gorge
5mo ago
I'm almost inclined to view Napolean as a force of nature rather than as "good" or "bad."
He was a man of incredible talent, incredible will, he was both a man of action and intellectually a total mensch. Thus, anyone who wants to achieve something in the world, can profit from studying his life.
But, what he accomplished, he accomplished for his own visions. The results were in the end catastrophic for the men who followed him, as they starved and froze to death in the Russian winter. The results for France itself were a mixed bag.
But it is hard for me to cry too many tears about the fate of his followers or of his victims. The institutions that fell were old and rotting. The men who followed him, chose to do so, if they were captivated by his amoral visions of conquest and were willing to subjugate themselves to his vision, then I cannot say they deserved better. We all die in the end.
I, an amateur to the Napoleonic wars, wandered away from Ridley Scott's Napoleon feeling more or less pleased with my night.
I haven't seen the movie and don't intend to after reading the American Sun review and others. From what I've heard the main problem is that they turned one of the most charismatic men in history into a mumbling bumbling clingy loser.
gorge
7mo ago
Like... we've had gay marriage for decades now, no one got turned into pillars of salt or anything, seems like empirically it works about as well as straight marriage for families and for raising kids, and even for church membership at accepting churches.
Marriage has been hit by a quadruple whammy over the last 150+ years:
- Replacement of asymmetric vows/obligations (the woman vows to obey) with asexual vows. Ending of the legal privileges of father/husband.
- No-fault divorce
- Normalization and even encouragement of sex-outside of marriage by high production value media
- Gay marriage
All of these things happened gradually and culture often lagged legal changes, so it is difficult to correlate the damage done with the change in policy. However, overall marriage has been completely hollowed out, and as a result we have seen a dramatic rise in broken families and mental illness. "Gay marriage" was more the final nail in the coffin than it was the decisive blow.
The biggest thing I've noticed about the post-Obergefell world is that it now seems political incorrect/taboo to say that "man-woman" marriage is better or the norm. Children are not born knowing that man-woman marriage is better than other arrangements, they must be taught that. But the post-Obergefell world, or official institutions like schools or children's TV programming cannot teach man-woman as the norm. And we see in surveys things like 50% of young women identifying as non-straight, or under 40% of young people responding in surveys that marriage and kids are important life goals, and we also see very high rates of mental illness among young liberal women. We have lost our ability in as a society to model what a default good life should be, and kids are making poor choices and ending up with mental health problems. And yes, the absysmally low (and highly dysgenic) fertility rates will result in an end of civilization if nothing changes.
One's true personal third heart might be atheist or animist or deist, one's sectarian second heart might be Catholic or Quaker, but everyone agreed their first public heart would be secular and nonsectarian and that no one would be punished for their other beliefs.... One really believed in the secularism taught in schools but they would go along with it and agree with it.,
Your history is off. You may be basically Madison's and Jefferson's views and the policies of Virginia, but you are not describing the early republic as a whole. Individual states were allowed to have official state churches, Massachusetts had Congregationalism as established and taxpayer supported up until the 1830s. Religious tests for office (requiring office holders to sometimes be Christian, other times Protestant) lasted into the 20th century. School teachers could actively teach religion in class up until at least the middle of the 20th century. The original idea behind the First Amendment was simply as a truce between the religious sects that were dominant in various states, the states could intertwine religion and government but the federal government as a whole would not choose sides and enforce one particular sect upon the entire country.
But by the late 1800s state constitutions banning "sectarian support" was starting to be used as anti-Catholic cudgel. State support of protestantism was ok, because protestant was not sectarian, according to this logic, but Catholicism was sectarian so could not be taught in a local public school.
By the 1950s and 1960s the First Amendment became a cudgel to use against mixing of any Christianity with government at any level. The novel "incorporation doctrine" was used to apply the First Amendment down to even a local public school of a town of a 1,000 people. The federal government was being used to quash the religious choices of a local community which was the exact opposite the original intent. At the same time, the hegemonic ideology of the United States shed its last connections to Christianity, and thus mutated to make itself immune to First Amendment charges. This hegemonic ideology -- an ideology that has no name, and defies all attempts to be labeled, any time a name is placed on it it tries to shed its name -- gained tremendous state support not only financially but in law (Civil Rights law has morfed into becoming a speech code and ideological test for high-status employment).
But Wokism has adapted to that circumstance, and now provides a full binding metaphysical moral vision in public that must be bowed to,
This isn't new to "Wokism" -- I wrote a school paper 20 years ago about how "Civic Americanism" basically had almost all the properties of what we normally call religion. Moldbug wrote the same back in 2008 in his "How Dawkins Got Pwned Series" -- https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/09/how-dawkins-got-pwned-part-1/ I'm sure other people noticed the phenomena before.
So how do we level the playing field, without shredding the constitution in ways we'll regret later when we live in Rick Santorum's Iran?
Who is "we"? The powers that be quite like being able to suppress the ideologies that traditionally code as religion, while being able to turbo-charge their own ideology with funding and legal support. They don't want a level playing field.
Fundamentally, I think the idea that religion could ever be separated from politics was an error. Politics at the end of the day depends on raw military power, and raw military power depends on people willing to risk their life for their God and their Sovereign. Politics also is all about making sure various groups and people get along, thus needs to teach a common morality, or at least a meta-morality. Politics is about forming durable group alliances -- which is what much of what religious ritual and sacrifice is about. "Religion" can only be separated from politics if you basically water down religion to just meaning a random grab-bag of stuffy old superstitions. Historically, and even in many contemporary societies, there isn't really an equivalent of our concept of "religion" that was separable from just life itself (in the same way American schools that teach "values" don't separate this value system as a separate category from just life itself.
My best take at defining religion that cuts reality at joints (and doesn't arbitrary distinguish between adhering to a "deity" versus "universal principles") is that a "religion is the binding agent of a non-kin or super-kin tribe." Things like creeds, stories, beliefs about ultimate meaning, rituals, sacrifice, are all components that help bind the group together and enable it to take collective action. I am unsure whether I would call "American hegemonic ideology" or "wokism" a religion, or a cancerous and metastatic mutant form of a religion, that is out-competing and strangling real religion.
gorge
1yr ago
Having kids, especially infants and toddlers, is distinctly type II fun: "miserable while it's happening, but fun in retrospect."
As a dad, this has not been my experience with infant and toddlers, except for the first two months of the first child. The journey itself is intensely rewarding. Has it been your experience?
gorge
6mo ago
Meanwhile if you transition around the start of puberty, you don't have to do any of these surgeries - you'll go through the rest of your life as a normal-looking member of the opposite sex, and won't have to go through the trauma of watching your body turn into something that gives you psychological pain every day. There's only one surgery you might have to do and that's sex reassignment surgery, and there I don't have any issue with not allowing minors to go through it.
Jazz Jennings seems to be going through plenty of psychological pain.
This not an honest presentation of the pros and cons of early transition. You are listing out the possible pros of early transition while forgetting the massive, elephant-in-the-room con: the child will likely be sterilized, they will likely never be able to have their own biological children, and may never have any proper sexual function or ability to orgasm. Again, see Jazz Jennings. No child is prepared to make that decision, no adult should be making that decision for a child.
I’d argue that the more or less unstated promise of the Sexual Revolution to young single women was that: a) they will be sexually free without inviting social shame i.e. normalized sexual experimentation and promiscuity on their part will not have an unfavorable long-term effect on men’s attitudes towards them, and women will not sexually shame one another anymore b) they will be able to leave their constrictive gender roles to the extent they see fit, but this will not lead to social issues and anomie because men will be willing to fill those roles instead i.e. men will have no problem becoming stay-at-home dads, nurses, kindergarteners, doing housework etc.
And none of that turned out to be true.
I'd argue that these actually turned out far more true than many critics at the time would have ever imagined. Shaming against sluts has decreased dramatically, men have repressed their concerns about sexual history, men have started to do much more housework and childcare, etc.
The two great errors were:
-
The claim that sex with someone whom you were not committed to with is fun and healthy -- the claim that it is not inherently sinful/disordered/"bad for your psyche"/"bad for your soul". This claim is false -- sex is very likely to create an emotional bond, and so when you create that bond without permanent commitment a woman is setting herself up for great hurt and distress. It also makes it harder to pair-bond in the future, which makes women less likely to find or create successful marriages.
-
The claim that "consent" is the critical thing that society needs to police. Sex doesn't work that way, it originated before we could even talk, and it is simply more natural and preferable to use body language. Many women like playing a bit of cat and mouse, like giving some token resistance, and don't like being explicit. What women want is "it just happened." Meanwhile, explicitly "consensual" sex can still be traumatic or greatly regretted. It gets even worse when "consent" is expanded so that women cannot actually consent to sex with more powerful men. But this is a problem because power is something that inherently something women find attractive. So women cannot consent to men they are most attracted to? Or women can only consent to sex with men who they attracted to for reasons of the genetic lottery (looks, height), but not to men who earned their attraction by working hard and gaining status? This is all a giant mess. The "consent" framework wrongly says that society shouldn't police a handsome guy who attracts and pumps and dumps a fully consenting women. However, it should ban, say, the relationship that made my good friend's life possible (his dad was a professor, his mom a grad student on the same team, they married and had a very long, fruitful, and successful relationship). IMO, what should matter is seduction with intent to marry. I'm fine with a professor going after a grad student or a boss his secretary, but if he wins her heart he better marry her.
gorge
1yr ago
For any given level of income/wealth, fame seems like a significant, net negative. That is, I would rather make $20 million from secretly winning the lottery than to get $20 million from having a runaway number one hit music album that made me famous. You have the downsides of stalkers, harassers, gold-diggers, cheats, etc. For every person with newfound respect for you, there are others trying to take you down a peg. And there isn't really any benefit. A person can reach peak happiness from being high status within his own family and social group. If you get so famous that you are awkward with your original social groups, and are in new higher status groups, then you haven't made yourself any better off.
Now, fame can be translated into money. So is it better to broke and waiting tables in Hollywood, or to get a huge break and become a famous actor? That is harder to say, but generally it seems to me that most modern social circles of the famous are very toxic and should be avoided.
Can someone explain to me how sex with no strings hurts people, and specifically how it hurts women more? In an age of contraceptives?
There are two potential problems with "sex with no strings" -- either the sex is bad or it is good. If it is bad, it is bad. If it is good, high chance that one of the two people "catches feelings" -- and now that person has formed a bond with someone else who might not be good for them, or that into them. Forming a bond with someone who is bad for you is very damaging. And forming a bond to someone, exposing your nakedness and vulnerability to someone, and then having that person reject you is also tremendously damaging and hurtful. This goes for both men and women.
"Sex with no strings" is not something that was common among our ancestors, it is not something we have evolved to handle. Young men and women have not evolved to make good decisions in some lazzei faire sexual marketplace, nor have they evolved to even predict how they will react to sex. "Sex with no strings" is simply not something that can be predicted a priori. Impossible.
Sex did evolve to generate a powerful, intense bond with your partner (especially for women), which helps bind the couple together through the difficult years of child rearing. Sex with random people at best fritters this bonding power away, and at worst makes people bonded to partners who aren't properly screened or committed and thus will end up creating great hurt.
gorge
8mo ago
It should be noted that he is firing Bishop Strickland for insubordination -- Strickland accused Pope Francis of having a program to undermine the deposit of faith, Strickland signed on to a letter that called Pope Francis a heretic, and then when Strickland was initially subject to a disciplinary investigation he doubled-down rather than apologizing. Catholic bishops are not allowed to criticize the Pope that way, calling the Pope a heretic undermines people's faith. Any boss in the world would fire a subordinate for such a behavior.
It is true though, that the Pope does seem excessively lenient toward the German bishops. Part of this may be that German bishops have been a bit more subtle in not directly picking a fight with the Vatican.
Overall, Francis has not actually betrayed or revoked the deposit of faith or Church dogma. In his own writings, he has upheld Church teaching on the disordered nature of homosexual, the invalidity of "gay marriage", and the impossibility of changing one's sex/gender.
It is true that in more informal settings he has made ambiguous statements that seem to wink at a more progressive, or even heretical view on key issues. Also, I do agree that his choices of which disciplinary battles to fight do reveal a progressive bent. The most charitable explanation is that he is trying to put a spin on things that the progressive media will find palatable, and thus give the Church more cover. The least charitable explanation is that he wants to change the Church teaching, but doesn't want to boil the frog too quickly so he walks right up tot he line of heresy without crossing it. Or for believers, he walks up to the line but cannot cross it because the Holy Spirit is still protecting the office of the Pope.
gorge
1yr ago
Early on I was swayed by more by my more libertarian friends saying "Hey, the FDA has always been way too cautious, it is dumb to worry that they were excessively swayed by the drug companies or were overly hasty in approving the vaccine, if they approve it, it must be pretty good."
Now I think that the FDA (and even more so, the CDC) is just bad its job, so sometimes it will be way too conservative in blocking experimental medicine, and other times way too hasty and gung-ho about approving medicine that does not really show a good cost-benefit ratio. If the FDA was good at its job it would be requiring a large, randomized control study of the MRNA shots that would be ongoing, that would look at both efficacy and overall mortality.
One thing I did not appreciate is how easily FDA "approval" turns into private mandates. A lot of people and institutions in our society are simply deferring to the FDA and CDC for judgement so if they approve it that is there signal to mandate it. I read the data about the covid jab in kids and it seemed like the cost-benefit was decidedly negative. That said, I was fine if the FDA wanted to allow parents who thought it might work for their particular kid to obtain it. And even when they approved it some of the officials said that they don't recommend that every kid just blindly get it. But then the CDC issued a recommendation, and then camps and classes I want my kids to attend started requiring the jab. There was simply no space for personal choice either way, no space for approved for those who wanted it, but not mandated.
It would be nice if there was a publicly acknowledged FDA stamp of "might work, use at your own risk but we don't recommend it." I guess that is what emergency use authorization was supposed to be. But somehow that is not what has happened.
gorge
1yr ago
Any institution that criticizes the Zeitgeist gets attacked as being "right-wing" or "partisan." And being pro-free-speech itself is increasingly being portrayed as a right-wing ideology. FIRE likely does not want the taint of being seen as only being interested in free speech as a right-wing thing, it does not want to be pigeon-holed, and so it is going out of its way to publicize its association with a famous case of (alleged) supression of left-wing speech.
To me, this is a case of false neutrality or false both-sidisims. In going out of its way to show it has neither a left-wing or right-wing bias, it is highlighting a case of alleged speech suppression that does not deserve to be highlighted purely based on its own merits.
The primary question I keep coming back to, and I come to this every time there's a large corporate fraud scandal, is: what is fraud, actually? Because it seems indistinguishable from "I thought our business was legit and every indication I had was that it was legit and then it failed and it failed really hard and lots of people lost money".
With crypto, there are certainly gray areas where the customer knows the company is taking risks, knows the assets are risky, but is not fully aware of just how much risk the company is taking, and the company is happy to keep the customer unaware by burying the risks in the fine print.
But this is not the case of FTX. FTX is just run-of-the-mill embezzlement.
FTX said in its terms of service that customer deposits were the property of the customer, were fully controlled by the customer, were not the assets of FTX, and would not be loaned out. FTX was acting as a custodian. Instead, FTX took the customer funds and gambled with them. This is analogous to a bank manager who is dealing with too many failing loans and so drills into people's safe deposit boxes, takes the money and gambles it at a casino. He cannot do that, that is theft, he needs accept bankruptcy, let the those who lent and invested in the bank to take losses, but allow everyone who trusted the bank as a custodian to pick up their own assets from their safe deposit boxes.. It seems like FTX also took the funds and sent them to SBF's other business (Alambeda), which is even more obvious and blatant theft. This is classic, go-directly-to-jail do not pass go crime.
gorge
10mo ago
Even, say, someone who converted to Christianity in the 1st century is in a better position than a modern westerner. He already believed the world was in the hands of the gods, which were real beings of power, and had believed this since he was born. He just had to be told, “hey, this new god, he’s even stronger than Zeus or Ba’al!”
Hmm, not so sure about that, Aristophanes The Clouds was written in 423 BC and portrays a society where old-style paganism was already going out of fashion. Of course, Greece is not Rome or Judea. But there is an argument that Christianity was persuasive to people who were already cynical about the old gods. There is another argument that Christianity was a result of a fusion between old-school pagan-style personal Gods and Platonic/philosophical concepts about the nature of the prime mover of the universe, hence a God that is the Logos made flesh.
gorge
1yr ago
I don't have a primary source, but it was reported in the NY Daily News:
And he was busted in August 2015 for attempted kidnapping after he was seen dragging a 7-year-old girl down an Inwood street. He pled guilty to endangering the welfare of a child and was sentenced to four months in jail.
I have not seen that reported in any other article about Jordan Neely, so it is possible the NY Daily News is mistaken.
gorge
1yr ago
Recently I listened to a very interesting podcast with Geoff Shepard. Here is part 1 and part 2. Shepard was a very young, junior staffer in the Nixon White House who in the past years has done a great deal of archival research and wrote a few books on Watergate. His take is that Nixon was basically innocent of any real crimes, and got railroaded by a gang of prosecutors and judges who ran roughshod over normal due process and distorted every shred of evidence to make Nixon look bad. You can listen to the podcast for more, or read his book "The Nixon Conspiracy." After paying very close attention to the Trump-Russia investigation, his description of what happened to Nixon sounds very familiar...
I'm not sure I'd call it a deep state conspiracy, which makes it sound like a Hollywood-style thing where the Deep State is doing something that the mainstream press would find criminal. It was a Deep State conspiracy plus a press pile-on of every establishment-type who hated Nixon, from the journalists to the judges.
I'm not sure if it is significant if Woodward was actually a CIA agent at the time. The Washington Post has long been know to basically be the stenographers for the security state, whether or not the journalist is actually on the payroll, or has simply made a bunch of friends in order to get fed stories, may not make much a difference.
It does seem significant that just a few years later Woodward's partner, Bernstein, published a long piece on the CIA infiltration of the media -- https://www.carlbernstein.com/the-cia-and-the-media-rolling-stone-10-20-1977 -- was he trying to get something off of his conscience?
gorge
1yr ago
You can kind of make sense of it if you just suspend disbelief and pretend that in this fictional world skin color and other phenotypic racial characteristics are just a matter of complexion, and no more important to identity than is hair color among white Americans. So it is not any more unusual for a black mom to give birth to a white child than it is for a white brunette to give birth to a ginger child. (Although even this isn't great film making, because a film-maker shouldn't require any more suspension of belief than necessary, so better to just cast families that intuitively look like families).
But what grinds my gears is when the producers advertise the casting as "adding diversity and racial dynamics to the show which will make it more interesting", then halfway into the show when watching it you realize that they did not actually add racial diversity to the in-story universe, they simply added complexion. The fictional society is actually a post-racial one where the different racial phenotype does not actually matter. I end up very confused because I am coming in expecting race to be an issue, expecting it to be a difference that matters in story, waiting for the shoe to drop, but it never happens.
This kind of thing used to happen, it was the original definition of the word "filibuster": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filibuster_(military). It has been illegal under U.S. law de facto since the 1794 Neutrality Act, although it wasn't always enforced until the 1850s. So what would actually happen is that the billionaire would be arrested and would lose everything.
Also, what would the billionaire gain? Haiti is a country devoid of human and natural resources, that relies on international aid simply to feed itself.
Even if he wasn't arrested (which he would be), the P.R. for the billionaire would be terrible. The American press would go into a fury at the idea of a billionaire doing an authoritarian corporate fascist take over of a country. They would signal boost every bad thing that happened: Every Haitian killed, every repressive act, every mistake in rule, everything thing with bad optics on the island would be blamed on this billionaire and he would be made to look like a super-villain.
gorge
2mo ago
Other men are competition. Unless a nation is facing a strong external threat, and the nation wants its men to be stronger in order to make the nation stronger at resisting, there is little incentive for "society" to give accurate information to men about how to be strong, or how to actually win sexual-attraction, or how to actually win at the power-game. In the first generation, the incentive is to spread public lies about how to be a man, while privately teaching your kid the truth. But public lies in one generation lead to the classic "kids don't get the joke" problem and the next generation simply does not know the truth. "Society" couldn't even tell the truth if it wanted to.
gorge
9mo ago
Trump is charged under OCGA 16-4-7, which says
A person commits the offense of criminal solicitation when, with intent that another person engage in conduct constituting a felony, he solicits, requests, commands, importunes, or otherwise attempts to cause the other person to engage in such conduct.
The felonious conduct he is accused of trying to solicit from Ralston is under OCGA 16-10-1, which says
Any public officer who willfully and intentionally violates the terms of his oath as prescribed by law shall, upon conviction thereof, be punished by imprisonment for not less than one nor more than five years.
The oath taken by Ralston includes swearing to support and uphold the Constitution of the United States.
By this logic, every time a President does something unconstitutional (eg, Biden's student loan forgiveness plan), then everyone in Georgia who promoted that policy or petitioned for that policy committed a felony. The prosecutor's use of this law is absolute madness, it criminalizes the losing side of any political battle involving Constitutional issues.
Learning about Shakespeare and studying themes in classic novels, while not completely useless, is less useful than learning about real historical events.
Kids do something like 6,000 hours of school-time and schoolwork over the four years of high school, there is plenty of time to do both. Storm of Steel should of course be required reading. I think it would be cool if elite students read the Shakespeare historical plays, watched multiple play versions, and then read the actual primary source history and the secondary source history. You learn the literature, you learn the history, you learn about propaganda and how the magic of storytelling works, you break out of the present and immerse yourself in a world very different than ours.
IMO, it's important to read primary sources and the classics. First, multiple generations have concluded that these sources were edifying, whereas a new book is much more likely to be of low quality that will soon be forgotten (the Lindy effect0. Second, classic sources help you eliminate "presentism" and build a basic common sense and historical grounding for how the world works. It's easy to read a history book in 2023 and have also sorts of current ideologies imposed on the past, you may read about how terrible the patriarchy was and how everyone was secretly gay, etc, but if you actually immerse yourself in primary sources I think you come to a much more complex, interesting, and realistic view about the past. Even if the play itself is fiction, all the assumptions built into the background of the play tell you a lot about the people who created such a play and the people who watched it.
But when talking about reforming high school, the elephant in the room is that most kids should not be in high school, at least not until age 18. If your IQ is around 105, you probably should be done with school once you can write a business letter and know enough math to do some carpentry or double-entry book-keeping for your business. If your IQ is 95, you should be done with school once you can do basic reading and know enough math to make change. Sticking the majority of kids on an academic-heavy track is not doing anybody, any good.
gorge
6mo ago
Religious conservatives and sex-negative feminists both agree that casual sex in the society that exists is inherently degrading to women, that women should choose not to engage in it, and that men should be punished for engaging in it.
A problem here is that the religious conservatives who are allowed to speak in mainstream outlets under their real name have to make concessions to feminism in order to not get cancelled. So they have to argue that the real problem with feminism is that men will take advantage of women. They have trouble arguing directly that hooking up is a sin for women, a sin that many women will indulge in if allowed, and that women must be policed too, and not just men. However, these conservatives who making the socially acceptable right-wing argument, aren't actually accurately representing what the typical right-wing conservative man actually deep-down believes.
This is similar to the "Democrats are the real racists" trope that mainstream conservatives (at the National Review, etc.) get trapped in. To avoid cancellation, they can't just argue that affirmative action is bad because it is bad for whites. They have to make the argument that affirmative action is bad because it is actually bad for black people, because of "mismatch" or the "soft bigotry of low expectations" or because it won't prepare blacks for the "real world." Ultimately, these arguments do not work (the left can just extend affirmative action entirely through a person's career) and the conservative ends up just ceding the moral high ground to the left.
gorge
6mo ago
It is rather annoying how certain activists have destroyed the meaning of the word....Genuine "I hate X race" type people can now get relatively far in politics
Eh, good riddance. Anyone who has is acting in morally deplorable ways relating to race can be condemned in language and terms and concepts that long predate the word "racism." Just call out what they are actually doing that is bad -- whether it is being slanderous, committing detraction, or covetous or whatever the bad thing actually is.
Meanwhile, as I read more history, I find that a lot of the "classic" racism that was universally abhorred before the "great awokening" (for instance school segregration) was not as clearly wrong as I thought it was. Read for instance Wolter's The Burden of Brown. I don't blame the white parents of any school district from using whatever laws they had at their disposal to keep their school from being overrun by a population with much higher rates of committing assault and with entirely different cultural norms and with incompatible levels of pedagogical needs.
An attractive ~20 year old woman can make anything look good. She would likely look better with long hair. Demi Moore was cute in Ghost, but she was still better looking with longer hair.
(...part 2...)
Newspapers articles seem to corroborate this narrative of gradual movement toward women's lib. As I read these articles, one thing I noticed is that in general it seems like the King and the government were trying to please both sides. They were trying to show the U.S. and the West that they were becoming more "modern" and treating women well, but also trying to show Islamic conservative critic that they were still obeying Islam. So maybe while the government would throw a sop to the conservatives by banning women from TV, the government would at the same time push women's education and employment -- but would say this is for economic reasons and not social reasons and not in violation of Islamic law. Ultimately, the latter was far more important toward ending patriarchy. Let's review the history through some articles.
From a 1981 article:
Italics mine -- note the government is playing a double game of assuaging the conservatives while telling the NY Times and Westerners that they are "progressing."
From another 1981 article:
In 1982 Saudi Arabia got a new king, who was depicted "as the leading figure in a progressive, modernizing faction within the tradition-minded monarchy."
We should keep in mind that of course Saudi Arabia is still very patriarchal and has very high brith rates at this point. The changes described in the previous two articles are just a beginning.
Leading on to 1989 we see more of a movement leftward, which is supported by the King and the government:
From a 1990 article, Saudi Arabia is officially extremely patriarchal, birthrates still very high, but women's lib creeping in:
Again, Saudi Arabia is still more patriarchal than the West (and has higher birth rates), but being "investigated" and "threatened" is still more liberal than being executed (as the adulterous Princess of 1977 was) or stoned (as the New York Times claims was the practice in the 1950s and 1960s).
From 1991, now in debt to the West after the Gulf War, the King is liberalizing by forming citizen councils:
(...part 3 continues as a reply...)
More options
Context Copy link