Correcting Others

Elspeth had some wise words to share not too long ago about correcting the behavior of others. What she had to say struck a chord with me:

Our culture has conditioned us to hate people “cursed” to be born with a sunny disposition in this age of snark and cynicism. But here is the worst part, from a Christian standpoint. We have actually convinced ourselves that the only way to speak truth or offer correction is from a place of pride, rudeness, and condescension. My kids can tell you that I’m as much a believer in tough love as anyone. I know that some people don’t respond to any other kind, but it shouldn’t be our way of first approach:

Dear brothers and sisters, if another believer is overcome by some sin, you who are godly should gently and humbly help that person back onto the right path. And be careful not to fall into the same temptation yourself. Galatians 6:1

We are inundated with bad news, dire predictions, and negative reports at every turn. No wonder there are so many grumpy, pessimistic people walking about. No wonder my little girl can’t even coax a smile out of half the people we meet from day to day. I’ve had to train myself to stop being so suspicious and be cautiously open instead, and make connections with other human beings, if only for a moment. (bolded emphasis mine)

Quick story: During this last summer visit, some long-running friction between S1 and Mrs. Wapiti came to a head. As one can imagine, dissatisfaction with this friction was not being expressed in a healthy way by my teenage son, and some words were said that were colored by some of the pride and rudeness that Elspeth mentions above.  Part of how this unhappiness was communicated was attributable to a skill deficit in how to express his feelings as a young person, the other part was a direct product of behavior shaped by the coarseness of the media he consumes (few to no limits imposed by the former spouse, much to my chagrin), and the rudeness-as-a-virtuous-art-form youth culture in which he is immersed as a public school student. In other words, he has had scant few opportunities to see constructive conflict resolution, and his role models actually encourage the opposite.

At any rate, it was an opportunity to counsel him on a couple of things I've learned over the years (slow learner, me): First and foremost, and Elspeth was right on the money with this one, is that making and maintaining connections with other human beings, in other words, relationships, is the key to getting along with others in this life. One can't just blunderbuss a heaping helping of  discontent at another person and reasonably expect a warm reception, let alone for that person to make the changes in behavior you seek.  If change in circumstances, or another's behavior, is what you want, you must first seek a connection, and establish that relationship.

Second, is to speak in love and humility, and not lash out in anger and frustration. If your message isn't framed in such a way as to be received by another in a manner that they'll accept your correction suggestions for improvement, well, at the minimum you are wasting your and another's time, and are likely aggravating the situation, not making it better.

The world is full of negative, an unfortunate state of being that I sometimes contribute to here at EW (and something that I'm working on improving, for I'm a reflexive glass-is-half-full kinda guy).  Speaking in kindness and love is not only more effective in my experience, but is something unusual in this world filled with encouragement to do the opposite.

Real Misogyny

The opposite of love isn't hate, it is indifference:

The shops at the mall haven’t conspired to force young women to misuse their sexuality. Not too long ago we collectively decided that moral constraints on women’s sexuality were unfair, and tossed them aside. What we are seeing now is where this lack of moral constraint is taking us. Women are being tempted by the culture, but they are being tempted to do something any student of the Old Testament should understand. They are being tempted to do things our great grandmothers understood. We can’t even think let alone use the word harlot, yet we have sluts marching down main-street.

While it is true that it is a challenge for a modest woman to find suitable clothing, the reason for this isn’t because men or evil capitalists have colluded to keep modest clothing away from the rack, it is because the vast majority of women are choosing immodest clothing out of a desire to misuse their sexual power.

We don’t help women by denying all of this, or by repeatedly telling women they are beautiful no matter what and begging them to believe it. We don’t help women by adopting their own blind spot regarding their temptation to sin. We help women by manning up and helping them be honest about their own temptations to sin, and we help them by teaching them what God finds beautiful.

The problem isn’t that modern women want to be beautiful, nor is it that they aren’t told enough how beautiful they are, how special they are, or how perfect they are. The problem is that modern women aren’t focusing their desire to be beautiful in the right ways. They shouldn’t strive to be beautiful for the other women around them, nor for the men they meet in public. They should strive to be beautiful to the Lord, and to be beautiful to their own husbands.

I was listening to Family Life Today on the radio recently, and something that one of the guests said was quite interesting: One of the unintended negative effects of feminism upon women (and men) has been a profound sense of abandonment. Not only abandonment in the sense of physical and/or social isolation (which has been on the increase for both sexes), not only abandonment in the sense of a lack of intimate relationships (also on the increase for both sexes), but abandonment in the sense that precious few within the Church or without would bother to keep women from sinning. For various reasons, society and the Church readily lecture men as to the error of their ways, but are very reluctant to do so for women, with the effect that women are then "given over" more easily to their sin with nary a warning or worse, the active teachings of Churchian doctrine.

Dalrock's quote above seems to be of an operative example of the abandonment described by the radio guest.  Contra the bleating of feminist agitators and their cartoonish claims of misogyny behind every tree and under every rock, there is precious little "positive" misogyny (i.e., overt, conscious, intentional hatred of women) in our culture today. However, "negative" misogyny--indifference, reluctance to intervene, and / or speak the Truth when a woman or women is doing something patently stupid, detrimental, and harmful to their mental, physical, or spiritual selves--abounds.

That is real misogyny, the sort that does far more harm due to its insidious nature. Not the occasional catcall or other eruptions of the so-called "patriarchy".

Please Stop Protecting My 2A Rights, OC Enthusiasts

Pretty much agree with this 100%:

Call me crazy, but I feel one of my responsibilities as a gun rights advocate is to show people that gun owners are reasonable, responsible people who aren’t a threat to the innocent. If I were to, say, walk into Chipotle carrying an AK at the combat ready, I’m pretty sure I’d accomplish the exact opposite. And I really couldn’t blame regular Joe for being afraid of me. Think about it, guys. If a cop walks into Chipotle with a rifle, people will get scared. If a soldier walks into Chipotle with a rifle, people will get scared. If some unknown guy walks into Chipotle with a rifle, especially if he’s carrying it at the combat ready, people are going to get scared. In America, carrying a rifle into a restaurant isn’t a normal act. Right or wrong, it scares people. And you won’t make people less scared of guns by intentionally scaring them with guns.

This has been explained by other writers already, but it’s worth repeating: if someone is carrying a weapon at port arms or low ready, it’s no different than walking around with a pistol out of the holster in a combat grip. Professionals carry their long guns in front when they’re prepared for imminent contact. When I was overseas and outside the wire, my weapon was either in my hands or hanging on my chest. You know, the way OCers carry their weapons inside coffee shops.

Statesman.com via chrishernandezauthor.com

Now, I’m going to do a little compare and contrast. Take another look at the totally non-threatening latte buyer above. Note how his weapon hangs by the sling on his chest. If I ever have a chance to ask him, I’m sure he’ll say nothing in the manner of his open carry suggests he’s a threat.

Now, check out this guy:

US Army photo via chrishernandezauthor.com

Notice that he’s carrying his weapon in pretty much the same manner as the latte buyer. But he is, in fact, one hell of a threat. Because the soldier, probably unlike the coffee shop customer, has been trained how to quickly raise his weapon and engage. The soldier carries his weapon up front specifically so he can shoot people with it. The fact that the open carrier apparently doesn’t know that he’s carrying his weapon in a combat-ready manner kinda suggests he shouldn’t be carrying it in a coffee shop.

I’m 100% pro-2nd Amendment. In fact, I actually support the legal right to open carry in private businesses. I support it the same way I support the Westboro Baptist Church’s right to protest at soldiers’ funerals. I consider both acts to be the height of stupidity. I think the WBC and open carriers are only harming their own cause. Both acts are moronic. But this is America, and people have a right to be morons.

Peaceful open carry rallies where gun owners safely carry long guns slung across their backs on public land? I’m down with that. Blatantly ridiculous, orchestrated confrontations where open carriers walk into private businesses with rifles at the combat ready, just to piss people off, knowing that all they’ll do is create more enemies? No thanks.

There was once a time in our country where firearms were ubiquitous and used as tools of both defense and provision.  After all, one had to feed oneself and their family as well as maintain vigilance from existential threats (like the French, Indians, Redcoats, Redcoats again, Damn Yankees, bandits, Indians again, etc). Furthermore, there was no such thing as a professionalized police force, the culture was relatively homogenous (no diversity+proximity to engender war to contend with) with a resultant high level of interpersonal trust, and women married the soon-to-be father of their children and stayed that way--choice mommies and their criminal spawn were seen as shameful pathologies.  Those times are long gone and are not likely to come back anytime soon. Nowadays, the overt presence of firearms on anyone, to include police officers, is disruptive at minimum, and often quite disorderly, depending on the context. How then, in this cultural and social context, is one to interpret the intent of  OC advocates with combat-ready carries of ARs, AKs, and SKSs?

boingboing.net

Hmmm, not easy to tell apart.  Just as with active shooters, or masked men breaching your door at 2 AM, it is difficult to discriminate between good guys and bad.

The moral of this story is this: Not only do urban OC advocates unnecessarily rile up the hoplophobic sheeple with their aggro high-profile sheepdogging, and therefore pose a very real lawfare threat to the entire body of 2A rights--which as the quoted author suggests has been gaining traction of late--but they are really hard to distinguish from someone intent on causing harm.  On top of this, their demonstrations counter-intuitively expose individual OC advocates to more risk, not less, as they are highlighting themselves as a target, the first threat criminals neutralize. They are thus giving away the primary advantage that CCW holders have should they ever find themselves in the vicinity of a violent crime in progress, one in which the criminals by definition hold the initiative...surprise.

But the reason why I care about this issue is not that OC poseurs might get shot in the course of their posing, but that they stampede sheeple into the arms of tyrannical liberalists who are only happy to relieve the People of their God-given right to defend themselves. Their actions make my family and I less safe and less free, not more.

When "Too Big to Control" Meets Gynocentrism

Color me surprised (not) to learn that "free" contraceptive coverage for women is required by Obamacare. Not because the requirement was deliberately written into the law by Congress (it wasn't), but that the law gives "discretion" to the HHS secretary, who then issues edicts for what is, and is not, covered.  Thus the present Administration, always enamored of the single-payer, universal health care paradigm, ratchets its way toward universal coverage by declaring various coverages to be cost-free at the point of delivery to a key liberalist constituency (ht Neo-Neocon):

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act mandates contraceptive coverage for all employers and educational institutions, even though the mandate itself is not included in the wording of the law(s) passed by Congress. The mandate applies to all new health insurance plans effective August 2012…

On January 20, 2012, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced a (then) final rule of an August 1, 2011 interim final rule on health insurance coverage with no cost sharing for FDA-approved contraceptives and contraceptive services (including female sterilization) for women of reproductive age if prescribed by health care providers, as part of women’s preventive health services guidelines adopted by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) for the Affordable Care Act. Male contraception is not eligible.

Regulations made under the act rely on the recommendations of the independent Institute of Medicine (IOM) in its July 19, 2011 report Clinical Preventive Services for Women: Closing the Gaps…

Why this coverage for women's contraception, when it isn't spelled out in the law? Well, it seems that the FedGov asked the IOM to review "what preventive services are important to women’s health and well-being and then [recommend] which of these should be considered in the development of comprehensive guidelines", and, go figure, the IOM did just that.  Subsequently, the HHS

adopted the IOM’s recommendations outlining which services for women should be included. Now, a full range of preventive services for women, including annual well-woman visits, screening for gestational diabetes, breastfeeding support, HPV testing, STI counseling and HIV screening, contraception methods and counseling, and screening and counseling for interpersonal and domestic violence, will be covered by new health plans without cost sharing. New health plans will be required to comply with these guidelines for policies with plan years beginning on or after August 1, 2012.

Well then. One finds what one seeks. No mention of men, of course, a population about whom the HHS didn't bother to seek recommendations.  As NeoNeoCon rhetorically queries "don't things like HIV, contraception, domestic violence, and STDs apply to men too?  Do they not deserve some freebies too?", knowing full well the answer is "no".

None of this of course should surprise anyone.  HHS is one of the tentacles of which is the Administrative State, one that in this case was granted wide discretion by Congress to more or less implement Obamacare in the manner that it wishes.  As we know that the Administrative State, like Academia, is a key component of the Cathedral, and that the door between them is wide and revolving, and that academic feminism seeks to secure resources and privilege for women at the expense of men, I'm shocked (/sarc) that the law is being used to do just that.  And there's little-to-nothing that men as a class can do about this crass, taxpayer-funded gynocentric gravy train, as such notables from the right and the left have observed that the FedGov is too big to effectively control.

Guys, It's All On You

Source: johnpavlovitz.com

On one hand, I absolutely, 100% agree with this:

Your sex drive? It’s your problem. You and me, we are visual. We do love the shape of women’s bodies. We are tempted and aroused by their physicality. [Yet we also] direct the limbs and the words. We choose what we grab, and touch, and rub-up against. This is about what we’ll choose to cultivate in our heads, and what we’ll choose to do with our hands as a result. [Y]oung men, this is a matter of ownership. The only thing you own; the only thing you’ll ever own, are your choices. That’s why it’s called self-control.

All well and good. The statement that men are responsible for their own actions and their own thought life is uncontroversial. Troof and all that. But Mr. Pavolvitz starts to lose me when he erects this strawman to bash:

I know you’ve been led to believe that it’s the girl’s fault; the way she dresses, the shape of her body, her flirtatious nature, her mixed messages. I know you’ve grown-up reading and hearing that since guys are really “visual”, that the ladies need to manage all of that by covering-up and keeping it hidden; that they need to drive this whole physical relationship deal, because we’re not capable. Guys, the girls you date, the ones in your class, the ones you meet on social media, the ones you pass on the street, the ones you hook-up with at parties: they’re priceless...and they don’t belong to you. Sometimes, doing what’s right toward someone, even needs to transcend their attitude about themselves. If a girl you know shows too much, advertises too much, and offers too much, it doesn’t mean you can take too much, because it’s about the value you assign to her, and to yourself.

A few thoughts here. First, ad strawman-inum: Who really, honestly argues that the shapely, flirty, mixed-messagey, scantily clad young woman is 100% responsible for the way men react to her signalling, and it's on her to cover it up lest the animals be tempted?  This is a pretty reductionist and frankly misandrist POV; perhaps Mr. Pavlovitz encounters this line of argument frequently, in which case I suggest that perhaps there are better groups of people with whom he can associate.

Second, hooking up? Brother, you're speaking to the wrong crowd, if this is your message. Believing men don't hook up, by definition.  And if you're addressing secular or liberalist men, what makes you think for a moment that the secular and/or liberalist male would recognize, much less value, the inherent priceless dignity in a human being, of which a woman, particularly a daughter of God, is one? That's a Christian value, not a secular one, and whatever inherent value our society assigns to men and women is merely Christianist residue in a neo-pagan Western culture. By contrast, if one's belief system is summarized by "in the long run, we're all dead", or that we're all just clumps of molecules vibrating in synchronicity, well, human value is derived from something quite different than what the Flying Spaghetti Monster-inspired scribblings of dead Semites say.  "Priceless" becomes far, far cheaper, maybe even bankrupt, and the behavior and manners of scantily clad women angling for male attention in the SMP is an indicator that said clothing-challenged women know it too.

Third, I've never ever heard calls from the pulpit exhorting women to modesty and controlling their own substantial commitment-seeking sex drives, let alone from the wider liberalist culture (which encourages exactly the opposite). Not. Once. Moreover, judging from the dress and appearance of of-age women in the pews at churches on any given Sunday, if there is any sub rosa instruction encouraging female modesty from within the Body itself, it is decidedly ineffective.

But what I have heard, from the pulpit (repeatedly) and from the wider gynocentric culture (constantly), has been an ongoing lecture about how men need to keep control of their sexuality, lest it lead them to do evil and inflict harm upon the innocents in their midst. Men merely noticing women's sexual fitness displays (as per the picture heading up this post)? Churchians:  Bad. Feminists: Bad. Women making those displays in the first place? Churchians: Er, can we just talk about how lust a men's problem? Feminists: You go, grrl! or alternatively, damn patriarchy!

This leads me to my primary critique of Mr. Pavlovitz's article, one that was also made by several commenters to his original and follow-up post here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and  here and here and here and here and here and here:  The message that men must take ownership of their sexuality, while certainly true in isolation, is only half the message that needs to be said. To be fair, Mr. Pavlovitz apparently recognizes this and repeatedly states that his post is directed at men and men alone, with the issue of feminine modesty tabled for later. Much "later", apparently, as in "don't hold your breath", as his past writings suggest he prefers to focus on issues surrounding men in the church and gives issues surrounding women in the Church a wide berth, preferring instead, for example, to counsel Christian men to "woman up", as if the Church needs more effete men, "Jesus is my boyfriend" theology, or a more feminized worship climate. No wonder there's a dearth of men in church. Or go great-guns vs Robin Thicke as an alleged exponent for "boys will be boys" culture for his recent on-stage excursion with a near-nude and tawdry Miley Cyrus, once again blaming boys and men for girls' and women's decisions to debase themselves for a little attention and / or a buck.

At any rate, without that balance, his message joins the larger one-sided, frankly not very male-positive chorus in our culture, one that correctly identifies what men need to do to get their conduct right viz women and God, but actively avoids addressing what the other 51% must complementarily do to get their gender house in order. Which is, namely, to be modest, but also for their (women's) far-too-cozy relationship with frivorce and serial polyandry.

In Half-Ephesians, Half-Timothy land, guys, it's all on you.

An Encouraging Sight At A Wedding I Attended

Last week, I attended a wedding of a young man to a young woman, something that happens a couple of a million times each year in the United States.  In other words, common, ordinary, and unremarkable. But what I saw and heard in this wedding gave me hope, and should to many of my readers, which is why I am writing about it today.

It started with the unusual seating arrangements...adult men and women were sequestered, no matter if they were married or single.  Men on the left, women on the right, as was the habit of this particular church. Segregation of the sexes in houses of worship is quite unusual in the West, particularly outside of certain faiths like Islam or Orthodox Judaism or Orthodox Christianity. But this was an evangelical Christian church, replete with a raised pulpit, a choir, hymnals, and hardwood pews with no padded seats. The setup was interesting to say the least.

But what got my attention, and thus what drove me to write this post today, were the vows. Outside of my own wedding, I have never attended a wedding where Ephesians was quoted word-for-word during the ceremony.  This was no half-Ephesians stuff either; not only was the husband encouraged to love his wife in accordance with Ephesians 5:25 and stated so in his vows, but the wife was exhorted to submit to her husband's leadership as outlined in Ephesians 5:22, Titus 2:4, and 1 Peter 3:1, and also stated so in her vows.  Yes, the dreaded "s" word was used, without modification or equivocation. My jaw nearly hit the floor.  Moroever, the bride's and groom's parents got in on the act as well, reading aloud scriptures addressing the gravity of the soon-to-be-wed couple's union and pledging to support and defend the marriage of their children.

At this point, a word about the demographics of this church is in order. As you may be suspecting by now, this is not your ordinary Churchianity church populated with Whites taking an, erm, more "free range" attitude toward Scripture.  No, the congregation of this church was Phillippino, and was pastored by a White man married to a Phillippina. Similarly, the bride's and groom's fathers were both white men married to Phillippinas, the latter having met and married while stationed in Manila in the 1980s.  So: not your typical evangelical Christian congregation.  But if two well educated and accomplished young people (the groom was a Serviceman in his mid- to late 20s, the bride an RN in her mid-20s) in this modern age can come together like this--with the full support of what appears to be a very conservative and traditional ethnic and religious community--perhaps there is a future for American society still.

An encouraging sight to be sure. One that stood in some contrast to the wife-half of a white couple who also attended: after the service concluded, she registered her disagreement with Ephesians 5:22 et al to Mrs. Wapiti.  Her concern apparently was that submission oppresses women and prevents them from assuming their proper place in the family.  And while this anecdote speaks somewhat to the degraded state of Christian faith amongst Whites, some non-white sects still hold fast to the Word.

As it is promised, the meek (i.e., the humbly observant) will inherit. And the future belongs to them.

"Outprogress the Progessives"

While my post documenting gender symmetry in commission of sexual assault was largely panned by critics, in that I call for men to tacitly "agree" with the rape alarmism industry's widening of the definition of sexual assault and "amplify" by applying the new yardstick to also judge female sexual behavior, at least one blog-brother and luminary of the neo-reactionary sphere appears to concur with my "only way out is through" recommendation:

Agree and amplify is a dialectical form of pivot, which utilizes the opponent’s own momentum in order to demonstrate how a given insult or test, whether implicit or explicit, is absurd. It implicitly calls their character into question, leaving as the only avenue for escape to back off, tail between legs. This works because only a person who thinks, even subconsciously, that there is some merit to what is being said, will tend to show this through a reflexive response. If someone gets angry with you, it’s usually because you’ve said something they agree with but hate to admit of themselves. It’s a way to control and manipulate people; if they refuse to help, make them unable to hinder. The reason women cry foul against a man is almost always because he’s doing something they recognize is beyond their control...Feminism has not become the de facto dogma of the modern age because it was ever demonstrated that women are equivalent to men in all the ways it has been claimed, but primarily because the defenders of patriarchy were susceptible to being shamed into no longer imposing their views without the tacit agreement of others. It is the same dynamic with “conservatives” under progressive ideology; they are unwilling to impose without the agreement of progressives, essentially handing them the power to veto and prevent any reversion of society to sane standards of civility.

[T]he worst thing that could happen for the Cathedral is if neoreactionaries were to start assisting it in its goals. They want gay marriage? Insist upon it! Shame gays not for their homosexuality, but for their lack of relationship bona fides. They want more women in the workplace? By all means! If they will not take their own medicine, they are but hypocrites, and if we are right about that medicine’s bitterness, they will only look sillier when they choke it down before throwing up all over themselves. Don’t fight the Cathedral; bring Progress to the Progressives!

There’s no reason to assault the main gates if you can get in through the back door. Such an assault would only be to capture the Cathedral’s attention, while the true work is being done from within. Though it might seem odious, hold your nose and read their works. I found this to be one of the most illuminating books about the inadequacies of Progressive thought paradigms. Outfoucault the Foucaultians. Outmarx the Marxists. Outbutler the Butlerians. Outsalon Salon. The worst, or perhaps best, that can happen to the Progressive mire of contradictions is honing it to a fine point of clear and clever absurdity. [bolded emphasis mine]

It's not enough to make liberalism and its offshoots, to include the rape alarmism industry, look absurd. One must insist that the very same standards and measures they seek to impose upon others are in turn imposed upon them. To be reluctant to do so out of fear of making men appear as victims, and thus unmanly...all that accomplishes is the continued inability of traditionalists and MHRAs to impose their alternative view (as AnarchoPapist outlines above) without the agreement of the liberalists...who are quite happy with the present moral order, thank you very much.  Moreover, given that liberalists are the present cultural hegemon, it makes more sense to sidestep the adversary's schwerpunkte and use their strengths against them, rather than confront head-on.

The Religion of Liberalism - Clairfied and Amplified

A few years back, I asserted that liberalism was itself a religion for those who fancy themselves irreligious. While this claim may be a stretch for some, the preponderance of the evidence, and the strength of the faith of its adherents, suggest that this assertion is more true than not.

Now, over the last four years, it has become evident that my description of the religion of liberalism needs updating. Recently, liberalism has canonized homosexuals, thus requiring me to add them to the list of liberalist saints, and has recently deployed the gaystapo to enforce liberalist hertodoxy, also necessitating an update to the section on liberalist mutaween:

1) Liberalism has its own deity--the State

2) Liberalism has its own clergy--the judiciary, public school teachers, and university profs

3) Liberalism has its own creation story--the myth of evolution

4) Liberalism has its own end-times eschatology--the violent destruction of the world via Malthusian overpopulation or, alternatively, global cooling global warming anthropogenic climate change.

5) Liberalism has its own saints--women, non-whites, and homosexuals

6) Liberalism has its own sacraments--abortion, choice mommyhood, and fornication--note the obsession with sex and sexuality.

7) Liberalism has its own tithing--taxation

8) Liberalism has its own houses of worship--courts and the halls of Congress

9) Liberalism has its own 'sunday schools'--public schools and the universities, in which students are educated in liberal catechisms and pieties

10) Liberalism has its own mutaween, or those that enforce the edicts of liberalism.  These religious police may be employed by the State, or they may be of the mob, as we saw in the "L'Affaire Eich" in which an intolerant gaystapo  took down a CEO earlier this year for the offense of nothing more than donating $1,000 to a pro-marriage advocacy group.

11) Liberalism has its own dogmas (viz. "climate change" above, also class privilege, knowledge sufficiency, do-good government, egalite, tolerance, diversity, "IPV is about power and control", to name a few examples )--and punishes heretical "deniers" with vigor

What prompted this update? Recent events (see "L'Affaire Eich", above) and then this article by Daniel Payne writing at The Federalist regarding the spiritual beliefs of Millennials.  A sampling:

If you speak to the average 20-something or Millennial about the concept of sin, you may be treated to a kind of quasi-Unitarian dismissal of the concept, a sort of uncomfortable rejection of the notion of ecclesiastical proscription in any sense: “I’m very spiritual,” you’ll hear a lot, “but not religious.” What this looks like in practice is generally a dismissal of accountability towards any higher power, or at least towards any rules He might impose upon His people: It is, after all, 2014.

Yet the Millennials, having sloughed off the religious notions of their parents and grandparents—at least one-third of Generation Yers are more or less without religion—have taken it upon themselves to adopt a new set of mandates and dictates to guide their lives. Call them the “new sins,” a number of commandments by which one might stay on the narrow way. The old interdictions now cast aside, a new series of injunctions must be obeyed: and like most religions and denominations, adherence to these commandments is held sacrosanct, any deviation from them fairly blasphemous.

Climate Change Dogma. One of the most fervent dogmas to which the Millennial cohort now cleaves is that of climate change. Indeed, if there is a modern-day corollary to the Apostolic Age, say, and the apocalyptic predictions to which it was in thrall, it is in the Church of Global Warming, which is as certain as was Paul that the end times are at hand. More than two-thirds of Millennials agree that the earth is “getting warmer,” and 75 percent of those agree that man’s activities have something to do with it.

The Church Of Gay Sex. I don’t mean to imply, of course, that all Millennials have rejected religion in favor of a kind of angry, portentous neo-paganism, only that a great many members of this age demographic have more or less done away with religious belief, and in the absence of religion they have ascribed a quasi-religious morality to a great many other issues and societal affairs, some of them quite passionately. Yet another third of Millennials claim, for instance, that they have left their “childhood religion” due to “negative religious teachings about or treatment of gay and lesbian people;” nearly three-quarters agree that religions “are alienating young people” by judging gays and lesbians too harshly. Regardless of how one feels about “gay and lesbian issues,” it’s obvious that Generation Y feels very positively about them, and its members are repelled by notions and convictions about which many of their parents (aside from the gay ones, maybe) were untroubled.

The Priestly Class Of Washington DC. Of course, every religious or sectarian organization needs a priest, and for young adults of today, that is more often than not the government, specifically Washington. A Pew research poll showed Millennials are as likely to favor an “economically activist government” as their forebears are likely to favor a limited one. More than two-thirds stated that “government should guarantee every citizen enough to eat and a place to sleep,” a well-worn political position but one a large majority of young voters share. There is a pointed similarity between Church rituals and government rituals—the pomp, the yearly solemn observances, the repeated mantras meant to reaffirm one’s faith and bring one back into the fold. If glorifying God has been discarded, for whatever reason, is it unsurprising that people may turn to another, highly visible and potent symbol of authority and raw power?

"Nature abhors a vacuum", it is said, and God designed us to have a god-shaped hole in our hearts. Added to this, one of the shortcomings of homo economicus is the total neglect in that model of man's spiritual nature. When God has been evicted from the human heart, and from the public square, something else will be erected in His place. Thus it is completely unsurprising that people would turn to another highly visible and potent symbol of authority and power.

While man's need for spirituality is organic, this man-made religion of liberalism is not. It is inculcated in the Cathedral, Moldbug's notional tripartate institution composed of the academy, the media, and the administrative State. Of the Cathedral's three parts, it is the academy that is the prime theological mover in the religion of Liberalism, and it both develops and inculcates a new moral orthodoxy with zeal, as my long-time blog-friend Novaseeker over at Veritas Lounge noted recently:

[T]here has recently been quite the internet dust-up about [a] Harvard Crimson editorial by Harvard undergraduate Sandra Korn regarding the need to replace academic freedom with a relatively newly-coined concept of “academic justice”.  The scope of the assertions in her article makes for interesting reading...what we [read] here is nothing less than the development of a new orthodoxy, together with the enforcement mechanisms which go along with any system of orthodox belief. Clearly this is the enforcement of a moral orthodoxy — or, rather, an enforced set of rules about permitted academic investigation or engagement which are in turn based on a preconceived moral orthodoxy. It’s quite telling that the ultimate justification, the “punch line” if you will, is that of having “the moral upper hand”. This is the ultimate “moral” (in reality, ideological) basis which justifies the accepted orthodoxy of one’s actions, and which trumps the academic freedom of any dissenters from such “consensus” orthodoxy.   What we are witnessing is nothing less than the “coming out party” of a new church — complete with a priesthood, monasteries and an emergent, and zealously enforced, orthodoxy.

The ideology of the academy is a religion (a non-theistic one, but a religion nonetheless) and these people are its priests – while the universities are the monasteries.  Ultimately what is opposed to us is not reason, and Korn’s op-ed, ironically, makes this quite clear....It is about controlling the use of reason, labeling some inquiries as morally legitimate and others as not — based on a non-theistic religious moral ideology. It’s about applying controls on reason which are based neither on God, nor on reason itself, but on the caricature of reason that is coalesced ideology — something which stands over and against the fundamentally inquisitive spirit of reason. That — restraining reason’s domain within limits — is what a religion does, and like all religions, it is based on a set of beliefs which are not falsifiable. In this case, however, it is an entirely man-made religion and one which therefore is subject to virtually no constraints on what it may seek to depose and displace as unorthodox. Of course, for theists, never mind Christians, a man-made religion cannot but be demonic in nature. But even leaving aside that theistic perspective, it should be obvious to any truly reason-based (rather than non-theistic-ideology-based) observer that a clearly man-made non-theistic and yet non-reason-based religious system which can therefore be rejiggered to condemn as unorthodox anything it wishes based on the whimsical winds of its mercurial “consensus” is a monstrously dangerous thing.

What we are opposing is a new religion, with a new priesthood, and a new set of powerful monasteries which serve to generate and enforce a new non-theistic, non-reason-based ideological orthodoxy.

Novaseeker opined in his linked essay that we are seeing the coming-of-age party for a new hegemony. I wholly agree.  We are witnessing the end product of a century-long Gramscian Long March through the institutions, in which a Western Civilization once informed by Christinaity is now is now ruled by another hegemony...one inspired by the prevailing religious orthodoxy of neo-pagan liberalism and the deity, sins, clergy, sins, saints, sacraments, etc listed above that accompany it.

Secrecy Surrounds Disease Environment Accompanying Cloward-Piven Human Flood

Apparently the Administration has the long game in mind regarding the Cloward-Piven human flood they started:

She said children in the camp had measles, scabies, chicken pox and strep throat as well as mental and emotional issues. "It was not a good atmosphere in terms of health," she said. "I would be talking to children and lice would just be climbing down their hair."

A former nurse at the camp told me she was horrified by what she saw. "We have so many kids coming in that there was no way to control all of the sickness - all this stuff coming into the country," she said. "We were very concerned at one point about strep going around the base."

Both the counselor and the nurse said their superiors tried to cover up the extent of the illnesses. "When they found out the kids had scabies, the charge nurse was adamant - 'Don't mention that. Don't say scabies,'" the nurse recounted. "But everybody knew they had scabies. Some of the workers were very concerned about touching things and picking things up. They asked if they should be concerned, but they were told don't worry about it."

The nurse said the lice issue was epidemic - but everything was kept hush-hush. "You could see the bugs crawling through their hair," she said. "After we would rinse out their hair, the sink would be loaded with black bugs." The nurse told me she became especially alarmed because their files indicated the children had been transported to Lackland on domestic charter buses and airplanes. "That's what alerted me," she said. "Oh, my God. They're flying these kids around. Nobody knows that these children have scabies and lice. To tell you the truth, there's no way to control it."

The counselor told me the refugee camp resembled a giant emergency room - off limits to the public. "They did not want the community to know," she said. "I initially spoke out at Lackland because I had a concern the children's mental health care was not being taken care of."

She said the breaking point came when camp officials refused to hospitalize several children who were suicidal.

"I made a recommendation that a child needed to be sent to a psychiatric unit," the counselor told me. "He was reaching psychosis. He was suicidal. Instead of treating him, they sent him off to a family in the United States."

She said she filed a Child Protective Services report and quit her job. "I didn't want to lose my license if this kid committed suicide," she told me. "I was done."

Baptist Family & Children's Services spokeswoman Krista Piferrer tells me the agency takes "any allegation of malfeasance or inappropriate care of a child very seriously."

"There are a number of checks and balances to ensure children are receiving appropriate and adequate mental health care," she said.

Piferrer said the clinicians are supervised by a federal field specialist from HHS's Office of Refugee Resettlement. She also said BFCS have 58 medical professionals serving at Lackland.

"Every illness, whether it is a headache or something more serious, is recorded in a child's electronic medical record and posted on WebEOC - a real-time, web-based platform that is visible to not only BFCS but the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services," she said.

Clearly, the Administration sees the present tidal wave of illegal aliens surging across the Mexican border (which has reportedly diverted 70% of the CBP agents away from security and law enforcement and toward providing care for "unaccomanied minors and incomplete family units" in some sectors, a step which is sure to exacerbate the problem) solely as a humanitarian issue with a minor public-health component, and not a border-security or law enforcement issue. Which makes sense given the ideological bent of this Administration, one that clearly welcomes the importation and placement of millions of grateful future Democrats on the welfare rolls. And the most transparent Administration in history is wise to keep a lid on this, lest the rubes in flyover territory start panicking about the tens of thousands of disease vectors that they are transporting on commercial airliners and buses to military bases and federal compounds across the country and far away from the border. They are wise as well to keep the optics of this under control; no squalid refugee camps at the Mexican border, pictures of which would be displayed on the nightly news (or at least on Fox and Drudge) for all to see. No, instead these illegal migrants are hidden away in places where cameras cannot go, and the light of public scrutiny on the actions of the government cannot shine.

Islam's Reformation Is Already Underway

This author asserts that the Islamic version of Christianity's Martin Luther...Mohammad Ibn Abdul Wahhab...has already come and gone. And, like his sixteen-century counterpart, Wahhab protested the "medieval synthesis" of the eighteenth-century Islamic faith, and started a movement to re-acquaint Moslems with the actual writings of the Koran and Hadith. Thus, just as Luther protested the man-made traditions of the Catholic religion which had been grafted onto God-given Christianity over 1,500 years, Wahhab's reforms endeavored to take Islam back to a less adulterated form of the faith:

At its core, the Protestant Reformation was a revolt against tradition in the name of scripture-in this case, the Bible. With the coming of the printing press, increasing numbers of Christians became better acquainted with the Bible's contents, parts of which they felt contradicted what the Church was teaching. So they broke away, protesting that the only Christian authority was "scripture alone," sola scriptura.

Islam's reformation follows the same logic of the Protestant Reformation-specifically by prioritizing scripture over centuries of tradition and legal debate...While the medieval synthesis worked over the centuries, it never overcame a fundamental weakness: It is not comprehensively rooted in or derived from the foundational, constitutional texts of Islam. Based on compromises and half measures, it always remained vulnerable to challenge by purists

In this backdrop, what has been called at different times, places, and contexts "Islamic fundamentalism," "radical Islam," "Islamism," and "Salafism" flourished. Many of today's Muslim believers, much better acquainted than their ancestors with the often black and white words of their scriptures, are protesting against earlier traditions, are protesting against the "medieval synthesis," in favor of scriptural literalism-just like their Christian Protestant counterparts once did.

I've heard repeatedly through the years, mostly from neocons and some on the tradcon right, that Islam is a "medieval religion" in sore need of a "reformation", presumably to temper its intemperate modern application. The above-linked article suggests that those who make these claims would do better to

embrace two facts: 1) Islam's reformation is well on its way, and yes, along the same lines of the Protestant Reformation-with a focus on scripture and a disregard for tradition-and for similar historic reasons (literacy, scriptural dissemination, etc.); 2) But because the core teachings of the scriptures of Christianity and Islam markedly differ from one another, Islam's reformation has naturally produced a civilization markedly different from the West.

Put differently, those in the West uncritically calling for an "Islamic reformation" need to acknowledge what it is they are really calling for: the secularization of Islam in the name of modernity; the trivialization and sidelining of Islamic law from Muslim society.

This last sentence states the problem clearly. Who can blame the ummah for resisting the forcible subjugation and assimilation of their culture and their faith by an imperialist pagan secular liberalism, ironically midwifed and aided in no small part by evangelical Zionist Christians who were similarly dispossessed of their culture by secular liberalists?

No, what these moderns are calling for is a counter-reformation of Islam, without quite realizing it. As such, they don't take seriously what they are proposing, not that their nihilism would afford them sufficient means to resist if they did. What's to worry about, anyway? After all, the counter-reformation in Europe, despite being horrifically bloody, failed to succeed, and even then yielded a cultural climate that gave rise to the Enlightenment and rationalism and the Golden Age of Western Civilization.

If one equates fundy Christianity with fundy Islam--as a great many liberalists do, despite the obvious differences between the religions when it comes to the values of tolerance, separation of church and state, monogamy, human dignity and the treatment of women, &c--what is there to worry about what sort of civilization that an Islamic reformation will yield? It'll be just like the one at present, correct?

Have An Impact

...by donating to someone who has had some.

Click here and read how W.F. Price's data-leveraging post on the safety of women relative to their domestic arrangements has attracted some mainstream media attention.

Then click here to throw a couple of pennies in the cup.

Now Anachronistic: Blazing Saddles

So I watched Blazing Saddles last night on AMC. For those unfamiliar, the campy 1974 Mel Brooks classic is about bible-thumping rural white racists the late 19th century American West who don't cotton too well to having a black sherriff.  I've watched this movie repeatedly over the years; when I was in primary school I laughed at the Looney Tunes-style sight gags and fart jokes.  When I was in my teens and very early 20s I was still laughing at the fart jokes, but also chuckled at some of the deeper humor (like the Hedley Lamarr character erotically molesting a statue of Lady Justice while conceiving of ways to evict the citizens of Rock Ridge)*, and appreciated a movie that broke taboos and spewed racial and ethnic epithets freely, not because I enjoyed the epithets, but that there was freedom to do so. With the spread of non-premium movie channels to broadcast TV and cable in my late 20s and 30s, I still enjoyed the movie but was annoyed at the PC police (who came about in the early 90s) bleeping out language thought to cause offense. This for a movie where the rough language was key the entire point of the film, and muting the casual bigotry on display blunted its effect. Paradoxically, the PC wet blanket reduced a movie made at the height of the Blaxploitation era (and its films which featured nearly all-black casts and made generous use of anti-white slurs) to a tepid shell of itself, still funny and potent in a way, but overall lacking in punch and flavor, artificial and tinny to the palate.  Kinda like diet soda.

It's been years since I've seen the movie, but when I saw it last night, I now view it through new eyes. Yes the slapstick humor is funny, and I'm old enough to remember what Looney Tunes were, whereas younger viewers may not. The difference is, this time around, the pendulum of racial bigotry has swung fully in the other direction, and now a movie that holds up prejudiced 19th century white country folk--no word, of course, about prejudiced Northern white urban left-wing sophisticates of the same era--for ridicule using late 20th century morality, must now in the early 21st century be viewed in the cultural context of Spike Lee's "mutherfucking hipsters" (apparently that's crypto for "honkey" or "cracka") and "visual daggers" comments, Oprah's "old white people have to die for racism to end" quip, Jamie Foxx's "I get to kill white people, how cool is that?" joke, in reference to the uber-violent racial revenge movie Django Unchained in which he starred, and Jay-Z's "whites are wicked and weak" "5 Percent" Nation of Islam bling worn courtside at a basketball game with a light-skinned Beyonce Knowles.  Indeed, the movie appears a bit dated in its banging on about the bigotries of frontier whites from 140 years ago, even if it was meant as a shot against vestigial Archie-Bunker-style white prejudice in the 70s, when even other blacks today today agree it is black racism that appears to be the problem.  One wonders if the movie perpetuates anti-white stereotypes, in the way that some thought the Blaxploitation films of the same era did viz blacks, and if so, why is it still on the air? Furthermore, the 1964 civil rights act, with its racial set-asides and reversed Jim Crow were just getting underway in 1974; forty years later, it seems everyone but whites have race-based preferences pulling for them, and a half-black man was elected not once, but twice, to the Presidency in no small part due to exceptionally un-colorblind votes of blacks.  In this context, a movie about white oppression of blacks, while possibly historical, has little application to the modern day.

The Whig view of history sees progress as linear, that the prejudices, bigotries, and mistakes of the past gradually improve so that we'll eventually arrive at some utopian future.  I'm afraid that's incorrect--the reality is that bigotry and hate just transfer to new owners, who in their merry lack of self-awareness perceive their own prejudices as correct, right, or just.

* This joke goes even deeper once one realizes that Lady Justice is a throwback to pre-Christian pagan Europe, where Lady Justice combines the Roman and Greek goddesses of luck, vengeance, and fate.

What This Place Needs Is...

Stolen from The People's Cube, channelling this classic SNL skit featuring Christopher Walken.

Study: Criminals More Reproductively Successful in the Modern Welfare State

Sad but true (ht: Chateau Heartiste):

From an evolutionary viewpoint, criminal behavior may persist despite adverse consequences by providing offenders with fitness benefits as part of a successful alternative mating strategy. Specifically, criminal behavior may have evolved as a reproductive strategy based on low parental investment reflected in low commitment in reproductive relationships. We linked data from nationwide total population registers in Sweden to test if criminality is associated with reproductive success. Further, we used several different measures related to monogamy to determine the relation between criminal behavior and alternative mating tactics. Convicted criminal offenders had more children than individuals never convicted of a criminal offense. Criminal offenders also had more reproductive partners, were less often married, more likely to get remarried if ever married, and had more often contracted a sexually transmitted disease than non-offenders. Importantly, the increased reproductive success of criminals was explained by a fertility increase from having children with several different partners. We conclude that criminality appears to be adaptive in a contemporary industrialized country, and that this association can be explained by antisocial behavior being part of an adaptive alternative reproductive strategy. [emphasis mine]

Reading this, I see more evidence in support of Glubb's cyclical Fate of Empires hypothesis: when a society becomes too successful, they forget the habits that got them there, and adopt new behaviors that reverse the civilizational arc. It's not malicious or even intentional; rather, it is natural for a people to want to enjoy the fruits of their labors once they've "arrived".  In doing so, however, they come to take for granted their successes and foresake dynamism for cautiousness, thrift for extravagance, hard work for dissipation, personal responsibility for public obligation. Liberalism it seems is the hemlock that apex societies drink when they no longer want to live; the welfare state a symptom of a people who no longer desire to care for themselves but be cared for.

Specific to this case, the social welfare state weakens the forces that steer the energies of men and women in socially productive directions.  From all, monies are seized to meet the wants of mothers in need, who, in turn, receive greater sums the greater their need. This redistribution redirects the focused paternal investment of socially upstanding husbands in their own families and children toward women who are not their wives and children who are not their offspring--a kind of societal cuckoldry, or a kind of compulsory polyandry, depending on your perspective--while simultaneously  insulating women from the adverse consequences of otherwise unwise reproductive and marital choices.  For their part, these dependable yet boring men are increasingly rejected by women in favor of more exciting men whose antisocial behavior inter alia means they are less disposed to invest in their children and society as a whole.

In short, government distortion of the SMP and MMPs through welfare and socialism means that dependable and upright behavior of delta providers is maladaptive.

I've written before that while marriage may domesticate men, it civilizes women. Married women tend to make choices that are socially constructive, unmarried women left to their own devices--and especially when those devices are subsidized by government--do not.  Same with married and unamrried men. This data appears to confirm my claim, and further suggests that anything that detracts from the patriarchal family model is an uncivilizing influence, is thus a net negative for an advanced civilized society, and takes us closer to, not further away from, the mud-brick savannah.

But take heart, deltas: While Roissy may very well be correct in that the ppbbbbbbth! sound we are hearing is the air escaping the nice guy / tradcon balloons worldwide, the very fact that we are presently living in a welfare state means that it's not going to last forever.

WapitiMail: Women Raping Men is Feminist BS

Eivind Berge, a staunch anti-feminist who blogs at the self-titled site Eivind Berge, had this to say in response to the recent post "Men Are Victims of Sexual Assault Nearly As Much As Women":

[W]omen "raping" men is gibberish. It all rests on the feminist lie that the sexes are equal. Please, let's be intellectually honest and admit that women cannot rape men. The female equivalent to rape is not forced sex at all but rather cuckoldry, which robs men of real reproductive resources. Pretending sperm itself of sex with a man has some great value or traumatizing power simply isn't honest, and it is a great red herring for the feminists to deflect attention from issues that really hurt men.

It is also a very foolish tactic to go along with the feminists on this in the hope that it will backfire on them, since it only legitimizes their redefinition of rape and provides the illusion that men need these new sex laws too, which is exactly what the feminists want. Haven't you noticed how feminists are the first to promote this charade at every opportunity? You are a useful idiot for the feminists while I am trying to preserve some sanity by resisting the feminist lie that women raping men is a huge problem. We can't fight feminist sex law reform by amplifying their bullshit. Instead we need to make it perfectly clear that the traditional definition of rape is the correct one, which required not just lack of consent but real violence or serious threats, and it sure did not include women raping men. Don't you think men would have thought of it at some point in history before feminists invented the concept in the late 20th century if men really needed legal protection from women "raping" them? Are feminists your greatest heroes since you feel the need to defer to them like that?

In a perfect world, I would agree with Mr. Berge. The idea of a woman raping a man would be non-sensical in a socio-legal environment where rape is defined as a penis forcibly entering a vagina to which the owner is not married; unfortunately, this environment no longer exists.

Moreover, socially the trend is toward androgyny in manner of dress and in customs and away from distinct gender roles of masculine and feminine. Whereas in the past women may have engaged in domestic violence at rates far less than men, today, the evidence argues for parity in IPV and in some cases points toward women as the primary aggressor sex.  Similarly, the sex responsible for initiating sex has changed; while men are still expected to be the initiator in relationships, women are sexually more assertive, even aggressive, than in times past.

Further, I think Mr. Berge would agree with me that the crime of "rape" is itself being replaced by the far more general "sexual assault", to account for the trend of expanding the concept of rape to encompass a wide range of sexual acts performed without the consent of the alleged victim.  Even so-called "marital rape", an act that itself used to be an oxymoron in the Christian west, is in post-Christian jurisprudence a crime as well.  Chief among these changes is the introduction of consent as the acid test of rape, as opposed to the "property rights" model, where carnal knowledge of a woman is a violation of a husband's (if married) or father's (if a minor) or woman's (if unmarried and not living under her father's covering, in other words, a fem sole) property rights. For certain, enforcement was much easier under the former regime--knotty questions of consent would give way to simple "did you go there without right?"--but such a paradigm went bye-bye when the millennia-old principle of coverture fell out of fashion. Again, clearly we do not live under a legal regime where these principles apply, and rape now means more (and less) than it used to.

Where Mr. Berge and I differ, however, is what to do about this shift and expansion in definition.  He appears to advocate fighting the social trends of the last couple of hundred years tooth-and-claw, to reverse the machinations of the post-Enlightenment liberalist Cathedral's institutional capture, and restore the concept of rape to its more diminutive form.  Again, I agree with him that this is a noble and worthy and desirable goal.  Yet I witness the moral and legal momentum of liberalism, of which feminism is but one head of the Hydra, and conclude that a small minority of MRAs, trads, neo-trads, reactionaries, neo-reactionaries, or whatever label applies, is unlikely to succeed in a head-on assault on the hegemony of the majority and their cultural and legal jurisprudence.

Instead, I think it would be a more successful tactic to use the feminist redefinition of rape against them, by agreeing and amplifying. Yes, it does lend additional legitimacy to the feminist notion of all sexual contact without expressed uncoerced consent  is rape. Unfortunately, it already is legitimate, and men's buy-in to this reality or lack thereof doesn't make it any less real. It already is the law. In this environment; I just do not envision success in standing athwart soon-to-be-history yelling "go back!" In fact, I see doing so as actually making things worse for men, not better.  For if we were to follow Mr. Berge's advice, and insist that rape is something that men do to women and women can't do to men by virtue that they don't own a penis, "victims" would enjoy ever more more potent weapons to punish "offenders" as the definition of sexual assault continues to widen, the definition of consent continues to narrow, and the procedural assumption of innocence steadily erodes.  All this while men continue to be kept in the proverbial Victorian box as the dirty, assumed aggressor, who is "always on", "is lucky to get any action", and is by nature dishonorable in thought and deed.  I fear that doing as Mr. Berge advises would do nothing but force men further between the rock of rape culture hysteria and the hard place of received Victorian concepts of pure femininity and seedy masculinity.

With respect to liberalism, I'm of the general opinion that the only way out is through, and the topic of sexual assault is no exception.  By forcing liberalists to adhere to their own rules--and by not allowing them to weasel out by crying "backlash" as they are wont to do when women are increasingly arrested for IPV--feminism's expansion of rape into sexual assault will rightly be seen as contrary to the interests of  women as well as men.  It is thus an attack on equalitarianism itself, by using its own weapons against it.

In this I suppose I am "go[ing] along with the feminists on this in the hope that it will backfire on them" as Mr. Berge asserts; I just judge the long-term outcomes for men will be better compared to the tactics he advises.