Welmer, Male Expendability and the Nature of Tribes

From the beginning, humans have lived in tribes, which are somewhat akin to groups of chimpanzees, cooperating to provide food, childcare, labor and dissemination of information. The family, in its varied forms, was always subordinate to the tribe, and the tribe often in conflict with other tribes. Humans have competed with each other for resources and territory from the dawn of history and before, and they have usually done so through some sort of tribal conflict. Usually, the more numerous tribe would win, because it could summon more men and defeat the other by force of numbers, but because the ideal human group is relatively small – some 50-100 individuals – summoning a larger force required relatively complex rules and strong taboos to maintain any sort of social cohesion. Hence the seeds of civilization were sown through tribal competition.

Despite the addition of all this complexity, which has enabled humans to live in mass societies, the basic tribal tendency remains part of human nature. And in a tribe, the most important component has always been the men. Without them, there is only booty, free for the taking for any group of men willing to come along and claim it. In fact, this has been the case for so long that patrilocality is the norm throughout the world. Exogamy in primitive tribes is exceedingly common, but it is usually the women who leave one group and go to another — this is reflected in our modern practice of women and children taking the husband’s surname. The men stay, because without them the group would simply be swallowed up by others.

Items of Interest, 29 June 2010

Laura Wood, Twilight: Emotional Porn for Women
Wlmer, Women Leaving their Husbands for Vampires

Asia Times:
Petraeus circles two camps
With General Stanley McChrystal out of the picture in Afghanistan, pressure is growing on US President Barack Obama to move up his July 2011 troop withdrawal timetable and get behind a negotiated settlement with the Taliban. Voices calling for an open-ended military commitment are equally strident. Incoming General David Petraeus is soon to reveal how he will weave his way between the two camps. - Jim Lobe

Obama risks all on flip of a COIN
General David Petraeus, US President Barack Obama's new commander in Afghanistan, is the "guru" of the counter-insurgency (COIN) cult. Petraeus' policy demands a decade-long war, involving nation-building, waged village by village, at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars and countless casualties. That simply doesn't square with troops supposedly due to start leaving Afghanistan next summer. - Robert Dreyfuss

Energy Bulletin:
Live dangerously: 10 easy steps (original)

Shannon Hayes, Yes! Magazine

When I first released Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture, I was advised to make a list of “easy steps for becoming a radical homemaker” as part of my publicity outreach materials. My shoulders slumped at the very thought: Three years of research about the social, economic, and ecological significance of homemaking, and I had to reduce it to 10 easy tips? I didn’t see a to-do list as a viable route to a dramatic shift in thinking, beliefs, and behaviors.

Welmer, Conservatives Celebrating Feminism

Ross Douthat recently wrote an article for the NY Times that basically endorses feminism, saying that conservative female candidates are proof of its success. Whether or not women in high offices is a good thing I’ll leave up to individuals to decide, but there’s nothing benevolent about feminism, which is at its core a supremacist ideology.

Only a couple decades ago, the idea that conservatives would embrace and support feminism would have been ridiculous, but here we are with Palin declaring herself a feminist and male conservatives emphatically agreeing and supporting her:

Items of Interest, 15 June 2010

Daniel Larison, Obviously, Iran Would Retaliate Against U.S. Attacks
Rod Dreher, Life according to Seventeen magazine and Technology in the classroom goes bust
Michael Shedlock, Stephen Roach says China's Housing Boom is Not a Bubble; I say "Nonsense"

The Spearhead:
Welmer: Girls Display Entitlement in Fight With Cop, Feminist Actress Beats Boy at Mall,
SPLICE — Hollywood is Finally Getting it Right!

Energy Bulletin:
Peak water? (original)

Lakis Polycarpou, Columbia University Water Center

In the last few years, scientists have begun to look at whether consumption of renewable resources follows Hubbert’s model. So how useful is the concept of “peak water”?

More accidents await with President Obama’s errant energy policies (original)

Brent Blackwelder, the Daly News

President Obama triumphantly entered office with the popular promise of moving the United States to a cleaner energy basis, but his actions to date, along with those of the Congress, have promoted two types of dangerous energy developments: off-shore oil drilling and nuclear reactors. Nuclear expert Harvey Wasserman highlighted the dual dangers by noting, “As BP’s ghastly gusher assaults the Gulf of Mexico, a tornado has forced a shutdown of the Fermi 2 atomic reactor at the site of a 1966 melt-down that nearly irradiated the entire Great Lakes Region.”

The facts of life (original)

Dave Cohen, Decline of the Empire

Counterpunch:
Mike Whitney, The Next Housing Crisis
Fred Gardner, Helen Thomas' Watergate Scoop

Asia Times:
The Pentagon strikes it rich
The motive of the United States Department of Defense in using old data to publicize the potential US$1 trillion in mineral riches in Afghanistan's war-ravaged land is under scrutiny. Given increasingly negative news from the counter-insurgency campaign, the headline-generating figure could reverse growing public sentiment that the war is not worth the cost. - Jim Lobe

China not yet a miracle
Visitors to China impressed by its emergence as a modern power can too easily overlook the continuing extent of subsistence farming, a dependence on low-value-added manufacturing and an absence of innovation. Nor can any country progress without deep crises and severe setbacks, as the United States can attest. - Benjamin A Shobert

China's wind power has faulty connection
With China requiring increasing amounts of imported coal and oil to drive its economic growth, the country is encouraging the use of alternative energy, with wind power a favored sector. That has led to investment in wind farms outpacing the infrastructure for delivering their energy to consumers. - Ryan Rutkowski

McChrystal faces 'Iraq' moment
A double dose of bad news concerning the troop surges of the United States in Afghanistan suggests things are about to get worse for US General Stanley McChrystal, who faces a collapse of political support in line with an increase in unfavorable media coverage. The situation is painfully similar to that in Iraq in 2006, when support from US elites tanked following months of reports showing that Washington had lost control of the war. - Gareth Porter

Welmer, Sassy Girls to be First on Subs

(Warning. Some of the comments are sexually explicit.)

Welmer, American Girls: Hookers in Training

GQ: A Dagger to the CIA, by Robert Baer

Welmer focuses on one aspect of the story in particular: Affirmative Action CIA Agent gets Herself and Others Blown Up.

Welmer, French Philosophette Confronts Tyrant Babies

Although these women may feel liberated, what they are actually doing is shifting their obligations onto the rest of us. As an example, I used to enjoy visiting the local library, but some years ago I noticed it was always full of screaming kids. I asked the librarian what was going on, and she told me that the mothers leave their kids at the library and then go do as they please for a few hours, coming back to pick them up later. The librarians had become de facto daycare providers. I actually asked a guy who was rather high up in the Seattle library administration what they intended to do about this problem, and he said they were working on it.

Eventually, they came up with a compromise. Now, there are still kids in the library, but they are mainly playing free video games on the computers, so they aren’t underfoot quite so much. Additionally, for those of us who like quiet libraries, there are a couple small “study rooms” where one can close the door to shut out the babbling. I saw a librarian tell a teenage girl to stop playing her ipod at a high volume once, and the girl refused and threatened to give the librarian a beating. The librarian was a small woman, so she couldn’t do anything about it. The compromise was obviously a failure. I don’t go to libraries much any longer.

When the new Cupertino Library was built, many of these features were introduced -- there is a rather large study room for teenagers. I do remember a librarian expelling some students from the library for being noisy in other areas of the library, though.

Welmer replies to Peggy Orenstein

Femivorism (See this post for the link to the original article by Peggy Orenstein.)

Welmer, The Decline of the Matriarch

The sinking of the US Navy.

Navy Times: Cruiser CO relieved for ‘cruelty’

The Thinking Housewife: The Holly and the Navy. I first learned about Capt. Holly Graf through The Spearhead. Sage McLaughlin writes in response to the Thinking Housewife:

This women in the military business is a difficult subject. I obviously have strong opinions-and yes, strong feelings-about it. What I hate most, though, is that it makes me feel ungentlemanly. This is just one more way in which feminism tears down what is good and honorable in both sexes. Faced with such absurdities and outrages, men are forced to argue vehemently for women’s unfitness for certain positions. We are forced to bang on about women’s lack of physical prowess, to assert women’s inherent inferiority in certain spheres, and contrary to liberal belief, decent Christian men hate doing that. I hate being forced to play the part of the chauvinist, to gripe about women’s inability to do this or that thing as well as a man.

It’s possible to make the same points in a genteel way in discreet circumstances, and where the problems are not so radical in scope. But feminist society is passing a certain line of egregiousness, such that a chivalrous attitude is no longer possible. Pointing out female inadequacies, in short, is a thoroughly unpleasant and increasingly necessary business. Quite apart from the concrete issues at stake, we are all poorer for this coarsening of men’s verbal handling of women. (Relatedly, it never occurs to feminists that in order to show super heroines like Buffy the Vampire Slayer triumphing over her male adversaries, they first must show her being savagely punched and kicked by a man, as though this were normal. But such really is the price of “equality.”)

I only wonder what protection feminists will flee to when they’ve finally crushed the last vestiges of Christian chivalry under heel?

Laura Wood responds with a comment about "white-knighting":

As I said in the previous post on patriarchy, deference to feminism is the modern equivalent of chivalry. Men are naturally inclined to some form of deference to women and this instinctive tendency was gradually perverted into what we have today. While men once flung their cloaks on puddles as women walked the street, they now grant them admiralties and warships.

Greed, materialism and just plain ungodliness are part of male capitulation to feminism. But there is also this unspoken code of honor, the natural expression of male competition for female attention and of masculine protectiveness. This does make it hard for men to stand up and complain about these outrages and about the greedy takeover of traditionally male fields.

It has taken an amazingly long time for men in any significant numbers to begin to speak out, rather than simply grumble to themselves.

Of course criticism is not the only way to skin this cat. It’s also possible to praise and defend the feminine ideal.

There are plenty of men out there who are quite willing to criticize women -- anger and hate, by their very nature, are strong motivators.


More links:
Susan Katz Keating
Military Corruption

Someone, ex-Navy, who defends women being put in command of combat vessels: WOMEN ARE 100% CAPABLE OF SERVING IN COMMAND OF NAVY COMBATANT SHIPS!! DO NOT DOUBT THAT FOR A MILLISECOND.

An example of how military officers feel compelled to defend the presence of women in the military based on a modern egalitarian notion of "merit." Small wonder that there is such little resistance within the military to the trends. With the possible opening of positions on US submarines to women (and hence command positions), how much more can the Navy tolerate? It is fortunate that it, like the Air Force, doesn't have to be tested by an equal enemy.

Drs. Fleming and Wilson are correct -- if men had not supported Feminism, would it have gotten anywhere?

Typical establishment talk, even if muted: Could women sink U.S. submarines?

And the feminist argument.
By Tracy Moran, USATODAY.com

Welmer takes issue with a Catholics Come Home commercial. What does Leon Podles think? Does it portray the Catholic Church in a way that returning to the Church becomes attractive to "masculine" men? Does Jim Caviezel's Christ appeal to men? But using images from the The Passion of the Christ may be too controversial. It is impossible to directly convey the richness of a deep interior life centered on Christ. How about an ad that shows a variety of male saints? The celebration of the OF in many Uhmerican parishes does exhibit traits of worship being feminized. (Has Leon Podles criticized Catholic liturgy specifically, or contrasted the EF with the OF?) It seems to me that how men are to achieve union with God must be elaborated, and thus can be done with illustrations from lives of the saints. But laymen also need to understand their role as fathers and husbands, and that sort of catechesis requires an explicit rejection of radical egalitarianism and cultural Marxism.

Welmer: "FYI, I am a Catholic. My childhood church used to hold funding drives for Marxist guerrillas in Central America, and hosted PFLAG and gay pride meetings. A number of priests in the area dropped dead of AIDS in the late 80s/early 90s. I mean, it’s one thing if they’re attracted to men and remain celibate, but it’s entirely different if they’re calling themselves priests while having anonymous sex in the local park and picking up gay prostitutes on Broadway.

Things may be a bit more under control, but the old sinners remain very much in control behind the scenes. I don’t think it will truly change until they are all too old to work or dead, which won’t be for at least another 20 years."

Welmer, Eddie Bauer: From Manly Store to Bankruptcy