Had to smile when Bill Cameron went into denial mode:
As for there having been 'deliberate moves' to break up the normal family as alleged by an earlier commenter, she (for I assume given the pseudonym employed that the writer is a she) wisely states that she has no evidence to back-up this bonkers claim.
The question is where to start showing the estimable Bill the evidence for this but as that's been done ad nauseam, not least on this blog, let's move tangentially and look at the concurrent attempt to snuff out Christianity as well. From the new UK citizenship test to the Beeb, it's a constant drip, drip, drip and sometimes a deluge. So many to hat tip for this one - Man in a Shed, Gates of Vienna, Paul Weston and Old Holborn:
Opening with Christianity, the first BBC page reverts to Marxist type as it explains that discrimination can only occur when prejudice is combined with power. As no minority race or religion in Britain is deemed to have power, so they can never discriminate against an indigenous British Christian.
The BBC would like us to believe that religious programming can be left in the safe hands of a Muslim. The relative treatment of Christianity and Islam in these revision articles shows this is just not the case.
It's a surprise to the supposedly down-for-the-count, irrelevant, superstitious Christian why the humanistic socialists are still so hell bent on snuffing out the last vestige of faith, instead of allowing it to die off of its own accord, given that said 'enlightened' humanists now regulate the world's moral compass and indoctrinate us from nursery school days onwards into believing that Man can do everything himself, thank you very much; one can pause and judge the veracity of this from the current state of affairs in our society.
Bit of a puzzler why these bozos wish to break up the family anyway, setting men against women via the irresponsible sexual predator and feminist ethos, creating a new society where we live separately in our little boxes and detest one another. Bit of a puzzler why we've created a nation of chavs with calloused knuckles, see it as the ultimate chic to play the gay, hold up the tattooed Jolie, Hilton, Spears and Madonna as youth's role models and allow our kids to create the new Generation Sexually Liberated Urban Teenager, hooked into the drug conduit. Bit of a puzzler why the new ambition of the young female is to get pregnant and go onto welfare and why the dole offices are filled with the young and the old.
Bit of a puzzler until you see the hand of the international socialist in either his EU form or whatever form he currently happens to manifest in that Armani suit.
However, that's not what this post is about.
Rose coloured glasses
There's a tendency to look back at the past and think of the good old days when things were more clear cut and small furry animals from Alpha Centauri were small furry animals from Alpha Centauri. Just how innocent was it all back in the 50s, say, as the sexual revolution was just around the corner?
Pisces Iscariot quoted Yodood:
"No thing remembered is ever again seen as it is but is laden with barnacles of meaning."
The revisionist history of the 50s to the 70s is largely an Alpha-Feminazi distortion of what actually happened, filled, as it is, with the oppression of women, all desperately unhappy in their chains, which is, strangely, not the memory of any of the ladies of that age group I've spoken with.
These malcontents were hell bent on making women dissatisfied but in the end, most of their machinations did not wash and so we have this sort of comment today from the normal woman:
I came to at-home motherhood, and to loving it, rather unexpectedly. I love what I do and over time, I came to understand that my happiness was intimately tied to the happiness of my family. With five kids under the age of ten, it's not hard to understand why we are all much happier and less stressed out with me at home.
Technology (especially the internet) and a supportive, helpful and grateful husband have all contributed to making my at-home experience (mostly) joyful. I've been doing it for more than ten years now, and I can honestly say that as an at-home mom I feel both liberated and happy. I wonder what Betty Friedan would think of that?
Our own family was, by and large, typical and though the father was the final arbiter for disciplinary reasons [I'll send you to your father], this father of mine still did his chores around the house and had his designated roles. The bottom line was that there was a lot of give and take and if my father had come on the 'head of the family' bit, my mother would have given him the rounds of the kitchen. The prime mover and administrator in our family and those of my friends was the mother. I saw very few Alf Garnett Silly Moos although there most certainly had to have been a few around.
Don't get me wrong - in the field of employment and other areas, the female was certainly unfairly disadvantaged, quite deliberately and there had to be adjustments. There were adjustments but to say that women enjoyed a 'newfound' independence does not accord with history.
In much of the 20s, 30s and 40s literature, the woman is very much a fully functioning person, often running rings round the man mentally and quite capable of handling herself, as and when she wanted. Anita Loos springs to mind, Coco Chanel, Nancy Mitford and so on and so on.
Film noir, for example, cast women in this light.
For a start, men and women still danced close in the 50s until rock 'n roll finally bit the dust and distance became the order of the day. Teenage angst was teenage angst and a boy tried to get her to say yes but if she said no, then rape was pretty rare, which didn't stop him from trying, of course.
Mothers seemed to have more influence with daughters then.
When I was 15, my girlfriend of the time allowed me to do most of what I wanted while she was sitting upright on the beach in the evening but the moment I tried to lie her on her back, there was fierce resistance [that summer anyway] and I got it out of her that her mother had put her up to it. My mate who took her away from me later reported a similar resistance.
Why did a girl say no in those days? It wasn't a religious thing - religion was never mentioned in day to day matters but it might have been that the parents loosely subscribed to the idea of the wedding first and kids tended to both kick against and follow parents' and teachers' attitudes. Incidentally, parents and teachers seemed to be speak with one voice at that time.
My mate and I, at 12, once phoned a girl who was one of two we knew 'did it' and as my parents were out, it was a golden opportunity. She wasn't averse but sadly, never turned up. Seems the father got wind of it [how?] and she was stopped from coming up to our place to 'play'. Can you imagine that barrier today? Also, it was pretty lean pickings when only two girls from a year group were odds on certs and well over half you'd never contemplate it with.
This fragment below from a sociological history says [click to enlarge]:
I believe that maybe it wasn't the girls alone who had the power but the girl in relation to her peers, her perceived reputation, her parents and extended family which curbed her. It was more usual for a girl to stay close to the support system while the boy roamed far and wide and brought his things home to mom to wash. I'm not suggesting any of this was right or wrong - it just seemed to be the case. A girl always had an infrastructure, even her own 'friends' whom she could hide behind.
You've all seen that scene in Grease when ONJ emerged from her crowd to meet JT who'd emerged from his crowd. I don't recall any of the guys ever emerging from a crowd - all my friends were lone wolves when it came to girls.
[Incidentally, ONJ went to a school I was at for some time and she had a reputation for jumping up on the desk and being every bit the provocative girl she played down in later years.]
A later feminist take on the times says:
There are elements of truth to this but the proving of virility was more a case of diving off the ten metre board, to the adulation of the females down below or having the best drag racer or of having the most girlfriends. I confess to going to all the girls when I was eleven and asking if they'd nominally be my girlfriend. Most told me to p--- off but five didn't and so they were notches on the belt. When my mates went and checked, I had five girlfriends but another guy had seven so I lost.
Nowhere was there anything overtly sexual in that. It was a game.
We'd get drunk and smoke but there were no drugs in our teenage and if there had been, we'd have been into them. They came on the scene in a big way much later. How did they come onto the scene when they did anyway?
The themes weren't dark, except through the Rolling Stones and people like Grace Slick but that was seen as something remote, at some distance from our real life. We saw black and white porn shots which someone had nicked from his dad but then we went back to playing football. Who knew what the girls were doing at the time? They certainly weren't hanging around with us. I got curious and started going about with girls to find out but as it was fairly boring, I went back to my mates.
The changing culture
Swimming costumes are a fairly good indicator. I remember, as a nipper, the first [discreet] shot in a newspaper of a topless swimsuit, which was meant to appeal to the basic need of Eve to shed as much of her clothing as the mores of the day would allow but they never took on as a fashion - not at that time.
Let me quote from Agatha Christie's Murder at the Vicarage [1930]:
‘What did she shoot him with?’ asked Miss Marple.
‘A pistol which she took with her,’ replied Colonel Melchett.
‘Well, that she didn’t do,’ said Miss Marple, with unexpected decision. ‘I can swear to that. She had no such thing with her.’
‘You mightn’t have seen it.’
‘Of course I should have seen it.’
‘If it had been in her handbag.’
‘She didn’t have a handbag.’
‘Well, it might have been concealed then - er - upon her person.’
Miss Marple directed a glance of sorrow and scorn upon him. ‘My dear Colonel Melchett, you know what young women are nowadays – not ashamed to show exactly as the creator made them. She hadn’t so much as a handkerchief in the top of her stocking.’
Girls started wearing Ursula Andress bikinis but there was none of the type of thing we'd seen in the newspaper. It was all kicking against the moral standard of the age rather than the dissolute lifestyle of today where everything's been done by 14.
Film reflected the times too. Romance and love still featured in onscreen relations and even James Bond treated her as a lady, mid-conquest. I suspect that one of the drawing cards in the 2006 Craig and Green Casino Royale was the return of romance, something which was excised in Quantum and made it a lesser film.
If men had only one thing on the brain, which modern day graphic porn reinforces, then who was it pushed the romance in earlier days? Was it women? Whoever it was, you didn't get her in the cot unless you did a lot of groundwork and mostly you had to get engaged to strike gold. There were always girls who 'did it' but the ones you set your heart on usually at least made an attempt to say no.
There was definitely a subculture in the 50s and 60s. From British coffee bars and vespas to American and Australian surfing culture, there was always something going on and left to its own devices, it would have self-actualized, sexually.
The problem was, it was not left to its own devices. We just wanted freedom and fun but in through the portal to fun we'd carved out for ourselves also swept all the dirt in the Pandora's Box of the world.
The youth culture was interfered with.
The destructive elements of the revolution in music, film and television crept in alongside the fun elements, with television lagging behind [or maintaining its values, whichever way you look at it]. Ed Sullivan forced The Doors to tone down their material, the Brady Bunch was still big in the 70s and sitcoms were the rage.
At the same time, shows like Hair were turning values on their head:
A product of the hippie counter-culture and sexual revolution of the 1960s, several of its songs became anthems of the anti-Vietnam War peace movement. The musical's profanity, its depiction of the use of illegal drugs, its treatment of sexuality, its irreverence for the American flag, and its nude scene caused much comment and controversy.
This was to make sure that any hitherto insulated young people finally got a dose of the new culture whether they liked it or not.
Peckinpah and others were also presenting a new type of film where heads were lopped off and the camera stayed on blood spurting from the neck in slow motion. You had no choice. All your mates and the girls were going along to the drive-ins or cinemas to see this stuff and you had to show you weren't squeamish by going along too. It was another test of virility.
Deep Throat came out in main street cinemas in 1972, while the Brady Bunch was still running. Vietnam was showing the real horror of life, the Kent State shootings, the assassinations.
Then even television became more risque:
But 1970s television also contributed to the new sexual culture. Television entertainment invited viewers to participate in a world in which “Would you like to come back to my cabin for a nightcap?” was an unambiguous sexual proposition, in which bralessness was an essential component of female sexual attractiveness, in which words such as “rape” and “VD” and “impotence” were part of a common vocabulary. Television made the new sexual culture the new American culture, and it made American culture more openly sexual than it had ever been before.
And that's how the west was won by the cynical people who wanted the current state of affairs we have now. I confess to liking candlelit dinners and walks along the shore so I googled 'romantic candlelit dinners' to find a shot I could use as a closing picture. Here it is - this is your chance of romance these days:
Swoon.
Good Lord! She could be Gene Simmons' daughter!
ReplyDeletePerhaps she is but without the makeup. Imagine an evening with her.
ReplyDeleteI once went out with a boy in high school who I thought was a friend. Our first date, he bought pizza...later in the evening, he became a little offended and upset that I wouldn't let him do anything (I thought I might be walking home after that)
ReplyDeleteI later heard through the grapevine that he felt he was owed something because he bought me dinner. I just put him in the knuckle-dragging category and forgot about him. :)
good post, James. I do agree with it; and, to be honest, it's been difficult raising children with the TV blasting unexpected, racy and provocative adverts, not even counting shows you think okay, then next is the superfluous sex scenes.
Of course, our various farm animals over the years have done the teaching with regard to the nature of things. When you have observant children, it's hard to avoid certain subjects when, well, perhaps I should have used the word, difficult to avoid certain subjects...
I am naturally, ...err , flattered that you refer to me as 'estimable', but am surprised that the only answer to the perfectly justified observation I made that it is 'bonkers' to assert that there have been 'deliberate moves' to break up the normal family (as an aside, whatever that is) is to make this comment:
ReplyDeleteThe question is where to start showing the estimable Bill the evidence for this but as that's been done ad nauseam, not least on this blog, let's move tangentially and look at the concurrent attempt to snuff out Christianity as well.
Whatever the merits of your latest 'treatise', which certainly seems to be tangential in the extreme, I am still waiting for some clear exposition of the 'deliberate moves' to break up the normal family which you say have been covered 'ad nauseam'. I can find no trace. Of course I can find wild assertions by the bucketload (aka acres of prejudice), but nowhere do I see anything approaching a rigorous and factual analysis to support the assertion of 'His Girl Friday' to that effect, and your own comment following my own there that:
There's an abundance of evidence. She might not have it at hand but I do. Many posts on this site cover this issue. There is most certainly a move to break up the family, destroy Christianity, destroy inheritance and create dpendence on the state. No one really challenges this these days.
- is not, and I hate to be blunt, 'evidence' it is a statement of belief. The two are fundamentally different. Your final sentence "No one really challenges this these days." is an especially egregious example of a kind of 'straw man' argument that simply does not withstand even a moment's scrutiny. I am still waiting to read about even a shred of the 'evidence' which you assert exists in abundance.
Incidentally, the link to your earlier article embedded immediately after the mention of my name in this latest article on this topic does not seem to function correctly. I thought at first that the earlier article must have been removed from your server, but a check through my Bloglines cache copy of that article, and from there to the article itself shows this not to be the case; I have so far been unable to identify precisely why the link does not work as the link URL embedded does seem to be correct when compared to the URL for the article itself; the discrepancy must be very 'obscure', which given the title of your blog is perhaps a sign.
I had not gone back and read comments subsequent to my own, to which you referred, until this evening so had not until now seen the comments made by 'Ubermouth' and from there her own rather satirical article written in response to your claim that you as as a WASP belong to some kind of oppressed minority. As a WASP myself (by family background and certainly by socio-economic status) I have never considered myself to have suffered from any kind of oppression and such a thouught would never have occurred to me as in my case, certainly, it would be an unsustainable assertion.
Finally, I do not know the person 'Bob' someone referred to in connection with mention of my name; a most amusing fantasy which caused me a minor chuckle, as indeed did your whole article today; the skill required to write an article so surreal is one I do acknowledge.
PS/ I have now discovered why the link does not work (also the link to my own little blog - I had not noticed that earlier) is that a space has been included inadvertently following the URL within the link code; personally I always double- and triple-check links embedded in my articles because this is a class of error I occasionally make myself when embedding links, although I incorporate 'target=browser' tags into my embedded links as well, as these give better control over how links function.
ReplyDeleteNot at all my idea of a candle lit dinner pic that one...
ReplyDeleteIn fact it is more likely to put me off my dinner!
ReplyDeleteit puts me off as well. At least she's not tattooed. Or, come to think of it, she doesn't have a lip ring that might cause the red wine to dribble and ruin her frock...
ReplyDelete1. Bill, an absolutely amazing statement by you, pulling the two oldest tricks in the book. Firstly, to flatly deny, then demand fresh evidence. The trick here is that you made the assertion that the presented evidence is wrong and therefore the onus is on you to come up with evidence that it is wrong, not the other way round. In other words, you lay the onus on the other for your own flat denial, minus any evidence. That doesn’t wash.
ReplyDeleteThe second chestnut is to try to make a distinction between two words. Coleridge did this when he spoke of the difference between Christianity and truth. Johnson did it when he said: ‘A Scotchman [ouch] must be a sturdy moralist if he does not love Scotland better than truth.’
You do it by trying to distinguish between evidence and opinion, two things which are by no means mutually exclusive. What does a doctor give you about your illness? Opinion but august opinion. Do you accept it? Why? Ditto with the opinion mixed in with the stats in the many articles I’ve written on this site. If I quote Hawking on general relativity, would you not accept that?
If I quote academic surveys from mainstream universities, which I did, does that not count for evidence? Isn’t it interesting how the rules of evidence which apply to one side are suddenly constricted for the opposing point of view.
Drs. Stanton Jones and Mark Yarhouse [Dr. Stanton L. Jones and Dr. Mark A Yarhouse, Homosexuality: The Use of Scientific Research in the Church’s Moral Debate, (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2000) p. 57; referring to Edward O. Laumann, John H. Gagnon, Robert T. Michael and Stuart Michaels, the Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United States, (ChicagoL University of Chicago Press, 1994), table 9.14, p. 344.], analyzed data from a comprehenisve survey of sexual behavior in America. They wrote:
Experience of sexual abuse as a child, in other words, more than tripled the likelihood of later reporting homosexual orientation. Other studies have reported the same trend.
Now, you don’t like that statement but how do you disprove it? Do you flatly deny that those researchers did that research? Where is your counter-research?
2. Do you deny that the British Humanist Association made the statement about breaking up the family?
ReplyDeleteAre you saying that Alison Jagger did not make the statement, widely reported, that “the very 'institution of sexual intercourse' where male and female each play a well-defined role will disappear.” Are you saying that she does not represent a main stream of feminist thought?
Are you seriously saying that the trend toward fatherless families levelled off in the late 1990s, but the most recent data show a slight increase. In 1960 only nine per cent of children lived in single- parent families. By 2004 this jumped to 28 per cent. The overwhelming majority of single-parent families are mother-only, these statements based on Rutgers University 2004 release of its annual report on marriage. This year's edition is titled "The State of Our Unions: Marriage and Family: What Does the Scandinavian Experience Tell Us?"
Look at the stats on original parent families as a percentage of the adult population compared to, let’s use 1950 as a marker. That’s a starter.
What percentage of single mother families are there compared to the 50s? How many of those are on the dole? How have the divorce stats altered since our arbitrary 1950?
The court rulings:
Since the April defeats for traditional marriage in the Iowa Supreme Court, the Vermont Legislature and the Washington, D.C., City Council, Americans in the other 48 states are quietly stress-testing their legal defenses against the spread of legalized same-sex marriage.
The Iowa ruling was particularly shocking. Not one of Iowa's seven supreme court justices, who were appointed by both Republican and Democratic governors over the past 15 years, could identify a valid public purpose for the institution that has guided our civilization for thousands of years.
This move by Obama exacerbates the feamle male split:
Unemployment figures show that men are continuing to lose jobs and that women are getting jobs created by the stimulus bill. The Associated Press reported in June that "social programs get bulk of stimulus cash; state 'shovel-ready' jobs take back seat to spending on health care, welfare."
Obama gave two of his economists the task of calculating the gender ratio of jobs to be created by the stimulus legislation. They reported that women had only 20 percent of jobs lost in the recession but would get 42 percent of stimulus-created jobs.
It goes on and on and on. I’ve already established enough on this blog that readers who have been following the posts see where they are going. I can’t turn round and republish them all because someone flatly denies them. They are there if you care to look.
Finally, you say that this post is tangential to the question of family breakup. It's not tangential - it's a difference post on a different topic.
3. Professor Kenneth Minogue wrote:
ReplyDeleteAccording to a recent poll by teaching union the NASUWT, an astonishing 97 per cent of primary school teachers said they have disruptive pupils in their classes.
Three-quarters, 74.4 per cent, claimed to have problems with physically aggressive children, while almost half noted that the disruptive behaviour of a minority was a daily occurrence. These statistics are remarkable, yet the common solution to such widespread poor conduct is just another example of the absurdity of the 'niceness' movement.
Instead of restoring the authority of teachers by giving them a range of tough sanctions to use against recalcitrant pupils, many primary schools employ 'Behaviour Support Assistants' in classes.
They take over the disruptive children and thus allow the tranquillity needed for a little actual teaching.
A difficult pupil might be asked to 'choose' whether he would be prepared to go back into the class and behave, otherwise he will be shepherded into a 'quiet room' without distractions where he can 'cool down'.
In a perverse twist, the welfare state has provided incentives to serial parenthood, yet imposes tax burdens on married life.
Deprived of fathers, boys growing up in the inner city turn to gangs for some kind of structure in their fractured lives.
As the problem worsens, the Government resorts to desperate measures to make up for the social cohesion that the two-parent family used to provide. As a result, in the Nineties, we had the creaking, useless bureaucracy of the Child Support Agency, hopelessly trying to force men to pay up.
This was followed by a deluge of official gimmicks, such as ' parenting' classes or courses in ' relationship skills' - typically ineffectual 'nice' initiatives that cannot possibly serve as a substitute for the real understanding of humanity that is learnt within family life.
Now Bill, are you saying that these things are not so, that they are not evidence of strain within the family? What causes children to misbehave in the first place? Is it not a combination of the nicy nicy policy in schools where teachers have no powers of discipline any more and vastly more families are now without fathers?
Because that’s what the stats are being interpreted as by a plethora of commentators in the MSM and sites like Conservative Home.
4. According to the CDC, DoJ, DHHS and the Bureau of the Census, the 30 percent of children who live apart from their fathers will account for
ReplyDelete63 percent of teen suicides,
70 percent of juveniles in state-operated institutions,
71 percent of high-school dropouts,
75 percent of children in chemical-abuse centers,
80 percent of rapists,
85 percent of youths in prison,
and 85 percent of children who exhibit behavioral disorders.
In addition, 90 percent of homeless and runaway children are from fatherless homes. In fact, children born to unwed mothers are 10 times more likely to live in poverty as children with fathers in the home.
5. The Beyond Same-Sex Marriage statement is nothing if not radical. It calls for extending government recognition beyond traditional married couples to groups of senior citizens living together, extended immigrant households, single parent households, “queer couples who decide to jointly create and raise a child with another queer person or couple in two households,” unmarried domestic partners, polygamous/polyamorous households, and many other diverse family forms.
ReplyDeleteNow, what is the purpose of this legislation? Officially, it is to recognize 'diversity', that there are alternatives to the traditional family and these are reconized as equal in value.
Is not an Act a deliberate move? Is not a move to downgrade the traditional family an attack on it?
OK, enough for tonight.
For heaven's sake, James, you can't blame it all on socialists, who are not necessarily humanists, or on the feminists! Coco Chanel is hardly a shining example of womanhood, nasty collaborator that she was. And Mitford, writing what was basically the same book over and over again, had no idea how most people had to live. Women said "No" in the 50s, did they? I wouldn't be here if that were true. The mores and hypocrisy of society at that time might have led some to be more careful but how come there were so many back-street abortionists? The advent of the contraceptive pill gave women what men had always had - control over their own fertility and that is what brought the biggest change in their lives - mostly for the good, I think.
ReplyDeleteI think we're all agreed that the first wave of faminism was jsut a push for equality and most would accept it was necessary.
ReplyDeleteThen the Jaggers, Friedans, Greers, Steinems and other man-haters got into it and it all went pear-shaped.
There is a perception in the revisionist history of the 50s which was just not so. That's what this post was addressing.