Friday, August 24, 2012
The ironies of Anders Breivik
As has long been clear, Anders Breivik is not insane. The prosecution got that wrong. The mass murder Breivik perpetrated was very much a political act. As the judge in her summing-up outlines, the arguments Breivik used in his 'manifesto' in respect of his political analysis were from the writings of others and not his own original thoughts. His analysis of 'political correctness' is fully in line with the historical documentation and scholarship on the topic, as I have previously pointed out.
The problem with Breivik – other than the obvious one that he has without justification murdered a large number of individuals -- is that the rationale for his political action itself comes from the political-Left analysis he himself attacks. Revolutionary acts (notably terroristic outrages) do not stem from a conservative mindset. This is self-evident, and pointed out and discussed most interestingly by the British philosopher John Gray (see his book, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia).
Furthermore, with the point of his actions to point up the bogus, extreme ideological nature of the contemporary outlook, hopelessly compromised as it is by PC; then surely no answer comes from pitting other ideology against it. Yet Breivik points up a pro-religious, extreme-nationalist supposed solution, and actually gave a recognised political-Right clenched-fist salute in the courtroom.
There is great irony too in the general response to Breivik, in that the way to stop further Anders Breiviks is not to shove under the carpet discussion of the origins and nature of 'political correctness' but instead to openly discuss it. What instead has happened is the usual 'guilt by association' ruse of the political-Left, whereby anything associated with something obviously bad is thereby itself deemed bad, when in fact the two have no logical connection with each other. Just because Breivik's actions were appalling does not make 'beyond the pale' historical documentation and scholarly analysis of the origins and nature of PC. That much should be obvious upon even the slightest reflection.
Completely wrong as the crime was -- however you look at it -- Breivik highlights a major faultline that surely heralds future conflict. His defence that he was acting in pre-emptive self-defence is clearly unjustifiable, but his vision of civil conflict over the elitist-separatist contempt for and indeed hatred of the mass of ordinary people by the political-media-education uber-class seems all too prescient.
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
Galloway is right about rape: the law is crazy
George Galloway – and I'm no fan – is right on the issue of crazy rape law. It's idiotic to extend the notion of the determination of consent to the point of absurdity. There has to be some limit before getting to the point that no component of sexual activity can escape the requirement of a signed consent form, thus making sexual activity impracticable.
If consent is not in doubt when two people go to bed and have sex, then any further sex whilst still in that bed and in the same time-frame hardly can be deemed to be lacking consent. On the contrary, some explicit clear signal of non-consent should be required from one of the parties to negate this presumption.
So it is not material that Assange's sexual partner was asleep on the occasion of the additional sex. Of course, in the absence of the context of clear prior consent, then no woman can possibly give consent when she's asleep, and that indeed would be an instance of rape. That is an entirely different scenario to that in the Assange case.
The case that should have exercised everyone is that of the footballer who was witnessed to take back to a hotel room a girl so inebriated she couldn't even stand up. The footballer was not convicted of rape because the jury decided that consent had been obtained beforehand – there is no other basis on which they could have delivered a 'not guilty verdict. How they managed this given what must have been in the judge's directions is a mystery, and it was to say the least a big assumption. The suspicion is that it was made for PC reasons -- the footballer was of an ethnic minority. [The footballer invited another footballer to join 'the party', and famously he WAS convicted on the basis of having sex with a woman deemed to have been in no position to be able to give consent -- because she was earlier too inebriated to even stand up -- but then he was NOT of an ethnic minority.] Journalists avoided commenting on the let-off likewise for PC-fascist reasons.
The problem with the ridiculous sex laws in the UK (as other places in the PC-fascist West) is the junking of due legal process to presume the male is somehow guilty unless this can be disproved. The law is supposed to work the other way round.
In rape cases, the male has to show that he took steps to ascertain consent, and because of this inversion of the law any man in effect is assumed likely to be breaking the law when he has sex, and can be made subject to a show trial where the onus is on HIM to prove otherwise; not on the Crown to determine guilt -- never mind 'beyond reasonable doubt'.
It is not the likes of Galloway who are the gross sexists, but commentators who have denounced his criticism of the rape laws.
As for the US politician making the claim that women possess mechanisms to prevent pregnancy after rape: evidence shows the very opposite. By great contrast, his silly, indeed scientifically illiterate claims are rightly attacked, being pure imagination in the service of an ideological anti-abortion stance; which in any case does not hold water given the decisive evidence against the existence of the supposed 'post-abortion' syndrome.
Sunday, August 19, 2012
Maternity Pay is a big problem for employers
Just been on BBC Telly talking about Statutory Maternity Pay (Sunday Morning Live, BBC1) to make points supporting a woman Apprentice winner (Katie Hopkins) that employers get a bad deal from the current system re women employees and maternity. After all, she rammed home: a baby is what the woman employee wants and is nothing at all to do with an employer like her. Indeed. Neither is it anything much to do with the wider community, being a purely personal decision (if not a pretty selfish one); a woman's partnership with a man she selects being pointedly the exclusion of others.
A fairly narrow topic for yours truly, admittedly, but they approached me and so I obliged.
As usual, the standard lame position is the scientifically illiterate failure to understand the deep sex differences -- that are actual dichotomies -- and a pretence that humans are a unisex. This flies in the face of by far the most comprehensive research on women and work, at the LSE (Hakim: several major recent books, papers) showing that 85%-90% of women view work as just one part of life – and very much a subsidiary part -- so that they do not have an attitude to work akin typically to that of men, who usually do (and want to) work full-time and continuously. The upshot is that at the end of the 52 weeks SMP, many women just say they have changed their mind and now don't want to return to work at all, or to do so only part-time.
This is bad enough for the employer, but there is also a huge perverse incentive through SMP not being means-tested. Most women have a working partner at home, and in consequence any benefits to which they may be entitled in principle are means-tested away. SMP, by contrast, is £135 a week for a whole year on top of everything the other half brings in through work.
The Government recognises a 'moral jeopardy' here in setting qualifying time periods to ensure that no woman can claim if she was already pregnant upon starting work; but to get round this all a woman has to do is to wait to stop using contraception until about the time she starts work. It's not as if getting pregnant is not fairly easy to control. In this way, a woman (a couple) who has decided to start a family can take a job not in good faith but so as to exploit the system. She works just six months and then gets a whole year of substantial support from the taxpayer to top-up income for her household even if it is already well above the equivalent of any combined benefits levels.
Employers are aware of all this – eventually through experience if not from the off -- and are bound to look askance at women prospective employees; so the generous taxpayers' money given by the Government to women actually serves to undermine the position of women generally in the workplace.
The trouble is that this sort of perverse incentive is often evident at the male/female interface, where the Government appears to act as if women are all 'sugar and spice' and would never take advantage of such low-hanging fruit. Not that any such thing would be offered to a man: the assumption would be that the 'slugs and snails' would race to the trough. This of course is entirely lost on the incredulous BBC.
To make these obvious and clear-cut points is – need I trouble to say -- to attract the usual lame kneejerk of 'sexism' -- cf; 'racism' and the other spurious -isms. Sure enough, so responds the self-appointed faux-spokesboy for the 'working class' (and actually a PC zealot) now predictably working for The Independent, Owen Jones. And the Apprentice media wallpaper cowardly sucked up to the PC imperative by citing "views like that", as if major LSE research and an all-too-apparent perverse incentive could be mere opinion. No opportunity for comeback was provided by the BBC, of course.
