Heretical Sex

Women who cry rape will ALWAYS be sent to prison, appeal court warns

noreply@blogger.com (Heretic) — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 22:31:00 +0000

"Women who cry rape were warned by the Court of Appeal today that prison was 'inevitable' for an offence which attacks the criminal justice system.

Rejecting a sentence challenge by a woman jailed for two years after making a false allegation against an innocent man, two senior judges emphasised the impact of such a crime on conviction rates." Reference

Great news! But sadly, the judge in question seems to have little concern for falsely-accused men. All he is concerned about is the effect that false accusations have on the conviction rate. Still, it's a good start.

The Feminist’s Guide To Debate Tactics

noreply@blogger.com (Heretic) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 21:04:00 +0000

I wanted to draw your attention to this article on the excellent website The Spearhead:

Observing comments made by feminists on MRA blogs – or on any blog or forum post which is even slightly critical of any aspect of feminism – for the last few years has made something very clear: feminists have no idea how to debate.

This is probably due to the overwhelming feminist hegemony in educational institutions. Women dominate the teaching profession, particularly in grade school, and all of these women are feminists. Girls have a powerful innate need to please the authority figures in their lives, and all they have to do to please their teachers is parrot feminist propaganda on cue. This leaves them completely unprepared for the outside world, where reciting this bunk results in demands that they produce facts and logic, things they have never been asked for before. The poor feminists are startled that their dutiful recitations do not result in a pat on the head, but instead in challenges they do not know how to meet.

So as a public service, I am providing this handy guide for feminists on common debate mistakes. This way, the next time you encounter one of those nasty old misogynists, your attempts at argument will not simply confirm his existing low opinion of women!

Mistake #1: “You’re only saying that because you never get laid!”

There are two problems with this argument. One is that in many cases, it isn’t true. Most of us misogynists started out believing all the bullshit about female equality we heard in school and on TV. It took a great deal of experience with women, in the workplace as well as in dating, to make us realize that in fact, women are very different from men, and in most respects inferior. Most feminists are straight women, so you’ll just have to take my word for this: having sex with women does not in any way enhance respect for women. Quite the contrary.

The second problem is, even if the man you are addressing is celibate, this proves nothing. It has no bearing whatsoever on sex discrimination laws, child custody agreements, polemics about the “male gaze”, women in combat, or anything else you might be debating. A very smart man in ancient Greece called this the “ad hominem” argument. You have probably seen this phrase in internet fora, but it is usually used incorrectly, by people who apparently have no idea what it means but know that it is a bad thing. An “ad hominem” argument is an attack on the person making the argument in lieu of a reasoned rebuttal of the argument itself.

Mistake #2: “You must have a small dick!”

This is another ad hominem argument. Once again, men with small dicks are still capable of stating facts which are correct. Unless you have some scientific studies that show that men with small dicks are always wrong, it’s best not to use this one. Besides which, MRA’s have all heard it so many times that it makes them conclude, probably correctly, that you don’t have any actual information that might back up your contentions. “You must have a small dick!” is basically feminist code for “I have no clue what I’m talking about!”

Mistake #3: (used against female antifeminists) “If it weren’t for feminism, you wouldn’t have the right to keep a blog!”

I have seen this charge levelled against women whose antifeminist opinions are far more moderate than mine. Feminists seem to believe that women used to be barred from the First Amendment until some heroic feminists got us in on it. The fact is, women and men have always had the same degree of freedom of speech. In the days when the Inquisition could burn people at the stake for heresy, men did not get away with any more heresy than women did. In Europe today, men and women, at least white ones, are equally subject to spurious hate speech laws. That women pre-Women’s Lib did not have freedom of speech would have come as a great surprise to Sojourner Truth, Carry Nation, Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Abby Kelley Foster, Madame de Stael, Renee Vivien, Radclyffe Hall, Rebecca Protten, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mary Baker Eddy, Mary Hunt, Elizabeth D. Golek, etc. etc.

If you want to use this argument, if you want it to be taken seriously you must offer the names of these mysterious feminists who gave women the right to blog. Dates and how they went about doing so, as well as some sort of evidence that women used to be kept silent, would also be useful.

Mistake #4: “Okay, so it’s true that women aren’t as good at science and stuff, but that’s because girls are raised differently from boys! If we were raised the same we’d be just as good at it!”

First, we don’t know that. The only reason to think that it is the case is that feminists want to believe it. There is no evidence. Your wishes are not a valid argument.

Second, there is considerable evidence that sex differences are innate. Feminists who try to teach their boys not to be violent are invariably dismayed when their toddling sons use the dolls they’re given as weapons. A boy who was raised as a girl after a botched circumcision knew even before he was eventually told the truth that he wasn’t actually a girl, and the attempt to turn him into one resulted in severe psychological problems; he ended by committing suicide at 38. For more on this, go to my blog and see the sidebar sections on “What Schools Are Doing to Boys” and “Biology Is Destiny”.

Mistake #5: “Women were too busy taking care of children and doing housework to invent things or discover things!”

And just what do you imagine men were doing while your ancestresses were cooking dinner or sewing clothes? The vast majority of them weren’t lounging happily in a library devising the principles of geometry or gazing through a telescope. They were mostly breaking their backs on farmland or in mines or smithies, enduring months of malnutrition and brutality aboard trading ships, getting shot at in armies, and other such fulfilling career paths. Yet somehow, men managed to build civilization in between.

For thousands of years, babies were delivered by midwives. Women had complete control of this profession. It never even occurred to the men who ruled the societies to interfere with midwifery. None of these women with the freedom and opportunity for hands-on experience invented the forceps. Instead, a man named Peter Chamberlen invented them around 1600, when the idea of male doctors delivering babies was still a controversial idea, and one chiefly engaged in by the decadent rich. In other words, men had scarcely arrived on the scene before they were inventing things that women had not imagined in thousands of years.

Commenter Paul came up with another excellent example: for the last few centuries, upper- and middle-class women were encouraged to learn to play musical instruments. A lot of these women had the leisure to spend a great deal of time on their music. Yet there have been very few female composers of any note, and black American men – not a privileged group by any means – invented both blues and jazz.

Finally, in the last few decades a great deal of effort has been expended on “encouraging” women and girls to achieve in traditionally male fields, and the lower and higher education systems are feminist-dominated. Where is the Renaissance of female creativity? Where are the female Leonardos, Isaac Newtons, and Mozarts? Women have made achievements – before and after feminism – but they are not equal to those of men.

Mistake #6: “Men have higher IQs, but that’s because the IQ test doesn’t measure female aptitudes!”

First, demanding that the rules be changed because you are losing impresses no one.

Second, the historical fact is that the IQ test is rigged in favor of women.

“The one exception to the general rule that different groups or populations usually differ in average IQ is that both sexes have approximately the same average IQ on most tests. This is not, however, a true empirical finding but a consequence of the manner in which the tests were first constructed…the two sexes were defined to have equal intelligence rather than discovered to have equal intelligence.” (Evans and Waites, 1981, 168).
(Evans, B.. & Waites, B. (1981). IQ and mental testing: An unnatural science and its social history. London, UK: Macmillan.)

More discussion of the slanting of the IQ test to minimize differences between men and women can be read here, here, here, and here. And despite the slanting in women’s favor, men still score consistently higher on them.

Mistake #7: “I guess Thomas Jefferson’s slave mistress wasn’t oppressed then, huh!”

Hijacking the misfortunes of other groups – slavery, the Holocaust, indentured servitude, dhimmitude, the potato famine, etc. – is tacky and does not prove that women are equal to men.

Mistake #8: “I cannot believe how ignorant you are!”

I think that feminists don’t know what the word “ignorant” means. It means that the person doesn’t know something. For example, I am ignorant of the Mandarin word for “insect”, because I have never studied Mandarin.

The only way this charge would make sense would be if you thought that the person you were talking to had never heard the glad tidings that women are equal to men. Unless you can come up with convincing evidence that someone on this planet hasn’t heard this nonsense, calling an MRA “ignorant” makes no sense whatever. We have all heard the feminist gospel. We aren’t ignorant of it. We simply don’t believe it. Indeed, given that feminists apparently believe that it was a heroic feminist campaign that won women the right to keep blogs and clearly don’t know that IQ tests are slanted against men, you are clearly the ignorant ones.

Of course, as a male blogger pointed out and I discussed, what women actually mean when they say this is that it’s stupid to believe unfashionable things because unconventional opinions make it harder to be socially accepted. For women, who are by nature dependent creatures, this is of paramount importance; the abstract value of truth has little appeal for most women.

Mistake #9: “I think this site must be a joke! You’re a troll!”

The world is full of people who disagree with you. Facing this fact is part of growing up.

Mistake #10: “You’re just too immature to handle a relationship with an independent woman!”

First, see #1. “Ad hominem”, remember that?

Roger Devlin handled this one quite ably:

A highly successful women’s magazine editor has written a book of advice for young wives stating: “Giving, devoting, sacrificing … these are the actions of a good wife, no? No. These are the actions of a drudge, a sucker, a sap.” Instead, women are urged to emulate a wife who threw her husband’s clothes into the garden to teach him not to leave socks on the floor: “He understood I meant it.” Or another who wanted her husband to help with the laundry, and hollered at him: “Are you a f***ing retard that you don’t see me running up and down stairs? Listen to me and stop your bulls**t.” Or another who discovered this interpersonal skill: “Just stand there and start screaming. If you stand there and scream long enough, someone is going to realize that you’re standing in the middle of the room screaming [and ask] ‘Why are you screaming?’” (pp. 245-47)

What could be wrong with men these days that they refuse to commit?

Mistake #11: “I am so very upset by what you’ve said! I nearly fainted! I almost threw up! I am trembling in horror!”

Evolution has designed women to use their emotions to manipulate their mates into providing for them and tending to them. We know you can’t really help it, but in a debate, particularly one about the alleged equality of women, it isn’t appropriate.

We know that a lot of what you’re doing here is putting on a display for other feminists. “See how terribly upset I am by this heresy! I am one of you! I am, like, totally sincere!”

But when debating with us, all that such “arguments” do is convince us that we’re right, that women should, for the most part, be kept out of masculine realms such as industry and science, because they are too weak to endure hearing facts they don’t like.

When Nancy Hopkins responded to Larry Summers mentioning the possibility that men might be somewhat naturally better suited to science – he even added, “I hope it isn’t true” – by fleeing from the room in a nauseated swoon, all she actually accomplished was to demonstrate to the world that women are too delicate and fragile for serious business like science. Do male scientists flee from the room when they hear hypotheses they hope aren’t true? Even black men respond more constructively to discussion of the black-white IQ gap.

If this is how women react to disagreement, it is a matter of public safety to keep them legally unequal:

Somebody in the Massachusetts Department of Motor Vehicles needs to look into suspending Dr Hopkins driver’s license. She obviously doesn’t need to be driving.

Now, I’m not saying that women can’t drive, nor am I implying that Ms Hopkins’ remarks are evidence in that direction. Republican women mostly seem to do ok at it, anyway.

However, given her self-reported reactions to Summers remarks, what would happen if she were driving down the street and accidentally punched up Rush Limbaugh on the radio, for example? Rush makes one of his “feminazi” jokes, and she throws up and blacks out.

When she then plows into a busload of innocent children, the blood will be on Rush’s hands, obviously. Still, that doesn’t help The Children.

Source: Should Nancy Hopkins be driving?

Also? Just because you don’t like something doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

Mistake #12: “What are you smoking and where can I get some?”

This was funny the first 5,000 times we heard it, but it’s getting old. More importantly, it’s irrelevant. I don’t use illegal substances, but even if my bloodstream were a cocktail of half the things Americans can be arrested for using, I might still be right.

Mistake #13: “Just because I’m wrong about the trivial details doesn’t mean that there were no Battles To Be Fought for women’s rights.”

Vague, sweeping assertions are not a viable argument. Those “trivial details” you can’t be bothered with are. If you don’t have any concrete facts, your rhetoric is just that.

So what kind of arguments will MRAs listen to?

We like facts. Go looking for dates, names, legislation, documentation, and statistics. Find a scientific study, if you can, that indicates that women might in some field have the potential to be equal to men. Find statistics showing that society has become better in some way since women’s privilege, er I mean feminism, took root. Of course, you’re at a disadvantage here, since all of the facts show that women are innately inferior, that women of superior achievement will always be in the minority, and that women’s liberation leads to all sorts of social pathologies – rampant divorce, child abuse, inflation, eating disorders, and a general lowering of standards so that women can keep up. But if you hope to change our minds, you’ll have to try to find some facts that support your case instead of ours. Good luck!

What has feminism ever done for men?

noreply@blogger.com (Heretic) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 20:05:00 +0000

The F-word
Written by Tuval Dinner
Tuesday, September 29 2009 18:35

"Last week I was hanging out downtown with my baby when a group of young women approached me and asked if they could interview me for a class assignment. First they asked me what my definition of feminism* is and then they followed up with a whole series of questions relating to feminism. The whole thing caught me off guard; I usually don't hear the word feminism in public nevermind being probed on the subject by a group of strangers. But their final question was the most surprising and interesting of all. They asked me, "what has feminism done for you?"

My immediate reaction was to say that feminism is the reason the government allows me to take paid time off of work to be with my newborn son (in Canada men can take parental leave). I didn't get past that comment before the students were off and searching for the next stranger to interview. But the question really stuck with me and I've been thinking a lot about what feminism has done for me and for men in general.

Usually, when people talk about feminism in relation to men it is in a very negative way. There are organizations (particularly in the USA) of men and women dedicated to the opposition of feminism and its perceived negative impact on society. In my mind feminism has only had positive impacts on my life. To me gender equity is a win-win scenario not one in which men lose and women win.

I would love to hear from men what they think feminism has done for them..."

Please write and tell him.

A Deafening Silence

noreply@blogger.com (Heretic) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 09:12:00 +0000

Dear Anna

Have you reached a conclusion about the issues I raised in my email of 9th October?

Is it acceptable for there to be a ratio of 3.3 female teachers to each male teacher? The attached link makes it clear that the Electoral Reform Society and the NAS / UWT consider an inequality of 5:1 unacceptable and worthy of protest.

http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/downloads/wpe24.pdf

Where does the tipping point lie? At a ratio of 4.1:1?

Regards

Peter Blades

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: pbla927
Date: Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 6:27 PM
Subject: Fwd: FW: Under-representation of men in primary school teaching
To: Anna Banton , Glenn Sacks

Dear Anna

Have you had any luck finding the answers to the queries in my previous email?

regards

Peter Blades

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: pbla927
Date: Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 7:19 PM
Subject: Re: FW: Under-representation of men in primary school teaching
To: Anna Banton
Cc: Glenn Sacks

Dear Ms. Banton

Thank you for your reply to my recent request. I have looked at the spreadsheet provided and have a few more follow up questions.

I see that the gender ratio of teachers employed is 3.32 Female to 1 Male for 1997-98 and 3.31 Female to 1 Male for 2007-08. Given these figures would you say that the efforts to bridge the gender gap in teaching recruitment have been successful?

As I understand it, these figures show the gender ratios for teachers across all pupil age groups. Are there no figures available at all for the gender ratios for teachers teaching 4-10 year olds or 4-7 year olds where;

a) the teacher's influence over the child's lifelong psychology, and consequently
b) the need for positive gender role models

...are the greatest? Surely a 3:1 gender disparity between female and male teachers in all pupil age groups can only place young men at a consistent disadvantage in the learning environment (given Harriet Harman's conviction that gender balanced groups make for better judgements). This might provide answers as to why young men are being consistently out-performed academically by young women in later school years.

If no such figures are available would it be a good idea to conduct more research? All that would be required would be a simple email poll amongst teachers with an email address, asking the recipient for their gender and the age group they teach (this would not generate any data protection issues as the respondents would not be providing information that could be used to identify them personally). Even a 10% response rate would provide a representative sample. Having spent £92,000 in the calendar years 2005-2009 on targeted recruitment, the results of this poll might help concentrate efforts more effectively towards the pupil age groups where the gender disparity is the greatest, and provide more specific answers as to why the money spent has not influenced the gender ratio over the 10 year timescale shown in the spreadsheet.

Many thanks for your help so far

Peter Blades

On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 4:51 PM, Anna Banton wrote:
Dear Mr Blades,

Thank you for your e-mail of 8 August 2009 to Harriet Harman regarding the under-representation of men primary school teachers. Your letter has been passed to me for reply. I am very sorry for the delay in responding to you.

In April 2009 we published the new Equality Bill. The Bill will expand the way positive action can be used so that employers can pick someone for a job from an underrepresented group when they have the choice between two or more candidates who are equally suitable, provided they do not have a general policy of doing so in every case. Positive action allows employers to make their workforces more diverse if they want to.

An example of where positive action can be used is to redress the imbalance of men primary school teachers. This example has been used by Vera Baird QC MP in media interviews.

Please note the Bill will not allow positive discrimination, which will remain unlawful.

Turning to your request for statistics, the data available which we can provide is based on an overall number of entrants by gender to full and part-time regular teaching service in local authority maintained sector schools for each year 1997-1998 to 2007-2008, on a March to March basis and not June to May (see table in sheet 1 of the attached spreadsheet).

The table does not show the number of contracts commenced each year as requested, but just the number of individuals who were in service at the end of the year who were not at the start. These are not the number of recruits either as some of them will have been in service before. These are entrants to regular service (i.e. excluding occasional teachers with short or no contract) and cover those with qualified teacher status (QTS) only. Where a teacher was previously teaching but did not have QTS, but then attained it, they are counted as an entrant. Where a teacher was teaching outside of the English local authority maintained sector and moved to within it, they are also counted.

The table in sheet 2 of the attached spreadsheet, provided by the Training and Development Agency for Schools (TDA), represents funds spent on advertising for ‘men into primary’ which is only available from 2005 to the present day.

The TDA has done a lot to attract men to train to be primary teachers - with more male centred recruitment campaigns, stressing the financial rewards and career development prospects, and taster courses.

I hope this is of assistance.

Kind regards
Anna Banton

From: Peter Blades [mailto:pbla927@googlemail.com]
Sent: 08 August 2009 01:01
To: HARMAN, Harriet
Cc: glenn@glennsacks.com
Subject: Under-representation of men in primary school teaching

Ms. Harman

In a recent interview quoted at:

http://www.theherald.co.uk/news/news/display.var.2523671.0.harman_blames_men_for_the_credit_crunch.php

...it was reported that you said:

"I didn't actually say you can't trust men, I basically said you get better decision making in a team if it's a balanced team with women and men working alongside each other," she said.

I appreciate that you are not in a position to influence what was reported on this website, and that the comment was made in the context of a gender disparity in recruitment to posts in the City of London.

Did the website report your comments accurately?

Can you direct me towards a public record of any statement you have made on the under-representation of men as teachers in primary schools?

I would like you to provide me with a report showing a count of;

a) the number of women and
b) the number of men

...who began a contract to teach children aged between 4 and 10 years in fully state-funded schools between the dates 01/06/1997 and 01/06/2008. I would like the report to show a sub-total of the number of men and the number of women recruited in each year (contract start dates 1st June to 31st May) within this date range.

Next to each yearly sub-total I would like you to show the government spend (in pounds) allocated in that year (calendar year or 1st June to 31st May - whichever best represents your view of the efforts made) on advertising aimed at attracting the gender that is less well represented (in terms of members recruited in that year) into the profession.

Bearing in mind the standard checks made on prospective primary school teachers, and the nature of the data they are required to provide, you will be aware that the information I am asking for is held centrally and can be provided without disproportionate cost. The advertising figures can be rounded to the nearest £10,000. If no advertising effort has been made to target the under-represented gender in a specific recruitment year please give a brief description of why (next to each sub-total), and the name and contact details of the officer responsible for making this decision.

I have made this request on 08/08/2009 and - given your position - I feel I need not remind you of your obligations under the Freedom of Information Act 2000.
Peter Blades

The Sexual Harrassment Culture

noreply@blogger.com (Heretic) — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 13:35:00 +0000

The real agenda is actually heterophobia.

The Bogus Figures on Trafficking

noreply@blogger.com (Heretic) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 11:56:00 +0000

I came across this excellent article examining the UK government's own bogus statistics on sex trafficking.

The Home Office report is based on such flawed methods as to be worse than useless, most of the figures are fabricated. While the authors use an apologetic tone and many caveats to excuse the poor data and high margins of error, Ministers, MPs and prohibitionists have seized upon figures as if they’re based on reality.

It makes me wonder if Harriet can read and write. It is beyond parody. It is like “Carry on Criminology”. If it wasn’t so tragic that women’s lives and savings are raided as a result of it, the poor methods would be funny.

Female Violence on the Increase. Feminist Movement says Nothing

noreply@blogger.com (Heretic) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 08:27:00 +0000

Drunk and baying like dogs, five women brutally attack a stranger in the street.

The women - all from the same family - targeted Matthew Campbell, 38, at random, kicking and stamping on him as he lay prone on the pavement.

Their sickening eight-minute assault was captured on CCTV and resulted in all the women being jailed for six months.

Mr Campbell, a commercial diver, told yesterday how he restrained himself from hitting back because he has never struck a woman before.

Reference

Why don't feminists have anything to say about this sort of incident? Especially on the influence of evil Patriarchal-Capitalist ideology, which prevented the victim from defending himself because he doesn't believe in hitting women? How does this square with feminist claims about male violence against women?

Your next moral panic will be along shortly. Thank you for your patience.

noreply@blogger.com (Heretic) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 12:01:00 +0000

Now that the sex-trafficking farce has finally been exposed as the charade that it so obviously was, I wonder what new moral panic we are going to be treated to next. My favourite has still got to be the one about the suburban paedophile rings run by gangs of devil-worshippers. That really is hard to beat for sheer absurdity.

Still, I'm sure the feminists will think of something...

Prostitution and trafficking – the anatomy of a moral panic

noreply@blogger.com (Heretic) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 06:26:00 +0000

There is something familiar about the tide of misinformation which has swept through the subject of sex trafficking in the UK: it flows through exactly the same channels as the now notorious torrent about Saddam Hussein's weapons.

In the story of UK sex trafficking, the conclusions of academics who study the sex trade have been subjected to the same treatment as the restrained reports of intelligence analysts who studied Iraqi weapons – stripped of caution, stretched to their most alarming possible meaning and tossed into the public domain. There, they have been picked up by the media who have stretched them even further in stories which have then been treated as reliable sources by politicians, who in turn provided quotes for more misleading stories.

In both cases, the cycle has been driven by political opportunists and interest groups in pursuit of an agenda. In the case of sex trafficking, the role of the neo-conservatives and Iraqi exiles has been played by an unlikely union of evangelical Christians with feminist campaigners, who pursued the trafficking tale to secure their greater goal, not of regime change, but of legal change to abolish all prostitution. The sex trafficking story is a model of misinformation. It began to take shape in the mid 1990s, when the collapse of economies in the old Warsaw Pact countries saw the working flats of London flooded with young women from eastern Europe. Soon, there were rumours and media reports that attached a new word to these women. They had been "trafficked".

The Guardian

Inquiry fails to find single trafficker who forced anybody into prostitution

noreply@blogger.com (Heretic) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 06:13:00 +0000

The UK's biggest ever investigation of sex trafficking failed to find a single person who had forced anybody into prostitution in spite of hundreds of raids on sex workers in a six-month campaign by government departments, specialist agencies and every police force in the country.

The failure has been disclosed by a Guardian investigation which also suggests that the scale of and nature of sex trafficking into the UK has been exaggerated by politicians and media.

Current and former ministers have claimed that thousands of women have been imported into the UK and forced to work as sex slaves, but most of these statements were either based on distortions of quoted sources or fabrications without any source at all.

The Guardian

There you have it, straight from the horse's mouth. I have been saying the same thing for years.

Why Ideologies hate the family

noreply@blogger.com (Heretic) — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 10:41:00 +0000

Nick Cohen, in his book What’s Left? argued that the family is always a threat to any ideology. If you come home and say “I joined the Communist Party today”, it will be your mum or your dad or your granny who will say “Don’t be daft. Your dinner’s on the table”. The family represents an alternative power bloc to the ideology, an alternative demand on one’s loyalty, an alternative source of values, an alternative, and much more psychologically compelling, source of personal identity.

It is for this reason that religious cults often demand that members break off all contact with their families. One’s family often represents a source of support, a grounding in reality, and the ideology, the Cult or Party, rightly sees this as a threat. Any ideology which demands total unquestioning obedience will soon force you to abandon your family. Firstly, on the grounds that a man cannot serve two masters. Secondly, as a test of your loyalty.

Michael Portillo recently said in an interview that in his experience, governments always exceed their powers. It is a basic fact of political science that bureaucracies will always try to extend their remit, increase their power and their budgets.

It has been said that the State has no power over honest men. The only thing that the State can do is to punish criminals. As long as you remain inside your own house, the State cannot touch you. There are always some elements within any State which do not like this fact. Private life constitutes a no-go area, off limits to State power.

When cultish ideologies manage to get themselves into power, the family is always one of their first targets. If private life represents a threat to their infinitely-ambitious quest for power, by attacking the family, they can attack and undermine private life. They generally do this by attacking the soft underbelly of the family. Children and women.

In the twentieth Century, the Nazis and the Communists both encouraged children to report their parents to the authorities for ideological thought crimes such as criticising the regime. Teachers were recruited for this purpose, to encourage the children to write diaries describing their home lives. If a child wrote down “My daddy says that Mr Hitler is wrong”, or something similar, it would be acted upon. Russia and China operated similar tactics.

Mao Tse Tung encouraged teenage ‘Red Guards’ to terrorise the population during the Cultural Revolution. I met one middle-aged former Red Guard, now resident in the USA, who described how as teenagers, a group of them would stand on street corners, surveying the passers-by. They had the power to pull anyone aside that they wanted. “If we saw a woman with a pony-tail”, he told me, “we could just take her to one side and cut it off”. He also described to me how they used to beat prisoners to death with rubber hoses.

Hard-line Maoists in China thought that their policies had failed because they had not tried hard enough. They decided to use the small neighbouring country of Cambodia as a laboratory in order to have another try. The resulting Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia had similar policies, using children to pick out individuals who looked in some way different, who would then be summarily executed or tortured to death. They also used children as prison guards, and encouraged them to incriminate their parents.

The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia used to force 12 year olds to execute their own parents as a test of loyalty to the Party.

In the West since 1965, the target of Marxist agitation in the family has not been children, but women. Feminists have exploited issues such as domestic violence, rape and child abuse in order to prise open the family. By massively exaggerating the scale of these problems, and wrongly blaming them all on men, they have exploited women’s fears in order to win converts to their cult.

The feminist movement, and the paedophile panic, are just the latest in a long series of instruments used by socialist and totalitarian political interests to attack the family. The family itself is what these political interest groups find threatening.

Rebel Scout leaders sacked after refusing to let in girls

noreply@blogger.com (Heretic) — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 13:30:00 +0000

Andy Bates, Linda Faux and Philip Martin and six assistants were dismissed by Bedfordshire’s Scouting chiefs for excluding girls in contravention of the rule that became mandatory in January 2007.

Dismayed by the decision, parents and children have begged district commissioner Kam Patel to allow them to stay on.

They made their feelings clear at a recent meeting.

Mr Bates, 45, said: ‘To say the meeting was explosive would be an understatement. There was so much passion in that room.

‘Boys mix with girls at school and at home and there’s a demand for somewhere where they can just be with boys.

But parents of the group’s members continue to oppose the sackings. One, David Troughton, said: ‘The first we heard of it was that all the leaders had been replaced. There’s a lot of bad feeling and resentment, they’ve had no right of appeal.

‘Together the leaders have given 60 years’ service and have worked very hard to make the group successful. I feel they have been extremely badly treated and I know other parents feel the same way.’

The Girl Guides remains an organisation for girls only.

Reference

Do you ever feel unsafe at night walking the urban streets of Britain? Maybe, to get to your local shop, you have to walk past a gang of hoodies playing with their bit-bull terrier. Maybe they come and sit on your garden wall and drink in the evening. Maybe you feel as if violence is only a glance away.

Increasingly, gangs of dyfunctional, alienated and maladjusted teenage boys dominate the streets, barely educated, kicking their heels with nothing to do. The social structures which traditionally socialised them and gave them a sense of identity and safety, have been systematically stripped away. The Scouts organisation was founded precisely to give such under-employed waifs something constructive to do. But it has now been taken away. There is no longer any boys' organisation they can turn to. It is not politically correct. The feminists wouldn't like it.

As long as males continue to be driven to the margins of society, and have their identities denied, their development sabotaged, their interests stifled, society will continue to become more and more violent and dysfunctional. Yet the situation will never improve until the feminist ideological one-party state is challenged head-on.

The ‘Progressive’ Education Revolution

noreply@blogger.com (Heretic) — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 05:59:00 +0000

“You might think nowadays that there had been some great discovery in the field of education in the 1930s and 1940s, a discovery which somehow led all teachers to the conclusion that rigour in exams, selection and discipline were counter-productive. No such discovery was made, yet the educational experts were convinced, by the early 1960s, that all of these things had to go. Why, if not for educational reasons?

If you look now at prophetic documents of the comprehensive revolution, such as Margaret (Postgate) Cole’s pamphlet ‘What is a Comprehensive School?’…what she is really concerned about is actually nothing to do with education, and all to do with class and society…Her real purpose is revealed in bold type: ‘We believe strongly that in a modern democratic community, it is important, both socially and educationally, that children of all types shall learn to live with one another in youth’…Seldom has the comprehensive ideal’s real purpose, a revolutionary social one, been so neatly and combatively set out. Now, after more than half a century of experience, its supporters would be hard put to deny that its Tory critics saw the future far more clearly than they did. And yet, interestingly enough, there has been no retreat from the comprehensive fetish in any significant part of the education industry.

Further evidence of the political, anti-hierarchy attitudes behind education reform can be found in the tragic Plowden report of 1967, which gave its blessing to self-styled ‘progressive’ methods in the primary schools…In the years since Bridget Plowden’s report encouraged the spread of discovery learning, and began a bonfire of old-fashioned desks and blackboards, children in this country have changed completely. Many cannot read, write or count. Many more can only do these things badly. Standards of behaviour, of self-control, of ability to respond to authority, or concentrate on any task, have sunk.

It is painful now to read Plowden’s soppy, Pollyanna words. She and her committee, just like Margaret Cole, had a purpose that they believed was more important than education. After all, there was nothing really wrong with the nation’s primary schools when her committee began their work, except in the small minority which had already adopted progressive methods. As Plowden herself says: ‘English primary education has long had a high reputation. We heard repeatedly that English infant schools are the admiration of the world.’ Who could say that now?

‘…We believe however, that the primary schools, as in so much else, should lead [my italics] public opinion, rather than follow it.

This is the joy of being a progressive. Whenever your views are rejected by experience, common sense and tradition, it is because you are ahead of the rest of the population, never because you are eccentric or wrong or just plain arrogant, or because they are not convinced by your arguments.

In the Economist of 20 June 1998, the magazine’s education correspondent recalls: One day almost 30 years ago, when the Economist’s education correspondent was a primary school pupil, he walked into his classroom to find that it had changed. Instead of facing the front in rows, the desks had been bunched together in groups. From then on, the teacher spent less time talking to the whole class, and pupils spent more time, alone or in groups, pursuing projects such as ‘communication through the ages’ at their own pace”. The Abolition of Britain, Peter Hitchens.

Fifty years or so later, the consequences are abundantly, disastrously, clear.

…the concept of sitting pupils in rows of desks facing the teacher is widely considered too didactic. Now, most primary schoolchildren sit at tables scattered about the classroom, as I saw for myself when I sat in on one class for a week in the East End of London.

On my table, the three children giggled, kicked each other and chatted. Their attention lay on what was immediately in front of them: themselves. Somewhere on the periphery of our vision, the teacher walked about, struggling to keep order. Somewhere else, behind our heads, hung a white board with work upon it, gleefully ignored by my table.

When I blamed the children's poor discipline and concentration on the layout, the teacher looked at me with horror.

'The pupils are working together, directing their own learning,' she said emphatically.

The educational establishment emphasises what ought to work; it doesn't investigate or accept the evidence of what actually works.

As one science teacher in the East End told me: 'I'm instructed to put into place initiatives for which there's no educational evidence whatsoever.'

Another complained: 'Education is an evangelical movement - evidence has nothing to do with it.'

Children are now expected, for example, to be 'independent learners' in charge of their own education. ('Why do teachers keep asking me what I want to learn? How am I supposed to know?' one boy asked me in exasperation.)

This approach has a disastrous effect on the academic achievement of boys from poor backgrounds. Yet faced with a pupil who's incapable of directing his own learning, teachers and psychologists question what's wrong with the child, not what's wrong with the teaching.

The school regulator, Ofsted, has proved remarkably toothless - indeed, two of its own inspectors are so disillusioned that they risked their jobs to talk to me. Instead of concentrating on the basics, they said, they have to check that schools are complying with the latest educational ideology and Government initiative.

Both inspectors have been shocked by the low standard of writing, even in good schools - which one of them blamed squarely on poor marking (never to be done in red ink).

Many teachers, they noted, had stopped correcting children's grammar, spelling and speech at all, for fear of discouraging them.

In any case, the inspector continued, teachers at some of the schools she visits are poor at spelling and grammar themselves. Examining the work of one form, she found the teacher had made numerous spelling mistakes and marked one essay with the comment: 'You need more stuff.' Reference

School-teaching has for many years been the profession of last resort for the academic loser. What high-flying graduate becomes a school teacher nowadays, if they have any alternative? It is only third-class academic trash who end up as teachers now, because the profession is so devalued that no-one else wants to do it. The other major group is young women who ‘want to work with children’, and have little regard for academia. Most of the men have been driven out by an organised campaign of hysteria over largely-imaginary paedophiles. The very profession charged with promoting academic values among the young can itself only recruit from the academic dregs.

More than half of primary teachers 'are unable to name three poets' Reference

The Government, as we constantly hear, is on a mission to improve our schools. How? Well, this year, the emphasis is on promoting healthy eating and 'community cohesion'. Indeed, every single school I visited had material on these two topics prominently displayed on their noticeboards. What a pity that some of their pupils were unable to read it.

One of the inspectors told me: 'I spend more time looking in children's lunchboxes than testing their literacy.' Someone, she said despairingly, needs to make children sit down, work hard and learn to concentrate.

Bright boys from chaotic backgrounds are almost totally dependent on their teachers for that first step to a different life. Yet, shockingly, some teachers saw their educational and social status not as a cause of inspiration to their pupils, but of shame.

'My main focus is not to offend my pupils,' said one. 'I don't want to push my middle-class values on them.'

What perversity possesses the minds of these sad mediocrities? Despite their stated reluctance to impose their middle-class values on to the children by teaching them to spell, that is exactly what they are doing, by imposing every passing middle-class ideological fad, regardless of the total lack of evidence. Healthy eating? Community cohesion? It doesn’t stop there.

I've accidentally stumbled upon a vast empire of pseudoscience being peddled in hundreds of state schools up and down the country. I'll lower you in gently. It's called Brain Gym, and it's a string of very complicated exercises for kids to do which "enhance the experience of whole brain learning". Firstly, they're very keen on water. "Drink a glass of water before Brain Gym activities. As it is a major component of blood, water is vital for transporting oxygen to the brain." Heaven forbid that your blood should dry out.
Reference

The whole ‘progressive education’ movement is itself nothing but a middle-class Left-wing fad, and it is being foisted onto working-class parents and children whether they like it or not, with catastrophic consequences.

The peculiar Left-wing fetish that all authority is always tyrannical, has led teachers to deny their own authority in the classroom. Yet children need authority. The power vacuum left by ineffectual adults gives rise to gang violence. If children feel that adults will not protect them, then they have to protect themselves.

Cecil and Nathan, both aged 13, told me that, at their inner-city London comprehensive, they were usually either afraid or on edge.

When bigger boys arrive at school with knives, they aren't searched.

When boys fight, 'the teachers just wait and watch,' they said. 'They don't intervene because they don't really care about us.'

The majority of the teachers at this school are women - a quarter of them quite young and scared, according to Cecil and Nathan. One teacher had been beaten up and another stalked by pupils.

Even the male teachers offered little safety. Nathan and Cecil recalled an older boy walking into their class and punching another in the face. 'There was blood everywhere.'

The male teacher, fearful of disciplinary action if he touched the assailant, told three of the bigger boys to pull him off.

In the topsy-turvy world of the state-school system, it's obviously quite all right to use 13-year-olds to break up a fight.

At Cecil and Nathan's comprehensive, where there is no after-school sport, there are regular fights between boys from rival schools and gangs.

All three boys said the police were rarely called - and then usually only the day after a fight. 'The teachers are scared,' said David with contempt.

Shockingly, both these inner-city schools were passed as 'satisfactory' in their last Ofsted inspection reports.

In fact, Ofsted has branded nearly half the schools in the country 'satisfactory' or worse - so the scale of the problem is clear.

Last year, classroom disruption was running at record levels, with schools sending home 2,200 children every day.

More than 200,000 were expelled or suspended the year before for violent, threatening or aggressive behaviour directed at teachers or other pupils.

It is, of course, extremely hard to learn - or teach - in this kind of environment.

Tuggy Tug said he hardly bothered to turn up at school any more. 'The teachers don't even try - they only care about the wage at the end of the year,' he said dismissively.
'You can sit on the desk with your shoes off, your socks hanging out, on the phone, doin' your ting [drug dealing] and the teachers won't give a toss.'

Too many schools are displaying a similar indifference to the wellbeing of their pupils.

As well as failing to teach them how to read and write properly, they are failing to protect boys from low-income families, to socialise them and to open up the world to the brightest.

The result is that more and more of these boys are joining violent gangs - and they are likely to remain in them. After all, as Mash remarked, what are they qualified for other than 'drug dealing and robbing'?

It is not hard to give teenage boys what they need to grow into successful men. It's not hard to steer them away from crime. The worst crime of all is that we are turning large numbers of potentially decent young men into misfits and criminals.

The link between illiteracy and delinquency is beyond doubt: when 14-year-old boys such as Darren and his friends can no longer keep up in class, they misbehave and often drop out.

‘A black car mechanic in his 50s, from Brixton, told me: 'Back in the Caribbean, we were taught the three Rs, but that's gone out of the window. After that, everything breaks down.'

This was certainly true of the dozens of teenagers I met.

By 14, the majority of them were involved in crime and drugs - turning up to school only to sell drugs or stolen goods. For them, illiteracy had already turned into a life sentence on the edges of society.

Call centres, and other service sector jobs, demand personal and social skills that are alien to most of the boys I met.

Unlike their middle-class counterparts, they have never been taught the basics, such as shaking hands, speaking clearly or looking a grown-up in the eye.

One teacher in a London inner- city school told me he considered this 'a massively serious issue'. He went on: 'I have really gifted black boys who can't communicate. You see them struggling. It's quite often the reason they get really upset and frustrated.' Yet he thought it ' patronising' to try to correct them.

Despite the Government's Literacy Hour and a massive increase in spending on schools, a third of all 14-year-olds have a reading age of 11 or below. One in five has a reading age of nine.

This is an extraordinarily high level of failure. After all, learning to read is a routine business managed by countries a lot poorer than ours. Cuba, Estonia, Poland and Barbados, for example, all boast higher literacy rates than ours, despite spending far less on education.

We wouldn't accept it if one in three everyday hospital operations ended in failure - so why do we accept it in our schools?

Certainly, for the majority of the boys I interviewed, school was part of the problem and not the solution. Most, such as Darren and his friends, hadn't been taught to read and write properly at primary school and were at best semi-literate.

For such boys, their lives are all but finished before they have really begun. The effect on society is devastating, too: feral gangs roam our streets and many people are scared to leave their homes. How has this been allowed to happen? Reference

Last week, I took part in a discussion on Woman's Hour with Christine Blower of the National Union of Teachers and with the deputy head of a former sink school. Ms Blower seemed anxious to play down the problems her members face, but she did accept that teaching is the second most stressful job in the country.

In an extraordinary admission of defeat, Ms Blower said she didn't think teaching should be seen any longer as a career for life. In other words, like a tour of duty in Afghanistan, teachers can take their life in their hands for a few years in the war zone that is modern state education.

The deputy head, meanwhile, talked about turning round an inner London school. And how had this miracle been achieved? Oh, by insisting pupils wore uniform and sending them home if they didn't. By the formidable headmaster standing at the local station and eyeballing any pupils who dared to be uncivil. By laying down rules and - now here's a radical idea - punishing those who broke them.

This new approach is called 'modern strict'. It sounds suspiciously like 'old strict'. That was a pedagogic approach that worked pretty well in our schools for, ooh, about 430 years, until the educational establishment opted for the view that children, not teachers, know best. Reference

Sir Terry Leahy, Tesco's chief executive and a member of Gordon Brown's Business Council For Britain, put it bluntly: 'Too many children have been leaving school after 11 or 13 years of compulsory education without the basic skills to get on in life and hold down a job.'
Reference

The Confederation of British Industry recently identified 'serious failings' in school leavers' ability.

It is also claimed that some companies have had to give teenagers remedial English and maths lessons because they have such a poor grasp of the three Rs.

The problem extends into university life too. One of my friends is a university lecturer. He recently told me that in the average batch of first-year assignments, one third of them are written in sms txt msg language. Cn u biliv it? One third of university entrants can only write text messages. That is deeply shocking. But that is what our dumbed-down, socialist-feminist education system is now producing.

One CBI study found that 52 per cent of employers are dissatisfied with the basic literacy of school leavers and 50 per cent with their basic numeracy.

A similar amount said some teenagers are 'unable to function in the workplace', claiming they cannot make simple calculations in their heads, speak in an articulate manner or understand written instructions. Reference

(Business leaders) believed a lack of basic skills amongst school leavers and new graduates will contribute to a significant fall in the country's competitiveness. Reference

The Left care nothing for national sovereignty or competitiveness. Our country will be less competitive? Isn’t that a good thing?

The fact that these Left-wing activists choose to call themselves ‘progressive’ and ‘liberal’ is deeply misleading, because the naming tends to forestall criticism, no doubt deliberately; who wants to be thought illiberal, or opposed to progress? However this is a ruse which must be exposed and its sting removed. The fact is that these people are neither progressive nor liberal. Destroying something that works perfectly well is not progress. Foisting irrational policies onto a population which does not want them is not liberal; it is exactly the reverse.

The post-1968, feminist-dominated, middle-class political Left has brought the education system to its knees. There are signs that the new incoming administration will tackle the problem head-on.

“We should applaud the Tories’ schools spokesman Michael Gove, whose passionate performance at last week’s Tory party conference suggested that at long last here was a politician who does understand not simply that education standards and expectations are shockingly low, but why.

...he showed that he also understood and was prepared to tackle many of the warped cultural assumptions that were causing so many schools to fail.

This entails, as he suggested, nothing less than taking on the entire education establishment.

Gove intends to break the power of university-based teacher training courses, which fill prospective teachers’ heads with ideological mumbojumbo, by expanding the Teach First scheme, which recruits the highest performing graduates into teaching.
In a further inspired move, he proposes developing a Troops to Teachers programme, to get Army professionals into the classroom, where they can provide discipline and leadership.

Gove has understood that the root of the problem lies in a bunch of destructive and positively anti-education ideas which — astoundingly — have become the entrenched orthodoxy in the education world.

Unless the power of this establishment is broken and its ideology defeated, there is no possibility of any meaningful reform. Reference

Even if Cameron’s government does a spectacularly good job, it will take at least a generation for our nation to recover from the effects of the educational disaster engineered by the feminist-dominated Left.

Baroness Deech calls for Divorce Reform

noreply@blogger.com (Heretic) — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 04:53:00 +0000

Marrying a rich man is not an alternative to getting a career, barrister tells women

Women should not be able to marry men for their money as an alternative to a career, a leading family law expert said yesterday.

Baroness Deech said women should expect to work and that the law should be changed to prevent them living in comfort for life after a short marriage to a wealthy man.

She called for pre-nuptial agreements, which allow couples to plan before they marry what will happen to their children and assets if they divorce, to be made legally binding.

She said divorce laws as they stand signal that 'getting married to a well-off man is an alternative career to one in the workforce'.

She has also warned that over-generosity to divorcing women has made England the divorce capital of the world.

Reference

Cartoon

noreply@blogger.com (Heretic) — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 08:52:00 +0000

Another gem from XKCD

Shocking Female Child Abuse Video

noreply@blogger.com (Heretic) — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 06:52:00 +0000

Login to Facebook to watch this edifying spectacle of a female child-carer in a room full of toddlers. She doesn't realise that she is on camera, as she seriously assaults a young child. She seems disturbingly calm about it, as if she's bored.

A few recent interesting stories

noreply@blogger.com (Heretic) — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 06:25:00 +0000

Ginger schoolboy 'begged mother to dye his hair to avoid bullying by female teacher'

Why I loathe feminism... and believe it will ultimately destroy the family

Candid Camera pranks smoke out US liberals

'Castrated Vikings' row hits Sweden

A dopey judge, a lesbian teacher and an insidious bid to lower the age of consent

Sickening footage of bully beating up schoolgirl, 14, is captured on mobile phone and posted on Facebook

Woman teacher exposed as 'predatory paedophile' who sexually abused young children she followed into public toilets

Pictured: Second woman charged over nursery 'child porn' probe

Sugar and Spice and All Things Nice

noreply@blogger.com (Heretic) — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 08:02:00 +0000

A 15 year old girl was driven to suicide after being bullied by other girls. She killed herself by jumping off a bridge onto a motorway, and she was hit by traffic. Reference

It was revealed that Holly, who went to £11,600-a-year St Edward’s School in Charlton Kings, Gloucestershire, had suffered months, if not years, of cyber-bullying.

A friend, Chloe Davis, 16, said Holly had moved to the fee-paying Catholic school in the past year to escape her tormentors.

She added: ‘Holly was nice and had the biggest smile in the world. She always did well at school but the other girls used to pick on her. She didn’t have any confidence, that was the problem.

Girls used to gang up on her and call her names and she didn’t have anything to say back. She just froze up. They used to leave comments on her Facebook wall, calling her names. They’ve probably all deleted them now.’

Chloe added: ‘I heard that the girls who bullied her at her old school told their friends at her new school to bully her as well and so it just kept on and on.

How to get men back into the classroom

noreply@blogger.com (Heretic) — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 14:51:00 +0000

In surveys, men report that they do not enter the teaching profession because

It does not pay enough.
They are concerned about facing false accusations of child abuse.

These problems are easily solved with a bit of political will.

First of all, let's deal with the paedophile panic.

Teachers accused of child molestation will be granted anonymity until a verdict is reached. Cases have to be dealt with quickly, within say, two months. The teacher will be suspended on full pay until the verdict is reached. Falsely accused teachers will be reinstated at once, and their name will never appear in the media.

Children who are found to be making malicious false accusations against teachers will be dealt with extremely harshly, as will their parents also. Both the child and the parents will face possible fines, incarceration, unpaid community work and then social services intervention in the family. The child will not face exclusion from education, only transfer to a harsher regime. Once there is no more incentive to make false accusations, these will stop.

Secondly, money. How can we attract more men to become teachers? Simple. Use market forces. I work in the private sector. If you want to hire a project manager, and no-one applies for the job, increase your offer until someone applies.

If there are too many women teachers and not enough men, the answer is simple. Pay men more than women. Let's say we pay male teachers 35% more than female ones, until further notice. That should do it.

How did it come to this?

noreply@blogger.com (Heretic) — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 12:28:00 +0000

A friend of mine told me recently "I would almost like to see a feminist government. Put Harman in charge of the country for 10 years and let's see what happens. But let's emigrate first", he laughed.

In fact, it looks to me as if that experiment has already been done. The New Left have been in charge of the country now for 12 years. It is difficult to understand how a more catastrophic set of outcomes could have been arrived at. Are they criminally incompetent, or are they actually on a mission to destroy the country? It seems there is some of each.

The former Home Office entry clearance officer Steve Moxon, in his book 'The Great Immigration Scandal', reveals that New Labour, in its first term, actually set out to destroy the character of traditional British national identity, and used unrestricted mass immigration as an instrument to achieve this. Destroying British national identity was actually government policy. If Moxon's claim is correct, then that is deeply shocking, almost treasonable.

Be that as it may, there has certainly been a large measure of incompetence at work too. Estelle Morris famously resigned as Education Secretary, admitting that she was not up to the job. If only the rest of them were as honest as her.

Whether cock-up or conspiracy, the fact is that men, and poor men in particular, have been adversely affected by a collection of social, political and economic forces in the last three decades amounting almost to a perfect storm. These can be summarised under four basic headings:

1 The collapse of the family.
The collapse of the family was largely engineered by the feminist-led New Left, after 1968. I have discussed this in more detail elsewhere.

Briefly, the Left has regarded the family as oppressive to women, and as politically subversive, since at least the 1840s, when Marx's collaborator Engels wrote 'The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State'.

The 1960s saw the industrialisation of the service sector, leading to the advent of many new safe, female-friendly jobs, at the same time as the advent of the pill and legal abortion. Rising working class wages and the new consumer boom meant that for the first time, women were freed from their traditional duties of housework and childcare, and there were jobs for them to go to, which, thanks to mass education, they were able to do. This led to a new independence for Western women, which was of course a good thing.

The feminist movement was not the cause of these changes. The pill, mass education and the rise of the service sector had more to do with it. The feminist movement was a response to these radically changed circumstances. However, ideological movements being what they are, the feminist movement claimed responsibility. As Orwell said in 1984, after the Revolution, the Party rewrote history to claim that it had invented the helicopter, the machine gun, the train and so on. We are simply seeing the same thing here. Women were dislodged from their traditional roles by these far-reaching changes, and sought a way of making sense of what was going on around them. The resurgent feminist movement was a consequence of these changes, not the cause of them.

Unfortunately, the feminist movement embraced a whole set of bad ideas. Marxism. Psychoanalysis. That was perhaps pretty much all that there was available at the time. The feminist movement started claiming that the reason their grandmothers had not enjoyed the same benefits that they themselves enjoyed was that their grandmothers had been living under the oppressive yoke of male tyranny. In fact, the opposite was the case. The technical advances which had liberated women by 1970 were designed and built by men, as usual. Instead of admitting this, the feminist movement claimed that it had wrested freedom by force from the savage jaws of Patriarchy. This was utter nonsense, but women do like a feel-good story. They turned back to Engels, and decided that the family was the source of their 'oppression'.

It was then that people like Germaine Greer started preaching 'divorce as revolution'. Married women were encouraged to abandon their husbands and get divorced. Single women were encouraged not to get married, not to have children, not to form traditional families, and preferably to become lesbians. With feminists increasingly penetrating the institutions of government, changes in the law quickly followed. Divorce became easier, and settlements became more favourable to women. Forty years on, women now hold all - and I mean all - the cards in the family courts.

Fathers have been forcibly driven from the family, and women have abandoned their own responsibilities, producing a generation of children left to fend for themselves. These children are the teenagers who will mug you, stab you, or burgle your house. These children are the products of the divorce revolution, the bastard offspring of Germaine Greer and the catastrophic failures of the feminist movement.

2 The collapse of male industrial employment.
We have all heard stories about the horrors of the Industrial Revolution, when little boys were forced to climb up chimneys to clean them, or of pregnant women working in coal mines, the kind of social horrors that Dickens described in his novels. These practices were eventually outlawed in England by the Factory Acts of the 19th Century, which banned women and children from working in dangerous industrial conditions. The result was that men had to be paid a 'family wage', sufficient to support the entire family alone, while the women stayed safely at home.

This legislation was passed purely as a humanitarian effort to improve the lives of women and children. It also determined the character of socio-economic life in Britain for a century to come. My own father worked in a factory in the 1970s, while my mother stayed at home. By then, however, massive forces were at work which meant that this apparently stable pattern was about to come to an end. Globalisation meant that manufacturing work could be done more cheaply abroad. Margaret Thatcher's government deliberately closed down manufacturing industry in a largely-justified attempt to rein in the Communist-dominated trade unions during the Cold War. This meant that traditional sources of male employment were disappearing rapidly.

At the same time, as I mentioned above, the rise of the service sector produced many new jobs for which women were ideally suited. Again the feminist movement falsely claimed that it had wrested the Right to Work from the Patriarchy's cold, dead hand. You never hear a feminist mentioning the Factory Acts. They much prefer a conspiracy theory. Their mothers hadn't worked in factories because evil men had prevented them from doing so.

The entry of women into the workplace in large numbers drove down wages. The notion of a family wage became a thing of the past. These changes in working practices were the result of profound economic and technological changes. The principal beneficiaries were middle-class women; the principal losers were working-class men. Indeed, there is no longer any such thing as 'the working class' of old. Now there is just the middle-class and the under-class.

3 The collapse of the education system.
I have discussed education at some length in other articles. Education was a traditional route out of poverty for many, including myself. In the early 20th century, the Left had demanded free education for all in order to overcome working-class children's disadvantage. Early feminists had demanded that girls be given the same educational opportunities as boys. After the post-WWII reconstruction, these dreams had largely become a reality, with bright working class children being able to attend grammar schools and universities on an equal footing with their more privileged peers.

The post-1968 New Left, unfortunately, decided to destroy the very education system that most of them had benefited from.

They have systematically undermined education for the last forty years. They have watered down traditional educational values, condemning them as elitist. They have decried core subjects such as science and mathematics as ‘masculine linear thinking’, and undermined their position in the curriculum. They have rubbished the icons of Western intellectual history as ‘dead white European males’, but failed to replace them with anything.

They have undermined the authority of teachers, driving men out of the profession by means of an organised campaign of moral panic over paedophiles. They have undermined discipline in schools, and removed any trace of competitive activity in case those who do not perform so well might feel bad about themselves.

They have sought to rig the system so that all children have the same educational outcomes, holding back the brightest, while artificially promoting the least able.

This has been a national catastrophe. Everyone has suffered the consequences, but it has been boys in particular who have been the principal losers.

The result is that 63% of poor white boys are unable to read and write properly at 14. As white males, they do not fit into any politically correct interest group which would entitle them to support; as poor and low-status males, they are simply beneath the dignity of the middle-class women who set the political agenda. Their lives just don't matter.

4 The collapse of traditional male culture.
A friend of mine is the father of two children, a boy and a girl, both around 10 or 11. They wanted to join a youth organisation, so he looked around his local area. He found that there were the Scouts and the Guides. The Scouts is open to both boys and girls. The Guides is open to girls. There is no youth organisation which caters only to boys. This is only one small example. The same trend is repeated in every walk of life across Britain today. This erosion of male institutions, the denial that males have any rights or any unique interests, is the result of decades of systematic attack on men by the feminist movement. It is unthinkable that there might be a male-only organisation, a place where females cannot enter. The reverse, however, is perfectly acceptable. There are all-female gym classes, swimming lessons, colleges, schools, taxi services, language classes, you name it.

These feminists think it is very amusing to 'get one over on the blokes'. What they don't seem to have realised is that the consequences are going to blow up in their faces eventually. Whether it is in being mugged by a 14-year-old, having your car broken into, being unable to find a suitable partner, growing old alone and childless, or just being taxed through the nose to pay for prisons and social workers, there is always a price to pay. Social breakdown is very, very expensive. Be careful what you wish for. You might just get it.

Tough on Education, Tough on the Causes of Education.

noreply@blogger.com (Heretic) — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 11:26:00 +0000

I came across this excellent and chilling article today.

The first time I saw Tuggy Tug, he was standing on a street corner in Brixton with half-a-dozen other 15-year- old boys. They were scowling at anyone who walked past.

He is already set on the path of social deprivation: prison, an early death or, at best, a lifetime on benefits. His life is already wasted.

Today, Britain is facing a crisis with its youth. In every town and city, boys like Tuggy Tug are failing to make the transition to manhood and a successful adult life. This has terrifying implications for us all.

Tuggy Tug's chances of having a decent childhood, it became clear, had been weighted against him from the start. As a black boy from a low-income Caribbean background, he belongs to one of the two categories most likely to fail at school and least likely to break out of poverty.

White boys from low-income families perform worst: 63 per cent are unable to read and write properly at 14 (compared with 43 per cent of white girls from a similar background).

Black working- class boys do not do much better: at age 14, 54 per cent cannot read or write properly.

The scale of the crisis in our education system is going unrecognised - but we ignore it at our peril.

Unlike previous generations, the boys who spill out onto our streets don't quickly grow out of delinquent behaviour.

What happens in school smashes their lives, leaving them antisocial-semi- criminal and dependant on welfare.

Which means we, the taxpayers, have to pay astronomical sums to keep fit young men idle. Youth unemployment, which has just hit 726,000 - its highest level in 16 years - is now costing us well over £90million a week.

And that's not all, of course. Illiterate young men with no other way of proving themselves or of making a living are likely to turn to crime. In 2004, the annual cost of youth crime in Britain was calculated at more than £1 billion - and it will be far higher now.

Certainly, adults are now less ready to intervene and monitor young people than in the past - and they are right to be afraid.

...the institutions that previously socialised and directed young men - the family, the church and school - have either lost or given up their authority.

And these changes have hit boys from poor backgrounds the hardest.

So, too, has the lack of adult males in their lives who can serve as role models.
The number of children living in loneparent households - almost all headed by a single mother - has more than doubled in 25 years.

And what happens when these boys go to school? Despite the billions thrown at education by the Government since 1997, nearly every one of the teenagers I interviewed, as well as quite a few of the men I met in their 20s and 30s, was unable to read or write properly - or had only learned in prison.

Everywhere I went, I met men whose lives had been blighted by their failure at school. According to the Statistics Commission, of the 1.7 million new jobs created since 1997, a whopping 81 per cent have gone to foreign workers.

The Department For Work And Pensions is jawdroppingly candid about the reasons for this.

UK citizens are on the dole because of 'issues around basic employability skills, incentives and motivation' it says.

What a pity it has not passed this insight on to the Department Of Education And Skills.

All over Britain, men like Dave are disengaging from society for a reason: they see nothing in it for them. And they are quite right.

A new report - by an all-party panel chaired by former minister Alan Milburn - spelled out: 'The problem is not a shortage of parental aspiration. It is a shortage of good schools.'

Whether these proposals will ever be taken further is doubtful. Labour has a track record of talking about reforms - and then doing nothing.

The problem lies in our schools, over which Labour has had complete control for the past 12 years.

In any case, most boys from disadvantaged backgrounds don't aspire to move to a different class; they rarely aspire to go beyond a few streets.

One young man I met in South London, for example, had never crossed the Thames because he couldn't read the bus timetables.

Truly shocking. I feel sorry for these young men, but my response, like that of most adults, is generally to avoid them for fear of violent mugging. How did it ever come to this?

Science

noreply@blogger.com (Heretic) — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 12:30:00 +0000

I liked this cartoon

Female Crime Stories: 'Liberal' Media Remain Silent

noreply@blogger.com (Heretic) — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 10:38:00 +0000

British woman facing 65 years in US jail for keeping three children as slaves. Story widely reported. Guardian and BBC say nothing.

Mercedes Farquhason, 63, was indicted in 2006 by an American jury after she was accused of keeping the three children, all of whom are also British, as her slaves on her North Carolina farm.

The children were rescued but she went on the run, and was only arrested in Bulgaria in July this year.

She was extradited to the U.S., where she was remanded into custody in North Carolina last night until her trial.

She had been wanted on two counts of felony child abuse over the suspected beating of her adopted daughter, and three felony counts of involuntary servitude.

The girls claimed they were put to work aged 12 and 7 and never went to school again, receiving frequent beatings at home.

At the time she was freed, Holly told local TV channel WCNC the experience was 'very draining'.

'We just didn't think we could survive because sometimes there were times she would say she wishes she could kill us,' she added.

'She'd hit you. She'd use canes, bamboo sticks and dog leashes. Multiple times she has strangled the three of us,' Jasmine said.

She added: 'We had to clean until we could eat off the floor or until you could see your face in the counter, but it was gruelling.'

Holly said all three girls got into trouble for something each day and at least two would be beaten every day. Reference

I did a quick search on the offender's very distinctive name. Almost every UK national daily has covered this story. The local newspaper in Hastings seems to have covered it. Guess who has ignored it? The Guardian. The BBC has one story dating back to April 2006 about the initial events. Nothing more recent. This happens every week. There are plenty of violent female offenders out there. Plenty of them. You just wouldn't get that impression if you read the Left-wing, ideologically-corrected Guardian or BBC. Reading these two 'news outlets' is like reading Pravda.

This kind of unspoken ideological censorship was a characteristic of Communist government in the 20th Century. 'Pravda', the Russian word for 'truth', was the organ of the Soviet Communist Party. In Mao's China, there was a newspaper which only published good news. This political control of information is a characteristic of totalitarianisms.

Our 'Liberal' press is not worthy of the name. The Guardian and the BBC are the least liberal news outlets we have.

The Stepford Classroom

noreply@blogger.com (Heretic) — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 17:18:00 +0000

"It's a great lie that children hate to compete. Teachers may complain, but kids relish the win-or-lose logic of The Apprentice

The only folks truly distressed by SATs are the teachers, since this is the only occasion they endure a cool external scrutiny. If only they'd admit this and stop perpetuating the great lie that children hate to compete.

The fortnight in the run-up to SATs, the preparation, mock tests, comparing scores with friends, has been the only bit of Year 6 my son has enjoyed. Before Easter he'd come home daily literally bored to tears. SATs are a challenge, a mission.

He loves a race, a rugby tournament, trouncing me at ping-pong, plays Monopoly standing up, the better to oversee his property portfolio. He has wised up - like all modern children - to the “all shall have prizes” shtick, scorning those medals these days awarded for coming fifth or just showing up. It incenses him and his friends that the school refuses to have a football team. An Australian parent - baffled by our crazy co-operative ways - quizzed the governors and was met with astonishment. Couldn't she see it would discriminate against those who weren't picked?" Reference

This frank and honest piece would have seemed shocking only 20 or 30 years ago. We can assume that the author's son is a fairly typical boy of his age; do they all really spend almost every minute at school bored to tears? What are the teachers being paid for, if not to mentally stimulate these children?

When there is a clear consumer demand for a football team, how can the teaching staff possibly justify not having one? I suppose there would be no point anyway. It would rarely get to play a game, in a country in which the school sports day is cancelled because the grass is damp; where parents are not allowed to attend in case a paedophile secretly joins the crowd to ogle the children; where even if the parents could get in, they wouldn't be allowed to take pictures for the family album in case they 'fell into the wrong hands'.

What insanity have we let ourselves in for? This madness is the mark of a nation in terminal decline.

What on earth has happened to our education system? A simple answer: it is now under the control of left-wing middle-class women.

Before I am accused of misogyny, I insist that all three of these elements are important. Conservative middle-class women would run things differently. Middle-class left-wing men would probably at least allow the boys to play football. The Dystopian absurdity that is our current education system is the result of a peculiar nexus of leftist ideological dogma, filtered through the lens of female psychology. The situation described above is the state of play in our dumbed-down, boy-hating, feminised, therapised, medicated, Stepford classroom.

Bored to tears, under-stimulated, many boys will abandon education at the first opportunity. Maybe that is part of the hidden agenda. Many others will become disruptive. The disruptive ones will probably be put on medication to keep them quiet.

It has taken over a decade for this educational regime to take power, step by step. A key factor was the flight of male teachers from the classroom. The devaluing of the teaching profession in the eyes of the wider society, together with the feminist-led false accusations pandemic, and the cold shoulder treatment in the increasingly female-dominated staffroom, has caused men to flee the education system in their thousands.

The result of this is not just that boys now often lack suitable role-models, although that is bad enough. It is also about the takeover of sentimental thinking.

What perverse priorities are at work. We can't risk the poor little thing crying because he wasn't picked for the football team (not that he would), but it's OK to destroy his educational chances and systematically drug him on a daily basis to stop him complaining about it. Which do you think is the greater harm? The female teachers don' t want to see him crying. It will tug their heart-strings so. And maybe someone will ask questions, and they will have to do something about it. This way, at least if they catch his eye and see his Ritalin glaze they can tell themselves that he feels OK, and he is under control, and that is all that matters. Because feelings trump everything else.

It is also about the takeover of spineless, ineffectual management.

What headmaster would cancel the sports day because the grass is damp? Thirty years ago we were sent out running in shorts and T-shirt in the middle of a Scottish winter. We may not have liked it, but it probably did us some good, and certainly did us no harm. I didn't particularly like learning maths either, but it had to be done. What is the alternative? Should we all just curl up in the foetal position, suck our thumbs and wait for death? Adult life is sometimes uncomfortable. It is sometimes disappointing. Only a female-dominated profession, and one dominated by immature, over-emotional attitudes, would attempt to molly-coddle and cosset the children's feelings to the exclusion of all else.

What headmaster would decree that parents are not allowed to attend a school play or sports day in case a paedophile turns up? Even as I write this, I can barely believe that it is not something from a Monty Python sketch. You have an issue with perimeter security? Fine. Do some perimeter security. To throw up your hands in panic and hold the entire event in camera is weak, weak, weak. Security only seems like an issue in the first place because of decades of feminist-inspired anti-male propaganda. There simply are not paedophiles lurking outside every school gate. This is just another bogus instrument being used to disrupt and cripple the lives of men and boys from cradle to grave.

Would the last one to leave Britain please turn the lights out.

Unwanted Rescues: A poster from Thailand

noreply@blogger.com (Heretic) — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 05:48:00 +0000

Check out this excellent page, and read the links. Thanks to Laura Agustin for pointing it out.