Stealing Christmas

This has to count as the most bizarre story of this, and probably any other Christmas season.

I don’t see why it’s appearing as a New York Times Modern Love column, because it’s a story about how a woman’s adult children managed to kill her Christmas.

Carolyn Briggs has three married adult children. They and their spouses have renounced Christmas in favor of a life dedicated to the worship of the Nature Goddess.

She describes them:

MY three vegetarian, activist, urban, multi-degreed, agnostic, adult children have rejected Christmas as a consumerist sham of a holiday, one in which they will not be participating. Oh, they’ll take the day off and drink organic wine, but they won’t be buying presents, putting up a tree, baking cookies, lighting candles or decking any halls. There will be no taking of a family picture for their card and no sending of that card or any other.

Christmas is celebrated around the world, by many people who are not Christians. In America it’s a national holiday.

Many Christians bemoan the commercialization of the holiday, but a minimally sentient human being should understand that there is much more to giving gifts than participating in a capitalist conspiracy against the Goddess.

What does Christmas mean to Carolyn Briggs:

For me, Christmas is one of those fleeting but essential “aah” moments of generosity, family bonding and extravagance of spirit that psychologists tell us matter because they give us the opportunity to transcend, appreciate and feel outside of time. I don’t know about you, but I need that at least once a year.

Surely, this explains why so many non-Christians celebrate Christmas.

Briggs’ “activist” children have made an ideologically-based decision. They will impose their views on their parents. They will do everything in their power to prevent their parents from celebrating Christmas.

These children love Nature beyond reason,  with the exception of the natural process that would allow them to reproduce themselves, and thus, to provide Carolyn Briggs and her husband with grandchildren.

Briggs writes:

There would be no homecoming, no wrapped gifts and no grandchildren to fill with Santa dreams. My grown children were childless by choice and vowed to remain that way. 

Ceremonies and rituals bring society together. Their absence divides and fragments the polity.

These children may not feel that they hate their parents, but they are acting as though they do. No one is forcing them to believe anything that they do not want to believe, but they ought to be able, for one day a year to show some respect to their parents.

If these neo-pagans do not want to celebrate Christmas, that is their business. Depriving their mother, in particular, of a holiday celebration that is, as her article explains, so important for her, bespeaks a meanness of spirit, an absence of generosity that deserves no respect.

Don’t these children owe their parents something for having given them life, for having brought them up and for having helped provide them with advanced educations?

Where did they learn to become monsters of ingratitude?

In today’s America, an advanced education often brainwashes people to the point where they can only show contempt for people who do not think as they do.

No one has ever described this heartlessness as well as Charles Dickens. Describing Ebenezer Scrooge, Dickens wrote:

Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dogdays; and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas.

External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty. Foul weather didn't know where to have him. The heaviest rain, and snow, and hail, and sleet, could boast of the advantage over him in only one respect. They often `came down' handsomely, and Scrooge never did.

One applauds Carolyn Briggs for shaming her ungrateful children in the pages of the New York Times.

Unfortunately, this story does not have a happy ending. Faced with the recalcitrance of her fanatical children, Briggs finds herself having to choose between them and Christmas.

She chooses her children and can now look forward to bleak and desolate, joyless Christmases.

I have thought about my behavior all year, and I am resolved not to become the old person in the family who remains recalcitrant and claims outsize privilege with age. I am not going to guilt my children anymore for not giving me what I assumed they would be happy to provide.

I had hoped for grandchildren, and I wanted those grandchildren with glossy hair and pajamas sitting around my Christmas tree each and every year, but that’s not what I’m going to get. My children will bring kennels and leashes to my house, not strollers and car seats. They are going to be exchanging notes on dog food and doggy day cares, and they will continue to refer to their peers who are parents as breeders.

We are all going to meet at my daughter’s in Texas at the end of December. Even though we will never attempt a traditional Christmas again, we will have some winter holiday gathering where we eat bowls of faro and root vegetables topped off by a dessert of silken tofu lemon mousse. We will share stories of our lives and travels. The guitars will come out.

Apparently, the Times applauds Briggs’ spirit of compromise and conciliation. The newspaper of record seems to like it when one group of people imposes its views on others.

It entitles the article: “A Holiday Built on Presence, Not Presents.”

As though the one precludes the other.

In truth, the Briggs children are not present for the festivities and celebrations. They might be there as flesh and blood, but they are absent in spirit.

There’s more to presence than occupying space. Holidays are about giving. The Briggs children are taking something from someone.

Giving gifts is a universal custom. It creates and confirms a human connection. To see it as a capitalist plot is mere ignorance.

I am not sure that any of us know what we would do were we faced with the choice that Carolyn Briggs faces. We would hope we would have the moral courage to shame our children in public for their disgraceful failure to show the least generosity and respect for their parents.

Tyler Durden's Statistical Portrait of the American Economy

In response to the previous post TL sends along a link to Tyler Durden’s statistical portrait of the American economy.

Durden begins on a somber note:

What a year 2012 has been!  The mainstream media continues to tell us what a “great job” the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve are doing of managing the economy, but meanwhile things just continue to get even worse for the poor and the middle class.  It is imperative that we educate the American people about the true condition of our economy and about why all of this is happening.  If nothing is done, our debt problems will continue to get worse, millions of jobs will continue to leave the country, small businesses will continue to be suffocated, the middle class will continue to collapse, and poverty in the United States will continue to explode.  Just “tweaking” things slightly is not going to fix our economy.  We need a fundamental change in direction.  Right now we are living in a bubble of debt-fueled false prosperity that allows us to continue to consume far more wealth than we produce, but when that bubble bursts we are going to experience the most painful economic “adjustment” that America has ever gone through.  We need to be able to explain to our fellow Americans what is coming, why it is coming and what needs to be done.  Hopefully the crazy economic numbers that I have included in this article will be shocking enough to wake some people up.

He continues with a list of 75 facts about the economy that the media has largely ignored.

They are well worth a read.

Two Americas?

The Washington Post is upbeat about the American economy:

Two new numbers out Friday morning indicate that the U.S. economy is plugging along better than you thought.

The most important legs of the economy—consumers and businesses—both showed surprising resilience in November, even as negotiations heated up over the fiscal cliff.Personal consumption spending rose 0.4 percent and incomes rose 0.6 percent, according to one report. According to another, overall orders for durable goods rose 0.7 percent while a key measure of business investment, orders for nondefense capital goods excluding aircraft, rose a surprising 2.7 percent.

It concludes:

Put it all together, and the Friday economic reports are a nice Christmas gift for anyone hoping to see a better year in 2013. The pieces are in place, with both the consumer and business sides of the economy holding up….

At the same time Bloomberg News offers a sobering assessment of the career prospects of Generation Y.

Generation Y professionals entering the workforce are finding careers that once were gateways to high pay and upwardly mobile lives turning into detours and dead ends. Average incomes for individuals ages 25 to 34 have fallen 8 percent, double the adult population’s total drop, since the recession began in December 2007. Their unemployment rate remains stuck one-half to 1 percentage point above the national figure.

Three and a half years after the worst recession since the Great Depression, the earnings and employment gap between those in the under-35 population and their parents and grandparents threatens to unravel the American dream of each generation doing better than the last. The nation’s younger workers have benefited least from an economic recovery that has been the most uneven in recent history.

Gen Yers who did not go to college do worse. Bloomberg reports:

Those who finish only high school or drop out fare worse. Almost four out of five jobs destroyed by the recession were held by workers with a high school diploma or less, according to Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce.

Middle-income jobs are disappearing for a wide range of young professionals. The number of financial counselors and loan officers ages 25 to 34 has dropped 40 percent since 2007, outpacing the 30 percent drop in total jobs for the profession, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Now the question is: which is the real America? Do statistics paint a fair picture of the economy? Or do the bleak accounts of the future prospects of American twentysomethings put us in touch with a higher truth?

Derrida and Deconstruction

The rehabilitation of Jacques Derrida has begun.

With a new biography written by Benoit Peeters, the founder of “deconstruction” is being prepped for sainthood. An excerpt was published in The Daily Beast.

Why would this mild-mannered, timorous philosopher need to have his reputation rehabilitated? After all, his philosophical practice proposed nothing more than a new way to read texts.

Derrida gained fame and fortune by teaching a generation of academics how to deconstruct texts. He was not looking for hidden meanings but for traces of the demonic influence of Western metaphysics, ontology and phallogocentrism.

He was teaching students to purge texts of the elements that had conspired to corrupt the goodness that had existed in pre-Socratic philosophy.

What could be wrong with that?

As it happens, a lot.

In his Daily Beast article Peeters seems most interested in obfuscating the basis of Derrida’s philosophy. He tells a charming story of how Derrida discovered the concept of deconstruction while pondering Martin Heidegger’s notion of destruktion.

Apparently, Derrida believed that the French would find the concept more congenial if it contained a “con.” I will refrain from speculating about why this would be so. If I were to examine the many meanings of the French word, con, this would cease to be a “family” blog.

In his own way Derrida was a man of letters. Neither he nor his hagiographer Peeters seems to think that the world of letters impacts the real world.

Martin Heidegger would have begged to differ. When he was an academic and an administrator in 1930s Germany, Heidegger wholeheartedly supported Adolph Hitler. In his 1935 book, Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger declared that the best realization of his philosophy lay in Hitler’s Third Reich. 

It wasn’t an ambiguous statement. After the war ended and the full horror of the Holocaust was revealed, Heidegger stubbornly refused to recant his Nazism. He explained that doing so would have meant disavowing his own philosophy.

When he published a new edition of the Introduction to Metaphysics in 1948 Heidegger kept in the line about the Third Reich.

After the war Heidegger was banned from teaching. Happily for him a group of French philosophers got together to get the ban lifted.

Derrida was not around at the time. By the time he burst on the scene, in the mid 1960s, most people had lost interest in the question.

The further removed everyone was the easier it was for Derrida to make Heideggerian thought, that is, disguised Nazi thought, respectable.

For those who continue to deny that Heidegger was a Nazi thinker, I recommend Richard Wolin’s masterful analysis in his book: The Politics of Being.

In his Daily Beast article Peeters says nothing about this aspect of Derrida’s career.

Whatever Derrida imagined, we have a fairly good idea of what Heidegger meant by destruktion. When you cut through the mumbo jumbo and the double talk, you discover that he was a great admirer of the street theatre practiced by the Nazi Stormtroopers who were led by Ernst Rohm.

If you can see through Derrida’s obfuscation you see that his effort to ferret out alien cultural elements in texts, the better to isolate and to neutralize them has an uncanny resemblance to the Nazi practice of isolating and neutralizing Jewish cultural influence in Germany and in the nations they occupied.

One is led to conclude, regrettably, that deconstruction is philosophy-speak for pogrom.

One might want to forgive Derrida. He seems not to have known what he was doing.

Yet, when Heidegger’s Nazi past was laid out in 1987 in Victor Farias’ book, Heidegger and Nazism, Derrida and his minions rushed to defend Heidegger. To their minds Heidegger’s Nazi allegiance was incidental to his contribution to the Western philosophy.

No one cared that Heidegger himself thought that there was no significant separation between his political practice and his philosophy.

It may have been pure happenstance, but the man who was most responsible for Derrida’s fame within the world of American academia, a Yale professor named Paul de Man had  worked for a Nazi newspaper and had authored Nazi propaganda in occupied Belgium. For most of his career de Man had hidden this detail, but it was eventually discovered. 

For a full account of the episode, I recommend David Lehman’s book, Signs of the Times.

Among de Man’s wartime writings we find this:

 … it is sufficient to discover a few Jewish writers under Latinized pseudonyms for all contemporary production to be considered polluted and evil. This conception entails rather dangerous consequences... it would be a rather unflattering appreciation of western writers to reduce them to being mere imitators of a Jewish culture which is foreign to them.

De Man was saying that he wanted to rid Western literature of what he saw as pernicious and alien Jewish influences. He seems to have been especially torqued over the fact that some Jewish writers were hiding their identities, and thus their Judaism, behind pseudonyms. He believed that it was a good thing to identify such people and to denounce them, the better to rid the body of Western literature of their influence.

It is chilling to see how hagiographer Peeters describes the first meeting between Derrida and Paul de Man.

For it was also from the United States that another warm letter arrived, announcing an equally fruitful relationship: that in which Paul de Man told Derrida how much he had been “thrilled and interested” by Of Grammatology. He expected this work to help in the “clarification and progression of [his] own thinking,” something which Derrida’s Baltimore paper, and their first conversations, had already suggested. As they talked over the breakfast table at the conference the previous year, the two men had realized that they were both interested in their different ways in the Essay on the Origin of Languages. This was the origin of a friendship which became deep and enduring: after this first encounter, Derrida would say, nothing ever separated them, “not even a hint of disagreement.”

When de Man’s perfidy was revealed, Derrida rushed to defend him. He wanted to remain loyal to a friend and refused to accept that there was any connection between de Man the propagandist and de Man the Yale professor.

We leave the last word to Boston University professor Jeffrey Mehlman who stated that there were: “grounds for viewing the whole of deconstruction as a vast amnesty project for the politics of collaboration during World War II.”

Feminism and Free Choice

A new study suggests that “gender equality” in the workplace is not arriving as fast as its advocates had predicted. The reason:  ingrown behaviors that constitute what is called “gender identity.”

One might look at the evidence and say that the grandiose attempt to re-engineer human nature has not been working out very well.

The reason: human nature has not been willing to play along.

But this is not the way research is conducted today. It does not ask whether we might have misunderstood something about human nature. It asserts that our concept of gender identity is still caught in the big, bad 1950s.

It does not seem to cross anyone’s mind, but the role of male provider was not invented in the 1950s. It is a universal human character trait, one that has existed in all cultures at all times.

A zealot never lets reality get in the way of a good story line.

The data is the data. The interpretation is another story. Researchers interpret data in order to prove their own bias: namely that a great historical wave is washing over the world, inevitably bringing “gender equality” to the workplace.

Women, and even men, are being told that they must ride the great historical wave, lest they remain mired in the 1950s.

It’s a choice that isn’t really a choice.

As a rhetorical strategy, it is designed to draw you into the feminist ecosphere but it will also deprive you of your free will.

Here is the research data. Women apparently earn less than they otherwise might because if they out-earn men they will have more trouble finding husbands. If they do marry and make more than their husbands their marriages will be unhappier and they will be more likely to get divorced.

I will tell you that most women knew this already. They do not speak of it very often in public because it is not politically correct.

The conclusion: women who want to have happy marriages are more likely to underachieve on the job.

Ray Fisman summarizes the results on Slate:

They find that women who, based on their skills and backgrounds, would be expected to out-earn their husbands are more likely to exit the labor force—a very costly way of maintaining gender identities and restoring familial harmony. Among those women who remain in the workforce, their actual earnings fall short of what the economists’ wage model would have predicted for them, especially if their predicted income was higher than their husband’s.

The studies also show that women who out-earn their husbands compensate by doing more, not less of the housework. You would think, Fisman says, that the partner who earns the least outside of the home would do more of the work within the home.

Such is not the case, because women adopt more wifely roles around the house in order to prevent their husbands from losing face in front of the children.

A woman who has high earning potential will thus be faced with a difficult choice: career or marriage? Does she want to break the glass ceiling or have a harmonious family life?

You might be thinking that a man does not have to worry about out-earning his wife. You might believe that this is a grave injustice.

Until the new order descends on the planet, it is also reality.

A woman does have a free choice. The choice entails sacrifice.

A woman might be willing to accept the risk that comes with being a high-earner or she might feel that it is not worth the cost in personal unhappiness?

The choice is hers and it ought to be a free choice.

Feminism does not see things this way. It believes that a woman’s primary allegiance is to feminism. It tells women that they need to strike a blow for gender equality in the workplace, no matter the personal cost.

Thus, feminists thrill to the example set by Hillary Clinton.

Clinton seems never to have compromised her feminist ideals in favor of her marriage. She has broken through glass ceilings and is still married.

Amazingly, no one seems to care that her husband was constantly cheating on her. She made a large personal sacrifice for the cause.

One wonders how many of the young women you idolize Hillary Clinton would want her marriage.

How many young women would want to bear the stigma of being the only woman Bill Clinton doesn’t want to….

In truth, Hillary Clinton made a choice and had every right to sacrifice her personal happiness to a cause.

This does not necessarily put her on the right side of any historical wave. It tells us where her values lie.

Then again, Anne-Marie Slaughter, formerly head of policy planning in the State Department recently made a very different choice.

She resigned her position at the State Department because she saw that her children were suffering from her absence.

One does not know whether Slaughter’s marriage was also being damaged by her new position, but she made a free choice in favor of domestic harmony and the well-being of her children.

One applauds Slaughter for fulfilling her parental responsibilities and for putting them ahead of her career goals.

One wishes that more people had respected her free choice.

Playing Chicken at the Fiscal Cliff

To House Republicans it must have felt like the Mayan Apocalypse.

Speaker Boehner could not find the votes for his ill-labeled Plan B, so he folded his cards and went home to celebrate Christmas. 

Even if it had passed the House, Plan B was destined to die in the Senate, so the Republican leadership was trying to give itself political cover. It was also a test for John Boehner: could he hold his caucus together? He could not.

Most people believe that the warring parties will reach a deal to avert the fiscal cliff. For now it appears that President Obama has the stronger hand: polls are saying that Republicans will be blamed for failure.

But, you can win a battle and lose a war. Obama is playing for political advantage. He is negotiating in bad faith and trying to humiliate Republicans. He might well win this battle but he is compromising, perhaps fatally, his ability to lead on subsequent issues.

The Wall Street Journal summed it up best in an editorial:

The White House may chortle that the GOP is in disarray, and it is, but this failure to govern also owes much to President Obama's failure to negotiate with any degree of seriousness. If Washington now goes off the tax cliff, Mr. Obama may not enjoy the plunge as much as some of his partisans believe.

What does it mean to negotiate in bad faith?

When you price a rug at $500 and a potential purchaser offers $400, a bad faith negotiator comes back with a counteroffer of $750.

The Journal described the Obama version:

Speaker John Boehner defaulted to Plan B as a last resort after weeks of failed negotiations with the White House. First he offered to raise revenue by $800 billion through tax reform, but Mr. Obama insisted on raising tax rates. When Mr. Boehner finally cracked on raising rates, at an income threshold of $1 million, Mr. Obama still said no.

The President also wanted more spending immediately, not less, and he offered no specific entitlement reform beyond a change in how inflation is measured in adjusting tax brackets and federal transfer payments. Oh, and he wanted the national debt limit lifted permanently.

To put this in raw political terms, Mr. Boehner offered to break a core GOP principle on taxes and Mr. Obama offered him nothing he could take back to his rank-and-file in return. Mr. Boehner is a political leader, not a dictator, and he needs to persuade Members, not beat them into submission.

As mentioned here Obama seems more interested in humiliating Republicans and beating them into submission than in negotiating a deal.

[For extra credit, the name of which world religion translates into English as “submission?”]

Boehner’s error, the Journal editorialized, was to imagine that he would be dealing with a new Obama who would magically have acquired the negotiation skills he so conspicuously lacked in his first term.

In its words:

The Speaker's miscalculation was that, just as in 2011, he thought he could get into a room with the President and negotiate a grand bargain. His intentions were good but he misjudged the all-or-nothing ideological nature of this Presidency. After the debacle of 2011, Mr. Obama could have treated the negotiations as the art of the bipartisan deal that could set the stage for immigration reform and other second-term achievements. Flush with victory, he could have at least made a gesture on entitlements.

Instead, he has treated the talks as an extension of the election campaign, traveling around the country at rally-style events at which he berates Republicans for not accepting his terms of surrender. Grant gave Lee more at Appomattox.

A lot of Republicans seem to be saying that they made a good faith effort to negotiate, but that, facing the choice between saving their dignity and caving in to Obama, they prefer the former, come what may.

Angry White Men

Christy Wampole sees the Sandy Hook massacre as a symptom of a larger social problem: the advent of the angry white male.

Wampole believes that white males have had a privileged status, but are now losing out to women and non-white males.

Of course, she fails to recognize the impact of Adam Lanza’s mental illness.

She also does not recognize the difference between rigging the game against white males and seeing white males lose to others in a fair competition.

Nevertheless, her evidence is compelling, even if anecdotal:

I come from a small town near Fort Worth, Texas. In this region, like many others across the United States, young men are having a very hard time of it. When I consider how all of the people I knew there are faring, including my own family members, the women have come out considerably better than the men. While many of the women were pregnant in high school and have struggled with abusive relationships, financial hardships and addictions, they’ve often found ways to make their lives work, at least provisionally, and to live with their children if not provide for them in more substantial ways.

The same cannot be said for many young men in the region, who are often absent fathers of multiple children by multiple women, unemployed or underemployed, sullen and full of rage. While every woman in my family has done O.K. in the end, every man on one side of my family except for my grandfather has spent time in jail, abused drugs or alcohol, suffered from acute depression, or all of the above. Furthermore, pervasive methamphetamine use, alcoholism, physical and psychological abuse and severe depression have swept not only my hometown and my region but large segments of the United States. If this pattern is not familiar to you personally, I am certain it is the lived experience of someone you know.

Wampole then indulges a bit of nostalgia for the old days when men were men:

They were once our heroes, our young and shining fathers, our sweet brothers, our tireless athletes, our fearless warriors, the brains of our institutions, the makers of our wares, the movers of our world. 

Wampole is an academic, so she is blind to the cause of this decline. She does not entertain the possibility that the decades long war on man has wreaked havoc on American culture. She does not have a sufficiently well-developed sense of irony to recognize that her wishes smack of pre-feminist nostalgia.

Somehow or other she does not know that everyone is forbidden to speak of men in gender-specific terms. Generic masculine pronouns have been replaced by pseudo-generic feminine pronouns.

And she missed the directive ordering everyone to call men and women persons. She does not even know that no socially-defined roles should ever again be specific to men.

When Wampole suggests that the problem can be solved by an extra dose of empathy, she shows that she has no idea what she is talking about.

When the school system is geared to reward those who have the most empathy and punish those who do not feel the right feelings, then it is being rigged against boys. If children are asked to tell how they feel and to write essays about how they feel, boys are being disadvantaged. If competitive striving is demeaned in favor of empty assertions of self-esteem, boys are being diminished. If girls are called on more often than boys, if girls are praised more often than boys... then boys are going to give up trying.

Allow me to be clear here. In principle, feminists believe in equality. They do not believe in rigging the game against men or women. They merely want women to have equal rights and an equal chance at career success.

So say many feminists. If you are a longtime reader of this blog, you will know that I have never confused feminism with the beliefs of individual feminists.

Getting lost in the ideological thickets is not the best way to evaluate modern or second-wave feminism.

Feminism functions like a cult. It needs to recruit adherents. It waters down its beliefs to draw unsuspecting young women into the fold.

Feminism is not the sum of its beliefs. Don’t judge feminism, or any other ideology by its tenets; judge it by its actions and the results its policies produce.

Feminism is an empowered ideology that has set down policy prescriptions for legislation and regulation. It has also set out personal policy prescriptions for the way individual women should conduct their lives. Feminism told women to postpone marriage and childbearing. Many, many women have followed this advice. If it hasn't worked out well or as advertised, the fault lies with feminism.

Through these policies feminism has produced a culture that, if we are to believe Wampole, is markedly hostile to men. This is true even if most feminists are not hostile to men.

To take an invidious comparison, Karl Marx once articulated a principle that began: “to each according to his needs….”

Regardless of whether you believe that an economy should allocate goods according to need, not achievement, we are within our rights to ask whether Marxist government policies provided for each according to his needs.

Here, the data is clear. Marxist governments have produced famine and starvation at unspeakable levels. The only real success that these governments have ever had is the number of people they have starved to death.   

Between them the Marxist Stalin and the Marxist Mao starved nearly fifty million people to death. In Marxist North Korea today people are starving to death.

Should Marxism be judged by its utopian presumption or its dystopian product?

Should feminism be judged by its utopian fantasies or by the dystopian culture it has fostered?

Let’s imagine that feminists did not want women to succeed at the expense of men. If their ideas have influenced the culture to rig, say, the school system against men, their hopes and dreams are irrelevant.

They and their ideology created the state of affairs. They should accept responsibility.

Whatever feminists believe, here is what their policies, in concert with other factors have produced.

Blogger Michael writes:

Why is it that mass murderers are almost always young men?  Why don't young women behave the same way?  Sadly, Adam Lanza and James Holmes are just the tip of the iceberg of a much larger problem in our society.  Our young women vastly outperform our young men in almost every important statistical category.  Young men are much more likely to perform poorly in school, they are much more likely to have disciplinary problems and they are much more likely to commit suicide.  In the old days, our young men would gather in the streets or in the parks to play with one another after school, but today most of them are content to spend countless hours feeding their addictions to video games, movies and other forms of entertainment.  When our young men grow up, many of them are extremely averse to taking on responsibility.  They want to have lots of sex, but they aren't interested in marriage.  They enjoy the comforts of living at home, but they don't want to go out and pursue career goals so that they can provide those things for themselves.  Our young men are supposed to be "the leaders of tomorrow", but instead many of them are a major burden on society.  When are we finally going to admit that something has gone horribly wrong?

Michael continues to describe the war on men, the culture’s way of diminishing and demeaning everything that is associated with manhood.

But certainly parents and our education system have to bear much of the blame.  In the old days, young men were taught what it means to "be a man", and morality was taught to young men both by their parents and in the schools.  But today, most young men have very little understanding of what "manhood" is, and our society has taught them that morality doesn't really matter.  Instead, television and movies constantly portray young men as sex-obsessed slackers that just want to party all the time, so that is what many of our young men have become.

How much better off would our society be if we had trained this generation of young men to love, honor, protect and take care of others?

How much better off would our society be if we had nurtured the manhood of our young men instead of teaching them to be ashamed of it?

In truth, you cannot even use the word “manhood” without being attacked by feminists.

Surely, it begins in the schools and in homes. If schoolteachers have restructured the learning environment to favor skills in which girls excel and to disfavor skill sets where boys excel, you produce a world where boys fail, and where they do not even have the right to be boys.

The only place they can feel like boys is in front of a computer screen playing video games and watching porn.

Since both of these are potentially addictive, they make a boy into an avatar more than a real man.

Ask yourself this: when these boys get home, how many of them are supervised? How many of them are left to their own devices in the time between school and the arrival of a parent? How many of them use the internet as their babysitter?

And then there’s the absent father problem. If there is no father at home to discipline a boy and to set an example for him to emulate his behavior will become a negative caricature of masculinity.

And then, if his father is not the breadwinner, a boy will not aspire to become a man who can protect and provide for his family.

Boys do not want to grow up to be strong career women. One of the best ways to promote manly behavior in boys is for them to see it at home.

If his father works, even if his father works a great deal, the child will happily set out doing his own work: because he will want to grow up to be a man like his father.

If his father is a slacker, he will also emulate his father. He will not want to grow up to be a strong career woman. 

Take the case of Adam Lanza. Not having a father at home he had expressed a wish to join the Marines.

His mother thought it a bad idea, so she talked him out of it. 

But, think about it. If he was not psychotic, then joining the Marines might have helped him.

Even if it was a bad fit, shouldn’t Mary Lanza have left the decision to her son and the Marines?

If he was psychotic, then perhaps the Marine psychiatrists would have figured out what was wrong with him.  No one else did.