"If Liz Truss’s car-crash premiership is to be a cautionary tale, let it be one about the dangers of affirmative action."

"Amid all the commentary on [Liz] Truss’s rapid rise and precipitous fall—which one year on blames either her free-market purism or the Whitehall 'Blob,' according to political taste—one key component of her career has been conspicuous by its absence. Truss’s rise coincided with the 'modernisation' era of Conservative leader David Cameron. And because she is a woman, Truss benefitted from preferential treatment within her party and sympathetic treatment in the media, even from traditionally hostile papers, in spite of numerous gaffes and failures. The liberal press may now wax apoplectic about Truss’s uselessness, but it surely protests too much—after all, it did so much to foster the tokenistic political climate that put her there....
    "When David Cameron was elected Conservative leader in 2005, he introduced his 'A-list' as part of an effort to remodel the party along the lines of Tony Blair’s incumbent New Labour and make it less male, pale, and stale. ... After he assumed power as head of a coalition government in 2010, Cameron made Truss a junior minister for education in his 2012 cabinet reshuffle.... the reasoning behind that decision: it was 'clinically designed to neuter claims Downing Street had a "women problem".' New female appointees were duly met with praise in the press, and hailed in the left-wing 'Independent' as 'the rapid rise of Cameron’s new girls.' ...
    "Before his election, Cameron had pledged that a third of his ministers would be women in the next parliament, and he was under pressure to deliver. Accordingly, ... on the morning of the [2014 cabinet] reshuffle, Cameron decided to promote Truss to the cabinet position of environment minister, a decision the former PR man would later describe as 'gut instinct.' 'I looked at people like [Truss and others],' Cameron recalls of the reshuffle in his autobiography, 'and saw the modern, compassionate Conservative Party I had always wanted to build.' ...
    
"Affirmative action is often used to placate media criticism, and politicians may even announce sex- or race-preferential appointments explicitly and be praised for doing so. Lavish praise then follows for the appointee, who is somehow held to have struck a 'historic' blow for representation. But how can box-ticking be considered ground-breaking female advancement? ...
    "The very question of 'women's advancement' requires us to view individual female politicians as representatives of women in general—a supposedly monolithic political category, whose interests are presumed to be the same. In reality, Truss’s rise was good for one woman and one woman only: herself (though the honour of being the UK’s shortest serving prime minister ever is surely a dubious one). To consider Truss’s high-flying a win for women as a whole is to subscribe to a collectivist mindset over a meritocratic one that values individual talent and ability."

~ Laurie Wastell, from his article 'The Disaster Artist: Was Liz Truss Britain’s first affirmative-action prime minister?'

"[Camille] Paglia laments that the 'antisex and repressively doctrinaire side of feminism is back.' She calls it 'victim feminism' and complains that 'everything we’d won in the 1990s has been totally swept away. Now we have this endless privileging of victimhood. Everyone is made to cater to it—'in the workplace, in universities, in the demand for safe spaces.'" #QotD

"[Camille] Paglia laments that the 'antisex and repressively doctrinaire side of feminism is back again—big!' She calls it 'victim feminism' and complains that 'everything we’d won in the 1990s has been totally swept away. Now we have this endless privileging of victimhood, with a pathological vulnerability seen as the default human mode.'  Everyone is made to cater to it—'in the workplace, in universities, in the demand for safe spaces.'
    "As a teacher of undergraduates, Ms. Paglia despairs at how 'bad it is for young people, filled with fears, to be raised in this kind of a climate where personal responsibility isn’t spoken of.' Since her own youth, she says, college students have devolved from rebels into skittish supplicants, petitioning people in authority to protect them from real life...
    “ 'Our parents were the World War II generation,' Ms. Paglia says, 'so they had a sense of reality about life.' Children now 'are raised in a far more affluent period. Even people without much money have cellphones, televisions, access to cars. They’re raised in an air-conditioned environment. I can still remember when there was no air-conditioning.' She shudders as she sips her cold beer, adding that she suffered horribly in the heat.
“ 'Everything is so easy now,' Ms. Paglia continues. 'The stores are so plentifully supplied. You just go in and buy fruits and vegetables from all over the world.' Undergrads, who’ve studied neither economics nor history, 'have a sense that this is the way life has always been. Because they’ve never been exposed to history, they have no idea that these are recent attainments that come from a very specific economic system.'
    "Capitalism, she continues, has 'produced this cornucopia around us. But the young seem to believe in having the government run everything, and that the private companies that are doing things for profit around them, and supplying them with goods, will somehow exist forever.' ... 'capitalism has produced the glorious emancipation of women.'” 

          ~ Camille Paglia, from the article 'A Feminist Capitalist Professor Under Fire'

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QotD: “Feminism is failing women...”

“Feminism is failing women. A hundred years ago the Suffragettes argued that women were strong and capable — now feminists encourage women to be scared of men and everyday life.”
~ @Ella_M_Whelan on Sky News (UK)
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Victorian artists are too racy for 2018

This Victorian fantasy above is too racy for 2018.

John William Waterhouse's 1896 painting of Hylas and the Nymphs, of a young man being lured to his doom by spectral young swimmers, has been removed "temporarily" from the Manchester Galery to create "a conversation."

Clare Gannaway, the gallery’s curator of contemporary art, said the aim of the removal was to provoke debate, not to censor... “It wasn’t about denying the existence of particular artworks.”said the debates around Time’sUp and #MeToo had fed into the decision...The removal itself is an artistic act.

The Victorians were less prudish than today's gallery directors.

[Hat tip Christina Sommers‏ & Jack Grieveson; Image: Wikipedia Commons]

Question of the Day: Am I a feminist?

 

 

From Helen Pluckrose’s article ‘Why I No Longer Identify as a Feminist'’

“I think it’s time I accepted that ‘feminism’ no longer means ‘the aim for equal rights for women’ but is understood to refer to the current feminist movement which encompasses so much more and very little that I want to be associated with. I posted this on Twitter recently:

“The serious issues faced by … the disempowerment of young women can [now] only be opposed, sadly, by opposing feminism itself.”

[Hat tip Stephen Hicks who comments, “Good essay: How postmodern philosophy vanquished liberal feminism.”]

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Quote of the Day: On feminists and penis envy

 

“Commanding women to be equal to men, when they are not designed to be equal, has not and cannot result in equality. Anyone sending a woman on a journey to be “equal” to men is sending her on a damning journey. Men and women are different, and this is not something to be ashamed of. The male body is better suited for some things and the female body for others. The completion of an adult, morally achieved woman is not an eternal struggle to be like a man. Women are not deformed males: the female form is complete in and of itself, able to achieve moral completion in its own right. A woman who tries to be “equal” to men will find she can only (not) do it by denying, evading, and damning herself for being a woman. She will become frustrated with, jealous of, and hateful towards men. If you can name anything worse to cause a woman to lose her own sensuality, please do. The result will be that instead of revering men, she will be jealous of men. If any woman can be accused of penis envy, it is a feminist.”
~ Amber Pawlik, from her book Objectivist Sexuality: An Outline for Happily Ever After

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It’s International Women's Day... [update 2]

… so here are some real international women.  Women who make you go :

* * * * *

In no particular order Katarina Witt, Maureen O'Hara, Hedy Lamarr, Rita Hayworth, Ursula Andress, sopranos Anna Moffo, Anna Netrebko & Waltraud Meier, Claudia Cardinale, Gina Lollabrigida, Elle McPherson, Isabelle Adjani . . .    

 x

x

 

 

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

 

 

 

x

x

. .  . and Diana Rigg...

 

And by the way, you know the sexiest part of a real woman?

Her brain.

[Hat tip for most: Kim du Toit’s Weekend Women]

UPDATE 1:  Oops.  The feminists at the Hand Mirror think I may have seriously misunderstood what International Women’s Day is about.  I protest!  Admiring women is a serious matter!  As is real feminism, which isn’t about either man-hating or beauty-denial.  As Wendy McElroy insists at iFeminists.Com, the real 21st

    “The 21st-century feminist is anyone — female or male — who rejects gender privilege and demands real equality for men and women under the law.”

One law for all. And in everything else vive la difference! Who could honestly disagree?

UPDATE 2: Right on cue, The Telegraph produces a gallery of film’s great femmes fatales, starting with the great Allida Valli, who we all remember as Kira in Noi Vivi (We the Living), don’t we.

NOT PJ: A Pack of Rankers

This week Bernard Darnton examines education’s standards.

There’s been screeching recently from people opposed to new national standards in education. Apparently measuring how poorly children perform in maths will create an “education underclass.” And bathroom scales are responsible for the obesity epidemic.

(By the way, that was just the most obvious example that came to mind. All talk of an obesity epidemic and, worse, the idea that “something should be done” is, of course, a load of crap.)

Unnamed “experts” are concerned that having schools concentrating on literacy and numeracy will lead to a narrowing of the curriculum. The purveyors of Dolphin Studies textbooks are said to be mortified.

Teachers unions are terrified of national standards because they encourage the idea that some schools might be better than others. There’s nothing like a complete denial of reality to promote faith in the quality of primary school teachers.

To get the unions on side, or at least to become less obstreperous, Education Minister Anne Tolley claims to have cooked up some arrangement whereby parents will get the performance data but media won’t. As long as no journalists ever procreate that should work a charm. I can only assume that the Minister hasn’t reached the national standard in rational thinking. Or perhaps, far more terrifying, she has.

The other possibility is that Tolley knows perfectly well that her plan is as viable as the Elephant Man’s bid to be America’s next top model but that the New Zealand Educational Institute has been bluffed into submission. The union representatives may not be the sharpest knives in the drawer.

It’s well known that a teachers college education isn’t what it used to be. Learning to count to five in Māori and to play three guitar chords doesn’t cut it in today’s complex world. The quality of the raw material has been declining too.

Economist Steven Levitt suggests that primary teacher standards have dropped because of feminism. In the bad old days the only job open to women that didn’t involve domestic drudgery was teaching. Now that women can become doctors, lawyers, and cabinet ministers the fraction of teachers in the top quintile for IQ has halved and the fraction in the bottom quintile has doubled. If you’re after a smile, the rest is in the recently released SuperFreakonomics, in the chapter on prostitution. (Don’t ask.)

National standards may be even more important if the standard of female teachers is slipping. (There have been no male primary school teachers since Peter Ellis’s 1993 conviction for walking a bit funny.)

An outfit called Parents Against Labelling has been set up to oppose these new standards. Whether this is a genuine grass roots organisation or a front for someone else, I don’t know. They do have a point though. Parents should be able to choose the sort of education their children get, whether it involves the three Rs, thirty hours a week of Dolphin Studies, or just the obedience training and baby-sitting service that too many schools offer.

I think national standards are better than having no standards at all. A whole lot of parents disagree.

As usual, the problem is the state’s one-size-fits-all education system. A bunch of policy analysts in the shambolic Ministry of Education gets to decide how all the country’s children are miseducated. Instead of choosing better schools parents have to form lobby groups and nag, quite likely in futility, for what they believe would be better schools. Rather than trust this crowd to set national standards, why not free the education system and let parents set personal standards?

* * Read Bernard Darnton’s column every Thursday here at NOT PC * *

Race-based racist foolishness

Q: What do you get when you cross a race-based party and a government education system? 
A: You get headlines like this one: ‘Give Maori Free Access To Uni’

It would be nice to think that racism was dead in New Zealand.  But it’s not.  It’s alive and well and thriving in Pita Sharples’ proposal for preferential entry to university for unqualified Maori entrants.

The “affirmative action” system admitting under-qualified Maori has been so “successful” – and only an entity occupying a race-based seat could call lowering standards based on race a success – that this numb nut wants to have it extended to Maori with no qualifications at all.

Dr Sharples, who is also Associate Education Minister, said allocating Maori places regardless of their qualifications would boost Maori participation at higher levels of study.

Well, yes it will.  It will but it will hardly earn them greater respect if they fail when they get there, or are coddled through their courses – and it will hardly endow them with respect for their courses or for their own learning.

It will not raise the educational standards of Maori; it will only lower educational standards for everyone.

Now it’s true that students can enter university and succeed without any substantive secondary success – I know this because I know students who have.  But this says more about the already appallingly low standard of New Zealand’s secondary and tertiary courses (there’s too little real learning being delivered at secondary level, and too few courses at tertiary level that truly necessitate it), and a lot about the courses these students choose. It’s possible for example to achieve a Bachelor of Arts or Education without any original thinking and any prior learning (that is to say, a Bugger All or a Bed, neither of which are worth much more than the paper on which the degrees are printed). 

In fact in most of the humanities faculties a working brain is a positive disadvantage.  But there other areas of learning where a student does need to have prior success and previous learning on which to build. Engineering and medicine are just two. It’s all but impossible to achieve a genuine medical degree or Bachelor of Engineering without some real hard graft, and genuine prior knowledge – impossible, that is, without the preferential coddling of students on the basis of race.

And as Thomas Sowell writes, "The dirty little secret about affirmative action is that it doesn't work."

    An even dirtier secret is that virtually no one really cares whether or not affirmative action works to advance minorities or women.
    It works politically to put its supporters on the side of the angels. It works for ethnic or feminist "leaders" as a rallying cry to mobilize support. For the mushy minded, it works to make them feel morally one-up.

And for politicians, it helps them get a headline.  So that worked well then.

The exploding glass ceiling

Aussie Tim Blair has news on the latest frontier for feminism: a women's equal right to blow herself up.  Apparently while the likes of Hamas and the Iraqi branch of Al Qaeda are happy to heed the call of "I am woman!  Here me explode!", Al Qaeda bosses are denying women the right to break, quite literally, the 'glass ceiling.'  Read, Blair's The Right to Ignite for the latest farcical feminist flatulence.

And the link is ... (updated)

George Reisman offers both a puzzle and a challenge for environmentalists.  He asks you first to identify the common link between communism, nazism and environmentalism -- and before you erupt in outrage once you've uncovered it, may I invite you to examine and reflect upon the link he identifies.  It's important.

Here's a clue: it's a particular view of ethics, encapsulated in just one hyphenated word.

Perhaps you think that to even suggest such a link is absurd?  Offensive even?  Then just consider Reisman's argument that it is neither:

    The “extremists” among you openly call for the death of 1 to 6.4 billion human beings. The “moderates” among you openly call for the forced reduction in carbon dioxide emissions of 90 percent within a few decades, which would serve to reduce energy use almost to the same extent. Such a severe reduction in energy use follows from the fact that there are no presently existing large-scale viable alternatives to fossil fuels other than atomic power, which is regarded by most members of your movement as a death ray and is opposed more vehemently than fossil fuels. Furthermore, the likelihood of ever finding and developing such alternatives will be greatly reduced by destroying the energy sources we do have and need to increase. So what your movement advocates is mass death or, at the very least, dreadful mass impoverishment whose outcome will be tens or hundreds of millions of unnecessary deaths and a life of misery for those who survive.
    If your motivation in calling yourself an environmentalist is merely such things as that you like to see flowers bloom on open meadows, and you love trees, whales, and polar bears and the like, then you owe it to yourself to put as much intellectual and moral distance as possible between you and those who do advocate mass impoverishment and mass death...
   If you care about your moral character, don’t place an indelible stain on it by supporting a movement that seeks to destroy Industrial Civilization and all the human lives and human well-being that depend on it. Accept moral responsibility for the ideas you propound and stop standing in the service of mass destruction and death.

Read all of Reisman's challenge here, and his puzzle here.

UPDATE 1: Xavier at the Reluctant Botanist offers a contrary opinion.

UPDATE 2: Owen McShane suggests that as it becomes more and more obvious we're going to see more and more people making these connections -- and he points me to his recent paper written for Muriel Newman's webpage: Beware the Dark Greens.

    We may all be Environmentalists now – but we must beware of the Dark Greens
    Over the last few decades most of us have learned to be feminists, and are generally comfortable with our conversion. But most of us have also learned to identify and avoid being grouped with the dark side of the feminist movement that remains deeply Marxist in its roots and intentions.
    Similarly, most of us are now environmentalists. We take some pride in our efforts to care for our surroundings, and to ensure that we enjoy the world around us without despoiling it for others. However, we also need to be conscious of the motives of the “dark greens” who threaten our democracy and many institutions and attitudes we hold equally dear...

Read on here..

The 'October' Revolution that wasn't

I missed my regular commemoration of the Bolshevik's 'October Revolution' last week, so let me remind you now that the Bolsheviks were pissweak, murdering liars, and invite you to read last year's explanation of why I say that, and Liberty Scott's recent revival of the commemoration tradition: Ninety Years On - Repent, Apologise and Be Wary.

UPDATE: Some former Octoberists need to apologise, says one former 'Cambridge Bolshevik' in The Times -- and many of course, still embracing the authoritarian urge, are are now warmists ...

"Bolshevism and the Russian revolution may have disintegrated in ruins but the generation that raised its toast in the direction of the Kremlin 40 years ago has triumphed. Leninism has been defeated almost everywhere in the world, but the postwar generation of baby boomers who went so far left in the 1960s now control this country’s leading institutions. Their taste for totalitarian simplicities and weakness for millenarian terrors has been digested into modern feminism, environmentalism and global warming. Many remain absolutely unrepentant about their past because they have been so successful in the present...

Much that I did in my youth can now make me shout aloud with shame; but not much is more mortifying than to think I once toasted mass murderers, torturers and totalitarian despots. How to explain it?

Read on. [Hat tip Marcus]

Nicholas - abused

Louise Nicholas has been used, abused and then discarded by people in positions of power who have used those positions to exploit her shamelessly for their own ends

I'm talking here of journalists, militant feminists and editorial writers.

In the wake of a journalist resurrecting the Rickards/Shipton/Schollum story from twenty years ago, where Nicholas herself had been content to let it lie, a tide of sensationalism and intrusion into Nicholas's life and intensely private affairs has swept the media and the country. Whatever private life she once had has now vanished in the glare of a thousand close-up photographs, the breathless revelations of too-much titillating journalism, and the man-hating agendas of militant feminism.

Enough. Leave her be. For pity's sake, just leave her be.

LINKS: Suppressing information. A challenge to free speech? - Not PCRickards v Nicholas - Not PC
Cue Card Libertarianism - Feminism - Not PC
TAGS: New_Zealand

Cue Card Libertarianism - Feminism

Like most intellectual movements, feminism is a movement of many strands, some valid, some toxic.

The rebellion against the notion of women as reproductive animals devoid of intellect, incapable of logical thought, destined by their biology passively to serve the needs of men – a notion brilliantly catalogued and analysed by Betty Friedan in her ground-breaking 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique – was long overdue. Unfortunately, it also became misdirected through such vehicles as Wimmin’s Lib and Wimmin's Studies and the idea that all wimmin are 'sisters,' that all men are rapists, and that wooly Feminazis are good looking.

The essential wrong of the barnyard animal view of women was that it was collectivist. It said, in effect, that woman qua woman had an inescapable, predetermined role in life from which no individual deviation was possible, let alone permissible. This is clearly nonsense.

The Feminazis, however, went on to preach their own version of collectivism with a vengeance - instead of equality they simply wished to reverse whatever 'gender thinking' then existed, and to replace the perceived positions on the totem pole. By their view, women were not only not inferior to men, they were superior; they not only had the right to pursue a career, they had a right to take jobs from men through such political means as affirmative action programmes, quota systems and sisterly solidarity; not only were they not sex objects, but all men were rapists; not only were they not breeding machines, but motherhood itself was immoral; not only had there been oppression of women, but all of Western civilisation, particularly capitalism, was an edifice of patriarchal hegemony; not only were men and women not completely different, there were no differences between them at all; etc, etc.

Fortunately, enlightened feminists such as Camille Paglia have emerged to counter such lunacies and encourage women to think of themselves as individuals, first and foremost. Libertarianism intersects with this strand of feminism. Strictly speaking, the term feminism, as a legitimate assertion of individuality and rebellion against collectivism, is a redundancy; individualism is sufficient. See Individualism!

This is part of a continuing series explaining the concepts and terms used by libertarians, originally published in The Free Radical in 1993. The 'Introduction' to the series is here.
LINKS: Cue Card Libertarianism - Individualism - Not PC

TAGS: Cue_Card_Libertarianism, Libertarianism, Politics, Ethics