Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category
A Sign of a Non-Competitive State? How It Treats Women
Radical feminists like to pretend that the only people who care about the rights of women are the socialist and Marxists that have dominated their movement for too long. But a 1998 article published in, of all places, the US Army War College Quarterly Parameters highlights the fact that in many ways how successfully societies integrate women into daily life — especially the workforce — is also a good marker as to how successful such societies will be.
Writer Ralph Peters insightful article, Spotting the Losers: Seven Signs of Non-Competitive States, looks at an issue of ongoing debate — what makes some countries and cultures succeed while relegating others to poverty and instability. The second factor on Peters’ list of things that hold back societies– closely behind the failure to inculcate the free flow of information — is the subjugation of women.
Peters attributes much of the success of the U.S. economy to the rising status of women thanks to the early feminist movement. Peters writes,
Vying with informational abilities as a key factor in the reinvigoration of the US economy has been the pervasive entry of American women into the educational process and the workplace. When the stock market soars, thank Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the suffragettes, not just their beneficiary, Alan Greenspan. After a century and a half of struggle by English and American women, the US economy now operates at a wartime level of human-resource commitment on a routine basis.
Ironically, as a number of critics of radical feminism have noted, it was sexual discrimination that at its heart was socialist in nature. Growing up I often remember hearing relatives and others complain that if feminism succeeded, then women would end up taking men’s jobs, as if individual men had some sort of lifetime right to a guarantee of a job free from competition from a woman.
Eliminating sexual discrimination, as Peters notes, has been a capitalist gold mine, allowing talented people to pursue their goals regardless of their sex and in the meantime enrich us all. As Peters notes,
The math isn’t hard. ANy country or culture that suppresses half its population, excluding them from economic contribution and wasting energy keeping them out of the school and workplace is not going to perform comfortably with us [the United States].
Peters then goes on to offer this advice, primarily directed at people considering investing money in foreign countries but equally applicable to all sorts of decisions,
The point isn’t really the fear that women will steal jobs in Country X. Rather, it’s a fundamental fear of women — or of a cultural caricature of women as incapable, stupid, and worrisomely sexual. If, when you get off the plane, you do not see men and women sitting together in the airport lounge, put your portfolio treat on the next flight home.
It is difficult for any human being to share power already possessed. Authority over their women is the only power many males will ever enjoy. From Greece to the Ganges, half the world is afraid of girls and gratified by their subjugation. It is a prescription for cultural mediocrity, economic failure — and inexpressible boredom. The value added by the training and utilization of our female capital is an American secret weapon.
Ironically, it is the radical feminists in the United States today who would most like to overturn this 20th century revolution by moving feminism away from its individualistic, equal opportunity roots and toward the sort of socialist, group think that so hampers Europe’s economy.
Source:
Spotting the Losers: Seven Signs of Non-Competitive States. Ralph Peters, Parameters, Spring 1998, pp.36-47.
Thanks to Andrew Hofer for bringing this article to my attention.
Man Wrongfully Imprisoned for 9 Years Now Hounded by Texas for Child Support
Clarence Brandley was wrongfully imprisoned by the state of Texas for 9 years. When he finally won his release in the early 1990s, the state of Texas had a message for him — he owed the state for child support payments he had been unable to make during his 9 years in jail.
Brandley, 51, was convicted in 1981 of raping and strangling a 16-year-old girl. Brandley worked as a janitor at a high school, and the girl visited the school as part of a volleyball tournament.
In 1987 a judge agreed with Brandley’s attorneys that he had not received a fair trial. In fact, State District Judge Perry Picket wrote that, “no case has presented a more shocking scenario of the effects of racial prejudice, perjured testimony, witness intimidation (and) an investigation the outcome of which was predetermined” than Brandley’s case.
In 1990, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals upheld Picket’s ruling and Brandley was freed from jail — but not freed from his child support payments.
Brandley had been divorced in 1977 and ordered to pay $190/month in child support payments. After being sent to jail, he did not make those payments, having no source of income.
After being released from jail, he apparently agreed in 1993 to make the back payments, but subsequently hired a lawyer to contest the payments for the time during which he was in prison and the state of Texas did not attempt to collect the child support.
It renewed collection efforts, however, after Brandley filed an ultimately unsuccessful $120 million lawsuit against various Texas state agencies over his wrongful imprisonment. Those lawsuits were all rejected on the grounds of sovereign immunity (a pernicious legal doctrine that says citizens cannot sue governments for wrongful acts because, well, they’re the government).
Dianna Thompson of The American Coalition of Fathers and Children told the Houston Chronicle that federal laws makes it illegal for states to forgive child support payments regardless of circumstance.
That law needs to be amended so that parents wrongfully deprived by the state of the opportunity to work and support their children are not penalized later for the wrongful actions of the state. It is not Brandley’s fault but rather the fault of the state of Texas that he did not make regular child support payments for 9 years. Forcing him to pay for the state’s mistake is obscene.
Source:
‘It’s like a double insult. Harvey Rice, Houston Chronicle, April 27, 2002.
No, Really — Old Women Are Not Witches
Comic Relief and the Department for International Development are funding an odd program in Tanzania — aid workers there are trying a number of approaches to convince people in north-west Tanzanian that old women are not witches.
According to the BBC,
In many African villages, old women living on their own or in isolation are often accused of being witches with local people holding them esponsible for tragic events or even general hardship.
The women are victimised and intimidated and in many cases they are killed.
The program targets 70 villages in north-west Tanzania. “We use traditional drama groups, dances, choirs to pass educational messages to the entire community that older people are not witches,” Sixbert Mbaya, who manages one of these programs, told The BBC.
On the one hand, it is difficult to fathom that in the 21st century there is any part of the world that still needs such a program. On the other hand, it is only a few centuries removes since the last witch trials in North America. Programs that genuinely improve the status of women in the developing world deserve our support.
Source:
Aid scheme tackles African witch myth. The BBC, April 26, 2002.
Controversial Use of Fetal Murder Law in Michigan
In Michigan, prosecutors are pursuing what is bound to be an extremely controversial application of the state’s fetal murder law in the wake of a tragic automobile accident.
The facts are this: On Jan. 3, 2001 Kara Hanford was 9 months pregnant and traveling in a vehicle driven by the father, Marty French. Hanford was not wearing a seat belt and French’s license was listed as being suspended (although Hanford maintains he had a valid driver’s license).
According to witnesses, as French approached a train crossing, he tried to stop but hit a patch of ice and slammed into a train. Hanford was thrown out of the car and into a nearby pond. She was taken by paramedics to a nearby hospital where an emergency Caesarean section was performed. The infant survived only four days.
This week French was formally charged with driving with a suspended license causing death and negligent homicide. French could spend up to 15 years in jail if convicted on the charges.
French is being charged under Michigan’s Prenatal Protection Act which was enacted after a highly publicized case in Michigan where drunk driver caused a car accident which killed a nearly full-term fetus. The idea was that there should be some sort of penalty for third parties causing the death of a fetus through their own negligence and/or willfully malicious actions.
But prosecutors in this case are reaching beyond all bounds if they think people who supported this law believed it would be used in this sort of case. This was a tragedy that both Hanford and French clearly have not yet recovered from. As Hanford nicely summarized French’s impending prosecution,
I lost a big part of me, and now they’re going to take the rest of me. Now one year later, they want to take away the only thing I have left. Like his son dying wasn’t enough.
Moreover, these sorts of prosecutions will only create a backlash that will undermine a law that could do some good if sensibly applied.
Source:
Prison threat adds to parents’ loss. John Agar, Kalamazoo Gazette, April 16, 2002.
Bonobos, Chimpanzees, and Maureen Dowd
In her endless quest to bring sexual politics into practically every discussion, the New York Time’s Maureen Dowd recently blamed men for the fact that only 49 percent of female executives making more than $100,000 have children (compared to 10 percent of men in that position who are childless). Dowd absurdly thinks that men should take a lesson from bonobos.
Before we get into monkey business, lets look at Dowd’s absurd logic. She cites a “60 Minutes” report in which a handful of women claimed that the second they told men that they attend Harvard Business School, the men are no longer interested in them. Harvard Business School student Ani Vartanian told Lesley Stahl,
As soon as you say Harvard Business School . . . that’s the end of the conversation. As soon as the guys say, ‘Oh, I go to Harvard Business School,’ all the girls start falling into them.
Of course anecdotes like this are manna to columnists like Dowd who seem positively allergic to anything even remotely smelling of actual data. Dowd implicitly argues that this is the reason female executives are childless without offering a shred of evidence.
She then goes on to urge men to be willing to date more “challenging” women, and, in the process, pauses to denigrate women who are not as “challenging” or “demanding.” According to Dowd,
Women who don’t have demanding jobs are not less demanding in relationships; indeed, they may be more demanding. They’re saving up all that competitive energy and critical faculty to lavish on you when you get home.
What a demeaning thing to say about women who do not attend Harvard Business School or pursue the high challenge careers that Dowd apparently thinks they should.
But it is when Dowd ends her column in a bit of comparative evolutionary biology between human beings and bonobos that Dowd really goes off the deep end. According to Dowd,
Bonobos, or pygmy chimpanzees, live in equatorial rain forests of Congo, and have an extraordinarily happy existence.
And why? because in bonobo society, the females are dominant. Just light dominance, so that its more like a co-dominance, or equality between the sexes.
“They are less obsessed with power and status than their chimpanzee cousins, and more consumed with Eros,” The Times’s Natalie Angier has written. “Bonobos use sex to appease, to bond, to make up after a fight, to ease tensions, to cement alliances . . . Humans generally wait until after a nice meal to make love; bonobos do it beforehand.”
All of this, is offered as a way to achieve Dowd’s ultimate goal which is, namely, “If men would only give up their silly desire for world dominance, the world would be a much finer place.”
First, Angier’s claim that chimpanzees are “obsessed with power and status” whereas bonobos are “more consumed with Eros” is the absolute worse sort of anthropomorphism. Chimpanzees don’t sit around plotting how to obtain power, and bonobos aren’t thinking of ways to get laid. They’re both following scripts pre-arranged for them by their particular evolutionary path. Imputing to them these human motives is absurd and unworthy of even a beginning biology student.
More importantly, though, decades ago this sort of anthropomorphizing held up chimpanzees as a model for human behavior. Until it was discovered that chimpanzees organizing hunting parties and engage in plenty of other organized violence.
But in evaluating bonobos vs. chimpanzees Dowd, like a lot of people who cite bonobos, leave out what bonobos do not do. What they do not do is use tools to nearly the extent that chimpanzees do. Chimps, like human beings, are rather creative tool users — they will use sticks to fish, use tree branches as ladders to escape, and exhibit a whole host of other behaviors. Bonobos have never been observed using tools in the wild (though they do learn how to use tools in captivity).
One persistent theory about human intelligence and tool use is that it evolved out of the needs of organized hunting and other aggressive. To the extent that one can draw the sort of crude comparisons between non-human primates and human beings, the clear lesson is that following Dowd’s advice might indeed reduce conflict, but it would also reduce that which makes us human — our incredible manipulation of our environment.
Personally, though, I suspect the amount of comparative information that can be gleaned about human behavior from chimpanzees and bonobos is extremely limited. More often commentators such as Dowd simply use these non-human primates as a post hoc justification for their already pre-existing ideological views. That’s one difference between non-human primates and someone like Dowd — the primates do not intentionally prefer fallacious logic over reasoned argument (the bonobos and chimpanzees at least have a ready justification for not relying on solid data — what’s Dowd’s excuse?)
Source:
The baby bust. Maureen Dowd, New York Times, April 10, 2002.
Women Who Run with Nazis
Norway’s Hanna Kvanmo, who sits on the Nobel Peace Prize committee sparked a controversy when she said that she and other committee members regretted awarding Shimon Peres the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 and wished they could take that decision back. Of course, Kvanmo apparently thinks Yasser Arafat has done a standup job of upholding the prize’s values and said nothing about Palestinian terrorism.
What’s going on here? Fredrik Norman fills in the details. Ms. Kvanmo’s position is a bit easier to understand in light of her activities during World War II.
On April 9, 1940, Nazi Germany invaded Norway and conquered it in about two months. Kvanmo was one of about 1,000 young Norwegian women who subsequently joined the German Red Cross and went to work on the Eastern front taking care of Nazi soldiers.
While the Nazis were rampaging across Europe, leaving death and destruction in their wake, Kvanmo chose to spend the war helping to treat war criminals (among other things, Kvanmo and others treated the wounds of members of the SS).
At the end of the war, many of these nurses were returned to Norway where they were sentenced to varying terms of prison for aiding the enemy.
Leave it to a woman who aided the Nazi war effort to lecture the rest of the world about peace.
Source:
The 9th of April. Fredrik Norman, April 9, 2002.
An Egregious Example of Paternity Fraud
Glenn J. Sacks turned up the most egregious example of paternity fraud that I’ve heard of.
Larry Nicholson received a notice that he was in arrears to the tune of $75,000 for a child he knew nothing about. When he showed up in court to find out what the case was about, Nicholson thought it would be open and shut — Nicholson is black, but the child in question is white.
No matter. Nicholson did not contest paternity of the child within the time specified by the state of California — a whopping six months. Nicholson said he knew nothing about the child until receiving the notice that he was in arrears.
Still, he is legally the child’s father according to California and must pay child support. Sacks reports that Nicholson currently pays 40 percent of his take home pay to support this child.
Sackrs reports that the Californian legislature is considering a new law which would remedy these sorts of problems by, among other things, requiring courts of vacate support judgments where the claims of paternity are clearly false.
Source:
California Paternity Justice Act: If the Genes Don’t Fit, You Must Acquit. Glenn J. Sacks, GlennJSacks.Com, March 16, 2002.
Women Obtaining Concealed Weapons Permits in Michigan
A concealed weapons permit system went into effect in Michigan several, and the Detroit Free Press focused on women who are lining up to obtain their weapons permits. Under the new state law, anyone with a clean criminal history can obtain a concealed weapons permit.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that large numbers of women are obtaining the permits. So far 3,278 pistol permits have been issued in Michigan. The law forbids the release of information about the identities of those seeking permits, but a gun shop owner cited by the Free Press estimates that as many as 40 percent of those seeking permits are women.
Jessica Lutz of Huntington Woods, Mich., tells the Detroit Free Press,
When I found out how much safer women could be . . . what’s my choice there? One of the things taught in my house was, you have to be self-sufficient.
The article also quotes Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence spokeswoman Nancy Hwa claiming that in other states permits have been revoked after permit holders committed crimes. Of course she forgets to mention that permit holders in those states have tended to commit gun-related crimes at rates that are often even lower than those committed by off-duty police (and, frankly, I’d be more inclined to trust a woman with a concealed weapon than an off-duty Detroit cop).
Source:
Weapons law draws women to get arms. Kathleen Gray and John Masson, Detroit Free Press, February 21, 2002.
Terrorism, Sexuality and Robin Morgan
Joelle Cowan wrote an article back in December about, of all things, “The Sexuality of Terrorism.” This was not Cowan’s invention, but rather the title of a course being offered by the Department of Women’s Studies at California State University. As Cowan puts it,
Most people never imagined that terrorism had anything to do with sexuality, but that’s not what those who study women think. But according to their materials, it would be more accurate to say that terrorism has a nationality, one that sounds a lot like American [sic].
The course is partially based on Robin Morgan’s The Demon Lover: On the Sexuality of Terrorism. Morgan’s thesis isn’t hard to predict. Cowan quotes her as writing that, “The terrorist is the logical incarnation of patriarchal politics in a technological world.”
Here’s a more extended bit of psychobabble from The Demon Lover,
The majority of terrorists-and those against whom they are rebelling-are men. The explosions going off today worldwide have been smoldering on a long sexual and emotional fuse. The terrorist has been the subliminal idol of an androcentric cultural heritage from prebiblical times to the present. His mystique is the latest version of the Demon Lover. He evokes pity because he lives in death. He emanates sexual power because he represents obliteration. He excites the thrill of fear. He is the essential challenge to tenderness. He is at once a hero of risk and an antihero of mortality.
And, of course, no feminist discussion of war could proceed without an assertion that war is simply sex by other means. According to Morgan,
A lack of ambivalence must be trained into a man. Can it ever be trained out of him? The war toy, the rigid penetrating missiles, the dynamite and the blasting cap-these are at first only symbols of the message he must learn, fetishes of the ecstasy he is promised. But he must become them before he is rewarded with what the lack of ambivalence promises him: a frenzy, an excitement, an exhilaration-an orgasmic thrill in violent domination with which, he is taught, no act of lovemaking could possibly compete.
After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Morgan’s publisher rushed a new version of The Demon Lover to press, and Morgan wrote an article on how the United States should respond to the attacks. Of course, any hint of supporting a war to remove the Taliban from Afghanistan was strictly off the table. Instead, Morgan urged her readers to,
Talk about the root causes of terrorism , about the need to diminish this daily climate of patriarchal violence surrounding us in its state-sanctioned normalcy; the need to recognize people’s despair over ever being heard short of committing such dramatic, murderous acts; the need to address a desperation that becomes chronic after generations of suffering; the need to arouse that most subversive of emotions — empathy — for “the other”; the need to eliminate hideous economic and political injustices, to reject all tribal/ethnic hatreds and fears, to repudiate religious fundamentalisms of every kind. Especially talk about the need to understand that we must expose the mystique of violence, separate it from how we conceive of excitement, eroticism, and “manhood”; the need to comprehend that violence differs in degree but is related in kind, that it thrives along a spectrum, as do its effects — from the battered child and raped woman who live in fear to an entire populace living in fear.
Yeah, Mohammad Atta was probably turning in his grave at the thought of radical feminists talking about the psychosexual politics of terrorism.
Sources:
Week 1: Ghosts and Echoes. Robin Morgan, September 18, 2001.
Demon Lover. Robin Morgan, Ms. Magazine, January 23, 2002.
The sexuality of terrorism? Joelle Cowan, The Contrarian, December 12, 2001.
Tags: Robin Morgan
Maryland High Court Vacates Child Support Order for Man Who Was Not Biological Father
Maryland’s highest court this month overturned a lower court’s ruling that a man should be forced to continue paying child support even though paternity tests established that he was not the father of the child in question.
In 1993 Michele Gunter gave birth to a child and told Nicholas Walter that he was the father since she had not had sexual intercourse with any other men in the previous year. A judge ordered Walter to pay child support, to which Walter agreed.
Walter, however, had a series of work-related accidents and was perennially behind in his child-support payments. In March 2000, Walter asked a judge to modify the payment award since injuries sustained in an accident made it impossible for him to perform his job as a cab driver. He also asked for genetic testing to establish whether or not he was the after of the child.
The paternity test established that Walter was not the father of the child, and he asked the court to absolve him of the unpaid child support as well as order the mother to reimburse him for the money he had provided.
Maryland Circuit Judge James C. Cawood Jr. ruled in 2001 that Walter was not entitled to reimbursement of child support he had paid and must pay the unpaid amounts as well.
Walter appealed and Maryland’s high court ruled in a 4-3 decision that since he is not the biological father, he is not responsible for the past due child support.
In the majority opinion, judge Lynne A. Battaglia wrote that, “Without paternity, there is no legal duty; without a legal duty, there can be no financial obligation.”
Source:
Court frees man from child-support order. Arlo Wagner, The Washington Times, January 20, 2002.