The Movement to Disbar Mary N. Kellett

Ed note: Today's post was authored by Dr. Paul Elam over at A Voice For Men and is reprinted here at his request. 

There are often times that we shake our heads at injustices in the world. Sometimes it seems to be all we can do. And with so many problems in modern life, and their often systemic, intractable nature, it can be difficult to choose what battles to fight and when. Because of this we have increasingly become a nation of head shakers, concerned about an array of injustices but often not knowing where to turn or what to do to solve them.With that in mind we have an opportunity, right here and now, to face down and fight against a terrible injustice, an absolute evil, going on in the state of Maine.

Vladek Filler is about to face trial for a second time on the charge of raping his wife, Ligia. He was brought to trial the first time by Bar Harbor prosecutor Mary N. Kellett, who has sought to imprison Mr. Filler despite the fact that she knows that there is no physical evidence that he ever committed a crime, and despite the fact that his accuser Ligia Filler has proven to be a violent criminal, a liar who has been caught in false allegations against her husband, and a physical and emotional abuser of her husband and children with a history of severe psychiatric problems.

Ligia Filler has been referred to as “certifiable” by sheriff’s department personnel who she repeatedly threatened to kill.

Mary Kellett’s professional conduct in this case breeches virtually all canons of legal ethics where it concerns prosecutors, from intentionally misleading jurors to avoiding pretrial discovery to actually asking a law enforcement officer to refuse to comply with a valid subpoena in order to help her conceal exculpatory evidence.

All of this, and many other similar cases, have been conducted under the supervision of Bar Harbor, Maine District Attorney Carletta Bassano, leading to the almost unavoidable conclusion that the problem is not just one rogue prosecutor, but one in which District Attorney Bassano is an enabling accomplice.

Additionally, all of these events have transpired without so much as raising an eyebrow in local news media.

Given the complicity of her supervisor and the lack of attention by local media, Kellett appears emboldened to continue this reign of terror on the life of Vladek Filler, his children, and other innocents who reside in the community Kellett is supposed to protect.

Vladek and son Andrew

- 6 months before the persecution

After having Filler’s first conviction overturned by the Maine Supreme Court, due to her own prosecutorial misconduct, she is coming after him again, putting him through another trial on the same slipshod evidence.

Kellett is not pursuing justice; she is making a mockery of it in ways that border on criminality. She is out of control and no one with authority over her is doing anything about it.

And given the hubris demonstrated by her actions, it is clear she feels free to proceed with impunity.

We cannot, must not, allow this to happen.

This is a battle worth choosing to fight, and A Voice for Men is not the only place that is happening. Glenn Sacks at Fathers and Families, the nation’s leader in father’s rights advocacy, is speaking out about this story. You can also read about it at The False Rape Society. This article will also be running at The Spearhead, with thanks to our good friend Mr. W.F. Price.

The organization Stop Abusive and Violent Environments (S.A.V.E.) has taken an even more significant action, sending a Complaint for the Disbarment of Prosecutor Mary Kellett to the Maine Board of Overseers for the Bar.

They have also authored a letter to Paul LePage, the Governor of Maine, referencing the disbarment complaint and making an appeal for an intervention on Mary Kellett on behalf of Vladek Filler and the people of Maine.

And you can do your part.

Write Governor LePage here and respectfully insist on an investigation to the practices of Mary N. Kellett. The message can be as simple as. “For the sake of justice, please assure that Mary Kellett is relieved of her prosecutorial duties and disbarred from the practice of law.”

Write the Board of overseers for the Bar here, and insist that they respond to the allegations against Kellett with an investigation.

Lastly, try to get the media involved. Bill Trotter does crime reporting for the Bangor Daily News. You can write email him at btrotter@bangordailynews.com or phone him at 207-460-6318 and ask him to consider investigating this story. This is a very important step as media attention will require political attention and action of some kind.

Don’t wait for others to do this, please, or think that just one person calling and writing is enough. That would be a fatal mistake.

When you have done one or all the suggestions listed here, please come back to this thread and simply put the word “done” in the comments, wherever you are reading this.

What is happening in Maine is only a microcosm of what is happening across the Western world. So regardless of where you live, your insistent message to one or all of these people can help force them to consider looking in to Kellett’s activities. And make no mistake about it, Kellett’s actions, if unchecked, are a forecast of own future. We know this is a witch hunt, but because most are ignoring it, it will spread. If we take this silently, we have lost in the most tragic and disgraceful of ways.

This is a fight worth fighting, people. If you are reading this, you could be another Vladek Filler, or someone who cares about him. Your children could be hurt the same way his children have. And your freedom, even if seemingly secure today, cannot be assured for tomorrow as long as the likes of Mary Kellett are allowed to practice predatory prosecutions against innocent human beings.

And If she is allowed to build a career on doing this, there will be nothing to stop the same from happening where you live.

It is your future, and your move.

Originally published at A Voice for Men on March 29, 2011. Reprinted with permission. Also see the petition to disbar Mary Kellett.

Marriage in the UK, By The Numbers

If this is where we're headed as a culture, yowza:

Statistics from the Office for National Statistics show that marriage rates are the lowest since records began, and that people are waiting longer before walking down the aisle – the average groom is almost 37 years old and his bride nearly 34. And perhaps understandably, given the number of empty pews across the nation's churches each Sunday, far fewer weddings include a religious ceremony nowadays. The number of couples saying their vows before God has halved since 1991.Just 231,450 couples got married in 2007 in England and Wales, a decrease of 3.3% on 2006, and a drop of 34% since 1981. With the exception of an increase between 2002 and 2004, this follows the declining long-term trend observed in recent decades and is the lowest annual number of marriages registered in England and Wales since 1895.

That marriage is increasingly less and less associated with the church and religion in general is most troubling to me, but in that sad statistic I think there is the opportunity for marriage to make a comeback.  The moment marriage was annexed by the State and therefore became a political football (and in particular used as a qualifier for favorable tax treatment, etc), it was done.Stick a fork in it.  For nothing would be able to stop the legal encroachment upon marriage and the widening of the definition of marriage to include a legal relationship between two women, or two men, or brothers and sisters, or even mere acquaintances...all want to get 'married' to share in the goodies. And it is hard to deny someone a "civil right" such as marriage.

The solution to the decline of marriage is to destroy it, at least as far as government is concerned.  Make marriage the province of those religious wingnuts who seem to care so much about it. Those communities of Believers can then administer this, the oldest civic institution in human history, in the way they used to before the State came along.

Tuesday Tomfoolery - Stereotypes Edition

Irony...

Passengers On The War Party's War Wagon

Senator Barrasso is one of my senators. And ordinarily I am proud of his defense of liberty and the Constitution in the Senate and in the public eye.  But this interview, he fell well short of what should have been a spirited opposition to dragging the country into yet another conflict for the cause of human rights imperialism:



That's it? The only defect in 44 taking our country to war against another sovereign country is that he didn't rhetorically engage the country or the Congress sufficiently? That he didn't adequately define our role in Libya and our goals? While I don't deny that such engagement is wise in garnering the popular support necessary to psychologically prepare the people for the butcher's bill of warfare, it strikes me as a bit petty to stake your entire opposition to a country going to war on the President's failure to sufficiently pontificate upon it to the populace or that he gives "mixed messages".  Incidentally, tonight, more than a week after US and NATO air forces have started bombing Libyan military targets, the President will address the nation. So I guess there goes Barrasso's and the Republican party's only objection to the United States going to war. Undeclared. Against a sovereign nation-state. Again.

Barrasso repeatedly ducked Judge Napolitano's questions, good questions, questions pertaining to the power to declare war and commit military force under Article 1 Sec 8 of the Constitution, to respond to imminent dangers under the War Powers Resolution of 1973, and what our relationship our putatively Constitutional republic has to the UN Security Council. Instead of thoughtfully addressing Napolitano's questions, he glossed over all of them, merely stating that the President was well within his authority to order military forces into action and offering the pleasantry that we Americans should not wait on the Security Council before we act in our own interests.  I find myself wondering, just like Napolitano, where this story ends...does the President have the power to hop all over the world looking for monsters to slay?  Moreover, who are we to judge that Khaddafi no longer has the right to rule? Who gives him that right to rule? And does a Republican form of government think itself the arbiter of when a foreign head of state has lost that right?  And how many governments around the world use police and / or military force to quell or suppress insurrections?  Do we plan to invade Bahrain or Syria or Jordan?  Indeed, is there no limitation on the President's ability to bomb, other than the War Party doesn't like the target of said bombing?

The Founding Fathers probably didn't know that democracies would turn out to be the most warlike form of government when in dyads with authoritarian or totalitarian regimes, giving lie to the myth of the democratic peace, since there were so few democracies in their day or even in history. But, in locating within Congress the power to declare war, they were likely implementing the prevailing zeitgeist of the time, as recorded by no less a luminary than philosopher Immanuel Kant in his seminal work Perpetual Peace:

If the consent of the citizens is required in order to decide that war should be declared (and in this constitution it cannot but be the case), nothing is more natural than that they would be very cautious in commencing such a poor game...but, on the other hand, in a constitution which is not republican, and under which the subjects are not citizens, a declaration of war is the easiest thing in the world to decide upon, because war does not require of the ruler, who is the proprietor and not a member of the state, the least sacrifice of the pleasures of his table, the chase, his country houses, his court functions, and the like. He may, therefore, resolve on war as on a pleasure party for the most trivial reasons.

It is for this reason that the power to commit forces into combat must lay with the People and the People themselves, not with the elites who literally have no skin in the game, to include the Amazonian Triumvirate who gleefully commit disproportionately middle and lower-class white men to die in combat for the cause of worldwide mercantilist feminism, and certainly not the profiteers resident in the War Party.  I wish Barrasso would have been more steadfast in insisting the President actually follow the Constitution, or at the very least, the War Powers Resolution of 1973.

Not Quite The Kind of Success I Want

Seems so-called "evangelicals" are winning many converts in Central America, even causing some within the RCC to rethink their positions on abortion and premarital sex:

A line of Bibles snaking out of the door of the Friends of Israel Biblical Baptist Tabernacle means the afternoon service is about to start. The church has been extended three times in ten years to seat over 10,000 people, but it is still so busy that the faithful use Bibles to hold their spots in the queue. Weekly attendance is now 80,000, which its officials say is the most in El Salvador. The evangelical Protestantism preached within its walls (and on screens outside) has taken off in Central America. Estimates vary, but according to the State Department of the United States, barely 50% of Salvadorans now identify as Catholic, and in Honduras and Belize the share has dropped below half. Nicaragua is close behind. In Mexico, by comparison, 90% have kept the Catholic faith.

The gospel of prosperity, recklessly preached by some evangelical outfits, goes down well in poor countries: Costa Rica and Panama, twice as rich as their neighbours, remain strongly Catholic. Proximity to America has spurred the churches’ growth. “Everything we know comes from the United States,” says Edgar López Bertrand Jr, who runs Friends of Israel with his father. Media savvy is one useful import: his church broadcasts on television and radio, and sells DVDs alongside religious books. The evangelicals’ success is forcing the Catholic church to adapt. “We must ask ourselves why our people left, what we are doing wrong,” admits Monsignor Rosa Chávez.* Some detect a more lenient line on premarital sex and even abortion.

Assuming that a European (and therefore reliably secularist leftist) magazine such as the Economist has accurately characterized the belief set of Evangelical congregations in Central America--a big assumption--this is not good news.  For while fundamentalist Evangelicals generally make at least an attempt to implement God's word in their lives,  there is a lot of theological sloppiness underneath the big tent prescribed by the catch-all term "evangelical".  And the evidence appears to be that "evangelical" in this case refers to those with a more, erm, flexible theological position, what with talk of "prosperity gospel", the citation of unnamed sources that fear for them to "compete", they must change their position on premarital sexuality and abortion, and the presence of immodest miniskirts.

I fear that this short article is an indicator that the sort of feel-good seeker-sensitive emergent church stuff going on here in the States is metastasizing south.  Not good.

* Is "Rosa" a male or female name in Central America? If anyone knows, please let me know. Otherwise, a female minister indicates that said church is openly in rebellion, and such theological flaccidity, in an RCC church or otherwise, must be rewarded with declining membership. 

HT: Alte

How to Tell If You're In A Patriarchy

Alte offers up an operative definition of patriarchy:

I’ve always followed the definition that patriarchy is “rule by men”, when it actually isn’t. It is rule by the male heads of family; the paterfamilias. In a patriarchy, the family is considered the lowest-level of government, with a man elected to its head. That man is not always the eldest or even the husband, but it is a man and he is elected. He is implicitly elected by the people in his family, who agree to follow his leadership.

I think Alte doesn't drill down far enough in her definition, but she's right on the concept.  A patriarchy is, quite literally, rule by the fathers.  As she defines it, a patriarchy would be rule by a father who is subsequently elected "patriarch" over an entire extended family, which is one level too much abstraction to be practical.  As usual, simplicity is the more elegant solution, and I contend a better definition of a "patriarch" is one that is suggested by the etymology: rule by married men with children.

It is important to note here that this definition of patriarchy is at odds with the culturally accepted one.  We can blame the femmarxists and their abuse of the Queen's English for that. Just as they have expanded the definitions of family to mean just about any social unit under the sun and rape to include sex regretted after the fact, they have widened the definition of "patriarchy" to mean "rule by men" (and successfully attached to it all sorts of negative connotations).  Thus defined--a more accurate description of such a social and governing system where men, any man, ruled, would be andrarchy--they then used that word as a billy club to facilitate their poxy vision of a utopian gynarchy.

I suppose I can't place all the blame on the femmarxists, however.  For in the United States, the Founding Fathers, in one of their rare screw-ups that we can see now in full 235 year post-hoc retrospect, when configuring this Constitutional Republic, moved the locus of social power away from family men and toward any man with real property. I suppose this was a useful device to temper the democratic beast--how better to mitigate the passions of the Athenian mob than to filter their desires through those among them who had the most to lose--but it disconnected the interests of the married man with children from the interests of society.  All one had to do to have a voice was to be born a male and acquire property.  No need to find oneself a fertile woman and get busy making babies, since being a husband and a father was no longer necessary to be a man that mattered in the new American-style government.

Someone probably called this new social order a patriarchy out of habit and as a homage to the old ways, and to be honest, the fabric of society looked the same and likely more or less operated the same way despite the change in theory and method of governance after the American Revolution.  Men and women still got together, had children, and it was the male head of family that was (a) respected as such, and (b) was charged with the leadership of his wife and the rearing of his family, and (c) was held accountable for the deeds of his wife and family. Socially, it functioned as a patriarchy. But how society governed itself had moved on, and before long, this change in governance would be reflected in the culture and in the family. American culture would soon no longer be accurately labelled patriarchal. 

In the meantime, with the family man thus divested in favor of the propertied man, the democratic nature of democracy was being realized.  No, we couldn't keep the republic: Not even 100 years after the Founding, suffrage was extended to all men, regardless of family status or property. It seems that, by narrowing down the set of men vested with the vote, landed men were not numerous enough to defend their power from usurpation by those unlanded and therefore unsuffraged men. The will of the democratic mob wouldn't stop there, either, as the interests of the several States was subsumed by the democratic interests of the mob with the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment, thus further upsetting the delicate checks and balances against Federal power the Founders took such painstaking care to install.  And then, 150 years after the Founding, women were suffraged too, and the divestiture of the patriarch was complete.  Being a family man with children gave a fellow no bigger voice in society, no greater right to rule, than the billionaire playboy on the other side of town, or the hooker plying her trade in the alleyway.  He was equal.

So: clearly we are not in a patriarchy, and haven't been for some time.  But how to tell if one is in a patriarchy?  Well, that's quite easy.  Start with the most  basic, fundamental unit of government, the one we experience first as humanity--the family--and note who leads it.  If that person is a married man (or widower) with children, and each successive layer of government is built upon that foundation, with no exceptions, backdoors, or special privileges, well you are in a patriarchy.  If not, government is built off of families headed by choice mommies, or two mommies, or two daddies, or even if it is a nuclear family but Dad's voice is but one in a cacaphonous din of single men, women, choice mommies, two mommies or two daddies, it is something else.

Friday Roundup - 25 Mar 11 Edition

OneSTDV skewers educational boot camps for young children, in a post that reminds me of a recent post highlighting Sir Kenneth Robinson's critique of the industrial schooling paradigm--that it destroys problem-solving divergent thinking in favor of rote learning.

From Bonald, why there are so few true conservatives--conservatism being an allegiance to a certain set of prinicples--among women.

Simon Grey, in discussing a recent post of mine that critiqued free markets and their impact on morality, argues that free market apologists sometimes erroneously conflate the effects of economic systems, legal systems, and political systems together.

Simon Grey again on "Game as a Social Tool".

A Finnish study found that "right wing candidates are more attractive".  

Last week, I highlighted one particular feminist's reaction to an 11 yo girl being allegedly gang-raped in the Houston area. Apparently there was a cavalcade of fembot jackassery to chronicle, as TDOM did when he skewered Amanda Marcotte's attempt to turn criticisms of the girl's conduct and the neglect of her mother into evidence of "rape culture".

Via Moonbattery (also here), another reason to homeschool your kids: to keep them from being used as political pawns by government agents agitating for more of your tax money, and even more importantly, to keep them away from blatant indoctrination like this:





Or this:





No wonder both Hitler and Stalin were in such favor of compulsory public schooling..."Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted"

Via Dalrock, we learn that a mere 38% of weekly churchgoing Evangelical protestants have experienced a divorce.  Wow.  Only 38%, a difference of only about 10% of the remainder of the American population.  Makes me want to rethink my advice for men to seek religious women as wives.

Another from Dalrock, this time on why kindersluttery exists: we don't put enough pressure on our daughters to not act like an oversexed wild animal.

A third one from Dalrock: the true value of men as protectors is in setting the cultural temperature such that potential violence isn't even contemplated, much less attempted.  In other words, Ward Cleaver beats Chuck Norris.

Flordia court rules that a case must be decided using Sharia law.

Fred Reed writes a concise history of the United States.

Assimilation? Yeah, Right

Justin ought to find this interesting.  An Arizona senator reads a letter from a substitute teacher in a Glendale area public school.  The letter pretty much speaks for itself.  Click and have a listen:


Tell me again why American and Arizona taxpayers pay to have illegal Mexicans in public schools, only to have those same students dump on those racist whites (who paid the most for their schoolin and welfare and God knows what other entitlements) who "stole their land"?

The students are correct about one thing, though. They will get "their" land back soon, because both halves of the bifactional ruling party not only do not wish to secure America's southern border but greet this tidal wave of Mexican migrants with open arms.  The Dems want to keep the border open because they are importing a new electorate more likely to support their class and race envy pogroms than not..  The Republicans for their part want to keep the border open because they are importing cheap labor for their big business interests.

Women's Safety Depends on Men

Well-behaved men, that is.  In another Lara Logan-style case that demonstrates just how much women benefit from the civilizations that men build--and how much they stand to suffer when the social order imposed by that civilization crumbles, one would think that women would be a little less sanguine about tearing those civilizations apart with their equalitarianism and/or feminism.  Or at least blithely assuming the safety they enjoy back home translates to the chaos of a war zone:

A female war photographer from the New York Times revealed tonight how she was repeatedly sexually assaulted during her nightmare hostage ordeal in Libya.

Lindsey Addario was one of four [male] Times journalists have now been released after being held captive by pro-Gaddafi forces. During their six-day detainment, the Americans were beaten and threatened with being decapitated and shot. Miss Addario, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer, gave a harrowing account of her brutal treatment at the hands of their Libyan captors in an interview given just hours after her release.

After she and her colleagues were hauled out of a car at a checkpoint near the eastern city of Ajdabiya, one of the Libyans punched her in the face and laughed at her. One man grabbed her breasts – the start of a pattern of sexual harassment she endured over the ensuing 48 hours. ‘There was a lot of groping,’ she said. ‘Every man who came in contact with us basically felt every inch of my body short of what was under my clothes.’

A couple of observations about this article:

1. First, one has to wonder what agenda is being worked by the publishing of this article.  Is it to illustrate to women the (minor in this case) consequences of deliberately placing yourself and your safety at risk?  Or is it to advance the aims of a global gynocentric media, a media that encourages and exploits women's fears while cultivating the image of men everywhere as potential rapists and thugs, thus furthering the feminist agenda worldwide?  Or is it to render invisible men's suffering while bringing that of women into international focus?
2. This woman took a risk going where she did. Even if she was surrounded by four men.  She should consider herself lucky that she got away with just a few grabs and gropes and "harassment".
3. Seriously, is "harassment" all she can complain about? Men are dying left and right in Libya. Pretty equivalent experiences, I'd say.  Not.
4. Do the experiences of the men she was travelling with not merit mentioning them by name, or taking their picture?

Bring Back Bastard

The word, that is.  "Bastard" used to describe the illegitimate* spawn of unmarried men and women and who, consequently, lacked the investment of a resident biological father. But more than this, bastard also carried with it a connotation that those labelled as such were ill-behaved and poorly bred.  Which is quite an accurate assessment, since those children raised in a choice mommy home typically behave much less civilized than those raised with two parents.

I know, it's not nice to call the children of choice mommies and/or serial inseminators bastards.  Well, for one, it's such a hurtful word, reminding the child that he or she was denied the investment of a biological father by one or both of his or her parents.  For another, we'd be saying it all the time, as the out of wedlock birth rate in 2009 was 106/1000, 72/1000, and 32/1000 for Mexican, black, and white women, respectively, meaning that 45% of Mexican children, 68%, of black children, and 24% of white children were born out of wedlock (percentages were for 2006). But perhaps, in our reluctance to accurately label, upstanding members of our society no longer have a language with which to publicly judge the retrograde actions of others. The effect is one that encourages: lacking the ability to politely express condemnation, society condones bastardy by default.  And what one condones, one gets more of.  A lot more of. 

Let's bring back bastard.

* There's another word that needs to make a comeback.

Tuesday Tomfoolery - Whistle Tip Edition

Last week's "donk" post inspired this posting of an oldie but a goodie.  Enjoy!

Military Women, Divorce, and Equalitarianism

Well, at least the data remains consistent with that from three years ago:

For women in the military, there's a cold, hard reality: Their marriages are more than twice as likely to end in divorce as those of their male comrades — and up to three times as likely for enlisted women. And military women get divorced at higher rates than their peers outside the military, while military men divorce at lower rates than their civilian peers. Last year, 7.8 percent of women in the military got a divorce, compared with 3 percent of military men, according to Pentagon statistics. Among the military's enlisted corps, nearly 9 percent of women saw their marriages end, compared with a little more than 3 percent of the men. [And] about half of all married women in the military are married to a fellow service member, compared with less than 10 percent of military men.

In other words, a piece of advice for the fellows: if a stable enduring marriage is your goal, you are advised to avoid marrying gals wearing combat boots. Ignore this freely offered advice and you may very well end up becoming a statistic for a divorce that just "happened", as if divorce just strikes randomly, out of thin air, to "burden" (sic) unsuspecting and innocent military women (but not military men, it seems).

Of course, the above-linked lace-curtain Associated Press article is long on socializing responsibility for women's divorces and short on assigning causation to the characteristics, behaviors, and choices of the women themselves.  But in doing so, it accidentally suggests something that fellow blogger Justin also noted: treating women equally as one does men, in a formerly "masculine" sphere like the military that still, more or less, retains masculine values, as the quasi-meritocracy known as the US military tends to do, yields some decidedly unhappy outcomes for equal-yet-decidedly-unequal women.  Outcomes that must be compensated for with lower standards for women, taxpayer subsidies for childcare, tolerating deployment-dodging and culture-killing behavior, and scandalous burden-shifting onto their (mostly white) male colleagues, who suffer disproportionately so that their female counterparts can enjoy the increased prestige and cushy job opportunities that comes with a mixed-sex military.  Why do we tolerate these obvious inefficiencies, again? 

It's a strange situation, where there's a fair amount of equality in terms of their military roles, but as the military increasingly treats women the same as it treats men in terms of their work expectations, however, society still expects them to fulfill their family roles. And that's not equally balanced between men and women," said David Segal, director of the Center for Research on Military Organization at the University of Maryland.

Kimberly Olson, a retired Air Force colonel who is executive director of Grace After Fire, a support organization for female veterans...said many female warriors don't get the support and space they need after war service to transition back to their roles as wives and mothers.  "The expectation that you can just turn that emotion back on like a light switch just because you walk off the airplane and they got signs and balloons and your baby runs to you, it is not very realistic," Olson said.  "It takes a while to get back into that tender, loving woman that's a mother. And if you're married, that tender loving woman that's the wife. And of course, a lot of people demand a lot of things from women, because we kind of have a bad habit of taking care of everybody else first and ourselves last," she said.

Get that? Because women are the equal of men, but are so dramatically and fundamentally unequal behind the equalitarian facade that the military must do all these extra things so as to ensure that all these putatively equal yet far more unequal women may serve in a something approximating an equal manner next to their more capable and cost-effective brethren.  

I also note the not-so-subtle victim card being played here.  These poor women find so much tension between their roles as mothers and soldiers that the military is called upon to tap significant additional resources--resources it does not find necessary to expend with male soldiers--to resolve this tension for its supposedly equal yet apparently quite unequal troop population.

The elephant in the room is that, despite all the equality talk, men and women just aren't the same.  The costs of reintegrating these apparently weaker sisters into society is socialized across the force; no one is bothering to count the cost.  Yet have no doubt, such costs are being paid...and it is men, civil and military, who pay the butcher's bill for the stylish presence of their equal-yet-unequal female peers in the military.

Feminism and the State of Entitlement

Lest there be any confusion as to how much organized feminism depends on government largesse extracted by force from you and I, gaze for a moment at the below video put together in opposition to defunding Planned Parenthood (HT: Grerp, via Capt Capitalism):

 Requiring feminists to pay for their own Paps, Vagisil, and abortions? The horrors! How dare we?

Even more amusing was the threat to withhold sex from those men who support withholding public money from PP. Putting aside the fact that probably quite a few straight women support defunding PP--and therefore don't care about some lefty women threatening to lock their boyfriends out of their bedrooms--the above video demonstrates just how bankrupt feminism is. When their primary weapon to justify continued receipt of taxpayer money is a threat to cut off the small fraction of hetero men who are in a relationship with feminist women, and therefore somehow goad them into action, that's pretty weak indeed. I think grerp mocked it best with this quote:

[I]f you're going to try and hold the loss of sex as a weapon over the entire American male population, you ought in some way to make that seem like a threat and not a relief.

*Snicker*

Honestly, PP is like NPR or any other lefty hobby horse (like DV shelters only for women but not men) subsidized by the Federal government...it's time has come and gone, and we simply cannot afford to subsidize sin any longer in the face of budgets this tight.

Quote o' the Day

Does anything better illustrate how sick we have become as a society than the phenomenon that we can [no] longer comprehend how to function without begging the government to impose more laws upon us?

Rob Fedders, via Deansdale, in a post on how to eliminate DV for good.

Friday Roundup - 18 Mar 11 Edition

Utah state legislature votes to recognize gold and silver as legal tender in the state. Now on to the governor.  Will the US Congress follow suit, and repeal legal tender laws? I doubt it, but it's fun to fantasize nonetheless.

A two-fer from Abagond:  First, the average African IQ isn't 70, it's more like 82...and the Flynn Effect isn't done with that continent yet (meaning we can expect African IQ scores to climb). Second, that the extant research suggests the genetic component of IQ is around 1/3, not 2/3 as postulated by Murray and Herrnstein in The Bell Curve.

Seems the FDA is mulling requiring citizens to secure the services of a physician before accessing their own genetic information.  A payoff to the AMA? You be the judge. HT: Amari over at Ferdinand Bardamu's In Mala Fide.

OneSTDV writes about how liberalism can never be satisfied...in the pursuit of ever-greater hedonism, they will always move the goalposts further and further toward abject animal depravity.  In a different post, One also reminds us who live in flyover territory what the coastal elites really think about us.

From Simon Grey: "the key to societal success is morality".

Ron Paul on why any no-fly zone imposed over Libya is un-Constitutional without a Congressional declaration of war.  He's right of course, but his rectitude is irrelevant. No one pays attention to what the Constitution says anymore in the TSA - Totalitarian States of America, so why should they listen to him?

Whiskey blogs about the corollary to the phenomenon of high-powered, highly educated women finding fewer dating opportunities at the top of the pile: these women, in their inability to shake their biological tendencies toward hypergamy, find their hypergamic nature also lowers the apogee of their career.

Gucci Little Piggy reports on how the weissenhassen at the root of American Marxism prevents feminists from calling a spade a spade...as they help a black so-called "community leader" in Houston blame-shift responsibility for a gang rape of a white 11 yo girl onto white men and the Patriarchy.

Liberal Morality + Market = Degeneracy

Laissez faire market purists contend that an unbridled free market leads to good behavior, and that government intervention in the market perverts it, thereby giving rise to counterproductive or retrograde behavior.  This position appears to be anchored in the Enlightenment notion that man himself is good or at least an actor of moral neutrality...i.e., neither naturally drifts toward good or evil.

I've challenged the idea that the market, by harnessing man's self-interest in resource-allocation decisions, is in and of itself a force for good.*  For what I've noticed is that, rather than the market's "invisible hand" encouraging men to make good decisions, it actually works the other way around, in that man uses the machinery of the market toward his own ends, be those ends good or bad.  So, rather than the market being a positive force for good in and of itself, it is actually an amoral tool, wielded according to the nature of those who use it. The market therefore is only good if the people interacting with it are good, if the people interacting with it are given toward baseness and crudity, the market enables these preferences too and allocates resources according to the desires of the base and the crude.

Note that my discussion of the market thus far assumes a pure market undistorted by government force.  How does a market that is not clearly not free (as in openly socialist Venezuela and quasi socialist America) encourage good and discourage the base and the crude? Not so well, it seems:

Venezuela has one of the highest rates of plastic surgery per capita in the world and in some cases teenage girls have had breast enlargements as birthday presents from their parents. Now Mr Chavez has condemned doctors who "convince some women that if they don't have some big bosoms, they should feel bad." Speaking on state television, he said that it was a "monstrous thing" to see that even women from poor backgrounds were now choosing to pay to go under the knife.  "It is painful to see girls or women that may not have sufficient resources for housing, to accommodate housing for the children, [to buy] clothes, who are looking to see how to do an operation on the breasts," he said.

The cosmetic surgery industry is booming in Venezuela with up to 40,000 women a year undergoing breast enlargements, according to the Venezuelan Society of Plastic Surgeons. In the capital, Caracas, billboard advertisements suggest taking out bank loans to fund surgery.

So much for the notion that markets engender good or productive behavior.  Seems even Senor Socialist himself, Hugo Chavez, can't help but notice how, when left to their own devices, the market facilitates the slide of a liberal populace toward baseness, crudity, and in this case, frivolity. The allocation of resources for clearly shallow and lecherous and salacious ends must be making his command-economy head explode. Would a self-controlled illiberal population do such things? I think not.  But at least Venezuela has more than its share of Miss Universe winners.

I also noted that Chavez condemned such bust-enhancing surgery as evidence of an "antiquated, militaristic, coarse, repressive attitude" toward Venezuelan women. But don't femmarxists celebrate wanton expression of female sexuality? Aren't large breasts the ultimate visible marker of that sexuality? It must be difficult to condemn something that is the logical outcome of a fairly rudimentary application of Marxist principles: a loosening of social mores, an abolition of family, and an increasing acceptance of divorce and attendant serial monogamy.

* This begs the question: what is good?  I posit things that are "good" are those that are morally positive.

HT: VD

Related posts:
Capitalism, Social Decay, and Right-Liberalism
Steps

The Tea Party...Still Much Ado About Nothing

Late last year, I threw a spear at the base of the Tea Party--despite being a self-declared Gadsden flag-waving member of the party of malcontents myself--for their collective attitude toward small government and entitlement spending.  For all their noises about being "taxed enough already", the difference between much of them and the Republicans and Democrats was shaping up to be a matter of degree. 

Thus even back then, before they had won any elections, my impression was that as soon as some hard choices had to be made, they too would cling tightly to their government entitlements, and protect the cows they thought sacred from being slaughtered.  They would not be willing to be radical enough to do what was necessary.

So, I hate to say "I tole you so", but here it is in black and white:

According to the Wall Street Journal who co-sponsored the poll, “Americans across all age groups and ideologies said by large margins that it was ‘unacceptable’ to make significant cuts in entitlement programs in order to reduce the federal deficit.” And the poll exposes a potentially discrediting hypocrisy within the Tea Party movement who claim to be for smaller government and a return to a libertarian Nirvana. Consider: by a nearly 2-to-1 margin, self-described Tea Partiers declared significant cuts to Social Security “unacceptable.” In fact, as the poll reveals, less than a quarter of Americans support making significant cuts to Social Security or Medicare to tackle the mounting deficit about which they cry warnings of impending doom.

Before Tea Partiers accuse me of trashing them, although I am not one of them, I have defended the movement many times when I felt it unfairly attacked by the left. You see, I agree whole-heartedly with their deficit concerns. But, unlike them, I am willing to give up my benefits to set things right. They clearly are not, Gadsden flags and tri-corn hats notwithstanding. So I find myself in the minority…even among my own kind it seems.  Despite the fact that such entitlements are already in the red, when asked directly if they thought cuts to Medicare were necessary to “significantly reduce” the deficit, 18% of respondents said yes, while 54% said no; the rest were not sure or had no opinion. On Social Security, 22% said cuts would be needed, while 49% said they weren’t.

More than seven in 10 tea party backers feared GOP lawmakers would not go far enough in cutting spending. “It may be hard to understand why someone would try to jump off a cliff” to solve the debt crisis, said pollster Bill McInturff of his fellow Republicans, “unless you understand that they are being chased by a tiger, and that tiger is the tea party.” Yet, as his own survey shows, this is a false premise as only one in three will be waving pitchforks. The other two-thirds, suffering from an astounding case of cognitive dissonance, will be cashing their checks.

This is the evil genius of government spending. A constituency, a hunger, gets built for other peoples' money, be it "jobs" or "handouts" or "healthcare" or "regulation", and to pinch off that umbilicus means one must fight not only the pols whose pockets are lined with campaign donations encouraging his/her support for such spending, but also fight the citizens who benefit from said wealth transfer.

It is also an operative example of just how big government gets started and is so hard to stop. You need to have a strong stomach, and be willing to lighten your own wallet a bit in the course of lightening others' wallets too.

In this way, the constituency of the Tea Party is failing the first test of leadership...leading by personal example. Their reluctance to gore their own ox is a message to others that exceptions can be made...and the rugby scrum commences with vigor after that.

Related posts:
Why The Tea Party Is Much Ado About Nothing...Thus Far

Tuesday Tomfoolery - 20" Rims Edition

Was at the beach recently on the panhandle of Florida, saw this excellent display of thug culture infecting what is locally referred to as the Redneck Riviera:

Click here to enlarge

Let me partially enumerate the ways in which this donk demonstrates the ridiculous nature of dissipating thug lyfe culture insidiously installing idiocracy immediately:

1)  Poor cost-benefit calculation.  Four 20" wheels + four 20" tires + lift kit + suspension upgrades ~ market value of the vehicle

2) Degraded vehicle handling == more likely to get into an accident, high probability of winning a Darwin Award

3) Makes you look stupid.  See #4

4) Leads those in traffic around you to assume that you are black Af-Am or Mexican Latino. Which is not a problem if one is black or Mexican--truth in advertising and all that--except that the pilot of this latter day Conestoga wagon was white, wearing a wife beater, and was partially sleeved to boot.  Obviously trying too hard to ingratiate himself to members of a subculture who will never truly accept those lacking the requisite melanin content or correct physical morphology into their club

5) Your "rebel" attitude means you are a lot less likely to behave wisely...such as failing to use your seatbelt, which this clown did not, as we discovered when we pulled abeam this creaking jalopy

6) Attracts extra attention from the police (see # 3, 4, and 5)

In other words, you are projecting the image of a wanna-be, a dumbass, and a proto-thug/criminal.  You deserve to be thought of all three ways.

Preparing to be a Husband and Father

In a healthy, balanced, sustainable (i.e., patriarchal) society, nearly all men would be husbands of but one wife and fathers to three children or more. And even in our unhealthy society, a great majority of men will eventually becomes husbands, and an even higher proportion of men will sire children. Thus preparing oneself for excellence in the uniquely male roles of husband and father should be of great concern to nearly all men, for failing in these twin cornerstone roles has serious culture-wide ramifications. So what tasks should an excellence-minded man undertake to become the best husband and father he can be?

Below is a brief list of these tasks, some of which are cribbed from a comment made by blogger Ann Michele over at A Light Shines In The Darkness. Feel free, of course, to suggest your own.

First up is what I think is the most important task a prospective husband and father--really any fellow, regardless of marital status or whether he has spawned some kiddos--can do: decide who/what will be his master. This question of hierarchy is important, not only because hierarchy is a crucial concept in masculinity, but because, whether a man likes it or not, he will serve something or somebody, be that Yahweh, Mammon, or Satan. From this question of lordship, all else flows.

Second would be to acquire wisdom, discernment, and judgment. One way to do this would be to educate oneself in history, philosophy, and rhetoric, therefore acquiring and instilling wisdom and perspective. Another would be to include surrounding yourself friends of good character,* while still another would be to actively seek out the counsel of those who have gone before, such as a father, older brothers, or colleagues from work. Moreover, these "wise men" need not be necessarily male, as older women may also prove to be a rich treasure trove of received wisdom,** depending upon the subject. Hand in glove with the acquisition of wisdom and associating with those of high character is membership and active attendance in organizations that (a) have large amounts of others of good character present, and (b) feed your spiritual side, such as a church (or temple, synagogue, or mosque, depending upon your flavor)

A third item is financial. Like it or not, no discussion of masculine preparedness for marriage would be complete without addressing this key point. Thus, becoming and remaining financially sound is a key element of this preparation. Financial soundness need not include a high-powered job, rather it means matching one's expenses to one's income. Debt-based consumption should be avoided like the plague, particularly student loans, and gambling on schooling to increase one's financial position is usually a poor risk to take, in part because of the low ROI and the fact that student loans cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, putting student loans on par with chilimony as the fast track to debt peonage.

Fourth is a marketable skill in a trade.  By this I mean something not contingent upon the "knowledge economy" that you can lean on in a pinch.  Something that costs good money to contract out to someone else, such as electrical work, plumbing, basic construction or carpentry, and auto repair. As long as humanity is not living in caves, and is still driving automobiles, you can be assured of being able to find some sort of work, or at least becoming somewhat self-sufficient.

Fifth is basic domesticity.  How to plant and tend a garden.  How to select good fruits, vegetables, eggs, and meats at the market.  How to mend clothes and darn socks. How to do your laundry without making the colors bleed together. And how to cook. 

These five items should produce a man well-positioned to embark upon not only the very serious missions of leading his family, husbanding his wife, and fathering his children, to say nothing about being a man that adds, not subtracts, to the soundness of the social fabric around him.


* As bad company corrupts good character, and iron sharpens iron, good company can only reinforce and improve upon good character

** I wish I had listened to the advice of the mother of the family which took me into their home during my college years. I would have averted the biggest mistake of my life--marrying my now PEW

Godzirrah Jokes

Already on Facebook I've seen publicly expressed black humor about whether the radiation released from the exploding reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant will spawn large rubber-suited animatronic creatures who shriek, breathe fire, and wreak generalized havoc upon the short-statured denizens of coastal cities.

Don't know whether to laugh or cry. A little nukie never hurt anyone, I guess.

On the upside, it may result in sending Jane Fonda to China.

Empathizing With Cops

I've been somewhat critical of law enforcement here at EW, mostly because of what I see as a system that has gradually morphed over time from one that protected liberty to one that erodes it.  Indeed, as individual LEOs became "professionalized", American law enforcement ceased being a system in which citizens secured justice for themselves, on a level playing field, facilitated by law enforcement and the courts, to a literal "us" versus "them" arrangement on a steeply tilted playing field where the massive resources of government are brought to bear against presumably innocent individual citizens.  In other words, ownership of the laws and the law enforcement process shifted from individual citizens to an amorphous "the people", thus divesting individual citizens from the justice process except as a collective (when enforcing the law), or as an isolated defendant (when targeted by law enforcement). This divestiture is so complete that jury nullification, that foundational right whose pedigree extends back as far as the Magna Carta, is viewed with contempt and hostility by those in the justice system and those who publicly profess this right are persecuted, pilloried, and/or proscribed from jury service.

It is in this context which LEOs, people just like any of us,* find themselves at odds with the interests of their neighbors while simultaneously being exposed to the worst pathologies of their neighbors. Rare is the person who is truly happy to see a cop in an official capacity.  I can't imagine this dynamic would result in anything other than poor outcomes for all involved, outcomes described quite well by this comment over at The Agitator in the wake of an expose about a Bell, California, program to boost ticket-writing likened to "motorist baseball":

#9 | Brooks | March 1st, 2011 at 5:08 pm
Cops come to the job with visions of helping people and stopping violent crime. Within 3 months they realize that half their job is playing mediator to completely disfunctional families and the other half is playing revenue generator for their municipality. Everybody becomes a suspect in a desire to uncover “real” crime, and cops are routinely exposed to only the worst that humanity has to offer them.

It all creates a ridiculous us vs. them mentality where the cop, his family and friends are “normal” and everybody else is just another potential part of the problem.

I empathize with cops, in that, like teachers, are largely good folks in a corrupt system. It is the system that must be changed, a system that attacks liberty and puts the lives of both cops and the people themselves at risk.

* Some have alleged that cops are not like us, in that they are drawn from a population given prone to authoritarianism and narcissism. YMMV. Given that I think the population that become LEOs is also the same one that feeds the military, I wonder how much  to make of that.

Related Posts:
Fascism In Law Enforcement
Law Enforcement Masquerading as the Tax Man
Us Vs Them and Alienation
Absolutely Predictable
A Brief History of Early American Law Enforcement Part I Part II
Wapiti Mail: Born On A Different Planet (a reader objects to jury nullification)
The Coming Police State
Disarm The Militarized Police

Friday Roundup - 11 Mar 11 Edition

Well I certainly wouldn't be sending my child to a school in which they were so paranoid about security that they would suspend a middle school student who opened a door for a gal whose hands were full. HT: Radley Balko.

California choice mommy being investigated for possibly attempting to traffick her daughter into an arranged marriage with a Pakistani national.  Yet another piece of anecdotal evidence that underlines the truism that the safety place for a child is in the custody/company of his/her bio father.

Fred Reed: The Pentagon's Throw-aways.

Exhibit A that the law is an ass.  Man is victim of sperm banditry, is hit with child support.

Exhibit A that those enforcing the law are also highly vulnerable to assery.  Traffic laws, arresting criminals, and college degrees are "racist" in Seattle.

"Notorious Bum Driller Is On The Loose".  Yes, you read this headline topping a gleaming example of journalistic accuracy and free speech correctly.  Brought to you by Giraffe.

Alte presents her hypothesis that chivalry developed as a mechanism to protect men's womenfolk from other men, just as modesty serves to protect women from other women.  I disagree, noting that, due to patriarchy, the rate of adultery, rape, sexual assault, and/or seduction was likely no higher in the peasant class than it was among the nobility or warrior class. It is patriarchy that protects women from male predators, not a silly Romantic notion harbored by the warrior and noble classes that women are the socially and culturally superior sex.

We Christians cannot have a cross on public land. No prayer in schools. No nativities on public land either, or the Ten Commandments in courthouses.  But our government can sure send taxpayer money overseas to fund mosques and madrassas. (HT: Van Helsing at Moonbattery)

Seems last Friday was "defriend" day on Facebook.  Although I missed it, and haven't "defriended" anybody, some of you out there in the blogosphere may benefit from the increase in personal security gained by doing some friend-list housecleaning.

TDOM on the 1848 Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments. Key quote: "...the document is a misandrous indictment of men that ignores any and all good that men do, any and all benefit that women receive, and any and all complicity and responsibility that women of the day had in creating and maintaining the social order."  Click and read the rest.

Another Whiskey tour-de-force, in a reply of sorts to Hymowitz' "Where Have All The Good Men Gone" bleating. "To end "Man Child" men, it is required to destroy "Alpha" women."

Steps

Myself, Simon Grey, and OneSTDV have been having a discussion of sorts about the inability of capitalism, materialism, pragmatism, or whatever one wants to call a governing philosophy that purposefully neglects man's spiritual nature, to provide the sort of support necessary to sustain a moral culture in a right-wing minarchist society.  While it seems that all three of us more or less recognize that left-illiberalism is a philosophy force-fed to the people by a determined adversary bent on replacing Christianity as the political and cultural hegemon in American culture, all three of us differ somewhat on what to do about it. For instance, OneSTDV speculates that it may be necessary for the Right to wrest control of government from the Left and use government to re-establish and protect an organic cultural conservatism.  As for me, I advocate for disabling the Left's ability to use the State to subvert Anglo-Saxon culture, while fearing that OneSTDV may be correct in the long run and that State intervention will be required, as France and Germany are doing.  For his part, Simon Grey says not so fast to both OneSTDV and myself, asserting that the state is not a solution to any cultural issue. But all three of us, if I may presume to speak for them, more or less agree on this next point: that our first order of business, if freedom is to survive, indeed if America is to survive at all, is to dismantle the government machinery that sponsors left-illiberalism and attacks our culture's foundational morality and religiosity--the twin pillars supporting American-style freedom and Republican form of governance.

Some will say that this has been the task and mission of the American Right all along. However, it is clear that the Right's reactionary battle strategy over the past four decades of playing cultural defense has failed. I suggest that it is past time for the Right to heed the dictum "the best defense is a good offense", and seize the cultural and legal initiative from the Left. It is time for the Right to be the cultural revolutionaries, the ones who subvert the dominant order and steer the culture in the direction of their choosing, rather than the being the defenders of an oppressive status quo. The alternative, should the Right fail in this endeavor, is tyranny.  Either the sort of left-illiberal tyranny that the Left is deliberately attempting to create, or a temporary tyranny imposed by the Right in an effort to restore the Republic. Neither of these outcomes are desirable, the former for obvious reasons, the latter because it is a high-risk play that I am not convinced will successfully resort in a return to a Right illiberal order.

With the frame thus set, the remainder of this post lays out a potential battle plan for accomplishing this task, with props to Alte for her post on "Winning a Spiritual War".

The first step in fighting a war is to know you are at war in the first place. This statement isn't as trite as it seems, for although the ranks of right-wing combatants are increasing in size due to the success of the Tea Party, plenty of right-wingers are not yet politically mobilized, or are politically neutered by baseless yet powerful accusations of racism, bigotry, anti-Semitism, homophobia, or simple meanness.  In the meantime, as the Right dithers and/or cowers in fear, the secular humanist Left has been engaging in siege warfare against the Right.  For lack of defenders, the Right has been reeling, falling back, retreating, giving ground along the entire front.  It is time to make our stand and fight back, with the dictum "the best defense is a good offense" as our watch word.

The second step is to identify your enemy. I propose that our enemy in this case is the Evil One and his attacks on the religiosity and morality of the people via the religion of secular humanism and the displacement of self-governance with the tyranny of Man.  However, as any "war on a concept" is bound to fail because the adversary isn't tangible, our energies should be primarily directed at neutralizing this religion's left-wing adherents and their ability to make cultural mischief through the machinery of the State and also through other vectors, to include NGOs, charities, and media outlets. Thus, in this way, left-wing secular humanism can be discredited as a legitimate governing philosophy, with an eye toward marginalizing it and, over time, ensuring its extinction, thus enabling the restoration of an organic spirituality and resultant religiosity and morality of a people fit to govern themselves once again.  

The third step is to identify strategies and weapons to defeat your adversary.  A two-pronged strategy comes to mind, both aimed toward shaping the character of the human condition: the proper role and level of government, and a restoration of religion and endogenous morality.

For the first prong, the battle over the proper role and level of government, it is important to note that role and level are not the same concept.  The level of government refers to the presence government has in the daily lives of its citizens, while the role of government refers to the sorts of things the government has a legitimate involvement in.  In a free society, this role is very small and, in fact, rolling back government means stripping government of the roles it has acquired for itself, especially when government, at the behest of leftist secular humanists, has been used to attack the very institutions that hold a right-wing free society together.  Simon Grey has suggested a good start to accomplish this neutralizing of left-wing attacks on right-wing civil society: a complete defunding of left wing programs at the Federal level, for example:

welfare, Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, or any other programs that foster dependency...no more federal money for the “Arts,” Planned Parenthood, or other leftist nonsense.  And this means no more regulatory agencies at the federal level

To Simon Grey's hit list I add pretty much any Federal social safety net that isolates citizens and/or businesses from the consequences for their decisions (no more "to big to fail" bailouts), as well as Federal interference in the ability of citizens to contract with one another, dispose of their property as they please, to include, for example, refusing to rent out their spare rooms to homogamous couples, and marry whom they please. In fact, the State must be evicted from the business of marriage entirely, and must immediately cease awarding benefits based upon marital status. Marriage is to be returned to the Church, the original owner and arbiter of marriage, before the State annexed it.

Indeed, some of this is already happened.  As evidence, I offer a pair of examples from my home state of Wyoming, which, in the span of three weeks in the end of February and the beginning of March 2011, scored two hits on left-wing governance by voting down two left-wing bills proffered by supposedly right-wing Republicans.  The first defeated bill would require doctors to advise women seeking abortions about the risks of the procedure, a very mild requirement indeed, while the second would prevent the state from recognizing homogamous unions made outside the state:*





 

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In viewing these videos, it is important to not be distracted by the Left's near orgasmic reaction to these two bills being defeated in the "reddest" state in the union.  Instead, we must keep our eyes on what must be our two-pronged strategy: to delegitimize the use of government force toward social ends, even if such ends are superficially beneficial, while simultaneously advancing the religious case against liberalism, in this case, infanticide and homogamy.  This two-front fight is crucially important; for in keeping cultural conservatives from limiting the excesses of liberalism, if the Right fails to bolster the religiosity and morality of the people, then members of the Right will continue acting as the left-illiberals' useful idiots--the Right will continue to undermine traditional culture and values in favor of that espoused by left-illiberals.

This brings me to the second prong of our one-two strategy: evangelization.  It is admittedly the more difficult of the two, but it also is the most critical, and members of the illiberal (i.e., religious) Right must go out and evangelize unBelievers with all their heart, to win over hearts and minds of the people and persuade them of the freedom that is found in religion and morality and self-regulation.  This task--convincing others of the wisdom of self-control--will be made easier when government no longer subsidizes sin itself and is no longer able to cushion individual citizens from the consequences of their actions. There will be a very clear and immediate connection between misbehavior and personal consequences, this connection makes ready the soil for the planting of the seeds of religion.  It is important to note that this evangelization must not be performed for the sole and self-aggrandizing purpose of filling pews in churches, however.  Instead, such evangelization must be made with an eye toward bolstering the two civic institutions that are a citizen's first tastes of proper government and frankly are far better and more effective governments to boot: the family and the church.  When both family and church are healthy, it is more difficult to rationalize a muscular State.  When family and church are healthy, there is little need for intrusive government in everyday life.  So it is far from coincidental that these two institutions are the ones attacked the most by the religion of secular humanism, for the lack of family and church are what create the cultural vacuum necessary for Left illiberalism to flourish.  And it is these two institutions that must be restored for the people to acquire the levels of illiberalism and morality required to live in a free republic.

If this strategy fails--and one can make the argument that my approach described above is too little, too late--our only alternative to salvage the culture will be the paths chosen by France and Germany and Holland: to establish a State-approved culture and use State organs to choose what is "in" the culture and what is "out".  Given that right-illiberals are a political minority in the United States, I do not think betting that the Right gaining control of the machinery of government to accomplish this feat is wise.  Thus the courses of action I outline above appear to be the most palatable short of political or violent revolution.

* In the second video, at 3:35, a Laramie Democrat dared to trot out the old lefty saw that one cannot legislate morality and that a politician's religion has no place in politics.  Pardon my cursing, but this is bullshit, and the Right must not fall for this liberal bait-and-switch.  What is the law in many cases, other than legislated morality? And it is the displacement of religion from politics that has resulted in the current mess that we are in. Where does religion belong, if not in personal-is-political politics?


Related posts:
Salvaging Civic Institutions
Capitalism, Social Decay, and Right Liberalism

Education and Hypergamy

It is nice to be able to ground one's perceptions of reality in empirical data every once in a while.  This is especially true when dealing with an issue of great concern to the manosphere like hypergamy. 

The phenomenon of hypergamy--literally, selecting partners of higher social or economic circumstances--is said by many to explain quite a bit about women's dating and marriage patterns, especially when viewing these patterns through the lenses of Game. Game theorists and practicioners postulate a universal, hardwired tendency for women to select for dominance and other indicators of higher social rank when choosing mates, and that this tendency regularly appears across cultures.  But until recently, I had not come across any actual empirical research on the subject.

Enter the following paper, Education, Hypergamy, and the Success Gap, by Elaine Rose at the University of Washington.  This paper looked at male and female education levels and how they related to marital success, where "success" is defined as ever been married. (No analysis was performed on the relationship between education and divorce, except to note that women who drop out of college are also slightly more likely to divorce.  The extant research suggests a negative relationship between education and divorce as well).

In a nutshell, the paper reports that:

• Marriage overall is on the decline, due to a confluence of many factors, including reduced gains from role specialization in marriage
• Lower class women drive the overall decline in marriage rates, as eduction level is generally positively correlated with marriage
• There used to be a strongly inverse relationship between female education and marriage. The more educated a woman was, the less likely she was to be ever married. This relationship has weakened significantly
• The more educated women were, the less the tendency toward hypergamy. In other words, her tendency to marry "up" declined as her education increased
• The success curves for men rise steeply until high school graduation, and then were relatively flat.  This suggests there is a success "floor", a minimum under which women will not consider a man as a mate. 
• Hypergamy was more common on the left-hand side of the education distribution (i.e., less educated), while it was less pronounced on the right-hand side

Now for the graphs.  Interesting data is buried here:

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

A look at Figures 4 and 5 indicate that those women who are 4-year college grads are more likely to be married at age 40, yet the odds of ever being married peak at high school.  This suggests that, for women, a college degree is positively associated with successfully getting married, and that those who will never marry select themselves out of the marriage market upon high school graduation.

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

I found the data concerning the men to be most interesting.  It suggests strongly that, despite the study's author's claims to the contrary, female hypergamy is not only alive and well but drives men's odds of ever getting married.  Note the shape of the curve in Figure 7, where a college degree does not appreciably increase a man's likelihood of marriage, where a professional degree does, a strong indicator of female preference for high-achieving men. A lack of a high school diploma, on the other hand, strongly impedes a man's ability to marry.  Figure 6, on the other hand, tends to answer Kay Hymotwitz' self-serving question: "where have all the good men gone?". Answer; they got married. The ones that remain are unattractive for another reason.  Which leads me to my next thought: Figures 6 and 7 also suggest to me that female hypergamy is driven by more than just education--perhaps a quality other than education, such as social dominance, is more of a controlling factor than education when determining whether or not a woman will marry. In other words, education may not be a good proxy for the sort of dominant traits that female hypergamy seeks to capture.

Of course, this paper defines "success" as getting married, which is somewhat of an anachronism in these libertine times.  For just as women's liberation meant loosing them from the home, hearth, and child-rearing--all three characterized by marriage--men have been steadily liberating themselves from marriage and productive employment.  This "men's lib" means that simply looking at marriage rates do not necessarily adequately characterize a man's attractiveness to the opposite sex, expressed as his ability to convince a woman to have sex with him (rather than her willingness to marry him).  In fact, a man's attractiveness for marriage may have little to no bearing whatsoever on his sexual attractiveness, a possibility that may further call into question the utility of education as a useful variable in predicting or explaining female hypergamy. 

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This graphic makes it quite clear that what is true for the great teeming mass of white women does not hold for non-white women, in this case, black women.  For black women, every additional year of education "helps" them succeed in their quest to be married with no education penalty to be felt. Given the far lower educational achievement of black men compared to white men, and the tendency for all races to marry within their races, it suggests that educated black women are fare more likely to engage in hypogamy than their white sisters.  Interesting.

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These graphs demonstrate conclusively that education depresses total fertility in a one-two punch. First, from Figures 18 through 16 (viewed in that order), it is clear that education delays childbirth, thus reducing a woman's fertility across her lifetime (these graphs depict the presence of a child in the home for that age cohort).  Second, looking at Figure 16, it is clear that the odds of a woman having a child fall off a cliff if she is educated beyond the 4-yr level.  Both phenomena serve to limit a woman's fertility. For men, these graphs are instructive: if you wish to have a family--and why else would your average un-Believing fellow get married in these tumultuous times--choose a woman who does not possess more than a 4-yr college degree.

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This graph shows the conclusion of Rose's paper...that a woman's tendency toward hypergamy decreases significantly for every year of education beyond high school, and even permits her to engage in a bit of hypogamy as well.

Addendum: My good friend Novaseeker brought up a point not mentioned directly in Rose's text, that a woman's education narrows her erotic field of regard for each additional year of education.  Rose's research supports this key assertion of MRAs via two graphs: Figures 19 and 6. Figure 19 (page 27 of the linked study) shows that marriages for higher-achieveing women tended much less toward hypergamy than for lower achieving ones. The highest achieving women married hyper- and hypogamously in roughly equal proportions, while equal marriages dominated.  Figure 6, however, suggests that the likelihood that a woman will ever marry peaks at the bachelor year of college and declines precipitously after that, suggesting to me that while the marriages are less hypergamous, the availability of men who are "equal" or "better" than her--and therefore marryable--declines.


I'll close this post by quoting a passage from the author herself, where she submits that, of all strategies for boosting marriage rates, perhaps the best ones would be oriented toward attacking what we have come to know as the mancession and other trends that suppress male economic health:

In terms of policy, measures designed to encourage marriage are more likely to be successful when targeted towards improving the economic prospects of men at the bottom of the economic spectrum

An interesting statement indeed, considering that nearly the whole of public policy is oriented toward extracting resources from men and giving them to women.  Mayhaps the realization is dawning on some that a better strategy for societal success (and thereby providing qualified mates for lower- and middle-class women to marry) would be to buoy the fortunes of those who are in the socially weakest position of all...lower class males.