Daily Archives: February 6, 2012

This is not your linkage.

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I was on the phone with someone last night… who said I had far too  much time, given the blog. Told her the truth: most posts take me half an hour. Forgot to tell her I don’t watch much TV…

But there is a man who makes money sharpening pencils. God gave you a folding knife for this purpose. Some people are too hip, and have too much money.

But I will confess to spending yesterday (post church) at home. This would be considered abnormal by extrovert jocksters (generally known as Americans) but is needed… for introverts.

In the meantime… the Borg has sandbagged American Bishops because they will not pay for contraception or abortion. On well thought out ethical grounds… but we must all work as one. We must agree. Refusal to assimilate is not an option. Since my academic career is made up of questioning routine practice (and finding evidence of effectiveness, or lack therof) I value the ability to question. But it appears that the Catholic Church has joined Charles Murray in Crimethink.

And the Federal Borg has hit New Zealand, Kim Dotcom may be fat, German, obnoxious and making oodles of money by running servers, but he’s now held in jail on charges that are not in the my nations deportation treaty with the Yankees. (As Taki point’s out, Yankee derives from a Dutch word for Pirate). But the point is that he is breaking the licensing model that hurts consumers.

Online “piracy” isn’t looting. It’s capitalism. It forces dinosaurs to evolve or become extinct. The music and movie industries are in denial, mistaking progress for criminal activity. In fact, they’ve already benefited from piracy’s kick in the ass. Music piracy sites such as Napster forced an antiquated model to reinvent itself, and today we have solutions such as iTunes at a dollar per song and Spotify’s monthly subscription rate. These new systems didn’t kill the music industry; they saved it.

If, for instance, I could buy a DVD or BluRay of the new BBC Sherlock, I would. In fact, when one comes out, I will. But in the meantime I want to watch it. Now. Most of the time, Sky TV will get me the things I want fast enough… but at times there is a delay. Which is why when Megaupload is taken down (and the server farms start deleting files owned legitimately by others) people just move to Ubuntu, Google, Microsoft and Apple.

(Note to Hollywood, if you want profits, stop making crap. If you make a movie which follows the classical rules of story telling (have a hero, a plot, a crisis, a resolution — like Shakespeare, Dryden, Goethe and Stan Lee did) and stop being clever people will see the movies. Similarly, with music, the artists who play music that sticks to the rules of composing (from Andre Reiu  through Richard Thompson to the Finns and Amos to Brooke Fraser and Hanna Howes) get audiences and make a living — in part because people like me deliberately buy their albums (and then make FLACs or high quality OGGs so we can listen on the move). If it is good, I’ll see it. There is some good movies out there — but most of them are not fashionable, and many that are praised are badly crafted).

The Atlantic puts it bluntly.

Regardless of your file-sharing habits, this latest wrinkle in the great saga of MegaUpload and its founder Kim Dotcom throws more fuel on the smoldering controversy over who controls all of your Internet data and why. Obviously everyone on the Internet has been paying close attention to the state of how copyright law is enforced thanks to the overwhelming protest against SOPA, PIPA and related legislation. But as Dotcom’s arrest and MegaUpload’s shutdown have made very clear, the Feds don’t need SOPA to go after a website. It would appear that they also don’t need your permission to erase all of your files.

I accept that most, if not all the politicians and senior clvil servants in New Zealand are loyal to the Crown and work quite hard to do good. I consider that most of them entered the service with a certain sense that they were there to improve the situation for all subjects of the Dominion, (and to be paid).

Our scandals are about a politician taking a spouse on a junket, or claiming too much as rental for a house they own. Helengrad was an exception: the politicization of the public service that the “third way” activists under Helen Clarke was damaging and has taken some time to undo.

I have qualms about Australia. I am quite worried about China. I have even more qualms about the US, where the laws seem to be even more harsh and arbitrary. I live in a small but independent country because I prefer to own my thoughts and words. I don’t want them deleted — and I will defend the right of people who consider me a most retrograde and superstitious person with incorrect ideas to say so.

 

Regaining honour for marraige?

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Now, I know that some people find Sheila Gregiore a pain.  I think she is a little less sheltered than people think. The number of women in the church who have been deeply hurt is legion.

But I want to commend this series to  you all. It is, frankly, written for Church Ladies who are overweight, and have forgotten that their man chose them, not some plastic Barbie she reads about in the local gossip rags.   Because we are commanded to honour marraige.

And Marriage means sex, And Sex means Children, And this is scriptural.

Hebrews 13:1-9

1Let mutual love continue. 2Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it. 3Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though you yourselves were being tortured. 4Let marriage be held in honor by all, and let the marriage bed be kept undefiled; for God will judge fornicators and adulterers. 5Keep your lives free from the love of money, and be content with what you have; for he has said, “I will never leave you or forsake you.” 6So we can say with confidence, “The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can anyone do to me?”

7Remember your leaders, those who spoke the word of God to you; consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith. 8Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. 9Do not be carried away by all kinds of strange teachings; for it is well for the heart to be strengthened by grace, not by regulations about food, which have not benefited those who observe them.

One of the memes in the manosphere is involuntary celibacy. This takes three forms.

  1. The man who cannot provide for a wife. He may have fallen out of work. He may be homeless. More commonly, all his disposable “official” income is going in alimony, and he is working under the table to live.
  2. The burnt. The last relationship was destructive. They have lost their home, savings, children, status… and (although they are now recovering financially) they see all women as exploitive.  The younger men see their fathers, brothers and friends taken to the cleaner. They no longer marriage. They see it as indentured servitude, for limited gain, and they go their own way.
  3. The faithful married man, whose wife is no longer interested in him. She tells him that is intentions to ravish her are evil, immoral, marital violence… marital rape. She cuts him off — perhaps having sex with  him out of duty once every couple of months. This man will be tempted turn to the plastic Barbies (of pornography or an affair with that cute intern): dishonouring the marital bed, even though he knows this is but junk food. He wants the woman he married, but he can no longer get her.

Ladies, if he is straight, and he wants to marry, he wants to ravish you. It is the way we are built, and there is not a thing wrong with it. There is a long erotic poem in the Bible, and it is wrong, indeed blasphemous, to treat it as a long metaphor.

We are commanded to honour marriage, not destroy it. Not to tolerate the (generally) female women who have started their next monogamous relationship before the separation document is done, nor to tolerate men who run a soft harem with whom they spread their seed.

There is no new teaching on marriage. Humans have not changed. We forget that the Romans and Greeks had no-fault divorce, a collapsing birth rate, and that taking a young man as a lover was seen not as being a pedophile but a mark of one’s masculinity. The command has not changed.  But we have forgotton it.

Sheila’s teaching here, however, is but half of the issue. For a marriage needs to occur within a context. Ladies, your husband cannot meet all your emotional needs, he cannot be your best female friend. He’ should be wired the wrong way. As Alte said, yesterday…

Magistra- My experience is that it is bad to rely solely on a man for emotional support.

This. It’s not only not good for you, it’s also not good for him, despite what he might think now when the thought of being your one-and-only sounds swell. Once/if you are living together he might be grateful if you’re not loading him down with all of your emotional needs. I know that my husband is glad that I finally have other women to talk to, and that I get to see my mother more often, as he used to bear the full brunt of my emotions and that’s a heavy burden for one person.

And sometimes it’s my relationship with him that’s the issue, and talking with him about it doesn’t always help much. Like when he was unemployed for a while he was so depressed and irritable, and it drove me crazy, but if I spoke to him about it he just became more irritable. But I could go to my aunt’s house and vent for an hour to someone I trust who won’t spread it all over town, and then when I got home I had more patience for him again. If I hadn’t had that outlet, we both would have gone bonkers.

Maybe you should encourage him to spend more time with his male friends, so that he’s too busy to worry about you spending time with your female ones.

It takes a marriage to build children, but that marriage needs to  be honoured: by their familes, by their church, by their friends, and even by the scarred, misanthropic, divorced single parents, like myself.

 

Waitangi day is not a day of union.

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Today is Waitaingi Day: so named because in 1840 the confederation of chiefs of Aoteoroa ceded soverighty to the British Crown. They were driven to this because of their awareness that the French and Americans were preparing to set up colonies in NZ (The French did at Akaroa about a year later) and they had developed trust and respect in the British Resident.

The British were seen, and I would say they were correct, as the least bad bunch. The British did not really want to do this. They sent a Naval Captain out to regotiate: the treaty was written in haste, varies depending on which text you use (Maori or English) and it remains a source of conflict and litigation.

Any thoughts of attending any celebration has gone. The local rag-tag of failed socailists and their followers demonstrate, loudly, and the correct response is to leave it alone.

The one group I pilty today are the Maori leaders. They are working, quite hard (and across party lines) to set in place a change of culture — away from dependency and towards entrepreneurship, creativity, and a pride in work. For the middle class, this is working, but for the long tail (and it is long) of people who have no skills, there is a continuing dependence on the Domestic Purposes Benefit and the dole.  But this is an ongoing task, done quietly, over a long time. It is not dramatic. There is no one posing on the barriers. It is not romantic. And the simple are seduced by that most noxious of memes: Take it from whitey and the uncle Toms.

But throwing money at this problem has not work. We have tried. We have had progressive taxes, butting 67 cents in the dollar: we have used protection, we have regulated so that Maori have entry into the trades and professions of power. But the problem is getting worse, not better.

While the underclass (Lumpenproleriat) has decreased for the other ethnic groups in New Zealand, it has increased for Maori. The rest of us have tried to help. But you cannot impart a spine where one is missing.