Monday, July 25, 2011

Kristallnacht.

As the saying goes, history doesn't repeat but it sure it rhymes.

Students of history will recall that title of today's post refers to the events occurring in Nazi Germany on the 9th of November of 1938. In response to the assassination of a German diplomat, Ernst von Rath by a disaffected Polish Jew,  Hershel Grzynspyn, the Nazi's unleashed pogroms against the Jews living in Germany. (Ironically, von Rath was being investigated by the Gestapo for his anti-Nazi sympathies)

German society (indeed most of Europe) always possessed a large anti-semitic undercurrent which  reverberated with the Nazi ideology. The Nazi's needed a pretext to "get rid of the jews" and the assassination of von Rath provided them with a pretext to get the ball rolling. It's important to remember that had von Rath not been assassinated, some other event would have been made to fit the bill.

For Kristallnacht to occur, there needed to be official sanction to public prejudice: Liberties and Rights were thrown out of the window.

The social climate of Kristallnacht has been on my mind lately, especially in regard to the terrible Murders in Norway.

Here in Australia, the murderer has been reported as a Right-wing extremist, Right-wing Christian extremist, Christian Fundamentalist and so on. The emphasis being on Right wing and Christian. Any normal person would be horrified and repulsed by the events in Norway ( btw, I think he deserves to hang) but what is beginning to worry me is that the media is only reporting on Christians and Rightists only in the context of negative events. The aim being to form a pavlovian assosciation in the minds of the public between Christians, Rightists and evil.

The public is being conditioned  by the liberal media to equate Christian and Right=Evil as effectively as the Nazi's peddling of the "eternal Jew". The pogroms are next.

I've had a brief look at the ramblings and the biography of Anders Behring Breivik and it would appear that he is nominally Christian and ideologically similar to Geert Wilders, possessing  a weird pro-gay (only in the modern world could pro-gay= Christian) and anti-Islamic form of conservatism. He is pro-Israel which doesn't make him a Nazi.  I suppose the closest American equivalent would be an East Coast Republican. This guy seems pretty socially liberal in my reading of things and it seems very difficult to categorise him as anything else than weak right and nominally christian.

Still the media seem desperate to link his warped Christainity and his anti-Marxism to his actions which they otherwise find inexplicable. However his manifesto is available on the internet (I'm not linking to it) and the explanation for his actions are there:
I’ve spent a total of 9 years of my life working on this project. The first five years were spent studying and creating a financial base, and the last three years was spent working full time with research, compilation and writing. Creating this compendium has personally cost me a total of 317 000 Euros (130 000 Euros spent from my own pocket and 187 500 Euros for loss of income during three years). All that, however, is barely noticeable compared to the sacrifices made in relation to the distribution of this book, the actual marketing operation;)

Yep. The bombing and the murders were part of a book launch. It's all a publicity event. I guess his aim was to do something so horrible that all the world's attention would be drawn to him: The media obliged.

This was a narcissistic individual who believed he had special message to tell the world.  I imagine that he really didn't want to kill those kids but his important message needed to be heard. Others have said the same thing, still they did not see the need to bomb the city and kill children to get their message across. Apparently he is co-operating with police and telling all. He probably see's himself as a martyr to the cause. Note, everyone else is dead except him.  His narcissism was his motivation for evil not his Christianity or his Right wing beliefs.

Still the the role of the liberal media is to slander Christians and Rightists, when it comes to pretext, any idiot will do.

This guy was real dickhead. ( I also note, played World of Warcraft and did not have a girlfriend.)

My condolences to the families of the victims.

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Taking Out the Family.

Kathy Farrelly provided some rather interesting comments to my last post.  It was this bit which piqued my interest:
I would be the first to admit that the kids drive me nuts at times and housework is boring as batshit. Sure It would break the monotony if I could get out a bit and do something else..

But it is all about "dying to self" and putting the good of the family above your own wants.
Firstly, I want to go on the record as saying the I like Kathy Farelly based on long running appreciation of her commentary in the blogosphere. From what she has written, she sounds like a good normal woman and a good mother. (This is not a sop to you Kathy, I'm simply calling it as I see it.)

Christian Traditionalists, extolling the virtues of motherhood, frequently place particular emphasis on the self-sacrificial nature of it,  seeing it as a particularly Christ like virtue. Traditionalists, who are opposed to the idea of a woman working, frequently assert that women who do work are selfish, fulfilling their own desires at the expense of the family, and as such, love themselves more than their families.

This charge strikes most normal women harshly.

Just as penis size is a source of constant anxiety for men, so maternal ability is for women. Lot's of women, in my experience, are constantly plagued by guilt and anxiety with regards to their efficacy at being a mother. Lots of women who work, are guilt ridden, feeling that they are being selfish by not "being there" and caring for their families. Lot's of women, who stay at home, find solace in their superiority over working mothers because in "denying themselves" they prove themselves to the world as being better mothers than their working others.

They are also supported by a good body of Christian Tradition that sees self sacrifice as the embodiment of love. 

This however is misstating the Christian Tradition.

Profound moralists have been concerned with the problem of evil and its recognition. From my reading, the evil most feared is the evil that looks like a good. In my mind, a superficial understanding of maternal-self-sacrifice is one such evil.

Many people who extol the idea of sacrificial love see it as a virtue in itself, which it isn't. Self-sacrifice is only a virtue when it pursues a good, otherwise it is an evil. But it is a very difficult evil to recognise since society, through cultural front-loading, automatically assumes it is a good. 

Blatant evil, such as murder, and is easy to recognise and hence repels our primitive conscience, the evils that really hard to spot are those which are agreeable or appear virtuous.  One of the most profound comments ever written with regard to human psychology was written by C.S. Lewis in his Srewtape Letters:
Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed, the safest road to Hell is the gradual one -- the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
The traditionalists have failed to recognise the signposts.

In my experience, contrary to much of the bleatings of the manosphere, many women have put the good of their family above themselves, frequently with detrimental consequences to the family.

The problem is that many women are not suited to being exclusively full time carers of their family, and placing them in this role, though cultural pressure and herd predisposition, places them in a position of chronic stress. Now, some women can cope with this stress whilst and others cannot.  The  thing about chronic stress is that it changes people involuntarily.


What I'm trying to get at it that many women stick at the motherhood role despite hating it, placing them in a position of constant stress, over time this stress changes the woman involuntarily so that she becomes chronically unhappy (and sexless in many instances), irritable, moody and miserable. This unhappy and miserable woman becomes both a pain to husband and to her children, and interactions with her are stressful. The kids get a disproportionate response to minor transgressions, she's always moody when the husband comes home. The household may be a mess and is a miserable place to be in.  In "dying to herself" everyone else gets taken down with her.

The whole point of self-sacrifice is towards an objective good, when the self-sacrifice is causing evil there is a moral obligation to stop it. 

For the majority of women, mothering competence is part and parcel of the female identity, admitting that you are having difficulty with mothering is akin to admitting that you are a lesser woman. This is why a lot of women do not seek help when they are suffering from post-natal depression. To them, its an admission of second class female status.  To use a male analogy, it's like announcing to the world that you have a small penis. (Perhaps more so, as women are more socially conscious than men.)

Many women have scarified their personal ambitions for the sake of the family and have been able to maintain cheerful and happy homes. Others, forced into the role of motherhood by either traditionalist conceptions or the "modern perfect motherhood cult" have found to their surprise that they have become miserable as have their households. If a woman's self-sacrifice is making her family and husband miserable, it's time for her to stop. Noble vice is not a virtue.

(If libido is in any way correlated with happiness then Kathy seems to be a good wife. :)    )



( Some people have criticised me for the unscientific nature of my posts. My posts aren't science papers, but interpretations of the sum of my clinical experience, which by now is considerable. My current patient load is greater than the numbers in many studies and I've had the chance to view many of my patients longitudinally, something few psychological studies have been able to do. What prompted me to blog was Theodore Dalyrmyple. I wanted to back up what he was saying. In my way, of course.) 

Sunday, July 17, 2011

No Woman's Land.

Recently I've noticed a few referrals from the Traditional Christianity website, particularly from this post. The author, after gently taking issue with my article, concludes her reply with the following:
Traditionalists can accept that not every woman will find her bliss being a mother, but we don’t have to arrange society to accommodate the few when the majority are wired for domesticity.
If Catherine Hakim's data is correct, and I have every reason to suspect that it is, then the majority of woman are wired for a mix of domesticity and outside employment. The authors contention, that the majority of women are wired for domesticity is wrong.  This is not my opinion, it is a fact.

In articles such as this one, the devil is usual in the details and one that pricked my attention was this one;
Our problem is that many feminists will use these outlier women as a reason why we must have all the stuff that Traditionalists don’t like (STDL).
This may look like an innocuous comment, but the logic behind it is a source of much female misery.
Here in Australia, the maternal world is polarised into two groups, the mums who work and then ones who stay at home. Ostensibly each group is happy with its life choice but when you get to know these women better you peel behind the facade and realise that many of them aren't.

As mentioned previously, women are more wired to be heard animals, they are acutely sensitive to group norms and their conformity with them. Women are most happy when everyone's doing the same thing. As soon as someone steps out of line they are ostracised, hence the cliquiness of women. In women, ostracism is an anxiety generating process which settles only by acceptance of the group.

One of Feminism's achievements has been to legtitimise the women who want to work, and this caused a splitting of the heard into two groups. Those who want to work and those who don't. Now, each woman recognises that she both belongs to one group and is excluded from the other, so while there is safety in being with her herd there is anxiety at being outside the other's.

One of the things you notice about talking to working women is that they frequently feel guilt at not being homemakers, the sting of childcare makes them feel like they are a bad mother. On the other hand, many women who are homemakers have expressed to me "their failure of being just a homemaker", especially when the kids have gotten older. Each group of women shames the other.

You don't see this happening amongst men. If one group of males wants to do X and another Y, X doesn't feel angst at Y's choices nor Y at X's. Men generally don't give a damn, since men are wired to be individualistic.

If we analyse the above comment in detail we see the following:
Our problem is that many feminists will use these outlier women as a reason why we must have all the stuff that Traditionalists don’t like (STDL).
Firstly, why does the author feel that feminists and traditionalists cant co-exist seperately? Why must we have all the stuff that Traditionalists don't like? Why do feminist choices imply traditionally repugnant imperative? In other words, why do feminists doing their own thing imply that the traditionalists have to go along with it? Answer: There is safety in the herd.

Suppose we were a traditionalist amongst feminists, citing Catherine Hakim's data to support our case that some women actually want domesticity. We could "flip" the sentence to the following:
Our problem is that many Traditionalists will use these outlier women as a reason why we must have all the stuff that Feminists don’t like (SFDL).
Is something that is not out of place in a feminist tract.

The women most secure in their life choices are those at the opposing poles of female domesticity spectrum, everyone else is caught up in a No Woman's Land of anxiety between these two poles. Guilt about motherhood and work is the hallmark of a majority of women.

Women are bitches to each other.

Saturday, July 16, 2011

Tradtional failure Exhibit A.

iFollowing up on my previous post, I thought I would present this following table reproduced from this paper.




Conservatives should reflect upon these figures as they provide an explanation with regard to the rise of Feminism in the 20th Century.

As I've mentioned before, women are intensely social creatures and their preferences for things can be modified by social pressure so the figures should be interpreted with that in mind. Still, the data was obtained from Britain where domesticity still has some credence amongst women, especially amongst the trend setting.


As Ms Hakim has pointed out, women today quite literally have the freedom to mix work and domestic duties without stigma to the degree which they feel comfortable. What the figures above thus represents is the natural temperamental distribution with regard to woman's desire to stay at home as a full time homemaker. What we see is that amongst the British population at least 80% of women would like at least some type of work outside the house.  The majority of women do not want to be at home all the time.


For the Aspergy out there, this does not mean that these women wanted careers, what it means that most women wanted some form of employment outside the home as a result of their natural temperaments.

Prior to full scale implemenation of the industrial revolution with subsequent urbanisation,  life was agricultural, communal and short. A woman was meant to pull her weight on the farm by assisting in the farming duties and raising the children (frequently with the assistance of an extended family). The lot of these women was frequently no different to men.

With the advent of the industrial revolution the resultant increase in wealth and urbanisation resulted in women being relieved of their agricultural duties, and given the traditional conceptions of womanhood,  these women were left with nothing to do but look after the husband and children. The forced domestication of these women by traditional society's failure to adapt to social changes ensured that there was an extremely large pool of legitimately dissatisfied women in the late in the early 20th Century.

Of course, the group most motivate to speak about this unsatisfactory state of affairs was the group most afflicted by it, those women whom were temperamentally career orientated. And given the herd wiring of the female mind, these women claimed to speak on behalf of all women, shaming those who disagreed. The rest, as they say, is history.

Just as good marriage will factor in hypergamy so will a good marriage factor in this desire for woman to do other things than just solely look after the husband and the children. The problem is though, that traditionalists did not want, or more probably were incapable of, factoring in this facet of female nature into their conception of marriage. 

Just as nature abhors a vacuum, so in the absence of good thought, bad thought will seep in. The midwife of feminism was traditionalism, which by failing offer any alternative to the social pressures that had been formed enabled a quack remedy to take its place. Feminism was the product of traditionalist failure.

Traditionalism failed because:

1) Whilst human nature remained the same, the intersection of human nature and new social circumstances generated profound dissatisfaction which it refused to recognise.

2)Its understanding of female nature was wrong.

3) It did not provide a satisfactory solution to the problem.