epoche's Profile

Name:
epoche
Joined:
Aug 11, 2012

Recent Comments

epoche

I agree with you in your sentiment but how does one go about building alternative institutions at this point? Every aspect of life is legislated upon. 

Jeff: KC is right in diagnosis butwrong in prescription. Liberal media outlets cannot be forced to cover stories fairly.

We lost the institutions twenty years ago. We will never get them back.

We must focus our efforts on building alternative institutions that represent us. We must, in effect, separate out social and economic lives from that of liberals. We must work hard to exclude them from our institutions.

We can't live with liberals. They won't leave us alone, and they won't be fair to us.

This is a domestic Cold War. It's fight by proxy by institutions. We must divide the house, contain the contagion.

The liberal model can't survive. look at Detroit and Chicago and bankrupt California. We must build a wall and let it fail, just like East Germany. · 5 hours ago

epoche

Why have men acquiesced so much in giving women the upper hand in society’s institutions? It falls to men to create society (because women almost never create large organizations or cultural systems). It seems foolish and self-defeating for men then to meekly surrender advantageous treatment in all these institutions to women. Moreover, despite many individual exceptions, in general and on average men work harder at their jobs in these institutions than women, thereby enabling men to rise to the top ranks. As result, women continue to earn less money and have lower status than men, which paradoxically is interpreted to mean that women’s preferential treatment should be continued and possibly increased (see review of much evidence in Baumeister2010). Modern society is not far from embracing explicit policies of “equal pay for less work,” as one of us recently proposed. Regardless of that prospect, it appears that preferential treatment of women throughout the workforce is likely to be fairly permanent. Because of women’s lesser motivation and ambition, they will likely never equal men in achievement, and their lesser attainment is politically taken as evidence of the need to continue and possibly increase preferential treatment for them. 

epoche

Even today, the women’s movement has been a story of women demanding places and preferential treatment in the organizational and institutional structures that men create, rather than women creating organizations and institutions themselves. Almost certainly, this reflects one of the basic motivational differences between men and women, which is that female sociality is focused heavily on one-to-one relationships, whereas male sociality extends to larger groups networks of shallower relationships (e.g., Baumeister and Sommer 1997; Baumeister 2010). Crudely put, women hardly ever create large organizations or social systems. That fact can explain most of the history of gender relations, in which the gender near-equality of prehistorical societies was gradually replaced by progressive inequality—not because men banded together to oppress women, but because cultural progress arose from the men’s sphere with its large networks of shallow relationships, while the women’s sphere remained stagnant because its social structure emphasized intense one-to-one relationships to the near exclusion of all else. All over the world and throughout history (and prehistory), the contribution of large groups of women to cultural progress has been vanishingly small.

epoche

Additionally, the loss of manufacturing jobs and inability of the US to replace them have led to men losing their economic ability to support a family.

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It wouldnt matter if we brought back manufacturing - the feminists would merely demand that women be given preferential treatment in hiring and promotions. 

from

Today most schools, universities, corporations, scientific organizations, governments, and many other institutions have explicit policies to protect and promote women. It is standard practice to hire or promote a woman ahead of an equally qualified man. Most large organizations have policies and watchdogs that safeguard women’s interests and ensure that women gain preferential treatment over men. Parallel policies or structures to protect men’s interests are largely nonexistent and in many cases are explicitly prohibited. Legal scholars, for example, point out that any major new law is carefully scrutinized by feminist legal scholars who quickly criticize any aspect that could be problematic or disadvantageous to women, and so all new laws are women-friendly. Nobody looks out for men, and so the structural changes favoring women and disadvantaging men have accelerated (Baumeister and Vohs 2004). [...]

epoche

marriage cannot be restored just by getting people to the altar - the economic basis for marriage must be restored. Dr Rahe should acquaint himself with the term hypergamy. As James Taranto (the editor of the Wall St Journal Opinion page) noted: 

from

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324020504578394791283850654.html

If that is sexist, then Mother Nature is sexist. (Or, if you prefer, God is sexist, or natural selection if you don't go in for anthropomorphism.) If you think it unjust that our social institutions tilt the sexual playing field even further to the advantage of high-status men and the detriment of everyone else, then your quarrel is with those who espouse the ideologies that have produced that result: feminism and sexual liberationism.

epoche

An even better question is: Why is it your business what people get paid?

We could put it into a fun sound bite: Its nobody's business who you get laid with and its nobody's business how much you get paid with. 

Edited on April 6, 2013 at 4:04am
epoche

I think our problems are with national identity rather than just budgetary. In our postfeminist, postchristian society we cannot agree on solutions because we cannot agree on what the problems are. 

Ontos: Prof Rahe: I am afraid I agree with the above post. Perhaps you or I could prepare a list of things that should BR done ( and undone) but the entrenched bureaucracy is not going away with one election. Certainly, Congress and a willing president could dismantle the agencies and their enormous reach. But what makes you see the way towards that happening? Even with a great election victory in 2010, the Boehner House ignored the mandate they were given. Obamacare was the pulsing issue, but Boehner could not bring himself to war against it, and the party nominated an exponent of RomneyCare. Theirs is great entrenched power. We don't even have an effective political party and voice. · 1 hour ago
epoche

do those stories of men oppressing women include the men who were injured in the job working to build things of value to support women and children as a backdrop or do you hear what you want to hear? 

Water Chestnut: 

Furthermore, when I was in my 20s, I had a number of women in their 70s as friends, and I don't recall hearing what an incredible, rosy, wonderful thing it was back then for married women who stayed at home.  That situation is nice if you have a kind, reliable man, but not all men are such, so the result for too many women, even in the 40s and 50s, was to put up with the philandering or abuse or else end up in poverty or a divorcee with that stigma.  I also know a number of well-educated married women from the era who did a lot of different sorts of jobs and activities, though we rarely hear about them and act like they didn't exist back then.  · March 22, 2013 at 8:29pm

epoche

Because you dont want to deal with the reality of female hypergamy. Women as a rule dont want to marry men who make less money than their men. There are exceptions but the exceptions dont make the rule. Even in Sweden where the government puts a tremendous amount of support in place for women they still marry up.  

Water Chestnut: I don't see what the big deal is who makes more money, the man or woman.  It seems to be more an ego thing that it comes up at all.  Like it or not, people (not just women/men as a category) have different skills and talents, so why not pull together and get what you can and play to both the husband and wife's talents? 
epoche

Because human beings ruin everything. 

Mendel

Frozen Chosen: Bingo!

I'm just trying to figure out why 50s parents did such a crappy job of raising their kids as evidenced by the boomers who are now screwing everything up. · 0 minutes ago

I was just wondering the same thing: if the 1950s were such a paradigm of the ideal American family, why did the offspring (and many wives) of those families reject everything about it? · March 22, 2013 at 4:25am

epoche

This is not related  to the post here but you asked why the birth rate is collapsing it is because the way the economy is structured it makes it very difficult to men to extract status out of working to signal to women that it is time to start a family. Nobody wants to deal with hypergamy. Tax credits for kids will not raise the birth rate at all.

Peter Robinson: If you wonder why we Catholics find Francis so astonishing, a picture of the way popes used to make their entrances:   · 17 hours ago
epoche

The childless are not getting any sort of free ride. These problems were caused by feminism and social security. How am I getting a free ride if I cannot have afford to have any kids? Giving people a tax break for having kids is not the same as restoring the family as an economic unit.

Michael Hinton: Well, Ramesh Ponnuru advocates for a $4000 per child tax credit to cancel out the tax bias against having children. We spend a lot of our own money on raising new taxpayers. The childless are getting a kind of free ride.
epoche

I think the right can win the citizenry by arguing for legalized prostitution. If we are going to accept sex without commitment as a standard feature of our culture at least people can have rules regarding it. The gap between our publicly accepted morals and how people really behave is so wide no one is taken seriously at this point. It would be better than what we have now. 

katievs: The right had better get wise to the fact that have tofight this battle if we don't want to be overrun utterly.  It's not going to be enough for our political leaders to check the "I support traditional marriage" box on their personal "issues" list.  Nor is it going to be enough for us to point out cynically how very far we've fallen.
epoche

Dr Rahe should have entitled this article

Soft Despotism Gets A Hard On

I know that its in bad taste but I had to share. 

epoche

The reason that the birth rate is collapsing is that our society refuses to acknowledge the reality of female hypergamy. If people do not believe that one of the major purposes of men working is that they can extract status out of working and have families then no amount of social engineering will matter at all. If people believe men having families is less important as a matter of public policy than issuing bad loans to historically disadvantaged groups, aids awareness campaigns and identity politics then we are probably looking at several lost generations anyways. 

epoche

Either the parents are responsible or everyone else is, there really is no third option in the final analysis. I dont see how "society" can make any more arrangements without resulting in moral hazard. Is the government in the business of breeding sheep or are people free moral agents responsible for their own well being? 

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