Let’s Talk About Why Female Divorcees Don’t Remarry

They don't? I have married two of them so I must have missed the message. The answer that the author gives is basically that men are bastards. But I have met men who think that women are bastards. What is the truth of the matter?

It seems clear to me that men do often mistreat women. I sometimes wonder why women put up with so much from their partners. Women have on occasions put up with rather more from me than I had any right to expect

But I think that the reason why men behave badly is also clear. Men were once indoctrinated to be chivalrous to women. The respect inherent to that was a very adaptive guide to a marriage. But the feminists threw that away. They stripped an important layer of protection from women. So now the natural incomprehension between the sexes rules with nothing to moderate it

Ossiana Tepfenhart

Marriage rates are going down across the board. While men often talk about how they don’t date, or how they feel like women are too stuck up, the truth is, women are starting to lose interest in marriage.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m happily married and marriage was always a priority for me. However, it’d be foolish to ignore or discredit the statistics. More women than men choose to stay single after a divorce. Ever wonder why this is?
First off, let’s address the big reason why male divorcees may want to marry.

Whether it is due to a long string of cheaters or a relationship that was so abusive that they can’t trust again, most women who say no to remarriage do so because they’re fed up with how they were treated by the men they trusted.

Honestly, who can blame them? Our society creates a serious lose-lose situation for women who don’t marry and have kids and live happily ever after. It doesn’t make sense to play that game!

Most people blame the victim when it comes to abuse, rape, and sex assault. When I told people I was abused, most men (and a shocking amount of women) I met gave a smug shrug and said, “Well, you picked the wrong guy.”

Men don’t necessarily have this. They very rarely ever have to worry about being raped or killed by their partner. Most people would also never blame them for trusting a woman. That double standard is a major issue that contributes to the “once bitten, twice shy” vibe women have.

Eventually, women who deal with bad dates and being blamed for their dating choices tend to say they’ve had enough. It shreds their trust in men, and rightfully so. Everyone has a breaking point.

When they haven’t had enough good experiences and all they find are men who blame them for not being into them, they will eventually swear off dating. There’s no return on investment for them, so why bother?

Most divorces are initiated by women, often as a final decision after trying to get their husbands to do their share of housework or after giving up on being prioritized. I’m not making this up, either.

This is a known phenomenon. It’s called Walkaway Wife Syndrome, and it happens when a woman gives up on ever being treated well by a spouse.

Believe it or not, most women who walk away from their relationships end up feeling pretty badly duped by their exes. They also tend to feel like they don’t have as much chorework to do when they’re single — primarily because they statistically don’t.

Relationships are hard. Picking up after your partner is hard. Taking care of a kid and a husband who doesn’t do his share is hard. After being married once and being burnt out from overwork, many women don’t want to bother with it again.
Others may have just changed priorities.

A lot of women I know who divorced decided that they no longer want to build a relationship with a man simply because they have better things to do with their lives. This is often the case with single moms who prioritize their kids.

Divorce does some weird shit to people. More specifically, it often teaches people what they don’t want in a relationship. Divorced women are going to be pickier than they were the first time around, and are not going to put up with shit they just left.

As a result, the dating pool is smaller. And that means some women just won’t find someone they click with. It’s no one’s fault, really, but it still happens.

https://medium.com/hello-love/lets-talk-about-why-female-divorcees-don-t-remarry-febf58f7d04f

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Conservative European countries facing pressure to turn woke

If you ever doubted that woke ideologues are heartless hypocrites, look at what the liberal European Union just did to Poland and Hungary, even while those conservative countries were doing their best to accommodate 1.7 million Ukrainian refugees streaming across their borders.

It is hard to believe in the middle of the biggest humanitarian crisis in Europe since World War II, but the European Parliament voted last week to slap millions of dollars in economic sanctions on the former Communist countries, including freezing pandemic loans, as punishment for refusing to go along with so-called EU “values.”

Their sin is to have conservative populist governments that rejected open border and LGBTQ policies imposed by Brussels. Like Florida and Texas, Poland and Hungary have passed laws banning schools from indoctrinating young children on gender ideology and sexual orientation. And the nations refused to allow illegal migrants from the Middle East overrun their borders after Germany’s Angela Merkel unilaterally ushered millions of mainly young Muslim men into Europe in 2015 during the Syrian crisis.

“Taxpayers’ money needs to be protected against those who undermine the EU’s values,” the European Parliament declared in a press release on Thursday.

Coming just three weeks before Hungary’s conservative nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban asks voters for a fifth term, the EU intervention is nothing less than election interference, says his chief political adviser, Bolasz Orban (no relation).

Bolasz Orban, 36, says Hungary’s government has been under “ridiculous pressure for years” from Brussels because of its conservative, family-first policies.

“Liberal policies became very popular in some of the Brussels institutions, especially in the European Parliament,” Bolasz Orban said on the phone from Budapest Sunday.

“Those politicians, the majority are leftists, liberal, green progressives. Politically, they are on a different side. The problem is they think about European cooperation from an ideological point of view when it never was originally about ideological homogeneity [but] economic prosperity.”

On border security, energy policy, education, and family values, he says, Brussels’ liberal overlords are trying to impose their will on Hungary’s democratically-elected government.

“We are warm-heartedly welcoming the Ukrainian refugees,” says Orban, pointing out that Hungary has accepted “about 400,000” refugees since the Russian invasion, a significant burden on a country of 10 million people.

But Hungary wants to retain the right to distinguish between illegal migrants from half a world away and refugees fleeing a war zone next door.

Brussels overreach

The EU is trying to “destroy all the legal mechanisms which are necessary to secure our borders, the structures we invented, the fence, the physical borders and legal mechanisms . . . They want to make it impossible [to stop] illegal migrants.”

Similarly, the EU is trying to force Hungary to overturn laws passed by its parliament which ban the indoctrination of children in the finer points of gender fluidity.

“They say it goes against homosexuality and sexual minorities. That’s a lie. Hungary is a free country. Everyone can do whatever he or she wants after the age of 18 but we are protecting our children and saving them from gender propaganda starting in kindergarten and they are attacking that.”

On energy, Hungary has come under pressure from Germany and Austria to close its nuclear power plants, which provide almost half its electricity and help keep Hungary’s greenhouse-gas emissions among the lowest in Europe. Without nuclear power, Hungary would be even more dependent on Russian gas, which provides 80% of household heating.

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has branded EU climate plans as “utopian fantasy” and blamed them for Europe’s soaring energy prices, eventually agreed to the Brussels target of net zero emissions by 2050.

But Hungary capped utility prices in the country to protect families from rising energy costs. This also fell afoul of the EU, says Bolasz Orban.

“Right now, there is a price cap on utility costs and that’s why the Hungarian people pay the lowest utility bills in Europe. From a market liberalization point of view [the EU] keeps attacking this price cap.”

Hungary spends 6.2% of its gross domestic product on family support programs, twice as much as the OECD average, encouraging couples to have more kids. A staggeringly generous new Family Housing Allowance Program offers $130,000, plus a $220,000 loan, to families who promise to have at least three children, so they can build a new green home.

Married Hungarian women get a $30,000 low interest “baby loan” which becomes interest-free after the first child and doesn’t have to be repaid after the third.

Again, Brussels liberals disapprove. “Our problem is that on the one hand they are not supporting these ideas and on the other hand . . . always in the Brusselian documents it’s about giving the money to illegal migrants and not supporting Hungarian families.”

Authoritarian overreach by Brussels forced the UK’s “Brexit” out of the EU. But Orban says a “Hexit” is not on the cards.

“Hungarians are very much pro-European. . . It comes from medieval history when we were the last frontier, the defenders of Christian Europe. We want to be members of the club but grassroots voters can distinguish between being pro-Europe and critical toward Brussels.”

Europe’s lefty bloc

To understand Hungary’s plight, imagine Washington, DC, was Brussels and the Biden administration was in permanent rule. A horrible thought.

Currently, four of the five largest member state of the EU — Italy, Spain, France, Germany — are led by progressive, green or liberal governments. Only Poland is majority conservative.

Bolasz Orban asks the EU to imagine if the situation were reversed, and conservatives became the majority bloc, and decided to disrespect the national sovereignty of smaller countries. How would Sweden and Holland like it if they were pressured to cancel same-sex marriage, for example?

Smug leftists should remember that the worm always turns, so it is best to treat your opponents as you would wish to be treated.

https://nypost.com/2022/03/13/conservative-eu-countries-facing-pressure-to-turn-woke/

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U.S. Cities’ Surge in Shootings Rattles Once-Safe Seattle

Dr. Deepika Nehra knew the only way to save the man on her operating table dying of a gunshot wound was to slice open his abdomen.

Nights like this have become routine at Harborview Medical Center, where this once-peaceful city’s mounting toll of shootings has played out again and again during the past year.

When the 39-year-old trauma surgeon tried to cut into the man’s midsection to stanch the bleeding, a brick of scar tissue blocked her way. It was from a previous gunshot wound. Unable to break through it quickly enough, she couldn’t stop the bleeding.

Long one of America’s safest cities, Seattle had 612 shootings and shots-fired incidents last year, nearly double its average before the pandemic. The city has just experienced its two worst years for homicides since the 1990s, when murder rates were at all-time highs. Gunfire has erupted all across surrounding King County, not just in neighborhoods plagued by violence.

“I stood by his side as he died and reflected on how needless his death was,” Dr. Nehra said. “The increase in gun-related injuries that we are seeing at Harborview and in Seattle is both palpable and just simply tragic. It will not let up.”

Dan Satterberg, the top county prosecutor, recently filed murder charges against a 14-year-old alleged to have randomly gunned down one man in January and another in October. In 30 years as a prosecutor, he said, he couldn’t recall charging a person so young with two killings.

Seattle is one of many U.S. cities, from Los Angeles to Chicago to New York, that have seen shootings and killings jump since the onset of the pandemic. Several cities, including Albuquerque, Philadelphia and Portland, Ore., endured their deadliest year ever in 2021.

Officials around the country are struggling to understand why. They point to a range of factors such as the social and institutional chaos wrought by the pandemic, which stalled efforts by community groups that steer young people away from crime.

Officials also cite fallout from the sweeping protests over police killings, which led to a push to defund the police and a pullback by officers. Such protests were especially persistent in Seattle, where demonstrators took over a section of the Capitol Hill neighborhood for weeks in 2020.

While Seattle’s murder rate remains lower than other major cities, it leapt above the U.S. average in 2020 for the first time in more than a decade. The shootings are reshaping facets of life in the metro area, and kindling tensions over the best ways to reduce them.

A week ago, the owner of a bakery decided to shut her downtown location after a man was shot to death near the store entrance in broad daylight. On Wednesday night, a 15-year-old boy was shot and killed close by.

Voters in the traditionally liberal-leaning city elected a tough-on-crime Republican as city attorney in November, and for mayor, picked a moderate Democrat who vowed to bolster the police force and combat gun violence.

King County is dispatching what it calls peacekeepers to work with young people they have identified as prone to committing shootings, becoming shooting victims or both. Harborview hospital has hired a past shooting victim to counsel the crush of gunshot patients entering its doors, hoping to keep them from returning for the same reason.

Seattle Police Chief Adrian Diaz’ s phone buzzes with a text every time there is a shooting. It woke him just before 2 a.m. on July 25. A man had been shot in a fight outside a bar.
By the time the chief arrived at the chaotic scene, where officers were trying to hold the victim’s wailing mother behind the police tape, his phone had buzzed again. This alert was for multiple shootings a mile away, where people were spilling out of nightclubs. Mr. Diaz sped there to find five men shot.

An hour later, another text: A woman was shot in the stomach. And an hour after that, a message saying a man was shot at a pickup basketball game. In all, three people were killed and five wounded in three hours, in a city that had long averaged 25 homicides a year.

“When you have a night like that, you’re trying to figure out what’s generating that level of violence,” said Mr. Diaz, who joined the department in 1997.

Since the start of Covid-19, the chief said, there has been a noticeable spike in domestic disputes, bar fights and road rage. “People’s stress level is at an all-time high,” he said.

Nightly protests in the summer of 2020 after the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer pulled Mr. Diaz’s officers away from their focus on gun violence, he said. The city council responded by cutting millions from the police department’s budget, including cutting the salary of then-chief Carmen Best, part of a national push to reallocate police funds to social programs. Mr. Diaz became interim police chief in 2020 after Ms. Best, Seattle’s first Black female police chief, resigned.

Demoralized officers have since left in droves, similar to other cities, said Travis Hill, a recently departed police sergeant who spent 14 years on the force. Letting protesters take over a precinct during the city’s unrest in 2020 was particularly disheartening, he said. “When you don’t feel the city has your back, your proactive work goes down,” Mr. Hill said.

About 360 officers left Seattle’s force in the past two years, leaving about 950 in the department to battle the rise in shootings. At the beginning of the pandemic, Seattle had 1,305 officers.

Stops and other activity initiated by officers dropped by 27% in 2021, and police response times reached historic highs, according to the department.

Mr. Diaz dealt with the loss of officers by shifting two-thirds of a unit devoted to gun violence back to patrol. He now is trying to rebuild that unit.

Police staffing and gun violence were a focus of Mayor Bruce Harrell’s winning election campaign last fall. He routed City Council President M. Lorena González, who supported the cuts to Seattle’s police department, by more than 17 points.

At a Feb. 4 news conference on gun violence, Mr. Harrell, who declined to be interviewed, said he was directing the police force to focus on the relatively few individuals authorities believe are behind most gun crimes, and on neighborhoods where violence is worst.

“I inherited a depleted and demoralized police department,” said the mayor, a former University of Washington football standout. Mr. Harrell opposes police budget cuts and backs funding for community intervention programs.

“When I see what I continue to see out there, I can’t sleep at night,” said the mayor, who has been personally affected. A few months ago, a friend’s son was shot and killed while trying to break up a fight.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-cities-surge-in-shootings-rattles-once-safe-seattle-11646589942?mod=hp_lead_pos5

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British orchestra defends move to cut Tchaikovsky from concert

Adirector of the Cardiff Philharmonic Orchestra says it has been taken aback by the backlash against its decision to remove the Russian composer Tchaikovsky from its forthcoming programme because of the conflict in Ukraine.

Members of the orchestra were also said to have been among those who had voiced reservations about playing Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture – which celebrates Russia’s defence against the invasion of Napoleon and is notable for featuring a volley of cannon fire – when the matter was discussed with them.

The 1812 Overture was due to be included in the orchestra’s Tchaikovsky concert at St David’s Hall on 18 March, but the entire programme has been abandoned because of events in Ukraine.

Japan’s Chubu Philharmonic Orchestra made a similar move this week, announcing it will replace a performance of the 1812 Overture with another piece.

Linda Robinson, a teacher who is one of the directors, said Cardiff’s decision was made in consultation with the venue, St David’s Hall, and rejected what she said had been a depiction by some critics of the decision as “anti-Russian”. In fact, three concerts this year will include work by Russian composers, including Sergei Prokofiev and Sergei Rachmaninoff.

https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/uknews/cardiff-orchestra-defends-move-to-cut-tchaikovsky-from-concert/ar-AAUXLyD

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Let’s think twice before we exclude white male artists from our art galleries

Terms such as “social justice, equity and inclusion” can mean replacing one set of prejudices with a different but equally narrow variety.

By John McDonald

A change is always an opportunity and Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art is set to begin a new chapter with the departure of long-term director Elizabeth Ann Macgregor and senior curator Rachel Kent. Yet, the transition has been complicated by two years of pandemic, and the impending opening of the Art Gallery of NSW’s Sydney Modern – a new wing that will duplicate much that goes on at Circular Quay.

The pressure is on the new director Suzanne Cotter, an Australian who has worked in Luxembourg, Portugal, the Middle East and the UK, to quickly come to terms with the nature of the museum and its audience. In her first few weeks, Cotter has said all the positive things one might expect from a new incumbent and raised a few warning signs.

She has spoken of the need to implement “urgent reforms with respect to social justice, equity, inclusion, and now COVID which has had a particular impact on the financial models of museums.” In theory, nobody could object to such goals, but terms such as “social justice, equity and inclusion” can mean replacing one set of prejudices with a different but equally narrow variety.

When we try to understand how this translates into attendance figures, sponsorships and patronage, there is a danger of principle outstripping practicality. It’s indisputable that public museums and galleries have historically favoured male artists over females, but does that mean today’s museums should deliberately reverse the trend? The same applies to Indigenous work, which was often treated as amateur or folk art. Should museum collections now give precedence to Indigenous art over more cosmopolitan expressions?

Move too far, too fast, in the direction of affirmative action and the museum runs the risk of alienating more people than it attracts. There’s no consolation in feeling virtuous when your paymasters are asking why attendances and revenues are down.

In countries such as France and Germany, the arts are taken seriously by a more cultured set of politicians. In Australia, with a few notable exceptions, our MPs are rank philistines who see the visual arts as part of the tourist industry. For the average politician, who would probably prefer arts funding to be handled by the private sector, the quality of a show is judged by its attendance numbers.

Corporate sponsors are equally keen on the big numbers when it comes to deciding how they distribute their largesse. When a museum has to reconcile a commitment to social justice with the need to raise revenue, the “financial models” are more complex to navigate.

Cotter dramatised this dilemma when she was quoted in The Australian as saying: “Today, if you are a white male artist, you are not so interesting... It doesn’t mean to say you’re not a great artist – I think it’s more that this isn’t what is ­relevant for people now. You have to think in a timely way.”

This sounds like bad news for white male artists, but it also raises the question of “relevance”. All contemporary institutions act as tastemakers, imposing their ideas about what’s relevant, fashionable, politically correct, etc, on their exhibition programs. But what a curator believes to be “relevant”, may be completely contrary to the views of the average gallery-goer.

The museum needs to strike a balance, avoiding populism without venturing too far into the realms of the esoteric. It needs to recognise minoritarian concerns, but pitch exhibitions to the broadest possible audience. In recent years the MCA has got its best results from projects with a touch of the wow factor. I’m thinking of solo shows by artists including Pipilotti Rist, Cornelia Parker and Sun Xun. Neither should we discount major retrospectives by David Goldblatt and John Mawurndjul that may not have been crowd-pullers but deserve the highest accolades.

At the time the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago opened in October 1967, Modern art was breaking down into Conceptual Art, performance, political activism, and a range of “anti-art” gestures.

With its militant attachment to “the New”, the museum was greeted with a mixture of enthusiasm and scepticism. In an essay titled Museum of the New, critic Harold Rosenberg pointed out the obvious contradictions of a museum devoted to the avant-garde project of dissolving the boundaries that separate art from life. Exhibit A was Allen Kaprow, the pioneer of “happenings”, who saw the museum as “a fuddy-duddy remnant from another era” and called for such institutions to be turned into swimming pools and nightclubs.

New gallery director aims to bring showstopping art to Sydney

Kaprow’s iconoclasm didn’t prevent the Chicago MCA from including his work – or at least documentation of his work – in its opening display. It’s a gesture that has been repeated countless times in the decades that followed: the artist who declares that art and its institutions are either dead or deserve to be killed, is celebrated and collected by those same institutions.

The logic is explained in Chicago’s mission statement of 1966: “A museum of contemporary art is different from the general art museum where the values of the past are enshrined. Instead, it is a place where new ideas are shown and tested.”

But if the “new idea” is that museums must be abolished, how can this be reconciled with a bricks-and-mortar institution caught up in the familiar round of exhibition and collection development, fund-raising, tourist initiatives and public education?

Perhaps the only option is to invoke Ralph Waldo Emerson, who once wrote: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

https://www.smh.com.au/culture/art-and-design/small-art-for-narrow-minds-is-what-happens-when-identity-politics-take-precedence-20220225-p59znp.html

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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)

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