There’s small choice in rotten apples. – William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew (I,i)
Newsweek magazine, like its rival/soul sister Time, has been degenerating into yellow journalism at least since the term “moral panic” was coined in 1972; the primary reason is probably the rise of television news in the 1960s. By the 1980s several of my English teachers were declaring it was no longer a credible source, and by the early ‘90s its main function seemed to be supporting prohibitionism by publishing disinformation-laden scare stories about sex, drugs, kids, stuff kids like, and drug-using kids having sex. One favorite target is the internet, but that’s not surprising considering it’s the reason for the plummeting revenues of the past few years, which eventually resulted in the magazine’s sale to an entrepreneur on August 2nd, 2010 for the price of $1. Not long after that it merged with the Daily Beast, which considering the latter’s own credibility issues hasn’t exactly helped. Case in point, this recent article which claims to be about “human trafficking” in China, but actually appears to be an extended ad for the rescue industry. It’s not the worst thing Newsweek has published lately, but it lies somewhere in the space between “Why Are Obama’s Critics so Dumb?” from January and “The John Next Door” from July of last year.
Steven Kim, an American businessman…may be the world’s leading expert on the market for North Korean brides…[while] living in China, overseeing the manufacture of chairs…he heard about a secret church that catered to…South Korean businessmen…Kim…became a regular attendee…and…began to assist North Korean refugees…[by providing] safe houses, food, clothing, and money; eventually he organized secret passage across China to third countries…Many of them turned out to be women fleeing from the Chinese men who had purchased them…
If the rest of the story continued like that you wouldn’t be reading it here. But apparently Kim’s religious devotion, the four years he spent in a Chinese prison after he was caught, and the potential for massive profits in the rescue industry drove him to shift his focus from helping people who wanted to escape, to interfering in the lives of those who don’t:
Today he runs 318 Partners, a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to rescuing trafficked women in China…The only practical escape route for fugitives from North Korea is through China, and…roughly 80 percent of those thousands of refugees are women and girls who have become “commodities for purchase”…Ever since the one-child policy went into effect in 1979, Beijing has enforced it through fines, imprisonment, forced abortion, sterilization, and…infanticide. The policy has had its intended effect of slowing the rate of expansion of China’s population. But there has been an unwelcome side effect: an unnaturally high male-to-female ratio…The result is an epic surplus of bachelors…[who] are often desperate—for companionship, for sex, for household help…
Chinese men want wives; North Korean women want to escape North Korea to the relatively-better conditions of China. Therefore marriage brokers have arisen to put them together; the system is no more foolproof at making good matches than the biochemical-infatuation system prevalent in America, but nobody’s proposing that women be “rescued” from that. When observed through the distorting lens of “trafficking” rhetoric, however, it becomes something else entirely:
…a chain of “suppliers,” “wholesale providers,” and “retail sellers” has developed…suppliers lure women from their homes with promises of a lucrative trip to China…if trickery fails, recruiters have been known to resort to kidnapping…wholesaler[s]…escort the women past Chinese ID checks to a safer place farther from the border…some of the women are sold directly to Korean-Chinese men who live in the region. From the woman’s point of view, this is usually the better option. Life with a Korean-Chinese man, in a community where the Korean language is spoken, is preferable to life with a Han Chinese man who speaks only Mandarin and whose culture and food will be unfamiliar. Other brides…are resold to retailers…[who] in turn sell the women to their clients…for between $1,200 and $1,500…depending upon her age and appearance.
As I pointed out in “Creating the Crisis”, horrible political situations (such as North Korean tyranny or the government-created gender imbalance in China) are bound to create brutal, coercive environments where bona fide human trafficking or even chattel slavery can thrive, and I have no doubt that crimes such as those described here really are committed in some instances. But how many of these transactions are based in fraud or violence and how many in women taking a calculated risk to get out of North Korea? Does denying women agency and applying slave-trade dysphemisms really help outsiders to understand why men might conduct this sort of business and women go along with it? The next paragraph struggles valiantly to make the women look like helpless victims, but careful reading reveals the truth:
At some point the woman realizes what is happening to her. She then has two choices: go through with the marriage or try to escape. This is not really a choice. The woman is on her own in a strange country…Most accept the inevitable and agree to be sold. They reason, not illogically, that life with a Chinese husband, even an abusive one, is preferable to arrest, repatriation, and automatic imprisonment in a North Korean labor camp for illegally leaving the country…
Why does a “slave” need to “agree to be sold”?
…Because the woman has no official identity papers, the marriage cannot be legally registered. Such pseudomarriages may be voluntary—at least in the sense that the woman has the theoretical option of turning down a man’s offer. But it is wrong to consider it a true choice. It is “a means of survival or livelihood,” says Lee Keum-soon, a senior researcher with the Korea Institute for National Unification in Seoul…In many cases, she says, a voluntary marriage is indistinguishable from a forced marriage. The woman’s few alternatives may include prostitution or online stripping. A woman who cannot speak Chinese would not be able to work in a restaurant or a store. The North Korean woman “would quickly realize that there was no alternative but to establish a live-in relationship with a Chinese man…as a relatively safe means of staying in China.” If a woman has relatives in China, they often urge her, not without reason, to strike a bargain with a Chinese man who will feed and house her in exchange for her labor and sexual favors…
If you can’t see the problem here, you need to reread “A False Dichotomy”. By these standards, how many life-choices are “true” ones? Do Chinese farmers “choose” to live in a country with no available women? Do the so-called “traffickers” choose to live in government-destroyed countries with few means of getting ahead? Obviously these women feel that staying in China, even under these conditions, is preferable to returning to North Korea, just as many people consider working in a sweatshop preferable to working on a farm. It doesn’t help poor, disadvantaged people when educated, successful ones try to shut down some of their extremely limited options for the “crime” of failure to rise to Utopian levels.
As is typical for this type of article, it then descends into a long, lurid personal narrative designed to appeal to the reader’s emotions; in this case the writer willfully conflates the actions of “traffickers” with the brutality and corruption perpetrated by police and government officials in both countries. It then returns to Kim, who admits that many of the “trafficked” women he endangers by his meddling tell him to get lost, but when he does manage to talk one of them into leaving with him he “sometimes asks the rescued women to pledge to pay back $1,000 of the costs once they get to Seoul and receive financial help from the South Korean government.” In other words, he convinces them to allow him to illegally smuggle them out of their current situations and into another country, then charges them for the privilege. Sound familiar?
Newsweek and Time “journalists” are about as intellectually adept as Ms. America pageant contestants.
Actually – I apologize to the Ms America candidates for that comparison.
But I mean seriously – reading those rags is like reading a bad high school newspaper that somehow skipped over the teacher in the editing process.
Hi. I left this comment on a previous entry in hopes of starting a discussion, but didn’t get a response. Sorry if I am being overly persistent, but I really like the commenter here, and of course Maggie’s sharp mind. Here’s the comment:
Hello Maggie,
I wanted to get your perspective on something. You distinguish between neo-feminists and “archeofeminists,” and you identify as the latter. It is clear that you think poorly of the “neo-feminists,” as do I.
Here’s my question:
To what extent (if at all) do you feel women were oppressed in the West as compared to men at any time in the last 200 years? Currently I hold the view that, while both and women have been oppressed, during any given period the oppression of women was no worse than the oppression of men during the same period.
Do you feel that there was once ever a need for any kind of feminism? Has this “archeofeminism” resulted in correcting any specific injustices against women?
Of course, opinions besides Maggie’s are welcome as well.
You’re representing archeofeminism and neofeminism as a dichotomy, which they aren’t; when it comes to human behavior, I don’t believe in dichotomies. There are many forms of feminism, of which these are just two of the outliers. The purpose of “archeofeminism” is not to “correct injustices against women” as a group, because we don’t subscribe to the conspiracy theory of history. That is not to say that there are not bad conditions at any given time due to a multitude of factors (including, in the present day, the actions of other feminists or those who claim that label without being “feminist” in any meaningful way).
That having been said, it was actually whores (the definitive archeofeminists) who won most of the rights modern women take for granted, including the right to own property. Dr. Thaddeus Russell covers the subject at length in his excellent A Renegade History of the United States.
Will definitely read the book.
And with all that is going on in the world today what do we see from brainless women? Demanding the “equal right” to walk around topless.
And western women wonder why I have so little respect for them now….I kid you not.
Might not these women demanding equal rights to be topless do better to demand that women are treated like real people and have agency to decide what to do for themselves? Gee, like what job they want to do?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2194208/Go-Topless-Day-2012-From-New-York-California-American-women-solidarity-womens-rights.html
You make the mistake of assuming that because they seek one thing (the right to deal with hot, humid weather the same way that men do), they can not seek another thing (the right to have their job choices respected). A lot of people are actually capable of walking and chewing bubble gum at the same time (except when the wind is blowing). Yes, even women.
LOL!!! LMAO!!! I hope you read my comments below. Your analysis of what is wrong has always been correct as far as anything I’ve read by you here and at other sites. I don’t always agree with your sollutions to the problems because mostly because I know most men aren’t ready for them yet, and even fewer women are ready for them. I have believed for a while that most women would hate if they were treated as true equals to men socially and legally speaking because they would discover that a higher percentage of men are treated with more contempt and as disposable and as manure than women. Sure a man in the top 5% has it much better than a woman in the top 5%, and a man in the top 20% has it a little better than a woman in the top 20%. However men in the middle 60% have it a little worse than woman in the same middle 60% and men in the bottom 20 percent have it much worse than women in the bottom 20% while the men in the bottom 5% have it so much worse than the women in the bottom 5% that no woman wants to even know of it much less experience it. Here’s the site of an Englishman who got dragged through the divorce and family courts you might like. He got himself considered persona non-grata at The Spearhead but not to the same degree as you. http://www.wimminz.wordpress.com/
Another derail from the ever moronic Peter-Andrew: Nolan(c). By the way punchy, did anybody ever tell you that you cannot copyright your own name? You may be able to trademark it, but because you didn’t invent your first, middle or surname it is a fraud to attempt to copyright it. Dumb dumb.
Yet again you show how there is a slipery slope between prostitution, marriage, and boyfriend-girlfriend. Where does one become the other? It’s often hard to tell.
If anyone thinks I’m wrong especially if you are a man, then listen because you’ll need to read and understand this. Women, what I’m about to say may be harsh so buckle up. Does anyone truly do anything for free for long? Usually not. Peter Andrew Nolan whether you consider him crazy or assinine or not, once said the truth on this blog: men will trade a meal to get sex from women and go hungry because he knows his provisioning skills are good enough(usually but not always true) to get another meal, but even the men who are the best at seducing amatuer women into sex do not truly know when they are going to get sex again. Getting another meal is easier than getting sex for men. The corralary is also true. Women know they can get sex very easily if they want to even though they may have to set their sights more realisticly. Men trade their better average provisioning and protection skills for sex while women trade sex for men’s better average provisioning and protection skills; and it’s been like this for tens of thousands of years even in primitive uncivilized hunter-gatherer societies of humans from prehistoric times until the present day. We living in ultra modern civilization are for the most part no different than our prehistoric ancestors and our hunter gatherer fellow human beings.
Perhaps our ruling elite thinks it’s better to have what we so often have in the USA. It is all too often a harridan “slave-master” wife who provides little to no sex to her “slave” husband and expects him to provision for her. If he doesn’t, she can divorce him and take at least half of the assets even if he provided for over half the assets. Whether it is a divorce situation or a out of wedlock child-birth situation, he will be forced to pay exhorbitant child support payments on the pain of being imprisoned even if he truly can not pay and she has no accountability to spend any of that money on the child. All of this is backed by the power of the government. She can make up lies about domestic violence or even rescind her desire to press charges even if it is true or not, and it doesn’t matter because the police have no choice but to arrest the man and he is one short step away from prosecution in a court of law. Why do so many American men sign up for such a horrible deal? It is because of sheer ignorance, stupidity and being brain-washed into being pussy-whooped and having silly romantic ideals which no longer exist for the most part in today’s USA and have been diminishing slowly since the 1860s when women got the house and children instead of the man after divorce and greatly since the 1960s when no fault divorce came into effect. Dead beat Dad laws and VAWA have accelerated it even more in the 1980s. American men, your silly notions about finding an American wife who will love you for who you are, love you till the day she dies and treat you decently while also letting you raise the children has a very low success probabaility because the neofeminists backed by our government made it that way through statutes and enforcement of those statutes through family courts which do not have to follow the U.S. Constitution so they don’t. Over 65% of the divorces are initiated by American women last time I checked too. Let me be clear men: Idon’t think women are any better or worse than men although they are different they are still human and for the most part the same as men because they are human. However our culture because of the neo-feminists, nanacy-boys who were allowed to take charge and our government have encouraged American women to become feral while holding men to higher standards. Make no mistake that American women are just as feral as Afghan men are on average. American men would be feral too if encouraged by the culture, crazy MRA groups and the government. What our ruling elite are doing is talking about the deplorable conditions in China and Korea which may not be that deplorable while ignoring the deplorable conditions here which they can do more about but choose not to.
It’s not a “horrible” deal – and let me tell you a secret about men …
Men DO like pair-bonding and they like doing it for life. Though guys like myself like variety … a LOT of variety … we still only view ourselves as having one mate. It’s not that important that that one mate be the best sexually – but she needs to be someone we emotionally connect with.
I watched this movie the other day – “The Notebook” …
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0332280/
The funny thing about that movie is that ALL of the men are nice guys – I mean, really, really nice guys – even the ones you don’t want to get the girl. In the end – the girl has to make a decision (and the two guys lack of negative characteristics and personality flaws doesn’t help her decision). But she does choose and the man she chooses remains with her for life – through thick and thin – even into old age and dementia when she can no longer remember who he is … and he never stops trying to get her to remember and sometimes she does – for five minutes or so … and they live those five minutes as man and wife until her memory leaves her again – and he begins the weeks (months) long process again …
All for five minutes with her.
That movie touched me – and I’m no beta male. I think all men have this view of relationships within them – we all hope for this kind of relationship.
If things have worked out for you and your wife has treated you well, then congratulations. However, it doesn’t for every man. Ask yourself why a lower percentage of military men suffer from post traumatic stress due to war than military women despite the fact that military men are more likely to experience horrific war time incidences. Men are on average more designed to inflict horrifying loss of life against the enemy as well as see horrific casualties on one’s own side even those of one one loves. Men handle death better in war time situations or industrial accidents. Ask yourself why so many military men commit suicide. Most military men’s suicides is because the wife or girlfriend is leaving them and she is taking many of the assets and children if there are any and has often depleted his bank accounts, ruined the home the military paid for and destroyed his credit rating. Men are less equipped to deal with loss of love or betrayal than women. Men are probably more romantic creatures, and this weakness in today’s USA which should be a strength is what is used to destroy these men. I’ve seen the movie,The Notebook which Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams were actors. I suggest you see the movie with actors Ryan Gosling and Michele Williams called BLUE VALENTINE. Michele Williams’ character was much better behaved than most American women I know. Most American men either couldn’t make the marriage with Michele Williams’ character work or would experience misery within the marriage, and her character was more marriage material than most American women you meet in my humble opinion. Most women love The Notebook, but are shell shocked by BLUE VALENTINE. All men need to see BLUE VALENTINE because it is more realistic and informative about male-female relationships and the true nature of women. Only neo-feminism could have made having sex with good honest professional prostitutes preferable, better and less hazardous for men than having a typical American girlfriend or wife. I wish it weren’t so. Sigh?!.
Also doc – it’s not a game of “men vs. women” and never has been. Men and women are on the same team playing different positions on the field. Neo-Feminists aren’t “bad” women – they are “bad” people … same thing for male chauvinists – or whatever is the male equivalent – these are just people who don’t understand the game, are confused, and pound the table loudly so that we all hear them.
I find them amusing – but they’ll never convince me that women are out to get me or that I shouldn’t play the game with them because it’s tilted in their favor.
Bad people are bad people. I agree. However, please ackowledge that neo-feminism has corrupted more American women than most any other nationality. It’s the way they’ve been trained, educated and brainwashed. It’s very hard to undo. Most women most of the time when they do these evil things don’t know why or even realize that they are being evil. they think they are being good, but they are not. I do not think most American women are intentionally trying to hurt anyone, but like well trained neo-feminist lap dogs, they will bite you for no good reason or even apparent reason. You can’t trust a dog to not eat the steak off a plate put on the ground, but you can trust a dog to act like a dog.because that is its inherent nature. You can also trust a dog to act the way it’s trained. My sister own a German shepherd who is quite friendly and playful because he was trained to be that way when young. Military German Shepherds trained to be attack dogs are dangerous to everyone but their sole master to one extent or another because they were trained to be that way. There comes a certain point where you can not teach an old dog new tricks. the military know and when the German Shepherd attack dog gets too old, it is virtually always euthanized, put down or killed as a result. A human if it is willing can learn new tricks even when it is old, but he or she has to want to do so, and even then you may never be able to fully teach him or her. A human has more potential to learn new tricks than a dog so to speak. Many humans don’t want to learn anything new nor to be better.
Kurlac,
If you were on the dating market today, you’d note that the women you’ll find are uhhhmmm.. on the entitled side. The expect much, but offer little in return.
Really? I find the same about men.
You and I should get together 😉
Yes, and it’s a tragedy. The world system pushes this: use men as literal banks; if they don’t have a certain amount of $’s they’re not even good enough to be friends with and/or have sex with; since there’s way too many sexually frustrated men use them for what you can get while making them THINK they’ll get sex; they all have to be able to support a woman to begin with before a full relationship is even considered, etc., etc. I learned quick when I 1st had sex only friends what a pure HELL it is out there. But, you don’t have to be part of it and live in some ###*** safe, little category box. ###*** the world system.
Women, what I’m about to say may be harsh so buckle up. Does anyone truly do anything for free for long?-YES. I’m 1 who does and has for years. I’ve purposely broken the “dating game rules” (gag) that the world system pushes for years. This includes in my main relationships plus sex only friends. I’ve purposely not charged specifically for sex and do what I can to keep the costs of meeting up for sex only (or more) as low as possible for the men. I really hate I can only do so much but you do what you can do. It counts and I’m proud of it. From the time I was ready to have a full relationship plus sex only friends I resolved to never be part of what the world system pushes as far as dating, relationships, etc., goes. I’ve kept that up (including at the present time) and would rather be dead than go along with what the world system pushes.
Maybe I’m a day late and a dollar short. You are the exception to the rule. I believe you. However, I don’t see virtually all other women changing their tune to your tune any time soon.
“suppliers lure women from their homes with promises of a lucrative trip to China…if trickery fails, recruiters have been known to resort to kidnapping”
Seriously? People are literally starving to death in North Korea, and so few women are willing to leave for another country that “suppliers” have to trick or kidnap them?
As for the morality of women agreeing to relocate to marry some guy they don’t know, we used to do that in this country. They were called “mail order brides,” Hollywood even made cute movies about the whole setup.
It might actually be half-way plausible (though I doubt it’s true). In Barbara Demick’s “Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea” North Korean propaganda basically paints the rest of the world as even poorer than NK. Sure, they may be eating dirt and grass, but the rest of the world doesn’t even have that (or so they are told). It (partially) removes the ‘grass is greener’ effect that would otherwise likely trigger a mass migration from that blighted hell-hole.
I can see that. But the article still only makes sense if you replace “trickery” with “tell them the truth about how much better things are in China.” I mean if someone is eating grass in North Korea how glorious a picture do you have to paint of China to get her to volunteer to go.
The Rescue Industry is related to the same people who created the Marriage Broker Regulations that are intended to make it difficult for American men to get “Mail Order Brides.” The same usual suspects of conservative Christians (like Senator Sam Brownback) and radical neofeminists conspired together to push through laws regarding this. This has been on their agenda for a while.
I wonder when they’ll start interfering with Indian arranged marriages? Seriously, I know a lot of Indians because of my job, and arranged marriages are still prevalent there. Also, Indian women have not yet received the “gift” of “Neofeminism.” I know one who was quite disgusted and horrified by the movie Juno, which is universally loved and praised by all the right people in the United States.
So, I’m looking forward to the fireworks when the Rescue Industry decides to save these “poor Indian women” from their happy and fulfilling arranged marriages. I expect that will not go over well, and may end up being a bridge to far for these political busybodies.
“As is typical for this type of article, it then descends into a long, lurid personal narrative designed to appeal to the reader’s emotions”
Actually, that’s typical of many media outlets and all types of news stories. To me, it’s little more than bad pornography.
Everything is “trafficking” to the fanatics. Due to the skewed demographics and much cheaper marriage in Vietnam, there is a rising trend of Chinese men going to Vietnam to marry locals before returning to China to settle. The Chinese regime makes application for immigrant brides difficult, so many choose to live in “illegal” marriages, and such are common in Guangxi province.
The Chinese men are sometimes surprised at how picky the Vietnamese ladies can be; the latter are no fools and know how to reach an arrangement that benefits them. But all of the complex negotiating and compromise is brushed over and any international marriage is quickly dismissed as abusive, exploitative etc.
You know, it just occurred to me that the fanatics would probably consider my Vietnamese manicurist a “human trafficker”. He’s been in the US for about 20 years, and two years ago went home to Vietnam for a two-week visit; at my first appointment after his return he introduced me to his new wife, whom he had married while in Vietnam. They knew each other as teenagers, but since she was in her 30s and still unmarried the families saw an opportunity and arranged for her to marry my manicurist when he visited. He then brought her back to the US, a country where she knew nobody but him and his sister (who lives in Dallas). She did not speak a word of English when she arrived, and though she’s learned some it’s slow going.
I decided to continue on what I wrote above. I do not mean to imply that all MRA people are crazy, stupid and mean because not all are just like that just like not all feminist people are crazy, stupid and mean. I also do not mean to imply that American men make better spouses than American women because I truly think both males and females truly have in decreasing numbers and percentages been raised to be poor marriage partners. The problem is because of neo-feminists, nancy boys who refuse to wake up and our government it is men who suffer the most when the marriage dissolves or there is a an out of wedlock child birth. Why should any female take responsibility for her own stupid actions and suffer the consequences when she can make someone else, the man as an individual suffer through child support, asset division and alimony, or the tax-payer as a group suffer through section eight housing, food stamps, welfare etc. for her said actions? All too often she won’t, and I probably wouldn’t either if I as a man could get away with it. Many men if for no other reason suffer for making the wrong choice to have sex with and/or marry the wrong women in a way that doesn’t happen as often when women do the same with the men on average in today’s USA. Like Maggie McNeill said, these women for the most part are making the best decisions they can for having harsh conditions and only a choice of poor choices, but our elite want to make these women’s lives worse.Our ruling elite with the neofeminists, nancy boys and government have made the state of marriage in the USA worse and failing more than all the whores who now live, have died and as yet to be born ever did or could in this world. These people have no business telling us how we or others should live especially when it comes to marriage and child support because they ruined them here in the USA.
Let’s look at what our ruling elite through neo-feminism, the government, intelligensia and nancy boys have allowed. A disproportionately higher percentage of American women would not make good wives, good whores or even good sluts for any man in comparison to most other countries.Many because of neo-feminism erroneously act like men love unnecessary drama when the opposite is true. Almost any man I know who has lived overseas like I have for an extensive period of time and have interacted with these foreign women will tell you that most foreign women are easier to interact with than American women on average, and that this is due to the corruptive influences of neo-feminism. All too many American men bring their foreign wives home to the USA to watch her get corrupted by American neo-feminism. Sadly the ruling elite, nancy boys, neofeminists with the U.S. government are trying to spread neo-feminism throughout the world. This includes making marriage a pale shadow of itself as well as trap for men and a sham marriage for men which feels more like slaveryto men, and also let us not forget spreading prostitution prohibition. They are having too much success in this.
Women need to ask themselves what they can offer men for a change especially when it comes to American women. Yes, there is the proverbial glass ceiling for women which is much harder to crack and get on top of for women. There is also the proverbial glass floor which is much harder for women to fall through than it is for men. I reckon it would be better to be the top man than the top woman, but it is also worse to be the bottom man than the bottom woman. What are the only things that a man can get from a woman that he can not get from a man? Sex if he is fully heterosexual and children no matter what his sexual orientation is the answer. Men like women want to believe that someone else loves and cares for them. The fact is that there are more and better male athletes just like their are more men who are disabled than women. There are also more male geniuses and more male mentally retarded than females. The list could go on and I’m sure you get the idea. I’d rather have the best doctor or best lawyer I could possibly get even if she is female, but it is likely that some male is better than her or at the very least there are many more men who are in her league than there are women. There are also more men who need to be institutionalized due to criminal behavior, violent insane behavior and mental retardation. Life is not fair. You can equality before the law and equality of opportunity but never equality of result.
I don’t say these harsh things because I hate women because I do love women. I say these things because too many are delusional. Ladies, too many of you have traded provision and protection coming from good individual men thinking the government, neo-feminists and our ruling elite can provide all the protection and provision you need without eventually screwing you like they have to men. You are wrong because eventually they will screw you, the other shoe will drop and without good individual men to protect and provide for you then you will eventually be screwed worse than the men have been. All of you reading this have been warned.
Doc, I think you are over-thinking things a bit here.
The fact is – over the last 50 years or so we’ve removed a good portion of the stimulus against pre and extramarital sex. The advent of reliable birth control has freed up women to treat sex a bit more casually than before. This, combined with the “detente” in sexual morality has led to an epidemic of single-parent households. And – since the males bagged ass leaving the woman with the child – the big government solution is to step in to save the woman and the child. This does nothing but perpetuate the problem.
Don’t bother with this – we’re running out of money and that experiment is about to fail hard. Once government gets out of the business of surrogate fatherhood – then we’ll see a return of the family. The family has been around since the dawn of mankind – and no socialist notion will ever kill it completely (and neither will any right wing notion either).
If women are guilty of anything – it’s in DE-VALUING themselves. The price for sex – among “free” women – is astonishingly cheap these days. Women almost demand nothing from men in return for sex.
It’s actually the DEMANDS that women place upon men in return for sex that makes men better people. I’m talking about “realistic” demands though – not crazy pie-in-the-sky demands.
The reason whores are more “enlightened” and “liberated” than their free sisters in the dark abyss is because they have placed a value on their sexuality. Men either pay that price or they go visit rosey palm and her five sisters. 😀
Don’t worry – this pendulum is about to swing in the other direction and I think once government goes bankrupt then we’ll see men and women acting as teammates again (as they should).
Yes, I agree with you fully in your statements above. However there will be much pain and wailing before that happens. Brace yourselves for Ragnorak, the Apocalypse and end of days as we know it before something new and hopefully better rises out of the proverbial ashes or worse out of the real ashes.
Trouble is, when the government goes bankrupt, there will be hordes of starving people: those who were on welfare and ex government employees, just to start. That means anarchy. I rather doubt that the government will sit still. Instead, it will print money to give to the hordes. That means hyperinflation…and then anarchy.
The idea of the US government going bankrupt “soon” is almost as absurd as the concept of the “Beta male”
At this point, US Treasury Bills are pretty much John Galt. The world would collapse without a steady supply of T-bills, bro. I think we’re loaning them out at an interest so low that it’s below inflation.
And, “Beta male”, well that mostly based on misunderstanding of how wolf packs work, and then applying it to an entirely different species. Chimpanzees are closer to that kind of system but even then, Humans occupy a vastly different ecological niche and there’s no reason any other animal would actually be close to us in social make up.
Even in that structure, a beta male is just the second in command, not some Chatty Cathy.
If things worked like this “Beta Male” nonsense suggests it would, Caesar would be the only one in his legions who could form his hand into a fist and everybody else would be having a gabfest about shoes.
Currently, US federal government debt is approximately 1 year of GDP. Or, put another way, every man, woman, and child in the US owes America’s creditors about $50,000. Add in various unfunded liabilities, needed infrastructure that’s unbudgeted for, and private debt….
America is in the position of someone who’s already broke but is trying to pretend that he isn’t by shuffling around money and debts. This works for awhile, especially if lenders feel they must lend more money in the hope that they can thereby prevent him from going bankrupt, but the end result is inevitable…..
I figure America has 10-20 years before we see the consequences of its profligacy.
Right – because we have unlimited money and the concept that money can be printed into infinity and spent without regard is totally “non-absurd”
/eyeroll
Also – beta male – it’s someone who vacillates back and forth in an indecisive manner – always sure of what he DISLIKES – always unsure of what he LIKES.
Check the mirror.
Why are you applying scientific meanings to terms that have an urban slang usage in today’s society?
Do you really think that people who throw that term around think … “Oh gee – Beta Male … yeah … that’s the male monkey in the zoo on the bottom branch of the tree that the alpha pees on all the time.”
??
A Beta Male is a male who doesn’t value masculine traits – or posses them. Someone who’s timid and vacillating, indecisive.
Are you the only person who only uses it as urban slang without connecting it to their terrible pop evolution psychology ideas?
If so, sorry for complaining about people doing that because there are so many more people who do use it as part of some kind of pop science garbage and it’s so annoying.
And Beta is second best, not worst. The slang term is based on a major misunderstanding of a scientific term.
It’s just… that people using words wrong… ON the internet. 🙂
Though the slang definition is also pretty dumb too.
I mean Obama is the biggest alpha male in the world, and yet everybody keeps calling him a beta.
Riddle me this: If modern presidents have any real personal power, how come they all just continue the policies of their predecessors unchanged once they enter office, even if they campaigned on a platform opposing those policies? Nearly every one of Obama’s executive policies can be charted smoothly on a graph from the Reagan administration. You’re probably too young to remember, but it used to be that things really did change when we got a new president; the last time that happened was after Reagan took office in 1981.
Neither Obama nor Clinton nor either Bush was an “alpha male” as far as personality types go; they’re just figureheads with all the real political power of Queen Elizabeth II. The real decisions are made by the fascist mechanism behind the scenes, and modern presidents are powerless to alter it.
Well, they don’t continue every single policy of their predecessors nor do they never introduce any new policy.
To play the devil’s advocate, the differences between the parties are very small but still enough to fight over. Just having your people being the ones to put identical policies in place is worth a lot of nastiness.
Modern presidents aren’t figureheads they’re key parts of two very similar fascist mechanisms.
They’re not “alpha males” but that’s why the concept of alpha and betas males is wrong. If the concept is correct, then the president, the guy with the most political power should be the most alpha male like. But the president isn’t.
By the way, what do you mean when you say the term “alpha male”? I’m thinking more in terms of MRA/PUA style pop evolutionary psychology idea and I don’t think we have the same concept in mind here.
I can’t speak for the US, but here in the UK an new, incoming government will find that at least 90% of public spending is already committed, often for many years into the future. Despite all the rhetoric, the new government has in reality very little room for manoeuvre.
It’s worse in the US, because we don’t actually change governments, but rather only a few actors who are quickly absorbed into Washington culture no matter what they intended when they arrived. If the system had continued to be tightly constitutional as the Founders intended that would have been a good thing, but once it strayed from that and began to grow and grasp it became a nightmare of inevitability, an insatiable Borg that cannot be changed without obliterating it entirely.
Of course, the *real* problem isn’t in Washington. It’s the American public, which demands ever increasing handouts from the government and which rolls over supinely while the government abrogates its freedoms.
To repeat a tired saw: In a democracy, the people get the government they deserve.
The fact is – over the last 50 years or so we’ve removed a good portion of the stimulus against pre and extramarital sex. The advent of reliable birth control has freed up women to treat sex a bit more casually than before.
That much is both true and good. But:
This, combined with the “detente” in sexual morality has led to an epidemic of single-parent households.
What “detente”? The epidemic of single-parent households has only one cause: the welfare system. Under AFDC and its sequels, the government will finance any 16-year-old girl to move out of her parents’ home and have her own, with everything paid for by others. All she has to do is get pregnant (usually by telling the man “I’m on the pill” or similar), then tell the agency who he is so they can enslave him.
Unfortunately, while the government is well beyond insolvent, the payments are not about to stop. They will just print an endless supply of dollars.
This is one of several reasons I draw parallels between today and the Weimar Republic. People whose life styles are threatened will vote for any dictator who says he has the answer.
It’s actually the DEMANDS that women place upon men in return for sex that makes men better people. I’m talking about “realistic” demands though – not crazy pie-in-the-sky demands.
This is the theory in Brin’s The Postman, and all I can say is that he must have had little or no understanding of sexuality, especially the female kind. Maybe not all women are attracted to dangerous, violent men, but plenty are — enough that there is no possibility that a movement along the lines of Lysistrata’s strike will ever succeed.
(And anyway, in my own experience, women’s demands are nearly always quite unreasonable if not crazy — which is why I want whores legalized, so that all the women with Platinum Pussy Syndrome will have to face plenty of competition.)
One small quibble, it wasn’t the Chinese government that created the gender imbalance, it was the cultural preference for male children over female children. If that cultural preference had not been there, there would now not be a gender imbalance, even with the one-child policy.
Why are sons prefered in traditional societies like China or India? It is because sons are seen as being able to better provide and protect their aging parents than daughters even if this is no longer true with our high levels of civilization and relatively high degree of safety plus wealth to susatain our health and lives. It was not always so. Even today, your typical young or middle aged man and even most old man is a more formidable physical, mental and emotional foe to a violent intruder to the home than any typical woman of any age. Men by nature are more designed to inflict violence and have violence inflicted on them than women on average of course.
Yes, it is the Chinese government’s fault for this. They should have allowed for at least 2 children and made abortion of female babies more difficult to do inorder to avoid the imbalance. They also should have accepted that everything coming from ancient Chinese culture could not so easily be crushed out of existance, and this includes a preference for sons because of their percieved better provisioning(not nearly as true now as in the past) and protection(almost as true now as in the past) potential, abilities and skills. China’s government also officially encouraged families to have more children producing high childbirth rates and bigger families than China could feasibly sustain before the one child policy.
It would happen in the US if we had a one-child policy here. The fact is – when you limit it to ONE child, then parents will game it to get the sex they prefer for that single one.
Personally – I like girls … though I have one son too. However, it’s a form of tyranny to tell me, or anyone else how many kids we can and can’t have. We can have as many as we damn well please as long as we can take proper care of them – I shouldn’t be punished for my neighbor’s shortfalls.
Another good post, pointing out the way stories are tweaked to be “more interesting.”
Sunday night at 9:40 PM, Central Standard Time (US), my mother’s husband, technically my step-father, a man I alternately called “Sonny” and “Dad,” lost his battle with cancer. He died surrounded by his wife, children, and a few grandchildren. His mother and two of his surviving sisters were able to visit him before he died, and to return to say goodbye before the body was removed from the upstairs apartment where he spent his last days in hospice care. Up to the last day, he was the warm and humorous man I had grown to know and love.
As I sat in that room, watching Grandma hold the hand of her only son after his death, it sort of put things in perspective. My fretting about how long it’s going to take me to pay off this computer, an argument I had with Laura, how far behind I’ve fallen on e-mail, some TV shows, this blog; it all seemed pretty small.
I will be leaving in a couple of hours to attend the final service in Oklahoma, and to visit family there. I will fall further behind, but it’s OK. I will catch up again, and it takes as long as it takes.
A few of you here have expressed best wishes to me, and I would like to thank you for that. I will be fine, and I will return to agree, disagree, laugh, and snarl.
Please accept my condolences on the loss of your stepfather, my prayers for your family and my wish that you have a safe trip to and from the services.
Thanks, Maggie. I’d mentioned his health here, and had received some best wishes, so I felt I should provide an update. Your condolences and prayers mean a lot.
Sorry to hear about that Sailor … take care and come back quick!
Sorry to hear of his passing. It’s never easy but having family around helps.
O Kaerinasai…
Thanks, everybody. I’m back now, and babysitting my nephew until some time tomorrow. I’ll be catching up from here.
Again, thanks.
… go into politics Maggie …
I don’t think Maggie would want to go into politics lol
Something tells me she’d face the same corruption traps that stopped Norma Jean Almodovar in her run for governor of California.