Christopher Hitchens on Male Genital Mutilation

On the issue of religion i am usually on the other side of the fence* to Hitchens, but on this matter i find i am 100% wholeheartedly in agreement. Male circumcision is practised by most of the societies that practise female circumcision, & more, for the same reasons & with comparable effects. Female Genital Mutilation, however, is considered just about the worst crime imaginable pretty much everywhere in the world, while Male Genital Mutilation is legal in every country & a joke the world over.

There is something to be learned here about how ideology - religious or otherwise - has an uncanny power to blind human beings to the actual reality of what is staring them in the face. If you truly cannot see that taking a razor & cutting parts off of healthy male infant's genitals is the same as taking a razor & cutting parts off of healthy female infant's genitals, then whatever is happening inside you at this very second is that process. Take a moment to step back & look at how you have got here.

For more information on both Male & Female Genital Mutilation please check the 'Resources' sidebar.

Tyrannies

by David Warren

 

One of the truest things said about Iran under the mullahs is "nothing in that country is quite as it appears." This is something journalists should know about Iran, or about any country where ideological misrepresentations of reality have been introduced, on a huge scale, for the very purpose of altering reality.

For the Shah was not the only thing overthrown during the Khomeinist takeover of 1979. In their attempt to reconstruct abiding Persia as a utopian, "revolutionary," quasi-Muslim quasi-state, the mullahs launched an attack on reality itself. Predictably, it has failed and, as we see today, a generation raised entirely on their doctrines and under their watchful thugs shows no gratitude.

Yet, as we saw before, during and after the fall of Communist regimes in Europe, tyranny does not evaporate like the morning dew. It is a spiritual poison, leaching into the soil. The effects of tyranny outlive the regime of tyranny, in the victims of tyranny. A typical side-effect is a kind of double-vision, in which reality and unreality remain simultaneously in view.

It becomes almost impossible to recover reality, because the tyrants so assiduously tampered with it. "The people" still half-believe the indoctrination; conversely, many of them openly embrace real evils, simply because they appear the opposite of the evils the regime embraced. Confusion reigns. Everything has been demonized; time is required, and the longer operations of nature, to sort what is good from what is bad.

Today's column is not about Iran, but I mention the country because we watch from a distance. That is what makes smugness possible. Nothing as horrible as what happens there has yet happened here. We feel secretly superior to people who've had to face circumstances we cannot imagine.

I remember the outrage of a Czech exile, a generation ago (before the Communists had fallen), receiving an uptight, self-righteous lecture from a shallow Canadian acquaintance. The latter said the enslaved Czechs should be blamed for co-operating with their Communist masters. Why didn't they just refuse to obey orders?

He was speaking to a man who had spent 12 years in labour camps for disobeying orders. Yet that was beside the point. The Canadian was speaking about things beyond his comprehension. My Czech friend, who had turned almost purple from his effort to contain himself, said only: "You are a fool." His Canadian interlocutor walked off, looking even more pleased with himself than usual. This Czech could have said more. I will say it for him.

In contemporary Canada we also face tyranny, but of a sort that we have brought upon ourselves in ways no Czechs, no Persians, ever did. There is no regime in Ottawa that seized power by violence, and imposed the "politically correct" ideology on us from a party manifesto. The advance of this tyranny -- of the Nanny State and all its trappings -- has been accomplished in plain view, by incremental advances, with our co-operation.

In two generations, we have witnessed a transformation, and nearly an inversion, of all the moral and ethical principles that guided us through countless generations before. The "revolution" has been accomplished by such means as George Orwell predicted: by changing the meanings of words.

Most overtly it has been done with "rights language" -- by the construction of new, artificial and quite abstract "group" rights that are anathematic to individual freedom. But beneath this, we have watched court and legislative interventions to redefine such basic ideas as manhood, fatherhood; womanhood, motherhood -- a purposeful destruction of the family in the cause of extending the powers of the state. We have likewise watched the religious order of society being systematically undermined, so that atheism or "irreligion" has become the default position from which the state now issues its ukases.

And we have allowed this and more, through the very laxity that shallow Canadian condemned in Czechs. We have accommodated the new powers, for fear of being isolated and ostracized.

I wrote last week about the evil of "feminism," and of the need to reverse its advance. It is typical of the present pseudo-reality that I am then attacked for being "anti-woman." It is further assumed, most obnoxiously, that I blame "women" for feminism -- thus playing the same game, of using one sex as a club to smash the other.

But no, I blame cowards -- most of them men.

Contemporary feminism did not prevail on such argumentative points as Betty Friedan included in her psychotic ravings. The movement had practical sponsors, who, for the most part, weren't female. They were men who wanted "free love" (read: copulation); who embraced contraception because it would free male pleasures from male responsibilities, and turn women very much into "objects" of their desire. That is how men conceded the high feminist ground.

Tyranny -- dehumanization -- advanced, because men failed to be men, women failed to be women, and both sexes pretended to become "persons" on an analogy more animal than divine. And today, nothing in our country is quite as it appears.

© Ottawa Citizen, 2008

Run, Little Man, If You Can

Oldie but goodie from Ilana Mercer :

In every boy there’s a girl waiting to break free. If boys were only encouraged to get in touch with their Inner Whiner, the problems plaguing them in schools and society at large would likely dissipate.

 

Distilled to its essence, this is the position some in the women’s movement are advancing. Feminists once aimed to unseat men, now they are actively engaged in queering them.

 

The new friendlier feminism is oddly attractive to men, who’ve been snarled at for so long by these attack dogs. One such dog in disguise is Carol Gilligan. At the risk of engaging in what liberals call “lookism” (I note that the anti-ageism bigots have taken to deriding Ann Coulter for being in her 40s), here's a photo of her.

 

The tumbleweed hair and the ghoulish grimace ought to be enough to make all men head for the hills. But Gilligan gulls the gents because hers is a slightly more evolved feminism.

 

Most feminists have dedicated their careers to denying the facts of nature, namely that men and women are different. Not Gilligan. On discovering the genders have “differing moral and psychological tendencies,” she devoted herself to elevating the sillier sex’s proclivities. 

 

You see, before they were so thoroughly feminized, “males and masculine persons” settled moral and ethical dilemmas differently to “females and feminine persons”—they were inclined to draw on individual rights and justice. Ladies, conversely, generally like collectivist considerations such as what is best for the group.

 

On observing this, Gilligan morphed psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory of moral development from a theory of absolute morality to a theory of relative morality: She decreed that reasoning rooted in collectivism was every bit as evolved and just as that based on individualism.

 

It recently dawned on Gilligan that boys had fallen far behind girls in almost all walks of life. Did this elicit introspection? Did she reflect on the crimes caused by codifying feminism into law? Did she finally confess to what privileging women and “women’s way of knowing” has wrought?

 

Affirmative action, the equal representation of women everywhere (including in sports), progressive teaching paradigms emphasizing group think; the banishing of competition (for which boys are hardwired) and moral instruction (which they generally crave); the demonization of the greatest writers, scientists, and explorers because they were men, the chemical castration of boys via Ritalin—was Gilligan driven to atone for these transgressions against boys and change direction? Did she even make the connection between men’s problems and the “Girls Gone Wild” gains of the women’s movement?

 

Not on your life.

 

In a recent column for Newsweek, Gilligan writes: “That boys are having trouble with school is not news. But images of rough-and-tumble boys not fit for the classroom now may blind us to a problem that has less to do with how boys seem and more with who they actually are—but are not allowed to show.”

 

That men have practically been made over in the image of woman is not enough for Gilligan. Their final “recovery,” as she sees it, lies in embracing the alleged woman within with complete abandon. Or in Gilligan speak, getting in touch with one’s "emotional intelligence," "relational self," and "feeling brain."

 

Gilligan’s credentials for “fixing” problems “scholars” like her have created include “having read ‘Tom Sawyer’ and ‘Catcher in the Rye,’” and thus knowing “that boys and school don't mix.” Her scientific data are as compelling—they’re drawn from a one-case study of a badly abused little boy.

 

As Gilligan tells it, “Four-year-old Sam asked his mother one day, ‘Mommy, why are you sad?’ Wanting to shield him from her sadness, [mom] replied, ‘I'm not sad.’ Then, according to Gilligan, poor Sam sprung his Inner Girl. “Mommy, I know you. I was inside you,” he told his long-suffering mother.

 

No tyke will spontaneously refer to his mother’s uterus unless he has been taught to. This boy sounds as normal as Alexander Portnoy, the antihero of Philip Roth’s eponymous Portnoy's Complaint.

 

But for Gilligan, there’s nothing creepy about a toddler’s reference to his mother’s entrails. Au contraire. She casts the clearly contrived and inculcated womb talk as natural—as just the “kind of emotional openness, sensitivity and connectedness” men are forced to suppress for fear of appearing unmanly. “[B]oys often repudiate these human qualities,” she laments. If they “can be encouraged to embrace them, these qualities will develop, expanding their capacity for relationships and also their sense of themselves.”

 

Vagina monologues or uterus prattle—feminists believe that as long as their insides are being discussed, humanity’s progress is guaranteed.

 

Remember the cult, 1967 British television series The Prisoner ("I am not a number—I am a free man!")? Whenever “Number 6” (the individual) attempted to escape from “The Village” (the collective), a giant balloon called “Rover” gave chase and subdued him. Little Sam’s metaphoric “Rover,” you can be sure, is his mother’s suffocating monster womb.

 

Unless the men’s movement is more concerned with claiming victimhood than reclaiming manhood, its advocates ought not to go along with feminism’s new, kinder castration.

© 2006 By Ilana Mercer

How Negative Depictions Of Men Make Women Look Bad

At last! After a long hiatus the majestic 6oodfella is back, with another park bench sit-down between gender-defenders Hugh Jass & Mary Hinge. I love these, some of the most righteous & funny things I've ever seen. Why won't someone give this guy a TV show? Or at least a slot on Sesame Street..



By the way, if you are interested in some of the points raised here about the methods & agendas of advertising, i recommend doing some research into Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, who began many of the modern techniques of advertising back in the 1920's & 30's, by applying his uncles theories of the subconscious to first commerce & eventually politics. There is an excellent documentary on this by Adam Curtis entitled 'The Century Of The Self' which I suggest you take a look at.