The brutal new class division appearing in Australia
This is not a new division at all. There have always been those who inherited significantly and those who did not. And being a "not" is far from a life sentence. Those who pass down wealth often started off poor themselves. I did. Nobody ever gave me a penny -- or even a cent for that matter. I earned it all.
And I remember that. I now provide heavily discounted rental accommodation to five people and give half my disposable income to a charitable education cause. So the rigid class lines described below are a myth. There are such lines but they are not all due to inheritance and are not fixed or permanent. And inherited wealth is often squandered anyway, which makes it very impermanent. It is squandering that I find contemptible
Inheritocracy – a term recently heard. Our lucky country is careering towards a great generational divide; a landed gentry of property owners on one side and renters on the other. A brutal new class division, flippant about educational attainment as the great equaliser. Rules are upended in the new order; degree holders may well be losing out. Indeed, among certain writers it’s now de rigueur to put “renter” in your social media bio. Blazing contempt and coolness, the brazen political stance of the othered. But as a nation we’re heading into uncharted waters, as resentments grow and younger voters cleave to whatever political party can do something about this vexed housing situation. If it can. The challenges are immense, the population restive.
That silky game of inheritocracy is playing out all around me. In one corner, a succession of friends and acquaintances stepping into enormous wealth as their parents pass away and family dwellings are inherited. The talk is of clearing parents’ houses for sale, upsizing into better places, holiday homes on the coast, paying off mortgages, extensive travel. They’re living their best lives, free of the corrosiveness of money worries. That’s a heady liberation. And during a cost-of-living crisis, no less.
In another corner, the dumping of building waste in a local car park. A council man clearing it up tells me people can’t afford the tipping fees anymore, so they drive all over the city to find car parks and secluded roads without CCTV to deposit their waste, which sometimes contains asbestos. A tiny snapshot of the other side. Of despairing Australians forgoing three solid meals a day because they can’t afford it. Of putting off the doctor visit because it’s too expensive. Of holidays as a distant memory. And many younger Australians work within a new order of employment – they’re immersed in all the stresses and indignities of the gig economy; the sheer, craven callousness of a system not on their side.
The stark reality: vast numbers cannot afford to live the life their parents had. For a 34-year-old in 1990, the average mortage in Australia was roughly three times their yearly wage – now it’s eight times. Many have given up on that great Australian dream of home ownership, a situation likely to reverberate through the generations. It’ll never happen for them now, nor, quite possibly, their children. Thus disadvantage rolls down through the years. What is bequeathed is all the uncertainties of the rental market – and a fundamental stress in life is instability. When it comes to property, we want to feel safe, in our own place, in a dwelling no one is going to take away from us. In the lucky country, the Great Australian Dream is now denied to a vast tranche of the unlucky.
NSW Treasurer Daniel Mookhey has warned that if we don’t act sharpish on housing affordability then Sydney may well be heading down the path of San Francisco, where you can see middle-class workers in suits and ties lining up for food banks and living in homeless shelters. The natural order of things, upended. The consequence of an obscene property market. Mookhey believes there’s only a five- to 10-year window to act.
“How one grudges the life and energy and spirit that money steals from one,” writer Katherine Mansfield wrote during a stretch of poverty. “I long to spend and have a horror of spending: money has corrupted me these last years.” The dream, for all of us, is to not be held hostage by a lack of money. To be free of the endless scrabble to obtain it, because how exhausting, stressful, consuming that is. What an extraordinary moment in time in Australia. We’re heading towards a new class order. It’s called a “propertocracy”, and it’s a tragedy for our nation.
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Biden Education Secretary Refuses to Answer Whether ‘Women Are Physically Different Than Men’
There is no limit to Leftist reality denial
Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona repeatedly refused to answer questions on whether physical differences exist between men and women at a Wednesday hearing.
The National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics announced Monday that only biological females can play in women’s sports at the roughly 240 universities it represents, which lawmakers referenced at the House Appropriations Committee budget hearing. Cardona has rejected discussing the NAIA policy as he says his department is currently engaged in a related rulemaking process on Title IX, but Maryland Republican Rep. Andy Harris pressed him on the issue.
“Would you agree that Title IX was necessary to help establish women’s sports, because women can’t fairly be expected to compete on biological male teams?” Harris asked.
Cardona began to speak about another topic but Harris cut him off, saying, “Please. No filibustering.” The representative then repeated his question, to which Cardona agreed that Title IX was necessary for this reason.
Female athletes have sued the National Collegiate Athletics Association over its policy allowing biologically male athletes to compete against women.
“Would you agree that women are physically different from men?” Harris followed up.
“I see where you’re going with this,” Cardona responded before the congressman cut him off. Harris then repeated the question, to which Cardona gave the same answer, adding, “I would love to talk about how we can work together to support the students,” before Harris cut him off again.
The Education Department sent Title IX regulation to the White House for its evaluation in February, which is anticipated to increase protections for transgender people in sports, according to Politico.
“Mr. Secretary, do you agree that biological women are different from biological men physically?” he asked. “This is a simple question for an educator. You’re not going to answer. OK.”
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/04/10/miguel-cardona-wont-answer-question-about-womens-sports/
*********************************************U.S. Helps Pro-Ukraine Media Run a Fog Machine of War
Wikimedia
Ukraine’s American-backed fight against Russia is being waged not only in the blood-soaked trenches of the Donbas region but also on what military planners call the cognitive battlefield – to win hearts and minds.
A sprawling constellation of media outlets organized with substantial funding and direction from the U.S. government has not just worked to counter Russian propaganda but has supported strong censorship laws and shutdowns of dissident outlets, disseminated disinformation of its own, and sought to silence critics of the war, including many American citizens.
Economist Jeffrey Sachs, commentator Tucker Carlson, journalist Glenn Greenwald, and University of Chicago Professor John Mearsheimer are among the critics on both the left and the right who have been cast as part of a “network of Russian propaganda.”
But the figures targeted by the Ukrainian watchdog groups are hardly Kremlin agents. They simply have forcefully criticized dominant narratives about the war.
Sachs is a highly respected international development expert who has angered Ukrainian officials over his repeated calls for a diplomatic solution to the current military conflict. Last November, he gave a speech at the United Nations calling for a negotiated peace.
Mearsheimer has written extensively on international relations and is a skeptic of NATO expansion. He predicted that Western efforts to militarize Ukraine would lead to a Russian invasion.
Greenwald is a Pulitzer Prize-winning independent journalist who has criticized not just war coverage but media dynamics that suppress voices that run counter to U.S. narratives.
“What they mean when they demand censorship of ‘pro-Russia propaganda’ is anything that questions the US/EU role in the Ukraine war or who dissents from their narratives,” Greenwald has observed.
There’s no evidence of Kremlin influence over their viewpoints, but their comments alone are enough for a network of U.S.-backed Ukrainian media groups to tarnish these experts as Russian propagandists.
As Congress debates major new funding to support the Ukrainian war effort, U.S. taxpayer dollars are already flowing to outlets such as the New Voice of Ukraine, VoxUkraine, Detector Media, the Institute of Mass Information, the Public Broadcasting Company of Ukraine and many others.
Some of this money has come from the $44.1 billion in civilian-needs foreign aid committed to Ukraine. While the funding is officially billed as an ambitious program to develop high-quality independent news programs; counter malign Russian influence; and modernize Ukraine’s archaic media laws, the new sites in many cases have promoted aggressive messages that stray from traditional journalistic practices to promote the Ukrainian government’s official positions and delegitimize its critics.
It’s not only dissident voices targeted by the media groups, which are funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
Detector Media went after the New York Times in February over a news report about hundreds of Ukrainians in the battle for Avdiivka who were captured or missing. The Ukrainian fact-check site offered little in terms of a rebuttal. Detector Media only cited a spokesperson for the Ukrainian Defense Forces disputing the Times' story, which it labeled as "disinformation." The New Voice of Ukraine quoted a Ukrainian official describing the Times story as a “Russian Psyop,” a term for psychological warfare.
Unlike similar media development programs that USAID has led throughout the Middle East, Ukrainian outlets tend to produce a great deal of English content that trickles back into the domestic American audience and explicitly targets American foreign policy discourse.
The New Voice of Ukraine syndicates with Yahoo News. VoxUkraine is a fact-checking partner with Meta, which assists in removing content deemed “Russian disinformation” from Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Detector Media has similarly led a consortium of nonprofit groups pressuring social media platforms to aggressively remove content critical of Ukraine.
"It makes more sense to have it in English because one of the things that happens is that the narrative that one encounters in the mainstream media in the West is referenced as the official Ukrainian voices," said Nicolai N. Petro, a professor specializing in Russian and Ukrainian affairs at the University of Rhode Island.
"These then become the known Ukrainian voices, although they're actually only an echo of the voice that we are projecting into Ukraine,” Petro added.
In the new aid earmarked for the war in Ukraine that Congress is now debating, a small portion of the $60 billion emergency spending package is devoted to continued USAID programs in the country. President Volodymyr Zelensky, in an interview this week with Politico and Bild, argued that legislators skeptical of the aid package were under the influence of Russian propaganda.
“They have their lobbies everywhere: in the United States, in the EU countries, in Britain, in Latin America, in Africa,” Zelenskyy said of Russian influence, without naming names. The pro-Russian pressure groups, the Ukrainian president added, relied on "certain media groups, citizens of the United States."
Information control is a central dynamic playing out in the Ukraine-Russia war. U.S. media have provided wide coverage of President Vladimir Putin’s efforts to clamp down on critical news outlets, enacting new criminal penalties for those publishing "false information" about the conflict. Many independent outlets in Russia have been forced to close, including the left-leaning radio station Ekho Moskvy. The Russian government has also blocked Russian-language news sites based in the West and arrested at least 22 journalists, including the Wall Street Journal's Evan Gershkovich.
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Discrimination against men can be toxic too
On one reading, Jason Lau, the man who successfully challenged the discriminatory sexism of the “Ladies Only” lounge at the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, is a massive sook. But on another reading, Lau is a paladin for modern men.
He is the victor in a small but significant fight against an increasingly aggressive feminist agenda that portrays all masculinity as “toxic” but doesn’t bother to define for boys what “non-toxic” masculinity might look like.
Lau paid full entry price for MONA but, like all male visitors, was refused entry to the lounge, which is a women-only space full of plush sofas and exquisite artworks cordoned off from the male gaze. The curator of the lounge, Kirsha Kaechele, says the discrimination is the point of the artwork – it is a comment on the historical exclusion of women from male spaces for centuries.
So piqued was Lau at being bounced from the lounge that he instigated a legal challenge against the museum. He made a complaint with Tasmania’s anti-discrimination commissioner, who escalated it to the Tasmanian Civil and Administrative Tribunal.
This week the tribunal found in his favour, with deputy president Richard Grueber stating that the relevant legislation “does not permit discrimination for good faith artistic purpose per se”. The museum is considering its options regarding an appeal.
The case was a literal example of what some men’s rights activists say is the new discrimination against men that post #MeToo feminism has enabled. It’s a hard contention for many women to stomach, to put it mildly.
We still face discrimination in the form of violence from men, pay inequity, and in the household labour we disproportionately take on. That’s not to mention the fact that in the United States – supposed a beacon of freedom – women’s rights over their own bodies are being stripped away at a pace that would please the Taliban.
This week the state of Arizona was the latest to outlaw abortion care. Control over female reproduction and sexuality is a well-recognised marker of ultra-right, nationalist and fascist governments. So long as they’re not facing all of that, what have men got to complain about?
Plenty, according to a growing number of sensible voices in the United States. They caution that if the left demonises men, particularly young men, in the process of pushing a gender-equality agenda, it leaves a vacuum for boys to be scooped up by misogynistic influencer-jerks like the notorious Andrew Tate.
Richard Reeves is one such voice. He is a British-American author and commentator who used to work for the former UK deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, he of the “radical-centrist” Liberal Democrats. Reeves now works at the Brookings Institution, a non-partisan social sciences think-tank in Washington DC, where he is president of the American Institute for Boys and Men.
In 2022, he published a book called Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why It Matters and What To Do About It. In it, Reeves argued that young men feel displaced by advancing women’s rights and a changing jobs market, where traditional, working-class “men’s work” is shrinking and less valued than it used to be.
Overall, boys now perform less well in school than girls (a trend replicated in Australia), and more young women go to university than young men (again, this is the same in Australia). Men are less likely to have close friends than women, and they take their own lives at a much higher rate.
In the United States, these problems are amplified for black men, who are overall poorer, more susceptible to family disruption, and incarcerated at a much higher rate than non-black men. Reeves argues that it’s wrong for progressives to dismiss the hostility of some young men to feminism as a sexist backlash against ideals of equal opportunity.
He says that “young men see feminism as having metastasized [sic] from a movement for equality for women into a movement against men, or at least against masculinity”. This is especially galling for young men when they are struggling on a number of fronts (not least in terms of their mental health), but these struggles are ignored or even mocked in mainstream discourse.
This, in turn, leaves them susceptible to the overtures of nasty misogynists like Tate, and the masculinist “philosopher” Jordan Peterson. The latter, in particular, affects understanding and empathy with struggling young men, and helps them turn their energies outward rather than retreating inwards.
Jonathan Haidt is a New York University academic and author who has recently published a book on the ills of smartphones combined with childhood – The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. He told the New York Times recently that there is plenty of evidence that social media is very bad for girls.
But for boys, the internet presents different dangers. While girls might be too invested online, for boys, the internet is a pathway to opting out. They do this through pornography and video games, which facilitate “the gradual withdrawal of boys from effort in the real world”. “We’re not seeing boys really applying themselves in the real world — we’re seeing them apply themselves in the virtual world,” Haidt says.
“They’re investing their time, their efforts into things that don’t pay off in the long run.” The appeal is obvious – porn and gaming are virtual opiates where your mastery is complete. In both, you are in control, or your male avatar is, and you can construct a fantasy-reality without having to consult, or please, the people around you – the women around you.
This male disaffection is mirrored in the growing political divide between young men and young women, a phenomenon across the OECD, including in Australia, on which I have written before. Sometimes the news can read like a litany of power abuses by men, from the geo-political to the interpersonal. But as we advance towards gender equality, we also need to consider how those stories are perceived by boys.
They need role models who can show them how to keep their innate sweetness, and pick a path towards being the sort of decent, kind men we all know in our families and communities.
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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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