So Long Ago…

Posted on September 25, 2018 by Davd

… that only Female Privilege could make it shameful? If it happened?
(c) 2018, Davd

A secondary school age boy, drinking at a party, “groped” and attempted to undress a secondary school age girl who was also at that party. Such, the news stories seem to say, is the accusation. The party took place 36 years ago.

A second accusation emerges, of rudeness one year more recent, “at a drunken dormitory party”. It resembles stories i heard last century, about “gross parties”.

Should an alcohol influenced “unwelcome advance”, even two, which stopped, or were stopped, well short of rape, of which the record available shows no recent repetition, bar a man from becoming a member of the U. S. Supreme Court?

If so, to apply a sports phrase, that country’s supreme Bench may get cleared. Nobody,  it may turn out, is perfect enough for those exalted jobs.1

I say No not so much to Ford’s accusation2 (though research on memory since 1982 gives significant reason to doubt it3) but to condemnation based on such old allegations, if the recent life of the person being assessed has been worthy of the honour for which [s]he is considered.

The news stories report that people alleged to have been at the party where Ford says she was “assaulted”, do not remember having been there. That is no surprise, it is normal forgetting…  the event is too long ago for us or them to know if they were..

Can i remember what i did at parties in 1982? No. I cannot remember what classes i taught that year,  nor how many parties i attended, much less the details of any of them. 36 years is a long time — nearly half my life ago, and at least two-thirds of the lives lived so far by the nominee and his accuser. I can remember that i applied for and won promotion from Associate Professor to full Professor, but i stopped and did the arithmetic to verify it happened in 1982.

It doesn’t surprise me, then, that people who might have been at the party might also have forgotten being there. That’s normal.

Under-age drinking is part of news stories about the first accusation (and the second if Connecticut had a drinking age higher than 18). That makes them somewhat illegal, putatively immoral events. If the accusers were “chaste young ladies”, they should not have attended. If each saw that the party was too naughty for her moral standards, she should have left.

The female teenager who grew up to be Dr. Ford, had put herself into “an occasion of sin”, to use an old Roman-Catholic phrase. Likewise to a perhaps lesser extent, for the Yale University accuser. If she went to a party expecting it to be prim and proper, she should have left when she discovered it was the opposite. If she went expecting erotic action and alcoholic drink, that mitigates any complaints if she found some that she decided she did not want.

There are two main points to this blog: First, that the accusations refer too far back in time to deserve much force, unless the accused has behaved badly much more recently. If the boy who became Judge Kavanaugh repented of such drinking [if he was indeed drunk] and behaved well recently; especially, if his work as judge has been superior; that is what is relevant to his nomination. I cannot assess that. The US Senate should assess that — rather than how rowdy or prim he was when still in his teens, two thirds of his life ago.

Second, responsibility for naughty and sinful conduct should be “gender equal”. If a woman were nominated for high office, would it be considered reason not to confirm her, that she had seduced somebody 36 years ago, or merely tried to?  That she had dressed immodestly and tempted various men? If men are expected to be prim and proper, women should be expected to be just as prim and just as proper, in ways different accordingly as the sexes are different.

References:

Loftus, Elizabeth, and Katherine Ketchum, 1996. The Myth of Repressed Memories: False Memories and the Accusations of Sexual Abuse . New York: St. Martin’s Press

Nathanson, Paul, and Katherine K. Young, 2006. Legalizing Misandry: From Public Shame to Systemic Discrimination against Men. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Notes:

1. Doubtless some sexually inactive candidates can be found. However, as we Christians say, everyone is some kind of sinner. Look back to adolescence or younger, strictly, and who is totally pure?

2…nor to Kavanaugh’s nomination (I don’t know enough about the other potential nominees to comment on that)

3. “… Elizabeth Loftus … research [on memory] showed that memories of any kind are distorted in about one quarter of the subjects merely through the power of suggestion or if they are supplied with incorrect information. Moreover, says Loftus, violent events actually decrease the accuracy of memory. Memories are weakest when associated with either low levels of arousal (such as boredom or sleepiness) or high levels of arousal (stress or trauma). In short, memory is fragile and disintegrates gradually. It is prone to suggestion, moreover, not autonomous. Loftus and colleagues have also shown that even imagining a false event increases subjective confidence that the event happened and that subjects can confuse dreaming and waking events when presented with a list of them. She writes that “63 percent can ‘recover’ nonexistent memories of being exposed [as infants] to coloured mobiles while in their hospital cribs—a literal impossibility since the nervous system is not developed enough to lay down explicit memories in the first few years of life. ‘[Nathanson and Young, 2006:15]

If incidents like what Kavanaugh actually did were commonplace at parties where he and his accusers went, then others there may have not found them memorable. Had what he did been shocking in context, it would more likely have been remembered.

 

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What Purposes That Blog?

Posted on August 25, 2018 by Davd

… I don’t presume to know them all; “Truth on Record” is one.
(c) 2018, Davd

A respected correspondent, responding to a recent blog on this site, asked “what purpose does this particular blog serve?” Whatever his exact motivation, his specific question provided me with cause to address “the question in general”: Why blogs, and are they worth writing or just ego farts?

The apparent nautical origin of the word “blog” offered an anchor point of sorts, for a reflection on blogging and on its merits and value1.

“Blog” seems to be a contraction of “web log”, analogous to a ship’s log of events and conditions on the voyage[s]. When i filled in as a crewman on a log salvage tug, the captain kept a log of which i will recall one item: “Keel struck a rock the chart shows to be a fathom below it. No damage. Beware low low tides.”2

Why that event and the condition that caused it, were logged, seems obvious. What Captain Karl might have done the next time he sailed that passage at a very low tide, is read the chart to find which side of that rock to steer. (If he was towing a raft of logs, they would not go deep enough to hit the rock; only the tug would need to avoid it.) The logs of his recent voyages through the same passage would be reminders of its quirks and dangers.

My July blog developed from a morning reflection, resting after a big breakfast: Shrinkage of the bourgeoisie to a tiny minority is demographic nonsense when applied to genders. If the Marxist theory is plausible, then the application is invalid; and making that application, especially publicly (rather than while enjoying recreational drugs in private, where — even if it’s only coffee and tea — standards are lower) discredits those who utter such nonsense. If the Marxist theory is implausible, then the use of it should likewise discredit those who utter it; the utterance is still nonsense, just a different kind.

I don’t know if the Marxist theory of the vanishing bourgeoisie is plausible. I do not recall reading of it ever happening in an actual “nation state”. Either way, plausible or not, it should not be used as part of the foundation of a moral and political ideology if its application therein is nonsense.

A blog may legitimately have no definite purpose beyond encouraging reflection. Capt. Karl could legitimately have written, “Three speedboats, apparently clam pirates, headed together toward Ucluelet. Why together?” (This entry is fictional.)

Such an entry might later enable him to testify more credibly if those three speedboats coincided in time with the disappearance of someone of interest to the Law, or an important theft, or merely the presence of people in Ucluelet who had not got there by road.

Unlike a ship’s log or a diary, a blog is intentionally public; which need not entail wide readership. As of the end of last month, it has been possible to access that statement that “a Marxist class-analysis of gender relations” is demographic nonsense. Someone else might value being able to cite it and state “This is not my sole notion, this has also been said, even published, by a retired professor with 180+ blogs up.”

Putting the truth as best we know it, on record, has merit in and of itself. Imaginably, Karl’s log entry about a rock will be of use in correcting the chart he was reading. Imaginably, some man who has felt shame for being “one of those privileged men” [when in fact women are more privileged] will have an ah, so desu ka moment that is good for his mental health and his courage in stating his best estimate of the truth.

From philosophical and moral reflection, to chart correction, and more generally, indeed very generally — blogging, like keeping a ship’s log, is about putting the truth on record. Any fair-minded, honest use of the truth so published, is “OK”; and the [b]logger should not be shamed if he did not anticipate that use. I used to be a scientist; indeed, at a much lower work intensity, i still am. One of the great merits of science is that one [wo]man’s truth can be put to good use by another, which use the first man, who published it, need not have imagined.

In a word from the philosophy of science, science is crescive. It builds on itself. If some reader who had been fooled by the “Marxist analysis of gender relations”, reading that blog, concludes that the “Marxist analysis” is nonsense and then proceeds to something better, something more valid as an explanation; that becomes one good use of “Feminism’s False Foundation” … and … other readers can find other good uses for it, too.

No, I didn’t know what-all specific uses the blog would have3. My purpose was more general: Put some truth on record.

———- Notes: ————

1 … or values — because a blog can be valuable for more than one reason — but “values” can have a double meaning: “worths” in the plural; or philosophical biases.

2. Charts, iirc, give depths at mean lower low water, and depths in whole fathoms.

3. Publishing a cogent fact that has been widely unnoticed, like shining a light on a dusty rusty sword at the back of a cave that has yielded only pottery and wineskins until then, makes for thought and discussion. The discoverer of the sword may or may not be the best discussant.

 

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Feminism’s False Foundation*

Posted on July 31, 2018 by Davd

… there are more men than ….
(c) 2018, Davd

A rather unfriendly Feminist told me some 40 years ago, that Feminism began with a “Marxist class-analysis of gender relations”. Feminists, she said, viewed men as a bourgeoisie and women as a proletariat. I don’t recall her going on to assert “the dictatorship of the proletariat” as the Bolsheviks did, but it may have occurred to her. Other things she said indicated that she considered me—and men in general—unworthy of equality with her gender.

Marx foresaw the bourgeoisie shrinking (through financial competition) to a tiny minority, too small to hold power over a huge proletariat (which huge proletariat then took over.) This does not parallel the sex-demographics of Canada, the USA, nor any state i can name.

The Russian Marxist-Leninists who took power were known as the Bolsheviks—a word meaning, approximately, “the majority party”. They claimed that name based on winning one particular vote; and they were skillful enough at propaganda that they managed to make Bolshevik their name. Two parallels with Feminism are:
‣ Women do outnumber men [though not on as fluctuating a basis as votes in an assembly], and
‣ Feminists have been deadly skillful at propaganda and politicking. Earl Silverman and Tom Ball are two of their better-known victims.

“The dictatorship of the proletariat” in Russia and her “satellites” turned out to be a dictatorship of the bureaucracy (Djilas, 1957; Komarov, 1980). The average Soviet or Yugoslav proletarian probably was better off under [bureaucracy wearing the name of “communism”] than a pre-Soviet, Russian serf; but not as well off as a Canadian or US union worker of the same time. The bureaucrats lived and dictated, not as fellow proletarians but as a ruling class (Djilas, 1957).

This is a blog and not a book; the details of the analogy between Feminism and Bolshevism are too many “to go through properly”1. It does seem apparent that Feminism rules, to the extent it does, through political intrigue (including shaming of their opponents somewhat reminiscent of Stalinist purge trials, and exploitation of privilege won through political intrigue) and through a bureaucracy which is more a ruling class than a representative of the population. It distorts facts in a manner reminiscent of Soviet-bloc “intellectualism” and government prose: The phrase “politically correct” is an example that became common during the reign of the same J. Stalin.

This site and other men’s sites have seen dozens, perhaps hundreds, of refutations of Feminist-promulgated invalid statistics, especially as to pay levels and gender violence. During the “Cold War”, Western and especially American media wrote heaps of scorn on “bogus Soviet statistics.” Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn, and Djilas himself, were treated not that differently from how men are treated who challenge Feminism today. I do not have a causal theory to proffer as the explanation, but it seems there are parallels between Feminism and Marxism in taking and using power, closer than the parallels between either and the shrinking bourgeoisie theory Marx originally propounded.

Marx’s forecast of the bourgeoisie shrinking though competition that evicts bourgeois “losers” into the proletariat, does not apply to biological gender. Men who are not bourgeois are the great majority of men, and while there are now stories of men “changing their sex”, they are extremely few; and there are also proclamations that those not “female born”, are not real women.

Women do constitute a majority of the adult population in many modern States, thanks largely to medical advances that have made death in childbirth and lactation, extremely rare. Men contributed immensely to those advances, and applauded them—we have been friendly to women most of the time, and with very few exceptions, we have been unfriendly only with good cause.

If there is a plausible near future “social path” whereby women will become an overwhelming majority of the population, and men a tiny minority, it cannot involve men becoming women as Marx envisioned members of the bourgeoisie becoming proletarian. Sex change is expensive and few men have shown any desire for the change. The high, increasing suicide rate among men is more plausible, but it is not credible that suicide will reduce the male part of the population to the tiny minority Marx posited.

In fact, the first “communist” government took power in Russia, where at the time there were: A small pre-industrial ruling class, a smaller, separate bourgeoisie, a rather small proletariat, and a peasant majority… very unlike the huge industrial proletariat and tiny bourgeoisie of classic Marxist theory.

A few Feminists have advocated more plausible “social paths”: Selective abortion of male fetuses, and the killing and castration of boys and men so as to reduce the male fraction of the population to one tenth or fewer.2

The Soviet state lasted some 7-8 decades, less than half the duration Glubb [1978] found for a full imperial life cycle, but about the same as a full human lifetime. It was founded on Marxism for propaganda purposes, but was far from the Marxist script of industrial proletariat and shrinking bourgeoisie. It might parallel Feminist political activities better than it parallels a genuine Marxist class analysis.

It seems that the classic Marxist class-analysis has yet to be lived out in a real, industrial society… and that the process it posits is impossible as between the sexes. Feminism, you might say, is Soviet in its falsity.

A few References:

Crankshaw, Edward, 1966. Khrushchev: A Career. New York: Viking Press

Douglas, Tommy, ca. 1944. “Mouseland”. Wikipedia states that one Clarence Gillis first told the story, but that it is customarily identified with Douglas. [accessed July 30, 2018]

Djilas, Milovan 1957, The New Class. NY: Praeger.

Glubb, John Bagot, 1978. The Fate of Empires. Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons Ltd.

Komarov, Boris 1980. The Destruction of Nature in the Soviet Union. White Plains, NY: M. E. Sharpe

Martin, Davd, 2011. “Feminists as Bolsheviks: Can a good look at Leninism and Stalinism help us improve on ‘Feminazi’?”
The Spearhead website, September 28.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels., 1888. Manifesto of The Communist Party. English text edited by Friedrich Engels. Project Gutenberg e-text Transcribed by Allen Lutins with assistance from Jim Tarzia.

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch. The Cancer Ward. The First Circle.

Wikipedia article, “Karl Marx.” Accessed September 26, 2011.

Notes:

* This is a blog, less rigorously documented than academic “journals” might require; and not a comprehensive survey of the foundations of Feminism. The “Marxist class-analysis of gender relations” refuted here is often enough asserted to be one of those foundations. Readers who differ with what they see here are invited to offer corrections, with suitable documentation.

1. This blog parallels substantially one published in 2011 on the now inactive Spearhead website. I cite it among the references, but provide no url because that site can no longer be accessed. This is not, however, simply an edited version of that blog.

2. I know of none having said it will occur by competition among men—certainly not by men turning other men into women.

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Why Honour Fatherhood

Posted on June 17, 2018 by Davd

… the benefits are great. Can we regain them?
(c) 2018, Davd

Let me begin by saluting my father, a truck driver and semi salesman during my childhood, and my grandfather, a master electrician and battery expert for a major railroad. Neither was perfect. Neither needed to be, to do me immense good. I doubt i could have lived as good an adult life (which was not perfect either) nor even lived as long1, without the nurture of them both during a hard childhood.

It is not 100% proven — nothing is 100% proven — that Mother’s Day much outranks Father’s Day in public respect; but it seems safe to say that is “virtually certain”. Likewise, looking at divorce and custody law and practices, (e.g. Brown, 2013, Nathanson and Young, 2006) it seems virtually certain that motherhood has immensely more bureaucratic and legal respect than fatherhood.

The difference has consequences, and over-all, they are bad.2

So far, “science cannot say” whether, once weaned from the breast, a child needs mother or father more. As an educated guess, one might estimate that girls need a mother more, boys, a father — but that does not apply to all girls and all boys; rather, it might apply “on average”.

Because divorce courts and bureaucracies are biased in favour of mothers (Brown, 2013, Nathanson and Young, 2006), being a father is no longer a matter of willingness and fidelity, as it was for most men when i was a boy. This is doing immense social damage, which has been documented (e.g. Finley, 2010). It is a “correctional truism” that very few boys with good fathers go to prison. It is a “social work truism” that fewer girls with good fathers get pregnant in their teens, go on drugs, or catch STDs. A mother who wants her children “off drugs”, free of STDs, teen pregnancy, and criminal experience; can do more to achieve those worthy goals by sharing their nurture with a father, than by worldly success (never-mind fashionable attire or location).

Why so? Why are fathers—resident, participating fathers—effective at keeping children out of prison and trouble more generally? Armstrong (2008: 12) states of the words Duty, Obligation, and Honor: “I’d read them in books. But I’d never used them, and certainly not as a reason for having done something.” She goes on to write that she was quite surprised that most men do give great weight to these words, and don’t much trust the minority of men who do not. On pp 44-5, she specifies that women lie when they say “I care about you”; and as context for her surprise that men care about duty, obligation, and honor, she remarks that her reason for spending a no-fun day to please her mother, would have been that Mother would be mad at her if she didn’t (2008: 11).

To summarize Armstrong’s observations: Men put principles first, women put feelings first — and this attested in a book written by a woman, entitled, Making Sense of Men. (Seems to me she found men’s principle based reasoning makes more sense than women’s feelings based motivation — but did she notice?)

Glubb (1978: 24) observed a cycle common to the 13 empires he studied3, all of whose lifespans approximated 250 years. He wrote of the common nature of that cycle: ” The life-expectation of a great nation, it appears, commences with a violent, and usually unforeseen, outburst of energy, and ends in a lowering of moral standards, cynicism, pessimism and frivolity.” (1978: 23)

“… Decadence is due to: Too long a period of wealth and power, Selfishness, Love of money [and] The loss of a sense of duty.” (1978: 24)

If indeed the United States is experiencing decadence4, and Canada is part of its empire, then the easiest explanation for the present lack of respect for fatherhood and the principled virtues it brings to child rearing, is that such is normal to decadence. Normal is not always good. Decadence, cookie advertising notwithstanding, is a bad thing.

For Father’s Day, more steak is advertised (and the expectation is that father will cook it.) for Mother’s Day, more candy is advertised, and Mother’s Day is the biggest business day for restaurants (Wikipedia, 2018). Steak is healthier than candy, cooking for the family is more efficient and frugal than “dining out”5.

Steak is good — Respect is better. Best of all, is to put fatherhood to its natural, good work.

References:

Armstrong, Alison, 2008. Making Sense of Men. Sherman Oaks, California: PAX Programs Inc.

http://www.avoiceformen.com/mission-and-values/about/

Brown, Grant A., 2013. Ideology And Dysfunction In Family Law: How Courts Disenfranchise Fathers. Calgary and Winnipeg: Canadian Constitution Foundation and Frontier Centre For Public Policy

Canning, Dr. Greg, 2012. “Girls behaving badly”. A Voice for Men website.

Catton, William R., Jr., 1967 “Is it worth it: Some social costs of economic growth in the Puget Sound region.” University of Washington Alumnus (Winter) 20-25

Catton, William R., Jr. 1980 Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change. Urbana, London, and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Paperback 1982

Dafoe-Whitehead, Barbara, 1993. “Dan Quayle Was Right” Atlantic Monthly, April.

Finley, Gordon E., 2010. “On Fatherhood.” Men’s News Daily, June 16. Prof. Finley has published considerable research on fatherhood, and this text has more authority than many.

Glubb, John Bagot, 1978. The Fate of Empires. Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons Ltd.

Hancock, Kerry Dale, Jr. 2007. “Children Without Fathers: Statistics,”

Nathanson, Paul, and Katherine K. Young, 2006. Legalizing Misandry: From Public Shame to Systiic Discrimination against Men. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

National Restaurant Association, 2006. “Mother’s Day Dining Fact Sheet” 28 April. Mother’s Day is the most popular day of the year to dine out, with 38 percent of consumers reporting doing so. (Cited in Wikipedia, 2018)

Wikipedia, 2018. “Mother’s Day.” page last edited on 14 May 2018

Notes:

1. At 76, i have so far lived approximately the mean male lifespan for my birth year.

2. Some of the citation urls in the text may have left the internet since i verified them during 2011-18. They all were valid when collected. It is unfortunate that the Internet is less durable than a paper book — and one might wonder if Canada’s Government reliance on the Internet, which is not even under Canadian Government jurisdiction, is a sign of decadence.

3. The United States of America was the 14th, and it had not completed its lifespan by 1978.

4, 1776+250 = 2026.

5. The custom of taking Mother to a restaurant seems to derive from mothers being the principal cooks in American (including Canadian) families. Commuting to paid employment, especially during the generation of time from [approximately] 1950-75, made cooking more a mother’s work than it might have been naturally.

 

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Disney Goofed

Posted on May 19, 2018 by Davd

… It wasn’t an Uncle who said that.
(c) 2018, Davd

“If you can’t say something Nice, don’t say anything at all.”

In Bambi, a children’s animated cartoon film which is iconic in a profane, secular sense, Disney put those words into the tiny cute mouth of Thumper, a baby bunny rabbit.

The film has Thumper quoting them as what his uncle had taught him… and if the secular icon Walt Disney indeed chose an uncle, rather than a mother, aunt, or grandmother — Disney goofed. That is not something an Uncle would say, much less teach.

I have spent at least three-quarters of this year’s social time — of time with people of my choosing rather than people i interact with because they have some particular office or job employment — with men. This is normal for men choosing their social companions (rather than having family or some formal organization choose those persons for us1.) I don’t hear those men directing me to be Nice. I do hear such directives, “from time to time”, from women.

Nice is about other people’s feelings. Truth, charity, fairness, fidelity, prudence, temperance. fortitude, are principled virtues2. Virtues are lived the same way “all the time” — whoever it is you’re dealing with, they lead to the same basic conduct. Especially back when Bambi first came to the theatres, uncles, like fathers and grandfathers, taught virtues. The women of the family (even of the school) might teach “manners” that put feelings ahead of principle.

Today, sadly, Governments are to be seen putting feelings first: Corry, in this month’s Equal Justice Foundation newsletter, refers to the tyranny of feelings in some Feminist laws. The Government of Canada is explicitly Feminist. In these times, it is a brave man indeed who disdains Niceness… and such bravery (or fortitude) is a virtue, while Nice falls short.

So today, an uncle who falls short of total fortitude, or whose nephew does; might counsel a nephew to be Nice, as a matter of prudence (that is of prudent timidity.) When Bambi came to the theatres, not normally. A valid, typical Fifties Uncle would not teach that. Even today, a real true Uncle would not teach that famous Disney phrase, rather something like “Be on the safe side — act Nice.”

This blog may seem to belabour a nuance3. It does so in service to truth, since the admonition If you can’t say something Nice, don’t say anything at all is famous, since the original film did attribute it as the teaching of an Uncle when virtuous Uncles did no such thing, and since the Uncle attribution can be misused, can be cited to misrepresent men as a human type.

The sexes are more different than the races. Uncles, like fathers and grandfathers, have virtues to teach. Nice Manners should be learned, in context, from the sex that values them (often, sadly, values them more than the virtues); and men and boys should always have social spaces to which to retreat, where Nice is known as the four letter word it is.

Ponder that last paragraph, and you should see that we have a long way to go to reach societal virtue.

Notes:

1. The bank in the village where i have spent all of May so far, has only women tellers. The Village Office has all women staff. The church i attend has all women on their Board of Directors: Not one man among all those officials with whom i meet for various working reasons.

2. Virtue begins with vir, which is Latin for — man. A virtue is a quality seemly to a man.

3… or “nicety”, but that follows a different, esoteric meaning of the 4-letter N-word.

 

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The Community Model of Gun Control

Posted on April 25, 2018 by Davd

… a Recent Example
(c) 2018, Davd

I’m genuinely impressed, how well my March 1st ‘post’ has held up in the Gun Control clamour. I did like the basic argument — enough to repeat it for emphasis here. But that Second Amendment was written and voted into law, over 200 years ago … and times have changed. What hasn’t changed, is human nature, including its application in men’s teamwork.

Not long after my March blog was published, BBC published “Four key dates that shaped the US gun debate” which reported on a June 2008 US Supreme Court decision deeming Second Amendment rights to be individual [by the smallest of majorities]. I had not noticed that decision from my home in a forest in Canada … and it was far enough from consensual, that i did not revise my published blog1. The words “A Well Ordered Militia” are there at the front of the text of that second article of the American Bill of Rights. I am still convinced they are there for good reason.

Can that good reason, still support gun ownership? I do believe it can.

Does that good reason, still support gun ownership in most of the United States? Of that, i’m not nearly so sure. Does it support gun ownership in most of Canada? It ought to in most of the rural Canadian landscape — but often, governments are not in harmony with that support, that direct local democracy — which is a “social problem” much more severe than apparent.

To quote, to repeat from that blog that has been in first position for more than six weeks, and intentionally:

A militia is more local than a national army. Its members are not full-time soldiers, they might not even be paid. In specifying a militia, the U.S. Founding Fathers were neither proposing to fund and administer a large standing army, nor advocating centralization—rather the alternative. They were saying that the sensible and public-spirited men of each locality should get together, organize provisions for the common defense, develop a command structure by consensus, and meet on some kind of mutually agreeable schedule to practice. These men (and i would guess, a tiny minority of women with an aptitude for such things) would then be among the first responders to violent trouble—and, if the US National Guard stories i’ve read be an indication, also responders to natural disasters.

It is in that context—of locally organized and led, locally and more-or-less consensually disciplined, public service and defense—that i read the Second Amendment to protect “the right to keep and bear arms.” It protects the local citizenry from being disarmed by a central government, but i read it to protect the local citizenry as a community, not as individuals. It was written within a generation’s time after the Revolutionary War, when the forced quartering of British troops in American homes and the brutality of Hessian mercenaries were living memories; and i read it as much more a matter of direct local democracy and self-defense than of individualism.

This very month, i saw imperfectly, an example of the local militia meeting a threat.

Recently, a cougar2 killed several cats and small dogs in the remote village to which i moved late last month. At least one local woman, mother and grandmother, saw that cougar at closer range than she found comfortable. At least three local men said they had shotguns handy. (None mentioned rifles — this is a village, and rifle bullets “carry too far.”)

Last week, a neighbour came in from a long walk with his two Welsh Border Collies — medium sized dogs whose weight adds up to slightly less than his — and said they had not scented the cougar. Whether a local hunter or a Government “Conservation Officer” killed3 that cougar, is a whole lot less important than that she was removed from the village, in a manner safe for the humans and pets living here,

The departure of that cougar was much less than a military matter. It was an example, at least “of sorts”, of local men doing violence with discipline and teamwork, to deal with a threat . Central government might have been involved, but it didn’t need to be… and that is the essence of “A well ordered [local] militia”.

The local wisdom includes:
‣ that shotguns and not rifles are the weapons to use to defend a village against a big predatory cat;
‣ who has the hunting skill and self-discipline to take part in that defence;
‣ much knowledge about cougars and their behaviour;.
‣ considerable general advice about prudently avoiding the cougar, for those who don’t belong in the hunting party.

The second point is specific to a village. The central government can’t know it “worth a hoot”, and trying to centralize the problem and the response, is socially inefficient at best.

The other three points are known to local people and (let us hope) the central government also. There is nothing to be gained by centralizing the task nor the assessment of the cougar threat.

In sum, the local people know how to remove an old cougar who has gone from preying on deer to killing easier prey like domestic cats and small dogs, co-operatively and safely. It is not the warlike employment of “A
Well-Ordered Militia…” but it partakes of the local wisdom that central government cannot know and cannot match.

That local community advantage is much of the foundation of the U.S. Second Amendment. It exists where local communities exist; which was ‘most of the United States’ when the U. S. Constitution and Bill of Rights were composed and voted into law… but which is not most of urban nor suburban North America today4.

With that community advantage, “the right to keep and bear arms” works better than bureaucratic “gun control”, Without it, well, … we don’t know well enough to say — and so, the demands for “a world without guns” seem plausible, even preferable, to many.

(But don’t tell that “world without guns” slogan to the people whose pets were killed, whose women and children, even men, were threatened, by that cougar.)

Notes:

1. Writing from Canada, i can leave that recent decision out of consideration more easily than a US source can; and as a sociologist with a few publications specifically in criminology, i can emphasize the natural social surveillance and control that a community enjoys and a large city lacks.

2… said to be a female too old to have any more kittens.

3… or trapped and relocated, though that seems unlikely if the animal was too old to breed.

4. It may be that i, a recent arrival, am inferring more of a local community from the few hunters with whom i discussed the cougar threat, than is extant. It is much more certain that such local communities were the norm in the early rural United States (and significant parts of Canada at that time),

 

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A Well-Ordered Militia

Posted on March 1, 2018 by Davd

The U.S. Second Amendment is Sounder for Those Words
(c) 2018, Davd

A recent BBC News commentary included “Repeal the Second Amendment” as the last of “Six Radical Ways to Tackle US School Shootings”. A more recent BBC article explains, incompletely: “The second amendment in the US constitution protects the ‘right to keep and bear arms‘.” Perhaps the national news media of Britain — the empire from which the United States departed by revolutionary war — can be forgiven for ignoring the first half of the text of that “Second Amendment”; it is sad that so much of the debate and discussion in North America misses it also, and especially those first four words.

Consider CBC’s Keith Boag writing:

The Second Amendment is arguably the clumsiest construction of 27 words in the U.S. Constitution. It reads: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”.

I could wonder — Is it the word militia1, or the nature of republics and democracies, that Boag doesn’t understand? Far from being clumsy, the Second Amendment specifies the locus and the disciplining of that “right to keep and bear arms.”

If Britain might not want to remember what a “Well-Ordered Militia…” is, Canada really should — and we all should remember the main points of the history and early government of the United States. In context of a local militia, the right to keep and bear arms is disciplined, and in the interests of the people.

As a foreigner who “was educated in that country”*, i recall those words well, perhaps better than many of those who have listened more closely to the U.S. gun-control debates of recent decades. I believe they offer vital wisdom to the debate that began2 when an “obviously crazy man named Adam” attacked an elementary school, and revived this year when a gun-loving loner named Nikolas Cruz attacked a secondary school.

A militia is more local than a national army. Its members are not full-time soldiers, they might not even be paid. In specifying a militia, the U.S. Founding Fathers were neither proposing to fund and administer a large standing army, nor advocating centralization—rather the alternative. They were saying that the sensible and public-spirited men of each locality should get together, organize provisions for the common defense, develop a command structure by consensus, and meet on some kind of mutually agreeable schedule to practice. These men (and i would guess, a tiny minority of women with an aptitude for such things) would then be among the first responders to violent trouble—and, if the US National Guard stories i’ve read be an indication, also responders to natural disasters.

It is in that context—of locally organized and led, locally and more-or-less consensually disciplined, public service and defense—that i read the Second Amendment to protect “the right to keep and bear arms.” It protects the local citizenry from being disarmed by a central government, but i read it to protect the local citizenry as a community, not as individuals. It was written within a generation’s time after the Revolutionary War, when the forced quartering of British troops in American homes and the brutality of Hessian mercenaries were living memories; and i read it as much more a matter of direct local democracy and self-defense than of individualism.

The “Minute-men” who turned back the British at Concord in April 1775 after Paul Revere’s famous night ride, were a militia3. (Less close as an approximation were the Sheriff’s-posses of the Wild West stories and movies: They served on a much more temporary basis; and we don’t read nor hear much about Sheriff’s posses having practice sessions.)

An important part of the wisdom that “a well ordered militia” has to offer, is the superiority of local personal knowledge of who’s who and what each man is like, over bureaucratic administration. No bureaucracy can know every member of the public half as well as his neighbours can. No bureaucracy can supervise the local population half as well as the neighbours can. (The strictly non-violent Hutterites know the value of “primary group” co-ordination and supervision from hundreds of years of experience; and they value it enough to divide their communities if they seem in danger of growing too large.)

Would a militia have accepted either killer? We cannot be certain, of course; but my estimate is that if he looked at all risky during basic training, he would have been assigned to what the U.S. Army called “KP” (cook’s helper) or [non-medical] “orderly” (cleaning, painting, and such), or even turned away.

He would have been “monitored”, in 1965 military talk, meaning the other men would have observed what he did and said. What weapons, if any, he learned to use, and was allowed to carry, would have been those the other men in the militia could trust him with. He would have been taught discipline in the handling and use of the weapons involved… and that discipline would have been much of the basis for assessing what weapons he had and whether he was handling them appropriately.

No well-ordered militia sends any of its members into a school with an assault-rifle and hundreds of rounds of live ammunition. If a demonstration of military equipment is put on for a school, the ammunition will be dummy or possibly blank rounds. There will be more than one man putting on the demonstration. Possibly, one or two “MP”s (Military Police, not Members of Parliament) will carry holstered pistols with which to fend off possible theft attempts.

(Does a modern militia need assault-rifles? Home-stored pistols? I should not answer those questions here, because i know too little about how well-armed the threats are. It seems very unlikely indeed that every militiaman needs one of them in his bedroom closet, with or without lock and key.)

I can express great doubt that bureaucracy will solve the problem; and also, great doubt that armed police in elementary schools (as i heard suggested by their “National Rifle Association” on CBC Radio News after the Sandy Hook killings) or training teachers and school janitors to double as armed auxiliary police, will improve the social climate of the USA. Organizing local weapons holding via militiae and hunting clubs—that, i do believe, would improve it significantly.

“The obviously wise thing to do,” it seems from here, is suggested by those four words “a Well-Ordered Militia”: Put access to guns into the care of local community hunting groups and militiae, where the best knowledge of the individuals involved, is held between the ears of the locals, and kept current by those ears and the eyes that go with them.

Notes:

1. Wictionary defines militia as: “An army of trained civilians, which may be an official reserve army, called upon in time of need, the entire able-bodied population of a state which may also be called upon, or a private force not under government control.” [accessed February 28, 2018)

* M. A. 1965, Ph.D. 1966, University of Washington, Seattle.

2… in this century, as seen from Canada.

3. I recall the song “Yankee Doodle Dandy”, which originated in the New England States. It refers to going “down to camp” to see men drilling and marching. Wells’ Outline of History contains a description of how the militiamen harassed, then stopped and defeated, a British Army unit.

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Amen, Kim Campbell

Posted on February 18, 2018 by Davd

… Modesty is a Virtue, and a little more of it than absolutely necessary
is better than too little
(c) 2018, Davd

BBC presenter Katty Kay is wrong, former Prime Minister Kim Campbell is right about modesty. Ms. Kay might be able to interview newsworthy persons wearing a sleeveless dress or blouse; and present news on television, sleeveless. I’m stating here that she could do it even better wearing sleeves.

Bare skin distracts from business, from work that does not involve it in a practical way. We may not need to “cover as far up” as the burka, hijab, and their male analogues cover many Muslims1; but covering our bodies and outward to the middle of our upper arms and legs, and somewhat loosely, seems to me a basic minimum of modesty. On a hot summer day when Bermuda shorts and short sleeved shirts are more comfortable than long pants and long sleeves, I’m inclined to hope that those be decent minimum modesty.

Of course, Ms. Katty Kay could plausibly claim that i am too far beneath her to understand. (Ms. Kim Campbell is above her, but also the target of her dispute — so let us look at what two longer serving women Prime Ministers have worn.)

For public working occasions, the women Prime Ministers of England and Germany nearly always wore wrist length jackets, in the photographs i found via Wikipedia2. The jackets are identifiably women’s clothing, not men’s: Dignified modesty in their dress, and consistently so. Women with power need not, and women who hold high offices consistently do not, show their bare bodies in public.

The most leading, powerful women i could quickly name, dress modestly and look comfortable dressed modestly. While the topic is before us, let’s be thorough and reverse the genders: What if men dressed less modestly?

If we imagine men news presenters wearing sleeveless T-shirts, or sleeveless robes for that matter: Would it be distracting? Very possibly. Credible? Less so than when dressed normally. The listener “has only so much attention to give”, and the wise presenter claims that attention for the subject matter — not his attire — and not her attire, in the case of sensible Prime Ministers.

(I have one photograph on file of future President Barack Obama wearing a sleeveless shirt — as one of a basketball team who are all dressed that way. Mr. Obama dressed for the occasion… and serious thinking work is no occasion for skin display3.)

If i ever make a speech sleeveless, then, it will be outdoors on a hot day4. (I can’t imagine a setting for delivering a report, that wouldn’t be shaded enough for at least short sleeves.)

(Going down-body, let’s mention two obvious anatomical issues very briefly: I won’t demand any woman wear a jock strap, and don’t no woman demand i wear a bra. In most cases, neither support garment need show.)

One book i reviewed in 2016 recounted a vignette of a decent working class man talking about distraction… and since the author was a Lesbian columnist disguised as a man, it seems very safe to trust her account as honest, and not misogynist at all.

Norah Vincent quotes Jim, one of the men with whom she bowled, saying,

I can work with an ugly chick. There’s an ugly chick works in my office with me every day and I’m fine. But every now and then there’s this hot, hot woman who comes into the office, and for the whole time she’s there I’m completely f[….]d. Everything’s out the window. I don’t get s[…] done. All I can do is stare at her like this

he made a dumbfounded expression”. [Vincent, 2006: 355]

Jim is a human being, and though a Feminist once insisted to me that men do not have nor deserve human rights, i’m of the opinion that ordinary working class American Jim, does have; and that his right to work without distraction is morally superior to any woman’s, or man’s, ‘right’ to display her or his body.

Jim, thanks for speaking up about that.

Reference cited:

Vincent, Norah, 2006. Self Made Man: One Woman’s Year Disguised as a Man. New York: Viking Penguin.

Notes:

1. I seem to notice, admittedly in photographs rather than by on-the-scene observation, that Arab Muslim men cover their bodies about as fully as do the women in the same places. Which is why Ms. Kay asking “would a burka raise my perceived IQ?” is silly. The men and women around her, from Theresa May and Janice Fiamengo to David Cameron and Jon Sopel, do not wear southern Mediterranean garb; and if she does, it will more resemble a costume party than business wear.

2. Her Majesty Elizabeth II wore what to this non-ruling class man, seemed like a ballroom long dress for her Coronation and one meeting with heads of Commonwealth governments. The etiquette involved is “over my head” in a social class sense. In most of her public photographs, she has worn wrist to elbow length sleeves.

3. There might possibly be exceptions in the practice of medicine.

4… or perhaps, extemporaneously in a locker room, something like that.

5… censored to this website’s PG-13 norm.

 

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Don’t Promise Her Happiness!

Posted on February 5, 2018 by Davd

… Valentine’s Day or any day,
(c) 2018, Davd

Valentine’s Day is coming soon, and romantic extravagance will be “the order of the day”1. Don’t follow the order; don’t follow the custom.

Be unromantic if that’s what it implies; but do be realistic — and realistically, you cannot keep a promise to make somebody else happy.

First, it’s impossible. You might be able to do some things that make happiness more likely, might make it easier; but the most you can do might be to make happiness more likely — not guaranteed. There’s a 4-letter F-word for people who promise the impossible: Fool. (If you prefer 6-letter words, Stupid is close — but Fool is more exact.)

Don’t promise her2 happiness — don’t be a fool.

Second, she might “hold you to it” — she might demand you keep that impossible promise… which obviously, you cannot do.

There is an important lesson for men to learn, or remember, about happiness: Men expect, morally if not practically, to have a reasonable opportunity to pursue happiness… indeed, the US Declaration of Independence, written by men, claims as men’s God-given rights, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”. Many women seem to expect happiness as their female right; men claim life and liberty, but not happiness, only the right to pursue it… which is more realistic than women’s claim to have a right to it.

Fairy tales often end with “happily ever after”. Few boys take such endings seriously. While i’ve never been a girl, it looks like rather many girls do take them seriously. … ooops!

Ain’t Momma happy,.. ain’t nobody happy! Is an Afro-American folk maxim. I mentioned that to a young, “Euro-Canadian” mother, and her reply was immediate: “Happy wife, happy life.” Please the female head of household, or else.

Would you want to be married to a woman who had your promise to do the impossible, to point to? Would you want to be tangled up with that kind of promise, at all?

Me, i’d rather spend February 14 in church with ashes on my face3.

Notes:

1. Why Valentine’s day for “romance”? They taught me 50-60 years ago St. Valentine was executed by firing squad — in his day, they fired arrows rather than bullets. The arrows through his heart were literally true, and fatal. (Neither Wikipedia’s current article on the Saint, nor the Catholic Encyclopedia, stated that when read in January 2018) Having heard that story “back when”, it’s a day i do not celebrate as has been commercially normal during my life. I’d plan to let the day go by like any other, as last year — except that this year, it’s also Ash Wednesday.

2. I may have missed some recent social change, but last i really noticed, back early in this century, Valentine’s Day was about heterosexual “romance” and if there was a homosexual variation, i didn’t see it, and haven’t since. (Don’t bother to inform me, if.)

3. For the first time i can remember (which might mean “no recent year” rather than “no previous year”) Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, is February 14. Instead of “romance”, i expect to spend the day focusing on austerity and self-discipline.

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Blaming the Victim:

Posted on January 27, 2018 by Davd

… “It Happens all the time.”
(c) 2018, Davd

If you leave your car idling at the curb, run into a convenience store to get a pack of chewing gum, and some chick jumps into the car and steals it, what are the cops going to say when you report the theft?

If you’re walking around a flea market with your wallet bulging your back pocket, and some old lady bumps into you; and while you are apologizing to her, her daughter picks that back pocket, what are the cops going to say when you report the theft?

“You asked for it” and “You should know better” are two likely possibilities. You, the victim of the theft, will almost certainly be “blamed and shamed” for tempting the thief… for making something too easy to steal. And it’s quite true that when i carry my wallet around in public, it’s in a front pants pocket or more likely, the inside pocket of a jacket with a zipper or buttons for protection.

When i stop a vehicle and get out to go shopping, i not only stop the motor and take the key with me — I use that key to lock the vehicle. Which the cops are likely to tell you you should have done if you report such a theft to them.

Innocent trust has become something shameful, you ask? That is one way to look at these vignettes. And shame is one of many sales ploys that those who sell “security” might use to get some of your money… but I would rather live where innocent trust is safe. If the police are right, at least “right in a sense”, to blame the victim of a car theft or a pickpocket; the situation, the milieu, is wrong. It’s better to live where you needn’t be so cautious1.

Another way to look at these vignettes, is to quote a line from a famous prayer:
Lead us not into temptation. There is something wrong with the place where you would have left your car running or your wallet in your back pants pocket, rather than wrong with you. What’s wrong, let me guess, includes that you are among strangers.

Not all strangers are evil, nor even weak when tempted. Suppose that 95% of all the strangers at the shopping mall where i park, are honest and discipline themselves against theft. I should lock the car anyway: There is enough risk that one of the weak or thieving 5% might wander by, while i am in a store, that i ought to lock it.

Likewise, don’t wear your wallet in easy reach of a crowd of strangers, even if 95% of those wandering the open air market are fit to be trusted.

Likewise, by analogy, if you are an actress or other female performer, a teenage girl in school, a “good looking” woman office worker, you should take care not to lead the men who see you into temptation. The analogy includes, then, women who are “sexually harassed” while dressed or behaving less than modestly. As surely as a wallet in a prominent back pocket and a car left on the public street with the keys in the ignition [or even on the front seat], are “asking for it”; so projecting one’s sexuality by dress, posture, how one moves one’s body, scent, “makeup”, and some of you readers can probably imagine other ways, is likewise “asking for it.”

(More surely, in fact. Projecting sexuality is directed at other people. Leaving keys in a private car or a wallet in a prominent back pocket, is perhaps overly trusting of strangers, but it happens entirely within one’s personal territory.)

Once a woman projects her sexuality [or a man projects his, but that’s much less common], if the [wo]man responds to that temptation — it’s not clear who is the victim, nor who is to blame.

The fact that much “entertainment” is substantially erotic, complicates the problem. Try out for a job acting in an erotic production, while dressed and behaving modestly? Might that perhaps be impossible? Might some of the morality underlying modesty, be telling us that erotic entertainment is wrong, after all? Perhaps that is a lesson from the “MeToo and Time’sUp” memes — that the time when erotica is considered legitimate entertainment, should be ending. Perhaps it should never have begun.

Me, i’m on the side of modesty, along with “Jim” who found attractive women working near him distracted him from doing his job (Vincent, 2006: 35); along with traditional Christian teachings; and along with schools that require, even attempt, “dress codes”.

If that means erotic entertainment becomes as improper as smoking in restaurants and driving with a mobile phone in one hand — that’s OK with me. I’ve abstained from all three for many years; in fact, all my life. In fact, i believe erotic entertainment itself is a kind of sexual harassment.

This blog began because Internet security, and electronic security generally, is looking more and more like an endless, losing battle. I recently spent several hours “updating” the operating system of the computer i am using to write this blog, because of an especially serious “CPU bug” (or is that, “bugs”?) that can be exploited via the Internet (and computer networks generally.) Much more tedious, that “updating”, than stopping the car motor and locking the car, or putting my wallet in an inside jacket pocket. Not at all the way i wanted to spend a Friday afternoon and evening.

If you look after a computer’s security, never mind the security of several computers, you’ll read articles blaming those who fail to protect themselves against wrongdoing by strangers. Does that look analogous to a bulging wallet or a car left running? — it does to me! Once again, the victim of wrongdoing is blamed for failure to spend significant effort and perhaps money, on protecting her/himself. And as in the case of victims of car theft and pocket picking, the victims seldom if ever use that “Blaming the Victim” phrase.

I chose to use opening examples that would have been shamed when i was one third my present age, and have nothing to do with these Janie-come-lately threats. I chose to use examples for which men were more shamed than women, back then and perhaps still. My reasons were to demonstrate that men as well as women can readily become “blamed victims”, and in situations that are not at all sexual.

The computer and Internet examples — and the long waits and security checks required when you travel by airliner — indicate that security is becoming a worse problem. The car keys and wallet examples indicate that security has been something of a problem for decades and even centuries. The sexual-harassment reaction doesn’t indicate either one: It might well indicate that the “sexual freedom” of the late 20th Century, which began when oral contraceptives and the Baby Boom population bubble coincided in the late 1960s, is abruptly ending.

Brinton’s famous Anatomy of Revolution (1965) posited that sexual liberty was normal during the time a revolutionary movement was taking power; and that prudery was normal when that same revolution was consolidating power. When a Women’s March article on the CBC website carries the title “The Future is Female” that looks to me like consolidating power (but not like equality).

So we may be in a time of rapid, even abrupt moral change from pro-sexual to anti-sexual — and if “anti-sexual” works out to blessing monogamous fidelity and condemning promiscuity, that’s fine with Christian old me. Among other benefits that such “anti-sexuality” will bring with it, are lower rates of “STD” infection, and less cost to taxpayers.
Sexual prudence is good for the men who are prudent [and for prudent women also]; and for public health. If things go beyond prudence to prudery for a while — well, prudery is safer than promiscuity.

Safer from accusations of sexual-harassment, as well as from infection.

References cited:

Blatchford, Christie, 2016 “Some of Us Escaped the Groping Back Then“. National Post Full Comment, October 14. Her recollections match mine—the sexually aggressive were a small minority of men [and of women].

Brinton, Crane, 1965: The Anatomy of Revolution. NY: Vintage.

Vincent, Norah, 2006. Self Made Man: One Woman’s Year Disguised as a Man. New York: Viking Penguin.

Notes:

1. . The places i know about, where you needn’t be so cautious, are all small towns, villages, and rural areas — which is not the same as saying every small town, village, and rural area is that safe.

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