Sunday, May 19, 2024
In the 'Nordic paradox', high rates of gender equality does not equal safety for women
I don't think there is much of a mystery about this. I suspect that the alleged low "gender gap" is a product of a lot of feminist legislation. And a high prevalence of feminist thinking in the society is the obvious precursor to heavy feminist legislation. And feminism is often anti-man. If you are constantly being put down and called "toxic" just for being a man you could feel pretty angry about that -- and anger does predict violence. And that violence could well turn against those who are promoted as superior beings
As ever, the real problem is the Leftist compulsion to see everyone as members of a class -- racial, economic, sexual etc. And when they do that they want to wipe out the group differences concerned. They replace the conservative ideal of equality of opportunity with an aim for equality of results. But people are different so pushing for equality of results will always be oppressive of someone
And the concept of any form of overall equality is rubbish anyway. What are we to make of the great female advantage in lifespan? Should we euthanize a lot of old ladies to equalize the sexes? Obviously not. We counterweight that advantage against female disadvantage in some other sphere. But the weight we assign to each of the different factors is purely a matter of opinion with no objective basis. The "gender gap" is an arbitrary statistical creation only but a lot of effort goes into reproducing it in the real world
It's supposed to be the world's "most gender-equal" country. But behind that title a devastating problem remains.
For 14 years, the small Nordic nation of Iceland has topped the World Economic Forum gender-gap rankings, considered to have closed 91.2 per cent of the male-female divide.
The survey considers the gender gap on four metrics: health, education and political empowerment and economic participation.
But statistics on violence in the country, paint a vastly different portrait of the nation's treatment of women.
About 40 per cent of Icelandic women experience gender-based and sexual violence in their lifetime, according to a landmark 2018 study by the University of Iceland.
"It doesn't matter even here in the one of safest countries in the world, your life is threatened for only being a woman," gender-based violence survivor Ólöf Tara Harðardóttir said.
"If 40 per cent of all women in Iceland are survivors of physical and or sexual abuse, that's no feminist paradise."
This phenomenon has been labelled the "Nordic paradox", where equality-focused Scandinavian countries experience higher-than-expected rates of violence.
Possible theories range from female advancement leading to male backlash to problematic alcohol consumption patterns and a lack of public discussion around family violence.
Many in the field accept there are challenges with comparing and collecting data, but repeated studies have shown rates of violence are higher than other European countries.
Ms Harðardóttir now co-leads a not-for-profit organisation, Ofgar, which campaigns for legal and social reform for women in Iceland.
"I decided that I needed to speak up … because I felt for too long our country silences victims," she said.
Last year, tens of thousands of Icelandic women — including the country's female prime minister — took part in a 24-hour stop-work demonstration using the slogan "you call this equality".
The strike intended to highlight the persistent gaps in women's pay, domestic workload and rates of gender-based violence.
"People say we are an equal country, but I say equal for who?" Ms Harðardóttir said.
Tanja Mjöll Ísfjörð Magnúsdóttir, another survivor who also co-leads Ofgar, said she felt let down by Iceland's legal system.
"I did everything by the book, I pressed charges, I went to the police and everything," she said.
"[But] my case got dismissed and my family, my home town they turned their back on me and and I had to look elsewhere to find help.
"I realise this happens to many survivors of abuse in Iceland."
Along with many others involved with Ofgar, she is campaigning for changes to Iceland's age of sexual consent, sentencing laws and treatment of survivors of sexual assault.
"Despite the female politicians, I still do not feel we get the answers we want," Ms Magnúsdóttir said.
The Scandinavian countries of Iceland, Norway, Sweden and Finland all rank in the top five of the World Economic Forum's gender-equality rankings, with scores of 81-91 per cent.
The gender gap is not closed in any of these countries but, based on these statistics, these nations have come closer to levelling the disparities than many others.
Yet, Nordic countries with strong legal and social empowerment frameworks for women appear to have rates of gendered violence above the European Union (EU) average.
"The work with gender equality doesn't fix the problem with violence," said Anneli Häyrén, a researcher at Uppsala University in Sweden.
"The Nordic paradox is hard to explain … but I would say that we do not have gender equality, and we clearly still have a problem with the balance of power between men and women.
"We have a problem with violence, men's violence against women and children and men's violence against other men as well."
In Sweden, 46 per cent of women have experienced violence, which is 13 per cent higher than in the EU overall, according to a major 2014 study by the European Centre of Gender Equality.
These figures are 10 years old, but a 2019 European Agency for Fundamental Rights survey also showed the prevalence of physical and sexual-partner violence against women in the EU was substantially higher in the Nordic countries than the continent's average.
It was about 30 per cent in Finland and 29 per cent in Sweden.
Dr Häyrén said the problem had for too long been framed as a "women's issue".
"The good guys are very silent in Sweden and I would say, and we would need them to be a lot more active," she said.
What to say to a victim of intimate partner violence
I fled intimate partner violence. Here's my advice for what to say to support someone going through the same thing.
The EU's main data collection agency says more work is needed to accurately capture information on violence against women, and that it is difficult compare data from different countries.
The EU does track a series of "gender equality" indexes — including statistics on work, money, knowledge, time, power and health — and has identified violence as a future metric.
"People really think that, men and women are equal and we don't need this kind of discussion," said Dr Juha Holma, from the University of Jyväskylä in Finland.
"We don't think that men or other professionals need to help women because they are strong …
"It's a cultural image about how Finnish women manage by themselves."
Despite women experiencing levels of empowerment and advancement in the workplace and society, many Finnish households may operate with different attitudes, Dr Holma suggests.
"We have been looking also at how people who have been violent in their close relationship, with their intimate partner, and it seems that there still are quite traditional gender roles in those families," he said.
"Women and men are still playing very old-fashioned roles sometimes at home."
A lack of public discussion around violence has led to a poor understanding of the issue, which is preventing a pursuit of solutions, Dr Holma said.
"In Finland, [violence against women] it's not topic, a theme in public, in media and so on.
Hulda Hrund Guðrúnar Sigmundsdóttir, another co-lead of the organisation, said she was assaulted by a close family member as a child.
She said growing up felt she could not disclose it as this would bring "shame to her family".
"We are trying to pave the way for our future so that our daughters and our sisters, can be safer than we were because when we were growing up," she said.
"We understand that many countries have it worse than us, but that does not mean that we have to settle."
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Sunsetting Section 230 is an attack on free speech and will end the free and open internet as we know it
Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning today issued the following statement urging Congress to reject legislation by House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) and Ranking Member Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-N.J.) that would sunset Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act:
“Congress is treading into dangerous territory with the announced sunset of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act being considered. Section 230 guarantees free speech on the internet. Without it, old-style bulletin boards like Free Republic and other alternative voices would have never been allowed to exist in the first place.
“Section 230 allows interactive computer services including e-commerce stores and other small businesses to operate without fear of liability from their user networks collectively consisting of millions of individuals, who also can freely post content, products and communicate with their peers. This is essential infrastructure for interstate commerce and for the free and open internet that the bill fails to offer any alternative for consideration.
“Before Congress acts, they need to understand that neither Truth Social, X nor Rumble would survive in their current forms if this bill passes. Passage of this legislation would have a chilling effect on free speech by demanding censorship of all non-government-sanctioned points of view.”
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Nakba, where Palestinian victim mythology began
On Wednesday, “Nakba Day” was commemorated around the world with even more vehemence than usual as outpourings of hatred against Israel, sprinkled with ample doses of anti-Semitism, issued from screaming crowds.
What was entirely missing was any historical perspective on the Nakba – that is, the displacement, mainly through voluntary flight, of Palestinians from mandatory Palestine. Stripped out of its broader context, the event was invested with a uniqueness that distorts the processes that caused it and its contemporary significance.
It is, to begin with, important to understand that the displacement of Palestinians was only one facet of the sweeping population movements caused by the collapse of the great European land empires. At the heart of that process was the unravelling of the Ottoman Empire, which started with the Greek war of independence in 1821 and accelerated during subsequent decades.
As the empire teetered, religious conflicts exploded, forcing entire communities to leave. Following the Crimean War of 1854-56, earlier flows of Muslims out of Russia and its border territories became a flood, with as many as 900,000 people fleeing the Caucasus and Crimea regions for Ottoman territory. The successive Balkan wars and then World War I gave that flood torrential force as more than two million people left or were expelled from their ancestral homes and sought refuge among their co-religionists.
The transfers reshaped the population geography of the entire Middle East, with domino effects that affected virtually every one of the region’s ethnic and religious groups.
The formation of new nation-states out of what had been the Ottoman Empire then led to further rearrangements, with many of those states passing highly restrictive nationality laws in an attempt to secure ethnic and religious homogeneity.
Nothing more starkly symbolised that quest for homogeneity than the Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations signed on January 30, 1923. This was the first agreement that made movement mandatory: with only a few exceptions, all the Christians living in the newly established Turkish state were to be deported to Greece, while all of Greece’s Muslims were to be deported to Turkey. The agreement, reached under the auspices of the League of Nations, also specified that the populations being transferred would lose their original nationality along with any right to return, instead being resettled in the new homeland.
Underlying the transfer was the conviction, articulated by French prime minister (and foreign minister) Raymond Poincare, that “the mixture of populations of different races and religions has been the main cause of troubles and of war”, and that the “unmixing of peoples” would “remove one of the greatest menaces to peace”.
That the forced population transfers, which affected about 1.5 million people, imposed enormous suffering is beyond doubt. But they were generally viewed as a success. Despite considerable difficulties, the transferred populations became integrated into the fabric of the recipient communities – at least partly because they had no other option. At the same time, relations between Turkey and Greece improved immensely, with the Ankara Agreements of 1930 inaugurating a long period of relative stability.
The result was to give large-scale, permanent population movements, planned or unplanned, a marked degree of legitimacy.
Thus, the formation of what became the Irish Republic was accompanied by the flight of Protestants to England and Northern Ireland, eventually more than halving, into an insignificant minority, the Protestant share of the Irish state’s population; that was viewed as easing the tensions that had so embittered the Irish civil war.
It is therefore unsurprising that further “unmixing” was seen by the allies in World War II as vital to ensuring peace in the post-war world. In a statement later echoed by Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill made this explicit in 1944, telling the House of Commons he was “not alarmed by the prospect of the disentanglement of populations, nor even by these large transferences, which are more possible in modern conditions than they ever were before”.
The immediate effect, endorsed as part of the Potsdam Agreements and implemented as soon as the war ended, was the brutal expulsion from central and eastern Europe of 12 million ethnic Germans whose families had lived in those regions for centuries. Stripped of their nationality and possessions, then forcibly deported to a war-devastated Germany, the refugees – who received very little by way of assistance – gradually merged into German society, though the scars took decades to heal.
Even more traumatic was the movement in 1947 of 18 million people between India and the newly formed state of Pakistan.
As Indian novelist Alok Bhalla put it, India’s declaration of independence triggered the subcontinent’s sudden descent into “a bestial world of hatred, rage, self-interest and frenzy”, with Lord Ismay, who witnessed the process, later writing that “the frontier between India and Pakistan was to see more tragedy than any frontier conceived before or since”. Yet in the subcontinent too, and especially in India, the integration of refugees proceeded to the point where little now separates their descendants from those of the native born.
All that formed the context in which the planned partition of Palestine was to occur. The 1937 Peel Commission, which initially proposed partition, had recommended a mandatory population exchange but the entire issue was ignored in UN Resolution 181 that was supposed to govern the creation of the two new states.
When a majority of the UN General Assembly endorsed that resolution on November 29, 1947, the major Zionist forces reluctantly accepted the proposed partition, despite it being vastly unfavourable to them. But the Arab states not only rejected the plan, they launched what the Arab League described as “a war of extermination” whose aim was to “erase (Palestine’s Jewish population) from the face of the earth”. Nor did the fighting give any reason to doubt that was the Arabs’ goal.
At least until late May 1948, Jewish prisoners were invariably slaughtered. In one instance, 77 Jewish civilians were burned alive after a medical convey was captured; in another, soldiers who had surrendered were castrated before being shot; in yet another, death came by public decapitation. And even after the Arab armies declared they would abide by the Geneva Convention, Jewish prisoners were regularly murdered on the spot.
While those atrocities continued a longstanding pattern of barbarism, they also reflected the conviction that unrestrained terror would “push the Jews into the sea”, as Izzedin Shawa, who represented the Arab High Committee, put it.
A crucial element of that strategy was to use civilian militias in the territory’s 450 Arab villages to ambush, encircle and destroy Jewish forces, as they did in the conflict’s first three months.
It was to reduce that risk that the Haganah – the predecessor of the Israel Defence Force – adopted the Dalet plan in March 1948 that ordered the evacuation of those “hostile” Arab villages, notably in the surrounds of Jerusalem, that posed a direct threat of encirclement. The implementation of its criteria for clearing villages was inevitably imperfect, but the Dalet plan neither sought nor was the primary cause of the massive outflow of Arab refugees that was well under way before it came into effect.
Nor was the scale of the outflow much influenced by the massacres committed by Irgun and Lehi – small Jewish militias that had broken away from the Haganah – which did not loom large in a prolonged, extremely violent, conflict that also displaced a very high proportion of the Jewish population.
Rather, three factors were mainly involved. First, the Muslim authorities, led by the rector of Cairo’s Al Azhar Mosque, instructed the faithful to “temporarily leave the territory, so that our warriors can freely undertake their task of extermination”.
Second, believing that the war would be short-lived and that they could soon return without having to incur its risks, the Arab elites fled immediately, leaving the Arab population leaderless, disoriented and demoralised, especially once the Jewish forces gained the upper hand.
Third and last, as Benny Morris, a harsh critic of Israel, stresses in his widely cited study of the Palestinian exodus, “knowing what the Arabs had done to the Jews, the Arabs were terrified the Jews would, once they could, do it to them”.
Seen in that perspective, the exodus was little different from the fear-ridden flights of civilians discussed above. There was, however, one immensely significant difference: having precipitated the creation of a pool of 700,000 Palestinian refugees, the Arab states refused to absorb them.
Rather, they used their clout in the UN to establish the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, which became a bloated, grant-funded bureaucracy whose survival depended on endlessly perpetuating the Palestinians’ refugee status.
In entrenching the problem, the UN was merely doing the bidding of the Arab states, which increasingly relied on the issue of Palestine to convert popular anger at their abject failures into rage against Israel and the West. Terminally corrupt, manifestly incapable of economic and social development, the Arab kleptocracies elevated Jew-hatred into the opium of the people – and empowered the Islamist fanaticism that has wreaked so much harm worldwide.
Nor did it end there. Fanning the flames of anti-Semitism, the Arab states proceeded to expel, or force the departure of, 800,000 Jews who had lived in the Arab lands for millennia, taking away their nationality, expropriating their assets and forbidding them from ever returning to the place of their birth. Those Jews were, however painfully, integrated into Israel; the Palestinian refugees, in contrast, remained isolated, subsisting mainly on welfare, rejected by countries that claimed to be their greatest friends. Thus was born the myth of the Nakba.
That vast population movements have inflicted enormous costs on those who have been ousted from their homes is undeniable. Nor have the tragedies ended: without a murmur from the Arab states, 400,000 Palestinians were expelled from Kuwait after the first Gulf War, in retaliation for the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s support of Saddam Hussein. More recently, Myanmar has expelled 1.2 million Rohingya.
But the greatest tragedy associated with the plight of the Palestinians is not the loss of a homeland; over the past century, that has been the fate of tens of millions. Rather, it is the refusal to look forward rather than always looking back, an attitude encapsulated in the slogan “from the river to the sea”.
That has suited the Arab leaders, but it has condemned ordinary Palestinians to endless misery and perpetual war. Until that changes, the future will be a constant repetition of a blood-soaked past.
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DEI Hits the VA: Biden's Veterans Affairs Department Offers Race-Based Training Programs That Exclude White Vets
The programs are taking place in at least four states, a Washington Free Beacon review of online offerings found.
In Battle Creek, Mich., for example, the VA offers a "BIPOC Support Group," an "8-week curriculum designed to provide support for Veterans that identify as people of color/BIPOC, or as multiracial or biracial," according to a program description. The Battle Creek VA also offers a "Race-Based Stress/Trauma and Empowerment" program, a "weekly group, tailored to our Veterans of color, to address race-based stress and trauma in a safe and validating environment."
In Long Beach, Calif., the VA also offers a "Race-Based Stress/Trauma Empowerment Group," which it says is for "Veterans who identify as BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) and who are interested in addressing issues of race-based stress, trauma, resilience, and empowerment." A similar program in Palo Alto, Calif., invites "Women Veterans of color" to join a "10-week group to explore [the] impact of racism on your well-being."
In Minneapolis, meanwhile, a VA-sponsored "Black Veterans peer support group" welcomes "all Veterans who self-identify as Black" to learn "skills that help protect against the negative impact of racial stress and trauma by increasing feelings of belongingness, connectedness to racial/ethnic identity and empowerment." And the VA's Central Ohio Health Care System advertises a "Minority Stress & Empowerment" group, an eight-week series "open to Black, Indigenous and all Veterans of color who are interested in addressing race-based stress and trauma."
Under Biden, the federal government has made "equity" a guiding principle thanks to a June 2021 executive order instructing agencies to beef up their diversity programming. "Such training programs," the order said, "should enable Federal employees, managers, and leaders to have knowledge of systemic and institutional racism and bias" as well as an "increased understanding of implicit and unconscious bias."
In other settings, however, race-based offerings have landed private entities in hot water. Last year, amid legal scrutiny, pharmaceutical giant Pfizer quietly amended a fellowship program to remove a provision that barred whites and Asians from applying. Now, University of San Diego law professor and U.S. Commission on Civil Rights member Gail Heriot is expressing similar concern over the VA's programs.
"It seems like every time you turn around there's another race-exclusive government program of dubious constitutionality and legality," Heriot told the Free Beacon. "Race exclusivity should raise red flags. Yet for the past four years, we've been seeing more and more of this kind of thing."
The VA did not respond to a request for comment.
Agency officials have discussed their "equity" offerings on the VA's Ending Veteran Homelessness podcast. Communications official Shawn Liu said the department began "a lot of our racial equity work" in the spring of 2021, around when Biden issued his executive order on diversity. He said the race-based offerings prompted internal pushback, which he dismissed, arguing that "treating everybody the same might not be enough."
"I remember early on, I want to say spring 2021, especially when we were starting to launch a lot of our racial equity work within the Homeless Programs Office, that was a pretty common bit of feedback," Liu said during a February podcast episode. "I would probably also categorize it as a little bit of criticism, right? Which was very well meaning, you know, dedicated staff who were grappling with this idea that the values that were instilled in them were you treat everybody the same, right? That discrimination is bad and you treat everybody the same. And if you treat everybody the same, that's the morally righteous thing to do."
"And those folks who had that feedback … you could see in like real time," Liu went on, "they were kind of grappling with that concept because in many ways what we're talking about today is, number one, providing tailored different solutions for different things, but also this understanding that because people are situated in society differently, they come from different barriers, they come from different challenges."
VA Veteran Justice Programs national training director Matthew Stimmel, who was also on the podcast, agreed.
"I think we can treat all veterans the same, and we should in terms of the amount of respect and dignity and compassion that we show them," he said. "But that doesn't mean we have to just blanketly offer the same exact services in the same exact way to everyone, as a matter of fairness."
Stimmel also serves as an assistant professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Both Liu and Stimmel forwarded Free Beacon requests for comment to the VA's public affairs office, which didn't respond.
The VA has a history of implementing left-wing cultural initiatives under Biden.
In 2021, internal agency training included the "genderbread" diagram, which is also featured in some elementary school curricula. The diagram points to the brain, heart, and pelvic area of a gingerbread "person" to distinguish "gender identity," "sexual orientation," and "biological sex," respectively. The full body of the gingerbread "person" represents its "gender expression," the diagram says.
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Homelessness Surging in Blue City Despite Doling Out Hundreds of Millions
The number of homeless people in San Francisco jumped compared to two years ago, despite the city spending hundreds of millions of dollars to address the issue, city data shows.
The total number of homeless people in San Francisco rose 7% to 8,328 in a one-night measurement in January 2024 compared to the same in 2022, reversing the 3.5% decline recorded from 2019 to 2022, according to the city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing. Funding for homelessness from the city increased to $676 million in the 2022-23 fiscal year, up from $284 million in 2018-19, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Despite the total number of homeless people rising, the number of unsheltered people fell 1% in January compared to the same time in 2022 as the city prioritizes providing housing, increasing the number of beds available by 28% since 2019, according to the department. The number of people living in their vehicles in January has jumped 37% since 2022, and the number of people living in shelters has spiked 39%.
“We are working every day to move people off our streets and into shelter, housing, and care,” San Francisco Mayor London Breed said in a press release following the survey. “This is safer and healthier for people on our streets, and it is better for all of us that want a cleaner and safer San Francisco. Our City workforce is dedicated to making a difference, and we will keep working to get tents off our streets, bring people indoors, and change the conditions in our neighborhoods.”
Breed is facing a tough reelection bid coming up in November later this year, holding just a slim lead over her more moderate opponents, according to The San Francisco Standard. The mayor’s unfavorability numbers are currently high and could rise higher if homelessness remains an issue.
San Francisco had a smaller jump in homelessness than the state of California as a whole, which had a 20% increase in the total number of homeless people compared to 2019, according to the department. California voters narrowly approved $6.4 billion in funding across the state for the construction of housing and treatment beds to accommodate homeless people with mental illnesses.
The increase in funding for homelessness follows a new business tax that was approved by San Francisco voters in 2018 and is specifically designed to provide funding for new housing units, rental subsidies, and mental health services, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. An individual or family needs to earn $51.25 per hour to afford a one-bedroom apartment in the city.
To address low housing availability and high costs, Breed has launched an initiative called “Housing for All” that aims to build 82,000 new homes over the next eight years through expediting housing approvals, reforming housing regulations and more. The city approved just seven new housing permits in the first two months of 2024, well behind what it would need to reach its goal.
There were just 2,024 new housing units built in all of 2024 in the city, the worst gain in a decade and a 30% drop from the year before, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. High interest rates and elevated construction costs are among the reasons for the slow growth.
San Francisco has relied heavily on nonprofits to combat homelessness despite concerns about how effectively the funding is being used, with the city’s attorney in early May accusing one nonprofit, the Providence Foundation, of stealing $100,000 of public money meant to address the issue. The Providence Foundation has received around $100 million in contracts from the city.
The city has faced recent criticism for piloting a “Managed Alcohol Program” costing $5 million that gives free beer, wine, and vodka to the homeless to help recovering alcoholics.
Breed’s office deferred the Daily Caller News Foundation to previous statements.
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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)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
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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