Australia is a Feminist's despair



Below is the first part of a familiar rant from an unhappy lady.  Her ethnography is correct.  Australians really are like that. 

I would be regarded s a deep-dyed villain in her book.  On family BBQs, my ex-wife sometimes gets me my meal, then usually gets me my dessert and then asks me later on if I would like a cup of tea.  I rarely get up.

So why does she do that?  It's to a small degree because we are a pretty traditional family but the real reason is simply that she is a very kind person.  She knows that I am rather clumsy and get involved in conversations with the men present so she simply looks after me. I noted the same in Scotland when I was there. I asked one of the Scotsmen at a BBQ why they did not fetch their own meal from the BBQ.  He said: "My wife knows what I take"

There are many kind women in Australia who willingly do most of the housework. They have various expectations of their men and if those expectations are fulfilled they are happy to do their bit.  The writer below seems not to know that.

The basic truth that she misses is that all relationships are different and the mix of expectations will differ too.  As she herself acknowledes, the pattern I am familiar with is the norm.  She wants to change the norm.  That is rigid and dogmatic on her part.  She should respect differences and stop trying to impose her preferred relationship pattern on others. 

In fact, she has the unshakeable conviction about the rightness of her values that one so often sees on the Left  -- a conviction that in Communist regimes regularly leads to mass murder.  How much better for all of us it would be if the values of the carpenter of Nazareth were our guide


AT A party a few weeks ago, I witnessed a blood-boiling example of inequality. Through the entire three courses of dinner — for which the women had put together salads and baked desserts, organised decorations and gifts for the birthday boy — the majority of men remained glued to their seats as we milled among them, collecting plates, serving food and effectively waited on them, hand and foot.

It was a clear example at the huge gulf between the sexes in Aussie culture.

While there’s plenty of talk about Australian men increasing their housework effort, and being ahead in their contribution of men in other countries, it’s clear women are still picking up far too much of the slack. While I am fortunate to be in the minority of women with a husband more anal than I am about germs, women continue to do up to two-thirds more housework than men, according to data from the 2016 Census. I should also point out that while neither of us cares that much about housework, both of us are aware of the fine line between pretending not to care and hoarding empty wine bottles and “Pods” packets under the bed.

In his article, “Dirty Secret: Why Is There Still A Housework Gender Gap”, Oliver Burkeman sums up the problem rather succinctly when he says: “The ‘housework gap’ largely stopped narrowing in the 1980s. Men, it seems, conceded that they should be doing more than before — but then, having half-heartedly vacuumed the living room and passed a dampened cloth over the dining table, concluded that it was time for a nice sit-down.”

I can believe it.

SOURCE 

COMMENT FROM A READER:

"...women continue to do up to two-thirds more housework than men"

 I doubt that statement is true, certainly not if we include house, garden and vehicle maintenance. I suspect she is one of those one-eyed, egocentric, ungrateful and perpetually irritable women. She says herself that her blood boils when she sees women bringing men their meals. Yuck...what a noxious creature she must be. Anyone with both eyes open can see that generally men do all of nearly all of the more physical and technical things around the house and property, the operating, repairing, maintaining and servicing of machinery such as motor vehicles, lawn mowers, chainsaws, and other equipment, repairing fences, gates, sharpening equipment, the building and renovating of things, all the dangerous work that involves plumbing, electricity, crawling inside and on the roof, cleaning and repairing roof guttering,... etc, etc, but she is blind to all that. And she is probably also blind to the fact that most men work






Europe's migration fiasco: Brussels plan to build EU migrant centre descends into farce as leaders queue to say 'not in my back yard'

A Brussels plan to build EU migrant detention centres descended into farce last night as European leaders lined up to refuse to host them.

The proposal was billed as an attempt to alleviate pressure on frontline Mediterranean countries, where the vast majority of migrants arrive.

But French president Emmanuel Macron said he would not host one of the ‘controlled centres’ and Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz mocked the prospect of one being built in his country.

EU leaders want to build migrant centres in north Africa to prevent them attempting to risk their lives trying to cross the Mediterranean

The detention centre proposal was part of a strategy agreed by EU leaders on Thursday night with the aim of ending a brewing immigration row. But key aspects of the plan unravelled within hours of being agreed.

EU diplomats last night poured scorn on the migration deal. One said: ‘It has kept everybody happy, but parts of it are an obvious fudge.’

Another said: ‘This is a bit of paper that will never become reality. It is a mess and will discredit the EU because it is unworkable and everyone knows it is unworkable.’

None the less, the deal appeared to have brought Angela Merkel’s political career back from the brink of collapse. The embattled German chancellor heralded the agreement as an ‘important step’ after it was thrashed out over a marathon dinner in Brussels that ran into the early hours of yesterday morning.

But the proposal to build migrant detention centres across the EU where asylum requests would be fast-tracked sparked a war of words between the leaders. Mr Macron said the secure centres would be reserved for Mediterranean countries at the forefront of key migrant routes, such as Malta, Italy, Spain and Greece.

‘France is not a country of first arrival,’ he said. ‘Some want to push us to that and I refused it.’

But Italian prime minister Giuseppe Conte rejected Mr Macron’s suggestion that the asylum centres would be hosted in countries such as Italy. He said: ‘Macron was tired. I deny what he said.’

Asked if he would host a migrant centre in Austria, Mr Kurz said: ‘Of course not... we are not a first arrivals country, unless people jump from parachutes.’

The centres will only be opened if EU member states agree to them and governments can refuse to host asylum seekers deemed in need of protection. The opt-outs are a concession to hardline member states such as Hungary and Poland.

The plan was signed off by leaders after heated discussions stirred up by Mr Conte, who threatened to scrap any agreement that failed to meet his demands.

After nine hours of talks on migration finished at 3am yesterday morning, he waved a copy of the agreement in the air and said: ‘Today Italy is no longer alone. We are satisfied.’ He said he had bullied other EU leaders a ‘little bit’.

But Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez, whose country has seen an increase in migrants, said the agreement could have gone ‘much further’.

The EU agreement backs the controversial creation of asylum centres in North African countries, which would see migrants who are rescued in the Mediterranean returned to a ‘disembarkation’ area to have their asylum claims assessed.

But in their joint conclusions from the meeting, the EU leaders acknowledged that the camps could create an unwanted ‘pull factor’ by attracting asylum seekers who could apply there.

The deal was welcomed by the CSU, sister party to Mrs Merkel’s CDU, which has threatened to close Germany’s borders in a move that she opposes. [The CSU represents the Southern States (Laender) so controls the borders leading into Germany.  The Southern states have considerable autonomy so could conceivably close their borders to immigrants -- leaving Merkel high and dry]

SOURCE





Real faked news

By GILES COREN

The poor old BBC is taking a beating again for having “faked” a scene in a documentary. Apparently, a treehouse built by Korowai people high up in a forest in Papua New Guinea, which featured in an episode of Human Planet in 2011, was just a stunt.

The charming buck-naked indigenous ­chappies built it purely for the ­cameras and had no plans whatsoever to live in it, despite the ­voiceover from John Hurt (so inherently trustworthy) declaring they were building “a new house 35m up. For the Korowai, the higher the house, the greater the prestige.”

Photographs of the huge, jerry-built shed teetering at the top of a preposterously flimsy tree look ridiculous. It is hard to imagine a child of six or seven believing it was someone’s actual home, let alone fully grown television viewers or producers.

But viewers are gullible and producers have a thankless, not especially well-paid, job to do. That’s how factual television works: underfunded, overworked functionaries slog their nuts off to put stuff on screens that millions of people who aren’t really paying attention will believe is real. Nobody involved pretends it’s the literal truth, as long as it can squeeze through the guidelines, which are quite vague and ­always open to interpretation.

I know. I have been presenting factual television for 15 years for the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Five, Sky and some international channels, and while I have never made anything that was an outright lie — nobody wants to do that — I’ve never made anything entirely true either.

Yes, in the dozens of time-travelling shows I’ve made, the house was stripped back to the way it might have looked in our chosen era … in the rooms we were filming in. Yes, Sue Perkins and I, or the guinea-pig family, wore period clothes … when the cameras were rolling. Yes, we/they lived on the diet of that time … for the meals that we filmed.

But nobody was going back in time, duh. People were being put through a series of ­scenarios built around ­received historical cliche that were designed to make you go: “Ooh, I ­remember that!” And you did. In your millions. And you loved it. And everyone got paid. And in the evening we all put our jeans back on and ­dialled in pizza.

Or take the travel shows I’ve done which, like all travel shows, build towards a climactic event involving all the people I have made friends with during my trip, in a big weepy last couple of minutes. More often than not, this big climactic event — a party, a fireworks display, a musical performance — happens pretty much the day I arrive in the country. So I am ushered straight off the plane into a room full of ­strangers, told which ones are going to become my “friends” during the course of filming and I go up to them and hug them and say things like, “How’s it going, man?” and “It’s been great ­getting to know you and your beautiful home/lovely family/vibrant political movement”, and they stare back, stupefied, at this lunatic English stranger pretending to know them.

Then during the course of the week I do meet them properly and bond with them and all that guff, and then back home in Britain they flip it all around in the edit, put the party at the end (when I’ve often weirdly lost the sun tan I had picked up during the week) and Bob’s your uncle: “Giles has been on a journey.”

Is that a lie? Is that wrong? Is that “Fake views!” as the newspapers screeched about the treehouse scandal, before going on to remind us of that time when Frozen Planet passed off some shots of polar bear cubs in a zoo with fake snow as wild footage?

It’s hard to say. No doubt the Korowai began building their “very high traditional treehouse” but it was only a metre off the ground and the film crew was a bit worried that this was going to be pretty dull and not at all worth the tens of thousands of dollars being spent on flights and kit hire and personnel and they just said: “Can’t you nudge it up the tree a bit? Just for us?”

Nobody would ever find out and then there’d be a much better chance of Barry in his front room shouting to Ethel in the kitchen: “Come and look at this, love, these primitive monkey people are building a treehouse in the sky!”

Or maybe it was the Korowai pulling the wool over the crew’s eyes for larks.

I made a film in Alabama once about an old-fashioned hog farmer who slept with his herd and lived on squirrel meat. For the final scene, he stewed some squirrel meat for me and we went through the whole recipe and I said how delicious and squirrelly it was. And then after we cut, the guy fell about laughing and revealed that what he had fed me was in fact a fricassee of pig’s testicles. It turned out he was angry about being pigeonholed as a rodent-eating redneck and thought he’d get his revenge on us by giving “that there Jew boy a mouthful of hog nuts!”

Well, it was too late to unfilm the whole show so we made our pact of silence and out it went into a million homes.

Which is why I think it is very possible that the Korowai just wanted to play a trick on Old Whitey, who couldn’t possibly be dumb enough to believe that they all live 30m up in the air, like something out of Gulliver’s Travels.

SOURCE






India riding high in space

The Indian Space Research Organisation launched its most powerful rocket to date on the southern island of Sriharikota on June 5

India has joined an international race to explore the dark side of the moon, seeking to launch a lunar mining expedition for nuclear fuel.

The Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) has announced that it will send an unmanned mission later this year to explore the south face of the moon, for signs of water and helium-3.

The latter, if properly harnessed, could change energy consumption on Earth for the next 250 years, scientists say. Helium-3 is in limited supply on Earth but is believed to be abundant on the moon, Bloomberg India reported.

“The countries which have the capacity to bring that source from the moon to Earth will dictate the process,’’ Dr Kailasavadivoo Sivan, the chairman of Isro, said. “I don’t want to be just a part of them, I want to lead them.’’

India is not the only country interested in the moon’s dark side: Russia, China, the US and Japan are also keen to explore there, along with the privateers Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson.

Landing a rover on the moon is one phase in a long-term plan for Isro that includes launching a space station and, one day, a human crew on Earth’s lunar satellite.

“We are ready and waiting,’’ said Dr Sivan, who joined the organisation in 1982. “We’ve equipped ourselves to take on this particular programme.’’

China is the only country to land anything on the moon this century with its Chang’e 3 mission in 2013. In the US, Nasa has a $19 billion (£14.4bn) budget this year with the aim of launching another lunar rover within five years.

Isro’s estimated budget is a fraction of Nasa’s – about $1.7bn – but exploring the heavens on a shoestring has been the hallmark of India’s space missions since the early 1960s.

The mission to the moon this year will not be India’s first. The Chandrayaan-1, launched in October 2008, discovered molecules of water on the moon’s surface.

The Chandrayaan-2 includes a rectangular rover, a six-wheeled vehicle powered by solar energy, which will collect information for at least 14 days

Meanwhile, Isro has announced that it will help train astronauts from smaller countries. “India has taken the initiative to train scientists of countries like UAE and African nations that lack the technical knowhow and capability to build a satellite”, said Mr Sivan said at the UN Conference on the Exploration and Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, in Vienna.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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