As my husband shows, there is great hope for the fathers of the future
NIKKI GEMMELL is a famous author so it is good to hear from her something other than the usual contempt for men that we so often read online. I think she is right in seeing modern fathers as potentially being helpful to children with problems. I am very happy with the way I was able to help my stepson from an early age. I was the only one who made sense to the boy. We still have a strong relationship now many years later
And if an old-fashioned "patriarchal" man such as myself can achieve that, there should be some hope that younger men who have been encouraged to involve themselves with their childrem might also be able to achieve much
But as Gemmell says, it depends very much on the individual. There always have been good fathers and there will continue to be
Long ago I believed in the will of the father, omnipresent within the family; that his desires, beliefs and needs prevailed over all others. This was how family was done. Yet the father in my own little family has taught me a different, more effective and egalitarian way of existing: that it isn’t about the will of the father, but about his attention. And that is the glue that holds our family together.
Recently one of our children was going through a tough time. There have always been little spot-fires to put out; there’s always something. But this situation had an edge to it. It felt deeper, more serious, and as parents it has taken all our concentration and instinct to get through it.
We’re there now, I think, as much as you can ever relax with the parental vigilance. But through it all I observed my husband enveloping a cherished child with love. Cocooning them so that the child felt utterly safe. Home was their calm space.
It was father as rock. It felt miraculous: a quiet, solid thing anchoring our entire family. I was observing a man repairing a vulnerable child with his careful love. Vanquishing fears. Circuit-breaking with laughter. Making no demands, for this was not the time. There was a wild beauty to this love. I handed over to the father on this one, to this man drawing our child within his cloak of tenderness, shutting the blare of the world out.
Do we, onscreen, see these good fathers enough? Not at all. The father so often portrayed in popular culture is the bumbling, comically hopeless goofball, or conversely the man clotted by silence and bewildered by the demands of a patriarchy that won’t let him be who he really is.
“You are Kenough” is the mantra of the moment, and there’s so much truth in that gentle pop culture joke. The film Barbie made a feature of the many men among us who are Kenough, actually, when the universe is telling them to be something they don’t necessarily want to be.
Increasingly though we’re seeing men who recognise they’re enough in the space called Fatherhood. Tender Dad. Involved Dad. Comfortable-In-Himself Dad. I have great hope for the fathers of the future when I look at the young men of today, because this modern father feels like a new and improved version of the father of old; those men of past worlds haunted by wars and weighted by expectations and pole-axed by a failure to communicate their truths.
Those men didn’t change nappies, didn’t talk like they do now. And they didn’t realise that a more equal world leads to less of a desire to have power over another, to dominate and control.
The best fatherly love is energised by vigilance to family. Love as attention. Love as service. Love defined not so much during the big, declarative occasions but in the quotidian. “I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments,” Umberto Eco wrote, “when they aren’t trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.” We become what our parents label us, from an early age; and we carry those labels, good or bad, throughout life. It’s label as burden, or rocket fuel.
My father was my rocket fuel, as I can see my husband is to his own children. This coming week I’ll be visiting dad’s grave, watched over by ’roos in a place too far away. While there I’ll give thanks for the only two fathers I’ve closely known. Men from vastly different backgrounds, with a similar aim: to be the father who makes their children feel safe. I carry that gift like an underground seam strong through my own life.
And as I walk in the world dad loved I’ll remember the words of Italo Calvino: “So, with my thoughts following my father’s footsteps through the countryside, I fell asleep; and he never knew that he had had me so close to him.”
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Facebook attacked as not Leftist enough
Allowing free speech is "hate"
The advertising boycott battering Facebook is unlike anything the social-media giant has faced in its 16-year history: Three days in, 800 companies worldwide have pulled millions of dollars in advertising from the social network, with brands from Coca-Cola to Ford to global conglomerate Unilever demanding that Facebook monitor hate speech more aggressively.
With pullouts mounting and the company’s name constantly tied to racism and hate in the news coverage, CEO Mark Zuckerberg responded by livestreaming part of an employee meeting — one of the few times he’s done that in the company’s history. Then, on Wednesday, Facebook’s powerhouse policy and communications chief, former British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, issued an open letter, titled “Facebook does not benefit from hate,” touting its efforts to police its content.
The boycott has emerged as a crucial test for a company that has become a key player in American politics simply because of what it hosts and promotes on its site, and which until recently had been vocally doubling down on its commitment to keeping an open platform for users’ speech.
It is also a behind-the-scenes triumph for a novel coalition of civil rights groups and other advocacy organizations — the architects of the #StopHateForProfit campaign that many of the boycotting companies have signed on to.
Interviews with leaders of the nine coalition partners reveal how the groups spun up a boycott idea in a matter of days, responding to the George Floyd protests late this spring and using public energy to join together several long-simmering, frustrated efforts to hold Facebook to account for its content. They lobbied corporate leaders in private and, in some cases, shamed companies on social media to join the effort.
“[Facebook] is a breeding ground for racial hate groups,” says Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP, one of the groups that made up the coalition. Referring to Zuckerberg, he said, “You can’t reason with the guy.”
In short order, the coalition has emerged as perhaps Facebook’s most formidable antagonist, when little else — not Congress, not European regulators, not public declarations by celebrities that they were deleting their Facebook accounts — has had much effect on how the site operates. And their campaign might offer a blueprint for how activist groups can tackle a modern tech giant: fusing novel pressure tactics with the weight of legacy civil rights groups.
It remains to be seen whether Facebook will really be dented, either financially or as a brand. The company declined to comment for this article except to point to a statement issued in response to the boycott, saying Facebook “invest[s] billions of dollars each year to keep our community safe and continuously work[s] with outside experts to review and update our policies,” and that it is taking steps to address hate. The statement added, “we know we have more work to do.” So far, the company hasn’t made major concessions, though. And while its stock price has dipped sharply, Zuckerberg — who has long defended the platform as a space for free expression — reportedly has said advertisers would be back “soon enough.” Analysts likewise say Facebook can weather the storm; most of its ads come from small and medium-size buyers, not the large corporations making boycott headlines, and Bloomberg researchers predicted Monday that the boycotts could cost Facebook only $250 million in ad sales — a sliver of the company’s $77 billion in annual revenue.
But a look at the origins and dynamics of StopHateForProfit suggests the campaign has at least one insight that people often forget when it comes to a tech behemoth with the Silicon Valley sheen of Facebook: At the end of the day, the social network is just an advertising vehicle, with 98 percent of its revenue coming from ads. And like old-line pressure campaigns against TV networks or newspapers, if you can get to the advertisers, the company has to pay attention.
While the boycott came together quickly, its roots trace back to the 2016 election. Amid widespread outrage over the role Facebook had played, one complaint was that Russians were using the site to exploit America’s racial tensions. But the site wasn’t just amplifying them, activists came to believe. It was a petri dish for racism and discrimination; it was growing hate. And, by taking a largely hands-off approach, Facebook wasn’t taking the issue seriously, the activists decided.
In the months after Donald Trump was sworn in as president, civil rights groups and other social justice organizations began quietly comparing notes about their interactions with Facebook and Silicon Valley more broadly.
“The conversations started really informally, just collecting information. But what we learned was that we were getting played by Facebook and other big tech companies,” says Jessica González, co-CEO of the left-leaning media advocacy organization Free Press. “They had a very strategic appeasement strategy, where they gave us breadcrumbs, but in a way that made it look like they were doing such great work when in fact hate and disinformation were rampant on their site.”
The advocates tried to figure out how to get Facebook and other tech companies to take their complaints more seriously. Campaigns to get users to stay away from the platform, or to allow civil rights groups to alert the companies of hateful activities, largely sputtered. In 2018, Facebook announced it would undergo an audit to better understand how it was affecting communities of color and other marginalized groups, led by Laura Murphy, a highly regarded civil rights advocate. But a pivotal five-week stretch this past fall largely erased whatever goodwill was left.
On a Tuesday afternoon in late September, Clegg, Facebook’s head of policy and communications, announced the company was exempting politicians’ ads from its fact-checking process, arguing that the public should be able to see, and vet, what political leaders say. Clegg told me in an interview at the time that it was long-standing policy but that, “The purpose of it, I hope, was pretty clear, which was: This is what we’re doing ahead of 2020. These are our plans.”
Facebook’s critics took umbrage at both what Clegg said — revealing, they thought, that Facebook failed to grasp the history of American politicians stoking racial divisions — and when he said it. Color of Change, which was founded in the wake of Hurricane Katrina to organize African Americans online, and other groups had been working for months to pull together an event, called “Civil Rights x Tech,” with Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg; it was scheduled for just two days after Clegg’s speech. At the summit, against a backdrop of soaring brick walls and exposed piping in an events space in Atlanta’s West Midtown, Sandberg and Neil Potts, a Facebook public policy director, were pressed on what Clegg had said and reassured the advocates, González told me.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/07/03/activists-advertising-boycott-facebook-348528
**********************************************TikToker divides internet with admission she asks men to see bank account balance on first date
This woman is just doing openly what other women do discreetly. Just asking about the man's occupation will usually reveal a lot but there are many indicators of economic success. For instance, when women hear that I retired at age 39, they normally have no further doubts about money
A TikTok influencer has divided the internet after revealing that she asks potential suitors to show her their bank account balance on the first date to ensure she's not "wasting" her time.
Former ‘Call Her Daddy’ co-host Sofia Franklyn confessed on her podcast, "Sofia with an F," that she's begun to ask men to show her their "bank account info" early on in the dating process because she "only want[s] to date a wealthy guy that has money."
"I think I have every f-----g right to be like, ‘Hi, are we on the same level or am I wasting my time?’" she said, adding that she considers herself to be "very successful" and expects her dates to have similar financial success.
"I think I’m just being efficient?" Franklyn wrote in a caption of the clip shared on her TikTok.
Fox News commentator Tomi Lahren said that while it's important for couples to discuss financials, she finds Franklyn's method to be "demeaning."
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Australia: politically incorrect journalism awards under fire
Calls to boycott the Walkley Awards because of the event’s links to petroleum company Ampol have met a growing backlash from the nation’s top journalists, with eight-times Walkley winner Hedley Thomas urging colleagues to stand up for the awards “lest our craft be further undermined by knee-jerk activism”.
The Australian’s national chief correspondent added his voice to the debate after legendary political correspondent Laurie Oakes branded the boycott – proposed by a group of cartoonists – as “white-anting” that would further undermine public trust in journalism.
Other cartoonists, including the Herald Sun’s Mark Knight, The Daily Telegraph’s Warren Brown and The Australian’s Johannes Leak, have slammed the boycott. “The custodians of the journalism awards should not be cowed,” said Thomas, who has twice been a member of the Walkley judging board.
“There will be no end to demands from activists if they sense weakness in the Walkley Foundation and leadership team.
“Those who are currently attacking the Walkley Awards for having been supported by ‘fossil fuel’ companies deserve, in absentia, a new gong – Most Hollow Virtue Signalling – at the 2023 event in Sydney in November.
“Our annual celebrations of journalism are always bleary, but I can’t recall seeing a bicycle rack outside the Walkleys, nor any of the current critics pedalling there in past years.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See
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