I’m a Feminist, but Women are Part of the Problem

Teresa Roberts

She cannot understand Republican-voting women. She does not consider that traditional roles might be largely inborn. Despite her early Christian background, she also seems to have no idea of the redemptive power of Christianity and its often powerful effect on behaviour.

She is right however in saying that women are very good at stabbing one-another in the back (metaphorically). She seems to see it as common and universal but I see it as especially true of feminists. The "sisterhood" is a myth

She is herself a real feminist as she sees good relationships between men and womens as "bedfellows with the enemy". So it is rather refreshing that she sees feminism as having limited appeal. I am amused to see that she rages at that. I suspect that she was just born angry

As time moved on and more and more women were earning better pay, building strong careers, having fewer children, getting married later in life, living with their partners outside of marriage, getting divorced if they weren’t happy, and some even choosing not to have children at all, I watched and approved.

I watched many of my peers become more interesting, independent, and better able to take care of themselves. Bravo!

More and more women were able to support themselves, pursue degrees, and develop strong interests and hobbies. I now number my female friends as far more interesting than most men I know. Women have definitely caught up with men in many areas of American culture and often surpassed them.

Yet, just about the time that I think we’ve won our independence, that the battle is over, and it’s time to get on with living our best lives, the rumblings of discontent start to get louder.

Unfortunately, the rumblings come from both men and women.

Just as my foremothers were not terribly supportive to me when I left the church and set out to live a life filled with freedom of choice, opportunities, and personal independence, women today are sabotaging not only my freedom but that of my daughter and granddaughter.

That makes me mad.

There are women like Jacky Eubanks, a legislative candidate in Michigan, who wants to see birth control banned in order to get Americans to comply with God’s moral law. You know, no sex before marriage. No birth control even in the marriage bed. Women should be having babies.

Suddenly, I’m back!

Back in the cult. I’ve been triggered big time. So much so that I literally feel nauseous. I’ve been betrayed by my own gender. It ruins an entire morning for me. I’m filled with fear for my daughter and granddaughter. How can this be happening? We’ve come so far. For the first time in history women have autonomy and personal freedom only to be betrayed by a woman. And, get this! Jacky isn’t an old woman either. She’s young.

Frankly, I find myself in the same spot I was in when I was a mere child, looking at my own gender with disdain. You see, I can understand what has driven men for centuries to deprive their wives, mothers, and daughters of the same opportunities that they believed belonged to all husbands, fathers and sons.

Nobody is anxious to give up their power. It’s a glorious place of privilege.

And, since most societies always have a pecking order, who in their right mind would volunteer to be at the bottom of the heap. Definitely not men. They are going through life with eyes wide open. If their power is threatened, they’ll brandish guns and knives, whatever it might take to keep the position their forefathers passed on to them.

Yet, there’s this other very strange phenomenon.

The downtrodden, those who are relegated to the bottom of the heap often will betray one another. I’m not a psychologist but I betcha a psychologist could explain this social aberration for lack of a better word.

What makes those who should unite in order to progress from the bottom of the heap in society to an equal position with those at the top often betray one another? What makes them vote against their own best interests? Why would they want to return to the Dark Ages, a grim time when their kind were without hope?

I don’t get it. Women do it all the time. Trust me, they will stick a knife in a sister’s back without blinking an eye.

I have to admit, when I see these women voting republican, cheering for the downfall of their own sisters, even willing to give up their own freedoms in order to become strange bedfellows with the enemy, I lose faith in humanity altogether.

There is a resurgence of this kind of woman.

They’re far more dangerous to me than the men with whom they are sleeping and forming an unholy alliance. These women can not be trusted. I wouldn’t turn my back on them for one minute.

Fortunately, they’re still a minority, but they think they’re invincible because their backing the big boys.

I’m done with them. I will never again befriend a woman who would feed me to the wolves. Never again. I will not offer them lenience nor try to find a way to extend a friendly hand to their kind.

They are dangerous.

The day of accountability has arrived for women. No longer will I allow women to use the victim card. They need to put on their big girl panties and step up to the plate. We’ve come too far and know better now. If you’re supporting, in love with, or have given your mind and body to a man who wants to muzzle and hold all women down, then you’re part of the problem.

You’re the biggest part of the problem.

https://teresawriter.medium.com/im-a-feminist-but-women-are-part-of-the-problem-a8d46acd632

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Why 'Educated' Liberal Women Are the Real Threat to Our Republic

When last Thursday night Joe Biden told America, "Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans" "threaten the very foundation of our republic," he missed the mark. The real threat comes from the unlikeliest of suspects: educated liberal females, or "ELFs" for short.

These are the women who will proudly vote Democrat regardless of soaring inflation, rising gas prices, rampant crime in the streets, the unchecked flood of illegal aliens, and oppressive COVID policies that have irreparably damaged all children, the poor most notably.

If NBC's polling from April is to be believed, this is the only demographic cohort more favorably inclined to Democrats in 2022 than in 2018. Unable to sell these women on his accomplishments — there are none — Biden last week appealed to their paranoia. What made this pitch strategic is his target audience's proven susceptibility to fear-based propaganda.

At the core of the ELFs' vulnerability is their ignorance, if not at the top, certainly among the masses. This should not surprise. Everywhere and always, men have performed better on political knowledge tests than women (just as conservatives routinely outperform liberals and independents). Researchers exploring this particular gender gap long ago gave up on questioning whether this was true and have focused instead on why.

Avoiding the obvious answer — namely, that men and women, being different, have different interests — researchers have spent millions of your tax dollars on the improbable and irrelevant. Among the more popular hypotheses is that women are more risk-averse than men and thus, on tests, are less likely to "guess under conditions of uncertainty." For some reason, it is more acceptable to stereotype women as "risk-averse" than as "politics-adverse." In fact, women, writ large, are likely both.

A survey of 10,000 individuals across ten nations by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) offers a more sobering analysis. What most surprised researcher James Curran of the University of London was that "gaps in political knowledge are wider in countries that have done the most to promote gender equality." Curran noted that women's scores in the U.K., the U.S., and Canada were more than 30 percent lower on average than men's, a significantly greater gender gap than in Greece, Italy, and Korea.

The ESRC data suggest that formal education may actually increase the knowledge gap between men and women. There are reasons why this is so. Historically, married women have tended to vote more conservatively than their unmarried peers. Spousal influence plays a role in their voting, but so does the added awareness of real issues that comes with raising a family and owning a home.

Today, however, more than a third of college-educated women are childless. Then, too, marriage rates among the educated continue to decline as they have over the past 40 years while the age of first marriage continues to increase. In 2021, the average age for a female's first marriage was 28.6, roughly nine years more than 60 years prior.

In the not too distant past, women attended college with the expectation of finding a spouse. Today, they would have much better luck hanging out at a construction site. As late as 1970, there were five men for every four women in America's four-year colleges. By the fall of 2021, there were almost two women for every man.

Once in college, the progressive grooming that began discreetly in high school now publicly and proudly moves to center stage. A study of faculty voter registration at 40 leading U.S. universities showed a more than ten-to-one ratio of Democrats to Republicans with the numbers skewing higher in liberal arts and among young faculty. In some fields, there are no Republicans at all.

Lacking a male counterpoint in their lives and often majoring in subjects with a social justice agenda, college women enter the political arena not so much uninformed as misinformed. Given that communications/journalism faculty members skew 20 to 1 Democrat, the media these young ELFs consume will only reinforce the biases nurtured in college.

The ELFs fail to see how they have been propagandized. They read the New York Times and other establishment media, thinking them gospel. Those ELFs less keen on reading rely on media outlets even more biased than the Times. As to friends and family who offer alternative points of view, there is the knee-jerk fallback, "Where did you hear that? Fox News?" ELFs don't want to know about the border crisis or the recession or Hunter's laptop, and their media oblige them. If their social media allow alternative voices to bleed through, the ELFs are the first to demand that those voices be silenced.

The danger that ELFs pose to constitutional government became all too evident in the Black Swan year of 2020. With the onset of COVID, ELFs quickly found themselves in the grip of what Belgian psychologist Dr. Mattias Desmet calls "mass formation psychosis." Writes Desmet in his surprise bestseller, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, "It is, in essence. a kind of group hypnosis that destroys individuals' ethical self-awareness and robs them of their ability to think critically."

Devoid of ethical self-awareness, it was the ELFs that emerged as our "Karens." What made them truly annoying was their belief, given their education, that they knew more than the people they were hectoring. They didn't. If proof were needed, a study of 35,000 U.S. adults by Franklin Templeton-Gallup revealed that a shocking 41 percent of Democrats believed that 50 percent or more of those who contracted COVID ended up in the hospital. The correct answer was 1–5 percent.

Through their control of the teachers' unions, ELFs have outsized influence on Democrat party politics. Deeply misinformed about COVID's impact, ELFs used their influence to lock down schools as long as they possibly could. Schoolkids, especially the less affluent, will never recover.

In her essential book, The Bodies of Others, Naomi Wolf reveals how her "affluent, liberal 'tribe'" behaved during the COVID years. It wasn't pretty. These "new authoritarians" resisted information outside approved channels and smugly oppressed the "working people" who dared question the orthodoxy du jour. Wolf documents in lived experience what Desmet describes as a "profound intolerance of dissident voices and pronounced susceptibility to pseudo-scientific indoctrination and propaganda."

In May 2020, as the joke goes, people had to take down their COVID decorations to prepare for George Floyd season. My office in Kansas City overlooked the staging area for the "largely peaceful protests" that would ravage our city. On that first day, I watched young men with out-of-state license plates unload heavy backpacks from their cars. They knew what they were doing.

The ELFs didn't have a clue. That evening, driving home, I passed the park where the protesters were gathering. To my surprise, the crowd was overwhelmingly white and female. The unintentional death of a chronic felon at the hands of four police officers of three different races in a progressive city in a Democrat state was indicative of nothing. George Floyd did, however, cry out "mama" at the end, and that was prompting enough for the ELFs to get swept up in one more self-destructive mania.

The men would do most of the damage in the streets — $2 billion of it nationwide — but the ELFs would do the lasting damage to our institutions. Those with access to Fox Nation would do well to watch Tucker Carlson's interview with Nicole Levitt, a liberal family law attorney in Philadelphia. In the immediate wake of Floyd's death, her organization, like others everywhere, showed its commitment to social justice by creating what Levitt calls "a racially hostile work environment permeated with discriminatory insults and stereotypes."

Levitt had the courage to blow the whistle on this Maoist nonsense. None of her colleagues would back her.

Women may, in fact, be as risk-averse as researchers suggest. How else to explain, for example, the silence of so many female Ivy League swimmers forced to compete against a male? Here too, "pseudo-scientific indoctrination and propaganda" overwhelmed common sense. And this is just one recent mania out of many.

In November, Biden needs the ELFs to vote en masse. This will happen only if they remain ignorant of the things that should worry them — the border, crime, inflation — and scared silly of things that need not. Something tells me that the producers of Biden's Nuremberg-style spectacle knew what they were doing.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/09/why_educated_liberal_women_are_the_real_threat_to_our_republic.html

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The strange effort to ‘decolonize’ global health

Peter W. Wood

“Global health” has emerged in the last decade or so as one of the growth areas in the medical and quasi-medical world. The CDC has a Center for Global Health which “works to protect Americans from dangerous and costly public health threats, including Covid-19, vaccine-preventable diseases, HIV, TB and malaria — responding when and where health threats arise.” Global Health “is a collaborative effort by technologists and researchers from leading international institutions to build a trusted, detailed and accurate resource of real-time infectious disease data.” The Global Health Corps is “a diverse community of health equity leaders.” It has just announced that “Safe Abortion is Essential Healthcare” and “is committed to protecting and advancing bodily autonomy as a pillar of health equity for all people.”

My discipline of anthropology was an early enthusiast for global health studies, and it is easy to find not just courses but whole degree programs in the field. Case Western Reserve University, for example, offers a one-year intensive master’s degree program in “Anthropology and Global Health.” I suspect that my fellow anthropologists took up this topic initially as a way of capturing undergraduate pre-med students who were looking for courses that would augment their med-school applications. But the field has burgeoned and taken on a life of its own.

And what an interesting life it is. Global health studies has made friends with post-colonialism. Which is to say, the advocates are intent on “decolonizing global health.” They wish to rid the globe of “various forms of colonial vestiges — ideologies and practices,” that “target the fundamental assumptions of global health.”

Perhaps when you think of “global health” you imagine campaigns to eradicate diseases through vaccination, sanitation and nutrition. That wouldn’t be entirely wrong, but such steps frequently interfere with local beliefs and practices — and their imposition reeks to high heaven of colonial authority.

Global health in its more up-to-date manifestation is unctuously eager to respect the wisdom and priorities of people who start from non-Western premises about the causes and treatment of ailments. This entails making sure that Western assistance avoids certain forms of overreach. It should not “build capacities to increase channels for imposing donor control,” or encourage “researchers who conduct research to instigate racial or ethnic disputes at the expense of the population they study,” or introduce “practitioners who deliver healthcare in a way that further cripples the local healthcare system and make the people more dependent on external help.”

If this sounds a bit vague, it is because “decolonizing global health” in practice means fostering techniques that probably end up causing a great deal of misery and death. Midwives can do a lot of good, but maternity wards can too. Native pharmacology indeed captures some useful knowledge about effective treatments, but it has never proved especially effective against malaria or river blindness.

Why do I bring this up? Because we live in a topsy-turvy world. Western medicine went tremendously far in advancing the health and longevity of humanity across the world. Yellow fever, for example, was cured in no small part thanks to America’s imperialist project in Panama. One after another the scourges of mankind were largely conquered by Western medical advances, carried on the palanquin of arrogant Western imperialists. It turns out that global health can’t be disentangled from the imperial mission. Colonial medicine saved millions of lives. That’s a bit awkward.

We should at least acknowledge that the life-saving doctors and missionaries of the past (often one and the same) tended to look down on the local practitioners, and their condescension has left a legacy of resentment. I am ready to believe that public health and imperialism were, and still are, intertwined endeavors.

That’s perfectly evident in light of the ministrations of Dr. Fauci, Dr. Birx and the whole crew at the CDC. The highhandedness of Western public health authorities is no long acceptable in Kenya or Gujarat, but it is thriving back at home. The imperial attitude reigns and we citizens now are cast in the role of benighted savages who must be made to comply with the magic spells and mysterious jabs of the white-robed savants who have assumed power over us.

I will spare my readers my nativistic wrath against the impositions of rags over our faces and sometimes heart-stopping djinns pricked into our blood. I just wish those who are seeking to “decolonize global health” would spare a thought for the new targets of techno-spookery who aim to deny us control over our own medical destiny. Or failing that, that they send us an old-fashioned Dr. Livingstone, rather than these Dr. Frankensteins manqués.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/09/the-strange-effort-to-decolonize-global-health/

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Cash is King -- and it should be

Nicola Salvi’s Baroque Trevi Fountain sits in the centre of Rome. It is a relatively modern addition, built on the bones of the 19 BC original where it honours its ancient surroundings with dramatic Travertine figures. They watch over the tourists who are busy littering the fountain with cash.

If you throw one coin into the water, you will return to Rome. Two coins destine you for love with an attractive Italian. For three coins, you will marry them.

I took a coin in my right hand and tossed it over my left shoulder into the Trevi. No, I wasn’t keen on lashing myself to an Italian beau, but I wouldn’t mind walking through Rome’s streets again.

It is romantic to think of my coin remaining there, beneath the unusually blue waters, but every night the coins are swept from the fountain and used to help the poor. What is the value of a wish? €3,000 a day or €1.4 million a year.

How fitting that the capitalism of wishes and market of dreams reside within a city that helped secure the notion of freedom from the State using the power of coin. People do not intend to buy charity, but it is a consequence of their fleeting, selfish desire – as it is with every economy held together by millions of private purchases.

Cash is not merely the currency of the poor rattling onto our streets in front of buskers and beggars. As the German economist Lars Feld said, banknotes are pieces of ‘printed freedom’ that the citizens of a nation remain entitled to because they offer an ‘escape’ from all-out State control.

Instinctively, people understand that there is something special about cash even if they don’t use it every day. Fighting to protect cash will be the social war of the century. Once it is gone, the State will never allow its people that kind of private commerce again. Human laziness and the false allure of ‘convenience’ has gotten us halfway to this promised economic dystopia.

Why is cash ‘liberty’?

There are several reasons, one of which being the inherent anonymity former IMF Chief Economist Kenneth Rogoff begrudgingly refers to when ‘neither buyer nor seller requires knowledge of its history’ meaning that purchases remain private and beyond the sight of the State.

This explains why Citigroup chief economist Willem Buiter has written about the widely-held inclination to abolish cash and replace it with a central banking digital currency that promises to give governments increased economic power.

Governments meddling in the economics of the free market is the very last thing we need after our two-year preview of reckless, dogmatic, financially illiterate, coercive, cruel, and dictatorial behaviour demonstrated by every level of the political class. If anything, economic power needs to be taken away from the State, like putting police tape around the scene of their Covid crimes against the economy.

In today’s world, a cashless society does not mean a switch to paying via phones and credit cards. Instead, it provides the ability for the government to attach ‘conditions’ to transactions, such as identity, environmental carbon credits, social licences, or behavioural-based social credits like we see in China.

Purely digital systems represent the limitation of tender at the behest of the State – a devaluing of currency by wrapping it up in a political and ethical equation much like social media manipulates the news with shadowy algorithms.

Conor Friedersdorf was right when he said:

‘To eliminate cash is to say to hell with financial privacy. An end to cash would mean that every financial transaction is exposed to a third party.’

That third party would be the government through its Trusted Digital Identity policy in which it has clearly stated its intention to insert itself between every private business transaction, with the power to veto a purchase on the base of a customer’s identity.

What is to say that the World Economic Forum’s Digital Identity project, when paired with a cashless society (as is the stated goal of Australia’s Digital Economy Strategy 2030), wouldn’t result in invalid vaccine passports locking citizens out of the economy? It’s one thing to be shouted at by a tri-masked Covid lunatic, but quite another to be digitally excommunicated from the entirety of civilisation.

Cash is the only means by which citizens retain some level of independence from totalitarian commands. It represents the security of the free market as the solution to government wickedness.

There are those that complain (disingenuously – and including former Prime Minister Scott Morrison) that removing cash is about cutting out crime. What rubbish. As someone who personally cracked a credit card fraud ring worth tens of thousands, I can assure you that criminal activity will exist in every medium humanity has available to it.

One might point out that the sale of art is one of the largest money laundering enterprises around, and yet I don’t hear economists calling for a bonfire made of Monets, Picassos, Brett Whiteleys, and Rembrandts. Commerce is a closed system. You can no more easily defraud the tax department with cash than you can with card because the seller’s stock goes walkabout either way and must be accounted for. That is why we have audits.

No. The government has long desired minute oversight into who is buying what. It doesn’t need this information to balance its taxes, it wants it. Once it has the information, a league of bureaucrats will set about devising ways to exploit our purchasing behaviour. The eco-fascists will try to stop us buying meat. The health nuts will curb our sugar intake. And the psychos will punish consumers who fail to comply.

Cash is not the facilitator of citizen crime. Cash gives citizens protection against the crimes of the State.

Learn it. Repeat it. Spread it.

Economic control is like the State’s first coin tossed into the fountain. It is the lesser of its wishes when it comes to the abolition of cash. First and foremost, this is about the power of the State. Let us return again to Rome and the founding families that served as the necessary counterbalance to the government.

Cash (along with its partner ‘privacy’) form the dividing line between ‘public’ and ‘private’. Families were the strongest units in the ancient world. Taking Rome as the example, private laws sat above public law. Family groupings operated like mini kingdoms that accumulated property, armies, and treasure. When large tribes (comprised of these families) collected together in an area, they created a city. Cities forged empires.

The hierarchy of family groupings into their collective tribes is where we get the definition of ‘publicas’ or public from. It is why ‘the State’ is interchangeable with ‘the public sector’ in modern politics. Christianity, and thus Western Civilisation, added a layer beneath the family for the individual, which has become the most important level.

All private entities compete with the State for power. A family with wealth to rival the government often replaced it on the throne. It was this fear that kept the State’s behaviour controlled.

Wealthy individuals and rich companies of today have significant influence. Governments often choose to fund these entities to turn them into dependents – parasites of the state – mediating their power. Public money weakens their competitive influence and lessens their desire to challenge the hand that feeds them. The same is true of governments with generous welfare systems, actively disempowering the populace by making them reliant on its favour.

Economic dependency is the root of collectivist control. It is why these regimes demonise capitalism and free markets. They ruthlessly object to competitive forces out of fear of being usurped. The very last thing collectivists want is for the individual to be prosperous.

Western Civilisation has a great many rich businesses (some with fortunes larger than nations) supported by the richest civilisation of individuals and families that has ever lived. The people, in theory (if they were smart enough to realise) hold extraordinary power over the State.

Weakening private economics has been a consequence of our Covid communism. We can see this reflected in our recent elections where the recently impoverished are increasingly choosing leaders that promise ‘free stuff’. It is a dangerous unravelling of our national psyche.

But what does the government do with all the billionaires? Their wealth increased during Covid.

Our modern Caesars have told the powerful families of ‘Rome’ (and all the peasants) that they can keep their capitalist wealth on the proviso it is held in the Senate treasury where it can only be accessed through the goodwill of the State.

That money is now worthless as a mechanism of power. It belongs, in theory, to the State. Digital economies represent the capture of private wealth by the State in an instant.

I am sure, given the intellectual decrepitness of our political class, many Australian MPs have no idea what the consequences of their push for a cashless future entails. These creatures are not students of history. Instead, they spend their days listening to the whispers of greedy banks and international socialist bureaucracies spinning lies about ‘safety’, ‘trust’, ‘recovery’, and ‘inevitable technological evolution’.

Even after watching Canada misuse the digital economy to lock the bank accounts of citizens over their political viewers – Australia has done nothing to safeguard its people from policies already waiting in line for approval.

Europeans are not abandoning cash as their governments hoped. Jaded by the behaviour of their governments in the past, there has been a resurgence in cash across the European Union. Australia, locked in the shallow waters of political infancy, has raised no objection to the government plotting to steal all its coins.

Crypto is not the answer when the government controls your means of access to the digital world. Cash, like burying gold bars in the ground, is the only true weapon citizens have to maintain economic autonomy. Hang onto cash if you want your country to survive the next hundred years with its dream of liberty intact.

What does a post-cash world look like? I leave you with Kenneth Rogoff:

‘Getting rid of physical currency and replacing it with electronic money would … eliminate the zero bound policy interest rates that have handcuffed central banks since the financial crisis. At present, if central banks try setting rates too far below zero, people will start bailing out into cash.’

Negative interest rates are the best way to erase private savings and ensure that the World Economic Forum’s promise really does come true: you will own nothing and you will be happy. Or at least, if you refuse to look happy, the State will lower your social credit score.

If cash is king the question we must ask is, who gets to be the new king once it is gone?

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/09/cash-is-king-for-now/

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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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