their most obnoxious, even dangerous, when their sense for idealism is tickled. If I think of the failed marriages within my circle of friends and acquaintances, I'd wager that the adulteresses are very sure that they really "love" that man, "deserve" him and can make him SO much happier than his wife can, in brief, that they are doing actually a good and meritorious, even noble, thing. Few of those I have in mind right now have gained much financially, but, again, that doesn't make them in the least better than any American gold digger and the marriage and family they broke up is just as broken.

The same applies to the wives who leave their husbands because they are bored. They usually don't improve their financial status.

Reversely, you would be amazed for what German men are exchanging attractive, charming and even rich wives. The Roissy-ites with their scale of female attractiveness would be stunned. I am not a man, so I can only say that I haven't a clue what makes them tick. Admiration from the cook or groom they don't get from their wives? Maybe, but why MARRY them?

I have been thinking for a while now rather sketchily in that direction because the differences are so obvious to me when I have no reason to doubt the complaints of the American men. Thank you and this blog for helping me clarifying that.

4:13 AM

It seems, that every society has got its own aphrodisiac and that women always make the worst of it.

More Deadly Than The Male

Yesterday, commenter FPB posted Rudyard Kipling's poem in the comment thread of an entry headed Is feminism the root cause of America's (and the rest of the West's) problems?. It is indeed so apropos to the topic of this blog that I retrieve it from the comments dungeon and put it up here:

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
The Female of the Species

WHEN the Himalayan peasant meets the he-bear in his pride,
He shouts to scare the monster, who will often turn aside.
But the she-bear thus accosted rends the peasant tooth and nail.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.

When Nag the basking cobra hears the careless foot of man,
He will sometimes wriggle sideways and avoid it if he can.
But his mate makes no such motion where she camps beside the trail.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.

When the early Jesuit fathers preached to Hurons and Choctaws,
They prayed to be delivered from the vengeance of the squaws.
'Twas the women, not the warriors, turned those stark enthusiasts pale.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.

Man's timid heart is bursting with the things he must not say,
For the Woman that God gave him isn't his to give away;
But when hunter meets with husbands, each confirms the other's tale—
The female of the species is more deadly than the male.

Man, a bear in most relations—worm and savage otherwise,—
Man propounds negotiations, Man accepts the compromise.
Very rarely will he squarely push the logic of a fact
To its ultimate conclusion in unmitigated act.

Fear, or foolishness, impels him, ere he lay the wicked low,
To concede some form of trial even to his fiercest foe.
Mirth obscene diverts his anger—Doubt and Pity oft perplex
Him in dealing with an issue—to the scandal of The Sex!

But the Woman that God gave him, every fibre of her frame
Proves her launched for one sole issue, armed and engined for the same;
And to serve that single issue, lest the generations fail,
The female of the species must be deadlier than the male.

She who faces Death by torture for each life beneath her breast
May not deal in doubt or pity—must not swerve for fact or jest.
These be purely male diversions—not in these her honour dwells—
She the Other Law we live by, is that Law and nothing else.

She can bring no more to living than the powers that make her great
As the Mother of the Infant and the Mistress of the Mate.
And when Babe and Man are lacking and she strides unclaimed to claim
Her right as femme (and baron), her equipment is the same.

She is wedded to convictions—in default of grosser ties;
Her contentions are her children, Heaven help him who denies!—
He will meet no suave discussion, but the instant, white-hot, wild,
Wakened female of the species warring as for spouse and child.

Unprovoked and awful charges—even so the she-bear fights,
Speech that drips, corrodes, and poisons—even so the cobra bites,
Scientific vivisection of one nerve till it is raw
And the victim writhes in anguish—like the Jesuit with the squaw!

So it comes that Man, the coward, when he gathers to confer
With his fellow-braves in council, dare not leave a place for her
Where, at war with Life and Conscience, he uplifts his erring hands
To some God of Abstract Justice—which no woman understands.

And Man knows it! Knows, moreover, that the Woman that God gave him
Must command but may not govern—shall enthral but not enslave him.
And She knows, because She warns him, and Her instincts never fail,
That the Female of Her Species is more deadly than the Male.

My thanks go to FPB. By the way, the entire entry is well worth reading. When I re-read it just now I thought: "Did *I* write that?" Thanks FPB for that experience, too.

The Advantage of the Ducking Stool

I watched Season Two of Dexter and found it, from an anti-feminist point of view, quite an improvement compared to the first one. Why?

Mainly because the show refrains from foisting one of the "tough and strong but oh-so-sensitive and vulnerable" paragons of female virtue on us. The whiny, whishy-washy girlfriend ("Reeda") got her comeuppance when she forced Dexter to join that "Narcotics Anonymous" group because she (SHE SHE SHE!) knew what was best for him. Predictably, he found somebody more attractive there. Problem is, Ms. Whiny Whishy-Washy always gets bossy for the wrong reasons and is thus a perfect, and perfectly obvious, image of the typical female mixture of inaptitude and conceit. I don't think the scriptwriters intended to make it a point, but I thought it was priceless when she got ver' ver' angry at the "Bay Harbor Butcher" not because he murdered 18 people, but because he frightened her (HER HER HER!) "kid". And, OH BOY, DO I hate this Americanism. (What must go on in peoples' heads who equate their children with little goats?)

The new "love interest" of the protagonist was depicted in every way exactly as irresponsible, hateful and aggressive as such "liberated" women tend to be, a remarkable performance by the English actress Jamie Murray. I searched for information on her at YouTube and she actually looks quite normal. I wonder how she managed, as "Lila", to form that gigantic duck bill and how she does those amazing movements while operating it. In fact, I searched for her because I wanted to know whether there is really somebody with such a grotesque "British" accent, and there was Murray, explaining in a perfectly ordinary English voice with a mild Cockney inflection, that the producers sent her to a "voice coach" because her own accent wasn't "British" (I guess that is "Briddish") enough. I wonder how anybody can listen to that grotesque twang without wanting to kick the cat. Clearly, Americans deserve what they are getting.

"Reeda's" awful mother was perfectly credible in all her power-hungry monstrosity either, and Dexter's hard-to-bear, aggressively insecure sister developed into something almost human under the influence of a mature, much older man. She even went so far to add "fuck" just to every third and not, as before, to every single word. Quite an improvement! As the age gap between Carradine and the actress who plays "Deb" is not, as stated in the series, 20, but 30 years, the bedroom encounters between them are something I'd prefered rather not to see, but that is beside the point here.

I was amazed as well that somebody like the Keith Carradine character, who, in spite of his "cool", showed some clearly macho overtones, was not depicted as a total jerk, in fact, not as a jerk at all.

In a somewhat different way, this applies to Sergeant Doakes as well. He is over-aggressive and only too trigger-happy, but at no point the impression is created that he is a jerk. He comes across as a good man caught in a tangled web somebody as straightforward as he is unable to escape. It was a very good thing, too, that it was shown what a false accusation of rape does to a decent man like Angel, who loves and worships women.

The decision of Captain Matthews to replace the lovely Lieutenant Laguerta, who clearly failed because of some X-chromosome related deficiency (she overstepped her authority and embarrassed her superior) with another, sickeningly unprepossessing, aggressive and, so it turned out, even much less self-controlled woman, is clearly in line with what I have seen men do. It is a fact that men are unable to deal with women in the workplace in a matter-of-fact manner, and no, not always, in fact rarely, a sexual relationship is involved. But then, men oughtn't to have to deal with women in the workplace in the first place.

Watching Season Two, I felt encouraged in the somewhat irrational fondness of Laguerta I developed during Season One. She clearly abused her female charm to get what she wanted, but she showed extraordinary panache in doing so. Instead of throwing her hapless successor under the bus, as a dumb bitch doubtlessly would, she calmly watches her self-destroy and she has much too much style to crow when she gets her old job back. When she shakes hand with the captain and thanks him for reinstating her, it came, at least to me, across as a wonderful and wonderfully subtle show of (deserved) contempt. She shows, too, that she is able to stand by her man Doakes. The lovely Lauren Velez gives this character amazing depth.

So lets ask the question of what would have become of those fictitious women in a healthy and functioning society where women had never been "sexually liberated"? My answer:

"Reeda" would have made a man of modest means and low expectations at least not unhappy.

Her awful mother would have been probably quite manageable after a couple of encounters with the ducking stool.

The potty-mouthed sister would have made a much older man, who had the guts to control her, very happy.

The crazy English bitch would have been sent to a nunnery or burnt as a witch at the stake.

Pascal, the hapless lieutenant, would have remained unmarried and, with proper training and supervision, made quite a good chambermaid or cook.

Laguerta would have made a king, or at least a prince, extremely happy.

The "Heroism" of The Just Adequate

Does the brouhaha about the female police Sergeant who shot the Fort Hood jihadist go on your nerves as well? For Heaven's Sake she did her JOB, not more, not less. We are so used to inapt women in men's jobs that we hail one as heroic already when all she's done was NOT to turn out as a complete failure.

And before somebody asks me whether I had performed as well in her case: No I very probably hadn't. And specifically not because I'd never had exposed myself to such a situation. Women have no business to be soldiers, police officers or firefighters. Full stop. She is an exception from the rule that women regularly fail to cope with situations like that. That is not their fault. What IS their fault is to hubristically expose themselves to them and then fail to protect those they are supposed to protect and - worse - force men to endanger themselves to save their inferior double-X-chromosome-addled sorry arses in archetypical protective instinct. Thus, this woman is NOT a case for females in such jobs, and she is certainly NOT a hero.

THIS is a hero:

Rank and organization: Master Sergeant, U.S. Army. Place and date: 3 October 1993, Mogadishu, Somalia. Entered service at: ----- Born: Lincoln, Maine. Citation: Master Sergeant Gordon, United States Army, distinguished himself by actions above and beyond the call of duty on 3 October 1993, while serving as Sniper Team Leader, United States Army Special Operations Command with Task Force Ranger in Mogadishu, Somalia. Master Sergeant Gordon's sniper team provided precision fire from the lead helicopter during an assault and at two helicopter crash sites, while subjected to intense automatic weapons and rocket propelled grenade fires. When Master Sergeant Gordon learned that ground forces were not immediately available to secure the second crash site, he and another sniper unhesitatingly volunteered to be inserted to protect the four critically wounded personnel, despite being well aware of the growing number of enemy personnel closing in on the site. After his third request to be inserted, Master Sergeant Gordon received permission to perform his volunteer mission. When debris and enemy ground fires at the site caused them to abort the first attempt, Master Sergeant Gordon was inserted one hundred meters south of the crash site. Equipped with only his sniper rifle and a pistol, Master Sergeant Gordon and his fellow sniper, while under intense small arms fire from the enemy, fought their way through a dense maze of shanties and shacks to reach the critically injured crew members. Master Sergeant Gordon immediately pulled the pilot and the other crew members from the aircraft, establishing a perimeter which placed him and his fellow sniper in the most vulnerable position. Master Sergeant Gordon used his long range rifle and side arm to kill an undetermined number of attackers until he depleted his ammunition. Master Sergeant Gordon then went back to the wreckage, recovering some of the crew's weapons and ammunition. Despite the fact that he was critically low on ammunition, he provided some of it to the dazed pilot and then radioed for help. Master Sergeant Gordon continued to travel the perimeter, protecting the downed crew. After his team member was fatally wounded and his own rifle ammunition exhausted, Master Sergeant Gordon returned to the wreckage, recovering a rifle with the last five rounds of ammunition and gave it to the pilot with the words, "good luck." Then, armed only with his pistol, Master Sergeant Gordon continued to fight until he was fatally wounded. His actions saved the pilot's life. Master Sergeant Gordon's extraordinary heroism and devotion to duty were in keeping with the highest standards of military service and reflect great credit upon him, his unit and the United States Army.

(Medal of Honor citation for Master Sergeant Gary I. Gordon)

The Chicken of Equality and Tolerance are Coming Home to Roost

Two comments from my other blog:

Alligator said...

Nature abhors a vacuum and I've heard that the same applies to spiritual beliefs. The West has abandoned much of its spirituality (primarily Christianity) for secularism. Perhaps this has left a void that is now being filled increasingly by Islam. Many people no longer have a basis (spiritual or historical) for refusing or opposing it. That and they have been conditioned by multiculturalism to see Islam as co-equal to anything produced in the west. Its just another way to live. (We must ignore the stoning of women or homosexuals, honor killings or threats to assimilate or annihilate those who do not embrace the true faith)

I don't know, I'm just casting a line out here for reasons. So many people seem hell-bent on proving they tolerate or accept Islam while overlooking its significant dark acts. Yet they are quick to pounce on any shortcomings of conservatives, Christians or Jews as reasons for rejecting and ostracizing those people, be they real or as is frequently the case, imagined. It puzzles and confounds me.

23 August, 2009 05:03

The_Editrix said...

Western submission to Islam has many reasons. Material considerations, love for totalitarian ideologies or, the spiritual vacuum you describe or, as in Germany, the well-founded hope that Muslims will finish what Germans were forced to stop 64 years ago.

Also, there is the aspect of Western women who have totally emasculated their men and are now nostalgically seeking for aggressive, violent, sweaty masculinity. That they are totally ignoring the rape statistics is probably something that has to do with the mental incostistency from which the majority of the female sex suffers.

Another, and specifically unsavoury, aspect is that of a certain cross-cultural affinity, which is largely overlooked, probably because the mere thought is too repulsive to most sane and healthy people to be taken as something that ought to be considered. How debased and rotten to the core is a society whose media publishes a justification of sex with children with the goal of excusing Islam of what it is? This aspect is more important that we wish it to be.

24 August, 2009 20:49

Women have not just alienated and emasculated their own natural protectors, but those of their sons as well.

Women and Guns

Ilana Mercer quotes Sarah Palin appreciatively:

"Hollywood needs to know: We eat therefore we hunt."

While I agree with what this quip is supposed to convey, (as I perceive it), namely that meat does NOT come out of the deep freeze and that we, as a society, have to kill to eat, there are several things that can be (and ARE) said about it. One of them is that animals ought not to be killed for fun and that farm animals is all we need to supply us with meat. Wildlife numbers, members of that faction argue, can be controlled by professionals. Of course, the stench of the Puritan surrounding this statement, who will sniff out if anybody anywhere on the globe has fun and will try to stop it at once, is overpowering. I just quoted it to show that we do NOT have to hunt to eat and that Palin's statement stripped to its bones, catchy as it may be, is simply wrong.

Of course, everybody who knows the first things about animals and wildlife will prefer game to meat from domestic animals, for both, animal welfare and reasons of edibility. Wildlife had had a good life in its natural surroundings when it finally meets its maker. It doesn't know what has hit it, it hasn't been raised on "hygienic" concrete floor, hip to hip with other poor critters, without a look at the blue sky ever, possibly even in the dark, fed with doubtful, chemically "enhanced" food. It isn't beaten into a butchery where it will be forced to smell the fear and the blood of all the animals slaughtered before. I'll gladly grant the guns their fun in exchange for providing me with meat that is not like that. Hey, I even know a farmer/butcher who shoots his free-ranging beef in the field, so that they'll never know what hit them. Meet from animals that haven't experienced stress before they died tastes better as well, a simple matter of chemistry.

I realize that German shooting and American hunting are very different. While I'm known to be a scourge of my own people, and while the eternal and spiritual values Germans tend to foist on that sport (ooops... of course it's no sport, it's a semi-sacred endeavour to better the world) go sometimes seriously on my nerves, at least our pork chops aren't tormented to death over a longish period of time and we don't see a point in chasing a terrified tame animal within a manageable enclosure while blowing holes into it. If that makes us leftist pinko commies or treehuggers -- so be it.

But I digress. The question I'd like to answer is: Now we know that "we", the members of a post-modern society, do indeed NOT "need" to hunt to eat meat, does a hunting woman really convey the proper image for a traditional, conservative society? Ilana Mercer seems to think so:

Palin is a terrific specimen of a woman. Would that there were more disciplined, gun-toting, hunting, energetic local leaders like this lady in my state. She’s not a philosopher or a thinker; but she should be the Gold Standard for the all-American archetype of a woman (and not the vacuous California toothy booby bimbo).

And while I largely agree with her assessment of Palin's good qualities, I once again challenge Palin's qualities to represent truly conservative and traditional values. It may be a matter of taste, but I don't think that the demonstrative wearing of weapons for other purposes than self-defense, befits a woman. I don't think, either, that women, on a large scale, can handle the responsibility that comes with it, and while it is the height of hypocrisy to revile Palin because she kills wildlife but not her unborn child, it is not very wise to promote a gun-toting Palin as a female role model fit for emulation.

Did you watch "El Dorado"? It can be seen, I think, as somewhat emblematic for women and guns. Where does the trouble come from? From a gun-toting, irresponsible girl who refuses to listen to her father. (I wonder whether they wore jeans that looked as if the wearer had been poured into them and such carefully dishevelled manes in the old West, but that's beside the point here.) And nothing will outline the nature of feminism better than her quip: "They haven't gotten around shooting women yet," when a man offers to escort her in a town highly charged with hostility. So it is alright for HER to tote a gun (and shooting men in the process) while she takes it for granted that no man will shoot her. Sheer and undiluted feminism. American men, you've brought it all upon yourselves!

If you look at the scene where that girl "Joey" comes to the prison with her sister-in-law whose husband has just beed kidnapped by the bad guys, the difference between a woman carrying a gun in self-defense and one who does it aggressively becomes quite obvious. There is nothing boastful, warchick-y about the other woman. She just does what she has to do.

I shoot as well, although I haven't killed anything yet, I am the holder of a shooting license, to be precise. Shooting in Germany is a largely all-male affair and I have yet to meet a woman who complains about it. I like to attend the annual general meeting of the regional guns' association because I and another woman of my age are usually the only ones present and among the youngest attendees to boot. I can't think in a hurry about any other venue where that would be the case. I know quite a few women who have, like myself, undergone the lengthy and expensive process to acquire a shooting license and who will reply, when asked why they have done it, to help their husbands, or to be licensed to lead dogs at gundog trials. I know very few who actually enjoy the stalking and killing bit. Not that I blame those who do, it just doesn't seem to be the norm and I think that tells its own story.

So this German challenges the lippy American "war chick" and "gun toting women" culture as something that may be very American but can in no way be called "conservative".

Like Sarah Palin, really!

Fatherless Generations

In an entry from Monday, The moral development of women, Female Misogynist discusses the integral moral and ethical blindness from which the female sex is suffering. In the comments section she pointed me at yet another entry's comments with the following information regarding German history:

In his Back to Patriarchy, Daniel Amneus said:

"One cannot help thinking of George Kennan's theory that the enormous number of fatherless families created in Germany by the slaughter of World War I was a principal cause of the rise of Naziism, a system satisfying the fatherless child's pathetic search for a father-surrogate with whom he could find himself in sympathetic resonance."

Item: if anyone knows where in George Kennan's work he presented this theory, please let me know.

So in Europe between the World Wars, we had a generation growing up without fathers, a circumstance which consistently leads to delinquency, and a couple of dictators playing father figure to the masses who had been deprived of real fathers. And we all know where that led.

This is a challenging thought, and, no doubt, explains a lot of the woes we are discussing here. But can it be applied 1:1 to German history?

Some data first: Wikipedia has the following figures for WWI-casualties. My brief exerpt below covers the deaths shown as the percentage of the population (military and civilian) and it is everybody's own guess how many male deaths it includes. Apart from one notable exception, which I will discuss below, the figures for the relevant countries are more or less within the same range. Notabene that in the theatre-of-war-countries the civilian losses were much higher and would thus lower the male contingent within the allover percentage.

United Kingdom 2.19%: The United Kingdom stayed safely clear from all dictatorial temptations. How much other woe was caused by the absence of so many men is beyond the scope of this entry.

France 4.29%: Well, France is France. No dictatorship, BUT...

Italy 3.48%: VERY second rate dictatorship, I'd say, and: Italy is Italy...

Bulgaria 3.41% / Romania 9.07% / Kingdom of Serbia 16.11%
The Balkan: The same applies basically to the Balkan. The overproportional number of civilian deaths in Serbia and Romania was due to food shortages and epidemics. Would all those countries have fared better without the loss of so many men? Certainly. Decisively better? I am not sure.

Russian Empire 2.08%: I do not think that the rise of Communism had much, if anything, to do with the losses of male lifes in WWI, but with the fact that Russia was a huge, backward country with a population still deeply steeped in the Middle Ages.

Ottoman Empire 13.72%: The overproportionally lage percentage comes from the huge civilian losses caused by famine, disease and the Armenian Genocide. Still, the military casualties were, with 771,844 deaths and 400,000 wounded, huge. Yet the Ottoman Empire developed later into the only country within the Islamic world that adopted, even if only partially, some modernism, Western values and institutions. Why that is so certainly calls for further questioning.

Austria-Hungary 3.05% / German Empire 3.82%
Nazi Germany: It shouldn't just be asked why Germany adopted a dictatorship, but why Germany adopted a dictatorship whose singular goal was the destruction of the Jewish people. I know that some Jews are deeply offended by the following, although I fail to see why and it's nothing but a fact: Germany would very probably have won WWII had it not invested its main resources into murdering the Jews of Europe. But then, WWII would have made no sense without that goal. It was only ostensibly about righting the (real or perceived) wrongs following WWI. Germany's way to the Holocaust was not a freak of history. In his epochal book "Ideology of Death. Why the Holocaust happend in Germany" John Weiss (a gentile, by the way) bursts that bubble.

The Holocaust happened in Germany, historian Weiss argues, because "the special nature of German and Austrian history" gave an utterly racist form of anti-Semitism "immense power." Weiss examines anti-Semitism's "Christian legacy" in Europe; the role of Martin Luther; the weakness of countervailing Enlightenment ideas in Germany and Austria-Hungary; and the central fact that, throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, "racism was increasingly used by upper-class reactionaries, middle-class nationalists, and lower-class populists as a weapon against the growing influence of democratic liberalism, economic modernization, and calls for social reform." Weiss reviews the rise of the Nazi movement and its fuhrer, Hitler's relationships with German elites, German (and Austrian) involvement with the death camps, and the postwar efforts of many German leaders (often with Allied support) to hide their prewar racial attitudes.

(From a Booklist review at Amazon.)

I do not think that a fatherless generation could have caused all that. Furthered it? Certainly. But caused? No.

However, I agree thoroughly with the last part of Female Misogynist's quote:

And now we have a large percentage of Americans and Europeans without fathers. And it seems that the Islamic world is willing to offer father figures, ones with a sinister agenda that is nonetheless at least not weak and feminine.

But then, post-Sixties lawlessness or better: prostitution of the law and general moral decline in the West has played a major role here. If I think of all the many German war-widows, many of them destitute refugees from the former German Eastern provinces, who have brought up their children, now in their Sixties and early Seventies, to be functioning, stable and upright citizens, I can not believe in a DECISIVE role of fatherlessness pre-Sixties. But then, those women had still internalized the values of the patriarchal society and were not spoilt rotten -- rather the reverse.

Of course, one can discuss now how many of the leading figures of the so influential and so destructive "68"-movement, who are of exactly that generation, had been fatherless, but that would be fodder for yet another entry.

This entry ends here and the picture below has only marginally to do with it. I happened to find it while I looked for WWI-casualty figures at Wikipedia:

A German prisoner helps British wounded make their way to a dressing station near Bernafay Wood following fighting on Bazentin Ridge, 19 July 1916, during the Battle of the Somme. Yep, evil white men oppressing helpless womyn.

How I Finally Came to Find Feminists Foul

This little piece is from my now shut-down website. The blog format with its integrated web-interface and its easy-to-use "content management" is so much less cumbersome than a website, so I am in the process of exporting, sometimes edited, versions of the entries to this blog, to Roncesvalles and to The Evil Style Queen.

This entry is one that fits perfectly into the framework of a blog about feminism. To be honest, the "finally" I added to the headline for alliteration's sake. I found feminists always foul.

When I first arrived at American message boards, Yahoo's, to be precise, in 1997, it was to improve my, a technical translator's, colloquial language and debating skills. My very first encounter happened on a board discussing the late Diana, Princess of Wales, and I was stunned how a lousy wife, bad mother and counterproductive job-filler could become a role-model for 95% of the contemporary female Western population, how a traitor to her own class, a cunning and malicious schemer who had done immeasurable damage to the family that made her, could manage to pose as a "victim", how a jet-setter with a money-spending habit of obscene proportions could have not just gotten away with it but become an icon and ray of hope for the underprivileged of this world. That was how it all started.

I was revolted by the general lack of intelligence and common sense and even more of the vulgarity, smugness, viciousness and misandrist views of her female supporters, so the leap from "Di" to the femboards was only a short one. Surely the feminist view wouldn't support anything like that?

To cut it short: I was wrong.

I had no strong anti-feminist views then. As a woman who reached adulthood in the Seventies, I never (and I MEAN never!) had to face "gender discrimination" in Germany. If anything, I had been treated just a little bit better because of my "gender". Feminism, to me, was Alice Schwarzer, a crone remnant from the Sixties who finally, for want of a cause and because of a strong liking of the limelight, turned free rider of the "patriarchal establishment", and whom hardly anybody of any importance and nobody of any weight took seriously in Germany.

I had never met a "women's studies" student, I didn't even KNOW then that there WAS an "academic" environment where anything like "women studies" (but no "men studies") existed, where women were given preferential admission status because of their "gender" (even though this was for the majority of graduating students), where they after graduation headed to a job they got through "affirmative action" and where they STILL WHINE AND WHINE BECAUSE THEY FEEL UNDERPRIVILEGED AND DISCRIMINATED AGAINST and I had never heard of the anti-male hatred and hostility discharged by Dworkin, McKinnon and other violent bigots.

Being all too readily brainwashed by a bunch of vicious delinquents was one thing, I felt. So was feeling underprivileged while being cushioned by a network of affirmative action and other props.

But what REALLY irritated me were those Bliss Ninnies at the femboards whose condescending conflict resolution counselor attitude and the fact that they are unable to post yet the simplest of messages without being self-congratulatory (mostly about their sexual prowess and allure) even made a saint -- and I am no saint -- scream abuse at them.

Here are a few random examples for your edification and entertainment, I marked my added comments in gray:

sweetjek (45/F/somewhere over the rainbo)
11/28/00 06:10 pm EST Msg: 1265 of 2515
and you know what, raul? I agree that there are differences...and I'm glad they are there. Would you accept the difference if it were presented as "males are not equal to women..." [blah, blah, blah] I don't want to be a cop or a marine...I teach inner-city kids and I'm very good at this TOUGH job...but not because I'm a woman. I love being a woman, and a nice mixture of feminism and strength... [blah blah yabber yabber...] sort of a yin/yang sort of thing. The man in my life [so now we know there is one] would not be attracted to me if I were too "helpless!"

Jaazzmyn (F/Southwest USA)
01/29/01 04:51 pm EST Msg: 1524 of 1524
Ahh Creepy, I am flattered that you keep tossing out Jazz bits to lure me into the conversation. Did ya miss me?? For the record, no matter what you choose to believe about a seventeen year old male that does a stint as cheerleader [i.e. the old prat's son], one thing he definitely is NOT, and that is a mama's boy. He is one of the most independent, stubborn, individualist I have ever known. Always thought he was born with an old soul….when he was just a toddler he so resented following orders from me, that I wondered if he had been MY parent in another life. We are talking about a young man who has been supporting himself since high school, and living on his own for most of his adult years…including moving (alone) cross country for almost half of that time. This kid would never be confused with one who is trying to crawl back into mama…..he is a kid who roared out full steam, ready for life and damn anyone who gets in his way. [Yep, another special male in HER HER HER life AND SHE SHE SHE even MADE him!].

sweetjek (45/F/somewhere over the rainbo)
12/10/00 05:20 pm EST Msg: 1621 of 2515
roadwarrior says:...the "cheering" and willingness to immediately resort to violence against men and have femicunts like you"cheer" is not going to be tolerated any longer.<<< … If you are so damn unhappy being a male, by all means, do something about it. I am happy being a woman, and the man in my life is very happy that I am too [in case we have forgotten there is one]. Other than the few guys on these boards who feel that they are being wronged, most men don't seem to have a problem with any of this...what's WRONG with you??? Also, why does a fictional commercial cause you such anger?? Yikes!

Jaazzmyn
12/23/00 12:03 pm Msg: 29 of 35
And one more thing….I think women can tell when another woman is ..ummmm…..willing. When my father was alive, the women regulars (many of them married) were all over him. He had plenty of opportunities. It wasn't because of his money - he wasn't rich, just a hard working guy. Today at our restaurant, I see the same thing with my husband [Yeah, ANY man in HER HER HER life just HAS to be special]. If he wanted to take home a different women every night, he could. But, he is holding out for that really rich sugar mommy. :- ) [Isn't she precious?]

What I found almost even more annoying was that they didn't seem to be able to make a point without quoting a personal experience and the fact that they were obviously unaware of the fact that their sickeningly blinkered Jolly-Hockeysticks-Sauberwoman attitude, peppered with some "New Age" drivel, has no relevance whatsoever for anything.

As some distressed male called it: The "American golden pussy notion".

Being aware of that phenomenon for quite a while now, I find that a similar attitude is creeping in at my end as well. I notice ever-growing misandrist overtones everywhere, be it an idiotic book about the upbringing of boys with a first chapter that is solely about being apologetic that the book was written in the first place and another one being headed (no kidding!) "Boys are not inferior, just different" (Who would have thought so!) or the fact that it has become acceptable -- "normal" -- for every dumb bitch to slag off or dress down her male counterpart in public, not to mention all the serious legal consequences for men as fathers including abuse allegations that have been turned into arbitrary weapons for women, the shamefully apologetic approach to the role of the women during the Nazi aera as victims and victims only, the appalling misandrist jokes that are circulating, the women who bully their men into role-reversal and then lose whatever little respect for him they had to begin with.

It's all about CHOICE isn't it? They can still choose what they want to be - damsel in distress or empowered performer and most of them them want and get both and use whatever suits their current agenda best, whining or bullying.

I'm asking myself what made a group of coddled, advantaged, white middle-class folks think they are underprivileged? Some time in one of those countries where REAL inequalities prevail would do them a world of good, India, for example, where female foetuses are selectively aborted and sick little girls are left to die, or African countries where genital mutilation is practiced, or Islamist countries, where an accusation of adultery is enough to be stoned to death if one is female, where young girls are arbitrarily murdered, mutilated or raped (or all of it) for real or imagined wrongdoings by the members of their own family.

But they don't go there. They don't because it's much nicer to stay here and dream of themselves looking like Pricess Diana in dungarees, tracking landmines.

And like so often, it's not so much what the perpetrators do, but how the world is reacting to them. Why don't men just put their feet down and, if necessary, beat some sense into those nagging nuisances? But then, they were brought up by women, after all. "The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world", as the feminists are fond of saying. And it's true. Men don't become mass muderers because of their deadbeat Dads, but more likely because Mum bathed them until they were well halfway through adolescence or forced them to wear their older sister's clothes.

Men can't win.

First Womyn on the Moon

A reader writes: "The US is going to spend $40+ billion to put people on the moon even though its a total waste of money since robots could do a better job. Care to guess the real reason for spending all that money? I bet it is just so the US can claim to have put a woman on the moon first, and the first black man, the first oriental, the first gay man, the first lesbian, etc. It will be a real rainbow coalition, I'm sure."

Methinks he has a point!

Listen to Christian J.

I give you here Christian J., his blog and his podcasts.

More later!

An Intact Sense for Class Distinction Helps to Keep the Language Precise and Beautiful

If one talks to Americans, the "stuffiness" of the English generally, but specifically of their language, is a target of frequent ridicule. Such a judgement, however, reveals an endearing lack of perception of a thing they know a fig about, but which still has a pull among the British, in spite of many strident assurances to the contrary: Class. One gets more often than not shrieks of disgust in return for mentioning the c-word, but as a matter of fact, it's alive and thriving and language is one of its main expressions.

There are, of course, other class indicators, for example at what time of the day one has what kind of meal, what clothes one wears, houses -- where and how, and whether one likes the late Princess Diana or not. The latter, in fact, managed to draw a sharply defined line between the middle classes, who adored Diana because she displayed ad nauseam all the maudlin and phoney values of which the middle classes are so fond, and the upper-classes, who hated her because she was, as "Private Eye" put it in a meanwhile removed article, "a neurotic, irresponsible and manipulative troublemaker who had repeatedly meddled in political matters that did not concern her and personally embarrassed Her Majesty The Queen by her Mediterranean love-romps with the son of a discredited Egyptian businessman".

The following (maybe, one hopes, not even apocryphal) joke puts it to a "T": Princess Diana visits the Queen Mother in hospital. Diana: [high voice] "I've come to hold your hand." Queen Mother: [even higher voice] "Piss orf!" Both, the very direct, unfussy linguistic approach and the pronunciation are proof of the old lady's impeccable pedigree.

Listening to Brits while making guesses about their social background is both, fun and revealing. The strongest class indicator of them all is the short little word "pardon". THE one big class divide between people who say "pardon" because they think (and, for the non-native bystander, quite understandably so) that it is polite, and those who consider it a horrible genteelism too unsmart for words. The latter will say "eh", "what" or "sorry" instead. Think a smoke-filled room full of crusty old colonels, all deaf, shouting at each other, hand behind ear, on the top of their voices: "EH? EH? WHAT did he say? EH? EH???" Then there is this only at first sight droll story about the little English boy who informed his teacher: "My Mummy says pardon is a worse word than fuck." Befuddled, I asked a friend, an Old Etonianin in his eighties, whether that is true, and after very short contemplation he was positive that there are occasions where a gentleman might say "fuck", but never, not to save his life, would he ever say "pardon".

So far my own fieldwork, and I have strong supporters:

Post-war Britain was much shaken by an article in the bulletin of a Finnish learned society. In a paper on "English Upper Class Usage” Professor Alan S. C. Ross of Birmingham University stated, it was in 1954, that it was "solely by its language” the upper classes were "clearly marked off” from the middle and lower classes. To prove his point, Ross listed the ways a "U-" (for upper class) speaker differed from a "non-U" speaker. For example: The former would say rich, false teeth, house, jam, jersey, and lavatory/loo the latter wealthy, dentures, home, preserve, jumper/pullover/cardigan and toilet; the former would pronounce, for example, forehead as forrid, power as par, the latter as fore-head and pow-er; and so on. "The lorst par of the British Empar" indeed! I once was asked in an upper class house (NEVER say ***shudder*** "home"!) whether I wanted to take a "shar" as the hot water supply was a bit erratic. It took me a few moments to realize that the host meant "shower".

What H.L. Mencken said 1921 in "The American Language" is still spot on:

The Englishman seldom tries to gloss menial occupations with sonorous names; on the contrary, he seems to delight in keeping their menial character plain. He says servants, not help. Even his railways and banks have servants; the chief trades-union of the English railroad men is the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants. He uses employé in place of clerk, workman or laborer much less often than we do. True enough he often calls a boarder a paying-guest, but that is probably because even a lady may occasionally take one in. … He avoids displacing terms of a disparaging or disagreeable significance with others less brutal, or thought to be less brutal, e.g., ready-to-wear, ready-tailored, or ready-to-put-on for ready-made, used or slightly-used for second-hand, popular priced for cheap, mahoganized for imitation mahogany, aisle manager for floor-walker (he makes it shop-walker), loan-office for pawn-shop."

Obviously, an intact sense for class distinction helps to keep the language precise and beautiful.

However, whatever their merits, Ross’ "U versus non-U" observations would have remained in Finnish obscurity, had it not been for Nancy Mitford, who, in addition to being a brilliant novelist, was also (so Evelyn Waugh) "an agitator - agitatrix, agitateuse? - of genius". Mitford jumped on Ross’ concept and impishly developed it into an article called "The English Aristocracy”. Partly prank, partly accurate, the "U versts non-U" flap was eventually memorialised in Mitford's extremely witty and funny book "Noblesse Oblige", an eccentric analysis of aristocracy, Englishness and language. "Poetus Laureate" John Betjeman contributed the following poem where virtually EVERY word is socially stigmatised:

How To Get On In Society
Phone for the fish knives, Norman
As cook is a little unnerved;
You kiddies have crumpled the serviettes
And I must have things daintily served.

Are the requisites all in the toilet?
The frills round the cutlets can wait
Till the girl has replenished the cruets
And switched on the logs in the grate.

It's ever so close in the lounge dear,
But the vestibule's comfy for tea
And Howard is riding on horseback
So do come and take some with me

Now here is a fork for your pastries
And do use the couch for your feet;
I know that I wanted to ask you-
Is trifle sufficient for sweet?

Milk and then just as it comes dear?
I'm afraid the preserve's full of stones;
Beg pardon, I'm soiling the doileys
With afternoon tea-cakes and scones.

Even after almost 50 years and in spite of all passionate pledges to the contrary, the social dimension of language is still considerable. In more recent times, the as observant as funny journalist and writer Jilly Cooper started all over where Mitford stopped and cultivated those class pranks to an art form in her novels.

The bottom line is, that certain features of language are still used to put people in their place and to keep them there. Although a clever parvenu might learn "received pronunciation", as Eliza Doolittle did from 'enry 'iggins, he (or she) won't have an easy life, as the snags are many.

A biblical example of language as a gatekeeper is given in Judges 12:

4 Jephthah then called together the men of Gilead and fought against Ephraim. The Gileadites struck them down because the Ephraimites had said, "You Gileadites are renegades from Ephraim and Manasseh."
5 The Gileadites captured the fords of the Jordan leading to Ephraim, and whenever a survivor of Ephraim said, "Let me cross over," the men of Gilead asked him, "Are you an Ephraimite?" If he replied, "No,"
6 they said, "All right, say `Shibboleth.'" If he said, "Sibboleth," because he could not pronounce the word correctly, they seized him and killed him at the fords of the Jordan.

As a result of this sad story, the word "shibboleth" is used to describe a linguistic marker that distinguishes one group from another. But it's not only "U" versus "non-U", it's the other way round as well. It was George Bernard Shaw who said that it is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without being hated or despised by another Englishman (or words to that effect) and people still object to people "gentryfying" their voices like Mrs. Thatcher ironing out her lower-middle class vowels or, the other way round, "plebifying" them. Jilly Cooper tells in her hilarious appraisal of British society, "Class", the as funny as sad anecdote of working class hero and heir to the Wedgwood billions, Lord Stansgate (now "Tony Benn") "yer-knowing folksily all over his electorate". "Don't call me Sir, my good man" he was heard ticking off some unhappy Labour supporter in a pub.

The bottom line is that the more precise, direct, short, simple, Anglo-Saxon (as opposed to Romanic), non-politically correct, less explanatory or unsentimental the choice of words is, the more likely it is that one is talking to a "U"-speaker. Scent, not perfume (words that come from a Huntin', Shootin', Fishin' background are obviously very "U"), jam, not preserve, cake, not gateau, to pee (or - if you like - to piss), not to urinate, house, not home, racing, not horse racing. Talking about horses… of course one "rides" not "horse rides" or, (heavens forbid!) "horse back rides". One is "rich" not "well off", "puts down" an old dog and don't "put it to sleep", has an "affair" not a "relationship", "dies" and doesn't "pass away". And one does definitely NOT EVER use "cute-isms" like "doggie" or "horsey" and NEVER NEVER platitudes like "pleased to meet you" or "Cheers"!

I don't quite agree with some of the learned people above who claim that the vocabulary distinguishes the upper from the middle and lower classes. I remain adamant that there are certain important and characteristic similarities between the upper and the working classes. The concept behind this, I think, is that the upper AND lower classes are oblivious to public opinion and, both for their own obvious reasons, not interested in social climbing and thus less pretentious and less interested in "education", whilst notions like "getting on in life", social advancement, and the impression one might make on others ("what WILL people say!") are typically middle class and thus lead to a more pretentious, explanatory, euphemistic, politically correct, long-winded, perceivedly "educated" sort of speaking. And as all this is happening in a society that is more and more identified by arrivistes from the (lower) middle classes, this way of speaking is on its way to become more and more the "normal English", presumably just to prove the Americans right.

Oh yes, the Americans! As a (non-native) English- (as opposed to American-) speaker, in the course of my modest fieldwork I found that the implied premiss of my little piece here, i.e. "English can be stuffy depending on the class of the speaker", ought to be amended by "and Americans are the last ones fit to be judges of that". In the course of more than ten years in the Internet, complimented by a bit of travelling, I have found that virtually ALL of the lower-middleclass, pseudo-refined, Romanic abominabilites mentioned above are common American usage. In fact, there are Anglo-American dictionaries on the web to help the desperate.

So we know there are linguistic dividers, but what is the fascination of those Frenchified euphemistic earsores in the first place?

I think there are three main reasons. First it's to make emotionally difficult or potentially embarrassing situations more tolerable ("the loved one" vs "the dead"). Second to bestow status to the undeserving ("sanitary engineer" vs "garbageman") or acceptability to the unsavoury ("landfill" or "recycling center" vs "dump"; "pre-owned car" vs "used car"). Third, and this is the worst part of it, to make the, sadly not always avoidable, icky "facts of life" bearable. While we can attribute the first two to a general lack of taste and discernment, which comes with any preponderance of lower middle class values, the third one is additionally owing to the moral bludgeon American middle class women, whose prissiness is only topped by their ruthless self-absorption, are swinging to keep society clean from what they are perceiving as unpleasant. Anybody who is able to manipulate millions of American-English speakers into re-naming rape-derived cooking oil into the "inoffensive" sounding "Canola" just because they don't like the sound of the former, is dangerous and potentially capable of ANYthing or at least so I think.

The Banalization and Infantilization of Women

Now they are blaming Palin for Obama's success. Granted, for argument's sake, that is WAS her fault (it wasn't), didn't those who appointed her KNOW about her lack of experience, her lack of polish?

Did they really think a woman like Palin would get them the women's votes? Don't they have the first idea about the female mind? Specifically about the American female mind? Could they really assume that an American female voting public, raised in a culture of sexual envy, a voting public that has undergone the gruelling experience of proms and "beauty pageants", would vote for a slim, pretty and markedly FEMININE looking woman like Palin? Couldn't they anticipate that everything about Palin, her looks, her relative youth, her husband, her children (HER FERTILITY!) would be the cause of intense jealousy? Didn't they see that Hillary Clinton, whose votes Palin was supposed to grab, goodlooking as she may be, does exactly NOT convey such an image? That Palin comes across as (at least to me) totally unbitchy, may have added to all this.

And now they are blaming that woman for the failure of the most inappropriate and unattractive presidential candidate imaginable (with the possible exception of Cynthia McKinney).

The epithet that comes almost invariably to my mind if I see a female politician is "simpering". Palin is no exception. It seems that a woman in politics has the choice between being "simpering" and "butch" and almost all of them end up on the simpering side. Somebody who seems to have largely escaped that predicament is, yes, Hillary Clinton. Our Angela Merkel is on the butch side, although not to an offputting degree, Maggie Thatcher was, too. Mind you, this is neither endorsement nor negative criticism of any of those women's politics, and I choose for the "butch" examples European politicians because I am not familiar enough with American politics to find credible examples across the Atlantic.

However, all this is a recent (post-Sixties) phenomenon. If I think of the first women who made their way into politics and who were, so we can safely assume, first-generation equality feminists, then it becomes obvious that neither of them was simpering and only a few were butch. But then, they thought they had a job to do and were not looking for a gig, photo ops and inflation of their own importance. It seems as if second-generation gender feminism has, opposite to all it claims to stand for, banalized and infantilized women.

As an aside, here in Germany, in predictable anti-American Pavlovian drooling, women of both sexes went over the top about the expenditure for Palin's outfit. I wonder how much sartorial, make-up-artist- and hairdressing genius it took (and cost) to make our Chancellor Angela Merkel remotely presentable for a public office.


And now the disclaimer: I do not endorse Merkel's politics. Sacred Heart Socialists, as any other Socialists, disgust me. But I admire that woman hugely for her total lack of vanity and for the businesslike attitude she shows towards her high office, and I remain adamant that the horrible "Cleavagegate" incident was based on a bet. It simply MUST have been.

Dulling the Mind

Via Lawrece Auster's VFR I discovered Tiberge's blog Galliawatch and specifically the post from which I quote:

The only factors that propel a language from mere street talk to the level of a great cultural asset are the men of genius who write great literature, the poets who open new avenues of expression, leading to a higher level of consciousness, the artists, musicians, essayists, playwrights, actors, journalists, commentators, teachers, scholars, etc... all of whom use, manipulate and enrich the language with individuality, and at the same time with national pride.

Such men are inspired and inspire others. But how to bring about a return to cultural excellence in this time of spiritual impoverishment? How to generate inspiration? Lawrence Auster, who was responsible for my discovering the site, has some suggestions:

To paraphase Obama's "spreading the wealth," what they're doing now is trying to save French by "spreading the French," instead of by elevating it. Meaning, improve the quality of French among the French people. Teach great literature. Instill love of France and French culture, so that the French have something worth talking about again. Make Muslims unwelcome and start pushing them out, thus re-invigorating French identity. Dismantle the EU and the entire managerial, liberal, egalitarian, and Eurabian agenda and consciousness, which kill the mind, turn language into a PC tool to conceal instead of a tool to communicate truth. Bring back belief in truth, so that there will be things worth saying again, worth using language well for...

[...]

Once French nation and culture and its Western identity have been saved and revived, and once the French used by the French people has been improved and purified, then start to make French attractive again to other Westerners. Forget about trying to make it attractive to Third Worlders. As you suggested from the articles at that site, such efforts do not avail. Accept the fact that France cannot have an empire again, that trying to have a Muslim empire only Islamizes France, but see that French can still be saved, because the greatness and beauty of French can still have a great appeal to fellow white Westerners. Thus encourage French as a universal second language in the West alongside English. It won't be as widespread as English, of course, but the unique beauty of French and the "high" of speaking it gives French an appeal that English can't match.

What do you think?

I responded that I agreed completely with his ideas but didn't think it would happen. However, I added that my more fatalistic view is not to be taken as a prediction. One never knows how things will evolve. After all the Renaissance was ushered in by disastrous events. That could happen again.

I would add a couple of ideas to what he said. First, start teaching LATIN again, and even Greek, if you can find students willing to make the effort. Second, STOP teaching French children the "global" method of reading. This language-destroying method has had a demonstrably disastrous effect on the way the formerly well-educated French spell, conjugate verbs, and express themselves. This applies to the teaching of foreign languages as well. Third, STOP teaching French to foreigners via the "global" (or "audio-visual-lingual") method. This method can lead to chaos. Language study for older students has to be structured and grammar has to be taught systematically, whether the students like it or not. Then it is easy to make the transition to structured speech, and eventually to everyday speech. (Note: the final step to authentic everyday speech at normal speed is never easy.) Foreigners are not learning French any better than the French are learning their own language.

[...]

A return to the teaching of the classics is one very good way of re-stimulating interest in the languages of Europe, including German and Castilian Spanish, which is very difficult - has anyone tackled Don Quijote in Spanish? The original version used to be read in American universities, but that would be very rare today. However a solid background in Latin would facilitate access to the great literatures of Western Europe...

As for German, it was quickly phased out (again, not entirely) after 1968. Nobody was willing to make the effort. Dumbing down the mind, and jacking up the grades became the unexpressed and inexpressible goals of American education.

Finally, what would happen if we suddenly began making intellectual demands on hedonistic young people, or people from different cultures who simply do not have the background to do rigorous work? Would there be violence? Is dumbing down a defense against revolution? Would it be better to just close the schools? I have often thought so, but people turn in disgust from such suggestions. They say "education is our future." That's what we all fear, isn't it?

It is indeed!

I do not speak French well enough to express an educated judgement about that specific language here, I just never liked it on a gut level because I subjectively perceived it as effeminate and still do. I was taught English, French and Latin at school and when I had to choose between the latter two I chose, silly and immature as I was, Latin because it seemed to me the lesser evil (and predictably I wasn't very good at it, which I still deplore and always will) and because I liked the Latin teacher marginally better than the French teacher. I do, however, cherish the basic understanding of language with which my Latin training, imperfect as it may have been, endowed me. I love my native language and I love English, which I speak and write well, I love Shakespeare, that unique all-time chronicler of humanity, I love the intriguing details of that language, its intricate times and mysterious prepositions which I have yet fully to master, its subtle societal implications and snobberies, some of which I am still discovering, a fact that, curiously, led to an even more intense dislike of French because of all the French-based politically correct linguistic abominations which are polluting the English language, most of them via the American backdoor.

I am sure I said something to the same effect before, but any English speaker who uses words like "romance" or "lingerie" ought to be clobbered to death with a leather-bound volume of Burke's Peerage.

But I digress and my lack of affection for the French language doesn't change the truth of what Tiberge and Lawrence Auster are saying, nor, indeed, the point I am trying to make: To place the 'dumbing down the mind, and jacking up the grades' of which Tiberge is speaking and the '"spreading the French," instead of by elevating it', as Lawrence Auster puts it, into the framework of my yobbofication -- a downlevelling to the lowest common denominator -- theory.

Yobbofication, as I understand it, has hijacked each and every nook and cranny of our Western culture, triggered off by the progressive goals, most of which were defined in the Sixties and early Seventies, some much earlier. Whether the problems of race, class, general equality or equal opportunities were tackled, it all ended in new injustices instead of ending the old ones. The following examples are randomly chosen and their order is purely random as well:

Initially, the target was to allow Blacks to become worthy members of the community and to end hatred. Now in countries with a considerable black population whites have become quasi-legitimate targets of black savagery and black gutter-culture has become a defining part of the mainstream.

I wrote at VFR in August:

I used to be crazy about the Olympics until they became totally commercialized and meaningless sometimes in the Eighties and with the Olympic Games going on now, I am reminded of those black American athletes of the past who have been such a credit to their country... The first Olympic Games I was able to follow were the 1960 Games in Rome and I remember how impressed I, a little girl, had been by Wilma Rudolph. Blacks of the generations to which Owens and Rudolph belonged were forced to play their game by the white man's rules. Then they were granted equal rights and sometimes along the way they got (or better: were given) the idea that they were actually superior and deserved preferential treatment. The frightening "yobbofication" (I have made up that word myself for want of a better one) we are currently watching with all its horrific consequences, is a result of white cowardice and a perverted notion of equality and justice. When the eternal truth that people are indeed NOT all equal is given up and ethics, morality and communication are geared to the lowest, instead of the highest, denominator, something horrible will happen, and it has.

Initially, the target was to give women the right not to be treated as second-class citizens. Now female "empowerment" has undermined literally all traditional institutions and values.

Initially, the target was to end a humiliating situation for homosexuals. (Didn't all of us know at least one of those inoffensive, even pleasant, mostly elderly, quiet, educated, middle class couples?). Now we are forced to watch (and even to approve of) debauchery and depravity that defies description.

Initially, the target was to make up for the worst of the gross injustices humans are bound to create, now we do not have limitless estate- or corporate powers anymore, but a welfare state that has crippled people's initiative, will to perform and pride.

Initially, the target was do do away with bigotry, racism, xenophobia and hatred, now we are grovelling before an alien death cult in the name of "religious freedom", "equality" and "multiculturalism".

Initially, the target was to spare some poor souls who had been, by sheer naivity, lack of knowledge and general incompetence, impregnated out of wedlock by some ruthless male a fate of social ostracism, now Little Miss Homebreaker gets an interview in a national glossy magazine right beside the interview with the cheated-upon wife.

Initially, the target was to allow people, who didn't have the money to buy formal clothes, to participate in certain social gatherings, and the outcome is a horrible display of tastelessness, vulgarity and lack of discernment throughout all classes, at each and every occasion, and at all times of the day.

In the same spirit, initially, the target was to do away with arrogance, class consciousness, racism and un-niceness generally and the outcome is the death of togetherness, family, marriage and a --you've guessed it-- horrible display of tastelessness, vulgarity and lack of discernment.

In all those cases, society hasn't elevated "Les Damnés de la Terre" up, but stooped to their level in a sad travesty of justice because the basic truth that NOT all people are equal has been first denied and then vilified and, like people, societies that deny the basic truths of life will get sick.

Take any recent political happening and try to apply my "yobbofication" theory. It will work a treat. Take, for example, Sarah Palin and her pregnant daughter! I'd say that in times when we dared calling "nice girls" by that name, nice girls didn't become pregnant. Full stop. Even if the supervision wasn't 24/7, it was understood that, at that age, a relationship with a boy or man intimate enough to get one pregnant was out of the question, contraceptives or not. One respected one's parents and -- yes -- one was afraid of the social consequences as well. But it is elitist now to remind girls of the fact that they are "nice girls". They don't have to fear social consequences anymore (that would be authoritarian) and they don't have something like a "reputation" to lose anymore (that would be sexist) and to be "authoritarian", "sexist" or -- Heaven forbid! -- "elitist" is almost as anathema as being "racist".

Take, to bring this to an end, Tiberge's 'dumbing down the mind, and jacking up the grades', take Lawrence Auster's '"spreading the French," instead of by elevating it', both fit perfectly the picture of downlevelling to the lowest common denominator. I remember, being child-, sibling-, nephew- and nieceless myself and, then, too young to be familiar with children attending Gymnasium (the German version of a grammar school) anyway, how horrified I was when I realized that a friend's son had to write a "critique" of a penny dreadful for his German class when he hadn't even been introduced to the classics or anything else that is good, beautiful and timeless in German literature. That was roughly 30 years ago. Have things improved since then? You must be joking.

Losing our language because it is dumbed down to a simplified everyday-version even a moron can understand means to lose the ability to express our thoughts -- and, finally, to HAVE thoughts. And that is what it is, at the end of the day, all about.

Is feminism the root cause of America's (and the rest of the West's) problems?

Continued from the previous entry Are Some Conservative Targets More Important than Others?: A (too outlandish?) theory of mine discussed at "Webster's":

Terry Morris said...
[...]
Is feminism the root cause of America's problems? I don't know. I do tend to believe that feminism and leftism, multiculturalism and all the other isms that are destroying America are all closely connected. Did feminism (the empowerment of women) kick it all off? Quite possibly.

Your theories are very interesting. Thanks again for the great comments.

-Terry
September 2, 2008 4:06 AM

Terry Morris said...
Nora's comment is so lengthy and wide ranging that I may have to address her points separately in separate posts. For the time being let me address this,

Nora writes:

(And don't you dare telling me that the husbands-to-be want anything like that as well!) Or the obscene prom-cult, or the even more obscene beauty pageant cult, where teenagers look like seasoned expensive hookers and little girls just grown out of their nappies like cheap hookers. Anybody who says that fathers want anything like that for their daughters needs his head examined.

I can't speak for other "husbands-to-be", but when I was one I definately didn't want all of that. Nor can I speak for other fathers, but again, I certainly don't want that for any of my daughters, nor does my wife.

But more than anyone who says that fathers want this for their daughters needing their heads examined, fathers who actually do want this for their daughters most definately need their heads examined. They probably oughta be institutionalized.

Everytime I see one of those commercials late at night advertising the "Girls gone wild" videos, or even think about them, I simply get sick to my stomach as I'm always reminded that these girls have dads and brothers and uncles and grandfathers, none of which, if he's halfway in his right mind, could ever approve of such.
September 2, 2008 4:33 AM

The_Editrix said...
Did feminism (the empowerment of women) kick it all off? Quite possibly.
Definitely!

Discussing feminism is akin to opening Pandora's Box.
September 2, 2008 5:04 AM

Terry Morris said...
Nora, I've said many many times that women can be the most ruthless people on the face of the earth. They can also be the most loving, caring people on the face of the earth. But your comments about women seeking to regain their ancient power over life seems to indicate that you believe with me that women have a ruthless base nature about them - a nature men have nothing on, incidentally - that, unless men exercise a restraining power over, will eventually be let loose in all its ugliness and fury.

I personally think it's more radical to say what I just said above about the ruthlessness of women, than it is to say that feminism is primarily responsible for our current levels of hedonism.

When I trace America's history back, I can't not notice that the ratification of the fourteenth amendment paved the road to woman's suffrage in America, and that America has been in a steadily increasing state of decline ever since.

But is it your opinion that feminism was responsible for the fourteenth amendment?...
September 2, 2008 6:23 AM

Call Me Mom said...
Well, don't I feel special now, as a woman who had no engagement ring, borrowed a blue dress from her mother in which to get married and got married at the local courthouse, followed by dinner with close family at a restaurant. I have to agree with the_editrix that the wedding culture is way out of hand in our nation.

However, getting back to the point of this post, I have always held that the only point at which a woman has a choice in whether or not to give birth, is when she chooses to engage in those activities whose natural result, given the Lord's blessing, is conception. (This opens up the whole rape/incest can of worms, but to my way of thinking, the lack of "choice" in those instances is not the baby's fault. He/She is just as much a victim of the rapist/incestuous party as the mother and perhaps more so. The mother, after giving birth, can choose to give the child up and put it all behind her, but the child can never forget that they are the product of a violent act.)

I am wondering how you view the latest announcement that Mrs. Palin's unmarried daughter is pregnant. Of course, this news was only released to quell the rumors that her youngest child is actually her daughters. This gets me thinking. The rumor was that the daughter of the VP candidate had a child out of wedlock and that affects the VP's credibility in character issues. So the solution is to release news that the VP's child is currently pregnant with a child out of wedlock. Mrs. Palin's baby couldn't have been the result of an out of wedlock pregnancy for her daughter because her daughter is currently pregnant out of wedlock. This makes Mrs. Palin look better than the rumor, how?
September 2, 2008 1:04 PM

The_Editrix said...
CMM, you say that, different from its mother, a child conceived through rape can never forget that it is "the product of a violent act". That is true. But only because there will always be some grown-up heartless moron who is unable to keep his (or her) trap shut.
September 2, 2008 1:46 PM

Call Me Mom said...
Editrix,
You are right in that.
However, I tend to believe that the truth is better in all circumstances than a lie. Which would be ultimately more harmful to such a child/person - to tell them the truth right off with the reassurance that God wanted them here so much He went to extraordinary lengths to get them born, or to cover it up and let "some grown-up heartless moron" use it against them later?
September 2, 2008 1:54 PM

The_Editrix said...
...you believe with me that women have a ruthless base nature about them...

I do indeed. I used to work semi-professionally with horses when I was younger, now with gundogs, and they are living with me in the house. Everybody who has closely watched animals will have lost any delusion about female frailty and submission. Different from human females, they just can't put on an act, act coquettish or coy. They are sheer and undiluted ruthlessness.

I personally think it's more radical to say what I just said above about the ruthlessness of women, than it is to say that feminism is primarily responsible for our current levels of hedonism.

It is indeed. I, personally, find the word "hedonism" much too weak for the current state of society anyway.

When I trace America's history back, I can't not notice that the ratification of the fourteenth amendment paved the road to woman's suffrage in America, and that America has been in a steadily increasing state of decline ever since.

But is it your opinion that feminism was responsible for the fourteenth amendment?...

Terry, I am not knowledgeable enough about American history to have an informed opinion here, so all I can do is to speculate. On one hand, women, with their mixture of ruthlessness and sentimentality have always been at the forefront of any "progressive" cause. Harriet Beecher Stowe and "Uncle Tom's Cabin" certainly boosted the abolitionist movement considerably.

On the other hand, I don't see how due process could be denied to the former slaves for any prolonged period of time after the decision was made not to deport them to Africa.

But, to quote Obama, the question is really above my pay grade.

It would be interesting to speculate whether woman's suffrage (helped by fourteenth amendment) INEVITABLY led to gender feminism of the destructive sort we are now suffering.
September 2, 2008 2:45 PM

The_Editrix said...
CMM, I do not have any children and I may be wrong. But I seriously think that a child should have already reached a certain level of maturity before it is told. But whatever, I like the concept of reassuring them "that God wanted them here so much He went to extraordinary lengths to get them born" very much indeed. If a child is mature enough to understand that, it is mature enough to be told about his origin.
September 2, 2008 2:57 PM

Call Me Mom said...
Editrix,
I concur with the required level of maturity. I am also in agreement with you about the ruthlessness of women.
September 2, 2008 3:20 PM

Make sure that you don't skip the interesting side-issue about children conceived by rape and the excellent point Call Me Mom makes.

Armpiece or Ally?

I am not really "into" American politics, but a lot of the topics transgress the daily political business and offer an enlightening aspect of wider social and ethical questions, which I find important not just in an American context. Case in point: The role of the wife of a politician. Armpiece or ally?

In his blog entry of August 26, The woman of wide shoulders, from the city of the big shoulders, Auster writes about Michelle Obama:

She didn't look like a woman, she looked like a male body builder. As I said in the other entry, how could her advisors have failed to see this obvious problem and gotten her to wear a different dress? The below photo captures something of what I'm talking about, but fails to convey how alarmingly wide Michelle's shoulders looked on TV (which can be seen here). However, the photo brings out something equally unsettling, which I didn't notice on TV. Look at the bunched-up musculature around her neck. I've never seen anything like it in a normal female. It's like the excessive muscle development you see in a male body builder:

To which I replied:

I was traveling by car yesterday, and as I possess neither a radio or a TV, this is always an opportunity to touch base with the media. I was stunned when I heard the following statement by Michelle Obama: "He is incredibly smart and he is very able to deal with a strong woman, which is one of the reasons why he can be president, because he can deal with me." To me, "strong woman" seems, since the advent of feminism, nothing but an euphemism for "loud-mouthed, pretentious bitch," and even more so when applied to oneself, but that aside: So the man is fit to rule the last remaining superpower because he is able to deal with a certain woman? Why did nobody laugh Michelle out of the room? But in a society so much degraded already by feminism, this was apparently just another normal and comprehensible remark to make.

As a European, I have difficulties with the emotional American approach to politics. When I grew into adulthood in the late Sixties and early Seventies, here, the wife of a politician was kept firmly out of the limelight, so it remained for a long time and although we are getting there, we have not quite reached American standards--yet. I remember when I heard the wife of Joe Lieberman, then running mate for Al Gore, referring to her husband publicly as "the love of my life," that I was actually deeply shocked for two reasons, first because that is a statement which ought to be made only within a very small and very intimate circle of friends (if at all outside the bedroom) and second because I couldn't fathom what such a statement was supposed to say about Mr. Lieberman. People are known to make the most awful choices when falling in love.

The American cult focusing on the wife and family of a politician is juvenile and distracts from the issues he is supposed to address. If a woman has political ambitions she ought to realize them as such, not as an accessory matter (which is what all those "strong women" are) of her husband. Besides, if we grant a wife any political importance the outcome is undemocratic and uncontrollable or at least that is how I see it. To put it bluntly: the wife of a president ought to make a good impression, smile sweetly and help her husband in social matters, mainly by keeping her mouth firmly shut.

But back to Michelle Obama. Am I alone in noticing how unlovely she is? That is the word that comes to mind, because she is far from ugly. She may be not particularly bright in spite of her academic credentials, she may have arrived where she is as an affirmative action token, but one thing she is for sure: as hard as nails. One look at her face ought to be enough to see that. And she is, too, the ace in the sleeve of her husband because she is both, black AND a woman and thus doubly untouchable.
If I read the fawning assessments of Michelle Obama, I feel a strong urge to throw up. The chickens of feminism have come home to roost.

To which Auster replied:

Making the family of the nominee central in the campaign and especially in the national conventions, having the nominee's wife and children deliver personal testimonials as to what a fine man he is, is a mark of the advanced decadence of liberal democracy. This is a development over the last 20 years or so. It's an expression of the fact that we have lost the public understanding of politics, the understanding that there is a public sphere as distinct from the private sphere, and that we behave differently in the public sphere than we do in the private sphere. For Hadassah Lieberman to tell the world that her husband is the love of her life is a violation both of her private relationship with her husband, and of the public sphere of politics.

Absurd as it may be, if a politician happens to live long enough and to have more than one wife over time, he may even revise his style. Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who, for all the many years he was in the center of public attention, strictly kept his family out of the limelight (this is neither an endorsement of the politics not of the person of that man, but just a fact) and whose deceased first wife was a paragon of wifely virtue (and much derided for it), now makes an ass of himself and a mess of his status as an "elder statesman" by publicly exchanging sweet nothings with Wifey II, 34 years his junior.

To answer the question: It's neither armpiece nor ally. It's the women who set the tone and men follow like sheep.