Category: Daybook

Feminism and Christian Man…

Over the last few days there have been a few bunfights going on. Mainly @ Dalrock, but elsewhere. The topic is best summed up thusly

Let me distill DG’s statement down just a bit.

1. There are women who make solemn, serious promises before witnesses.
2. Later on, sometimes a few years later, some women break those promises because they are no longer made “happy” by keeping their promises.
3. Men don’t like women who break promises for unserious reasons, and “not happy” is not a serious reason. And now, finally, groups of men are making their anger over promise-breaking known, in sometimes very blunt language.

That’s it. That’s what there is. So if there are wimmenz who want to defend promise-breakers they won’t find this site very pleasant.

Now, this is around Dalrock referrring to a thread on Christian Marriage and Christian forums. Some argue that this is rude: one should not quote forums. Um… No. It is fairly easy to make a forum private. Subscriber only. I can access the forum…this is a fun Calvinist thread there.

But their moderation policies are equally rude.

It is unbearable, and it will not be tolerated there. You cannot even mention divorce being a bad thing, lest you are said to want to enslave women in bloody abusive marriages, you cannot question ….QUESTION mind you, haaaaaapiness as the measure of a marriage, you cannot discuss modesty, lest you be avoiding responsibility for your male proclivity, you cannot mention pornography unless you spew angry venom, mention grace and you are a porn addict, you cannot question the absurd definitions of “abuse” or you are abusive, submission is so controversial its a disallowed topic and no matter where you come down on it, you are an ogre who demands obedience and fealty…

why am I writing this here, you all know all this because its the same tactics of feminism, just adapted to the church.

Now… at times some people (particularly in the thread that grows and grows) people have been personal. They have gone and trolled through other blogs and taken apart people because of their frailties. Now, I don’t tolerate this. I accept that we are all fallen: we all sin… even though at times I get emails asking me to ban this person or that person.

If I want to go play in a sewer, I can go wind up the feminists at the Hand Mirror, where the use of logic is seen as oppressive. Or Free Jinger.

But. as Deti says, if you say something publically you can expect it to be questioned. Christian men are starting (praise God) to argue back. Deti sums this up fairly well:

1. In case people are not seeing this, the point of the “Cornerstone to stepping stone” post was that leaving a marriage because you’re not haaaappy is not at all Christian. Leaving a marriage because that is easier than staying and working through the unhaaaaappiness or letting your unhaaaaappiness pass is not at all Christian. Leaving a marriage because you don’t love each other or no longer love each other or your love is of a different, less satisfying character than it was, is not at all Christian.

In fact, “I’m not haaappy” is not a biblically sanctioned reason for divorce. “I’m no longer in love” or “I love you but I’m not in love with you” are not biblically sanctioned reaons for divorce. Period. Full stop. End of discussion. One would expect professing Christians to have deep knowledge and understanding of this.

Seriously: These tenets are (or at least should be) beyond any debate for an orthodox Christian. How can there be any serious discussion or disagreement about them?

But also, I was personally surprised to see such secular ideas expressed and even overtly advocated on a Christian message board. More evidence to me of how feminism has thoroughly infected western Christendom.

2. It’s said that “I’m not haaappy” is just a symptom of a larger problem. But most of the time it is not what a wife thinks it is. Many times it’s hypergamy. She’s seeing what she believes are better men — nicer looking men, richer men, more interesting men. Or he’s let himself go and is not as physically attractive as he was. Or she tingles at them and thinks “these other men are more attractive. That means my husband doesn’t make me happy!” Or something is broken in her — maybe she can’t pair bond or never pair bonded or chose not to. Maybe she married her husband for the wrong reasons. Or he’s too beta, formed from years of trying to keep her pleased.

That said, none of these things — NOT ONE — are a biblically sanctioned ground for divorce.

Seriously: Why are Christians even entertaining such concepts? That’s the point of the Cornerstone thread.

3. The women at CF in the linked privacy alert thread were chastising the men for not defending them. Oy.

4. If you’re going to write something on a public forum in a public blog, especially something that might engender controversy, expect to be challenged on it, expect disagreement, and expect to be quoted. It’s no different than being out on a public forum and saying something to a broadcast journalist; or to a newspaper reporter.

Now, one of the things that Christian Women need to recall, particularly those that call themselves feminists, is that they may have injected their medicine into us, but like Stephen Daedulus, it has not taken.

There is a great quote by Orwell that perfectly summarizes this situation: “During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” The institutional left has so eroded the foundation of its house of cards over the past 50 years – too many takers vs. not enough makers, and the incentives for the makers to stay in the game are too few and far between. Why start a family if your “wife” can get up and smash it to pieces any time she likes through the family court system? Why work hard and become “marriage material” when most of the women around are totally unworthy, rather like little 5 year olds in women’s bodies who view men’s principal responsibilities as a husband revolving around keeping them entertained? Who have laid with too many men, and are thus chemically unable to pair bond or in many cases, so utterly spent that they no longer feel love? Better to sit back, live the best life you can, and help your family and friends rather than hope for winning the lottery. The problem of course is that as men start to realize this, and start to back out of the rat race, the tax base that the takers rely on becomes unsustainable – ergo the fiscal situation much of the west finds itself in. God willing, we are witnessing the last gasps of the ongoing attempt to destroy the greatest gift bestowed unto mankind ever known to human history. Illegitimi Non Carborundum!

Now, these discussions can cause people distress. True. The gentle, the idelealistic, those who take their vows seriously find the very fact that we have these conversations incomprehensible.

So a woman could say “I’m unhappy, I wish my husband cheated on me…” file for divorce, then get granted full custody? A judge would find her motive for divorce completely acceptable? [since it wouldn’t fall under the medical definition of crazy…]

No wonder MRA guys are so upset. Imagine being a normal, dedicated husband, only to be punished for your wife’s immature flighty selfishness…..

Yes it is crazy.

Yes, it is wrong.  But we are fighting powers and principalities that have entrenched themselves in the women’s networks that run across denomiations. The development of the Orthosphere is helping: our brothers and sisters are forming a more orthodox network, which is spiritually and psychologically healthier than the mainstream Christian forums.

But we need to work together — as women and men. Beleiving in Christianity — without qualifications (such as feminism, conservatism, or socialism). For Christ is our foundation, not any other ideology.

 

 

The fourth turning will not be progressive.

The idea of the fourth turning is that the way parents raise their children affects the way they act… and react against. This leads to cycles of children… from those raised in poverty who become the voices for change, those raised by the activists (who become cynical, practical, without great vision — the current Generation X), those raised by the Xers who are somewhat more protected, and then those raised by them who are in security.

This theory of generations relies on a certain winnowing effect — if you do not breed your tribe dies.  If the liberal English descendants who formed the revolution do not produce 2 to 5 children per family (depending on the child mortality rate) then you are factng the loss of that tribe. And this is exactly what the liberal elite has done. This means that the next generation with the confidence to change things… which is coming into adulthood about now… will be conservative. And this will roll back the boomers, who were the last generation that shook things up.  Quoting Alte (from today, the same thread…)

I recognize what you say, Hound, but things are slowly turning. It’s the fourth turning.

Tradcons are finally reaching critical mass and they’ve become the main source of productive wealth and efficient human capital in America. Although they’re a small portion of the adult population, they’re increasingly separatist (which raises retention rates) and they’re swiftly becoming a plurality of economic and demographic capacity. Immigration is actually declining quickly, as the employment prospects dry up. Liberals are sterile, immigrants are going home, and tradcons are going to be the future as they’ll be the only ones to show up.

We’ve been a side-show for so long that people are waking up in shock to realize that there a … lot of us now and we breed like rabbits. And — most importantly — our men are hard and stable workers and valiant soldiers. Who else is working? Do you think the oil rigs, farms, utility companies, trash collection, truck companies, and coal mines are manned by a bunch of liberals and pansies? Do you think the military will continue to function as a permanent gay pride parade?

As those same men pull out of the corrupted fighting and working forces to defend and provide for only their own families, the liberals are having a fit. They’re starting to go after the RCC first, as that’s the biggest political prize. Then it’ll be the (mostly Protestant) homeschoolers, then the Mormons, and so on. They’re going to try to pick us off one by one, if we don’t show a unified front and send them packing back to the deviant ghettos they come from.

Tradcons are only irrelevant as long as the debt-money keeps rolling in. Cut off the spigot, and things will get ugly fast. …

It’ll be a resource war, and we’ll have the resources. The land, the food, the energy, the manpower, the fertile women. They’ll have the MSM and oodles of weaponry and godless mercenaries they’ve bought on credit with a toilet-paper currency. It’ll be fun to watch.

 

…

 

Moderation and assimilation is the habit of those welcome in the majority. Things are changing, and the desperate behavior of the liberals is going to accelerate that. People are going to have to finally pick sides, and that’s the game-changer.

In America it’s going to be mostly a religious conflict, with a secondary ethnic one. In Europe it’ll be an ethnic one, with a sharp rise in populism and devolvement of government, with an increase in religiosity coming only afterward. In both cases, people are going to move back to their traditions and the liberal governments (and the bottom-feeders they support) are going to resist, with violent results

Well Alte is 30odd. When I was that age, the wall came down, and the cold war ended. The West won — but during that we set up the seeds for our destruction by expanding the welfare state:

New Zealand has always had a strong welfare state tradition. In its original form, as introduced by Michael Joseph Savage in 1938, state welfare supplemented the community-based charitable efforts that had traditionally assisted the needy. For thirty years until the late sixties fewer than 15,000 people received state welfare, with under a thousand unemployed.

In the late sixties, however, amidst growing concerns that the benefit system was losing relativity with rising living standards, the Holyoake Government established a Royal Commission of Inquiry to review New Zealand’s social security system. The Commission, under the chairmanship of Sir Thaddeus McCarthy published its report, Social Security in New Zealand, in March 1972. Many of the recommendations were adopted by the 1973 Kirk Labour Government, but there were three recommendations in particular that were responsible for changing the social structure  of New Zealand by giving rise to a permanent dependency culture and an emerging underclass.

The first of these recommendations changed benefit eligibility from being needs-based and available only to those ‘of good moral character and sober habits’, into a universal entitlement. That destroyed the well-established social contract that had existed between taxpayers and the government that ensured that only good citizens who met community standards were eligible for state benefits. From this point  the welfare system began to reward indolent and destructive behaviours such as alcoholism, drug addiction, and criminality and removed moral responsibility from those receiving welfare.

The second was the raising of benefit levels to be closer to a working wage. Instead of welfare providing temporary support sufficient to tide people over until they found a new job, the Commission wanted a beneficiary to “enjoy a standard of living close enough to the general community standard for him to feel a sense of participating in the community and belonging to it”. As a result, the need for a beneficiary to find a job to make themselves appreciably better off disappeared. This established a base from which long-term inter-generational welfare has grown.

The third was the introduction of the Domestic Purposes Benefit to provide support for an estimated 20,000 sole mothers and their dependent children to escape from violent relationships. Despite being well intentioned, over the years the numbers on the DPB have mushroomed. There are now 114,000 sole parents and 180,000 children dependent on the DPB. A third of these women became parents as teenagers, and half have spent three quarters of the last ten years on a benefit. Around 29 percent of women on the DPB have given birth to one or more additional children whilst on the benefit since 1993. Over 90 percent of these women are single, and most who started on the DPB with a newborn baby have never had a job. In spite of its lofty ideals, the stark reality is that the DPB has become a lifestyle choice for unskilled teenage girls – despite the overwhelming evidence that the outlook for their children is dismal

Now, the result is that… in my lifetime… we have gone from a nation of stable families and fairly full employment to having one in five on benefits and child poverty, child abuse that was unheard of in my childhood. At the same time, children nowadays are incredibly cosseted. And… most of them are from believers. The bankruptcy of the current welfare state is clear to anyone who will add.

Things will turn. And like Alte, the odds are that they will turn back towards tradition, destroying the liberal, non believing branchlike of every denomination. political party, and club. The boomers will be dying by then, and it will be my bunch who are the elders… fixing up the transition in the hope that we can again avoid conflict, or at least conflict in the West.

For I hope Alte is wrong, and we can peaceably move back to self sufficiency. But my reading of history tells me that she is right.

 

What the libertarians moderate on madness

The Orphans of Liberty website has a “whistleblower” talking about the new Western Australia Mental Health Bill. It is a bill — for those of you who are not part of the Commonwealth, that means that it is currently out for comment.

Now, the exact wording really is not my business. I live in NZ. The NZ Mental Health Act… is. Like all MHA, it is fairly draconian — and needs to be. The entire moral justification for a MHA is that some people are not in their right mind & it is not the correct time for a nice chat and cup of tea, but to literally hold them, restrain them… and then, once in a safe (and at times locked) place, treat them.

Which is what I do for a living.

What wound me was a comment.

And the fact that an awful lot of what passes for psychiatry and psychology is not supported at all by serious studies means that they are further subjecting children to complete quackery.

It’s late, and I’m angry. So… this is in moderation over there, but stuff it, I’m putting it up anyway.

Um, NO.

In fact, hell, No.

Over the last two or three decades there has been this thing called (ahem) Double Blind Trials. Like for Aspirin… give half the bunch placebos, the other lot what you think will work, and don’t tell them or the doctor which is which.

Only way to get rid of this thing called hope… or the placebo effect.

Sounding cynical? OK… Now for some data.

ECT at proper dose works better than low dose ECT. Both work better than sham ECT.

ECT at too high a dose causes more memory loss than proper dose, and low dose causes about the same as proper dose. Sham ECT doesn’t

Antidepressants work better than placebo for anxiety disorders and mood disorders (I’m shortening that statement — I spend a fair amount of my professional life reviewing said studies).

Simple, cheap, and manualised therapies work better than long and non scripted therapies such as psychotherapy. It looks like computerised therapy works almost as well.

Psychosurgery generally causes more side effects than benefits.

If you don’t Belleville me… look up Clinical Evidence, The Cochrane collaboration. We use the same clinical tools in psychiatry as a cardiologist uses to sort out what works and what does not.

Now for the kiddies…

Behaviour Therapy generally works. Meds less so (exceptions include stimulants for ADHD, and I mean real ADHD — unable to sit still, unable to attend to friends, unable to learn, miserable because your classmates are getting you to do stupid things that get you into trouble).

Family therapy helps for some things.

Cognitive therapy, particularly in groups, helps adolescents. As people get more like adults, the medications become more useful.

On ECT for kids, I used to run an ECT service. In the two centres in NZ I have worked, I have never seen a kid have ECT. Most ECT is used in the very old — where the drugs we usually use (yes, I’m talking about modern antidepressants such as fluoxetine (Prozac) etc) are more dangerous than ECT.

Now…

Everything I’ve said has not changed much for the last 10 or 20 years. Moreover, what we do generally works.

So kindly do not call those treating the mad, the sad and the bloody desperate quacks. We use this thing called science. And… we are aware that one in two of us will have some form of mental illness during our lives,

The mad deserve proven, effective and safe remedies. We have them. But there are some ideologues who just think of mad doctors, like the mad, as either a tool of the state or to be shut away.

Rubbish. The mad are not only with us, at times we can all be crippled by anxiety, despair, trauma or the living hell that is psychosis. The mad, sadly, are us.

Hat tip Crusader Rabbit.

UPDATE…

I type too fast. Should be beleive me not Bellvue me — but since that is the name of a big psychiatric institution in New York I’m leaving it in.

 

Poverty, Kirk and Christ.

Dawn, Northern Amsterdam

Kirk today was around the theme of Christ at the Margins. Kirk has but one full time pastor. The other two — well one runs a photography business, and the other is the New Zealand Coordinator for Servants. But we do not live in the poor parts of Vancouver, where there will be one shower for every 30 rooms. (which is below NZ standards for anything residential). In the developed world, poverty is a complex issue — relating not only to live choices but the structure of society. Today we were reminded that Jesus cares for the poor and oppressed: he supports them over Wall St.

Wall St shopping mall, George St., Dunedin

Jon pointed out that some would see this unfair. We are fed, but God cares for the hungry. We deserve his love. Well, actually we don’t. We cannot earn salvation: instead God saves us and then changes us.

And this world is unfair. We should care for those at the bottom, because they are us. They are our brothers and sisters. It is not a matter as much of fomenting revolution as refusing to accept the lies of the ideologies. The people at the food bank do not care that I am a tory with reformed theology. They want to be less hungry.

Now, throwing money at the problem does not solve it. We have around one in five people in New Zealand on some form of benefit — theiy are either retired, disabled, solo parents, or unemployed. (There are far more people on benefits who are unable to work than waiting for jobs). The benefit is not generous, but it does allow people to not be in boarding houses if they budget well. However, as in Vancouver, we have a homeless people despite having a welfare state and a socialized health care system. People still fall between services — that are continually revised by our politicians — who all want people working and healthy, even though some are Trostkyites, others as Social Democrats, and others are Tories.

The state cannot deal with everything. There is local poverty and global poverty.

How can we outwork this? Well, my part of the city has people donating their fresh vegetables and swapping them for things that do not require refrigeration and last (Yes, I mean canned food). Because canned food can go to the food-bank. Our children are contributing to a fund to buy wells in the least developed parts of Africa.

We cannot remove all the structural problems, but we can help our neighbor. And when we meet at Kirk, we need to encourage each other to continue with this.

The manosphere is a hate crime?

Well, I hinted about this earlier today, but those nice fools at the Southern Law Group (gotta love US liberals, for their stupidity is so predictable) have decided that the manosphere is evil.  Well, this is what they say.

The so-called “manosphere” is peopled with hundreds of websites, blogs and forums dedicated to savaging feminists in particular and women, very typically American women, in general. Although some of the sites make an attempt at civility and try to back their arguments with facts, they are almost all thick with misogynistic attacks that can be astounding for the guttural hatred they express

Absolutely correct.

But there is a reason. It is very simple. The laws around families and men… are at times evil. This evil is concentrated in the USA. This is from Dalrock, who is a little annoyed he did not make the “list of haters”, but it is not an atypical story.

I went through a divorce two years ago, although I did nothing “wrong” so to speak, but rather because my wife was bored. Under my questioning, she said there was nothing I could have done to have prevented the divorce, which I believe to be true. I was not really lacking “game” (hadn’t heard of the term until recently, but I was manly and attractive), but she was very tired of the routine and banalities of married life, and wanted to, in her words, “find herself”, whatever that means.

As is typical, she did very well in the divorce and got the house, car, most of our assets (she cleaned out our bank accounts and savings and stripped the house bare while I was on a camping trip with a friend which she encouraged me to take – I should have been suspicious as it was the first time she had ever wanted me to do something like that, but I was overjoyed, and of course, completely taken by surprise when I returned to a house empty save for the divorce papers; I was never able to recover any of the things she took preemptively), full custody of both children, alimony until remarriage, and I got a disproportionate amount of debt and had to pay for the entire divorce, both lawyers. I have very restrictive visitation, usually I only get to see my children two days per month. I knew women usually were favored in divorce, but had no idea how unjust it was until it happened to me. In addition, I was completely blindsided. She was still very affectionate and sex had not dropped off at all. I never saw it coming.

I am a traditional Christian man, and had always looked forward to fatherhood and raising my children. In fact, I would say having a family was my dream ever since I was little (I never felt “defined” by my career or that it was anything other than a means to an end, but I am not a CEO or doctor). Now I am watching my children grow up in fast-forward, without any say in how they are raised. I have missed all of the birthdays and Christmases (and other holidays) for the past two years, not by choice. It is truly devastating to spend a month not hearing my children’s voice, or even touching them (let alone any human being) for weeks at a time, to say nothing of losing (who I thought to be) my soulmate after 15 years of marriage.

What is the most painful realization is that I have lost my future. I make $70,000 a year, but have to live on $15,000 after the payments (which I pay the taxes for, can you believe it? – I am in the $70,000 bracket!). I went from a decent house to a $500/month apartment in a bad part of town, and now live alone. I realize that I am becoming estranged from my children (I don’t really know anything about them).

Now, this poor bastard lives in the US, where the laws are simply misandrist. I live in New Zealand, and I am not estranged from my children. But it took a very good lawyer (guys, hire a girl lawyer. She will see through your ex in ten seconds) to get something that worked for the kids. And we have laws that are strictly equal. There is no assumption that a man will provide, or a woman will care. The courts are supposed (and are beginning now to change so this happens ) to work for the children’s interests — and that does not necessarily mean the mother or father.

If children are suffering, and removal of a decent parent from a child will cause that child to suffer, then evil is systematic. It is a cause for anger. It is best to see feminism — as an ideology — as something that is actively destructive to families, to men, and to our children.  Now, the fact that the legal apparatus of the liberal (read stupidly, destructively, evil) branch of US politics disapproves of this is as expected as the KKK disapproving of me loving and marrying a woman of another race, staying with her for 20 years, and then bleeding when the marriage was killed.

Ah, you say, this is not systematic. Well here, I am going to quote Novaseeker.

By the way, if anyone reading thinks that John’s story quoted in the post is atypical or odd for the US, you’re quite wrong.

Be aware that, in many US states at least:

(1) Your spouse can clean out the bank accounts (and in many cases the movable assets) without any real accounting at the time of the finalization of the divorce, because you weren’t separated at the time of said cleaning out, and the cash, which was a marital asset at the time, has now simply been consumed, as in “poof, there it goes”. This is why so many people do it, by the way. Feel vindicated and that the judge will view this poorly? Guess again (unless you’re the guy, of course).

(2) Once your spouse leaves with the kids, or you are removed by your spouse from the spouse and the kids, your likelihood of getting custody is quite small, because a temporary custody order will generally come into effect (if she is being advised properly), and the final custody determination, which typically comes quite some time later, gives heavy weight to this “de facto” custody situation — in effect, the way the system works is that in everything other than outlier cases, you lose custody almost immediately upon separation, and even though this is “temporary”, technically, de facto it generally becomes permanent.

(3) If the situation described in (2) happens, you’re very unlikely to get the house, either. The house normally goes to the parent with the custody. In some states, the court will make that spouse “buy out” the other spouse’s portion of the equity value of the property by selling or refinancing, but in situations where there are significantly unequal incomes, the asset distribution can be quite unequal, too (in favor of the lower income spouse), resulting in this simply not being distributed, or being greatly reduced.

(4) Your ability to enforce visitation “rights” is almost nil in most places. Technically, your spouse is violating the law by violating the court’s decree, but other than issuing a new decree reiterating , the visitation order, courts generally won’t do much else to enforce these. They almost never are willing to accept this as a basis to revise the custody order, either. In fact, custody orders are very hard to revise under almost any circumstances, barring a truly awful situation involving the custodial parent — it’s more likely that the kids get referred to CPS than that your custody order gets revised, to be honest. So, your ability to see your kids depends largely on the goodwill of the custodial parent. If you find yourself in this situation, and she is of relative goodwill, maintaining this is the best option, if you want to see your kids regularly. If you have a war-like relationship with your ex, your likelihood of having regular visitation decreases, as she has incentives to block and no real enforcement. Once a lover/boyfriend/second husband comes into the picture, it complicates things even further around visitation, because you start to have a step-Dad in the picture who spends more time with your kids than you do, and has more of an influence on them than you do, whether he actively does that or not. Also, keep in mind that quite a few states won’t prevent a custodial parent from moving very far away with your kids simply on the basis of a visitation order — in these states you’ll be expected to lump it and figure it out, or move yourself to where your kids now live if you want to see them more often (but don’t expect your support obligations to go down if your new job pays less).

Now, I know of no part of scripture that tells me that I cannot hate. Instead, I am told to hate evil.

And the US court system is simply evil.

It destroys women by making marriage something that is easily dissolved. This means that men are much less likely to commit (for every may has heard stories of what goes wrong). Having a live in relationship, in current law, is a recipe for poverty. It is more rational to be a cad or an otaku. But no society can live like this, and most women do not want to be enemies with their lover. They want to have peace… but they are instead told that any male behaviour is violent.

(Not all power issues are violence. Hatred is not violent. Assault is violence — and that is a crime everywhere. To have an additional crime based on a persons fear is to make all people slaves. It is the same as Massa beating Jim because he may be thinking of escaping. Now, if you try to enslave me, I’ll fight.

But if you try to enslave my two sons, or my two grandsons (or my daughter or granddaughter, I’m an equal opportunity misanthrope) I will fight. Preferably using the courts, because that will hurt you more.)

It destroys children by opening them to neglect and abuse. The man a child is safest with is their father. They are most at risk from their mother’s new lover, particularly if he has a history of violence and aggression against women.

And it destroys men directly. The rate of suicide, for men, increases following divorce. If you are bloody minded enough to survive, you are left with financial and familial consequences.

The current system is more evil than Jim Crow. Racist laws are oppressive and wrong, true. But they did not destroy the family and damage the soul. This does.

So the manosphere is not the “Hate Crime”. Feminism is.